Analysis

ⓘ In FracTracker’s investigation, we were able to find records of 269,370 agreements with oil and gas companies over 33,923 parcels in Allegheny County, totaling 152,642 acres, or about 32% of the county’s landmass. This section contains some summary statistics about those agreements.

Leases and Other Agreements

This project contains a section that explains different types of oil and gas agreements in detail, and it might be useful to cross-reference that resource with this one, to better understand what some of the summaries contained here are referring to. But put simply, oil and gas leases are a contract between the mineral rights owner and a company that wishes to extract hydrocarbons underneath their property. It is also important to note that there are some other types of agreements that these companies sometimes make with landowners or mineral rights owners, such as easements and rights-of-way, allowing the companies to conduct certain activities on a given parcel of land.  

Many of the summaries discussed in this section discuss “agreement acres,” which is a bit more inclusive than “leased acres.” Altogether, we found 63 different agreement types made between energy companies and the parcel’s surface or mineral rights owners. Of these, there are really only two that indicate the signing of a new oil and gas lease—“O & G” and “Lease”—and one of those can also indicate other types of leases, such as this document involving a water withdrawal lease. This means that there is really only one type of agreement that specifically means a new lease has been signed, “O & G.”

Agreement Types	Parcel Count	Agreement Acres
O & G	30,518	144,554
ASGMT O & G	15,860	90,231
AMEND O & G	2,150	37,518
LEASE	982	27,382
DEED	2,762	25,463
RELEASE	779	23,063
AGREEMENT	3,024	19,841
BILL OF SALE	2,348	19,326
R OF W	915	15,855
PARTIAL DEED RELEASE	101	15,291
All Categories	33,923	152,642

Figure 1. The ten agreement types involving oil and gas companies that cover the largest acreage. “O & G” agreements are leases, as are “Lease” agreements, but these could include other types of leases, such as water extraction. Many categories would require looking at a copy of the deed to know if the parcel was leased for extraction or not. See the complete list.

However, there are a couple of points to be made here. First, “O & G” is the most frequent type of agreement that we came across, representing 30,518 parcels and 144,554 acres, representing 90% and 95% of their respective totals in this investigation. Second, quite a number of other agreements on our list refer to existing leases on the parcel, whether to extend, amend, or surrender such leases, for example. Most of these are located in the same parcels, however, so that when we count anything mentioning leases or O & G, we only add 50 parcels and 369 acres to the total.  

It is also not a given that the 3,355 parcels over 7,707 acres where we have other types of agreements aren’t leased for oil and gas extraction—merely that we don’t have evidence of it.  The Deeds Office mentions that the oldest deed book that they have online is number 3680, which contains various deeds from 1957 and 1958, and we know from various sources that oil and gas drilling has a significantly longer history in Allegheny County than that. 

Municipalities and School Districts

The City of Pittsburgh is not just the largest of the 130 municipalities in Allegheny County, it is also located right in the middle of it. Of course, Pittsburgh and the inner ring of suburbs are densely populated compared to the communities further out, and so it is not surprising that these more remote locations would be the target of unconventional oil and gas leasing. 

There are a number of reasons that make the outer ring more conducive to fracking, including the state’s 500-foot setback from homes for wells of this type, the necessity of adding gathering pipelines to connect these gas wells to other infrastructure, and the logistics of organizing leases over multiple square miles of land for a single horizontal well is much easier where the parcels are larger.

Municipalitiy	Agreement Acres	Leased Acres	Total Acres	Percent With Agreements	Percent Leased
Findlay	17,921	17,829	20,778	86.3%	85.8%
West Deer	13,140	13,120	18,448	71.2%	71.1%
Plum	12,637	12,489	18,542	68.2%	67.4%
Elizabeth Twp	11,353	11,263	15,851	71.6%	71.1%
Forward	11,330	11,260	12,697	89.2%	88.7%
Moon	9,497	9,278	15,349	61.9%	60.4%
North Fayette	8,319	8,178	16,116	51.6%	50.7%
Fawn	7,119	7,116	8,239	86.4%	86.4%
Frazer	5,638	5,633	6,014	93.8%	93.7%
Jefferson Hills	5,576	5,400	10,717	52.0%	50.4%
All Municipalities	152,642	144,923	476,226	32.1%	30.4%

Figure 2. The 10 municipalities with the largest number of agreement acres are all relatively far from the City of Pittsburgh and the central part of Allegheny County.  Note that for each location, the number of leased acres is only slightly less than the number of agreement acres.  See the complete list. 

