Continental Resources, one of the largest Bakken Shale producers, announced some good and bad news to investors yesterday – a new oil discovery (good) but increased capital expenditure guidance (bad). The company announced a new oil discovery in the South-Central Oklahoma Oil Province (SCOOP) where it also said “net unrisked resource potential has increased to approximately 3.6 billion Boe, nearly the size of its Bakken opportunity.” Continental is also increasing drilling and completion capital expenditure for the remainder of 2014 and 2015, which spooked investors concerned about the sustainability of capital-intensive shale drilling programs. [Financial Times, American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Continental Resources]

Saudi state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco’s venture capital arm made a substantial investment in gas-to-liquids company Siluria as part of a series D funding round. “Siluria has developed a catalytic process for transforming natural gas—the most abundant and widely available hydrocarbons on earth—into transportation fuels and commodity chemicals in an efficient, cost-effective, scalable manner using processes that can be seamlessly integrated into existing industry infrastructure. Siluria has created a growing portfolio of process configurations with applications in upstream, midstream gas processing, downstream chemicals production and refining operations.” [Siluria]

As Russian state-controlled oil giant Rosneft digs deeper into the natural gas space the company is increasingly chafing against state-controlled gas behemoth Gazprom. Case in point, Gazprom’s deputy head of LNG exports recently moved over to head up gas marketing and new markets at Rosneft. “Rosneft has been seeking access to Gazprom’s planned Power of Siberia network to China since the beginning of the year. The Moscow-based company, which aims to almost double gas output to 100 billion cubic meters by 2020 compared with 55 billion this year, also plans to build an LNG plant in eastern Russia.” [Bloomberg]