Injection wells operated at high pressure are an accident waiting to happen

Announcement from Ryan Clover, Halt the Harm Network, March 8, 2021

Are you concerned about injection wells? Want to meet other people working to prevent them?

Not sure if you’ve seen this yet – but FracTracker put together a report about disposal wells in PA and Matt Kelso will join us this Friday at our weekly live event.

Matt is the Manager of Data and Technology at FracTracker, so I’m sure we’ll have lots to discuss. I look forward to seeing what comments or questions you bring to the conversation on Friday.

§§§. MARCH 12, 2021 @ 2 PM
Coffee Break with FracTracker Alliance –
Pennsylvania’s Waste Disposal Wells –
A Tale of Two Datasets

Coffee Break is a weekly live-stream discussion to talk about the latest with researchers, leaders, community organizers, filmmakers, and artists standing up to fracking and the oil & gas industry.

This week’s guest is Matt Kelso, Manager of Data and Technology at FracTracker Alliance. Stop by to meet Matt and learn about the work they’re doing to map the industry.

​Register here via Crowdcast​.

Thanks! — Ryan Clover,
Halt the Harm Network

Antero "Clearwater" Construction

Residents wary of Antero’s answer to fracking wastewater problem

From an Article by Ken Ward, Jr., Charleston Gazette-Mail, September 17, 2016

<< Antero Resources is still seeking some of the permits it needs for a massive fracking wastewater treatment operation, but construction of the facility is well underway along the Doddridge-Ritchie County line >>

Greenwood, WV — Large cranes loom over the rolling hills just off Sunnyside Road. The tip of a large industrial tank and the steel skeleton of a building peek over the tree line along U.S. 50 near the Doddridge-Ritchie County line. Construction crews crowd the narrow road that winds up the hill from the four-lane, as workers push forward on a $275 million, two-year effort to complete what Antero Resources has dubbed “Clearwater.”

Antero officials say their new major complex — including a water treatment plant and adjacent landfill — will help solve a nagging problem faced by its natural gas operations across Appalachia: Getting enough water for gas drilling and then disposing of that water once it is contaminated with salts from underground mineral deposits and chemicals used to help release the gas from the region’s Marcellus Shale formation.

“This significantly improves the safety and reduces the environmental impact of shale development by removing hundreds of thousands of water truckloads from the roads every year, and recycles and reuses the water rather than dispose of it,” Antero CEO Paul Rady said when the project was announced a little more than a year ago.

But in the months since that announcement, residents near the project site and in the surrounding communities have become increasingly wary. Some residents have simple questions, like whether a new stoplight eventually will be installed at the intersection where the plant is being built. Others aren’t convinced that the water treatment facility will really remove some of the most potentially dangerous contamination — metals and radioactive materials — from the water from Antero’s natural gas production activities.

Still other critics of Antero’s plan worry that installing such a huge piece of industrial infrastructure simply furthers the state’s ties to another polluting fossil fuel industry, hindering any effort to make West Virginia a state that thrives on renewable energy production.

“There’s been strong community interest about this significant project coming to Doddridge and Ritchie counties,” said Angie Rosser, executive director of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, which has been working with the local Friends of the Hughes River Watershed Association to help educate the public about the project and open dialogue between Antero and the community.

Last week, the two citizen groups hosted a community meeting on the project. About 50 people gathered in Harrisville, at the Women’s Club Center on Main Street, a few miles west of the construction site. Representatives from Antero attended. So did someone from the Department of Environmental Protection’s Office of Environmental Advocate, which works to help citizens be better heard and understood during DEP’s review of permit applications for projects like Antero has proposed.

Conrad Baston, Antero’s project manager, explained why he and his company believe that the water treatment plant and the landfill are such good ideas. “It’s a centralized way of dealing with this waste, trying to compress this issue into as small a package as you can,” Baston said.

The whole process presents obvious problems: Where will all that water come from, especially during dry months when streams are low? What will companies do with all that contaminated water that comes back up?

Those underground injection wells have drawn increasing scrutiny, sometimes because they might be leaking, and others because scientists have found underground injection causes earthquakes.

Antero’s project would change all that, Baston said. Wastewater produced at the company’s wells would be trucked to the treatment plant, where it would be cleaned of salts and other contaminants. The water could then be reused at other gas wells. Salts would be disposed of at an adjacent landfill. Material with other contaminants would be hauled by train to some other dump somewhere else, probably in Utah or Idaho. No more on-site waste pits. No more underground injection wells. Less truck traffic.

