E&P

One day after Tuscaloosa Marine Shale (TMS) pioneer Goodrich Petroleum Corp. said it would redirect capital from the Eagle Ford Shale to the emerging play, Eagle Ford-focused Sanchez Energy Corp. Thursday announced deals worth $78 million that give it entry into the TMS.

Now that it has seen some encouraging well results, Goodrich Petroleum Inc. is stepping up activity in the Tuscaloosa Marine Shale (TMS) of Louisiana and Mississippi, where the company is about to close on an acquisition that will more than double its footprint in the emerging play.

Colorado’s top oil and natural gas regulator told executives in Denver Tuesday that adopting a culture in the onshore that goes above and beyond what’s legally required will do more than anything to achieve community acceptance.

While it is putting more emphasis on its utilities longer term, Rapid City, SD-based Black Hills Corp. is focused shorter term on “proving up and capturing substantial value” from its oil and natural gas properties in the Mancos Shale plays in the San Juan and Piceance basins, along with new-found interest in Powder River Basin oil, CEO Dave Emery said Tuesday during a second quarter earnings conference call.

WPX Energy has achieved its second exploratory success of the year, this time from the Mancos Gallup Sandstone formation in the oil window of Northwest New Mexico’s San Juan Basin, company management said during an earnings conference call.

Under a settlement of a pending court case, the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) office in northwestern Colorado has agreed to reevaluate air quality impacts on 34 authorized, but not yet permitted, oil and natural gas drilling projects in the western part of the state.

Chevron Corp. unit Chevron Canada Ltd. has agreed to acquire all interests from Alta Energy Luxembourg S.a.r.l. and affiliates in the Duvernay Shale formation in west-central Alberta. The acquired interests cover 67,900 net acres.

Southwestern Energy Co. Marcellus Shale production during the second quarter was more than triple the year-ago level, and the company has been taking steps to get its gas out of the transportation capacity-constrained play. Meanwhile, production from its Fayetteville Shale activities edged up slightly.

Concerned groups like the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) are raising new greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions concerns related to the North American natural gas production boom, citing a new paper on methane leakage in Utah’s Uintah Basin released Monday by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and University of Colorado.