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Weekly Shale Drilling Permits for PA, OH, WV: Oct 11-17
Last week Pennsylvania issued 14 permits to drill new shale wells scattered around the state. The permits were issued to Chesapeake Energy, EQT, EXCO Resources, Chief Oil & Gas, and Southwestern Energy. Ohio issued five new permits in two counties, but all of them were issued to Ascent Resources. West Virginia issued just one new permit in a county we don’t often see in the list: Marion. The single WV permit was issued to EQT.
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At some point in the distant past (during our lifetime) swamps got renamed to “wetlands.” Don’t you just love how the left euphemizes everything? Chesapeake Energy is a bad actor when it comes to shafting landowners out of royalties, we’ll grant you that. However, the company must now pay Pennsylvania and the federal government (DOJ and EPA) a combined $1.9 million for “failure to identify and protect wetlands at 76 oil and gas well sites in Pennsylvania.” In other words, failure to protect swamps.
We don’t write much about Alta Resources, a shale drilling company co-founded by the inventor of shale fracking, George Mitchell. But that doesn’t mean Alta doesn’t drill in the Marcellus. The company owns some 547,000 gross (239,000 net) acres producing natural gas from approximately 900 wells in the Marcellus Shale across Bradford, Wyoming, Sullivan, Lycoming, Clinton, and Centre counties in northeast Pennsylvania. Alta is shopping all of their considerable Marcellus assets, looking for a buyer.
By any measure, it’s obvious to see that shale *drilling* activity in northcentral Pennsylvania counties–including Bradford, Clinton, Lycoming, Potter, Sullivan, and Tioga–is on the “bust” side over the past five-plus years. 2016 was the low point. However, is there any hope of seeing another boom in shale drilling in the region?
We don’t often see news about a Marcellus producer called Alta Resources. Alta was one of the first drillers we wrote about just after launching the MDN website back in 2009 (see 
It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on Canadian energy company Enerplus Corp, which currently owns some 36,000 acres of Marcellus Shale leases in northeastern Pennsylvania. The company doesn’t drilling any wells in the region but does participate by funding the drilling programs of others. On Friday Enerplus issued their 2018 and 4Q18 update, which shows the company’s Marcellus production averaged 208 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d).