Top 10 Shale Wells of 2015 for Marcellus, Utica, Entire Country
Rystad Energy Ranks, a data company based in Norway, hosts web-based portal with easy-to-use access data on oil and gas wells around the globle. They call their service “Rystad Energy cubes.” Rystead has made a wealth of data available in predefined “ranking lists” where the user can change filter settings to drill into and slice and dice the data. They call it their “database list format Ranks.” Up to now, Rystad Energy cubes have been available only through Rystad Energy’s proprietary Cube Browser. With “Ranks” users can now access predefined analyses based on the same databases. The really cool thing? They offer the “top 10” for various queries absolutely free. No registration required. We took it for a spin and produced Top 10 lists for Marcellus Shale well production in 2015, Utica Shale well production in 2015, and all American shale wells for 2015. As you might imagine being an MDN reader, most of the wells in the “all American” list are wells located in the Marcellus/Utica…
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MDN has written a number of stories about CORN–the COalition to Reroute NEXUS (
Details are just now coming to light of a new E&P (exploration and production, or drilling) company headquartered in Pittsburgh and focused totally on the Marcellus and Utica region. Until now the company has flown under our radar. The company is American Petroleum Partners (APP)–not to be confused with Aubrey McClendon’s American Energy Partners (AEP)–and is headed by Rice Energy alumnus Varun Mishra, who is the founder and CEO. The big news is that last September Mishra’s new company, founded in 2014, received a major injection of investment capital. Apollo Global Management invested $411 million in APP with the option to double it up to $800 million. MDN has it on very good authority that although APP quietly issued a press release about this last September (see it below), the company has intentionally kept the news quiet. Not any more! Big mouth MDN is blabbing it to the world. Below are the bits and pieces we’ve been able to put together about this newest Utica/Marcellus driller…
Once upon a time the Clinton Sandstone layer was the most drilled rock layer in Ohio. Then the Utica/Point Pleasant came along and it seemed as if everybody forgot about the Clinton. Previously the Clinton was drilled vertically, or conventional-only. But what if you drilled the Clinton horizontally, like you do in the Utica? You might get a “Utica-lite” well, as we commented a year ago (see 
As MDN previously reported, as of the third quarter 2015 Ohio’s oil and natural gas production from shale deposits had already surpassed production for all of 2014 (see 
A trucking company contracted to haul brine (i.e. naturally occurring water from the depths that comes out of a borehole long after drilling operations are completed) for Gulfport Energy crashed last Wednesday early in the morning and spilled 5,000 gallons of brine onto a field, which found its way into a creek, which emptied into a local reservoir serving Barnesville, OH residents (Belmont County). The trucking company is ECM Energy Services Inc. Barnesville was not drawing any water from the reservoir at the time (they have three local reservoirs from which to draw), so there was no threat to the local human population. Neither was there any impact on the local wildlife population. In fact, it was pretty much a non-event–except for the way it was inaccurately portrayed by media outlets like the Columbus Dispatch, whose reporter either intentionally misrepresented the facts, or was too obtuse to understand the facts…