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Tags: gas drilling, hydraulic fracturing, Marcellus, natural gas, unconventional play
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From Clearville Times, who blogs at http://clearville.wordpress.com/
Clearville, PA like DISH, Texas: “pretty much in the middle of nowhere, which from the gas storage owner’s point of view, made it the perfect place”
Clearville had five production wells drilled by PGE gas drilling company, which produced about two years in the Oriskany formation. Wells suddenly stopped production on the same day and were sold to a gas storage company from somewhere in Texas, known as Spectra Energy or maybe known as a “Spin off of Duke Energy?” from a gas storage operator’s point of view, Clearville, PA made it the perfect place” known as the ” Steckman Ridge Gas Storage Project.”
In Pennsylvania, gas is stored in the Oriskany formation, the source rock for the Oriskany is the Marcellus Shale.
In the middle of nowhere, there seems to be a trend for gas storage fields in the Oriskany formation located near the Marcellus Shale. There is a gas storage field located a few miles down the road from the Steckman Ridge’s underground gas storage field known as the Columbia Gas Storage field, in Artemas, PA. Columbia gas storage field is also located in the middle of nowhere but has been the perfect place since the early 1940′s . Columbia gas has been storing gas in the Oriskany formation where the Marcellus Shale is the source rock.
There is a big difference, between then and now’s, when it comes to gas storage project acquisitions, at least up until 2005. Columbia Gas Storage got off to an easier start in the 1940′s. At that period in time, most all gas production leases gave away gas storage rights in gas production leases.
Landowners over the years with the advent of the internet, became more savvy and placed no gas storage clauses in their gas production leases. Soon these gas leases became known as obstacles in the market place which needed a removal tool. Someone, somewhere, came up with the perfect legal tool to remove these obstacles in the market place for gas storage projects.
Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney used legal legislative laws as the best use obstacle removal tool in EPACT of 2005. At that time, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney likely knew a little about the gas market, heard about obstacles in the market place, and knew a solution was needed for the problem. Minds of genius noted for acquisitions developed and signed a law which classified depleted gas wells which can be taken legally for underground gas storage projects because they are now considered public utilities. This law is broad and can take land which has no gas leases. This law will take any land and give it to a private company for profit once they eye your land as the perfect place for a federally backed underground gas storage field.
Clearville, PA was eyed as the perfect place. Landowners watched Halliburton and Schlumberger legally use exempted fracking chemicals from the SDWA. They watched as horizontal gas storage wells were drilled into the Oriskany sandstone formation. This was a federally backed gas storage project with all the amenities.
Remember: “There is no way to save your land from the laws of a federally backed gas storage project. If someone, somewhere, spots your land as the perfect place, you can kiss it goodbye.”
Clearville, PA; the Oriskany formation; the Marcellus Shale is the Oriskany source rock; in the middle of nowhere; all goes somewhere; from a gas storage operator’s point of view; Clearville was another perfect place.
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Tags: clearville, DEP, eminent domain, Marcellus, natural gas, PA, Steckman Ridge compressor station
“Canadian pipeline companies are considering requests from U.S. producers to reverse the flow of their export lines to bring natural gas from the prolific Marcellus shale into Ontario, displacing some Alberta suppliers who have dominated the Central Canadian market for half a century.” - U.S. Gas Producers Eye Ontario Market
Tags: export, market, natural gas
This isn’t “misinformation. ”
It’s not “misrepresenting the facts”
about “responsible gas exploration.”
It’s just what’s already actually happening in and to Wetzel County, WestVirginia.
The following post is copied with permission from
http://sootypaws.livejournal.com/15049.html
_______________________________________________________________
Wetzel County
We’ve seen and heard a presentation by Ray Renaud of the Wetzel County Action Group about what’s happening in north Wetzel County in northern West Virginia (just below the panhandle) where there’s a tremendous amount of drilling activity taking place. Right now the wells being drilled are for Marcellus shale but other companies are getting ready to move in including CNX which is an operator specializing in coalbed methane.
This is a very rural area with only a few roads and those are narrow, about 10 feet wide. Because of all the drilling there is a lot of traffic as equipment and materials are hauled to and from sites. Twenty-four hours a day, as many as 47 trucks an hour.
