E&P

The Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates will increase borrowing costs and lead to greater credit risk for lower-rated companies, Moody’s Investors Service said in a report.

BP plc’s Lower 48 onshore business on Friday snapped up all of Devon Energy Corp.’s natural-gas rich San Juan Basin assets, including 480 wells spread across 33,000 gross acres, in the “first major acquisition” by the business in seven years.

After plummeting 28 rigs in the week-ago tally, the Baker Hughes Inc. census of active U.S. drilling rigs held steady with the previous week in the report issued Friday (Dec. 18).

Drillers voted overwhelmingly in favor of oil in the latest Baker Hughes Inc. U.S. rig count. While the overall U.S. count was static, 17 oil rigs were added, neatly offset by the departure of 17 natural gas rigs.

A federal judge in Wyoming has denied a motion by a coalition of six environmental groups to expedite the legal proceedings surrounding rules governing hydraulic fracturing (fracking) on public and tribal lands.

Halcon Resources Corp. plans to “take a more tempered approach” to its capital expenditures (capex) in 2016, setting a drilling and completion budget of $180-210 million, the company said Friday.

Efforts that began last year to lease state-owned land on the Ohio River and elsewhere in West Virginia have practically stalled with the sharp decline in oil and natural gas prices, compounding the downturn’s impact on state revenues as severance tax collections have fallen this year, too.

From the mandate of state legislation (SB 1358) passed this year and two years earlier, North Dakota’s oil/natural gas regulators in the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) have built a new unit for the first time to oversee the construction, operation and maintenance of the state’s expanding gathering pipeline systems.

Gastar Exploration Inc.’s first operated test in the Meramec formation within Oklahoma’s stacked reservoirs appears to extend the definition of one of the most promising plays in the U.S. onshore.