FracTracker Alliance

Save the Date: Dr. Ingraffea to speak in Pittsburgh on March 18th

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Dr. Tony Ingraffea

Unconventional Gas Development from Shale Plays: Myths and Realities
A. R. Ingraffea, Ph.D., P.E.
Dwight C. Baum Professor of Engineering
Weiss Presidential Teaching Fellow
Cornell University

Friday, March 18, 2011 — 3:00 PM
Swanson School of Engineering, Benedum Hall, Room 921,
University of Pittsburgh

Abstract

We will explore some myths and realities concerning large-scale development of the unconventional natural gas resource in Marcellus and other shale deposits in the Northeast. On a local scale, these concern geological aspects of the plays, and the resulting development and use of directional drilling, high-volume, slickwater, hydraulic fracturing, multi-well pad arrangements, and the impacts of these technologies on waste production and disposal. On a global scale, we will also explore the cumulative impact of unconventional gas development on greenhouse gas loading of the atmosphere.

Biography

Dr. Ingraffea is the Dwight C. Baum Professor of Engineering and a Weiss Presidential Teaching Fellow at Cornell University. He did R&D for the oil and gas industry for 25 years, specializing in hydraulic fracture simulation and pipeline safety, and twice won the National Research Council/U.S. National Committee for Rock Mechanics Award for Research in Rock Mechanics. He became a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1991, became Co-Editor-in-Chief of Engineering Fracture Mechanics in 2005, won ASTM’s George Irwin Award for outstanding research in fracture mechanics in 2006, and in 2009 was named a Fellow of the International Congress on Fracture. Recently, he has been deeply engaged in informal education regarding the topic of this lecture with over 50 public presentations over the last year.

Faculty Host

Jorge D. Abad, Ph.D., jabad@pitt.edu, 412-624-4399

Guest Author

PennEnvironment Update: Marcellus Shale Organizer Trainings

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Last week PennEnvironment held two organizer trainings to provide citizens to empower to organize around Marcellus Shale issues in their own communities in Southwest PA.

The two events, one in Pittsburgh and the other in Connellsville, attracted about 60 people who wanted to learn more about the impacts of gas drilling in their area, how to protect their local communities from the public health impacts of drilling, and learn new skills to use as they organize their communities. The Connellsville event was even covered by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The trainings taught citizens – both through overviews and small group practice sessions – how to recruit volunteers to their cause, build power through coalitions, and get their issue covered by the media. Thursday’s training also included an introduction to FracTracker, which is an online system for citizens to connect, work together, and report local problems from drilling.

The events were cosponsored by a host of other organizations including Earthworks, CHEC, GASP, 3 Rivers Waterkeeper, Mountain Watershed Association and others.

We now plan to expand these trainings across the Commonwealth including trainings in Philadelphia, Scranton and Washington County this spring.

Please let me know if you have any questions about these trainings, are interested in helping host them or have questions about other work PennEnvironment is doing.

Sincerely,
Adam Garber
PennEnvironment Field Director
1420 Walnut St, Suite 650
Philadelphia, PA 19102
(215) 732-5897
www.PennEnvironment.org

Matt Kelso, BA

The Utica Shale

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The Marcellus and Utica Shale Gas Plays (small)
The Marcellus and Utica Shale Gas Plays. Please click the image for a larger, zoomable view.

By now, most everyone in the Mid-Atlantic states is aware of the gas-rich geologic formation known as the Marcellus Shale.  After all, it has led to thousands of productive (and often problematic) gas wells in Pennsylvania and West Virgina, and has had some activity in New York, Ohio, and Virginia as well. Compared to other major shale gas plays such as the Barnett in Texas and the Fayetteville in Arkansas, the Marcellus covers a huge area, and several million people live right on top of it. Over the past several years, the Marcellus Shale has become big news, but there is another shale gas play in the area that is even bigger–the Utica Shale. All the gas industry has to do to get there is drill a little deeper.

Since the Marcellus is more accessible, it has rightly received much of the early attention, but the industry has already been looking ahead to the next shale gas “boom” for some time, as is evidenced by this 2002 report from New York.

And in Quebec (1), drilling in the Utica Shale has already begun. So, too, have the problems. This CBC News article reports that 19 of the 31 exploratory wells inspected by Quebec’s Ministry of Natural Resources were leaking natural gas. That ministry report is available here, in French.

