Where

Shale and tight oil plays are key components of the North American portfolio of Norway’s Statoil ASA, executives told investors in New York City Wednesday. The company also has announced a farm-in agreement that gives it early entry into an Australian shale play.

In North Dakota where a quarter of the booming oil production in the Bakken Shale play is moved by rail car or truck — not pipeline — North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple Thursday urged the oil and gas industry to beef up the pipeline network in his state to keep up with rapidly growing production. Dalrymple spoke to more than 100 industry and government representatives at the state’s annual pipeline summit in Bismarck.

The bloom has been off the dry gas rose for a while now, but the Fayetteville Shale continues to provide Arkansas with a bouquet of economic activity and job creation, according to a new study.

An appellate court in Pennsylvania has ruled that compressor stations fit the legal definition of “gas production” and therefore can’t be banned by localities where other aspects of natural gas production are already permitted.

Naggingly low natural gas prices apparently haven’t dimmed prospects in the Bakken Shale in North Dakota and Montana, where the booming play is driving a surge in hiring, housing starts, infrastructure projects and more.

Naggingly low natural gas prices apparently haven’t dimmed prospects in the Bakken Shale in North Dakota and Montana, where the booming play is driving a surge in hiring, housing starts, infrastructure projects and more.

WPX Energy Inc. said it has determined through isotopic testing that four contaminated drinking water wells in Susquehanna County, PA, were fouled by naturally occurring methane and not by Marcellus Shale drilling.

A two-phase approach to the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries should result in a new line from Oklahoma to the Gulf being in place sometime next year, with the XL phase from Canada to Nebraska following by early 2015, the CEO of the project’s sponsor, TransCanada Corp., said Friday. The latter is the only part of the project now requiring a federal Presidential Permit from the U.S. State Department.

Seventeen separate water withdrawals already approved in Pennsylvania by the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) — mostly for natural gas operators — have been temporarily suspended because of localized stream flow levels that have fallen throughout the basin on drought conditions, officials said.