Tag Archive for: Pennsylvania

Statewide County Natural Heritage Inventory Map

We Love Maps

At FracTracker, you could say that we are a bit obsessed about maps and data.  The amazing map below was created and is updated by the PA Natural Heritage Program (PNHP). While this is a recurring project for PNHP, with the increase in shale gas activity in recent years it is ever more important to protect and document changes to sensitive ecosystems.

Important Natural Heritage Areas

PA Natural Heritage Sites - Click for Interactive Map

Click on the map to check out a statewide interactive map featuring data from the County Natural Heritage Inventory. The results presented in this map represent a snapshot in time, highlighting the sensitive natural areas within Pennsylvania. Core habitat is outlined in red (places where any disturbance could be detrimental to certain ecological species), supporting landscape in purple, and landscape conservation areas in yellow.

By clicking on the map, you will be taken to the Heritage Program’s site where you can search the map by county, watershed, or an address to learn more about the protected areas near you. On this page you can learn about the species of special concern such as the Copperhead, the Bog Turtle,  and Northern Cricket Frog.

About the Inventory

The County Natural Heritage Inventory is a cooperative program undertaken by the PNHP partnership. The County Natural Heritage Inventories (CNHI) have been systematic studies of the critical biological resources of the state, county by county. The primary focus of CNHIs has been on species of concern: those plants, animals, natural communities, and habitats most at risk of extinction at the global or local level. These projects are designed to identify, map and discus areas that support species of concern, exemplary natural communities and broad expanses of intact natural ecosystems that support components of Pennsylvania’s native species biodiversity. These areas are prioritized based upon their ecological qualities and provided with recommendations regarding their management and protection.

These studies were conceived as tools to assist in planning to avoid the accidental destruction of habitats supporting species of concern at both the county and municipal levels and have been used effectively in that capacity. CNHIs have been incorporated into comprehensive plans, consulted to plan development projects, and utilized by conservation organizations to prioritize their work. Additionally, these studies have been used to help in the development of recreational amenities, promotion of tourism industries and assistance in community development. CNHIs have also been a primary source for much of the Pennsylvania Natural Diversity Inventory permit review data. CNHIs can actually streamline economic and infrastructure developments by providing information on sensitive environmental features early in the planning process when adjustments can be made at little cost or delay.

The County Natural Heritage Inventory is a planning tool, and is not intended to be used as a substitute for environmental review. For more information, view the Statewide CNHI fact sheet.

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Drilling and Compliance in PA’s Marcellus Over Time

The following line chart shows the number of Marcellus Shale wells drilled in Pennsylvania from January 2007 through March 2012, and the number of violations issued (1) by PADEP over the same period of time:


Drilled Wells and Violations in PA’s Marcellus Over Time

While drilling activities in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale really got under way in 2005, the threshold of 10 wells drilled in a month didn’t happen until 2007, so the earlier data has been omitted in favor of charts that are a little less crowded. Here are a few milestones that have happened along the way:

  • First month with more violations than wells: April 2008 (difference=8)
  • First month with 50 violations: June 2008 (n=82)
  • First month with 50 wells: June 2009 (n=75)
  • First month with 100 violations: July 2009 (n=101)
  • First month with 100 wells: November 2009 (n=111)
  • First month with 100 more wells than violations: September 2010 (n=109)
  • First month with 200 wells: August 2011 (n=212)
  • Longest streak with more wells than violations: 15 months (January 2007 to March 2008) (2)
  • Longest streak with more violations than wells: 7 months: (February to August 2009)
  • Second longest streak with more wells than violations: 11 months (May 2011 to March 2012)
  • Second longest streak with more violations than wells: 2 months (Aug.-Sept 2008 and Dec. 2009-Jan 2010)
  1. Included in violations is the total number of records from the compliance report linked above during the given time period where the “Marcellus only” and “Inspections with violations only” fields are set to “Yes”. This inflates the number of incidents reported by PADEP, which keeps track through the number of unique violation ID’s issued, so that if two instances are issued the same violation ID, it will be counted as one violation.
  2. This streak may well be longer if months prior to 2007 were included

PA Marcellus Drilled Wells Data Updated

A few days ago, I talked about the nebulous situation in trying to determine just how many Marcellus Shale permits there are in Pennsylvania. Many of the same concerns with permits can lead to multiple occurrences on the spud report which is the source of the drilled well data in Pennsylvania.