This impact is really just the tip of the iceberg for the Utica Shale. After all, the formation is underneath seven US states and two Canadian provinces. But since, like the Marcellus Shale, the Utica requires hydraulic fracturing and each well produces millions of gallons of waste water, the entire effect of the future Utica Shale natural gas industry will be huge.


The Utica Shale and Major US Hydrologic Units. Please click on the gray compass rose to see the full extent.

The implications of this map are significant. Considering that pollutants flow downstream with the water, one can see how discharges in the Delaware River Basin in New York could affect municipal water sources in New Jersey, and how discharges in Ohio could have a similar impact in Indiana. These effects are, of course, already being felt with the efforts in the Marcellus Shale. In the months ahead, as talk of the Utica Shale begins to heat up, keep in mind that the formation is every bit as problematic as–but more widespread than–the Marcellus Shale.

The Utica Shale: Differing Shapefiles (small)

  1. There are several different boundary files for the Utica Shale available online, all from reputable sources. This map, for example, show an extension of the Utica near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec. We know this to be accurate, because the formation is actually being drilled there.
FracTracker Alliance

Upcoming Event: “Fracking” Our Food: A New Threat to Sustainable Farming

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Speaker: Sandra Steingraber

Speaker: Sandra Steingraber – “Morgan Lecturer”
World Renowned Ecologist, Author and Cancer Survivor
A reception and book signing will follow.

New Date! February 3, 2011 — 7pm
Dickinson College, Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, Carlisle, PA

In this lecture, Steingraber will explore the tangled relationship between petrochemicals and farming, with a special focus on how the extraction of natural gas from shale bedrock threatens the ecological conditions of our food system.

The event is co-sponsored by the Women’s Center, the Office of Institutional and Diversity Initiatives, and the Departments of Biology, American Studies and Environmental Studies.

Biography (provided by the speaker)

A world renowned ecologist, Sandra Steingraber is an expert on the links between cancer and the environment; reforming chemical policy and contamination without consent.

Ecologist, author, and cancer survivor, Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D. is an internationally recognized expert on the environmental links to cancer and human health. Steingraber’s highly acclaimed book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment presents cancer as a human rights issue. Originally published in 1997, it was the first to bring together data on toxic releases with data from U.S. cancer registries. Read more.

The Clarke Forum’s Annual Theme

Each year The Clarke Forum devotes a major portion of its resources to activities organized around an annual theme. All members of the Dickinson community, including students, are invited to propose topics for annual themes. Annual themes have included: Democratization, Race & Ethnicity, The Politics of Identity, Environmental Sustainability, Citizenship, Corporations & Globalization, War, Crossing Borders, For Richer or for Poorer: Globalization under Attack, Religion and Political Power, Energy, A Gendered World and Human Rights. The theme for 2010-11 is Thought for Food.

Click here for more information.

Matt Kelso, BA

Talisman and Chief Fined by DEP

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who-got-fined

In response to separate incidents, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued fines to two of the larger natural gas companies in the Commonwealth: Talisman Energy USA, Inc. and a subsidiary of Chief Oil and Gas.

Talisman’s $24,608 fine was announced on January 6, 2011 in reaction to a large diesel spill at a Marcellus Shale site. According to the DEP, the March 2010 spill contaminated 3,800 tons of soil and 132,000 gallons of water.

Chief Gathering LLC, a subsidiary of Chief Oil and Gas, was fined a $34,000 for illegally discharging hydrostatic water on August 11, 2010. According to the DEP report, hydrostatic water is used to test for leaks in gas pipelines before they are used for gas. There were five related violations with the incident, including:

  • Failure to minimize the flow rate from the discharge point and allowing the formation of a 150-foot erosion channel
  • Failure to submit accurate, detailed Notice of Intent project information
  • Discharging hydrostatic test water with a total chlorine residual greater than 0.05 parts per million
  • Allowing an unknown industrial waste to co-mingle in five storage tanks with the hydrostatic test water, which was subsequently discharged
  • A failure to monitor the discharge for the specified effluent parameters at the minimum frequency required.

In my earlier analysis of violations per drilling operator, both of these companies were fairly high in terms of violations per well, but relatively low in terms of violations per million cubic feet of natural gas produced.

From fractracker

Violations per Marcellus Shale gas well, 1-1-07 to 9-30-10.

From fractracker

Violations per million cubic feet (MMcf) of natural gas produced, All violations are from 1-1-07 to 9-30-10, while all production values are from 7-1-09 to 6-30-10.

FracTracker Alliance

How is PA handling shale gas wastewater?

