Maryland’s attorney general is urging people in the western part of the state to check with their mortgage lender before signing a mineral-rights lease.

Douglas Gansler says some federally approved mortgages have requirements that conflict with mineral-rights leases. He says property owners who are considering a mineral-rights lease should have their bank or mortgage lender sign off on it to avoid potential legal problems. Read more »

For those who have spent their entire lives in the previously quiet farm towns that dot the northwestern corner of North Dakota, the discovery of oil in the Bakken formation has been anything but fortuitous.

The thousands of people from around the country flocking to these boomtowns has led to a housing shortage and an increase in traffic, crime and frustration among the locals who feel like their small, close-knit towns are now gone forever. Read more »

More than 1,200 new Marcellus Shale natural-gas wells have been drilled in Pennsylvania this year. Because each well requires many workers to build and operate, there's no shortage of new jobs in the drilling regions - at least a certain kind of job.

The problem is that not enough high school graduates from southwestern Pennsylvania want the jobs, allowing workers from the nation's oil-rich South to capitalize on Pennsylvania's bustling new industry. Read more »

As has been the case for months the oil complex as well as most all risk asset markets continue to be impacted by the 30 second news snippets hitting the media airwaves around Europe. Last week the market sentiment began to start pricing in a soft landing for the European sovereign debt problems including the positive comments that came from the G20 meeting of finance ministers over the weekend. However, the sentiment quickly changed when Germany suggested that the EU was not likely to solve the debt problems by the October 23rd summit in Brussels. Read more »