Clock on local fracking decisions ticking down

As a March 15 deadline for many Athens County landowners approaches to cash in on their oil-drilling leases with the West Virginia-based Cunningham Energy firm, a number of questions are still up in the air.

It's not clear, for example, how much more land the company may have already locked up for drilling in the county, in addition to the acreage it has officially acknowledged. Cunningham has also steadfastly refused to divulge the identity of the large corporate joint-venture partner it says is waiting in the wings to help finance and/or operate its drilling plans.

Attorney Sky Pettey, of the John P. Lavelle & Associates law firm in Athens, noted last week that an affidavit filed recently by Cunningham with the Athens County Recorder's office, listing more than 400 drilling leases for around 35,000 acres in Athens County and the edges of surrounding counties, only includes those leases that utilized terms worked out by Lavelle's firm. The law firm asked the energy company to file this affidavit, Pettey said.

If Cunningham does have more acreage under lease in the county, it is under no legal obligation to file notice of the signing of these leases with the county recorder.

Based on the list of leases included in the affidavit alone, Cunningham has agreed to pay up to $87 million in signing bonuses to area landowners for the right to drill for oil or gas beneath their property. It is likely that at least some of these leases will fall through, however, because the property owners won't turn out to own their mineral rights.

Cunningham also has the option of backing out of all the leases – though not doing so selectively – by March 15, for whatever reason.

The company has been utterly tight-lipped about its joint venture partner's identity, and on Dec. 9 a company official told The Athens NEWS that for the time being, they were no longer going to publicly comment "on our operations in Athens County." (Since then, they have made exceptions for isolated stories, however.)

Possible candidates for joint venture partners may include Chesapeake Energy, a big Oklahoma-based corporation that has recently announced it is moving into Ohio "liquid-gas" shale drilling in a big way in partnership with a French firm; or Anadarko Petroleum, another big energy company based in Texas. Anadarko, with wells about 40 miles northeast of Athens, has the closest oil and gas horizontal "fracking" operations to our area.

Both companies have recently bought up at least some existing mineral-rights leases in Athens County. Though in some cases these leases appear to have been written only for shallow drilling – not for the allegedly oil-rich Utica shale, about a mile and half below the surface in Athens County – their ownership could conceivably tie up the right to do any kind of drilling on the land.

In late September, according to documents on file with the county recorder, Anadarko E&P Partnership bought mineral rights to 263 acres in Canaan Township, which had been held by the Canton-based Alliance Petroleum Corporation.

Also in September, Chesapeake AEC Acquisition bought up mineral-rights leases accounting for more than 2,000 acres in Trimble, Bern, York and Dover townships, from a handful of companies apparently associated with the Texas-based Enervest, which manages oil and gas properties for institutional investors.

A LOCAL LANDOWNER and attorney, meanwhile, who is concerned about reports that injection wells used to dispose of the water-sand-chemical mix used in the horizontal hydraulic fracturing drilling method may have caused earthquakes in the Youngstown area, has filed a public records request with Ohio regulators to get information about an injection well in Rome Township.

The operator of the well reportedly has told the Athens Messenger that while it does accept wastewater from horizontal "fracking" operations, it has not exceeded its state-permitted limits on how much of this material it can inject underground.

Attorney Don Wirtshafter, who lives near Guysville, is skeptical of this claim, and has asked the Ohio Department of Natural Resources' Division of Mineral Resource Management to provide him with records on the well, located on River Road.

According to data obtained by The Athens NEWS from ODNR, there are currently four injection wells operating in Athens County – one apiece in Rome, Alexander, Canaan and Lee townships. The oldest began operation in 1983 and the newest in 1995, according to the agency's records, so it would appear likely that none is a deep, high-pressure injection well.

Wirtshafter said he is scheduled to visit the state agency this week to inspect more records.

THE POLITICAL BLOG Plunderbund reported last week on its examination of state records that track citations of violation for oil-and-gas wells (not injection wells) across the state.

The blog reported that 693 of Ohio's more than 64,000 active oil-and-gas wells had failed at least one inspection last year.

Athens County, perhaps surprisingly, was at the top the list, with 53 wells showing violations, most of them multiple (Holmes and Washington counties were close behind), though Plunderbund acknowledged that a fair amount of the violations statewide were for relatively minor infractions such as failing to legibly identify a well.