“As an engineer, I just see this problem that I’m trying to compress into a smaller and smaller footprint,” Baston told residents.  That description, though, didn’t sit well with Lissa Lucas, who lives a few miles west of the project. “I wonder if you recognize that what you regard as a problem or an obstacle to making profits is different than what someone who lives nearby regards as a problem,” Lucas said. For example, Lucas said, “You may be saying there’s only 10 houses affected, but if you live in one of those houses, that’s a big deal.”

‘Right on top of us’

The scale of the Antero project alone has many residents worried. Located on a nearly 500-acre site, the landfill would accept 2,000 tons of salt per day, according to a Rivers Coalition fact sheet. Environmental groups also note that the landfill project alone would bury more than 5 miles of streams.

Antero officials like to point out that, overall, the facility — especially with an adjacent landfill that eliminates having to ship the salt for off-site disposal — actually helps to greatly reduce truck traffic related to the company’s operations. But residents worry that the treatment plan, by processing 60,000 barrels per day of wastewater, creates one giant, congested industrial site.

“You’re consolidating,” said one resident, who didn’t give his name. “What you’re consolidating is the problem — right on top of us.”

For some residents in places like Doddridge and Ritchie counties, West Virginia’s natural gas boom has brought with it not only concerns about water quality, but what one local sheriff has called an “invasion” of truck traffic, along with constant noise and light and localized air pollution concerns.

Lyn Scott Bordo, a sixth generation Ritchie County resident, said that the noise from a natural gas compressor station that started up near her home ended her ability to even have a conversation while sitting on her porch in the evenings.

Residents especially are resentful toward Antero. They note repeated water pollution problems and workplace incidents that left workers hurt or dead. And Antero is the main company targeted by hundreds of residents who have filed lawsuits over truck traffic, mountains of dust, constant heavy equipment noise and bright lights that shine into their homes day and night.

Kevin Ellis, an Antero vice president, reminded residents who brought up such issues during last week’s meeting that a lot of their neighbors work for Antero and its many contracting companies, and that those neighbors do their best every day to operate safely and to minimize any negative effects from the company’s operations. “We take seriously our obligation to do right,” Ellis said.

Still, residents and environmental groups have a variety of questions about the finer details of Antero’s plan.

For example, the company proposes to permit its landfill as a non-commercial facility — one that would take only Antero’s own waste — a move that avoids dealing with siting review by the local solid waste authority, which is required for commercial operations under the state’s decades-old law aimed at reducing out-of-state garbage. But Antero officials also talk about the possibility that they might accept and treat wastewater from other natural gas producers at the Clearwater facility, and then dispose of the salt from that treatment at the landfill, under the theory that the salt becomes internal to Antero when it comes out of the treatment facility.

Also, residents worry that they don’t yet have enough information about exactly how the treatment plant would ensure that only the salts, and not other contaminants like metals or radioactive materials, would be kept out of the landfill. In written comments submitted to the state Department of Environmental Protection, a coalition of environmental groups noted that the project is located so that spills or leaks or other discharges could affect the drinking water supply for the Hughes River Water Board, which provides water to Pennsboro, Harrisville and Cairo.

The groups complained that the company’s permit applications have not described these potential impacts or any steps that would be taken to avoid them. Antero says its landfill has many layers of protections to avoid any water contamination, but residents and others are concerned that there’s no way to absolutely guarantee any such system is foolproof.

“Landfills leak,” said Kendra Hatcher, an environmental scientist who has been examining the project for the Morgantown-based environmental consulting firm Downstream Strategies. “It might not be a big, catastrophic event, but landfills leak, so there is a legitimate concern for the groundwater.”

‘Good for the environment’

Compounding the concerns for local residents is the fact that while the DEP is still reviewing permit applications from Antero — and asking members of the public for their comments on those applications — construction has not only started, but appears from what residents can see to be fairly well along.

Jane Hearne, of Ritchie County, wondered aloud at last week’s meeting if approval by DEP of the project’s permits isn’t a “done deal … when you see the [construction] process is already underway.”

Residents who worry about the politics underlying such projects and their review by state agencies were greeted at last week’s meeting with promotional material from Antero that included a quote from Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin in which the governor praised the company and its project as “good for the environment and good for West Virginia’s economy.” That quote appeared in Antero’s press release announcing the project, with approval from the governor’s office, Tomblin communications director Jessica Tice said last week.

Antero already has a construction and operation permit for the treatment facility and a construction stormwater permit, issued by separate divisions of DEP. The company still needs several other DEP approvals, including an air quality permit for the landfill, a draft of which was issued for public comment on the day of last week’s public meeting in Harrisville.

The process, with separate permits under separate laws, rules and programs — and divisions of DEP — has been confusing for residents, even setting aside the issue of whether, with a facility already being built, a review of other permit applications is no more than an academic exercise for agency officials and citizens.

