Energy investor T. Boone Pickens said he has been buying up U.S. shale acreage, and he could consider signing joint ventures to develop the properties, or some property sales.
"I'm in two big shale plays and one of them is the Marcellus," Pickens said in an interview, referring to the massive natural gas field that stretches from West Virginia and Ohio across Pennsylvania and into New York.
Pickens said his other shale holdings are in an oil shale field, but he declined to name the field.
"I'm still buying," he said.
Advances in drilling technology in the past decade have opened up vast tracts across the United States to oil and gas drilling that were once too difficult or expensive to tap.
The shale fields could hold enough natural gas to supply the United States for more than a century, experts have estimated, although the hydraulic fracturing techniques used to extract the gas have raised environmental concerns in ...