WV Looks to Lease More Ohio River, Other State Land for Drilling
West Virginia is interested in leasing more under-the-water land (and under other state-owned land) for shale drilling. You may recall that Gastar recently had the winning bid to drill under 232 acres of the Ohio River as it flows through Marshall and Wetzel counties (see Gastar Wins Lease to Drill Under Ohio River in WV). WV is getting $3,500 per acre and a 20% royalty on gas produced from Gastar–a nifty $812,000 check just for signing the lease, money that goes into the coffers of the state. They like that money and they want more of it–and Gastar is interested in drilling under more WV-owned land…
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Looks like drilling and fracking adjacent to, and underneath, the Ohio River isn’t the only state-owned asset West Virginia has in mind to raise revenue (see 
We have some more details about that lease deal for $100 million by Tug Hill Operating to lease land in Marshall and Ohio counties in the northern panhandle of West Virginia that we wrote about yesterday (see 
We have some information, but not a lot, on a recent deal to lease land in Marshall and Ohio counties in West Virginia. Tug Hill Operating, a small, privately owned exploration & production company headquartered in Fort Worth, TX, has just brokered a deal with the Marshall and Ohio County Landgroup. We don’t know how many acres are involved in the lease, nor how many families. What we do know is that the money Tug Hill is paying the landowners, collectively, is an eye-popping $100 million. We don’t have a copy of the lease, but we have little doubt that both Marcellus and Utica layers are part of the deal. Here’s what we do know about Tug Hill and the deal:
Earth to Mars (PA): To the anti-drilling parents in the Mars School District in Butler County, cast your eyes to the south in neighboring Allegheny County. The school district in East Allegheny, PA has just signed a lease with EQT to drill shale wells on district-owned property–in one case 500 feet away from the middle school! Now what was that about a well pad 3/4 of a mile from a Mars school–on non-school property–that has you so enraged? (see 
The Chesapeake Energy fire sale continues–and this time it’s cut right into the bone and sinew of the company. The beneficiary of Chesapeake’s ongoing divestiture, this time, is Southwestern Energy. Southwestern has signed a deal to pick up 413,000 (!) Marcellus/Utica acres, most of it in West Virginia with some of it in Washington County, PA. Much of the land is in prime wet gas areas (see the map below). The deal includes 256 (!) operating and producing Marcellus and Utica Shale wells and another 179 (!) non-operated, non-producing wells–a total of 435 drilled wells. Southwestern is paying Chesapeake $5.375 BILLION for the deal–which will make Chesapeake’s real boss, corporate raider Carl Icahn, very happy…