MPR Building New Sand Storage Along Ohio River in Belmont County
Here’s a neat company we haven’t written about in 4 1/2 years: MPR Supply Chain. It’s a family-owned and operated riverfront transloading facility located in Bellaire, Ohio, at mile markers 92.5 and 93.7 on the Ohio River. MPR’s facility is a Gateway Distribution Point, located minutes from major north-south and east-west transportation routes and within 24 hours of two-thirds of the population of both the United States and Canada, including some of the largest material-consuming regions in the country. MPR moves a LOT of frac sand for the Marcellus/Utica industry through its facility, and has been for 10 years. MPR just broke ground on an expansion. Read More “MPR Building New Sand Storage Along Ohio River in Belmont County”
For the week of October 13 – 19, the number of permits issued to drill new wells in the Marcellus/Utica increased significantly from the previous week. There were 37 new permits issued across the three M-U states last week, up dramatically from the 7 issued two weeks ago. We can’t remember the last time we saw 37 (or more) permits issued. It’s been a looong time (months, at least). Pennsylvania issued 19 new permits. Ohio issued 13 permits. And West Virginia, which had been skunked with no new permits for three consecutive weeks, finally woke up last week (it’s woke!), issuing 5 new permits. 
We happened across a lawsuit we didn’t know about, involving an issue we’ve seen before. A landowner in Belmont County, Ohio, filed a lawsuit in June 2024 alleging that Gulfport Energy, in a joint development agreement with EQT (the lease owner), drilled three wells under the landowner’s property that tapped into the Point Pleasant formation, which sits immediately below the Utica. The landowner said the lease only allows drilling in the Utica and Marcellus and NOT in the Point Pleasant. 
In January 2023, Ohio House Bill (HB) 507 became law with the signature of Gov. Mike DeWine (see 
Gulfport Energy is the third-largest driller in the Ohio Utica Shale (by the number of wells drilled). The company emerged from bankruptcy four years ago with a new board and new management in May 2021 (see 
One of the significant stories of 2024 in the Ohio Utica was about Austin Master Services (AMS), a radiological waste management solutions company in Martins Ferry, Ohio, that handles fracking waste by transporting it for disposal. AMS ran into trouble when it ran out of money. The Martins Ferry facility in Belmont County, where waste is temporarily stored, had exceeded its permitted maximum of 600 tons of stored waste, resulting in a violation of its permit. The Ohio Attorney General’s office filed a lawsuit against the company in March 2024 to force compliance and to force the cleanup of the facility. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) stepped in to do the cleanup work. As of today, cleaning and testing are done.