Sell your Jefferson County mineral rights.

Jefferson County produces more than a fifth of Ohio's natural gas, roughly 106.1 million Mcf in a recent quarter against only about 12,300 barrels of oil. It is second in the state for gas and it is emphatically dry: no liquids, no condensate, no processing uplift.

That purity matters to an owner. Your income tracks the gas price directly, which makes you unusually exposed to Appalachian basis differentials, the discount at which regional gas sells because of pipeline takeaway constraints. That is a real input into a realized price per Mcf and it belongs in a valuation rather than being quietly ignored.

The operator list is short: Ascent Resources Utica at roughly 261 active wells, EOG Ohio at about 123, and Gulfport Appalachia at about 23. Roughly 407 wells are active out of 3,700 drilled, and Jefferson has continued appearing in weekly permit issuances.

Title here varies more within the county than in most of eastern Ohio. Steubenville's steel and river industrial history left fragmented small urban, railroad, and mill parcels next to rural farms, and Pittsburgh No. 8 coal severances from 19th century mining run through the chains. Small urban interests are exactly what buyers with minimum transaction sizes ignore. We buy them.

And as everywhere in Ohio, an unrecorded severed interest is at risk under both the Dormant Mineral Act and the Marketable Title Act. If nothing has been recorded in your name in decades, record a claim to preserve before you do anything else.