Does anyone know if there is any current Marcellus Shale activity in Clearfield County right now? It just seems as though everything has died down since September - no offers on properties or anything. Is there active drilling at the moment? If not, any ideas on when it will start back up?

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Lots of activity!!!!!!!!!!!! heaven knows how many wells in our state forest ! lots of traffic, stink, contaminated water and some not so friendly guards patrolling the roads. This has been a huge mistake.. before you sign a lease PULEEZE ask all your neighbors if they mind living next to intensive industrialization, that will forever change their once peaceful surroundings. Neighbors can file a nuisance suit and you might not get any of the money you were hoping to receive. and please know that whatever they tell you, there are experts that are certain that it's all going to back to haunt us, eventually those casings of cement and steel are going to corrode crack and degrade. I know Clearfield is all open arms to the gas industry, but it is short sighted as there are many many, unresolved problems. I know i am going to get jumped all over for writing this by all the gas company trolls all over this place. but please if you consider yourself a person of reason, research this topic on sites that are NOT put out there by the industry before you make a decision you'll deeply regret. look up the people who have been sickened, Chris Mobaldi, Stacey Haney, Judy and Carl Stiles, Chrystal Stroud, Lisa Parr, Mary McConnel, Pam Judy,

Brittany,

I've talked to Carrizo recently, they are drilling in eastern Clearfield County, and are very reluctant to lease any land at the moment.  The reasons are first and foremost, that the price of nat. gas has taken a nose dive to near $2.00/thousand cubic feet.  It gets difficult for them to make a profit at those levels.  Also, they have already leased thousands of acres on which the leases will expire if they do not sink a well, so they are focussing on drilling the already leased acreage, at what may turn out to be a loss, just so they can hold the leases they have already paid for.

There is hope.  I saw Dominion Resources is planning on converting their facility near Baltimore to compress our gas and load it on tankers to sell to the rest of the world, where prices are $16/thousand cubic feet.  They originally built this facility to unload gas for the American market, and pipe it to storage fields under Potter County, PA.  It will however take several years to do the conversion. 

I'm also hearing of new power plants and older power plant conversions to begin using nat. gas.  This will gradually soak up the excess supply and should help the price.  In the meantime though, all this drilling to hold acreage and then recoup the cost of drilling (upwards of $4 million per well) is flooding the market.

The other thing that is killing activity in our area, is we have dry gas.  Western PA and Ohio are going crazy now with activity.  The gas there has oil and other liquids in it which are very profitable.  Other shales in the US are heavy in oil, and these are also very active, but they get a lot of nat. gas out as well, which adds to the problem for us dry gas folks.

Thanks for the info Peter! - Please keep me updated if you find anything more out :-)

This article is kind of a downer for anyone in Clearfield who has not leased, but explains some of the technical details and economics.

http://knappap.blogspot.com/2012/01/wet-gas-vs-dry-gas-do-you-know-...

 

Thank you for that link Peter - very informative! :-)

Brittany,

You are correct but you all have another problem as well.  The Onondaga that the Marcellus sits on top is full of water.  This is not true in all parts of PA.  Greene County and Washington Countys for instance the Onondaga is dry.

Because the water is very briny the it must be disposed of in a enviromentally friendly way.  The cost of this type of water disposal whether you are talking about injection, disposal or treating and recycling the water is very costly venture.  Once we can figure out a way to fracture the Marcellus without getting into the Onondaga I am sure you will see activity start to come back to the area.

 

Peter,
Have you heard anything new from Carrizo lately?

To quote Simon and Garfunkle "The sound of silence".  They've not returned my calls.  One way to follow these guys is to go through their investor presentations.  http://www.crzo.net/investor-presentations  The IPAA Palm Beach Presentation has a chart on page 16 which caught my eye.  Its for the Eagle Ford Shale, but shows very clearly why they are going after the liquids ($$$).  To sum up, they are focussing on other (wet) shale plays, what they are doing in the marcellus, focusses on producing wells in north east PA.  They have 2 rigs in the "C" counties, which includes Clearfield, drilling evaluation wells.

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