Billions in private investment earmarked for Ohio drilling

10:22 PM,
Jan. 19, 2013

Workers from Austintown-based Wildcat Drilling work near Airport Road. Buckeye Brine is installing a brine injection well at the site. Disposal wells deposit oil field waste fluids into the ground for absorption. These fluids are 95 percent salt water, with the rest being trace elements of chemicals part of oil drilling flowback from fracking.

Written by

Russ Zimmer
CentralOhio.com

Billions of dollars will pour into Ohio's Utica Shale this year. How much of that eventually will be recovered from the shale in the form of lucrative hydrocarbons remains a mystery, one that might not be solved this year.

More than $1.2 billion so far has been budgeted for drilling costs in Ohio this year, according to forecasts by several of the companies that have received permits to drill here. Chesapeake Energy, the most active of the field, plans to spend an additional $1.25 billion before the end of 2014.

Several more publicly traded companies have not released their expected capital ...