WV-DEP inspectors perform a critical function for our State

From an Article by Jeff Jenkins, WV Metro News, March 11, 2021

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A new fee that could bring up to $500,000 annually to the state Department of Environmental Protection’s Office of Oil and Gas will next be considered by the full House of Delegates after approval by the House Energy Committee Thursday.

The measure, SB 404, would create a $2,500 fee that would be charged each time a drilling permit has to be modified.

Those obtaining permits for drilling for oil and natural gas currently pay a one time $10,000 permit fee but are not charged if the permit is modified. There were 200 modifications to existing permits last year.

State DEP Deputy Secretary for External Affairs Scott Mandirola told the committee Thursday the agency needs $2.4 million a year to run the Office of Oil and Gas with 25 inspectors. It currently has $1.1 million for next budget year. The new fee would provide $500,000 of the remaining $1.3 million needed.

The office currently only has 10 inspectors for thousands of wells.

“There are 75,000 wells including abandoned and orphaned,” Mandirola said.

WV-DEP well inspectors are currently funded through permit fees but drilling for natural gas has slowed down in West Virginia causing a significant reduction in fee revenue.

Mandirola said a modification fee is nothing new for the WV-DEP. He said permits for coal, water and air all have modification fees but there’s been no fee for drilling changes.

The bill, which now goes to the full House for consideration, has already passed the state Senate.

Horizontal drilling has effectively replaced conventional vertical drilling

From an Article by Kallanish Energy News, June 7, 2019

Wells drilled horizontally into tight oil and shale gas plays continue to account for an increasing share of crude oil and natural gas production in the U.S., the Energy Information Administration said Thursday.

In 2004, horizontal wells accounted for roughly 15% of U.S. crude oil production in tight oil formations. By the end of 2018, that percentage had skyrocketed to 96%.

Similarly, horizontal wells comprised roughly 14% of U.S. natural gas production in shale plays in 2004, and jumped to 97% last year.

There were more vertical than horizontal wells until 2017!

Although horizontal wells have been the dominant source of production from U.S. shale gas and tight oil plays since 2008 and 2010, respectively, the number of horizontal wells did not surpass the number of vertical wells drilled in these plays until 2017.

Roughly 88,000 vertical wells in tight oil and shale gas plays in the U.S. still produced crude oil or natural gas at the end of 2018, but the volume produced by these wells was minor compared with the volume produced by horizontal wells, acording to EIA.

Many of these remaining vertical wells are considered marginal, or stripper, wells, which will continue to produce small volumes until they become uneconomic.

Drilling horizontally allows producers to access more of the oil- and natural gas-bearing rock than drilling vertically. This increased exposure allows additional hydraulic fracturing with greater water volumes and pounds of proppant.

The lateral length of horizontal wells has also increased, allowing for more exposure to oil- and natural gas-producing rock from a single well.

The production history of horizontal vs. vertical wells varies by play, EIA said. For example, some tight formations in the Permian Basin have a long history of vertical well production. In 2004, vertical wells generated nearly all (96%) crude oil production from these formations.

As late as 2014, vertical wells accounted for as much as half of Permian production, but by 2018, vertical wells accounted for only 7% of that production. By contrast, modern production in the Marcellus Shale play in the Appalachian Basin is almost entirely from horizontal drilling.

While some of the first natural gas wells in the U.S. were drilled in Appalachia, production shifted to more economic areas and only resumed upon the development of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing techniques.

Presently, essentially all (99%) hydrocarbon production from the Marcellus has been from horizontally drilled wells.

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See Also: Super Laterals: Going Really, Really Long In Appalachia | Hart Energy, July 2, 2018 ·

One horizontal well had an extended lateral length of 18,500 ft with a total depth of 27,048 feet. It was completed with 124 stages of fracturing. After the first 24 hours of flowback into sales, the well was producing approximately 5 MMcf of 1,300 Btu gas, with 1,200 bbl of condensate per day. To date, the company has drilled 15 super laterals with an average lateral length of 18,375 ft. Its longest lateral was 20,803 ft—Purple Hayes, which was drilled in 13 days.

