St Clairsville RFP to Lease 195 Utica Acres Comes & Goes, No Bids
St. Clairsville (Belmont County), OH put out a request for bids on 195 acres of city-owned land. They want to lease the land for shale drilling. The RFP sought bids from drillers and contained these minimum terms: $7,300 per acre signing bonus, and 20% royalties. Yikes! Apparently St. Clairsville believes they hold all the cards. The deadline for bids was yesterday. How many bids did they get? Zero. Nada. None. But city leaders aren’t discouraged. Apparently putting it out for bid was a requirement under Ohio state law–a dance that they had to dance, motions they had to go through–and now that the RFP has come and gone, the real negotiations will begin. And make no mistake, drillers are interested in leasing the property. It sits in one of the sweetest sweet spots in the Utica Shale.
Here’s the St. Clairsville RFP story, and a good roundup showing the terms other municipalities have recently gotten for leasing their land…
Read More “St Clairsville RFP to Lease 195 Utica Acres Comes & Goes, No Bids”
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.