Despite the big players and big money pouring into the Utica and Point Pleasant Shales of Ohio over the past 90 days, don’t expect the play to boom next year, a diverse panel told attendees at Hart Energy’s 2011 DUG (Developing Unconventional Gas) East conference in Pittsburgh last Thursday.

“This is a 2013 development. It’s not a 2012 development. The next year is about evaluation. It’s about getting your head around the rock,” said Michael Bodino with Global Hunter Securities LLC.

While analysts say they’ve been studying the play for years, the energy world didn’t prick up its ears until Chesapeake Energy Corp. CEO Aubrey McClendon began shouting, first comparing the Utica to the Eagle Ford Shale, then pegging the value of the play at $500 billion and finally releasing encouraging production figures (see NGI, Oct. 3; Sept. 26; Aug. 1). Now, several major players are permitting and drilling in Ohio, and forming Utica joint ventures (see NGI, Sept. 12; July 4).

That list includes Houston-based EnerVest Ltd., the largest operator in Ohio, a substantial acreage holder in the Utica and a joint venture partner of Chesapeake in the play (see NGI, Nov. 7). EnerVest CEO John Walker thanked Chesapeake for “derisking the play for us” but said the current wells are costly experiments used to gather information. “We’re going to be doing science projects for at least another year or two. We’re not going to be in pad drilling for a while,” he said, adding that the joint venture has shot thousands of miles of seismic, but plans to shoot more.

The biggest challenge for Utica will be finding a completion strategy, Walker said, noting that EnerVest continues to refine its strategy in the Barnett, a play approaching a decade in production.

While it is generally accepted that the Utica contains three phases — dry gas, wet gas and oil — there is still not enough publicly available information to map the boundaries of those windows, and, perhaps more importantly, where the oil window eventually becomes immature as it moves west.

When the U.S. Geological Survey mapped the Utica in 2006 they thought the immature window covered the western half of Ohio, but, “We’ve got a lot more data now. We know this map is very wrong and we’re going to be changing it,” said Larry Wickstrom, director of the Ohio Geological Survey. “We don’t think there’s really much, if any, immature zone over there in western Ohio.”

While acknowledging that he does not have any expertise in geology, Walker disagreed, saying, “Our information would suggest that not that far out to the west its thermal immature.”

The Chesapeake well data is in the wet gas window, but a well Devon recently permitted in Ashland County, the farthest west to date in the Utica, would provide information the oil window, Wickstrom said. “This will be a very important one for us all to watch,” he said, because it will provide information about the extent and the characteristics of the oil window.

Infrastructure could also stall development, although not to the degree it has in the Marcellus.

Ohio, like Pennsylvania, can’t use much of its existing gathering infrastructure because of the higher pressures in the Utica, Wickstrom noted. There could also be a Catch-22 between midstream players and upstream players. “It’s a little bit of a cat and mouse game at the start here,” he said.

Unlike every other shale play, though, the Utica is starting its life as a home for major players with deep pockets, and those companies are already planning infrastructure solutions, Bodino said. The exploration activity currently underway should yield data in the next six to eight months, and “that’s the time period a lot of those infrastructure issues will start to be resolved,” he said.

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