When you spend significant time doing research about the Marcellus and Utica shales you come to realize that there’s a lot more development going on in Ohio and Pennsylvania than there is in West Virginia.  It takes a bit longer to figure out why.  The really short answer is: geography.  The slightly more detailed answer can be found in this article over at Marcellus Drilling News.  I’ve been a subscriber to MDN for years, mostly for their daily news summary, but every once in a while they have a good article of their own.  This is one of them.

To sum it up for those who aren’t subscribers or can’t other wise view the article, the really valuable parts of the Marcellus and Utica shales are those that produce oil and wet gas.  Those parts underlie more of Ohio and Pennsylvania than they do West Virginia.  There are three or four counties (the northern panhandle of West Virginia) that could potentially produce oil and wet gas.  While there is wet gas in other West Virginia counties, the potential is just not the same as it is in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

While there has been a shift away from searching for wet gas lately, the search for oil is still there and drives a lot of decision making.  West Virginia wells just don’t produce much oil and so West Virginia doesn’t attract as much attention from developers and investors.