The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) recently published its biannual reports for production and waste from unconventional wells throughout the state for the last half of 2012. FracTracker has learned the hard way not to be too eager in analyzing this data.  In the previous cycle, this data was released without the contribution several operators, one of which happened to be the biggest player in the state, Chesapeake Appalachia.  That incident prompted the inclusion of a data disclaimer from DEP, which includes the following text:

The Oil and Gas Act reporting is a self-reporting system, meaning that data is reported from producers to DEP as required by law. All production data is posted as it was received from the unconventional well operators. DEP does not independently verify the data before it is posted.

While the Oil and Gas Act requires accurate and on-time data reporting by producers, and the producers and DEP endeavor to correct any errors discovered after the data is posted, DEP makes no claims, promises or guarantees regarding the accuracy, completeness or timeliness of the operators’ data that DEP is required to post.

While considering content regarding production and waste in Pennsylvania, it is worth noting that the DEP considers the data to belong to the various operators.  All data for this post was downloaded on February 25, 2013, and while it seems reasonably complete, it is important to note that there could be operators which have not posted their data to DEP in a timely fashion.

PA Production and Waste From Unconventional Wells: July 2012 to December 2012. Click on any map icon for more information, or click the “Fullscreen” button at the top right of the map to access more toolbars.  To access data for individual wells, viewers must zoom in to 1:750,000, or an area equivalent to several counties.

The default map frame includes most of the activity for unconventional oil and gas production and waste from Pennsylvania, but if you zoom out, you can find a landfill in southwestern Idaho that accepted 11 tons of flowback fracturing sand for disposal.  Unfortunately, the available data does not give any indication of why an operator might choose to ship waste over 2,000 miles away from its source.

Below are the six month statewide production and waste totals for Pennsylvania’s unconventional wells, including the number of wells that contributed to each total:

 

The total gas produced was over 1.1 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) for the six month period, which was over 250 billion cubic feet (Bcf) higher than the previous total of 895 Bcf.

And here is a look at the disposal method for each type of waste, in terms of percentage:

Note that while road spreading rounds down to 0%, 425 barrels of produced fluid were used in this effort.

Ever since the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) first released violation data to FracTracker in October 2010, our viewers have wanted to know if there were any discernible patterns in the data.  Since that time, the format of the data has changed, the data categories have changed, and the analyses at FracTracker have continued to evolve.  The gold standard has always been some variation on the number of violations per well (VpW), which takes into account the reality that some operators have many more wells than others, so ranking by the total number of violations would show the largest operators in the worst light.

Even so, there are many ways to calculate the data.  The first effort was violations per offending well, which more than anything measures how badly things go when they do go wrong.  The difference between that and violations per drilled well is more than trivial semantics, because it’s designed to show how often things go wrong per attempt.  This same analysis also includes violations per amount of gas produced, which is more of a cost/benefit analysis, which allows for the possibility that some violations may be “worth it” more so than others, if the well is an especially large producer.

But even violations per drilled well is less straght-forward than one might think.  You could look at a given time frame, or the entire period of available data–either way you do it there will be some skew, whether because some activity is excluded, or because the data for drilled wells goes back three years further than violations data.

There is also the fact that some violation ID numbers appear more than one time on the compliance report, a fact that makes, “What is a violation?” something of an existential question.  Summaries by PADEP show that the agency counts violations by the number of violation IDs that have been issued, although a close look at the data really does make it seem like related issues are sometimes lumped together into a single violation ID, although usually not.

And finally, there is the whole issue of whether we should even bother to count administrative violations, or if we should limit it to the environmental, health, and safety (EH&S) category.  In February 2012, FracTracker argued to include administrative violations, as a closer look at those violations showed that it included real-world impacts, and not just a failure to dot i’s and cross t’s.  A few months later, the University of Buffalo’s Shale Resources and Society Institute (SRSI) argued, among other things, to exclude them.  FracTracker then created a Classify the Violation Quiz, which asks users to guess whether a given violation was classified as administrative or EH&S.  This anonymous quiz was set up so that participants who got half of the questions correct would pass, but despite the fact that each question only has two possible answers, a large majority of respondents have failed.  A few months later, the prime advocate for excluding administrative violations–the SRSI–was closed by the University of Buffalo amid a cloud of ethics concerns.

It is a shame that a simple metric like violations per well should require such a preamble, but at FracTracker, we strive to be completely open with what we have done with the data.  In this case, I have looked at both the number of violation IDs issued as well as the raw number of appearances on the report.  Administrative violations are rightfully included.  Wells are included if their spud date was in 2012, and violations are included if their violation issue date was in 2012.  This data has been summarized by drilling operator and by county.  So let’s get to it:

The following line chart shows the violations per well as tabulated by unique violation ID numbers issued:

In the chart above, Penn Virginia and Enerplus seem to be particularly egregious in terms of violations per the number of wells drilled, but it should be pointed out that both operators had only one well drilled in 2012, reminding us of the importance of sample size.  Here then is the same data, including only operators that drilled 10 or more wells in 2012:

The state-wide average in this category is 0.50 violations per well drilled.

Let’s take a look at the data in terms of geography:

Violations per well by county for unconventional wells in Pennsylvania

As with operators, there is considerable variation in terms of violations per well between the various counties:

In the first half of 2012, gas production from unconventional sources such as the Marcellus Shale was reported in 30 different counties in Pennsylvania, according to data downloaded from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) website on September 10, 2012. Of these, 19 counties had aggregated totals of at least one billion cubic feet (Bcf), lead by Bradford (235 Bcf); Susquehanna (189 Bcf); Lycoming (97 Bcf); Tioga (89 Bcf); Washington (79 Bcf); and Greene (74 Bcf). Here are the proportions of those 19 counties presented graphically:

We can also view the data spatially. To find out the production value of any county, please click the blue “i” tool, then any county shown in blue. Also added is the location of the top ten wells in the state in terms of natural gas production for the six month period:

On this view, the top wells are clustered so closely together that there appear to be only four. The top two producers are both operated by Citrus Energy in Meshoppen Bourough, a small town in Wyoming County with 563 residents as of the 2010 Census, and a total surface area of 0.7 square miles. The other eight wells on the list are operated by Cabot Oil and Gas in a handful of municipalities in Susquehanna County. Here is a closer look at the wells, with an additional layer of all unconventional drilled wells:

The wells in red are the same 10 wells, all within 10 miles of one another as the crow flies. The wells in black show the other unconventional drilled wells in the area as of late August. Obviously, this part of the state has been the focus of considerable attention by the operators active in the region.