Methane and other hydrocarbons are potent greenhouse gases

From an Article by Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, May 13, 2020

Natural gas drillers in Pennsylvania leaked more than 1.1 million tons of methane into the air in 2017, 16 times the amount they reported to the state, according to an Environmental Defense Fund review.

The review released Wednesday morning found that fugitive emissions of methane from approximately 8,000 unconventional shale gas wells totaled 543,000 tons for 2017, not the 70,150 tons reported to the state Department of Environmental Protection.

Methane emissions from almost 73,000 older, vertical, or “conventional” gas wells totaled another 599,200 tons. The PA-DEP doesn’t collect fugitive emissions data on conventional well sites.

“The fact that natural gas operators are emitting well over a million tons of methane pollution each year into the air Pennsylvanians breathe is unacceptable,” Dan Grossman, senior director of state advocacy at EDF, said in the organization’s news release. “The staggering scale of the methane problem in Pennsylvania makes Gov. Wolf’s proposal to reduce emissions from existing oil and gas operations all the more critical.”

The new EDF review builds on a July 2018 study in the peer-reviewed journal Science that found fugitive emissions of methane from wells across the U.S. in 2015 were 60% higher than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency inventory estimate.

The new review, which uses 2017 data and emissions modeling developed for the 2018 Science study by EDF and more than 140 research and industry experts, found Pennsylvania methane emissions in 2017 were double the 2015 estimate.

“Tapping into the latest scientific research and best available data has allowed us to more accurately discern the state’s oil and gas methane emissions in a way that best reflects conditions on the ground,” Hillary Hull, EDF senior manager for research and analytics, said in the release.

The new analysis, which also projects methane emissions in the state through 2030, said those emissions will climb to 13 million tons under existing regulations, would drop to approximately 6.5 million tons if regulations were stronger and would increase to 19 million tons if they are weakened.

Gas drilling companies are required to report their fugitive emissions to the PA-DEP so the department can assess the impact of those pollutants on public health based air quality standards.

Allen Robinson, who heads the Carnegie Mellon University mechanical engineering department and helped develop the modeling used in the 2018 Science study, said the department is getting an incomplete picture of the problems posed by fugitive methane emissions.

“Methane is a serious climate issue and also a wasted resource, wasted product issue,” Mr. Robinson said. “And I don’t know why PA-DEP doesn’t measure methane emissions from conventional wells. From a climate perspective it just doesn’t make any sense.”

The EDF said methane, the primary component of natural gas, is a greenhouse gas over 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in the near-term warming of the planet, which can contribute to extreme weather events, longer and hotter summers, and increased risk of Lyme disease and West Nile virus. High airborne concentrations of methane can be explosive and can cause a host of health impacts including headaches and dizziness, nausea and vomiting, loss of coordination and trouble breathing.

The EDF review also found that oil and gas operations emitted more than 63,000 tons of volatile organic compounds, which can form ozone, the primary component of unhealthy smog. VOC exposure can cause heart disease and exacerbate respiratory diseases, such as asthma and emphysema.

The Centers for Disease Control has also found that individuals living with those conditions are more at risk for severe illness from other infections, such as COVID-19, the EDF said in its release.

David Spigelmyer, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, a drilling industry advocacy organization, issued an email statement that notes “credible federal, state and independent third party organization data shows overall emissions, including methane, continue to dramatically drop as natural gas production soars. . .”

“Since methane is the very product produced and sold, operators have every incentive, especially in this historic low price environment, to capture and market natural gas,” Mr. Spigelmyer stated. “Through new technologies and best practices — such as robust leak detection and repair programs and vapor recovery systems — operators continue to make significant progress to ensure natural gas reaches market,”

The PA-DEP has been working on a new methane emissions reduction rule, and Lauren Fraley, a PA-DEP spokeswoman, said it is set to be published later this month followed by a 60-day public comment period.

“The EDF data highlights the need to reduce methane, and the Wolf administration/DEP recognizes the need to act quickly to reduce methane pollution from wells and other natural gas infrastructure,” Ms. Fraley said.

