Drilling and Compliance in PA’s Marcellus Over Time

/by

The following line chart shows the number of Marcellus Shale wells drilled in Pennsylvania from January 2007 through March 2012, and the number of violations issued (1) by PADEP over the same period of time:


Drilled Wells and Violations in PA’s Marcellus Over Time

While drilling activities in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale really got under way in 2005, the threshold of 10 wells drilled in a month didn’t happen until 2007, so the earlier data has been omitted in favor of charts that are a little less crowded. Here are a few milestones that have happened along the way:

  • First month with more violations than wells: April 2008 (difference=8)
  • First month with 50 violations: June 2008 (n=82)
  • First month with 50 wells: June 2009 (n=75)
  • First month with 100 violations: July 2009 (n=101)
  • First month with 100 wells: November 2009 (n=111)
  • First month with 100 more wells than violations: September 2010 (n=109)
  • First month with 200 wells: August 2011 (n=212)
  • Longest streak with more wells than violations: 15 months (January 2007 to March 2008) (2)
  • Longest streak with more violations than wells: 7 months: (February to August 2009)
  • Second longest streak with more wells than violations: 11 months (May 2011 to March 2012)
  • Second longest streak with more violations than wells: 2 months (Aug.-Sept 2008 and Dec. 2009-Jan 2010)
  1. Included in violations is the total number of records from the compliance report linked above during the given time period where the “Marcellus only” and “Inspections with violations only” fields are set to “Yes”. This inflates the number of incidents reported by PADEP, which keeps track through the number of unique violation ID’s issued, so that if two instances are issued the same violation ID, it will be counted as one violation.
  2. This streak may well be longer if months prior to 2007 were included