Hydraulic fracturing, stimulations, & oil & gas drilling unjustly burden Hispanic & non-white students

November 17, 2014/by Kyle Ferrar, MPH

By Kyle Ferrar, CA Program Coordinator, FracTracker Alliance

As my first year in The Bay Area of California comes to a conclusion and the summer once again turns into fall I realize how much more this time of year meant for me living on the east coast. For us lucky ducks living in the Bay Area, fall is perpetual. With the California drought seasons blur together, but back home in Pennsylvania and New York, fall marks a much appreciated relief from 90°F+ days. Regardless of where you live certain fall activities are universal, including hockey, postseason baseball, football, and most importantly for kids – going back to school.

In California alone, almost 6.24 million students from kindergarten to 12^th grade are enrolled and attend classes at one of the 10,366 state “campuses.” State-recognized schools range in size from under a dozen students to a maximum 2013/2014 enrollment of 5,229. When so many children are together in one space, they share much more than just the scholarship, social development, and the occasional but inevitable flu virus. They share the same environmental media (air, water, soil) and are therefore exposed to the same environmental contaminants.

To understand who among this vulnerable population is subject to potential health impacts, the FracTracker Alliance has put together a report analyzing the demographic characteristics of schools located near oil and gas extraction activity. An interactive map of the data that was analyzed is shown below, as are the points of the report. The full report can be found here:

Disproportionate Burdens for Hispanic and Non-White Students in California

and here in Spanish:

Las Estimulaciones por Fracturación Hidráulica y la Perforación Petrolífera Cerca de las Escuelas y dentro de los Distritos Escolares de California son una Carga Desproporcionada para los Estudiantes Hispanos y Estudiantes No Blancos.

Sequoia Elementary School located in Shafter, CA.

In the background, less than 1,200 feet from the school is
an oil well (API 403043765) that was hydraulically fractured.

Key Findings of School Analysis:

There are 485 active/new oil and gas wells within 1 mile of a school and 177 active/new oil and gas wells within 0.5 miles of a school.
There are 352,784 students who attend school within 1 mile of an oil or gas well, and 121,903 student who attend school within 0.5 miles of an oil or gas well.
There are 78 stimulated wells drilled within 1 mile of a school and 14 stimulated wells drilled within 0.5 miles of a school.
There are 61,612 students who attend school within 1 mile of a stimulated oil or gas well, and 12,362 students who attend school within 0.5 miles of a stimulated oil or gas well.
School Districts with greater Hispanic and non-white student enrollment are more likely to contain more oil and gas drilling and stimulation.
Schools campuses with greater Hispanic and non-white student enrollment are more likely to be closer to more oil and gas drilling and stimulation.
Students attending school within 1 mile of oil and gas wells are predominantly non-white (79.6%), and 60.3% are Hispanic.
The top 11 school districts with the highest well counts are located the San Joaquin Valley with 10 districts in Kern County and the other just north of Kern in Fresno County.
The two districts with the highest well counts are in Kern County; Taft Union High School District, host to 33,155 oil and gas wells, and Kern Union High School District, host to 19,800 oil and gas wells.
Of the schools with the most wells within a 1 mile radius, 8/10 are located in Los Angeles County.

Report Map

The interactive map below allows the user to compare the demographical profiles of school districts with oil and gas drilling and stimulation activity. Non-white enrollment percentages of school districts are displayed in shades of blue. Overlaid with red are the relative counts of stimulated and/or non-stimulated oil and gas wells. The highest counts of wells are hosted in school districts located in the Central (San Joaquin) Valley and along California’s south coast. Geologically, these areas lay above the Monterey Shale – the 50 million year sedimentary basin producing California’s oil reserves.

Comparison of Oil and Gas Violations and the Sale of Wells

November 12, 2014/by FracTracker Alliance

Well pad spill, wetland. Photo courtesy of WV Host Farms Program

By Matt Unger, FracTracker GIS Intern

When the unconventional oil and gas extraction boom hit Pennsylvania in the mid-2000s small, local operators were among the first on the scene. As shale plays continued to develop, many of these smaller companies were bought out by larger, national corporations. Larger oil and gas development companies often maintain that they are better able to handle the expected regulatory requirements, and so FracTracker wanted to determine if there was a change in the compliance record for wells that changed hands. Does having more resources available to them translate into stronger compliance standards for oil and gas drillers, better training for their employees, and a greater burden to get things right? Investigating these questions by looking into compliance data and the sale of wells, however, was no easy task.

