Ohio AG Succeeds in Blocking $2B in Nuke Payments to FirstEnergy
We continue to peel back the layers of the rotten, smelly, stinky onion that is Ohio’s House Bill (HB) 6, a law granting billions (plural) to FirstEnergy in an attempt to prop up the company’s economically failing nuclear power plants. FirstEnergy is accused of bribing legislators to pass, and keep passed, HB 6 by paying out $60 million (see FirstEnergy Involved in Bribery Scheme to Pass $1B Nuke Bailout Law). It is the biggest bribery scandal in Ohio history. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has been hammering FirstEnergy with lawsuits since the bribery scandal was first revealed. It looks like Yost (and consequently Ohio residents AND the Ohio Utica Shale industry) has won.
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In 2016 a group of business and government leaders from Ohio and West Virginia in the Mid-Ohio Valley banded together to form an economic development group called Shale Crescent USA, or SCUSA (see 
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost continues to hammer FirstEnergy Corporation. In November Yost filed a lawsuit to block the collection of $150 million provided for under House Bill (HB) 6, aimed at propping up FirstEnergy’s unprofitable nuclear power plants in the state (see 
The Enverus U.S. oil and gas rig count slipped by one to 406 over the past week. The Marcellus play stayed even with 32 active rigs. However, in a good sign, the Ohio Utica picked up 2 new rigs to close the week with 8 active rigs (total of 40 active rigs in the M-U).
FirstEnergy is up to its metaphorical rear-end in alligators. Not only has the Ohio Supreme Court blocked (for now) the collection of annual $150 million payments from the residents of Ohio given to FirstEnergy to prop up its uneconomic nuclear power plants, but multiple (over a dozen) lawsuits have been filed against the company by some of FirstEnergy’s biggest investors alleging fraud that has caused the company’s stock price to plummet.
The Ohio Supreme Court just delivered a decision that affects one particular landowner (and former mineral rights owner), but also has implications for all Ohio landowners and rights owners. And by extension, implications for drillers that pay royalty payments. The Supremes found in Gerrity v. Chervenak that the landowners in the case (the Chervenaks) did enough due diligence when searching for the rights owner who had moved out of the area. The Supremes said the landowner performed the proper steps to reclaim ownership of the severed mineral rights under their land.
Anti-fossil fuelers love to protest things. Fine. Let them protest. This is (still) America. But when antis tip over into illegal acts like blocking legal activities of building pipelines or drilling wells, or when antis tip over into acts of vandalism like destroying equipment, that’s NOT okay. Antis call it “protesting.” We call it criminal behavior. A bill just passed in the Ohio legislature calls such activity what it is–crimes. And now (provided Gov. DeWine signs the bill into law, which is expected), such miscreants will pay stiff fines and in some cases do jail time for their crimes.
By now it’s a cliche to say that 2020 has been an exceptional year–and not in a good way. For the first time in our memory of writing MDN, we witnessed widespread curtailments or “shut-ins” of wells in the Marcellus/Utica during 2020. That is, drillers voluntarily turned the values off and flowed less gas in a bid to (a) not sell the gas at prices that don’t return a profit, and (b) drive up the price of gas (see 
There is an ongoing question of whether or not the Ohio Marketable Titles Act (MTA), which impacts Utica shale rights, can be used to return previously severed mineral rights back to a surface landowner, or whether the MTA is superseded by the Ohio Dormant Minerals Act (DMA). In February 2019, Ohio’s Seventh District Court of Appeals said the MTA *does* still apply to mineral rights. The Seventh Circuit then ruled in a second case in April 2019, reaffirming yet again that yes, MTA applies to mineral rights. The Seventh Circuit ruled in a third case in October 2019 to say YES, the MTA still applies. In April, the Ohio Supreme Court agreed to hear and rule on the matter too (see 
Yesterday MDN brought you a post about the dramatic increase in natural gas-fired electric plants in the Marcellus/Utica, particularly Pennsylvania (see 
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 