The well sites are huge with pads covering acres and pits just about as large. Multiple horizontal wells are being drilled and fractured on each pad before the operator moves to a new site. Fracturing requires large amounts of water and sand.
The scale of everything and its effect on the community and environment is hard to imagine. A copy of the presentation as a PowerPoint document is available online but it is a large download, almost 50 MB. http://www.sendspace.com/file/hlpich
Ray said we could use some of the photos from the presentation.
The roads are narrow and wind up and down steep hills. Most of the equipment is much heavier than the roads were designed and built
for — cars and light trucks. This is a holding structure for sand used in
fracturing a well. There will be a large number of these tanks on the pad.
. Because of all the traffic there’s a lot of accidents. This truck has rolled over, its cab partially crushed on the guard rail.
We wrote a post a while back about
injuries and accidents in the oil and gas industry. About 25% of deaths are caused by road accidents.
. Traffic jams can last for hours and hours. These trucks are parked in front of the volunteer fire department, blocking fire trucks if there were to be an emergency.
The scale of everything is either huge, large or enormous. In the foreground on the right is a three-story barn. In the middle ground is a large volume pit holding fracture fluid. Operators “dewater” rivers and streams for all the water used in drilling and fracturing, turning good water into waste.
. This is a photo taken at night showing just a portion of a pad during drilling a horizontal well. Drilling goes on day and night. Once two wells are drilled on this pad the equipment will be moved to another pad to drill two more wells. Eventually there will be 6 wells on this pad.
. The EPA waived sedimentation control requirements for the oil and gas industry. This means that oil and gas sites don’t need to use silt fencing or other control to protect streams, rivers and lakes. The rivers in Wetzel County are now running thick slurry instead of clear water.
Our own gas well study has focused on problems at well sites and older ones at that. What’s happening in Wetzel County, West Virginia, and in parts of Pennsylvania, Texas and Arkansas and a host of other places is the future writ large as the oil and gas industry converts rural America into an industrial wasteland.
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Visit original post at:
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Tags: accidents, drilling, exploration, extraction, Marcellus, natural gas, traffic, trucks, Wetzel County, WV
Letter published today in the Cleveland Sun Star Courier:
by James W. Cowden, Guest Columnist
Monday August 31, 2009, 9:24 AM
This is being sent as a result of the several letters on oil and gas drilling that have appeared in your pages over the past month.
The other paper has also published material including a column on the financial benefits to Ohio.
What has not been publicized has been the impact of oil and gas drilling on the natural resources and the public health of Ohio and its citizens.
I have been a consultant on environmental and resource issues for over 30 years. I have worked with Ohio EPA and the Division of Oil and Gas to curb and control the problems associated with the industry for a number of those years.
I have written ordinances for many cities in Northeast Ohio to allow them to control drilling in their communities. I have written a technical guide book for Ohio EPA. I have testified in court cases against drillers and their haphazard waste disposal practices, their drilling proposals, and the lack of adequate regulation.
The development of oil and gas wells is inherently a dangerous activity. Although there are few deaths and injuries reported, they do occur.
For instance, two men were killed in Marion County last October by an explosion of a crude oil storage tank.
The industry has too little concern for public health, for our groundwater resources, and for facts.
Natural gas is a highly compressible, highly expansible mixture of hydrocarbons, with approximate percentages of Methane-80%, Ethane-7%, Propane-6%, Butane-2.5%, Pentane-3% and Isobutane 1.5%.
In addition, natural gas may contain quantities of nitrogen, helium, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide and water vapor. In Pennsylvania, methane related to the natural gas industry has contaminated water wells in at least seven counties since 2004.
In one case, methane was detected in water sampled over 15 square miles. In another, a methane leak led to an explosion that killed a couple and their 17 month old grandson. These cases were linked to newly drilled, active natural gas wells.
Essentially, the methane migration was linked to improper construction of gas wells that allowed gas to seep out of the well structures and into water supplies.
An adequate inspection system would have prevented these accidents from happening. Since the passage of HB 278 by our feckless state legislature, neither regulation nor inspection has been carried out adequately by the state.
