St Clairsville RFP to Lease 195 Utica Acres Comes & Goes, No Bids

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St. Clairsville (Belmont County), OH put out a request for bids on 195 acres of city-owned land. They want to lease the land for shale drilling. The RFP sought bids from drillers and contained these minimum terms: $7,300 per acre signing bonus, and 20% royalties. Yikes! Apparently St. Clairsville believes they hold all the cards. The deadline for bids was yesterday. How many bids did they get? Zero. Nada. None. But city leaders aren’t discouraged. Apparently putting it out for bid was a requirement under Ohio state law–a dance that they had to dance, motions they had to go through–and now that the RFP has come and gone, the real negotiations will begin. And make no mistake, drillers are interested in leasing the property. It sits in one of the sweetest sweet spots in the Utica Shale.

Here’s the St. Clairsville RFP story, and a good roundup showing the terms other municipalities have recently gotten for leasing their land…

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