Data driven discussions about gas extraction and related topics.

FracTracker Alliance

Tracking the Effects on Farms

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By Samantha Malone, MPH, CPH – Communications Specialist, Center for Healthy Environments and Communities (CHEC), University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH); and Doctorate of Public Health (DrPH) Student, GSPH

If done improperly (or in excess), shale gas drilling has the potential to contaminate ambient air, surface water, drinking water, and/or ground water. A healthy agricultural system relies upon all of those media in varying degrees.On any given day, I receive roughly 50 emails from people concerned about the effects of natural gas drilling. Check out this document as an example. The topics of conversation are incredibly diverse, and yet the discussion surrounding the effects that drilling may have on our local farms is occurring more and more frequently. One of the reasons for this ‘boom’ in concern about our farms, in my opinion, is that the scientific evidence that connects drilling and hydraulic fracturing to the potential contamination of the food supply is lacking – while the anecdotal evidence is not.

As a result, people have even begun to compile ‘evidence’ suggesting that drilling has affected local agriculture, or will. I believe this is a research issue of great importance, and would welcome suggestions of additional resources (either pro or con) from readers. What are the concerns or questions that people have, you might ask? In a very simplified nutshell:

  • How is the health of farm animals affected by industrial processes occurring nearby? (e.g. by accidentally drinking frac pond fluids or by the stress caused by noise pollution)
  • How will shale gas drilling and forced pooling affect farmers who are applying for or trying to keep their organic farm certifications?
  • Do the communities burdened with gas drilling truly ‘reap’ the rewards?
  • Will the royalties some farmers receive cause them to produce more or less food on their property? And as a result, will access to local and fresh foods improve or decline? (Of the many benefits, access to local, fresh foods improves health by minimizing truck traffic used to ship the products, reducing farming’s carbon footprint – which affects climate change, and providing access to seasonal foods so that consumers do not rely upon packaged, nutritionally deficient food.)
We are just beginning to understand the breadth and depth of this issue. Unfortunately, some effects caused by events today may not surface for years to come. That is a major challenge to epidemiology. We at CHEC, including many other organizations across the Marcellus Shale region, are working to conduct baseline and field research, identify areas of key concern, and prevent negative health and environmental consequences to the highest degree possible. If you are interested in learning more, please email us at chec@pitt.edu.Below is one snapshot created using FracTracker’s DataTool that highlights some of the issues raised by this new industry – and how it may affect our agricultural system:

Working with this map:

  • Minimize the legend by clicking on the button that looks like a compass.
  • Use the magnifying glasses on the left side of the gray toolbar to zoom in and out of the map.
  • You can pan the map to different regions by clicking on the image and dragging your cursor.
  • The “i” on the toolbar allows you to inspect a record (dot or colored area).
  • You can change the background of the map to show roads or a Google Earth view using the three boxes on the right side of the toolbar.
  • Clicking on the button with the arrows on the right-most edge of the toolbar will take you into FracTracker’s DataTool so that you can do more with the map, including share it!

Additional Resources

Matt Kelso, BA

Vulnerable Populations and the Shale Gas Boom

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What is a vulnerable population? For a term used so often, a clear definition from an authoritative source is surprisingly hard to come by. For example, the term has over 2.5 million Google hits, but no Wikipedia page. The National Institute of Health has almost 5,000 references, but the handful of pages that I looked at assumed the reader already knew the definition. In a sense, of course, it is fairly self-explanatory. The UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations(CVP) tells us that they serve:

…populations for whom social conditions often conspire to both promote various chronic diseases and make their management more challenging.


OK, that makes sense, but from the perspective of someone trying to map the effects of the natural gas industry on vulnerable populations, the term is still hopelessly vague. Who exactly are we talking about, and where do we find them?

There are probably many groups that would qualify as a vulnerable population, but for this analysis, I have included hospitals and schools as a place to start, because those are the places where those who are already sick and children congregate, respectively (1). These groups unquestionably apply to the CVP definition, above.