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See Also: JPT — Drilling for Miles in the Marcellus: Laterals Reach New Lengths, August 8, 2018

Drilling costs per foot have fallen dramatically

Mother Jones championed the laborers of West Virginia

From an Article by Alexander C. Kaufman, Mother Jones Magazine, August 17, 2018

Fracking companies used 770 percent more water per well in 2016 than in 2011 across all the United States’ major gas- and oil-producing regions, according to a new study.

The number of new fracking wells decreased as gas prices fell, but the amount of water used per well skyrocketed, with up to 1,440 percent more toxic wastewater generated in the first year of each new well’s production period by 2016.

The research, published Wednesday afternoon in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, raises new concerns that hydraulic fracturing, the controversial drilling technique used to extract oil and gas trapped deep in bedrock, imperils vital drinking water reserves.

In regions where the warming climate is drying sources of fresh water, fracking intensifies pressure on an already-strained system while increasing the availability of fuels that cause emissions, speeding up the rise in temperatures.

Fracking also produces huge volumes of wastewater laced with cancer-causing chemicals, salts and naturally-occurring radioactive material that can cause earthquakes and contaminate aquifers when pumped underground.

“We saw this dramatic rise in water use and wastewater,” Avner Vengosh, a co-author of the study and professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, said in a phone interview. “They’re drilling much more.”

The study found that if gas and oil prices rise and production increases to the levels of the early 2010s, when fracking first took off, water use and wastewater production could multiply 50-fold for gas drilling and 20-fold for oil extraction by 2030. Even if future drilling rates stay at 2016 levels, the study predicts “a large increase of the total water use for both unconventional oil and shale gas basins,” with a surge in wastewater creation to match.

To conduct the analysis, the researchers compared well information from the US Energy Information Agency and state environmental and natural resource agencies to data collected by the services DrillingInfo and the FracFocus Chemical Disclosure Registry. The data set covered six years and more than 12,000 individual wells.

Mounting research shows that rising fossil fuel emissions, which increase the temperature of the planet, pose grave risks to water supplies. Water levels in 21 of the world’s 47 largest known aquifers are trending negative, according to a 2015 study published by a group of NASA scientists in the journal Water Resources Research. Another NASA study, published in the journal Nature in May, found that California alone lost four gigatons of water from 2007 to 2015.

The demand for water, driven largely by agriculture, is on pace to increase by 55 percent globally between 2000 and 2050. Food production already accounts for 70 percent of water withdrawals around the world, but, by some estimates, farmers need to increase water use by 69 percent to feed the total global population by the year 2035.

“At a time when large parts of our county are suffering through persistent droughts and year-round fire seasons, it’s truly unconscionable that the fossil fuel industry would be allowed to divert vast volumes of water to fracking for oil and gas,” Seth Gladstone, a spokesman for the environmental group Food & Water Watch, said in an email. “The fact that the burning of this oil and gas is driving our climate chaos and intensifying the droughts and fires makes this reality all the more shameful and absurd.”

The American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s biggest lobby, declined to comment on the findings of the study before it was released, stating that it would review the details of the report. But, in an email, spokesman Reid Porter said the industry focuses on “reclaiming and practical reuse of waste, using treatments that reduce the waste produced, thereby reducing the amounts that have to be disposed.”

Despite oil and gas industry pushback, other research shows wastewater can contaminate drinking water. In April 2016, former Environmental Protection Agency scientist Dominic DiGiulio concluded that methanol, a chemical that causes permanent nerve damage and blindness, seeped from unlined pits holding fracking wastewater into a massive aquifer in Wyoming.

The EPA later found diesel and benzene, a carcinogen, in wells near the water reserve, but held off on linking the contaminants to fracking, which the Obama administration touted for increasing natural gas production and reducing the nation’s reliance on carbon dioxide-spewing coal.

