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ODNR Releases Ohio Utica O&G Production for 3Q18 – Top 25 Wells
The Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) issued third quarter 2018 production numbers for Utica shale oil and gas production yesterday. And what a report it is! Natural gas production was up an amazing 31% over the same period last year (after being up 42% in 2Q18). Utica natgas production broke another record, hitting a new all-time high of 605 billion cubic feet (Bcf) in 3Q18. But perhaps the biggest story was Utica oil production. In 1Q18 Utica oil production was down 3.6%. In 2Q18 Utica oil production was up 11%. But in 3Q18, Utica oil production soared, going up 32%.
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Two separate cases before U.S. District Judge David S. Cercone (in Pennsylvania) were settled yesterday by EQT. One of class action cases, brought against EQT, alleged the company had intentionally misclassified employees as independent contractors to avoid paying overtime. The settlement awards “more than 100” workers back wages totaling $2.8 million. The other class action case is similar, except it was filed against Rice Energy before Rice was bought out by EQT. Now that Rice is part of EQT, it is EQT paying the bills. In the Rice Energy lawsuit, some 90 workers are being paid $2.9 million for unpaid overtime. Wednesday was an expensive day for EQT.
Remember the Carrington’s from the 1980s prime time soap Dynasty? Or how about the Ewings, as in J.R. and Bobby, from the prime time soap Dallas? No, we’re not talking about the remakes of those shows appearing in recent years. We’re talking about the originals. Both shows revolved around oil families of immense wealth–one in Colorado, the other in Texas. We have a real-life version of Dynasty and Dallas playing out right now–in Pittsburgh–with the Rice brothers and EQT. Not all the sex stuff–get your head straight! We’re talking about the backroom deals and bare-knuckle politics stuff. Last week we told you that Toby and Derek Rice, formerly of Rice Energy, have launched an effort to take over the company they sold Rice Energy to (see 
The CORNballs are still at it. Even though NEXUS Pipeline, a $2.6 billion, 255-mile interstate pipeline that runs from Ohio into Michigan, partially started up in October, and went fully online in November, the Coalition to Reroute NEXUS (CORN), along with the City of Oberlin, Ohio, is asking the D.C. Court of Appeals to reverse the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s original decision to approve the project. Yes, the CORNballs (our name for CORN) want to shut it all down–even though the pipeline is in the ground spreading economic cheer throughout the region, and even though all of the scary nightmare scenarios predicted by CORN and Oberlin with respect to building the pipeline have now been proven false. The CORNballs and Oberlin are sore losers and apparently have endless gobs of money for lawyers to file frivolous lawsuits in federal court. The same two groups tried this stunt in a different court, the Sixth Circuit, where the lawsuit was tossed out last March. They’ve gone court shopping to try it all again.
In October 2017, the radical Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) published a “report” that makes the preposterous claim that New England customers have overpaid utility bills by $3.6 billion due to collusion between the natural gas and electricity industries (see 
The “best of the rest”–stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading: New York leads nation in population loss; Rig count stands at 19 in Ohio’s Utica; Holyoke residents speak out against changes to natural gas pipeline; U.S. DOE to ease LNG exports reporting requirements; Exxon Mobil opposes weakening Obama-era emissions rules: letter to EPA; Powering the world: Renewables are still far behind coal and natural gas; Canadian resort town’s climate shakedown blows up in its face; India is losing the natural gas race to China; Poland’s goal of ditching Russian natural gas bolsters American LNG and Trump’s energy agenda; Vietnam to increase electricity production with natural gas imports.
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?
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 
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