Tervita Corp., a Calgary-based environmental and energy services company, has been selected to build and operate a facility in Carroll County, OH, to treat Chesapeake Energy Corp.’s produced and tophole drilling water from its Utica Shale operations, the companies said.

Tervita will also provide an option to deploy a proprietary mobile processing system to treat flowback and produced water for reuse.

“Tervita’s treatment process will provide clean water and decrease our process costs, which will increase our efficiency with reusing water,” said Chesapeake District Manager Tim Dugan.

A recent report from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ (ODNR) Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management indicated that the ODNR issued 375 horizontal drilling permits through November (see Shale Daily, Dec. 7). Chesapeake has received the most permits (238) of any company this year, according to the report, and more permits were issued for Carroll County (136) than any other jurisdiction in the state.

Chesapeake four years ago was the first big producer to unlock the unconventional natural gas and oil potential of the Utica, a nearly spent conventional oil play, and it has since captured the biggest leasehold, with close to one million acres. However, it has 337,481 of those acres up for sale in an effort to appease recent shareholder concerns (see Shale Daily, Oct. 22).

The U.S. Energy Information Administration said recently the number of drilling rigs active in the Utica Shale during the last week of October had more than doubled compared with the same week in 2011, with an increase in rigs targeting oil more than offsetting the loss of natural gas rigs (see Shale Daily, Nov. 26).

The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and the ODNR recently announced that they plan to collaborate with independent researcher Battelle to identify technologies that would increase water reuse and decrease wastewater injection (see Shale Daily, Nov. 14). The three-way partnership followed enactment of Ohio Senate Bill 315, which strengthened state rules on hydraulic fracturing and added rules covering wastewater disposal in injection wells (see Shale Daily, June 14).

Tervita last month sold its drilling fluids business to Canadian Energy Services & Technology Corp.