4 New Shale Well Permits Issued for PA-OH-WV Mar 25 – 31
What’s below dismal? The new permits report for two weeks ago showed just five new permits, which we called “dismal” (see 5 New Shale Well Permits Issued for PA-OH-WV Mar 18 – 24). Last week, for March 25 – 31, there were just four new permits issued. Technically, there were only two new permits (both in Pennsylvania), but Ohio’s Dept. of Natural Resources was tardy in their update and recorded two new permits last week for permits issued the week before. We didn’t report them two weeks ago, so we will report them this week. In PA, there was one new permit each issued to Snyder Brothers (Armstrong County) and Greylock Energy (Potter County). OH issued two permits to Ascent Resources (both in Guernsey County). West Virginia issued no new permits for the second week in a row.
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A royalty case that took nearly four years and hundreds of filings by both sides was finally decided by an Ohio jury in March (see 
The Ohio Oil & Gas Association (OOGA) held its annual meeting in March at the Hilton in Columbus, OH. While MDN was not there, an industry friend sent along a copy of the slide deck used by the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) Division of Oil & Gas Resources Management. The ODNR’s “regulatory update” addressed a number of interesting issues, including the state’s ongoing application for “primacy” in permitting carbon dioxide injection wells, permitting and unitization (forced pooling), updates on rule changes for drilling and fracking, and several “top 5” lists for natural gas and oil producers in the Utica Shale.
Oil production in the Ohio Utica hit a record 27.8 million barrels in 2023, up 41% from 2022, according to researchers at the Levin College of Public Affairs and Education at Cleveland State University. In December, eastern Ohio oil wells pumped 93,000 barrels of crude, up one-third from December 2022, according to federal data. Oil has been locked away in the Utica/Point Pleasant shale layer for millennia. Aubrey McClendon, co-founder and former CEO of Chesapeake Energy, was the first to see the vision of freeing oil from the Utica. However, it was a successor company, Encino Energy, that figured out how to coax large quantities of oil out of the Utica shale.
In January 2023, three Marcellus/Utica companies — Chesapeake Energy, EQT, and Equitrans Midstream — launched the Appalachian Methane Initiative (AMI), a coalition committed to further enhancing methane monitoring throughout the Appalachia Basin and reducing methane emissions throughout the region (see 
Ascent Resources, founded as American Energy Partners by gas legend Aubrey McClendon, is a privately held company focusing 100% on the Ohio Utica Shale. Ascent, headquartered in Oklahoma City, OK, is Ohio’s largest natural gas producer and the 8th largest natural gas producer in the U.S. The company issued its fourth quarter and full-year 2023 update yesterday. The update contains a statement by CEO Jeff Fisher that says we should look for a shift in the company’s strategy in 2024 for less gas production and more liquids production.
Back in the summer of 2020, MDN told you about a lawsuit brought by an Ohio rights owner called TERA, an organization that owns the royalty rights for a number of leases with wells in Belmont County, OH, drilled by different producers, suing the producers for drilling into the Point Pleasant shale layer when the lease only mentions the Utica layer (see 
Last November, Northern Oil and Gas, Inc. (NOG), a company that invests in non-operated oil and gas assets (they let others do the drilling), announced a deal to enter the Utica Shale (see 
Yesterday we brought you the latest update on EOG Resources’ oil drilling program in the Utica Shale (see