Vulnerable populations and the Marcellus Shale gas industry. Click on the tabs with the gray compass rose and double carat (^) to hide those menus. Click on the “i” button and then one of the map icons for more information.

There’s a lot of information on that map, and, frankly, it is difficult to determine the proximity of problematic wells to these centers of vulnerable populations at this scale. For this reason, CHEC Director Dr. Volz made a series of regional snapshots, which can be found here.

 

  1. A fuller list might include parks, daycare facilities, nursing care facilities, etc.
Matt Kelso, BA

Wells in Quebec Along the St. Lawrence

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Wells along the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, Canada. Please click the map for a larger, dynamic view.
The United States isn’t the only place where the gas drilling industry is adversely affecting the environment. I have recently uploaded a dataset from Quebec’s Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement, which includes over 600 wells, including 31 which have recently been inspected.

The CBC has correctly noted that 19 of these inspected wells–more than half–were shown to be have natural gas emissions, which is a violation in Quebec for wells that are supposed to be temporarily capped.

Even though the 31 inspected wells is a small sample size, there were other problems.

[Edit – Map removed; URL expired]

Problems identified with inspected wells along the St. Lawrence River in Quebec. Click the “i” and then click on one of the map icons for more information.

In fact, of the 31 wells, there were only three that didn’t have any reported problems at all (1). While this report doesn’t provide a lot of detail on these violations, repeated violations such as, “bolted joints in water” or , “no surface casing” makes it seem like either the drilling operators don’t care about the law, or they actually don’t have someone on site who knows what is permissible in the area that they are drilling in.

With almost every well having a violation and some having more than one, the violations per well in Quebec seem roughly in line with the 0.96 violations per Marcellus well in Pennsylvania.

Although many of the wells in this report are quite old, the natural gas industry is starting to accelerate their efforts there as Canada begins to explore the Utica shale.

  1. One of those wells erroneously appears to be in Maine, an error that probably occurred on my end when I converted from one coordinate system to another.  I will try to address that problem shortly.
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.
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.

Matt Kelso, BA

New Datasets on FT’s DataTool

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Archived

This page has been archived. It is provided for historical reference only.

Several new datasets have been added to our DataTool in the past few days, including:

  • Municipal Waste Operations
  • AML Point Features
  • PA Marcellus Well Permits since 2007 (2010-12-16)
  • Pennsylvania Unemployment
  • Air Emission Plants

For dynamic, clickable views of the following data, please click on the thumbnails. [links removed]

The “Municipal Waste Operations” dataset includes a variety of data, including the different types of facilities (pictured here) and which locations are in a state of compliance. I was hoping to see which of these facilities accepts residual waste from drilling facilities, but that information does not appear to be included on this list. It still has some use though, because like natural gas drilling, landfills and related facilities contribute are sources of pollution. There are over 2,500 facilities on this list in Pennsylvania.

“AML Point Features” is a list of abandoned mines in Pennsylvania. Abandoned mines could potentially act as a conduit for gas migration into surface waters and aquifers, and also pose a number of health issues in their own right. This dataset contains information on the priority of the threat posed by these abandoned mines (show here) along with dozens of categories of the specific nature of that threat. There are over 11,000 points in this database.

“PA Marcellus Well Permits since 2007 (2010-12-16)” is an update of the previous dataset of permits for Marcellus Shale wells in Pennsylvania. As of December 10, there are over 5,663 records in this dataset. Snapshots made with previous datasets should have updated automatically.

“Pennsylvania Unemployment” contains October 2010 unemployment figures by county in the Commonwealth. These numbers are not seasonally adjusted, and vary greatly by county. A snapshot showing an overlay of the Marcellus Shale formation shows no apparent effect of the industry on unemployment in the state. This dataset was obtained from the US Department of Labor, and is included on FracTracker for comparative purposes.

“Air Emission Plants” includes sites that burn fossil fuels, fuel storage sites, pollution control and monitoring devices, and other related facilities. Like “Municipal Waste Operations”, this dataset contains facilities that contribute to polluting Pennsylvania. There are over 109,000 records in this dataset.