For example, as late as December 2015, when the DEP Division of Air Quality issued the treatment plant’s air permit, residents who asked questions about the company’s landfill plans were told by the agency that Antero hadn’t submitted a landfill permit application and that the company had told DEP only that “they are exploring this option, but no decision has been made yet.” The application was submitted a month later.

Some residents complained during the air permit comment period that their community is “already besieged by the gas industry — well pads, diesel truck traffic, compressor stations, pipelines, and major processing facilities … [that] already emit toxic substances into our air. We who choose the fresh air, clean water, and quiet of country life find these destroyed.”

WV-DEP officials responded that they are “aware of the increased activity in the oil and gas industry as it pertains to horizontal drilling in the Marcellus Shale.” “The increase in drilling activity has created new challenges with maintaining healthy air, water and land usage,” the DEP Division of Air Quality said. “Air quality issues associated with the oil and gas sector are an expanding aspect of the DAQ’s regulatory responsibilities.”

John King, of the DEP Office of Environmental Advocate, told residents last week that the agency doesn’t allow housing developers to segment their projects into small pieces to avoid having to get stormwater construction permits, and that some sort of “common plan of permitting” is something DEP could consider and residents could encourage the agency to employ when they submit public comments on the Antero project.

‘They created the problem’

DEP Secretary Randy Huffman said last week that he doesn’t recall a situation with a major project where his agency has ever “lumped all of the permits together and required all of the permits before you can do anything.” Such an approach, Huffman said, probably would only be relevant to citizens who view the permit process as a “thumbs up or thumbs down” on a project, as opposed to an opportunity for the public to point out things DEP permit reviewers may have missed or ways the agency could improve a project’s air or water permits.

Huffman said his agency’s job is not to decide whether a particular activity — such as natural gas drilling using hydraulic fracturing — is allowed. Lawmakers and governors set such policies, and DEP enforces them, Huffman said.

“We’re not there to make policy decisions about whether some activity should occur or should not occur,” Huffman said. “The presumption with any permitting action is, if all of the requirements are met, then you will be issued the permit.”

When lawmakers passed and Tomblin signed a 2011 law aimed at better regulating oil and gas drilling, they weakened some provisions of it that would have provided more protections for residents near gas production operations. State officials said they would study those issues and could come back to them later.

The studies were done, and recommended more protections, but the law hasn’t been updated based on the findings. Instead, environmental and citizen groups have had to spend their time beating back legislative proposals aimed at lessening controls on drilling and blocking citizen lawsuits against companies like Antero.

It all creates a tough situation for residents confronted with permit applications for operations like the one Antero has planned for Doddridge and Ritchie counties, or already living with the realities of large-scale natural gas production in West Virginia’s Marcellus Shale region. They feel like a big part of the discussion is left out of the public hearings and comment periods DEP encourages them to take part in, and permit decisions are made without looking at the whole picture of a project or industry.

Rosser, the Rivers Coalition director, said that the Antero project should be “part of a broader discussion of where we are going with energy production. This infrastucture we see, with projects like this and pipelines, the more we are setting ourselves up for that future with more and more waste and not moving toward renewables.”

And as for Antero’s specific plan, Rosser recalled what one resident at last week’s meeting said as the event was breaking up: That it was good that Antero officials were trying to come up with a solution for the wastewater problem, but that, “what underlies that is that they created the problem in the first place.”

State must fend for itself against fracking hazards

Letter to Editor, Morgantown Dominion Post, March 21, 2016

Studies and investigative reports indicate that horizontal hydro-fracking poses serious and unavoidable threats to our health and environment. Due largely to these findings, the process is now prohibited in New York state, Maryland, Vermont, parts of Canada and 10 nations.

One report, by Physicians for Social Responsibility and Concerned Scientists, states that the underground effects are uncontrollable because of the randomness of subterranean landscapes.

There, increased drilling can result in “pressure bulbs” that break up confined aquifers and cause earthquakes. Like lead paint, DDT and asbestos, it said, horizontal hydrofracking is too destructive to use.

The most damaging result of horizontal hydrofracking, reportedly, is air pollution; from waste pits, condensate tanks, leaks, spills, diesel engines and compressor stations.
Combined with hundreds of chemicals, heavy metals and high radioactivity in the liquid and solid frack wastes, a poisonous overload is produced known to cause health problems.

In West Virginia, state and federal laws compound the threat. Treated as hazardous in any other industry, oil and gas waste has been exempted there. No laws in West Virginia require safe handling of these extremely toxic pollutants.

The EPA’s national inventory on potentially frack-contaminated drinking water study excluded Class II injection wells, moreover. These wells are extensively used in West Virginia for disposal of out-of-state frack waste and are the most likely to pollute aquifers.

