An update on the latest drilling permits (issued the past two weeks) for the Utica Shale in both western PA and eastern Ohio, by driller and county:
Although we’ve known for a while that the embattled Chesapeake Energy has been shopping some of it’s shale basin and other assets in order to pay down debt, they’ve made a huge announcement today. Chesapeake has sold most of its Permian Basin acreage along with “substantially all of its midstream” assets for $6.9 billion. The buyers for the Permian were Shell, Chevron and EnerVest. Most of Chesapeake’s remaining midstream assets were sold to Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP).
Chesapeake previously announced they would sell off assets in areas where they were not number one or two in an attempt to repay loans and concentrate their drilling in core areas. Two of the core areas where Chesapeake is sticking around are the Marcellus and Utica Shale.
From the Chesapeake Energy press release:
Who are the biggest producers of Marcellus shale gas in Pennsylvania so far this year? Below is the list of the top seven as compiled from production numbers by the Pittsburgh Business Times.
The following are production numbers for January to June 2011 in Pennsylvania.
When the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) recently told Marcellus Shale drillers in the state to stop hauling wastewater from fracking to municipal sewage treatment plants that are not equipped to fully treat the wastewater by May 19 (see MDN story here), they all committed to comply and indeed did comply. But the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) jumped in and demanded detailed plans from six drillers as to just how they planned on treating and disposing of the wastewater once the they stopped using the municipal plants.
The EPA’s deadline for the six drillers to file plans was Wednesday, May 25. Five of the six complied by the deadline: