E&P

With strategic objectives to keep oil and natural gas exploration/production (E&P) as no more than a quarter of its utility-dominated overall business, Rapid City, SD-based Black Hills Corp. is content to take a slow, steady approach to developing its shale and other gas resources, its executives told Wall Street analysts Thursday.

As the majors and other large oil and gas companies deploy up and down the Marcellus and Utica shales, a handful of smaller companies are targeting shallower formations like the Upper Devonian Shale, using hydraulic fracturing (fracking) at less expensive wells to achieve their own measure of success.

Shale gas production activities in the Barnett Shale have not resulted in volatile organic compound (VOC) exposures great enough to pose a health concern for area residents, according to a new study of the region’s air quality.

ZaZa Energy Corp. and joint venture (JV) partner EOG Resources Corp. have revised their agreement in order to further develop and expand their Eaglebine/Eagle Ford Shale East assets

After a 32-year run, Royal Dutch Shell’s U.S. operations are pulling the plug on oil shale research in Colorado, noting that the company has spent tens of millions of dollars and learned a lot. The closing of the operations will be a careful, phased exit to maximize environmental and safety considerations in the Piceance Basin in northwest Colorado, Shell said.

While Gov. Jerry Brown already has declared he will seek to fine-tune its provisions next year, California’s new law (SB 4) regulating hydraulic fracturing (fracking) will not have final rules implemented for the industry to follow until 2015, although the law will be effective on Jan. 1 (seeShale Daily,Sept. 24).

A U.S. arm of Royal Dutch Shell plc is throwing in the towel in the Kansas portion of the Mississippian Lime, selling off 45 producing wells and about 600,000 net lease acres.

Gulf South Pipeline Co. LP is targeting growing industrial demand in the Baton Rouge-New Orleans, LA, region with a potential expansion of its system that would tap shale gas supplies from multiple basins. The project joins another targeting a similar market from rival Spectra Energy Transmission.

A pair of rules proposed by the Interior Department’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) that would list as endangered the gunnison sage grouse, which is found in Colorado and Utah, and designate 1.7 million acres of critical habitat for the bird under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), would cost the two states more than $290 million annually, according to a drafteconomic analysisreleased by FWS last week.