The US Bureau of Land Management’s Anchorage, Alas., office released a draft plan listing near-term priorities and actions to plug and clean up legacy wells in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, but the draft quickly drew fire from the state’s senior US senator.

The US drilling rig count gained 5 units during the week ended May 10 to a total of 1,769 rotary rigs working, Baker Hughes Inc. reported. That compared with 1,974 rigs working in the comparable week last year.

Deliverability of natural gas in Canada is in what the National Energy Board calls a “holding pattern” because low prices have suppressed gas drilling.

Thirteen US House Republicans formed a working group to consider ways the federal Endangered Species Act is working, how it could be updated, and how to make it more effective. ESA matters to oil and gas producers as petitions to list species as endangered are filed with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, sometimes with the potential to severely restrict or outright prohibit exploration, production, and development.

Mississippi has reduced the severance tax on hydrocarbons produced from horizontal wells and the sales tax paid on electricity for oil and gas produced via carbon dioxide enhanced oil recovery.

Canada’s minister of natural resources has warned officials of the European Union against “discriminatory treatment” of fuels made from products of Canadian oil sands.

A test deployment of well control equipment was completed by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), Noble Energy Inc., and the Helix Well Containment Group (HWCG) to assess Noble’s ability to respond to a potential subsea blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.

Safety was a priority for engineers planning the first floating production, storage, and offloading vessel installed in the Gulf of Mexico, Petrobras America Inc. executives told a May 6 technical session of the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston.

ExxonMobil Corp. will develop a field with nearly 6 billion bbl of resource in place more than 30,000 ft below the sea floor in more than 7,000 ft of water in the Gulf of Mexico.

Brazil’s Petroleo Brasileiro SA (Petrobras) plans to increase net production from its offshore presalt formation in the Campos and Santos basins to more than 2 million bo/d by 2020, from 311,000 b/d of oil as of Apr. 17, according to Carlos Tadeu de Costa Fraga, the company’s presalt executive manager. Fraga spoke May 7 to attendees of the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston.