Understand

President Obama’s nominee for Interior secretary, Sally Jewell, former CEO of Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI), told a Senate panel Thursday that she can do something that probably no other department nominee could: hydraulically fracture (frack) a well.

U.S. onshore horizontal drilling has improved steadily across every category, in part because of improvements in technology, but the “human experience factor” appears to be playing a substantial role as well in moving well times and depth curves to the left, according to an analysis by Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co. (TPH).

Tradition Midstream LLC said it has secured $100 million in equity financing to develop infrastructure across North America, with an initial focus on unconventional plays in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana.

In separate announcements, Gulfport Energy Corp. and Seneca Resources Corp. reported that they are achieving encouraging production results from some of the first horizontal wells drilled in the Utica Shale.

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden has sent a letter to the Department of Energy (DOE) to “understand the criteria” used to determinate whether liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports to a non-Free Trade Agreement (FTA) countries “are in the public interest.”

President Obama Friday called on the Senate to pass comprehensive legislation aimed at protecting critical national infrastructure, including energy facilities, from cyber attacks prior to leaving for its August recess.

Lawmakers in North Carolina should consider several health and environmental measures as they weigh the legalization of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in their state, researchers at Duke University said in a new report.

Riding the Bakken shale rush, North Dakota appears in a good position to jump up to the second biggest oil producing state in the nation behind only Texas. If the upper Midwest state achieves that status next year as expected, it would leapfrog over both Alaska and California, something that would have been unthinkable five years ago.

In two days’ time Hess Corp. has acquired stakes in almost 185,000 net acres in the Ohio portion of the Utica Shale, the latest deal adding 85,000 more acres to its prospective leasehold.