WADESTOWN, W.Va.—CNX Gas has announced a major investment in production and donations to local fire departments in Monongalia and Wetzel counties.
CNX operates 24 producing wells on three pads near Wadestown with six more wells being developed on existing pads. There’s also one new pad under construction, adding another $100 million investment into the Wadestown operation. Chief Operating Officer Navneet Behl said they will continue to drill and frack in the area through 2029.
“In 2028 we come back again to the same pad, and we’re going to be drilling in the spring, and then we’ll be fracking in the summer,” Behl said at an event last week. “And then we come back again in 2029 to do the same thing.”
The announcement was made at the Blacksville Volunteer Fire Department Social Hall, where the company donated $10,000 each to volunteer firefighters in Hundred, Blacksville and Wadestown. Officials said they plan to work closely with the community during operations in order to safely share the roads with day-to-day activities.
“Telling (the drivers)exactly where the schools are on the road, we put that into a GPS plan and they have to obey all the speed limits, and if they don’t we run them off,” Behl said.
Officials expect to remit about $85 million in severance taxes through 2032. In Wadestown, the company expects to pay $525 million in royalties on the six wells in development and the 13 others planned on the new pad.
“For the Wadestown project we’ll have 300 to 400 from start to finish,” Behl said. “Not at one time, from the construction crews all the way down to sales.”
The company has funneled about $1.1 billion in development capital across the operations across West Virginia since 2018, and since 2019 they have remitted about $60 million in severance taxes.
“We have about 81 wells total right now and we have another pad to build in the Wadestown area, so over the next five years we’re going to spend another $300 million or so in capital,” Brian Aiello, vice president of external relations. said.
The Wadestown operation is tapping into the Marcellus reserve, only leaving the supplies from the much deeper Utica reserves for future production. The company owns or operates about 2,600 miles of natural gas gathering pipelines and a number of natural gas processing facilities across their operations.
“Overall in the country the demand is up, but in the Appalachian basin there’s still a constraint on gas takeaway capacity due to the pipelines,” Behl said. “So, there’s only so much more we can drill because everybody is producing enough gas.”