In December 2016, the EPA issued a landmark finding that fracking can contaminate water.

But the agency failed to put any regulations in place to establish a national standard for addressing the issue before President Donald Trump took office, installing former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a man with brazenly public ties to the oil and gas industry, as EPA administrator. Almost immediately after the Senate confirmed his nomination, Pruitt began eliminating regulations on the fracking industry.

“We don’t have a national policy, and each state will have different ways of dealing with [fracking],” study co-author Vengosh said. “Given that there’s no uniform regulation in the US, and the weakening of the EPA to have no say in anything these days, that could be a problem.”

Fracking isn’t the only source of contaminants putting stress on water systems. The study comes amid rising concerns over perfluorinated chemicals, including compounds used in firefighting foam and nonstick Teflon, in water sources across the country.

A growing number of states are setting strict new limits on the cancer-causing chemicals, which remain in the water for decades. But the EPA has yet to regulate perfluorinated chemicals―and went as far as to suppress a federal report that recommended lowering the maximum limit by nearly seven times the current standard.

Large long-distance pipelines can damage streams

Coalition Contact: Doug Jackson, doug.jackson@sierraclub.org, Sierra Club, July 3, 2018

RICHMOND, VA — Today, the coalition of clean water advocates that forced a halt of stream crossing construction activities for the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) in West Virginia has formally requested the same for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP). The coalition took two actions today. First, it filed a petition for review with the Fourth Circuit. Second, it formally asked the United States Army Corps of Engineers to stay the stream construction permit during litigation. If the Corps refuses to stay the permit, the coalition will ask the Court to do so.

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline stream crossing permit suffers from the same defects as the Mountain Valley Pipeline permit that the Fourth Circuit stayed last week. Specifically, Atlantic Coast’s planned crossing of the Greenbrier River–the longest remaining free-flowing river in the East–will take longer to complete than allowed by law.

The coalition includes the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, Appalachian Voices, Chesapeake Climate Action Network, and the Sierra Club, and is represented by Appalachian Mountain Advocates.

In response, Sierra Club Beyond Dirty Fuels Campaign Director Kelly Martin released the following statement: “We know we can’t trust the polluting corporations behind these fracked gas pipelines to build them without doing serious damage to our water and communities. Construction should be immediately halted on the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, just like it was on the Mountain Valley Pipeline.”

Cindy Rank of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy said: “The West Virginia Highlands Conservancy is concerned about the overall impacts of mucking about in streams whatever the activity – including by the gas industry. The value of the hundreds of miles of streams being crossed and disturbed by the ACP gas pipeline demand that more specific evaluation be given to each and every crossing than the general considerations provided by nationwide permits.”

Anne Havemann, General Counsel for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, said: “Dominion Energy, the main company behind the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, has cut corners and pushed regulators to approve its pipeline without proper reviews. With irreplaceable water resources at stake, we think it’s our patriotic duty this Fourth of July to ask the court to require a full review of the pipeline’s impacts.”

Peter Anderson, Virginia Program Manager for Appalachian Voices said: “Add this to the pile of evidence that a general permit is inappropriate for a project the size and scope of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Impacted communities along the pipeline’s proposed path deserve an immediate halt to construction activities while the court determines the legality of the developers’ application. Considering the magnitude of impacts to water resources, citizens demand not only a project-specific permit, but construction plans that can actually comply with the permit’s conditions as well.”

Angie Rosser, Executive Director for West Virginia Rivers Coalition said: “Once again, our watchdogging reveals short-cuts that undermine West Virginians’ interests in water protections, and that those short-cuts come back to haunt these mega-pipelines. We’re confident the court will agree that this flawed permit cannot stand and that construction must be put on hold.”

Submitted by : Anne Havemann
General Counsel & Foundation Grants Manager
Chesapeake Climate Action Network & CCAN Action Fund
anne@chesapeakeclimate.org

Long distance pipelines damaging to mountains & streams

Article from WV Public Broadcasting, Associated Press, June 2, 2018

The final two protesters who had perched themselves on trees and poles to block construction of a natural gas pipeline through Appalachia have come down.

