Who owns the mineral rights beneath your property? That can determine what drilling companies can do and what rights a landowner has when drilling begins. More in an article on the ArkTimes.com website.

EnCana reports that they purchased 250,000 net acres above the Collingwood Shale in Michigan. More on the Bloomberg.com website.

Encana has an informative video on their website that illustrates and explains the horizontal driling / hydraulic fracturing techniques used for many natural gas wells drilling in shale. Look for the video link on the right of the page – the video file is very large but worth waiting for the long download.

An article in the Evansville Courier & Press reports that Eagle Resources is planning to drill the New Albany Shale in Edwards County Illinois. They have paid $6/acre/year for the leases.

An article in The Vancouver Sun reports on a Canadian shale gas play known as the “Duvernay” that is expected to bring hundreds of millions of dollars in auction revenues to the Province of Alberta.

An article in the Houston Chronicle explores why major oil companies have taken an interest in natural gas shales. Part of the reason is that the resource has a long lifetime.

Exxon Mobil has made some major recent investments in onshore natural gas that have some people asking if the company is changing directions. An article on the Houston Chronicle website reports on comments by David Rosenthal, Exxon Mobil’s VP of Investor Relations that address these questions.

The American Petroleum Institute has released a best practices document that explains methods of drilling and cementing for wells that will be hydraulically fractured. “API HF1, Hydraulic Fracturing Operations – Well Construction and Integrity Guideline.”

An article on the Reuters website reports that Indigo Minerals, LLC is purchasing over 500 producing natural gas wells and undeveloped acreage in Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas from Chesapeake Energy Corporation for $218 million.

Although North Carolina has no current oil or natural gas production, drilling methods developed in other states might be used to tap natural gas reservoirs in Mesozoic basins beneath several North Carolina counties. The Cumnock Formation of the Deep River Basin and the Cow Branch Formation of the Dan River Basin both contain organic-rich shales that might yield commercial quantities of natural gas. More at Geology.com.

Mineralweb.com has several articles related to mineral rights, oil and gas leasing, royalties, taxes and more.

A Broome County, New York, government committee is writing a policy on mineral rights and foreclosed properties that will be submitted to the legislature. The county has been stripping the mineral rights from foreclosed properties and keeping them if the properties are redeemed. More at PressConnects.

A group of Pennsylvania landowners are fighting an attempt to acquire their mineral rights through eminent domain for a natural gas storage field. They say that the $400 per acre being offered is a lot less than they could get by leasing the same property to Marcellus Shale landmen. More in the Lebanon Daily News.

The President of the Kanawha County Commission (West Virginia) sees lots of natural gas money changing hands and is calling for a reassessment of natural gas property values within the county. More at the Charleston Daily Mail. County Commissioners in Pennsylvania are lobbying for the ability to assess oil and natural gas properties at the county level. More on the Susquehana Independent website.

Norway’s Statoil, one of the largest natural gas producers in Europe, is buying up to a $3.37 billion stake in Chesapeake Energy’s Marcellus Shale natural gas lease holdings. More at Marketwatch.