It turns out that the question, “How many school districts are there in Allegheny County?” isn’t as simple to answer as one might think. If we look at the bottom of the website for Pittsburgh Public Schools, it informs us that it is the largest of 43 districts in the county, but if we download district data directly from the county, it shows 45 districts. And yet, we have data showing oil and gas agreements in 46 different districts in the county. Wikipedia agrees with this number, although the list is slightly different.  

So, what is going on here? It turns out that a small portion of two municipalities extend into Allegheny County from neighboring counties, and therefore, the school districts that those communities send their children to also overlap. This includes McDonald Borough and the Fort Cherry School District, which is mostly in Washington County, and Trafford Borough and the Penn-Trafford School District, which are mostly in Westmoreland County.  In addition, there are 18 properties in Allegheny County that report to Norwin School District, which like Penn-Trafford is mostly in Westmoreland. The Wikipedia list includes the long-defunct Edgewood School District, which was merged with Woodland Hills back in 1981, and does not include Norwin, accounting for the last of the anomalies.  

As it turns out, FracTracker has the most complete and accurate list of Allegheny County school districts of all of these sources, and all of them have at least some acres with oil and gas agreements registered with the Deeds Office.

Do you remember how I mentioned that we had accounted for all of the anomalies with school districts? Well, that was almost true—nothing is allowed to be simple, I suppose. We also need to mention that there are slightly different totals for acreage for the county when calculating within municipal (476,226 acres) versus school district boundaries (475,959 acres). This is a difference of just 267 acres. This seems to be due to how the Fort Cherry district is shown on the map.

Figure x – The fort Cherry SD is shown here in blue.  FracTracker added the red line showing where the county boundary is located, accounting for the slight undercount of acreage within the county for this layer.

For the Penn-Trafford SD, the district was split into Allegheny and Westmoreland County portions, but that was not done with the Fort Cherry SD, leading to the slight undercount of total acres for this data layer within Allegheny County. The situation with Norwin SD slightly extending into parts of White Oak and South Versailles was ignored by this data layer completely.

With all of that out of the way, here are the 10 districts with the largest number of agreement acres.

School Districts	Agreement Acres	Leased Acres	Total Acres	Percent With Agreements	Percent Leased
West Allegheny	26,242	26,007	37,192	70.6%	69.9%
Elizabeth Forward	22,728	22,567	27,807	81.7%	81.2%
Deer Lakes	19,656	19,426	26,057	75.4%	74.6%
Plum Boro	12,637	12,489	18,542	68.2%	67.4%
Moon Area	9,590	9,368	16,873	56.8%	55.5%
Highlands	8,969	8,750	14,506	61.8%	60.3%
West Jefferson Hills	5,973	5,774	12,653	47.2%	45.6%
South Fayette Twp	5,333	4,941	12,987	41.1%	38.0%
Fox Chapel Area	4,356	4,050	21,962	19.8%	18.4%
Montour	4,317	4,197	13,765	31.4%	30.5%
Grand Total	152,642	144,924	475,959	32.1%	30.4%

Figure 3. The 10 school districts with the largest number of agreement acres.  Most of these are in the same geographic area as the top 10 municipalities, but because there are fewer school districts than municipalities, the acreage values shown on this list tend to be larger.  See the complete list.

Ownership Type and Zoning

After all of that hassle with school districts, we decided to make things a bit simpler when it comes to classifying who owns the parcels. In the 33,923 parcels that we found with oil and gas agreements, the data from the Allegheny County Real Estate Office includes nine different ownership categories. However, that can be simplified into just two:  corporation owned, and “regular,” which appears to represent individuals or groups of individuals. 

