Lease & Royalty Payments | Ohio | Pennsylvania | Statewide OH | Statewide PA | Statewide WV | West Virginia
Free Website Helps M-U Landowners Estimate O&G Values
After selling Rice Energy to EQT in 2017, the four Rice brothers, all of whom worked at Rice Energy (and left after the merger), launched a new venture (see Rice Brothers Act II – $200M Marcellus/Utica Investment Firm). Dan, Toby, Derek, and Ryan Rice plus a fifth partner, a former VP at Rice, pooled $200 million of their money (and their expertise) and launched Rice Investment Group (RIG). One of the companies they invested in provides a cool (free) online website for both drillers AND landowners, offering instant valuations for the oil and gas rights along with the location of wells drilled nearby.
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Ascent Resources has listed for sale two “packages” of its assets in the core of the Utica Shale in Ohio. One package contains a non-operated interest in 68 wells and 1,362 net leasehold acres. The second package includes a royalty interest in 10 wells and 106 net revenue interest acres. Details on where the assets are located (which counties) and other details are in the listing below.
Last week Pennsylvania issued 12 new shale well drilling permits with a mix of permits issued in both the southwest (wet gas) and northeast (dry gas) regions of the state. Ohio issued 7 new permits, all of them except one in the same county (Jefferson). West Virginia was a goose egg–no new permits issued last week.
The plot thickens in the $60 million FirstEnergy nuclear subsidy bribery scandal. Last week MDN brought you the news that Ohio’s Attorney General, David Yost, had filed a second lawsuit to stop the collection of money from ratepayers that funds $150 million annual payments to FirstEnergy provided for under the law known as House Bill 6 (see 
Yesterday Rising Phoenix Royalties (RPR) announced it has purchased the future royalty payments from a landowner in the Utica Shale, in Monroe County, OH. This acquisition is RPR’s third Marcellus/Utica transaction this year.
We hoped it wouldn’t happen, but warned you it might when Gulfport Energy announced several weeks ago it had missed a debt payment and was in “restructuring” talks (see 
Once again PTT Global Chemical is changing the timeline for a final investment decision (FID) to build a $10 billion ethane cracker plant in Belmont County, OH–for the umpteenth time. The most recent timeline had a decision coming by the end of this year or in the first quarter of next year. Whoops, they did it again! The new timeline is now “at least the middle of 2021.”
It’s all starting to come undone for FirstEnergy Corporation. Last week two of Ohio’s three largest cities sued to block annual $150 million payments to FirstEnergy’s Energy Harbor subsidiary on the basis those payments are ill-gotten gain, the result of FirstEnergy bribing government officials to pass House Bill 6 (HB 6) and keep it passed (see 
In July, now-former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder and four of his associates were indicted for felonies related to an alleged $60 million bribery scandal in passing the hugely unpopular House Bill 6 (see