The regulation, as currently written, will reduce methane emissions by more than 75,000 tons per year, she said in an email response to questions.

“Gov. Tom Wolf and the DEP are to be commended for advancing a methane rule that addresses emissions from the state’s tens of thousands of existing oil and gas wells,” Mr. Grossman said. “It’s essential that the state adopt a strong final rule that protects public health and delivers on the governor’s promise to tackle climate change.”

But the Trump administration announced last fall it would move in the opposite direction and seek to roll back the federal methane rule.

”It is not a priority in this administration to apply methods to reduce methane emissions,” said Mr. Robinson. ”It’s really a matter of having the political will to put structural methods in place. If we wanted to, we could have an impact on the emissions totals.”

Hill Family has Water Problems & Old Gas Well in Harrison County

Gas Well Interaction Can be a Boon to Some, Disaster for Others in West Virginia – It’s called well communication …

From an Article by Glynis Board, WV Public Broadcasting, March 31, 2015

When natural gas drillers use extreme pressures to drill and crack rocks thousands of feet underground – when they frack for natural gas, for example – sometimes nearby conventional gas wells will suddenly see production double, or triple.

When drilling processes of a new well affects an already existing one, it’s called well communication. Sometimes it’s a good thing. Sometimes it isn’t.

Swiss Cheese, West Virginia

In West Virginia, over 1,500 horizontal wells exist on some 400 well pads. That’s in addition to roughly 50-thousand conventional wells spread throughout many back yards and hillsides. Then there are another 12,000 wells that are abandoned (many of which were drilled prior to 1929 when the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection started to keep track of such things).

One thing is fairly certain about all of these wells: they are all conduits underground, through the water table. Nowhere is the Swiss cheese that is West Virginia more apparent than in Doddridge County where gas wells new and old are a common as cows.

Abandoned Hiss

Lyndia Ervolina is not an industry expert, but she knows what it’s like to live surrounded by horizontal drilling operations. Not only is the industry moving around Ervolina on wheels, Big Gas has moved in to Ervolina’s yard, literally. It comes from across the street.

“I have a condensate tank up there that they blow off right across the road that they put in when they put the pipeline in. So when it gets blown off into the air it comes to my house,” Ervolina said.

The troubling fact is that the smell of treated gas isn’t the only indicator of air pollution Ervolina worries about. There’s also a noise.

Right next to the condensate tank, an abandoned well that was drilled in the ’60s is making this noise. That sound is gas venting into the air from some underground rock formation. Neither Ervolina nor the DEP knows who is responsible for it. It’s been making this sound for years. “I came out one day and there were pieces of the thing laying all over the place and it was just pouring gas out, pouring gas out,” she said.

She can’t say for sure what happened to the well. There was some pipeline construction in the immediate vicinity. In the last few years, her area of Doddridge county has seen a lot of fracking, which is when drillers use liquid, sand, and extreme pressure to crack rock thousands of feet underground. “The casing is gone. It’s completely busted up. So let’s get out of here.”

Ervolina says she already gets so much exposure to gas and pollutants from the condensate tank that she won’t linger around it for long. Untreated natural gas doesn’t have an odor, but there is actual video footage taken with special filters that clearly reveals this particular well venting gas. Ervolina says when nearby horizontal wells are being fracked, the well hiss is louder.

Well Communication

The phenomenon Ervolina is describing, when one well affects pressure or production of another well, is an example of wells communicating. Research at West Virginia University is just getting underway now at a horizontal gas well in Morgantown to determine if any gas is migrating from the Marcellus shale rock formation there into overlying formations or underground sources of drinking water.

One Morgantown scientist, Marc Glass, says the possibility of migrating liquids and gasses is something scientists have been concerned about for years. Glass is in charge of the Environmental Monitoring and Remediation Program at Downstream Strategies, the Morgantown-based environmental consulting firm. Like Ervolina and other residents, Glass says he’s concerned about potential contamination associated with well communication. He explains that plenty of demonstrations of well communication exist. But he says predicting how wells will communicate is beyond us.