Meanwhile, although the same Marcellus shale underlies West Virginia, groups of physicians and scientists have called on President Obama, the surgeon general and the governors of Pennsylvania and Maryland to create a permanent ban on horizontal hydro-fracking in those states.

So must West Virginia become a sacrifice zone where citizens must protect themselves?

Doing just that, Fayette County last year closed the oil and gas loophole by declaring such waste hazardous, then banning it within county jurisdiction. Although one industry giant has blocked its enforcement by attempting to overturn the ordinance in court, the ban should rightfully survive litigation.

Barbara Daniels, Richwood, WV

Other Large Diesel Trucks on Country Roads

Truck overturns, spills drilling wastewater that taints reservoir

From an Article by Laura Arenschield, Columbus Dispatch, March 9, 2016

A truck hauling drilling wastewater overturned in eastern Ohio early this morning, sending thousands of gallons of toxic water into a nearby creek and contaminating a reservoir in Barnesville in Belmont County.

The truck crashed along a curve just after 3 a.m. today, said Barnesville Fire Chief Bob Smith. The driver, Hiley Wogan of Chesterhill, Ohio, was flown by helicopter to a hospital in Columbus, Smith said.

About 5,000 gallons of drilling wastewater spilled into a field, then a creek and finally into one of Barnesville’s three reservoirs.

Smith said the reservoir is closed while the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency tests the water. James Lee, an EPA spokesman, said the agency is investigating the spill.

Smith said the truck is owned by ECM, a brine hauling company with a location in Cambridge, Ohio, not far from Barnesville.

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Injections of wastewater rise in Ohio despite lull in fracking

From an Article by Laura Arenschield, The Columbus Dispatch, March 7, 2016

The amount of fracking wastewater pumped underground in Ohio increased by more than 15 percent last year, even as shale drilling has slowed nationwide, according to new numbers from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

Ohio took in nearly 29 million barrels of fracking wastewater in 2015, according to a Dispatch analysis of department data. That is about 4 million more barrels than in 2014.

Fracking involves pumping a mixture of water, sand and chemicals at high pressure into deep wells to fracture shale formations and free oil and natural gas trapped underground.

The water can be recycled for reuse but eventually must be dumped somewhere. Ohio, which is situated to accept wastewater from states that don’t allow injection waste wells, has more than 200 injection wells. Fewer than 10 have been approved in Pennsylvania, where much of the fracking boom in this part of the country has taken place. West Virginia has about 60.

That means about 13 million barrels a year comes from Pennsylvania and West Virginia, according to the Natural Resources data.

Ohio typically takes more fracking wastewater from outside Ohio than inside. But last year, about 55 percent of the fracking wastewater that ended up in Ohio injection wells came from Ohio, the Dispatch analysis shows.

Wastewater generally travels in tanker trucks on Ohio’s highways until it reaches injection well sites, which are primarily in eastern and southeastern Ohio.

Athens County, for example, took more than 4 million barrels of fracking wastewater in 2015, an increase of 1.1 million barrels, or nearly 40 percent. Most of that wastewater was injected into wells in the eastern part of the county, near the village of Coolville and the unincorporated area of Torch.

Residents there, worried about drinking-water contamination and earthquakes associated with injection wells, have fought unsuccessfully to keep wastewater out.

“Something’s got to give,” said Teresa Mills, program director for the Buckeye Forest Council, an environmental-advocacy group. “Athens County, Coshocton, Guernsey (counties) — these are environmental-justice communities, and we have to stop burdening them.”

Exact numbers about drilling patterns and oil and gas production in Ohio in 2015 are not yet available. Companies were required to report that information to Natural Resources by Feb. 14, said Matt Eiselstein, an agency spokesman. The department will not make the numbers public until it reviews them, he said.

Industry trends nationwide show that drilling slowed in 2015, hampered by low gas and oil prices. A weekly drilling report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration released Feb. 25 showed that the nation’s number of natural-gas rigs was its fewest since 1987.

Jackie Stewart, a spokeswoman for Energy In Depth, an advocacy group for the oil and gas industry, said that even though drilling is down, production per well could be increasing. Drillers also are probably drilling longer horizontal cuts to access oil and gas, she said. That would require more water, which would in turn produce more wastewater.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Tanker Truck for Frack Wastewater

Fayette County  Injection Wells at Lochgelly (WV) Stir Controversy

Action Alert Letter of Tom Rhule, Communications Director, WV Mountain Party, May 22, 2015

On May 14th the WV Environmental Quality Board “EQB” decided to allow Danny Webb Construction continue dumping hydro fracking waste at that Fayette County site without a permit. This is alarming.

