With all the
gloom and doom in the news about the oil and gas industry, why would anyone
remain optimistic about the future of drilling and exploration in the Utica
Shale?
Because the oil
and gas industry remains important to the State of Ohio and it citizens, for
one. Rhonda Reda, executive director of the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Program,
said this an article in Ohio Gas &
Oil magazine: “Ohio’s oil and
gas industry has been producing crude oil and natural gas from various
geological formations beneath our feet for more than 150 years. The past
several years have also brought many new companies, jobs and innovations to
Ohio’s industry, leading to unprecedented and record energy production levels.
As a result, Ohioans are intertwined with the state’s oil and gas industry more
than ever before.”
Beyond driving down gas prices at the pump—a fact that
Americans are noticing across the country—shale gas development in recent years
is poised to produce a boom in petrochemical and plastics manufacturing,
according to an article by John Funk that appeared in the Nov. 21, 2015 edition
of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Funk writing about a Cleveland State University study,
reported that it examined “the extraordinary
productivity of the wells developed so far, the capacity of the processing
plants and pipelines, both those in service and those on the drawing boards,
and the most likely rate of additional wells being drilled and gas production
over the next five years.”
Much of the shale play under Ohio and
West Virginia “produces not just methane but propane, butane and ethane, a trio
of hydrocarbons called ‘natural gas liquids’ or NGLs,” he wrote.
Continuing, Funk reported that the study
“projects that by 2020, the region—Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia—will
have such a surplus of ethane, which must be separated from methane before
natural gas can be used as a fuel, that it will only make economic sense to
build ethane refineries here rather than try to ship the volatile ethane to
crackers on the Gulf Coast.”
As pointed out in the article, economist
Iryna Lendel said that while most people tend to focus only on production,
“they forget that we should be focusing on downstream development—on
manufacturing, because manufacturing creates permanent jobs that require skills
and pay well.”
As we shared in an article last
November, those jobs are coming to Northeast Ohio—more than 2,000 during the
construction of three natural gas-fired power plants in Carrollton, Lordstown
and Yellow Creek Township, which is located in Columbiana County.
Tough times come along in any industry
from time to time, but the ability to weather those storms and look for the
silver lining in an otherwise cloudy forecast provides a vision for what the
future truly has in store. And the future for Ohio, and the role the oil and
gas industry will play in its economic resurgence, remains strong.