Groundwater constitutes the most important mineral resource annually extracted from beneath the earth’s surface.
Water is an economic resource for Ohio and preservation is an economic necessity. Groundwater monitoring in the state is inadequate to detect water quality problems.
A product of oil and gas well drilling is brine.
What’s so bad about brines?
Brines are too concentrated, they have too much sodium and there is far too much of it, Clinton brines have 175,000-210,000 parts per million of sodium.
For comparison, ocean brines have only 18,000-35,000 ppm of sodium.
The USPHS standard at one time was a maximum of 250 ppm. One volume of Clinton brine can raise 800 volumes of fresh water above the 250 ppm limit.
There is no adequate program to address lack of disposal capacity. I do not have data beyond the 1980′s but I have no reason to believe the ratios have changed.
At that time, there were 56,000 producing wells with an average brine production of 184,000 barrels with an estimated injection well capacity of 36,000 barrels. The excess was 148,000 barrels.
That is roughly 6.2 million gallons, which if dispersed could make 4.8 billion gallons of fresh water unsuitable for use.
I tried to get legislation passed to prohibit brine in surface or groundwater in such quantity as to cause:
1. Taste and odor problems
2. Exceedance of safe drinking water standards or limit of 100 ppm of sodium
3. Damage or injury to public health or safety to include damage to the environment beyond the immediate site of drilling and storage of oil and gas.
4. This would include exposure to benzene, ethyl benzene, alkyl benzene, toluene, xylene, naphthalene, and 2,4 dimethyl-phenol that exceed drinking water standards. Also exposure to concentrations of silver, arsenic, barium, cadmium, chromium, mercury, lead and zinc that exceed drinking water standards.
This came from “Toxicological Analysis of Ohio Brine Constituents and Their Potential Impact on Human Health.” By Dr. Gerald Poje.
Regulation 1501-9-9-02 at one time required all reasonable means to safeguard against hazards to life, limb and property. It should require notification of local fire officials of fire, explosion, major gas leaks, water and air pollution and training on how to cope.
There are a number of recommendations I would make to amend state law and regulations and require compliance.
First would be to abolish the subservience of the legislature to the oil and gas industry and think about the public they supposedly serve.
There is a need to redefine the ground surface water system and restructure the approach from correction to prevention.
But unless the Division of Mineral Resources is mandated to protect human health and drinking water and is given the funds and staff to accomplish this, both public health and the economy will continue to suffer.
__________________________________James W. Cowden is a resident of Brecksville. He has been a researcher, educator, coordinator and consultant at Kent State University and Hiram College and has written extensively and provided expert testimony on a range of topics including water resources planning, pollution control, public health and public involvement in policy development.
http://www.cleveland.com/sunstarcourier/index.ssf/2009/08/brecksville_resident_weighs_in.html
Tags: brine, contamination, DMR, explosion, gas leak, groundwater, Marcellus, natural gas, OH, regulators
“As it runs through Orin Edwards’s ranch, the Belle Fourche River bubbles like Champagne. The bubbles can burn. They are methane, also called natural gas, the fuel that heats 59 million American homes. Mr. Edwards noticed the bubbles two years ago, after gas wells were drilled on his land. The company that drilled the wells denies responsibility for the flammable river.
“An hour’s drive west, the artesian well on Roland and Beverly Landrey’s ranch has failed. After producing 50 gallons a minute for 34 years, the well, the ranch’s only source of water, stopped flowing in September. A well digger who examined it blames energy companies drilling for gas nearby, but the companies dispute that. So the couple – he is 83 and ailing; she describes herself as “no spring chicken” – hauls water in gallon jugs and drives 30 miles to town weekly to wash clothes and bathe.
“Dave Bullach, a welder who lives near Gillette, couldn’t take it anymore. For two sleep-deprived years, he endured the incessant yowl of a methane compressor, a giant pump that squeezes methane into an underground pipeline. There are thousands of these screaming machines in Wyoming, where neither state nor federal law regulates their noise. Mr. Bullach stormed out of his house at midnight last year with a rifle and shot at the compressor until a sheriff’s deputy hauled him off to jail.
. . . . .