It is also disturbing that the WV Dept. of Environmental Protection “WV-DEP” has never cited this operator nor ordered remediation, considering that a Duke University scientist found undisputed evidence of this waste in nearby Wolf Creek. But what is most alarming, is that as far as anyone can tell, that site is still leaking fracking-related toxins and dangerously high radioactivity.

When it comes to industrial dumping, the WV-DEP has never failed to live up to its reputation as the Department of Everything Permitted, especially when backed by the governor-appointed EQB and all the Friends of Cancer who pull the strings in the Statehouse. By the way, there are literally over a thousand industrial waste injection wells strewn all over the State.

So the good citizens of Fayette county have basically been left to their own defenses. And although on May 18, the Fayette County Zoning Board recommended that the County Commission regulate future injection wells through a stringent permitting process, unfortunately that plan will not stop Danny Webb Construction, nor any other currently operating injection site from polluting the county’s waters.

This has been a real problem for quite some time. The West Virginia American Water 2011 Source Water Assessment and Protection Plan for Fayette District PWSID WV330L046 clearly states that “hydrofracking fluid is being injected into abandoned mines.” In fact, page 7 of that Plan lists the dumping of frack waste into abandoned mines, as one of the highest priorities with respect to water contamination. And that was 4 years ago.

Once again, the County Commission’s current zoning recommendation fails to ban it.

The petition that we are circulating urges the Fayette County Commission to immediately pass an ordinance that will make it illegal to dump frack waste and coal slurry anywhere within the county. Passing that ordinance will tell the world that Fayette County is not a sacrifice zone. But it’s going to take your support to make that happen.

On Wednesday, May 27^th, at 9:00 am, the Fayette County Commission will hold its regularly-scheduled meeting. On the agenda is the Zoning Committee’s recommendation, where I intend to introduce the ordinance to ban industrial waste dumping outright. Scheduled at the Fayette County Courthouse and open to the public, your showing up to support the passage of an outright ban will be empowering.

If you haven’t already signed the petition now going door-to-door urging the Fayette County Commission to ban industrial waste dumping, there is a copy at the Cathedral Cafe in Fayetteville. Or, you may endorse a digital petition online at mountainpartywv.com by clicking on the orange-colored YODO – You Only Die Once – button. Accuracy counts, so only one signature per citizen, please!

Citizen activists Tom Rhule of the Mountain Party and Brandon Richardson of Friends of Water will hold a press conference immediately Commission’s meeting on May 27^th outside the Courthouse to answer questions and provide details about the petition drive and proposed ordinance.

Tom Rhule, Communication Director, Mountain Party of WV

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Note:  See also the Fact Sheet from the WV-DEP on the two Lochgelly injection wells.

Fracking Waste Study Says States Aren’t Doing Enough to Protect Public

From an Article by Glynis Board, WV Public Broadcasting, April 12, 2015

A new report was published this month that looks at how states are dealing with dangerous waste produced during shale gas development. Not well, according to the report.

Defining Hazardous

The Environmental Protection Agency regulates the disposal of toxic or hazardous materials. Such waste includes things that may contain heavy metals, chemicals, dangerous pathogens, radiation, or other toxins. Horizontal drilling produces both liquid and solid waste streams which can contain heavy metals, dangerous chemicals, salts and radiation. But you will never hear it referred to as toxic or hazardous by anyone, officially.

Amy Mall, senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a Washington-based nonprofit, explains that thirty years ago the EPA exempted oil and gas waste from the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). “So right now, oil and gas waste, regardless of how toxic it is, can be treated like normal household waste in many parts of the country,” Mall said.

“Wasting Away”

There’s a new report: (Wasting Away – Four states’ failure to manage oil and gas waste in the Marcellus and Utica Shale) that examines this subject published by Earthworks – a nonprofit concerned with the adverse impacts of mineral and energy development. Lead author Nadia Steinzor explains that the EPA didn’t exempt the industry because the waste wasn’t considered a threat, but because state regulation of this waste was considered adequate. Of course, this was a couple decades before the horizontal gas drilling boom.

Steinzor and her colleagues decided to see what they could learn about waste practices in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, where Marcellus and Utica shale gas are being developed.

The report indicates that states are well behind the curve in adapting to the natural gas boom: good characterizations of the waste is incomplete according to a 2014 study that’s cited; and not much information is available about where the waste is coming from, going to, or how it gets there.

West Virginia’s Oil and Gas Waste Management

West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection officials say most information that does exist about oil and gas production and waste disposal procedures is available online. What information isn’t public can be accessed with a fee and a Freedom of Information Act request.

