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Some OH Lawsuits Against Long-Finished NEXUS Pipe Still Active
NEXUS Pipeline, a $2.6 billion, 255-mile interstate pipeline that runs from Ohio into Michigan, has been fully online since October 2018 (see More of NEXUS Pipe Goes Online, FERC Approves Compressor). In typical fashion, Big Green groups and landowners (some of them backed with Big Green money) tried to shut the pipeline down via lawsuits, but ultimately could not (see our NEXUS lawsuit stories here). Some landowners claimed the pipeline damaged their property during construction. Most of those lawsuits were either tossed or settled. However, there are still a few outstanding landowner lawsuits against NEXUS still active.
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We’re always suckers for railroad story. Not sure why, but we love reading about short line railroads that do well because of the shale industry. We spotted such a story about the 48-mile short line Belpre Industrial Parkersburg (BIP) Railroad between Parkersburg, West Virginia, and Relief, Ohio (via Marietta). BIP expects to double its traffic over the next year to 18 months thanks to the Marcellus/Utica Shale industry and the business it’s generating.
PTT Global Chemical yesterday issued a press release to say its major partner and financial backer for a planned $10 billion ethane cracker facility in Belmont County, OH–South Korea’s Daelim Chemical USA–has decided to pull out of the project. PTT said it remains committed to the project and will look for a new partner.
How much of an effort is “enough” when a surface landowner in Ohio tries to locate the owner(s) of the belowground mineral rights under his or her land using the Dormant Mineral Act (DMA)? Is it enough to search the public record archive in the county where the land is located? The Ohio Supreme Court recently ruled in a case to say no, it’s not enough to run a quick search in one county when attempting to locate mineral rights owners.
Do you remember the child’s game called “Simon Says”? That’s what we were thinking when we read about a lawsuit in Ohio by landowners against a group of shale drillers. The lawsuit, initiated by several landowners in Belmont County, OH, claims the drillers drilled too deep–into the Point Pleasant rock layer–when the leases signed only mention the Utica rock layer. The lawsuit, which is seeking class action status, claims “unjust enrichment” by the drillers.
In June 2018, EV Energy Partners (EVEP), the drilling subsidiary of EnerVest, emerged from bankruptcy court a mere two months after entering with $355 million of debt erased and sporting a new name: Harvest Oil & Gas Corp. (see 
It’s such a breath of fresh air (and so rare) when we spot actual, in-the-field, real science being done. So many times the “studies” we see published are nothing more than rehashed interpretations, speculation, and outright fabrications parading as scientific inquiry. We spotted a new study published just yesterday in the journal MDPI Atmosphere by researchers with the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) in Pittsburgh. In 2019 researchers flew specially outfitted drones with methane sniffers over 73 kilometers (45 miles) of Utica Shale gathering pipelines and associated infrastructure. Know what they found? There were ZERO methane leaks from the pipelines.
In December 2017 Fairmount Santrol, an Ohio-based sand producer that sells frac sand to drillers in the Utica and Marcellus Shale, announced it would sell itself to another sand company–Unimin, a subsidiary of Belgium-based SCR-Sibelco–for $170 million and 35% ownership in the newly combined company (see 
The Washington & Jefferson College Center for Energy Policy and Management (Washington, PA) is hosting a free webinar series on “
Each quarter the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) issues an update on Utica (and Marcellus) oil and natural gas production. Until the recent blowup of the ODNR website (still only partially restored) ODNR would issue a detailed list of all active wells with production by well. No more. That report is missing from the latest quarterly high-level update from ODNR covering first quarter 2020 numbers. What we can tell you, based on the information that has been released, is that production between 4Q19 and 1Q20 was down significantly.
A group of leftwing radical professors (all of the Democrats) from seven universities in Ohio and Pennsylvania have colluded to write a letter to the governors of Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The letter trash talks the billions of dollars in economic impact and tens of thousands of jobs ethane cracker plants and the petrochemical industry will have in the region. The leftist gang of seven poo-poos those estimates and says the proposed PTT cracker is too “risky” to approve. How do they figure?
Enverus (formerly known as Drillinginfo) recently released its latest FundamentalEdge report that explores the ongoing supply response to demand destruction caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. As part of the report, Enverus estimates how much dry gas production each major shale play produced, month by month, from January through May of this year. The numbers show that production from the Marcellus/Utica, which produces the most natural gas of any play, decreased the most of any play–by some 1.5 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) from January to May.
EnergyNet is an online marketplace for buying and selling oil and gas working interests (operated and non-operated), overrides, royalties, mineral interests, leaseholds, and other contracts. From time to time we spot auctions on EnergyNet from Marcellus/Utica drillers. EnerVest Energy is currently auctioning a package of leases scattered across Ohio and Pennsylvania via the EnergyNet website. The EnerVest auction ends June 17. We have the details below.
MDN was launched in January 2009, during the heyday of leasing for shale drilling in the Marcellus/Utica region. One of our early focuses was to highlight lease deals by landowner coalitions. (Indeed, it was one such deal, in Deposit, NY, that inspired Jim Willis to begin writing MDN.) These days you don’t read or hear much about landowner coalitions because most properties are now leased (not all, but most). MDN friend Nicole Jacobs from Energy in Depth highlights a successful coalition in Belmont County, OH in a recent post.
Although many landowners in the Marcellus/Utica (at lease those who are interested) have already signed leases to allow shale drilling on and under their property, not all have. And sometimes leases expire with no drilling. Plus, not all landowners have leases that allow pipelines and other development (like solar projects). The Ohio State University Extension is offering several webinars at the end of June of interest to all landowners general, and Ohio landowners in particular, with an interest in leasing and mineral rights.
Gulfport Energy, the third-largest (by number wells drilled) producer in the Ohio Utica Shale, issued an update yesterday to its previous plans on drilling in the Ohio Utica (and Oklahoma SCOOP), revising down the amount of natural gas it will produce and revising down drilling activity previously planned for 2020. The company says it will delay until later this year/early next year more of its production than previously announced–due to ongoing low prices for natgas.