Chesapeake Energy Corp. CHK -0.23% is selling its last remaining oil and gas holdings in Ohio’s Utica Shale, a move aimed at whittling down the company’s debt and enabling it to focus increasingly on crude production. The roughly $2 billion sale to Houston-based Encino Acquisition Partners, announced Thursday, is the latest in a series of deals by Oklahoma City-based Chesapeake to improve its finances. “This essentially ends the era of asset sales as being the principal instrument for improving our financial balance sheet,” Chesapeake Chief Executive Doug Lawler said in an interview. Under the deal, expected to close in the fourth quarter, Chesapeake would shed its last 320,000 acres in the Utica, a region the company’s late co-founder, wildcatter Aubrey McClendon, once called the “biggest thing to hit Ohio since the plow.” Chesapeake’s 920 wells there produced the equivalent of about 107,000 barrels of oil a day last year, […]