Analysis Methods

There are no indications in either the drilled wells or permits datasets available from the DEP that a well has changed hands; in both of these sources, one operator’s name is simply substituted for the other. It is possible to comb through old news stories, and find that East Resources sold its assets to Shell in 2010, for example. However, this approach is piecemeal, and would not lead to satisfactory results on an industry-wide analysis.

Major obstacles to our analysis included:

Lack of information on the transfer of oil and gas wells from one operator to another
There is often a lag time between the time violations occur and when they are reported
Errors in compliance reporting. For example, one API Number was found to have the operator listed as “Not Assigned” (It was later discovered that this well was never sold).

Results

Unlike wells and permits, any items on the compliance dataset are attributed to whichever company was operating the well at the time the violation was issued. So while FracTracker could not do the analysis that we wanted to because of the limitations of available data, we were able to isolate 30 wells that have changed hands between January 1, 2000 and November 4, 2014 (Table 1). One well has been bought and sold twice, with each of the three operators being issued violations.

In some instances the original well owner was reported to be out of compliance more times than the second owner. For example, API Number 013-20012 had 11 violations reported under its first owner and only 1 since it has been sold. The contrary also occurred, however, such as in the case of API Number 065-26481, which had 4 violations reported under its first owner and 14 under its second owner. There are not enough data points to determine which scenario is the trend in the data – if in fact there is one.

Due to limitations in the data, we cannot currently evaluate whether the notion that larger companies can improve the track record of problematic wells. In fact, many of the wells that were issued violations for multiple operators really just changed hands from one big operator who wanted to get out of the Marcellus to another big operator who wanted to get in. Our small sample doesn’t include any of the wells that were issued violations to only one company, of all the wells that changed hands over the years. To accurately assess the scenario, more data would have to be released, specifically the date when wells changed hands from one company to another.

Table 1. Wells with violations by API number that have changed ownership

API Number	First Owner	Last Known Date Of Ownership	Second Owner	First Known Date Of Ownership	Third Owner	First Known Date Of Ownership
013-20012	Chief Oil & Gas LLC	5/24/10	Chevron Appalachia LLC	2/5/13
015-20033	Belden & Blake Corp	4/10/09	Chesapeake Appalachia LLC	12/7/11
015-20051	Consol Gas Co	6/16/04	Range Resources Appalachia LLC	8/9/05	Talisman Energy USA Inc	11/16/11
019-21494	Phillips Exploration Inc	6/10/08	XTO Energy Inc	7/24/13
019-21680	Phillips Exploration Inc	4/6/10	XTO Energy Inc	3/13/13
065-26481	Dannic Energy Corp	5/11/11	Mieka LLC	11/10/11
065-26832	Dannic Energy Corp	3/2/11	Mieka LLC	4/11/12
081-20062	Chief Oil & Gas LLC	1/6/09	Exco Resources Pa LLC	8/16/11
081-20069	Chief Oil & Gas LLC	5/21/08	Exco Resources Pa LLC	3/28/11
081-20128	Chief Oil & Gas LLC	11/15/10	Exco Resources Pa LLC	6/27/11
081-20144	Chief Oil & Gas LLC	7/21/10	Exco Resources Pa LLC	3/15/12
081-20149	Chief Oil & Gas LLC	1/10/11	Exco Resources Pa LLC	2/21/12
081-20244	Chief Oil & Gas LLC	5/20/10	Exco Resources Pa LLC	11/15/12
081-20255	Chief Oil & Gas LLC	11/15/10	Exco Resources Pa LLC	11/29/11
081-20279	Chief Oil & Gas LLC	12/3/10	Exco Resources Pa LLC	4/20/12
081-20298	Chief Oil & Gas LLC	5/26/10	Exco Resources Pa LLC	6/27/11
083-53843	Anschutz Exploration Corp	4/7/09	Chesapeake Appalachia LLC	3/20/13
113-20025	Chief Oil & Gas LLC	2/15/11	Exco Resources Pa LLC	3/16/11
113-20049	Chief Oil & Gas LLC	11/30/10	Exco Resources Pa LLC	4/13/11
115-20052	Turm Oil Inc	9/24/08	Chesapeake Appalachia LLC	8/21/14
115-20169	Alta Opr Co LLC	11/24/09	WPX Energy Appalachia LLC	4/13/11
115-20174	Alta Opr Co LLC	4/16/10	Wpx Energy Appalachia LLC	4/29/11
115-20191	Alta Opr Co LLC	12/1/09	Wpx Energy Appalachia LLC	6/1/11
115-20214	Alta Opr Co LLC	7/19/10	Wpx Energy Appalachia LLC	8/16/10
115-20231	Alta Opr Co LLC	4/8/10	Wpx Energy Appalachia LLC	6/1/11
117-20197	East Resources Inc	4/8/08	Talisman Energy USA Inc	1/26/11
117-20280	East Resources Inc	5/19/10	Swepi LP	8/28/14
117-20330	East Resources Inc	12/18/09	Talisman Energy USA Inc	2/20/13
117-20394	East Resources Inc	12/14/09	Swepi LP	10/25/11
117-20538	East Resources Inc	12/18/10	Swepi LP	5/27/10

