Gas drilling in 2008

A year of promise and controversy

By TOM KANE

RIVER VALLEY - In early January, 2008, a quiet woman from Damascus Township with a Bachelors of Science degree from Columbia University became startled.

“Landsmen from some of the largest gas drilling companies in the country have been swarming all over Northeast Pennsylvania and Wayne County for the past year and a half, pressuring landowners to sign leases that give companies the right to drill for natural gas on their properties,” Barbara Arrindell would tell whoever would listen. “They’re everywhere and some of them are using scare tactics to get people to sign.”

The Marcellus Shale deposit, which geologists have known about for years, spans a land mass from West Virginia, parts of Ohio, most of Pennsylvania and parts of New York’s southern tier. It is thousands of feet below the surface.

Last fall, using figures from the gas companies, scientists Terry Engelder of PennState and Gary Lash of SUNY Fredonia said that the deposit’s breadth is about 5.16 trillion cubic feet.

The estimated monetary boon to individual landowners and the state is expected to be enormous.

The largest companies that have leased land for drilling in Pennsylvania are Chesapeake Energy (1,200,000 acres), Range Resources (1,150,000 acres), Quest Resources (119,000 acres), EOG Resources (700,000 acres), National Fuel Gas (700,000 acres), Atlas Energy (516,000 acres), Exco Resources (415,000 acres) and Equitable Resources (300,000 acres). Many smaller companies are also operating in the state.

The Marcellus Shale deposit is now considered the largest, and the richest, deposit of natural gas in the country. But if the Marcellus deposit has been known for years, why the sudden gold-rush-mentality in harvesting the gas?

The answer to that question brings up the most controversial issue of the whole affair: the process of exploration is “hydraulic fracking” or fracturing, a new technology of drilling down vertically and then turning horizontally and forcing liquids under high pressure into the deep deposit of shale, releasing the natural gas.

Invented by Halliburton, the company whose former CEO was Vice President Dick Cheney, fracking requires three to five million gallons of water to drill one well and depends on the addition of chemical lubricants and biocides, plus sand, to open the fractured rock further. Complicating the water recovery and disposal of the fluids is the naturally occurring radioactive minerals, heavy metals and salts that mix with the fracturing fluids during the process.

Complicating the picture more is the gas companies’ exemption from important federal environmental laws as stipulated in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The exact recipe of the fracking fluids has so far been deemed proprietary trade secrets. Just recently, Pennsylvania is requiring that companies reveal the chemicals they use.

But that’s not all. Besides the fact that Northeast Pennsylvania could have as many as 8,000 wells drilled this year with anticipated road damage by large tractor-trailers hauling equipment and water, the wells, when operational, will require a network of pipelines to carry the gas to regional pump stations and large public pipelines like the Tennessee, the Columbia and the Millennium pipe lines, which already exist in Pennsylvania and New York.

Two river watershed commissions?the Delaware River Basin Commission and the Susquehanna River Basin Commission, which have jurisdiction over water withdrawals, and in some cases water disposal, have a regulatory process that requires the drilling companies to seek permission if they plan to draw more than a million gallons of water a day from either watershed. To an extent, this has slowed down the permit process the companies must follow before they drill.

At the present time, New York State has effectively put a temporary halt in all gas drilling permit applications while a new Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS) is being worked out with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). The SGEIS is a process that examines the impact on the environment, and may be a mechanism for looking at the cumulative effects of gas drilling on the state. Until the SGEIS is completed, estimated to be in summer 2009, gas companies can prepare their own impact statements.

Most recently, gas drilling activity has somewhat abated since the price of natural gas has plummeted to new lows. Despite these signs of a slow down, about 42,000 wells are expected to be drilled in Pennsylvania in the next three years.