From Roughneck to Art Deco Artist? Making a Living Post-Bust
We don’t have to tell you it’s bad out there in the oil and gas patch. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have disappeared in the last year or so. Many workers are on unemployment. Some have transitioned to other jobs within the oil and gas industry–many to other industries completely. But there’s one guy–a former roughneck–who has transitioned to a job we never imagined. He creates Art Deco pieces by welding old machinery and leftover whatever together–into things like tables. Apparently he makes enough money from it to pay the bills, including the salary of one employee. He does admit, however, that he’s biding his time until the o&g industry turns around again. Meet a unique 50-something guy in Ohio who went from roughneck to artist…
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Long before the words “Marcellus” and “Utica” entered the public discourse and consciousness of Ohioans, there was the Clinton Sandstone. For years conventional drillers have been sinking wells in the Clinton, which is found 4,500 feet below the surface (the Marcellus and Utica Shale layers are deeper). The Clinton lies under 25 counties in eastern Ohio. Over the years, some 35,000 conventional (vertical) wells have tapped the Clinton Sandstone in Ohio. EnerVest, one of the largest acreage holders in the Utica Shale (and in the Clinton Sandstone), has embarked on a great experiment. What if you turned a Clinton Sandstone well horizontal, like a Utica or Marcellus well? Would it work? Could you get more gas out of the sandstone by fracking it like shale? EnerVest has drilled seven horizontal wells so far, with a permit to drill another and a request to drill a ninth. Here’s the details, along with the differences between a Clinton horizontal well and a Utica horizontal well…
MDN has written many times about the odious and misnamed Food & Water Watch (FWW)–an anti-fossil fuel, anti-drilling group behind a lot of so-called “spontaneous” protests against fracking. We always knew the FWW faithful were misguided in their opposition. Unfortunately we have to be honest and add another adjective in the descriptor of FWW protesters: dumb.
As this issue goes to press, the Wall Street Journal and Fox Business is reporting that Chesapeake Energy has put 94,205 Utica Shale acres on the auction block. That’s nearly 10% of their remaining 1 million Utica Shale acres. This is not unprecedented. Last June Chesapeake put 337,000 acres on the auction block (see