There is renewed interest in Northeast Ohio (Columbiana, Mahoning, Trumbull and Southern Ashtabula county) oil and gas development. Once abandoned, no longer.
Data releases from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) and county recorder offices continue to indicate renewed interest in an area once abandoned by the industry. What’s driving the roughly $10-13 million/well investment in northern counties from the likes of EOG, Antero and others to drill the modern 2.5-4 mile laterals?
Boom to Bust Up North… Until Recently
From 2012 and 2014, Trumbull County Ohio became the epicenter of the boom and the bust for extracting oil and gas from the Northern reaches of the Utica Shale play. BP famously signed and then discarding a pool of approximately 84,000 acres, suffering a $544 million Utica-related write-off. The rock under Trumbull County looked promising, and still does. BP surely had a lot of data and justification for the large cash layout to landowners. BP surely had high confidence that they would be successful. As it turned out, they were just a little ahead of the time when new completion methods are proving successful in coaxing oil and gas out of the fracked subsurface in parts of Northeast Ohio once abandoned.
The Case for the Most Recent Northern Tier Expansion is Spelled W-E-H-R
The Northern Tier Utica/Point Pleasant Shale story is headlined by EOG’s Wehr Spring Valley Farm MH ELS 1H located in Ellsworth Township, Mahoning County. The well came online in July 2025 and has produced 97,111 barrels of oil in four quarters — 75% of all the oil Mahoning County, Ohio has produced since 2020. Before the Wehr, the county managed about 5,000 Bbl a year from five legacy wells brought online in 2014–2015.
What else makes the Wehr notable? Its lateral spans just 6,758 ft, less than half and nearly a third the lateral length of the wells drilled just south in the northwest corner of Columbiana County.
So while Wehr production numbers don’t appear to compare well with the recent wells drilled just south based on production alone, the numbers show impressive production for the relatively short lateral.
Over the first four quarters of production — the fairest window, given early decline and total production time interval — the Wehr on a per-1,000-ft basis matched EOG’s best Lehwald CL BUT well in Butler Township and beat the other Lehwald wells by 20% to 60%, while running roughly two-thirds of the two Kitzmiller CL KNX wells in Knox Township.
Renewed leasing activity in Mahoning County points to operators assembling acreage to test the trend further north. And while the Mahoning County records office indicates that leasing activity up north has ramped up, no new wells have been permitted in Mahoning County since the Wehr Spring Valley Farm well. This puts us in the earliest stages of a step-out to the north to further test, prove and delineate the rock. And as leased land inventory declines down south, the north will see a combination of infilling close to wells that are proving profitable and testing wells further north to build out leased acreage to keep things moving.