Encore Energy Inc., acting in its capacity as lease advisor to mineral rights owners in eastern Ohio’s portion of the Utica Shale, announced Wednesday that it was currently shopping multiple tracts of “add-on” acreage to operators in the play.

Steve Stengell, CEO for the Bowling Green, KY-based company, told NGI’s Shale Daily that six or seven tracts totaling about 1,000 net acres in Guernsey and Noble counties were up for sale.

“They mainly are 70-, 100- and 200-acre pieces that are right in the area of other operators,” Stengell said Wednesday. “We’re getting more acreage almost on a daily basis. We’re marketing smaller tracts to existing operators.”

A company statement added that the acreage in question was in areas where several active operators had already posted “reports of phenomenal success from a combination of crude oil, condensate, natural gas liquids and dry gas production.”

Encore controls nearly 250,000 acres across 13 counties in the Utica Shale, including a tract of more than 10,000 contiguous acres currently held by production (HBP) that Stengell said the company is trying to market separately for lease or joint venture development. The marquis property spans Athens, Meigs and Washington counties, and is off-set from vertical pilot wells targeting oil that has shown an estimated total organic content of 2%.

Last month the Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management reported that the state produced about 73.3 Bcf of natural gas and 4.9 million bbl of oil in 2011 (see Shale Daily, Dec. 7, 2012).

“I think [2013] is going to go great,” Stengell said. “We’re going to see all of these operators starting to report production because of the one-year lag in Ohio. I think that’s going to really boost and speed up the activity in the Utica Shale.”

In October Encore announced that it had closed on the sale of acreage in the oil and wet gas window of the Utica Shale, in three townships in Morgan and Washington counties. Although the company did not disclose the total acreage or the name of the buyer, Encore did say the majority of the acreage is HBP and is off-set from production by Anadarko Petroleum Corp. in Noble County’s Brookfield and Sharon townships (see Shale Daily, Oct. 4, 2012; April 20, 2012).

The October sale also included a 1,300-acre contiguous tract located three miles from Anadarko production and surrounded by Anadarko-leased acreage.