EOG Drilling Handful of New Wells in Ohio Utica in 2023
In 2020, EOG Resources, one of the largest oil and gas drillers in the U.S. (with international operations in Trinidad and China), sold *all* of its Marcellus assets, which were located in Bradford County, PA, to Tilden Resources for $130 million (see EOG Resources Sells Marcellus Assets for $130M, Exits Basin). EOG left the M-U building. But the company couldn’t stay away. Last November, we told you that EOG admitted to stealthily amassing 395,000 net acres in the Ohio Utica for very little money (see EOG Resources Accumulates 395K Acres in Ohio Utica for Under $500M). EOG calls its new position the “Ohio Utica combo play.” How much drilling does EOG plan to do in its Ohio assets in 2023?
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New shale permits issued for Feb. 13-19 in the Marcellus/Utica remained elevated last week. There were 35 new permits issued in total last week (down slightly from 40 the week before), including 27 new permits for Pennsylvania, three new permits for Ohio, and five permits issued in West Virginia. Last week the top receiver of new permits was Coterra Energy, with 13 new permits for Susquehanna County, PA. The number two permittee was Apex Energy with five permits in Westmoreland County, PA.
Yesterday morning Harrison County, OH, commissioners got a face-to-face update from Encino Energy’s director of external affairs, Jackie Stewart. You may recall that Encino bought out and took over all of Chesapeake Energy’s existing Ohio assets–both shale and non-shale–in November 2018 for $2 billion (see 
The Barack Hussein Obama administration went crazy with over-regulation in many areas. One of them was to redefine “waters of the United States” (or WOTUS) as everything down to, no exaggeration, mud puddles. When Donald Trump took office, he set about to correct some of the insane abuses of the Obama era, including WOTUS. He finally got it fixed. However, the Bidenistas took up the cause once again. Radicals at the EPA announced a new rule in January aimed at re-regulating all waters, putting power over just about everything (including oil and gas drilling) into the federal government’s hands via WOTUS (see 
Evolution Well Services, headquartered in Houston with a regional office in Pittsburgh, specializes in “electric” fracking–using natural gas from the well pad (instead of diesel fuel) to power turbines to create electricity that drives fracking pumps. In September 2020, three former Evolution employees who worked at remote sites in the Marcellus/Utica filed a lawsuit against the company claiming Evolution failed to pay them for their commute to and from job sites. The lawsuit was turned into a class action in February of last year (see 
The heads of three major oil and gas groups in the Appalachian region–the Marcellus Shale Coalition (representing Pennsylvania), the Gas and Oil Association of West Virginia, and the Ohio Oil and Gas Association–combined to pen an open letter to President Biden encouraging him to let the Marcellus/Utica “lead the way” in achieving our country’s shared goals for domestic, affordable, and clean energy. It’s a great letter making strong and cogent arguments for why more M-U natgas can reduce emissions and benefit not only the economy but the environment. There’s just one small problem…
Baker Hughes reported the rig count for last week saw the deepest cuts in rigs for any single week since June 2020 (just as the COVID pandemic and lockdowns were taking hold). The oil and gas rig count, an early indicator of future output, fell by 12 to 759 in the week ending Feb. 3. That is the lowest overall rig count number since September of last year. All of which sounds rather ominous. So we grabbed the numbers and updated our own spreadsheet/chart, and found the rig count across the three Marcellus/Utica states–Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia–remained a constant 52 active rigs over the past three months. Whew.
The Ohio Oil and Gas Leasing Commission, established in 2011 by a law signed by RINO Gov. John Kasich, is a five-member group designed to oversee drilling and fracking on state-owned land. After Kasich created it, he refused to appoint members, for years, to punish the oil and gas industry for not endorsing his plan to raise the severance tax rate. In 2017, under threat by the Republican legislature, Kasich finally relented and appointed the five members (see 
U.S. Rep. Bill Johnson, Republican Congressman from Ohio’s 6th congressional district (in the Utica Shale part of the state), has introduced his first bill of the new session of Congress. The bill is called the Unlocking Our Domestic LNG Potential Act. It will allow domestic suppliers of natural gas, including LNG, to export our gas to allies in Europe and Asia after completing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) review process only–cutting out a requirement to have the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) also approve it. The DOE approval takes much longer (years) and has been a choke point. It’s time to end the delays. It’s time to get rid of the weakest link.
In February 2022, Equitrans Midstream announced it had filed a new pipeline expansion project with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (see 
The Ohio Court of Appeals recently issued a decision in a case involving lease language about a “depth severance clause” that is very important for both landowners and drillers to know about. In Tera LLC v. Rice Drilling D LLC, et al., a landowner in Belmont County, OH, signed a lease with language that leases both the Marcellus and Utica shale layers, but all other formations were “reserved to the lessor” (i.e. the landowner). However, the driller, Rice (now EQT), drilled into and produced hydrocarbons from the Point Pleasant layer that sits immediately below the Utica. According to the lease (and the decision by the court), that was a no-no.