In Ohio’s Utica Shale, Oil Wildcatters Are at Home

For generations of wildcatters, the adage “oil is found where it’s been found before” has proven true. Today, it’s proving true in Ohio, which has been producing crude since 1814.

That first well, the Thorla-McKee, was a shallow one and actually drilled for brine, a valuable commodity at the time, near Caldwell in Noble County. The salt was saturated with oil, though.

The well’s partners, Silas Thorla and Robert McKee, decided to soak up the oil with blankets, ring it out and sell it as a topical medicine, calling it Seneca Oil.

In 1859, a hole was made in Trumbull County in northeastern Ohio specifically for oil a few months after the global oil industry’s opener, the Drake well in Pennsylvania.

John D. Rockefeller, a bookkeeper in Cleveland at the time, got into the business, forming Standard Oil Co. in 1870 and focusing primarily on refining and transportation: oil-hauling.

His myriad enterprises had a hand in some 90% of all U.S. crude by the turn of the century and were famously broken up 11 years later after losing an antitrust case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

More than a couple of centuries since that 1814 brine well, EOG Resources put four horizontals far deeper, landing them in the Ordovician Age’s Utica Shale. These flowed a combined 30,800 bbl in their first eight days in March, averaging 963 bbl/d each.

Turns out, that EOG pad, White Rhino, is just a few miles from the 1814 Thorla-McKee.

The EOG holes are among the southernmost tests of the new Utica oil play, in which operators are putting completions in laterals after other operators did the same during the past decade, but with completion recipes that were minted at that time.

For example, a pad in Carroll County is being completed with slickwater today, while initial wells were pumped with gel in 2015.

In the renewed play, more than 700 horizontals have been landed in the Utica Formation’s Point Pleasant since 2019—in the dry-gas, wet-gas and volatile oil phases.

Among those targeting oil are Encino Energy’s three David Weaver holes in Harrison County, Stock township, near Tappan Lake.

Brought online in December of 2020, they made a combined 104,000 bbl their first 31 days online. They haven’t sputtered out either. This past first quarter, they produced 30,000 bbl.

Altogether, in 40 months online each, they’ve made 1.05 MMbbl through March 31. Solution gas totaled 6.5 Bcf; water, 379,000 bbl.

Some of Encino’s wells in Stock are under Tappan Lake, a reservoir in the Muskingham Watershed Conservation District that’s named for the community that was displaced in 1938 by the damming, along with Laceyville which is now under the lake.

With royalties, the district is earning from the oil and associated gas, a bar and grill was opened at one of the marinas in April and other improvements are underway in the 7,350-acre recreational area.

Back south, in the area of that 1814 well, is a Microtel Inn & Suites that advertises, “Close to [the] Utica Shale.” It’s in Cambridge, about a half-hour north of Caldwell and the Guernsey County seat.

Conversations are easily struck up in the area. Eventually, a local will ask, “What brings you to Ohio?”

In New York City, “oil and gas” typically prompts confrontation. In Ohio, the answer brings smiles. “They’re drilling a well near my home!” one said, excitedly.

In Ohio, the oil and gas industry is at home.