Satellite Image of Well Found with FracTracker’s DataTool
Recent well site and pit north of Evans City, Butler County, PA. Click the image for a dynamic view.
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Sometimes, you get a bit lucky. While helping a user find data about drilling operations in Butler County, I noticed that while there are relatively few Marcellus Shale gas wells in the county, activity has picked up dramatically there in 2010. Prompted by these factors, I decided to try to find visual evidence of drilling operations using our DataTool. I found this recent pair of wells and brine pit.
Closeup of wells. Both wells were issued permits on 12-16-09.
Using the information tool (the white “i” in the blue circle), we can find out some information about these wells. Their unique API numbers are 019-21657 and 019-21658, both were drilled by Rex Energy, and the permits for both were approved on December 16, 2009. Having the API number, we can look on our other datasets to find that one of them was drilled on February 8, 2010, and the other one was spudded twelve days later. Both of these wells are on the production dataset, although apparently, neither of them had produced anything as of the June 30th cutoff date for that report.
Closeup of brine pit. Note the trees for scale.
It is possible to zoom in even further. If you follow the link that says, “Click to see more details on this map”, it will take you to our DataTool. From there, you can zoom in with the zoom bar at the bottom left, and then even more with the wheel of your mouse.
>So this is good–fractracker can be used to look at the site degradation and size of pads where drilling occured before the new Google maps this year–site clearance is responsible for erosion and sedimentation of streams and smaller watersheds and is a big category in violations databases.
Site clearance removes trees and native plants that lower the ecological services available to pruify water and now we can get a real sense of this from the satellite view–good work Matt–CDV