DEP spokesperson Kelley Gillenwater says her agency is going above and beyond what’s required by law to make information more accessible and is currently working on a project to digitize and make public the information they collect. She says, however, that project is in the early stages and a timeframe for completion doesn’t exist yet.

Steinzor’s report argues that states don’t require enough information and often rely on operators to self-report in good faith.

The Earthworks report cites a 2013 study that says nearly half of all liquid oil and gas waste is shipped out of state, the remainder is injected underground. But Amy Mall from NRDC says rules for injection wells everywhere are also in need of attention.
“We think the rules for those disposal wells need to be much stronger than they are now because those disposal wells are not designed to handle toxic waste.”

Steinzor does credit West Virginia for taking some steps to address solid waste problems in the state. The sheer volume of drill cuttings, which at one point was simply being buried onsite, may have helped force the issue. Municipal landfills do accept the waste even though it’s largely uncharacterized.

Requirements are now in place for the waste to be held in separate storage cells within landfills and DEP is working with Marshall University to study the leachate from those facilities. Results from that study are scheduled to be presented to state lawmakers this July.

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RE: “Lochgelly Waste Injection Well Permit Renewal” — Operator: Danny Webb Construction.  A Public Hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, April 21st at the Oak Hill High School Auditorium, 350 Oyler Avenue, Oak Hill, WV.   Time: 6 pm to 8 pm.  [Written comment period extends to May 1st, per comment below.] Find more information here.

Decker's Creek Rail Trail

ENERGY CORPORATION OF AMERICA

501 56th Street, S.E.,  Charleston, W.Va.

For Immediate Release: April 18, 2014

ECA elects not to pursue “injection well project” in Preston County

This week, Energy Corporation of America (ECA) determined not to pursue an injection well the company has been exploring near Masontown in Preston County.

A number of different factors led to this decision.  It is a complicated and involved process, which took nearly a year to complete.  Throughout this process we considered all of the factors necessary to determine if the project would be practical to pursue.  These factors included well integrity, ease of site access, environmental sensitivities, and many others.  In the end, our exploration simply concluded this well is not a good candidate for conversion to a Class II injection well at this time.

While we had hoped the project would come to fruition, our approach was responsible and produced the most comprehensive decision possible.  We will continue to operate as we have for more than 50 years, focusing on the wellbeing of our employees, safety of the environment, and ongoing commitment to the communities where we operate.         -30-

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WV DEP Issues Cease Operations Orders to Antero at Sites in Harrison & Doddridge Counties

From an Article by Kim Freda, WBOY News 12, Clarksburg, April 18, 2014

The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and the Office of Oil and Gas have issued violation notices to Antero Resources in relation to an April 11 tank rupture at a well pad located in Doddridge County and an April 15 tank rupture at a well pad in Harrison County.

Two storage tanks at the Antero’s Marsden Well Pad in Doddridge County ruptured due to a build up of pressure, said DEP spokeswoman Kelley Gillenwater. The first notice of violation was issued for the imminent danger to people on or around the pad and issued a cease operations order that will remain in effect until the order is complied with.

A second notice of violation was issued for pollution, due to an undetermined amount of produced water that spilled onto the well pad during the rupture, said Gillenwater. As a result of the violations, Antero is required to produce information to help determine the cause of the rupture, to sample and analyze soil, and to develop and submit a plan to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future. Remediation may be required upon completion of the soil analysis.

Additionally, the DEP issued an imminent danger notice of violation to Antero in connection to an April 15 tank rupture at the Varner-West well pad in Harrison County. The notice of violation also requires Antero to cease operations at the well pad until detailed information related to the cause of the rupture and an accident prevention plan are provided. In this incident, the DEP said no produced water spilled onto nearby soil. Similar to the Marsden well pad incident, the tank rupture occurred due to a build up of pressure inside the tank, said Gillenwater.

No injuries or fires were reported as the result of either incident.

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See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Seeking Sites for Disposal of Marcellus Fracking Wastewater

From the Article by Spencer Hunt, The Columbus Dispatch, September 23, 2013

Photo in Article: A semi from Pennsylvania unloads wastewater at the Devco No. 1 injection well near Cambridge, Ohio.

Scientists at the Batelle Memorial Institute in Columbus are leading a search for sites where companies can pump fracking waste underground in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

The two-year project, funded by a $1.8 million U.S. Department of Energy grant, is a response to the growing amount of polluted wastewater that bubbles out of fracked shale wells. Millions of barrels of the waste are pumped into disposal wells, many of which are in Ohio.

With more drilling and fracking expected, oil and gas companies will need to find the best locations to safely inject more waste, said Neeraj Gupta, senior research leader for Battelle’s subsurface-resources group.

