BLM Auctions 75 Acres in OH’s Wayne Natl Forest for $209/Acre
Last week the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Eastern States Office ran another oil and gas lease auction for federal land on the eastern side of the country. Up for auction was 2,456 acres in Ohio, Michigan and Mississippi. Only half of the property listed for auction actually brought bids and sold. Of the 2,456 acres offered, a piddly 75 acres, in two parcels, was located in Ohio’s Wayne National Forest (WNF)–in Monroe County. That is, 3% of all the acreage in the BLM sale was in the Ohio Utica–and yet that 3% brought in 69% of the revenue from the sale: $15,720 total. However, the amount paid per acre for the WNF parcels seems to be small–just $209 per acre. So who picked up the 75 acres for a song?
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It seems all of New England hates natural gas pipelines of any kind–whether large interstate pipelines to bring low-cost, clean-burning Marcellus gas into the region, or tiny new extensions of existing local distribution pipelines (the local gas company), especially after the tragedy near Boston (see 
It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything about Duke Energy’s plan to build a critically-needed natural gas pipeline near Cincinnati, OH, to replace an old pipeline built in the 1950s. We told you in April that Duke had, finally, refiled their application to build the new pipeline along an alternate route, with a few tweaks (see 
In early November, Gulfport Energy, an independent oil and gas driller with significant acreage positions in the Utica Shale of eastern Ohio and the SCOOP Woodford and SCOOP Springer plays in Oklahoma, canned their CEO Michael Moore following allegations that he used a company credit card, and the company chartered jet, for personal uses (see 
LNG (liquefied natural gas) is increasingly a critical part of the natural gas picture here in the U.S.–and in the Marcellus/Utica–as in exports of LNG. This year Dominion Energy’s Cove Point LNG export terminal in Maryland came online, and early next year Kinder Morgan’s Elba Island LNG export facility along the coast of Georgia is due to go online. Not only that, we now see a trend of setting up smaller LNG facilities inland, not situated along the coast, in places like northeastern Pennsylvania (see 
The “best of the rest”–stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading: PA joins 8 other states, D.C. to develop regional program to cap greenhouse gas pollution from transportation; Ohio shale production spikes, and what that means for the state; How responsive will Cove Point LNG exports be to economics?; NY Comptroller DiNapoli facing heat over climate change; Natural gas industry burns for more pipeline capacity in Mass.; Anti-pipeline activism isn’t generating more investment in renewable energy; The incredible shrinking credibility of the climate movement; Oil nosedives to $46 – worries about economy collide with supply glut; Natural gas producer key to Trump’s energy dominance agenda strikes new deal with Malaysia.
A week ago MDN brought you the news that Toby and Derek Rice, formerly of Rice Energy, have launched an effort to take over the company they sold Rice Energy to (see 
Antero Resources, one of the biggest drillers in the Marcellus/Utica, is also one of the best hedging companies in the business. They routinely lock in prices for their gas up to a year (or more) in advance, to ensure they make a tidy profit. And Antero averages higher prices for their gas sales than just about any other Marcellus/Utica producer. This morning Antero issued an update on their latest hedging moves, which is always interesting. But that’s not what caught our eye. They also issued a fourth quarter update. No, not for the entire fourth quarter as we still have a few weeks left in 4Q and the full, official 4Q update won’t come along until maybe the end of January. But in this interim 4Q update, we spotted the news that because of the addition of the Rover Pipeline, Antero now sells a full 30% (up from 16%) of their natural gas production to Midwest markets–markets that pay, on average, more for gas than elsewhere.
The “Beast in the East” (Marcellus/Utica) continues to roar, according to our favorite government agency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration. EIA publishes our favorite monthly report, the Drilling Productivity Report (DPR), a forecast of oil and gas production in the country’s seven major shale plays for the coming month. The latest DPR shows that the Marcellus/Utica region (called Appalachia in the report) will expand by another amazing 414 million cubic feet of natural gas production per day (MMcf/d). The increase is a response to new pipelines coming online in the region, carrying our gas to other regions where it fetches a higher price. Not only is M-U production off the charts, so is natural gas production collectively, across all the plays. EIA says that in January, production from all seven plays will go up another 1.1 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d), after it went up 1 Bcf/d in November (see 
In December 2017, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a final approval for the Mountaineer XPress pipeline project (see 
In June 2017, MDN reported that the Fresh Water Accountability Project (FWAP), a radical anti-fracking group based in Michigan, had filed a lawsuit against the Patriot Water Treatment facility and the City of Warren, OH, claiming the two treat frack chemicals at their respective facilities that don’t get processed enough–and consequently get released into the Mahoning River (see 
A year ago, in December 2017, Virginia’s Water Control Board issued a water permit/certification for the Mountain Valley Pipeline project–a $3.5 billion, 301-mile pipeline that will run from Wetzel County, WV to the Transco Pipeline in Pittsylvania County, VA (see