Gas well snapshot shows high-producing Ohio wells

ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS

Asso­ci­ated Press

COLUMBUS — Nat­ural gas wells using the drilling method known as hydraulic frac­tur­ing are pro­duc­ing at a much higher rate than tra­di­tional wells, accord­ing to the first look at pro­duc­tion fig­ures from nine active wells in the Utica Shale for­ma­tion in east­ern Ohio.

Fig­ures reported Mon­day by Okla­homa City-based Chesa­peake Energy Corp. show five wells in east­ern Ohio pro­duc­ing 2.6 bil­lion cubic feet of nat­ural gas in 2011. The other four wells pro­duced hun­dreds of bar­rels of oil but are not in nat­ural gas pro­duc­tion yet, accord­ing to Chesapeake.

The report, which Chesa­peake pro­vided to the Ohio Depart­ment of Nat­ural Resources, shows one well in Har­ri­son County pro­duc­ing 1.5 bil­lion cubic feet of nat­ural gas, or 2 per­cent of the state’s entire nat­ural gas production.

Put another way, that well has 300 times more in daily pro­duc­tion than the aver­age well drilled ver­ti­cally into the ground, said Rick Sim­mers, chief of ODNR’s Divi­sion of Oil and Gas Resources Management.

“The pre­lim­i­nary pro­duc­tion for all the wells on the gas side is very high,” Sim­mers said.

Com­pa­nies includ­ing Chesa­peake have drilled 38 other wells that have yet to report production.

Ohio has issued about 150 per­mits for Utica Shale wells in Ohio. By con­trast, the state has about 49,000 tra­di­tional gas wells report­ing pro­duc­tion of about 73 bil­lion cubic feet in 2011.

The fig­ures con­tinue to fuel Chesapeake’s opti­mism about the for­ma­tion, spokesman Keith Fuller said in a state­ment. “The data reported, while promis­ing, is still very lim­ited and only a small part of the infor­ma­tion needed to gauge the poten­tial of the entire for­ma­tion,” he added.

The data reported Mon­day involves wells drilled using a method dubbed “frack­ing,” in which thou­sands of gal­lons of chem­i­cally laced water are blasted into shale deposits, free­ing nat­ural gas trapped in the lay­ers of shale.

The nat­ural gas reported Mon­day includes both “dry” gas that can be dis­trib­uted almost imme­di­ately to gas com­pa­nies for home and busi­ness use, and “wet” gas that includes other pro­po­nents such as butane and propane that must be stripped out, Sim­mers said.

East­ern Ohio is in the midst of a nat­ural gas boom as devel­op­ers seek to cap­ture rights to Utica Shale deposits. Last month, BP announced it had leased 84,000 acres of land in the Utica/Point Pleas­ant shale for­ma­tion in north­east Ohio for oil and gas production.

The Utica Shale lies below the Mar­cel­lus Shale, where oil com­pa­nies in Penn­syl­va­nia have drilled thou­sands of wells in search of nat­ural gas and, more recently, oil.

Also last month, Chesa­peake announced a $900 mil­lion project for gath­er­ing, com­pres­sion and pro­cess­ing of nat­ural gas and nat­ural gas liq­uids. The project will roll out over five years, with parts of the com­plex sched­uled to begin oper­a­tions by June 2013.

Deci­sions by Chesa­peake and BP to develop in Ohio come despite a pro­posal by Repub­li­can Gov. John Kasich to hike the taxes that oil and gas drillers pay for extract­ing the state’s nat­ural resources. Ohio’s oil and gas asso­ci­a­tion has crit­i­cized Kasich’s plan as a poten­tial turnoff to drilling activ­ity. The gov­er­nor wants to use the pro­ceeds to fund a mod­est statewide income-tax reduc­tion begin­ning in 2016.

Posted by AP News on Apr 2 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.