By GLENN WOJCIAK

The Post staff writer

Property owners in every township in Medina County signed contracts last year leasing the mineral rights on their property to energy companies interested in extracting the oil and gas trapped in shale deposits deep underground.

Those lease agreements are filed in the office of County Recorder Colleen Swedyk who estimates 350 new oil and gas leases were filed in her office in 2011. She expects more to come in 2012 based on a sharp increase in activity in her office.

"It was an anomaly to see so many new oil and gas lease agreements filed with our office last year," Swedyk said. So far this year, her office is busier than ever although the energy company representatives now are mainly researching mineral rights and not currently filing many new lease agreements.

"Now the activity is day in and day out," she said. "Every day we have 15 to 20 researchers in our office copying and analyzing documents," she said. "We have 20 public computers and there are times when all of them are in use so the title researchers who normally use them can't find a computer to work on."

Medina County is just one of the areas in Ohio where big energy companies have begun efforts to tap what experts believe are vast amounts of oil and natural gas deposits trapped in the Utica and Marcellus shale deposits which lie a mile or more underground. The technology used to extra those energy resources is hydraulic fracturing or fracking, which has been criticized by environmentalists.

Devon Energy plans to "frack" the first new well in Medina County next month in Harrisville Township. How many more will follow and where? No one knows the answer to that question. However, based on the mineral rights landowners are leasing to energy companies, drilling rigs could appear at many places around Medina County.

County Auditor Mike Kovack, who sits on the Medina County Shale Initiative Committee, wanted to get a better sense of where potential drilling sites might be developed and tasked an intern in his office with mapping the new leases for mineral rights filed with the recorder's office last year.

The picture that resulted is a map of Medina County dotted with sites where landowners signed new oil and gas leases last year. Many of the new leases are concentrated in Harrisville, Homer and Spencer townships, but new leases have been filed in all parts of the county including on some plats just outside the city limits of Brunswick, Medina and Wadsworth.

Kovack said he was also interested in potential drilling sites because of the real estate tax implications for his office.

"I've talked to other auditors around the state who are concerned about the potential to create shifts in property values," he said.

A small share of taxes on oil and gas production is passed down to the counties, but most tax revenue is collected by the state which has sole authority to regulate the oil and gas industry in Ohio.

The Akron Beacon Journal recently reported that the oil and gas industry expects to drill 4,000 new wells in Ohio over the next four years and pay the state $40 million in taxes and well fees in 2014.