Without going into all the monotonous details once again, as of February 1, 2012, there were 4,534 records on the spud report, representing 4,274 distinct wells.  The following are depictions of the larger number, both spatially and temporally.


Drilled Marcellus Shale wells in Pennsylvania. To hide the menus, please click on the gray compass rose and double carat (^) icons.

Approaching 10K Unconventional Wells in PA

How Many MS Permits Are There in PA?

People interested in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale data frequently ask me what they think is a relatively straightforward question: how many drilling permits are there for Marcellus Shale wells in Pennsylvania? As it happens, this is actually a somewhat complicated question, as there are numerous paths to finding the answer, all of which will lead to a different result. Consider, for example:

  • If you go to the Well Permit Workload Report for the week ending 1/20/12, the answer is provided for you: 9,883. But…
  • …if you search the Permits Issued Detail Report using the same end date, you will be given the result since the year 2000 as 9,868.
  • The above item is particularly confusing when you realize that it consists of 11,209 rows of data. No problem, you say, I’ll just use my Excel skills to pivot the data by it’s unique API number, and as of today’s data we’re down to a mere 9,880 (plus two items with the wrong numerical formatting altogether).

So which number is right? In my opinion, none of them. If you follow the API link above, you will see that there are serveral components to the API number, which generally is in the format AB-CDE-FGHIJ-KL-MN, where each letter is represented by a digit ranging from 0 to 9. Here’s what they mean:

  • “AB” represents the state code. In Pennsylvania, the code is “37”, but it is not included on the DEP dataset.
  • “CDE” is the county code, which is alphabetical, and starts at 001. So for example, Allegheny County has a code of 003, since it is near the start of the alphabet, while Washington County is 125, which is near the end.
  • “FGHIJ” is the unique well indicator. In theory, this allows for 100,000 wells per county to each have their own number. If you count the distinct combination of county codes and unique well indicators, there were 8,942 well permits as of 1-20.
  • “KL” indicates the directional sidetrack code. This could represent multiple horizontal components of a well, so there is some wiggle room for argument if you want to consider each horizontal segment to be its own well. I argue against it, as the language talks about there being numerous horizontal components to a well, but for the record if you include it, then the number is 9,638.
  • “MN” represents the event sequence code, which includes modifications to existing wells that also require permit actions. The number of distinct Marcellus Shale permits if you were to include the directional sidetrack and event sequence code would be 9,878 as of the 20th of January.

So…which number is right?  My interpretation of what the code means is that to count the number of wells in any given state, you should include all of the three digit county codes and all of the five digit unique well indicators (or “CDE-FGHIJ”, as described above.)  As of January 20th, that number was 8,942 for Marcellus Shale well permits in Pennsylvania, and as of today, that number is 9,005.

Sometime this year, I expect that the number of total Marcellus Shale permits in Pennsylvania to top the 10,000 mark.  But if that claim comes within the next week or two, my opinion is that it isn’t an accurate representation of the data–even if the claim comes from the DEP itself.

The following charts contain data through the end of January 2012.  The first is based on 11,297 permit actions (or records on the permit report), while the second is classified by unique 8 digit well API numbers.

PA Oil and Gas Inspection Data Available

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has updated their delivery mechanism of violation data, and it is now possible to search all inspections, including those that do not result in violations. To test it out, I downloaded all oil and gas inspection data from January 1, 2011 to January 16, 2012. Here is a summary of the results from that query:

While the vast majority of instances where no violations were issued were recorded in Column F, it seemed likely to me that no violations would have been issued for any category in rows D through I, so I aggregated those columns and divided by the total number of inspections.

According to the report instructions, the report was intended to include only those violations that resulted in a violation, but the final compliance report does allow for seeing all results. This is a very good thing, a it provides us with another way to evaluate the various operators within industry.

Before I present that data for the Marcellus Shale operators, I should point out a source of skew: When an inspection yields more than one violation, there are multiple entries for the actual inspection. For example, if one inspection yielded ten violations, this analysis would look at it as ten inspections, each of which yielded one violation. Clearly, that would distort the actual number of inspections with violations downward, resulting in more favorable scores for any operator with multiple violations on any one inspection. That in mind, let’s consider the following results to be preliminary.  Still, it is useful in combination with the violations per well and violations per million cubic feet of production metrics to triangulate in on the operators’ culture of compliance.

