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SM Energy Co. raised its guidance for 2011 and introduced plans for 2012 that surpass what analysts were expecting as company executives emphasized a sharpened focus on the Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas.

Fayetteville Shale pioneer Southwestern Energy Co. has been branching out to Appalachia’s Marcellus Shale; to New Brunswick, Canada; and to the Lower Smackover Brown Dense formation, an unconventional oil reservoir in southern Arkansas and northern Louisiana. Right now company executives are most enthusiastic about the latter, which Southwestern has been working on for more than two years.

Riding the continuing wave of high oil prices, Occidental Petroleum Corp. (Oxy) expects its shale well count to keep growing, drilling 150-175 wells this year in California, said CEO Stephen Chazen during an earnings conference call with financial analysts Tuesday.

Former Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard, who now serves as president of the Quebec Oil and Gas Association (QOGA), appeared before a Quebec National Assembly committee to urge compensation for companies in limbo from the province’s environmental study of shale gas, but the meeting became heated after a legislator called Bouchard “unfaithful” to Quebec’s citizens.

In the wake of a well blowout last month in the Marcellus Shale, a Pennsylvania Senate committee has approved a bill (SB 995) that would require companies to provide to state and local authorities detailed emergency contact information for all of their wells in the state.

In e-mail notices that arrived a minute apart Thursday morning, Southern California Gas declared a high-linepack OFO for the same day and then extended it through at least Friday. The tolerance for positive daily imbalances was set at 10% in both cases. The distributor also said it will lose 30 MMcf/d of storage injection capacity from next Tuesday through June 10 due to anomaly repairs on Line 1004.

Louisiana parishes overlying the Haynesville Shale “are awash in money;” others, not so much, an economist told NGI’s Shale Daily. As producers set their sights on more lucrative shale plays — the Marcellus and Eagle Ford, for instance — beneficiaries of the North Louisiana shale boom would be wise not to build the shale revenue into their budgets, he said.

Prices finally interrupted the up-down-up seesaw changes that had dominated Monday-Wednesday trading by continuing to go in the same direction for the most part Thursday for the second day in a row. But they were seeing more softening than the day before, particularly at Midcontinent/Midwest locations.

Natural gas supply and demand set new records in 2010, while regional changes in production — including that from the nation’s fast-growing shale plays — altered the industry landscape, according to a state of the markets report issued Thursday by FERC’s Office of Enforcement.