“That’s one of our objectives. Where is the injection capacity?” Gupta said. Right now, it’s in Ohio, where more than 14.2 million barrels of fracking fluids and related waste from oil and gas wells were pumped into 190 disposal wells last year. That was a 12 percent increase over 2011.

Much of the waste — 8.16 million barrels last year — came from Pennsylvania, which has seven active disposal wells. West Virginia has 63 disposal wells. (Most of these in WV are limited to specific wastes, as sanitary sewage sludge. DGN)

The fracking process pumps millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals underground to shatter shale and free its trapped oil and gas. Some of the fluid bubbles back up, along with ancient saltwater that contains toxic metals and radium.

Environmental advocates say they worry that old, poorly maintained disposal wells will leak pollutants to groundwater. “Ohio has injected enough waste into all of the different strata,” said Teresa Mills, fracking coordinator for the Buckeye Forest Council. “They just need to stop it.”

Mark Bruce, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, said state geologists will provide mapping data and core samples to help Gupta’s team map the extent and capacity of injection zones. “The more information you have, the better and the easier it is to make the decisions that have to be made,” Bruce said.

Christina Novak, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, said her state’s geologists hope to learn more about the rock strata there and whether it can safely contain fracking waste.

Gupta said Battelle has done extensive work in West Virginia to see whether deep rock formations could contain injected carbon dioxide, a key climate-changing gas. Many of the rock formations that could hold carbon dioxide also should hold fracking waste, he said.

The $1.8 million grant was awarded by the Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America, headquartered in Sugar Land, Texas. The partnership, which judges applications for federal energy grants, is made up of university officials and oil and gas companies, including Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips Co.

Kent Perry, a Research Partnership vice president, said he hopes Battelle produces a map and database that drilling companies can use to locate spots for new disposal wells. “Ideally, there are some areas and more formations that have possibilities for disposal,” Perry said.

NOTE: The Batelle Memorial Institute was founded by industrialist Gordon Batelle in 1929. This non-profit research and development organization is the largest of its type with some 22,000 employees worldwide, with headquarters in Columbus, OH.

What We Are Learning From Shale Drilling – Earth Sciences

Analysis by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor and Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV
 
Geologists and petroleum engineers are learning that the earth is really much more complicated than the simple conceptual diagrams that are in their textbooks and that they put out to the companies that want to drill.  Those diagrams are a bit like a layer cake.  They appear to have uniform thickness and consist of uniform, homogenous, single component layers. 

However, buried landscapes, compression and extension, lateral thrusts, percolating waters of various compositions, often highly corrosive or oxidizing, radioactivity, an immense amount of detail which changes unpredictably in a few yards vertically or a few tens of yards horizontally are left out.
 
They have to be, because every location is different.  Fracking gives an opportunity to find details which don’t appear in published diagrams.  Things like abandoned wells, cracks large enough for migration at depth, variations in the thickness and quality of the target rock.  Terry Engelder is quoted here as saying certain joints in the source rocks may “break out of the gas shales and populate the rock above these gas shales. [This] joint set may appear about 1000 feet above or even as much as 4000 feet above the gas shales.”  The industry vigorously denies this.  The economic value of shale varies tremendously within a few miles.  Nobody (almost) says anything about this.
 
Chesapeake Energy began selling investments with the assumption all drilling locations were more or less identical, and the wells would provide economic amounts of gas for 30 or 40 years, like conventional wells.  This has not proven true.
 
Something petroleum geologists and petroleum engineers are learning that they did not suspect is the rapid decline in production and the spottiness of production within a field.   Look up graphs of decline rates for various shale fields here.

Much more information for a sample of the Marcellus is printed here, but the graphs are harder to read.  Each diamond shape indicates a well’s production decline as of June 30, 2013.  The months it has been in production is along the horizontal axis and the percent decline is a long the vertical axis.  For example, the extreme right upper diamond represents a well in production for 48 months (just a little left of the 50 months line) and it has lost 79% of its production in that time.  Another, the diamond shape lowest in the left has lost 58% of its production in 12 months time. The beauty of this reference is that the information reported to Pennsylvania DEP (which by law is open to the public) is printed along with the graphs.  No argument can be made with this!

If you read much about shale drilling, you are already aware of the rapid decline in production of shale wells, compared to drilling in conventional reservoirs.  James Stafford quotes Arthur Berman: “… nobody thinks very much about is the decline rates shale reservoirs. Well, I’ve looked at this. The decline rates are incredibly high. In the Eagleford shale, which is supposed to be the mother of all shale oil plays, the annual decline rate is higher than 42%. They’re going to have to drill hundreds, almost [thousands of] wells in the Eagleford shale, every year, to keep production flat. Just for one play, we’re talking about $10 or $12 billion a year just to replace supply.”  What this means is illustrated in an article about the Barnette in The Oil Drum.  Instead of drilling wells and being able to sit back and relax and count on initial production to hold up for years at nearly the initial level, tens of billions of additional investment will be required to maintain initial levels. 

