Chesapeake Seeks to Change Terms of OH Leases Already Signed
According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Chesapeake Energy is attempting to change the terms of leases with Ohio landowners—after the leases were signed. One of the issues faced by Chesapeake is that they have signed, or purchased, a lot of leases in Ohio’s Utica Shale (and other shale plays for that matter). In Ohio, it amounts to leases for about 5% of Ohio’s total land area.
In order to fulfill their end of the bargain, Chesapeake must drill wells on all that land within a certain period of time—usually within five years. At least one well must be drilled on a “unit,” usually defined as 640 acres of land, or one square mile. Multiple landowner properties are usually part of a single unit.
But Chesapeake has a problem: cash. They don’t have enough of it right now to drill all of those units to “hold” them. So they’re redefining the unit—they now want a unit to be two square miles in stead of one square mile.
Read More “Chesapeake Seeks to Change Terms of OH Leases Already Signed”
Columbiana County, OH has just signed a deal with DPS Penn (an agent for Chesapeake Energy) to lease 548 acres for Utica Shale drilling. And they astutely doubled their money from the original offer from DPS a year ago. The new terms of the deal, just signed, are for $5,850 per acre and a 20 percent royalty. Columbiana also negotiated the lease term down to three years. A typical lease is five years.
In a major victory for New York landowners, Attorney General Eric Schniederman’s office reached a settlement with Chesapeake Energy to allow 4,400+ landowners with a collective 264,000 acres to renegotiate old gas drilling leases that Chesapeake was attempting to extend using the “force majeure” clause. MDN has followed this story for more than a year (see 
A cautionary story for landowners comes from Columbiana County, Ohio. Some landowners, like Patrick and Jill McNicol, own land encumbered by old gas leases going back fifty years they knew nothing about. What does it mean? They’ll get $4 per acre for their land (and no royalties), while their neighbors will get $5,800 per acres and 12-20 percent royalties.