Conventional and unconventional wells in PA

Over 1.2 Million Pennsylvanians Within 1/2 Mile of a Well

October 30, 2014/by Matt Kelso, BA

Aging well in McKean County, PA. Source: saveourstreamspa.org

One of the potentially troubling aspects of oil and gas development is that there are usually people who live in the vicinity of the wells. Pennsylvania now has over 8,000 active unconventional wells; there are any number of issues that can occur with these modern, industrial-scale sites, including road degradation, contaminated water, and health impacts, among others. In addition, there are over 93,000 of the smaller, conventional wells in operation throughout the Commonwealth. While these garner far less attention than their unconventional counterparts, they are also prone to producing similar impacts, not to mention that since many of them are older wells, they not only have potentially been subject to deterioration and occasional neglect, but were constructed during a period with less stringent requirements than are currently expected.

Petroleum engineers are now capable of drilling horizontally for tens of thousands of feet. For the most part, however, this technology is employed to maximize production, rather than to ameliorate impacts on people who live near the product. But who are these people? To help to answer this question, the FracTracker Alliance calculated the number of people living in a half-mile radius around active wells in the state.

More than 1.2 million Pennsylvanians live within the impact area.

Of the 93,754 wells that have been drilled in the state since 1950 that have not yet been plugged, the Pennsylvania DEP only has location data for 79,118 of them. All but one of the 14,636 missing locations are for wells that are categorized as Conventional. While one must presume that there is some overlap in coverage within the half-mile zone, the extent of this region – and therefore the population that lives within it – cannot be determined.

Fig. 1. PA Populations Near Oil and Gas Wells. Click here to access written description and additional map tools.

To maximize the reliability of our calculations, this map was created using a custom Albers equal-area projection centered on Pennsylvania. A half-mile buffer around each well type was created, and the resulting layer was clipped to Census tract data. The ratio of the smaller clipped area to the full Census tract area was calculated, and that ratio was then multiplied by the population totals from the 2010 Census to obtain our population estimates of the half-mile zone. The area in the study area is larger than six states, while the calculated population is larger than that of eight states.

Of the 79,118 active oil and gas wells in PA for which location data are available, we determined the area and estimated the population within a half mile radius. Note that some regions are with a half-mile of both conventional and unconventional wells.

Fig. 2. Number of people in PA near oil and gas wells (79,118 active wells for which location data are available). Note that some regions are with a half-mile of both conventional and unconventional wells.

The county most impacted, in terms of area, for unconventional wells is Bradford, with 353 square miles (See Figure 2). Washington County had the most people living in the zone, however, with 20,566. For conventional wells, the drilling landscape is the largest in Indiana County, affecting 761 square miles, while Erie County has the most people in the half-mile zone, with 212,900. When considering all wells together, the numbers are almost identical to conventional wells. Indiana County leads with 762 square miles, while the drill zone in Erie County represents 211,903 people, or 76% of the county’s population in 2010.

West Virginia

July 22, 2014/by Guest Author