Matt Kelso, BA

When the Landman Comes Knocking

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Archived

This page has been archived. It is provided for historical reference only.

Especially this time of year, it is easy to see the appeal of the landman. A stranger comes knocking on your door, offering you money for something you didn’t know you had, and that you won’t have to work for. How do you beat that? Regular readers of this space know, though, that there are many problems that can be associated with gas drilling, including explosions, spills, road degradation, property devaluation, and gas migration into streams and aquafers.  If operators want to drill on your land, assume that their representative:
  1. Is familiar with the relevant regulations
  2. Has some sort of an idea of what to expect from your land (including how much gas will be produced)

Regulations

While the regulations are available online, this is not the time to try the do it yourself approach. The only way to level the legal playing field is with an informed mineral rights attorney. Should you ever find yourself entertaining a landman’s offer, go get one right away. There could potentially be a lot of money (or a lot of headaches) at stake. Drilling operators in Pennsylvania are required to give the mineral rights owner at least 1/8th of the wellhead price of gas that is produced, but how much would they be willing to spend per acre(1)? That depends on the production that they anticipate from your land.

Production

[media removed]
Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale natural gas production interpolation. Please click on the tabs with the compass rose and double carat to remove the gray boxes.

Of course, no one knows exactly how much gas a well will produce until it has been drilled, but that doesn’t mean that the industry is blindly poking holes in the ground. The map above is an interpolation map that estimates the amount of gas that would be produced from the Marcellus Shale at any given point in Pennsylvania. This is based on self-reported production data from drilling operators that was posted on the Pennsylvania DEP website.

I made this map with a process called kriging, which compares the value of points with other points on the map, and interpolates the values of the areas in between dots. Because of this, the closer a projected value (blue to red contour lines) is to a measured value (black dots), the more accurate it is. In this map, there are several “bubbles” that look like high production areas in the middle of the state that are probably misleading, since there are no actual wells nearby (2).

It is probably safe to assume that the industry has more and better data to work with, but even so, some information is better than nothing at all. To effectively use this map, zoom in to the area of interest, click the “i” in the blue circle, and click on the lines on either side of the area in question. A box will pop up with a value, which will be in thousands of cubic feet (Mcf). How much a well on your property would produce is critical in determining whether you would be offered $500 or $5,000 per acre. And for the land owner, it is critical in determining whether or not the whole endeavor is worthwhile at all. After all, why have your peaceful home disturbed by a few months of round-the-clock industry for a couple of hundred bucks? Now that you have some idea of what might be produced from wells on your land, you can get an idea of what you might earn with a royalty calculator.

 

Violations

It is just a fact that sometimes things go wrong once drilling gets underway. Upon request, the Pennsylvania DEP provided us with a list of 9,370 violations from 2007 to the end of September, 2010. And while who the drilling operator is will tell you something of how likely a violation is, geographically speaking, the wells with a lot of violations are somewhat randomly distributed throughout the Marcellus Shale formation.
[media removed]
Number of violations per offending Marcellus Shale well, 1-1-07 through 9-30-10. Please click on the tabs with the compass rose and double chevrons to remove the gray boxes.

The map above includes only the Marcellus Shale gas wells that were issued violations by the DEP in the dataset mentioned above. The number of violations per well range from 1 to 37, with smaller values depicted by small blue circles, while the most outrageous wells are large red circles. Obviously, there are some visible clusters in the southwest and northeast of the Commonwealth, because that is where the most wells are being drilled. But a closer look at the map reveals that wells with a lot of violations are actually fairly randomly distributed, with several of the worst offenders in the less productive central part of Pennsylvania (3).

