AN INTERVIEW WITH APACHE CORPORATION

It has rarely happened in oil and gas history: Today just a handful of resource plays, mainly shales with an abundance of crude oil and liquids targets, accounts for a major share of all spending for land drilling and development in the United States.

Nothing better illustrates the extremes that opponents of hydraulic fracturing will go to than the deception noted by Texas State District Judge Trey Loftin on Feb. 16.

Mimicking the path of the gold rush that traversed the nation in the 1850s, shale gas exploration and production has surged in the past four years from Pennsylvania to California and from Texas to North Dakota.

Oily and liquids-rich plays, like those common in the Permian Basin, are the preferred target for those looking to capitalize on steady oil prices.

Technology typically used for drilling and completing wells in shale formations has created a resurgence of interest in a non-shale play, the Mississippi Lime in northern Oklahoma and southern Kansas.

With natural gas production in the Utica Shale predicted to reach at least 1.2 bcf/d by the end of 2014 and crude oil production expected to hit 155 Mb/d or higher by 2016, transportation constraints and competition for processing capacity take center stage in the Northeast.

The Niobrara geologic formation is an oil play in northeastern Colorado and parts of adjacent Wyoming, Nebraska, and Kansas.

All things Eagle Ford continue to grow except, perhaps, production

The Bakken shale play in North Dakota, Montana, and the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba is one of the largest oil resources in North America.