Armstrong County | Beaver County | Columbiana County | Coterra Energy (Cabot O&G) | Encino Energy | Energy Companies | Inflection Energy | Lycoming County | Monroe County | Ohio | PennEnergy Resources | Pennsylvania | Snyder Brothers | Southwestern Energy | Susquehanna County | Weekly Permits
Weekly Shale Drilling Permits for PA, OH, WV: Jun 7-13
Two of three Marcellus/Utica states received permits to drill new shale wells last week. Pennsylvania issued just 4 new permits, spread all around the state, all in different counties. Ohio issued 8 new permits, split equally between Encino Energy (EAP) and Southwestern Energy (Eclipse). West Virginia’s shale industry got skunked last week with no new permits for a second week in a row! We can’t remember that ever happening.
Read More “Weekly Shale Drilling Permits for PA, OH, WV: Jun 7-13”
Several weeks ago we brought you the news that landowner Gateway Royalty was sounding the alarm over a new bill quickly advancing in the Ohio legislature. Ohio’s House Bill (HB) 152 would use forced pooling if 65% of a proposed unit’s landowners are leased (too low a bar) and also would force the landowner to accept a 12.5% royalty and force them to accept post-production deductions with royalties in some cases potentially going down to nothing (see 
Ohio’s House Bill (HB) 6 law granted billions (plural) of dollars to FirstEnergy in an attempt to prop up the company’s economically failing nuclear power plants. FirstEnergy bribed state legislators to pass, and keep passed, HB 6 by paying out $61 million to a small group of insiders, including the now-former Speaker of the House (see 
The state treasurers from all three actively producing Marcellus/Utica states, including Stacy Garrity (PA), Robert Sprague (OH), and Riley Moore (WV), along with the state treasurers from 11 other oil and gas producing states, sent a letter to John Kerry, Biden’s so-called Climate Envoy, telling Kerry and other Biden officials to stop pressuring banks and other financial institutions to divest from fossil fuel companies. The treasurers also issued a warning to those banks and financial institutions letting them know their states (all 14 of them) will collectively pull their money out of those banks and financial institutions–BILLIONS of dollars–if the banks and financial institutions persist in divesting from fossil fuel companies. Fossil fuel haters: BACK OFF!
Gateway Royalty is sounding the alarm over a new bill that’s quickly advancing in the Ohio legislature. Ohio’s House Bill (HB) 152 allows drillers to force-pool landowners if 65% of a drilling unit is signed to a lease–a pretty low bar if you ask us. But that’s not even the worst part. The reluctant landowner would receive a standard 12.5% royalty, no matter what the royalty is for the rest of the leases in the unit, AND post-production deductions would be taken out. Landowners could realistically see a 6.25% royalty…or less! It’s time to burn up the phone lines to either get this bill changed, or defeated.
Radical environmentalists continue to use the City of Oberlin, Ohio to try and advance their agenda of ending the use of natural gas pipelines. And Oberlin willingly lets them do it. We’re referring to the latest court filing by Oberlin (actually by Big Green lobbyists using Oberlin) contesting the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) decision to approve the NEXUS pipeline, a pipeline from the Utica Shale into Michigan that’s been flowing for years connecting to a pipeline that exports some of the gas into Canada. Oberlin says FERC’s approval of NEXUS is faulty because some gas gets exported and is not “in the public interest.”
We’ve written many articles about the potential PTT cracker plant since April 2015 when PTT, a huge petrochemical company based in Thailand, first announced they would consider building an ethane cracker plant in Ohio (see 
Over the years we’ve covered a number of stories about companies buying future royalty payments from landowners (and rights owners) for an upfront, one lump sum payment now. Normally the deals don’t disclose how much money changed hands for those upfront payments. We have some recent transactions from a newcomer to the Marcellus/Utica, a company willing to announce how much they paid to buy those rights, which caught our attention. We have financial details for a deal in the Marcellus, and details for a deal in the Utica to share with you. We have hard numbers for how much they paid to buy those royalty rights.
We spotted an interesting article on the Forbes website about microproppants–really really tiny particles of sand or ceramic beads–and how the smaller the size of the proppant, the more likely it is to keep cracks in shale rock open and flowing natural gas and oil. In the Utica Shale, for example, a special kind of microproppant called DEEPROP will yield an additional revenue of $315,000 – $585,000 per thousand feet drilled. Show me the money!
Ohio’s House Bill (HB) 6 law granted billions (plural) of dollars to FirstEnergy in an attempt to prop up the company’s economically failing nuclear power plants. FirstEnergy bribed state legislators to pass, and keep passed, HB 6 by paying out $61 million to a small group of insiders, including the now-former Speaker of the House (see 