E&P

The city council of Denton, TX, has put the brakes on drilling within the Barnett Shale town, at least until Sept. 9, while city staff and council reconsider drilling rules in light of numerous citizen complaints about drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) activity harming their health and quality of life. No new drilling permits are to be issued while the ordinance is in effect.

Appalachian pure-play operator Eclipse Resources Corp., which has been rumored since last year to be considering an initial public offering (IPO), has filed a Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission indicating that it intends to raise $100 million on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in the coming months.

Little changed for Appalachian pure-play operator Antero Resources Corp. during the first three months of the year, as production continued to steadily climb and the company kept realizing strong natural gas prices as the result of cold weather and its sharp focus on firm transportation.

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports are expected to increase to 3.5 Tcf in 2029 and remain at that level through 2040 under a reference case used by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), but more than two dozen alternative scenarios put that number at anywhere from 0.8 Tcf to 6.7 Tcf, according to an EIA report released Wednesday.

Pioneer Natural Resources Co. more than tripled the number of rigs it has deployed in the Permian Basin’s Spraberry and Wolfcamp formations during the first quarter of 2014, a move that helped the company beat its production guidance and grow its oil production.

Too much information (TMI) from the Tuscaloosa Marine Shale (TMS)? Not a chance. Activity in the Louisiana-Mississippi play continues to gather pace, and analysts can’t wait to hear more about well results from producers there, Goodrich Petroleum Corp., for instance, which these days is pretty much all about the TMS.

Gulfport Energy Corp. on Thursday announced a drastic shift in its strategy to develop the Utica Shale, defying expectations and scaling-back its drilling and completion plans in favor of a slower approach aimed at long-term growth that found analysts on edge and sent the company’s stock plummeting.

Midstream operators MarkWest Energy Partners and DCP Midstream Partners each had strong first quarters, opening a plethora of infrastructure and processing facilities in U.S. shale plays, and recording significant earnings increases, the companies said in separate announcements this week.

The recent proliferation of local government proposals to curb or ban oil/natural gas activity, including hydraulic fracturing (fracking), is not immediately ringing any alarm bells in the newly relocated Houston executive offices of Occidental Petroleum Corp. (Oxy) as it works to spin off its multi-billion-dollar California operations into a separate company.