Antero Pays $15K/Acre, 20% Royalties for MWCD Piedmont Lake Lease
All’s we can say is “WOW!” Last Friday the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District (MWCD) signed another (new) lease with Antero Resources to lease more than 6,300 acres in and around Piedmont Lake, in Guernsey, Harrison and Belmont counties in Ohio. The land is in prime Utica Shale territory and Antero must have wanted it bad, because they paid a $15,000 per acre signing bonus. Plus 20% in royalties for anything produced from the land. That is, by far, the largest bonus payment we have ever heard of in the Marcellus and Utica region.
Landowners in the MWCD area should be thankful. Because of this deal and other leases signed by the MWCD, the rates landowners pay to the MWCD are going down–by 50%–starting next year. What a fantastic story where everyone wins. Landowners win with lower watershed fees, Antero wins by scoring what will no doubt be very productive property for shale wells, America wins with more (and cheaper) natural gas. There are no losers in this scenario. Here’s more on Friday’s meeting of the MWCD board and the decisions they made…
Read More “Antero Pays $15K/Acre, 20% Royalties for MWCD Piedmont Lake Lease”
Rice Energy experienced their first well site fatality on Saturday when a Texas man was killed at their Bigfoot 9H drilling site in Belmont County, OH (see 
In August of 2012 staffers at the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) made a boo-boo. They put into writing (in the form of a 13-page memo, embedded below) a draft plan to promote Utica Shale drilling under (not on) Sunfish Creek State Forest (in Monroe County), under (not on) Barkcamp State Park (in Belmont County), and under (not on) Wolf Run State Park (Noble County). The memo begins by saying there will be a communications problem to solve: “An initiative to proactively open state park and forest land to horizontal drilling/hydraulic fracturing will be met with zealous resistance by environmental activist opponents, who are skilled propagandists. Neutral parties in particular — such as ordinary citizens concerned about their families’ health — will be vulnerable to messaging by opponents that the initiative represents dangerous and radical state policy by Gov. Kasich.” (emphasis original) The memo states later on that, “Anti-fracking activists will attempt to legally and physically disrupt or halt the drilling projects, including staging dangerous protests on state lands. (This will require sustained legal countermeasures and crisis readiness by ODNR.)”
MDN has previously told you, on a number of occasions, that an early indicator of where drilling will soon heat up is to watch the local county land recorder’s office–the place where they keep official copies of property deeds. If it’s crowded in the local land records office, that means drillers are ready to make offers to landowners and want to start drilling. Of course they first have to figure out who owns the mineral rights, hence the activity in title searchers and abstactors checking deeds.