Sell your Columbiana County mineral rights.

Columbiana County is the clearest re-acceleration story in the Utica. The first wave of drilling here largely failed, operators moved east to the dry gas, and the county went quiet. It is coming back: EOG, following its Encino acquisition, and Hilcorp are both active, Hilcorp has been repeatedly filing new horizontal permits, and trade coverage has been calling the northern Utica revival Utica 2.0.

The unusual and genuinely valuable thing about Columbiana is that a large share of acreage came free of lease when the first wave failed. In a region where almost everything is held by production, open acreage is rare, and it means unleased Columbiana minerals are worth materially more than the same acreage in a fully held county. In the adjacent northern Utica leasing surge, bonuses have been reported in the thousands per acre with gross royalties at 18 to 20 percent.

So if you own here and are unleased, the honest question is whether to lease rather than sell. We will run both numbers for you and tell you which we would take, even though a lease means we buy nothing. Our free lease offer check reads the whole document, not just the bonus.

Production currently runs roughly 543,900 barrels of oil and 26.4 million Mcf of gas a quarter in the northern liquids window.

Ohio's Dormant Mineral Act and Marketable Title Act still apply here as everywhere in the state, so if nothing has been recorded in your name in decades, record a claim to preserve before doing anything else.