Summary

The take-home message from these two maps is that while the production of gas from a well on your property can be predicted, wells that cause a lot of problems could happen anywhere. Moreover, there does not seem to be a correlation between the two, as some of the worst offenders are in parts of the Commonwealth where the Marcellus Shale play is relatively unproductive. If you have been approached by the industry’s landmen, then the decision of whether or not to lease is yours. Since the stakes are so high, getting a mineral rights lawyer is essential; if legal counsel seems too expensive, then the lease probably isn’t worth the negative impact of drilling anyway. If you are interested in hearing an offer, estimate the amount of gas that will be produced with the map above, plug the range of numbers into the royalty calculator (4), then decide whether moving forward with a lease is worthwhile for you or not.

  1. There are other factors that can be negotiated, including which geologic formations are included.
  2. This happens because there are two high density areas of production in the state, in the northeast and southwest. When the kriging computation was made, a high density area between these two areas was assumed, because there are not any low density production values in between. In short, it is due to the curve of the Marcellus Shale field in the state.
  3. I actually tried to krig this map as well, but the result was nonsense. It projected Philadelphia to be a high violation area, although the nearest Marcellus Shale well would be hundreds of miles away. This nonsensical map is consistent with a random distribution.
  4. The first royalty calculator that I looked for took itself offline because they noticed sharp decreases in production of natural gas after the first year, and wanted to get a handle on the rates of decline. This would indicate that a gas well might just be a short-term financial windfall, which should be another factor to consider.
Guest Author

FracTracker Visualizes Violations of the Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Act by Congressional District

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Archived

This page has been archived. It is provided for historical reference only.

By: C. D. Volz, DrPH, MPH

John Dawes of the Environmental Integrity Project put up a very useful dataset onto FracTracker’s DataTool showing the geographical location of congressional districts. I have visualized this dataset along with locations of violations of the PA Oil and Gas Act across the state. One can get further information on each congressional district and the violations in them by clicking on the “i” button and then on the map to see details. Some of these violations are especially serious and include brine and wastewater entering the surface waters of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. These pollution events can certainly have an effect on downstream municipal water sources-individually and collectively.

Matt Kelso, BA

Satellite Image of Well Found with FracTracker’s DataTool

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Archived

This page has been archived. It is provided for historical reference only.


Recent well site and pit north of Evans City, Butler County, PA. Click the image for a dynamic view.

[image removed]

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.

Matt Kelso, BA

Updated Pennsylvania Marcellus Shale Production Information

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Archived

This page has been archived. It is provided for historical reference only.


Marcellus Shale Gas Production by County. Please click the map for more information and a dynamic view. [map removed]

Pennsylvania released preliminary production information for Marcellus Shale gas wells in September, but the updated data that the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) posted earlier this month is superior in several ways. First of all, it is more complete than the preliminary list, as one quarter of the operators actually missed the reporting deadline. In addition, the columns of data are no longer jumbled together, and units of measure have been provided. With all of these improvements, it is time for another look at the numbers.

Between July 1, 2009 and June 30, 2010, Marcellus Shale wells in Pennsylvania produced almost 195 billion cubic feet (Bcf) of natural gas. That sounds like a huge number, but Pennsylvania consumed at least 756 Bcf in 2009 according to the US Energy Information Administration. That means that the Marcellus Shale gas boom in the state accounts for only about of 28% of our own usage.

Geographic Distribution


Marcellus Shale Gas Production in Pennsylvania by County, July 1, 2009 through June 30, 2010


Marcellus Shale Gas Production in Pennsylvania by County, July 1, 2009 through June 30, 2010

The two counties with the highest natural gas production levels are Bradford and Susquehanna, both in the northeastern quadrant of the state. The next highest producers are Washington and Greene Counties, located in the southwest. These four counties account for 77% of all Marcellus Shale production in the state.

Production by Drilling Operator


Marcellus Shale Gas Production in Pennsylvania by Drilling Operator, July 1, 2009 through June 30, 2010


Marcellus Shale Gas Production in Pennsylvania by Drilling Operator, July 1, 2009 through June 30, 2010

There are 44 drilling operators listed on the report. Four of these–Cabot,Chesapeake, Range Resources, and Talisman–account for over 65% of the production.