Technology exists today where, just by listening carefully during the fracking process, we can pinpoint where the rocks underground are cracking. It’s called microseismic monitoring. But Glass says it has limitations.

“Microseismic tells you where the fracture has occurred. It does not tell you where the fluid that was required to generate the pressure actually is, was or will be,” Glass said. “It only tells you that there was enough fluid present to create enough pressure to induce a fracture.”

Antero Resources is a gas company doing a lot of horizontal drilling in the state. Antero’s regional vice president and chief administrative officer, Al Schoppe, explained that well communication isn’t always a bad thing. It’s an indicator that an area has been thoroughly “developed,” he said. But it is something Antero operators are also concerned with. Schoppe says mostly, Antero has safety concerns should older equipment in the area give way under greater pressures. He says it’s common for horizontal drillers to map all the wells in the vicinity of their operation. And if they can, his operators try to communicate with any local operators who might be affected by the drilling process. Unfortunately, there’s no policy or law where they have to also talk to residents in the vicinity.

The DEP confirms there have been at least two incidents where, as a direct result of horizontal drilling activities, conventional gas wells have seen increased pressures. There was an incident in 2012 in Ritchie County. And more recently, after horizontal drilling activity in Ohio, conventional wells were affected on the others de of the Ohio River in West Virginia. DEP says that so long as it doesn’t break equipment, increases in pressure are often a good thing for these conventional gas wells because they see increases in production. But for people living near abandoned wells, it seems more like bad luck.

Plugging Wells

The hissing, broken well at Ervolina’s house is a conduit for underground pollutants into our atmosphere, and the DEP says it should be plugged. That’s essentially when you pour cement into the well. As simple pouring some cement into a hole sounds, DEP officials say the process costs anywhere from $25,000 to more than $50,000 per well. Even by conservative estimates, plugging all the abandoned wells in West Virginia (there are about 12-thousand that we know of) would cost the state $300-million. And experts agree that the abandoned wells are hardly the problem when you consider the 50,000 aging conventional gas wells in the state owned and operated by families and small companies who simply do not have the means to plug their wells. The price tag to plug those wells is $1.25 billion.

From the West Virginia DEP, this map shows the locations of the approximately 11,000 abandoned wells that have been permitted in West Virginia. To meet the “abandoned” criteria, it means that no production data for these wells has been submitted for 12 or more consecutive months.

Blowing a Cement Cork out of the Ground

So while the DEP tries to figure out who is responsible for the abandoned well in Doddridge County, the Ervolinas have to continue to deal with the air pollution. But should they also worry about their water?

Industry advocates claim that liquid communication between wells is so unlikely that no one needs to worry. But many residents are worried and many are living with contaminated water as a direct result of horizontal drilling activity.

Suellen Hill and her husband Dave are surface owners in Harrison County who have been living with the reality of horizontal drilling since 2008. A complicated reverse osmosis water system was installed in their home and every two weeks bottled water is delivered to them after several surface spills contaminated their water well. Their water was not contaminated as a result of well communication.

But they are concerned about the threat of contamination throughout the region from conventional gas wells and water wells being pressurized by drilling operations. “I don’t want to be a doomsayer, but I think our legislature and all of the agencies have opened a Pandora’s Box of pollution that is really beyond all of our imagination,” Sue Hill said. These concerns rose after witnessing strange and surprising things happen on their property.

A site of an old South Penn shallow oil well exists on the Hill farm, about a third of a mile from a horizontal well pad. The oil well there is long-retired. “It was probably drilled around 1910. It had been plugged. I’m not sure what date. And we discovered in about 2010 or 2011 that this plug was actually blown out of the ground.”

It’s a troubling thought because abandoned and conventional wells can be full of carcinogenic toxins. Their casings that cut through the water table, if they are still intact, are not built for pressures applied in horizontal wells. Many experts admit that these potential conduits pose threats to the health of watersheds, air, and the people who exist in the vicinity.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net and www.Marcellus-Shale.us