BP Invests In Ohio's Utica Shale

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.

March 28, 2012 | 11:27 AM

Scott Detrow / StateImpact Pennsylvania

A Susquehanna County drilling rig

The latest sign energy companies are more interested in Ohio’s Utica Shale than Pennsylvania’s Marcellus play: an 84,000-acre leasing purchase by British Petroleum.
More from the Post-Gazette:

BP, the nation’s second-largest oil and gas producer, leased the Trumbull County acreage from the Associated Landowners of the Ohio Valley, a nonprofit group of landowners who joined together to market their properties. Terms of the agreement will be executed with each landowner and were not disclosed.
BP will target the Utica and Point Pleasant shale formations, which underlie much of Ohio and contain lucrative pockets of oil, natural gas and natural gas liquids like ethane. The shale rocks have a depth of about 6,000 feet, and are of similar thickness to the Marcellus Shale that underlies most of Pennsylvania.

Yesterday, news broke that Pennsylvania’s rig count has dropped over the past year. That’s due to the fact most of Pennsylvania’s shale contains “dry” gas. With natural gas prices at record-low levels, companies are more interested in extracting “wet” gas, which contains minerals and materials that can be sold for higher profits. You can read more about the difference between the two gasses here.