Thomas Gardner, research director for Simmons & Company International, says that natural gas companies have become the “victims of their own success”. They have discovered enough gas to depress the price. More at the Star-Telegram.com website.

“The U.S. Department of Energy announces the release of Modern Shale Gas Development in the United States: A Primer. The Primer provides regulators, policy makers, and the public with an objective source of information on the technology advances and challenges that accompany deep shale gas development.” Quoted from fossil.energy.gov. Download the .pdf

Ziff Energy Group has a press release on their website predicting that unconventional gas plays now active across North America will account for 53% of the continent’s gas production by 2020.

USGS reports that recent email messages encouraging people to write to their congressional representatives about oil extraction from the Bakken Formation were part of a scam.  Read more in the Los Angeles Times.

A post at the Clastic Detritus blog discusses the types of resources present in the Bakken Formation, looking specifically at the USGS fact sheet for the Bakken undiscovered resource assessment. The author points out that these are “undiscovered” “resources” and explain that means less than many people will read into the numbers.

MegaWest Energy Corporation plans to try horizontal drilling and hydrofracking technology that has successfully been used in the Bakken Formation in an effort to produce oil from the Heath Shale in Montana. More in an article at GreatFallsTribune.com

Shares of Questar dropped over 8% on Thursday. Share prices of that company and others in the natural gas sector might have advanced faster than their ability to deliver gas. Their Haynesville and Bakken Shale properties have been featured in the news but most of the production can not be sold for a year or more. See more in an article by The Salt Lake Tribune.

XTO Energy spent $1.8 billion to acquire 352,000 net acres of Bakken Shale leasehold in Montana and North Dakota. Their engineers estimate that the properties hold 68 million barrels of oil. More at Pegasus News.

The North Dakota Industrial Commission’s statistics reveal that April’s oil production was a new monthly record. An average of 150,578 barrels of oil were produced per day and that beat the old record of 147,774 per day set in August 1984. More information in an article at BusinessWeek.com.

A new well drilled in the Bakken Shale of McKenzie County by Continental Resources had an initial flow of over 1000 barrels of crude oil equivalent per day. The EnidNews.com website has an article.