Luzerne

From Wikimarcellus

Luzerne County is located in northeastern Pennsylvania and is home to the City of Wilkes-Barre. It is immediately south of Wyoming and Lackawanna counties, and east of Sullivan and Columbia counties. Historically, it has been an important anthracite coal-mining district.

So far the county has been little explored and developed for Marcellus shale, despite two pilot wells drilled near Back Mountain, PA by EnCana during the summer/fall of 2010.

In November, 2010 EnCana announced that it had pulled up stakes from both Luzerne and neighboring Columbia counties as commercial quantities of natural gas, in the company's opinion, were unlikely to be discovered there.

EnCana was known to own 1,156 leases in Luzerne and Columbia counties. The bulk of these were in Luzerne. It planned to let these go to landowners without paying the $2,500 per acre lease bonuses.

Citrus Energy had also leased several hundred acres in Luzerne Co. Apparently, these leases were sold to Williams.

Areas such as Luzerne Co., where hard coal has been found, have in the past been subjected to such pressure and heat that natural gas has been squeezed out of the shale. State Route 118 that slices across Luzerne Co., is considered by drillers to be a dividing line between productive shales of the north that have been less subjected to these extreme conditions of heat and pressure, and unproductive ones further south that have.