Report Suggests Ohio's Utica Shale Packed With Gas

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.

April 3, 2012 | 2:00 PM

Production numbers are showing a lot of natural gas in Ohio’s Utica Shale, as the AP reports:

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.

In addition to becoming drilling hotspot, Ohio is also a repository for Pennsylvania drillers’ used brine and fracking fluid, which is inserted into deep injection wells. Check the StateImpact Pennsylvania website tomorrow morning for a report on Ohio’s injection sites, and one location’s tie to earthquakes.