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Ohio to Announce Shale Production Results Today
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- The Ohio Department of Natural Resources has scheduled a press event at 2 p.m. today in Columbus to announce long-awaited production results from ongoing oil and gas development in eastern Ohio's Utica shale.
The results will encompass oil and gas production for 2012, providing an analysis of the 87 producing wells, according to an ODNR release. Major oil and gas producers were required to submit their 2012 production numbers by the end of March. Ohio mandates that these companies deliver results of their producing wells annually.
The presentation this afternoon will be streamed live online and the results will be available at this website.
Test results conducted last year from major energy companies such as Chesapeake Energy Corp. and Gulfport Energy Corp., both based in Oklahoma City, proved encouraging.
Gulfport, for example, hit big with a handful of oil and gas wells in the southern portion of the Utica in Belmont and Harrison counties.
Last October, the company reported that its Shugert well in Belmont County registered a peak production rate of 7,482 barrels of oil equivalent per day while a second well at the site reported a peak rate of 4,913 barrels of oil equivalent per day.
In addition, Gulfport's Wagner 1-28H well in Harrison County reported peak test production of 4,650 barrels of oil equivalent per day. That well is connected to a pipeline that sends the gas to an interim processing operation constructed by MarkWest Energy.
MarkWest is constructing a massive cryogenic and fractionation complex in Harrison County, which would allow gas coming out of Utica wells to be processed for sale.
Chesapeake announced recently that its Coe well in Carroll County tested at a peak rate of 2,200 barrels of oil equivalent per day, with 33% of the content being natural gas liquids.
Nevertheless, industry players agree, production during the year was largely muted because of the lack of midstream infrastructure throughout the Utica.
During its fourth-quarter earnings call, executives from Chesapeake said that production in 2012 was "fairly minimal" because a large network of pipeline and processors under development has yet to come online.
The first phase of the Kensington cryogenic plant in Columbiana County is likely to start by mid-June, while another processing plant in Natrium, W.Va., is also set to be commissioned soon.
Once the infrastructure is completed, Chesapeake CEO Steve Dixon noted earlier this month, the company plans to "significantly grow production during the second-half of 2013."
Still, results for 2012 will easily dwarf those of 2011 because the small number of wells drilled and in production limited production that year.
In 2011, the Utica yielded just five commercially producing wells and four wells that had produced oil through wastewater generated by hydraulic fracturing.
Together, those wells produced 2.6 billion cubic feet of dry and liquids gas since production ramped up during the last six months of 2011. Another 46,323 barrels of oil was also tapped, ODNR said.
The most productive well then was the now-famous Buell 8H well in Archer Township, Harrison County. That well, among the first to be drilled in the Utica, alone yielded 1.52 billion cubic feet of gas over 198 days, or 2% of total gas production in the entire state of Ohio, ODNR said.
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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