”’Ways of life are being changed for the purpose of energy extraction,’ said Jim Ventrello, a Republican county commissioner in Delta County, Colo., ‘and it is not the quality of life that we seek here.’
“That overwhelmingly Republican rural county in western Colorado banned coal-bed methane operations this year.”
Complete story at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/29/national/29METH.html?pagewanted=all
Tags: coalbed methane, natural gas, New Mexico
From a homeowner in Missouri:
“We do not like being told that we have the responsibility of keeping these pipelines safe. That we can not do what we want in our own back yards, that we are the eyes and ears of the operators. Yet like it or not we are. And many people have no idea what to do with that responsibility.
“I get calls from people who smell or see something and don’t know what to do about it…The people who call 911 do the right thing but some are afraid to call 911. Some call our local gas utility company, they check their lines but the service guys that come out generally have no idea that these pipelines are out here.”
Tags: homeowner, natural gas, pipelines
In a July 27 post, Robert F Kennedy correctly lists some of the reasons we need to move away from burning coal for energy generation. Unfortunately, his conclusion that the solution is to replace coal with natural gas is as erroneous as his convictions about coal are correct.
At http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/king-coal_b_245117.html he concludes:
“Natural gas comes with its own set of environmental caveats. It is a carbon-based fuel and [its] extraction from shale, the most significant new source, if not managed carefully, can cause serious water, land use, and wildlife impacts, especially in the hands of irresponsible producers and lax regulators. But those impacts are dwarfed by the disastrous holocaust of coal and can be mitigated by careful regulation.
“The giant advantage of a quick conversion from coal to gas is the quickest route for jumpstarting our economy and saving our planet.”
In response, SplashdownPA writes:
“It sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?
“All we need are responsible producers and vigilant regulators!“Congress can’t even agree that this is necessary! Money isn’t there for environmental protection agencies to hire the number of inspectors necessary to monitor this lawless industry. And YES! coal mining and burning is dangerously toxic, but when Kennedy talks about enough affordable natural gas to last us into the next century, he’s supporting perpetuation of a carbon-based energy industry that has demonstrated it is unwilling to divert a nickel of its profits to safeguard our absolutely VITAL resources: WATER, AIR and LAND. Their best practices are simply NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Especially not a century’s worth!!!
“Closing coal fired plants would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 20%.. BUT, what measure of CO2 and even more environmentally harmful methane is released into the atmosphere during extraction of natural gas, including toxic air polluting emissions from transporting the millions of gallons of water to and from well pads, treatment or burial of “produced water”, operating drilling rigs, compressors and other associated gas production equipment and activities, over and above emissions from well flares and finally, power plant emissions from energy generation from natural gas? How does all that stack up against that 20%?
“How too does Kennedy justify the permanent depletion and contamination of drinking water supplies across the country, occurring as a result of mining for gas? Surely he can’t think that indicating the need for responsibility and vigilance is going to suddenly manifest a new attitude on all fronts, by all players in this play?
“What guarantees do we have that a gluttonous industry won’t milk the quick fix dry, leaving us with an irrevocable permanent loss in exchange for temporary energy?
“There are important unanswered, and without drilling reform legislation in place, perhaps unanswerable questions. They loom like loopholes in his argument as we continue to learn how criminally untrustworthy corporate America is willing to be in pursuit of the almighty dollar. We’ve seen too how even regulations aren’t foolproof, and how when one entity acts outside the law it encourages others to follow suit.
“Meanwhile, the gas industry has already been irresponsible for deadly releases of toxins into the atmosphere, deadly releases of toxins into our waters, for killing and/or sickening livestock, wildlife and humans, for the seepage of toxic wastewater into our lands, contaminating land and water, the evaporation into the atmosphere of carcinogens from open sludgepits… in short, there isn’t anything healthy or friendly about the production of natural gas and turning a blind eye to the devastating problems of the lesser of two evils does not make the lesser evil any better.”
Read more at:
http://splashdownpa.blogspot.com/2009/07/king-coal-rf-kennedy-jr-weighs-in-on.html
Tags: air emissions, coal, energy generation, groundwater, Huffington Post, natural gas, RFK
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