Animating Data: A Different Way to Look at Marcellus Shale Drilling

by Josh Knauer, CEO of Rhiza

At Rhiza, we love to experiment with new ways of visualizing data that help tell better data stories. In most of our work environments, using data is kind of difficult and visualizing is usually left to data experts. We’d love to see a future where sharing data visualizations (maps, charts, explanations, etc) is as easy as recording and sharing a video on YouTube. Not everything produced will be stellar in quality, but at least we’ll all be a lot further down the road towards breaking down the traditional data silos and moving data aggregation and visualization solely out of the hands of database admins and graphic designers. We’ll still need those folks, their jobs will just get a lot more fun!

To this end, when I saw a data animation created by John Detwiler that showed the spread of drilled Marcellus shale gas wells in Bradford County, I wanted to create my own data animation telling the same story, but for the entire state of Pennsylvania… Read more»

Updated Drilled Wells Data for PA

Three drilled wells datasets for Pennsylvania have been updated or created, including:

The last of the three datasets is the most unique, with data spatially joined to municipalities. The following two maps exhibit the Marcellus Shale related data that they contain:


Number of Marcellus Shale wells per PA municipalities as of December 16, 2011. Click the gray compass rose and double carat (^) to hide those menus. Then click the information tool (the blue “i”) then any map feature for more information.


Number of Marcellus Shale wells in PA municipalities per square mile, as of December 16, 2011. Area calculation performed in PA State Plane South.

Bradford County PA Wells Drilled Animation

Bradford County Wells Drilled Animation

One of the regular users, John Detwiler, recently took the mapping application that is part of the platform to an even greater level. He exported wells drilled data by year into Google Earth to create an animation of the shale gas wells drilled from 2007-11 in Bradford County, PA. Check it out:

Gas leases in Dryden NY

Gas Lease Review by the New York Times

Gas leases in the southeastern corner of the Town of Dryden (approximately).

Example lease map. Source: LivinginDryden.org

 

The New York Times has collected more than 111,000 oil and gas leases and related documents through open records requests. Over 100,000 of the documents in the archive are from Tarrant County, Tex., roughly 3,200 are from New York, and the remainder are from states including MarylandOhioPennsylvania and West Virginia.

To see all of the leases that have been collected by the New York Times, click here.

 

Some quick tidbits about what they found:

  • Fewer than half the leases require companies to compensate landowners for water contamination after drilling begins. And only about half the documents have language that lawyers suggest should be included to require payment for damages to livestock or crops.
  • Most leases grant gas companies broad rights to decide where they can cut down trees, store chemicals, build roads and drill. Companies are also permitted to operate generators and spotlights through the night near homes during drilling.
  • In the leases, drilling companies rarely describe to landowners the potential environmental and other risks that federal laws require them to disclose in filings to investors.
  • Most leases are for three or five years, but at least two-thirds of those reviewed by The Times allow extensions without additional approval from landowners.

Violations per Well by Operator Over Time

The following chart contains all operators that have either drilled a Marcellus Shale well in Pennsylvania from March 6, 2006 to November 27, 2011, or have been issued a Marcellus Shale related violation by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection between January 1, 2008 and September 30, 2011. Results are cumulative, thereby reflecting each company’s legacy with the Marcellus Shale, rather than their performances for any given year. The Violations per Well (VpW) score has been color coded for easy reference, with the following scale:

Most companies that are issued violations are well operators, although there do seem to be some midstream companies on the violation list. This might account for some of the blue “No wells” below, but mostly they reflect operators that were not yet active. For example, Antero Resource’s first well was in 2010, so entries for 2008 and 2009 read as “No wells”.

Whenever we look at Marcellus operators over time, the changes in companies has to be dealt with in some way. In this case, I took a minimalist approach: while East Resources, Inc. and East Resources, Llc. were combined, I did not merge name changes that were more substantial than that. For example, even though CNX Gas and Consol Gas are both owned by Consol, I did not merge the two. Another example is St. Mary Land and Exploration changed its name to SM Energy, and those two entries were left unchanged. Because of all of the changes within the industry, I have included the most recent drill date, so that viewers can determine if the drillers are still active.