Another big thing discovered is what happens when pressures of thousands of pounds per square inch are applied to liquids pumped down disposal wells in volumes equal to several houses day after day, with only cracks and pores the size of a grain of sand in them to receive it.  Rumble, rumble!  It takes about 4.0 on the Richter Scale to cause damage, but one in South Texas got up to 4.8.  The Richter is a logarithmic scale so 4.8 is 6.3 times the magnitude of 4.0.  Definitely connected with the well, as many small quakes have between verified to be connected to disposal wells. 

Cliff Frohlich, speaking at WVU, recently identified one of 5.7.  He thinks injection wells shouldn’t be sited in cities, but out in the country is OK.  (The “country hicks” don’t care if they are injured or their property is destroyed?  The insurance companies will compensate them for their losses?)  Earthquakes don’t happen at all disposal wells, but when one considers the facts above, then one has to wonder just where these toxic waste liquids do go and how long they will stay put.
 
Frohlich has the life expectancy of the Marcellus field down to less than 30 years (to 2040).  That’s assuming future wells do as well as the present wells, no doubt, in spite of the fact drillers avidly seek out the “sweet spots” and highest returns first.  And, assuming the investors are willing to cough up money to drill and drill and drill. 

Then there will be all those wells to plug.  Any body willing to say this generation of drillers will be more responsible about plugging their wells than those in the past?  What do you suppose it takes to plug a well that takes 3 to 8 million to drill?  Don’t you think that expense will be left for the public, just as wells and mines worked in the past must be remediated by government money, our taxes, or not at all?
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REVIEW: Injection-Induced Earthquakes

From William L. Ellsworth, Science Magazine, July 12, 2013
Source: Earthquake Science Center, U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, CA

Background
Human-induced earthquakes have become an important topic of political and scientific discussion, owing to the concern that these events may be responsible for widespread damage and an overall increase in seismicity. It has long been known that impoundment of reservoirs, surface and underground mining, withdrawal of fluids and gas from the subsurface, and injection of fluids into underground formations are capable of inducing earthquakes. In particular, earthquakes caused by injection have become a focal point, as new drilling and well-completion technologies enable the extraction of oil and gas from previously unproductive formations.

Earthquakes with magnitude (M) ≥ 3 in the U.S. midcontinent, 1967–2012. After decades of a steady earthquake rate (average of 21 events/year), activity increased starting in 2001 and peaked at 188 earthquakes in 2011. Human-induced earthquakes are suspected to be partially responsible for the increase.

Advances
Microearthquakes (that is, those with magnitudes below 2) are routinely produced as part of the hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) process used to stimulate the production of oil, but the process as currently practiced appears to pose a low risk of inducing destructive earthquakes. More than 100,000 wells have been subjected to fracking in recent years, and the largest induced earthquake was magnitude 3.6, which is too small to pose a serious risk.

Yet, wastewater disposal by injection into deep wells poses a higher risk, because this practice can induce larger earthquakes. For example, several of the largest earthquakes in the U.S. midcontinent in 2011 and 2012 may have been triggered by nearby disposal wells. The largest of these was a magnitude 5.6 event in central Oklahoma that destroyed 14 homes and injured two people. The mechanism responsible for inducing these events appears to be the well-understood process of weakening a preexisting fault by elevating the fluid pressure. However, only a small fraction of the more than 30,000 wastewater disposal wells appears to be problematic—typically those that dispose of very large volumes of water and/or communicate pressure perturbations directly into basement faults.

Outlook
Injection-induced earthquakes, such as those that struck in 2011, clearly contribute to the seismic hazard. Quantifying their contribution presents difficult challenges that will require new research into the physics of induced earthquakes and the potential for inducing large-magnitude events. The petroleum industry needs clear requirements for operation, regulators must have a solid scientific basis for those requirements, and the public needs assurance that the regulations are sufficient and are being followed.

The current regulatory frameworks for wastewater disposal wells were designed to protect potable water sources from contamination and do not address seismic safety. One consequence is that both the quantity and timeliness of information on injection volumes and pressures reported to regulatory agencies are far from ideal for managing earthquake risk from injection activities. In addition, seismic monitoring capabilities in many of the areas in which wastewater injection activities have increased are not capable of detecting small earthquake activity that may presage larger seismic events.