Gas wells are coming to Damascus

Company wants to protect township roads

By TOM KANE

DAMASCUS, PA — Two representatives of Newfield Appalachia Corp. of Houston, TX visited the monthly meeting of the Damascus Township Board of Supervisors on January 18 to begin a dialogue with the township.

They intend to begin drilling wells—they didn’t say how many—this summer, probably in July, and want to have a road-use agreement with the township.

“We want to inspect your roads when the winter ice is off them in order to see what the best routes would be,” one of them said.

They appeared at the tail end of the meeting and left quickly after the meeting was adjourned. This writer was unable to get their names but was told by the leader that I would be contacted by a company representative named Steve Campbell as they drove away.

The leader of the duo said that if their trucks should cause any damage, the company would compensate the township. He said that there would be a lot fewer trucks than in a normal drilling operation because they would be using air pressure to drill the vertical portions of the wells. Water would be used subsequently to frack the horizontal portions of the wells in order to release the gas from the rock shale.

“We have been working on a road-use agreement and will have one available soon,” said Jeff Dexter, chairman of the supervisors.

After their presentation and, since no one had any further questions, they left.

There have been only two drillings of wells in Wayne County: the Matoushek well in Creamton, which never went into production and was capped, and the Robson well on Fox Hill Road in Oregon Township, a vertical test well, which caused some contamination to the vegetation and trees surrounding the well-site.