The Roanoke Times reports one protester was forcibly removed Friday and another came down voluntarily as authorities approached.

Friday’s actions end three months of aerial blockades in Virginia and West Virginia to protest construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

Authorities removed 30-year-old Catherine “Fern” McDougal Friday morning from an elevated platform in Giles County where she had been camped out since May 21. She was charged with four misdemeanors in federal court.

A few hours later, a man known only as Deckard came down from a tree stand on Peters Mountain in West Virginia. That stand had been occupied since February 26.

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Mountain Valley Watch urges landowners and volunteers to report the start of any and all construction activity on the pipeline route including additional temporary work spaces, access roads and trenching. Report commencement of construction at:

833-MVWATCH or 833-689-2824

Please describe the nature of the work and the type of equipment being used and any possible violations such as missing erosion controls, refueling near waterways, driving through wetlands or operating outside of assigned right of way.

Time stamped photos with location data can be sent to Jason@newrivergeographics.com. Please do not use the Facebook page for incident reporting as we do not monitor that page for messages throughout the day. Feel free to reply directly with questions.

Construction contractors may be attempting to shield themselves from public scrutiny. Reporting new construction activity will help us respond effectively and keep contractor activity in public view. Thank you!

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No arrests made but shots fired at fracking protest in Fayette County, WV

Article from WCHS/WVAH, Charleston, WV, May 13, 2018

Oak Hill, WV — Fayette County deputies said shots were fired during a fracking protest in Oak Hill Saturday.

At about 1 p.m. Saturday shots were fired during a fracking protest in the Lochgelly area near Oak Hill, according to a news release from the Fayette County Sheriff’s Department. The caller, Danny Webb, told dispatchers that shots were being fired by the protestors.

While dispatchers were on the phone with the caller, the release said they could hear more shots being fired.

When deputies arrived they said they found about 30 protestors who had gathered to protest the disposal of fracking waste on the property owned by the Danny Webb Construction Company.

Webb told deputies that shots had been fired by the protestors, but the protestors said Webb had fired several shots into the air near them.

The release said deputies could not locate any firearms or shells casings at the scene, but could hear multiple shots being fired in the distance, as if someone was shooting for target practice.

No one was injured and no arrests were made.

Purple Hayes Gas Well in Eastern Ohio

Ohio Drillers Setting Utica Shale Production Records — Amount of Utica Shale Acreage  Increasing

From an Article by Casey Junkins, Wetzel Chronicle, May 17, 2017

St. Clairsville, Ohio — Eclipse Resources officials left a “Purple Hayes” with their 3.5-mile-long horizontal well last year, but their “Great Scott” operation now stretches almost 1,000 feet farther into the Utica Shale beneath in Guernsey County in eastern Ohio.

As Eclipse drills deeper and farther into the shale, fellow operators Gulfport Energy and Rice Energy continue increasing production and adding new acreage for future fracking.

“In the Utica condensate area, I am extremely happy to announce that we successfully drilled what we believe is the world’s longest onshore lateral ever drilled with a total measured depth of 27,400 feet and completable lateral extension of 19,300 feet, almost 1,000 feet longer than the previous record held by our ‘Purple Hayes’ well,” Eclipse Chairman, President and CEO Benjamin W. Hulburt said.

According to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the Great Scott well is located in Guernsey County, west of Barnesville and south of Cambridge. Industry leaders consider condensate as light form of crude oil.

Eclipse, which also has operations in Belmont and Monroe counties, is benefiting from the recovery in the industry. The company posted net income of $26.8 million for the first three months of this year, which compares to a net loss of $45.5 million during the same time period in 2016.

“This was another tremendous quarter for us as we continued our track record of exceeding production expectations, while expanding our operating margin by keeping our per unit operating expenses and our general and administrative expenses low,” Hulburt added.

