Since 2004 there has been much work on and investment in the Fayetteville Shale Play. The Fayetteville Shale is an unconventional gas reservoir located on the Arkansas side of the Arkoma Basin, ranging in thickness from 50 to 325 feet and ranging in depth from 1,500 to 6,500 feet. The Fayetteville Shale is extensive and is present across numerous counties in central and eastern Arkansas, including the counties of Cleburne, Conway, Faulkner, Independence, Johnson, St. Francis, Prairie, Van Buren, White, and Woodruff. The figure illustrates the location of the Fayetteville Shale Play in eastern Oklahoma and northern Arkansas. While shale gas has been explored for and tested as a gas resource since the 1980s, it has only been in recent years that it has become an economic source of gas supply due to the advent of better oilfield service and drilling technologies and higher natural gas commodity prices.

Until 2002, the Fayetteville shale potential had gone unnoticed. However, in early 2002, an attempt was made to map the Wedington sands in the conventional part of the Arkoma basin. For some reason, wells in this area were producing four to five times as much gas as expected, and for this reason, the area came to be called the "Wedington Incongruity." In light of the developments, natural gas production in Arkansas is likely to rise substantially in the coming years as will the number of gas producing wells.