MDN’s Prediction of Gastar Stock Offering Scary Accurate
We don’t toot our own horn too often (at least, we hope not), but we want to point out how MDN keeps readers on the cutting edge. Yesterday we brought you the news that Gastar Exploration is a) shifting their drilling focus to a play outside the Marcellus/Utica in 2015, and b) is issuing more common stock, hoping to raise more money for drilling (see Gastar 2015 Budget: Scaling Back Marcellus/Utica Drilling). We said, based on our back-of-the-envelope calculations, we expect Gastar will raise around $100 million from issuing the new stock. After we published yesterday, Gastar released an update on their stock offering to say they expect to raise…
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A shout out to MDN readers who may be attending the always-excellent Shale Insight conference 
In March 2013, the Center for Sustainable Shale Development (CSSD) burst onto the scene. It had been a closely guarded secret, the creation of a few hand-picked people from both industry and the environmental movement working together to see if there is any common ground on which both sides can agree that shale development would be safe, sustainable AND affordable. They worked hard for over a year and finally hammered out a set of 15 standards that if a driller (or midstream company or contractor) would meet, it would get a stamp of approval from both the industry and environmental groups as being a good goobie–a safe driller. We were somewhat skeptical from the start (see 
This is a very important story that MDN has been following for more than two years. In June 2012, MDN reported the launch “out of nowhere” of a study by U.S. Dept. of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) to test whether or not faults, or large cracks that sometimes exist through multiple rock layers, can create a pathway for hydraulic fracturing fluids to migrate to aquifers (see