Select Energy Services provides water solutions and wellsite services in every major shale play in the U.S. With $1 billion in revenues and some 5,000 employees, Select Energy is a major player in both the Marcellus and Utica Shale. They also just jilted Carroll County, Ohio.
Read More “Select Energy Reneges on Deal with Carroll County, OH”
Rex Energy announced yesterday that it has closed on a previously announced deal to sell its subsidiary Keystone Midstream to MarkWest Energy for $512 million (see this MDN story for the original announcement). Rex also announced that their Bluestone cryogenic processing plant, part of the sale, has just gone online and will begin selling gas by June 1st.
But perhaps the biggest news yesterday from Rex, at least for landowners, is that Rex has completed drilling its first Ohio Utica well, in Carroll County. Fracking of the well begins in June, and Rex is now moving the rig back to PA where they will drill their second Utica well—in Lawrence County.
Read More “Rex Energy Drills First Utica Well, Sells Keystone Midstream”
Another story about how electric generating plants are switching from coal to natural gas. This one comes from Ohio, where Appalachian Power brought a newly completed gas-fired plant in February near Dresden. Why switch from coal to gas? It’s all in the economics. The cost of coal has skyrocketed from $43.75 per ton in 2007 to $63.78 in 2011, an increase of 46 percent. At the same time, natural gas has gone from over $14 per million Btus to around $2.70 today. Need we say more?
But at what price is it more economical to use coal rather than natural gas? Thanks to Appalachian Power, we now know.
Ohio’s new shale oil and gas drilling legislation (SB 315) has now passed both the House (73-19) and the Senate (21-8) and is on the way to Gov. John Kasich’s desk for his signature, which it will receive. The bill as passed is 220 pages long and wide-ranging in its scope, covering not only shale oil and gas extraction, but renewable energy, water conservation, and wastewater treatment. The bill reportedly contains some of the strictest rules in the nation for hydraulic fracturing.
So what’s in the bill? MDN doubts you want to read through 220 pages to find out. Embedded below is the 70-page summary overview version. However, here’s a few brief highlights of what’s in it:
Read More “Ohio Passes New Drilling Law, Gov. Kasich Will Sign”
Ohio legislators have been working to craft new shale oil and gas drilling rules that will do more to protect the environment, and at the same time, help protect the fledgling shale drilling industry in the state. New legislation passed in committee yesterday that will now go to the full House includes a provision to help prevent frivolous lawsuits brought by deep-pocketed anti-drilling groups, like the Ohio Environmental Council and the Sierra Club. These groups, who are opposed to expanded use of fossil fuels, use the legal system to tie up shale drillers in court and force them to spend huge sums of money as a tactic to reduce fossil fuel mining and use.
When the Ohio House added a protection against such shenanigans, predictably the anti-drillers objected.
Read More “Anti-Driller Groups in Ohio Don’t Like Being Legally Neutered”
A cautionary story for landowners comes from Columbiana County, Ohio. Some landowners, like Patrick and Jill McNicol, own land encumbered by old gas leases going back fifty years they knew nothing about. What does it mean? They’ll get $4 per acre for their land (and no royalties), while their neighbors will get $5,800 per acres and 12-20 percent royalties.
Is there any recourse for the McNicols? Maybe.
Read More “Some OH Landowners Get $5,800/Acre While Neighbors Get $4/Acre”
The Columbiana County (OH) Port Authority voted on Monday to lease 43.9 acres of its property in Beaver County, PA to Chesapeake Energy.
Read More “Columbiana County Port Authority Leases Land to Chesapeake”
The Louisville City Council (Stark County, OH) passed an agreement yesterday to sell both potable and treated sewage water to Chesapeake Energy for their use in fracking Utica Shale wells. The water purchase agreement runs through 2017.
Read More “Louisville, OH to Sell Chesapeake Water for Fracking”
Last week Chesapeake transferred 90 percent ownership of their 9,000 Utica Shale leases in Columbiana County, Ohio to their French partner Total in return for $2.03 billion. Back in December Chesapeake did an initial deal with Total for a 25 percent ownership stake in Chesapeake’s Ohio Utica Shale leases for 10 Ohio counties. This latest deal does not grant Total 90 percent in all 10 counties, so the question is, why Columbiana in particular? In two words: headache relief.
Read More “Chesapeake Sells More of its Utica Leases to Total”
The Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District has just signed a deal with Sierra Buckeye of Houston to allow Utica Shale drilling on 185 acres of District-controlled land—and it got some VERY favorable terms for the deal.
Read More “Muskingum Watershed District Signs New Deal for Utica Drilling”
An unnamed driller in Ohio has asked Canadian company GASFRAC to use its waterless fracking technology to drill two trial wells in the Utica Shale. You may recall that a group of Tioga County, NY landowners with a collective 135,000 Marcellus Shale acres were set to use GASFRAC’s LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) technology to jump start drilling in New York, but the lease and royalty deal with the driller, eCORP, fell through (no fault of GASFRAC, see this MDN story).
Will GASFRAC’s innovative technology do the trick in Ohio’s Utica Shale? There’s some disagreement on that point.
Read More “GASFRAC Waterless Fracking Technology Debuts in Utica Shale”
Carrizo Oil & Gas has just received a permit for drilling in the Utica Shale in Trumbull County, Ohio. But the company says it’s not going to start its exploratory drilling for the foreseeable future, at least in Trumbull because Trumbull has more restrictive road repair demands, so instead Carrizo will drill its first Utica exploratory well in neighboring Mercer County, PA where the demands on road repair are not as restrictive.
Read More “Carrizo Gets Utica Permit for Trumbull County, OH”
One of the more interesting stories (to MDN anyway) over the past several years has been that of how short line railroads are seeing a comeback because of shale gas drilling. Perhaps it’s the romanticism of a bygone era that appeals. Some of the uses for old short line railroad beds have been innovative—things like “dual use” corridors where rail trails and pipelines have been run together.
But there’s a very new and interesting twist on this story MDN has just noticed. In at least one Ohio location, an energy company wants to lease an abandoned rail line, but not for pipelines and not to run trains on it…
Read More “Ohio Driller Eyes Abandoned Railroad for Innovative Use”
Yesterday MDN wrote a story about a newly released study by Ernest & Young that purports to show that Ohio’s oil and gas taxes are the lowest in the country, and would remain the lowest even if Gov. John Kasich’s plan to boost those taxes were to be adopted (see this MDN story). MDN stated that we could not find a copy of that study to review the data. Thanks to two intrepid MDN readers, we now have a copy (embedded below).
Read More “Ernst & Young’s Analysis of Ohio Proposed Severance Tax”
Landowners in Trumbull County, Ohio—some 50 to 60 families—are now collectively $7 million richer since receiving their lease signing bonus checks. Including Richard and Ida Faber, who received a check yesterday for $701,580—almost $3,000 per acre.
Read More “Trumbull County, OH Landowners Receive Lease Checks”
Carroll County, Ohio is starting to feel the negative effects of Chesapeake Energy’s troubles, as noted in a story yesterday in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Because of recent revelations of debt financing, private hedge funds and other practices by Chesapeake CEO Aubrey McClendon, and a resulting fall in Chesapeake’s stock price and credit rating, drilling industry activity in Carroll County has slowed down—a lot.