Chesapeake Scales Back Its Dry Gas Drilling Operations

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

January 23, 2012 | 3:40 PM

Scott Detrow / StateImpact Pennsylvania

Chesapeake CEO Aubrey McClendon speaks to the Marcellus Shale Coalition's "Shale Gas Insight" conference

Here’s a sign reduced natural gas prices are having an impact on production: Chesapeake Energy is scaling back its drilling operations.
The Central Penn Business Journal reports:

Chesapeake Energy Corp. plans to reduce its dry gas rig count from 75 in 2011 to 24 by the second quarter, the company said in a statement. Half will operate in the Marcellus Shale, and six each in the Haynesville and Barnett shales in the Gulf Coast states, the Oklahoma City-based company said.
Chesapeake also will reduce investment in dry gas production from $3.1 billion in 2011 to $900 million this year, and will reduce daily production immediately by 8 percent, or half a billion cubic feet, it said. Chesapeake will lower production an additional 8 percent, if needed. The company accounts for about 9 percent of total U.S. production.
Chesapeake said it plans to shift resources to wet-gas plays. Unlike dry gas, which is solely a fuel, wet gas byproducts provide valuable feedstock to the chemical and plastics industries.

According to our Shale Play app, Chesapeake operates more than 100 producing Marcellus Shale wells in Pennsylvania.