Owner Type	Agreement Acres	Parcel Count	Average Parcel Acres	Average Parcel Sales Price
Corporation Owned Parcels	84,290.5	6,430	13.1	$473,578
Other Parcels	68,351.0	27,493	2.5	$94,740
All Agreement Parcels	152,641.6	33,923	4.5	$163,629

Figure 4. Oil and gas agreements by parcel ownership, including the most recent parcel sales price data. See the complete list.

Because the agreement acreage and leased acreage in the municipal and school district analyses were so close, we decided to forgo that calculation for the remaining charts in this section, giving us a chance to focus on other metrics. Here, we looked at the total number of agreement acres within each category, as well as the count of parcels in each. This allowed us to look at the average parcel size with agreements. Not surprisingly, the corporate owned parcels are more than five times larger than those owned by individuals, on average. We were also able to calculate the most recent sales price of these parcels, which is also about five times higher for corporate owned parcels.

Municipal zoning is a complicated topic that has a lot to do with how communities protect their residents from the oil and gas industry. In general, municipalities in the county can set up zoning in a way that makes sense to them, but the county will interpret those categories into a smaller number. Our investigation found oil and gas agreements in seven different zoning types around the county.

Zoning Type	Agreement Acres	Parcel Count	Average Parcel Acres	Average Parcel Sales Price
Agricultural	34634.2	899	38.5	$103,728
Commercial	26488.2	2,629	10.1	$864,063
Government	30199.7	591	51.1	$51,109
Industrial	5338.9	536	10.0	$537,784
Other	1147.8	24	47.8	$195,502
Residential	51820.7	29,084	1.8	$99,175
Utilities	3001.1	160	18.8	$30,906
All Agreement Parcels	152630.8	33,923	4.5	$163,629

Figure 5. Oil and gas agreements by zoning type. Download this table.

As with the ownership type analysis, we include calculations for average parcel size and the most recent average sales price.  Residential properties represent 86% of parcels and about 40% of the total acreage, leading both of those categories. The largest parcels with agreements tend to be government owned parcels, averaging about 51 acres, followed by “other,” at almost 48 acres per parcel.  

Since “other” is an unsatisfying category and there are relatively few of them, we can take a deeper dive into these 24 parcels by looking into the use description category. Sixteen of them (67%) are listed as “charitable exemption/HOS/homes.” Three parcels (13%) are listed as municipal government parcels—perhaps miscategorized, given that a government category also exists. The use description for the remaining five parcels include one each for “Coal land, surface rights”, “Coal rights, working interests”, “Mineral land”, “Oil & gas rights, working interest”, and “Single family.” The last of these seems like it should be residential, and the other four don’t really explain the zoning situation.  

Companies

To acquire data for this project, we started with a list of oil and gas companies that are known to be active in the region. The ten companies with the largest number of agreement acres are as follows:

Companies	Parcel Count	Agreement Acres
Range Resources	7983	90,216
CNX	12278	77,916
Huntley & Huntley	13119	68,993
EQT	14228	42,331
Noble Energy	6552	30,276
Bow & Arrow	2438	26,503
H&M Holdings	1751	24,535
Peoples Natural Gas	6472	22,101
Chesapeake	3319	17,732
Carnegie Natural Gas	1154	17,663

Figure 6. Top 10 companies in terms of agreement acres. See the complete list.

There was, however, a major omission in our search list. We did not include Olympus Energy, LLC, a company with 45 permitted unconventional wells in the eastern portions of the county, 24 of which have been drilled. However, we do have records for Huntley & Huntley, the previous incarnation of this company, as well as Bow & Arrow, a land company that arranged a number of Huntley & Huntley’s leases. As it happens, we do have 70 records that include Olympus from the search criteria that we did use, but this compares to 1,015 records for the various Olympus Energy records currently available at the Deeds Office website. We will certainly make sure to include Olympus in future analyses, but in the meantime, it is our hope that most of these parcels are already included under Huntley & Huntley or Bow & Arrow.