In eastern Ohio, brand-new tractors have been zooming off the dealers’ lots, snapped up by local farmers. Suddenly cash-rich after being showered with bonuses for leasing oil and gas drilling rights on their land, typically worth $1,500-$4,000 an acre, they have been quick to invest their windfalls in new equipment.

A few years ago, those same leases would have sold for just $15 per acre. The difference now is that eastern Ohio is at the heart of the region that has become the most exciting area for oil and gas development in North America: the Utica shale.

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Within the past two years, the industry has woken up to the prospect that the rock layer stretching across the north-east of the continent from Kentucky to Ontario is rich in oil, gas and the “natural gas liquids” such as ethane and propane that are used as feedstock for the chemicals industry. Leading companies – including Chesapeake Energy, ExxonMobil and Hess – have between them spent billions of dollars building land holdings with drilling rights.

Estimates of the Utica shale’s reserves are imprecise but Aubrey McClendon, Chesapeake chief executive, has said he thinks the region could hold 25bn barrels of oil and gas: almost as much as the entire proved reserves remaining in the North Sea. Chesapeake is already reporting “very strong initial drilling results” from its first Utica wells in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania.

The implications for long-depressed rust belt US states are momentous. The east Ohio tractor boom is one small harbinger of what many people believe is an impending economic
revolution.

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