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Aubrey McClendon Continues to Bet Big on the Utica Shale By Matt DiLallo | More Articles | Save For Later May 29, 2014 | Comments (3)  Source: Chesapeake Energy. Former Chesapeake Energy (NYSE: CHK  ) CEO Aubrey McClendon once boasted that the Utica Shale would prove to be "the biggest thing economically to hit Ohio, since maybe the plow." He called it a half-trillion dollar opportunity because "it sounds bigger" than a $500 billion opportunity. Unfortunately for McClendon, the Utica Shale didn't work out exactly how he envisioned it would. Many of his peers pulled back on the play after it...

Drilling companies beginning to explore the Utica shale got a piece of good news Friday when the U.S. Geological Survey estimated the rock formation in Ohio, Pennsylvania and other states holds enormous reserves of natural gas and oil. Releasing its first estimate of the Utica, the USGS calculated the shale formation holds about 38 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, recoverable natural gas, 940 million barrels of oil and 9 million barrels of natural gas liquids like ethane and propane. The Utica lies beneath the Marcellus shale...

From Australia and China to South Africa and Eastern Europe, the global economy is being transformed by the extraction of huge amounts of natural gas from shale rock. The United States has played a major part in this revolution; new “plays,” as fields of shale gas are known, are now producing in Texas, Louisiana, Illinois, Arkansas, Colorado, West Virginia, and other states. In the last three years, more than 3,000 gas wells have been drilled in western Pennsylvania’s share of the huge Marcellus shale formation. With more and more producers in the business, the price of natural gas has dropped...