New Transportation Hub for Drillers Coming to Eastern Ohio
A new tri-modal (rail/truck/barge) logistics and transportation hub serving the Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia shale drilling is coming to the former Ohio Cold Rolling Company steel finishing mill in Yorkville, Ohio, located on the border of Belmont and Jefferson counties–right in the thick of where shale drilling has recently heated up. Esmark, Inc., which purchased the old Ohio Cold Rolling Company two years ago, recently announced that they will close the mill. However, in its place they will create a new transportation hub where products like frack sand, steel pipes, heavy equipment and other goods used for Utica and Marcellus drilling will be loaded and unloaded and reloaded, heading to various destinations. Esmark is converting the 1 million square foot plant into a rail/truck/barge complex called the Yorkville Energy Services Terminal. Among the many services at the new facility will be sucking 3 million gallons of fresh water per day from the Ohio River–to be used in drilling and fracking…
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On Sunday, August 31 at 5:45 pm, there was an earthquake in the vicinity of Weathersfield (Trumbull County), OH. However, no one felt it. The only way anyone knew there was a quake was because of monitoring by the U.S. Geological Survey. The Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) is investigating whether or not two wastewater injection wells, operated by American Water Management Services (AWMS), was the cause of that low-level quake that no one felt. According to the ODNR, from an “abundance of caution” they asked AWMS to shut down operations at those two wells while they investigate, which has now been done…
Long before the words “Marcellus” and “Utica” entered the public discourse and consciousness of Ohioans, there was the Clinton Sandstone. For years conventional drillers have been sinking wells in the Clinton, which is found 4,500 feet below the surface (the Marcellus and Utica Shale layers are deeper). The Clinton lies under 25 counties in eastern Ohio. Over the years, some 35,000 conventional (vertical) wells have tapped the Clinton Sandstone in Ohio. EnerVest, one of the largest acreage holders in the Utica Shale (and in the Clinton Sandstone), has embarked on a great experiment. What if you turned a Clinton Sandstone well horizontal, like a Utica or Marcellus well? Would it work? Could you get more gas out of the sandstone by fracking it like shale? EnerVest has drilled seven horizontal wells so far, with a permit to drill another and a request to drill a ninth. Here’s the details, along with the differences between a Clinton horizontal well and a Utica horizontal well…
The Ohio Utica Shale is having a big week. First, the shale play that Aubrey McClendon once famously said is “the biggest thing to hit Ohio since the plow” was added to the constellation of shale plays tracked by the U.S. Energy Information Administration in their monthly Drilling Productivity Report (see