Sunday, June 28th 2020, by Mike Gauntner

One of the companies that were at the forefront of the once highly touted Shale Boom in eastern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania has filed for bankruptcy.

Chesapeake Energy Corporation announced on Sunday that it is beginning the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process in hopes of restructuring $7 billion in debt. The company says it has secured $925 million in financing which will be available upon court approval.

Nearly a decade ago, Chesapeake and other energy companies converged on the Valley using a process called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” to tap into the predicted vast stores of natural gas trapped in what is known as the Marcellus Shale region.

Beginning in 2010, energy companies held public hearings with landowners to convince them to lease the drilling rights to them.

Attorney Alan Wegner of the law firm Harrington, Hoppe & Mitchell who has decades of experience overseeing mineral rights contracts for landowners, told 21 News that some of Chesapeake’s leases in the Valley were transferred to other companies, while the majority, thousands of leases, were just canceled.

As noted by Chesapeake in February, over the past decade, the landscape of energy production has changed dramatically in the United States.

Companies like Chesapeake became victims of their own success, as outlined by the company’s financial statements earlier this year when it reported that “fracking” had produced so much oil and gas, prices plummeted from where they were ten years ago.

https://www.wfmj.com/story/42300979/onetime-shale-boom-leader-chesapeake-files-bankruptcy

When investors are so far from the facts, “experts” can become confidence men. The United States was blessed with abundant petroleum. It also had a social climate that motivated people to develop it as a trade item. Oil and its products were soon exported.

But the US has about 2% of the earth’s dry surface, and the technology was easily exported elsewhere, and for decades now oil has been imported to the US.

Vast amounts of oil and gas are present in shale, and methods to extract it were developed with US government help, but it is expensive to get. The rock had to be broken by tremendous pressure and friction reducer chemicals used. Vast amounts of energy were required for extraction of oil and gas from shale, too, making the return of energy for the investment of energy produced marginal.

Another problem was huge externalized cost. The chemicals used in fracking poisoned wells and streams. This effecting rural people, their livestock and crops, and wildlife. Roads were crowded and destroyed, and the countryside was uglyfied. These were costs the companies and investors did not have to pay, but it produced a large, very active, opposition, desperate to protect their own interests.

At the same time there were other nations, which had abundant supplies of conventional sandstone and limestone oil and gas, which could be pumped without breaking rocks and using, synthesized chemicals. Was there a way to suppress their supply? Unfortunately the Arab nations, Russia, Iran, Libya, Venezuela and others, have not proved cooperative, and are a major problem for our diplomatic and military forces.

So the economic truth is sinking in. At the same time awareness of the effects of carbon dioxide and methane on the climate are permeating the public consciousness.

Fracking is not viable.