Lisbon, East Liverpool, Salem. Sixty-six new wells came online here between July 2023 and December 2025, and then the rigs left for the southern counties. If you own under one of those units, what you own changed and nobody sent you a letter about it.
Columbiana County had its Utica wave, and it was recent. Between July 2023 and December 2025, 66 wells first produced here, led by Hilcorp with 38 and EOG with 19. Then the rigs moved south.
We want to be straight about the current picture, because a lot of what is written about this county is not. There is no rig running in Columbiana today and essentially no permitting in the last ninety days. All nine of Ohio's active rigs are in Carroll, Guernsey, Belmont, Harrison, Monroe and Noble. Columbiana is not where the industry is working this quarter.
That is not bad news for you. It is just different news than a boom, and it changes what you should watch out for.
If your tract sits under one of those 66 units, the important thing that happened is that you now have production history, probably starting sometime in the last two years.
That matters because nearly every offer you will receive is a multiple of your recent royalty income, and a Utica well's first year is its biggest year by a wide margin. These wells decline steeply out of the gate and then settle into a long, much flatter tail.
So an offer computed off your best twelve months, arriving in the year right after your best twelve months, is not conservative. It is precisely mistimed, in the buyer's favour. The number looks generous against a check that is already shrinking, and it quietly buys twenty years of the flat part.
Ask any buyer, us included, to separate two things: what they paid for your existing production, and what they paid for everything that has not been drilled. If those are blended into one figure, you cannot tell which one they got cheap.
The genuinely unusual thing about Columbiana has not changed. The first Utica wave here largely failed, operators left, and a meaningful share of county acreage came free of lease. In a region where nearly everything is held by production, open acreage is rare, and it is worth more than the same acreage in a fully held county.
What we would caution against is pricing it off headlines. The bonuses reported in the northern Utica leasing surge were paid where operators were actively assembling units. Columbiana is not where they are assembling right now, and a lease offer here today faces thinner competition than it would have in 2024. That cuts both ways: it means a lease offer deserves more scrutiny, not less.
Operators permit before they drill. Always. That sequence is the single most useful thing an Ohio mineral owner can know, because permit records are public and free and the people mailing you offers are working from purchased lists rather than filings.
Right now EOG, which is the most active operator in Ohio with 29 of the 145 permits filed statewide in the last ninety days, is concentrating on Tuscarawas and Guernsey. If EOG permits start appearing in Columbiana again, you will see it months before anyone raises their offer. We wrote up what the current filings show in What the Ohio Permits Are Saying.
Ohio's Dormant Mineral Act and Marketable Title Act both let a surface owner take a severed mineral interest, and the Ohio Supreme Court has confirmed that both routes work. This is not a technicality. It is the most common way Ohio families lose minerals they believe they own.
If nothing has been recorded in your name in decades, record a claim to preserve before you negotiate anything. We will pull your chain and tell you where you stand, free, whether or not you ever sell us anything. See the Ohio mineral owner's guide for how both statutes work.
Well, rig, permit and operator counts are sourced from Enverus and current as of August 2026. Berlin Royalties is a mineral buyer and a landman shop in Tulsa, not a law firm or a tax advisor, and this page is general information rather than advice about your interest.
The northern Utica liquids window. Columbiana sits in the oilier, shallower part of the play rather than the dry gas core to the south, which is why its history here is different from Belmont's or Monroe's.
Clinton and Berea sandstone wells drilled across the county for the better part of a century. Roughly 789 wells are still producing in Columbiana, and most of them are these, not Utica horizontals.
Absent here. The Marcellus does not extend this far northwest, which is one real difference between Columbiana and the Ohio counties on the West Virginia line.
Wherever your tract sits in Columbiana County, we will research it free and value it with the work shown.
We buy in every Ohio county, including ones without a page here. See the full county index or the Ohio overview.
Everything a Ohio owner needs in one place: who owns what under state law, how royalties must be paid and by when, what a buyer can and cannot deduct, the tax treatment of a sale, and the deadlines that quietly cost people their minerals. Free, and no sign-up.
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