Chesapeake Is Selling 337,000 Acres Of Its Ohio Holdings

• 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.

Two months ago, Chesapeake Energy was boasting about its Ohio land holdings. One of its natural gas wells was producing 300 times the average Ohio well’s output.
This week, the company is selling a quarter of its Utica Shale leases. The Post-Gazette reports that “through a listing on the website of Meagher Energy Advisors, Chesapeake has put more than 337,000 acres across 19 eastern Ohio counties up for sale.”
Why is Chesapeake selling so much Ohio land, after CEO Aubrey McClendon bragged shale drilling was “the biggest thing economically to hit Ohio, since maybe the plow”?
Because the company needs to raise cash. Chesapeake holds more than $13 billion in debt, and the Oklahoma-based firm is under increased pressure to improve its balance sheet, due to fallout from a controversial loan program the company was hiding from shareholders.
StateImpact Pennsylvania recently documented Chesapeake’s financial woes.

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