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Jim Riggio, plant manager for the Beaver Falls Municipal
Authority, shows a sample of solid materials removed from
the Beaver River during treatment Dec. 15 at his plant.

On January 3rd, Associated Press writer, David Caruso, criticized the efforts underway in Pennsylvania to protect surface waters from shale gas drilling wastewater – especially because in most other states the primary means of disposal is deep well injection.

On January 4th, both the Marcellus Shale Coalition (the industry’s PR group) and DEP Secretary John Hanger defended the Commonwealth’s actions and current regulations.

What do you think?

Do you want to know where shale gas wastewater is permitted to be disposed of into surface waters near you? Below is a snapshot that I made in August 2010 using FracTracker’s DataTool of the facilities within PA that are permitted to receive shale gas drilling wastewater:


To learn more about a particular site, click on the inspect button in the gray toolbar – the “i” – and then click on a red diamond. A white box will pop up. Within that box, click on “view” to see who operates these facilities and how much wastewater per day they are permitted to receive. (“MGD” stands for Million Gallons Per Day. “GPD” means Gallons Per Day.)

And finally, here are two blog posts written by CHEC staff about the challenges facing our surface waters – and potentially our health – as a result of both fresh water withdrawals and wasterwater disposal:

Matt Kelso, BA

What’s the Impact of One Spill?

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Most of what I post on this site has to do with numbers: Pennsylvania’s 9,370 violations in less than four years; which drilling operators have the most violations per well; Marcellus Shale wells are 1.5 to 4 times more likely to have violations than conventional wells; and so on.

But of course, numbers only tell part of the story of the impact of gas drilling. It doesn’t really even begin to explain what a single violation means to people who live near these wells. The best way to get that qualitative information is to read the stories of the people who live there. What follows is a first-hand account from Bonnie Burnett of Bradford, PA.

To Whom It May Concern or Who Cares:

My husband and I own a little farm (125 acres) we planned to retire on in Granville Summit, Bradford County, PA. In March of 2009, when the drilling started in Bradford County, there were 2 spills on a well pad next to our property, that rushed down the hill side into our pond, killing all the fish and aquatic life. A deadly swath was carved from the drilling pad to our pond, killing everything. Big old oak trees to tiny peppermint plants that we planted.

A little history: Before Chesapeake started drilling my husband wrote to DEP and asked them the protect our little pond and our property. We saw how they were installing the drilling pad, cutting down over 5 acres of forest and trying to burn the stumps, to no avail, then burying the unburned stumps. Hauling tons of fill and crushed stone to make the pad…..on and on.

Then there was an fracking spill, all noted and recorded -(Chesapeake called it a
human error) causing about 50,000 gallon of second hand fracking water to flow through the woods, downslope into our pond and over the breast of the pond, down into the wetland and into the little creek that flows into the town of Towanda. Two weeks later there was an acid spill of approximately 600 gallons of hydrocholoric acid, all noted and recorded, that again flowed through the pad and seeped through the woods and into our pond. I’m not sure if they labeled this a human error or an accident!

From that date to today, after every rain event water from their pad flows into our pond. On 12/2/10 after a rain storm, water from their pad was flowing across their property into our pond at approximately 95 gal per min., as per their engineer report. After hundreds of telephone calls, on our part, and meetings with Chesapeake and a lot of promises-guess what-it’s winter and the ground and pond is frozen. To top it all off, our well water has been contaminated also. DEP send us a letter and told us not to ingest our well water. Oh well. Chesapeake is making money and the politicians are lining their pockets and are happy and OUR (your and mine) water is being contaminated!!!! I don’t know how old you are and I really don’t care, my husband and I are in our 60’s, but my little grandbabies are the ones I am really concerned about. If the water is
contaminated there will be no life. No one seems to understand that. Life needs water!!

By the way, my husband has had several meetings with DEP, EPA, CNN, CBS, the BBC, PBC (you can find them all on the internet) Guess what-they all say the same thing- This can’t be happening!  I’m one of the first ones to admit, I do NOT want more rules and regulations from the government. However, when a big powerful money laden company comes and starts to destroy our countyside and starts to pollute our water, then it’s time for some regulations. The average AMERICAN, who works and gives everything for our country and wants to be safe, needs to have someone help protect us.

You now know some of the mess we have acquired from a huge money making endeavor, a company that happens to be owned by some foreign country and they are laughing all the way to the bank!!

Respectfully submitted,

Bonnie Burnett

If you or anyone you know has first hand stories about gas drilling, send it to me and I will share it with our readers. We are interested in hearing your stories.