Shift in Utica Drilling – from Wet Gas to Dry Gas
One of NGI’s (Natural Gas Intelligence) ace reporters, Jamison Cocklin, wrote a top notch news/analysis article last Friday in NGI’s Shale Daily publication about the “crucial priority” of new gathering pipelines and pipeline infrastructure in general that’s needed in the Utica Shale. Jamison made the observation that while not every operator in Ohio’s Utica Shale has shifted from focusing on wet gas extraction (concentrating on wells that extract not only methane but also natural gas liquids) to dry gas (or methane only), some of the biggies have. A change in focus doesn’t mean a change in geography. The change in focus from wet to dry is happening in core wet gas counties, including Monroe, Belmont and Jefferson…
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Everyone loves a Top 5 or Top 10, including MDN. Who are the Top 5 drillers in the Utica Shale? It depends, of course, on your criteria for selecting such a list. One of MDN’s favorite writers on The Motley Fool website, Matt DiLallo, has just published what he calls “The 5 Companies Dominating the Utica Shale Play.” In other words, the Top 5 Utica drillers. Matt points out that in the span of five short years the Utica has become the nation’s second largest shale gas play, behind only the Marcellus. Matt uses a combination of acres-under-lease and number-of-wells-drilled to come up with his list of five drillers who are leading the charge in the Utica. It won’t surprise you to learn that Chesapeake Energy, which was the first company to drill in the Utica under then-CEO Aubrey McClendon, is head-and-shoulders above the rest as the #1 Dominator in the Utica. Some of the others in the Top 5 list may, however, surprise you. Here’s Matt’s excellent roundup of the Utica…
Yesterday MDN’s favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), issued our favorite monthly report–the Drilling Productivity Report (DPR). The DPR is the EIA’s best guess, based on expert data crunchers, as to how much each of the U.S.’s seven major shale plays will produce for both oil and natural gas in the coming month. One observation from the June report: The worm has turned for natural gas production in the Utica Shale. Until this report, the Utica has stood alone among nation’s seven major plays in a trend of producing more natgas month over month. The EIA now predicts next month that trend will reverse and the Utica will begin to produce less natgas month over month. Not a lot less! Just 4 million cubic feet per day (Mmcf/d). But still, it’s worth noting. Another observation: When you combine all of the plays for both oil and natgas production, the rate of decrease for both is picking up. That is, month over month we’re now producing less and less of both oil and natgas from our shale plays. Which will likely be good for prices (less supply, the same or more demand equals higher prices). Here’s the latest from the EIA…
An MDN reader recently alerted us to a little-known fact: JKLM Energy has successfully drilled and is flowing gas from Potter County, PA’s first Utica Shale well. JKLM is owned by Terry Pegula, the guy who sold most of his Marcellus assets and used the money to buy the Buffalo Bills (see 
MDN spotted a fascinating story in NGI’s Shale Daily publication about what may be a new trend developing in the Utica Shale. It all concerns interlateral well spacing. What the heck is that? When you drill a shale well, like a Utica well, you can drill down from a single location (i.e. well pad) multiple times and when you turn the drill bit horizontally, you drill an entirely new well. So each well pad contains, typically, anywhere from 2-12 underground wells. Each horizontal well underground is called a lateral. When you drill a lateral, you frack it–using small explosive charges to crack the rock apart near the lateral, injecting water with sand into the cracks. The water drains out, the sand remains “propping open” the cracks to allow natural gas (or oil, or NGLs) to drain out of the cracks, into the well and up the borehole to the surface. In the past few years most drillers have found putting the laterals about 750 feet apart keeps them far enough apart that the cracks from one well don’t interfere with the cracks from another well (see image below). Ideally you want the laterals to be far enough away that they don’t drain any gas from the next lateral–but close enough that you’re not leaving undrained rock in between. That distance in the Marcellus/Utica seems to be around 750 feet. But Rice Energy and Gulfport Energy, two major players in the Utica, are moving back to 1,000 foot spacing between their laterals. Why?…
As MDN previously reported, as of the third quarter 2015 Ohio’s oil and natural gas production from shale deposits had already surpassed production for all of 2014 (see 
Last Friday CONSOL Energy released their fourth quarter 2015 update and we couldn’t stop the Meghan Trainor song “