New Leases Sought in Columbiana County, OH, for Oil Drilling
Leasing activity is picking up once again in the northern part of the Ohio Utica shale play. Greg Carver, a trustee with Knox Township in Columbiana County, says he was recently contacted about leasing 15 acres he owns for new oil drilling. In late February, a consortium paid $1.6 million for mineral rights for 345 acres in Knox Township. Holy smokes! That’s $4,637 per acre! It sure sounds like Utica leasing is “back” — just not where you might think it would be.
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While you wouldn’t know it from looking at the NYMEX Henry Hub futures price, the cuts in production from Marcellus/Utica producers, including Chesapeake Energy, ETQ, Antero Resources, Coterra Energy, CNX Resources, and others, IS having an effect on prices — on the spot prices of physically-traded natural gas in the M-U region. Over the past eight weeks, gas production from the Marcellus and Utica shale has fallen sharply.
The government screws up just about everything it touches — ever notice that? A perfect example is a water testing program set up by then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro in December 2022. In August 2022, Shapiro, who AG at the time, announced that he had finally bullied Energy Transfer into pleading “no contest” (meaning they don’t admit to a darned thing) in a so-called criminal case against the company for a series of accidents affecting construction for both the Revolution and Mariner East pipelines (see 
The production of ethane in the U.S. — one of several natural gas liquids (NGLs) that come out of the ground when drilling both oil and gas wells — rose 9% in 2023 to a new record high of 2.6 million barrels per day (b/d), according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). Record ethane production was a result of the boom in natural gas production and the addition of two new ethane cracker plants coming online, one in Texas and the other in Pennsylvania.
In January, Joe Biden announced a “pause” for any approvals of new LNG export plants (currently 17 requests in the pipeline) for at least one year (see 
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