Gulfport Energy, meanwhile, grew production to 849.6 million cubic feet per day in the first three months of this year, a 23 percent increase from the first quarter of 2016. The company maintains substantial operations in Belmont, Monroe and Harrison counties.

“We are extremely pleased with the results from these new wells and would expect both of the wells to rank among the top wells completed in the play to date,” Gulfport CEO and President Michael Moore said of the company’s new operations.

Rice Energy, featuring numerous wells in Belmont County, recently set a new company-best mark by drilling 6,170 feet during a 24-hour period, a 15 percent improvement from its previous mark.

The firm averaged 1.27 billion cubic feet of natural gas production in the first three months of this year, which is an 11 percent increase from the 2016 period. The company hopes to reach 2 Bcf per day by 2019.

“Looking ahead, we are focused on generating best-in-class exploration and production results to achieve our three-year exploration and production targeted growth outlook,” Rice CEO Daniel Rice IV said.

Data provided by ODNR show Buckeye State drillers and frackers pumped 1.37 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in 2016, a new record that shatters the previous year’s mark of 955.6 billion cubic feet. One billion cubic feet of gas is enough to provide power to about 24,315 homes for one year.

See also: Eleven ‘Super-Lateral’ Wells for East Ohio

Where is the Court taking us?

WV Supreme Court reverses itself on gas royalties of post-production expenses

From an Article by Ken Ward, Jr., Charleston Gazette – Mail, May 26, 2017

In a ruling that was expected by most industry observers, the West Virginia Supreme Court on Friday reversed its own decision from just last year and ruled that natural gas drillers can deduct post-production costs from the royalties paid to certain types of mineral owners.

In the decision, the court ruled 4-1 in favor of EQT Corp. to allow deduction of such expenses — for things like gathering, transporting or treating gas after it is extracted — when checks are sent to a group of mineral royalty owners covered by a state law meant to update and reform decades-old natural gas industry payment practices in West Virginia.

Chief Justice Allen H. Loughry II wrote the 47-page majority opinion, in which he was joined by Justices Menis E. Ketchum II and Beth Walker. Justice Margaret Workman sided with the majority, but wrote a concurring opinion. Justice Robin Jean Davis dissented and reserved the right to issue a dissenting opinion at a later date.

In a new point of law, Loughry’s opinion stated that royalty payments under that state law “may be subject to pro-rata deduction or allocation of all reasonable post-production expenses actually incurred by the lessee.”

It said that oil and gas companies may use “net-back” or “work-back” methods to calculate royalties owed but that the “reasonableness” of those expenses in specific instances may be decided by future court cases.

The court’s reversal of its November 2016 ruling in the case, called Leggett v. EQT Production, comes after last year’s election, in which Walker defeated Justice Brent Benjamin, who had written that earlier court opinion.

Walker’s involvement in the case generated controversy, because her husband had previously owned significant stock in a long list of natural gas and other energy companies that would be affected by the court’s decision. In the new ruling, Workman also went from ruling with what was then a 3-2 majority opposed to allowing post-production costs to being with the majority that was in favor of allowing such deductions.

Last year’s ruling found that West Virginia’s 1982 law to update old “flat-rate” leases requires that companies like EQT not deduct from royalties they pay to mineral owners any expenses for gathering, transporting or treating gas after it is initially extracted from the ground. The court had ruled a decade ago, in a case called “Tawney v. Columbia Natural Resources,” that deducting these sorts of post-production costs from royalties to gas owners was illegal unless doing so was specifically outlined in the lease.

The case decided Friday, brought on behalf of Patrick Leggett and other mineral owners against EQT, focused on whether the same legal requirements from Tawney also applied to drilling operations that work under the 1982 law.

Legislators passed that law to reform what they said was “wholly inadequate compensation” for mineral owners covered by leases that dated back, in many instances, to the turn of the 20th century. Those leases often paid a flat rate, such as $300 a year, regardless of how much gas was being produced and how much profit drillers were making. Basically, the law said that, to put a new well on a site covered by one of those flat-rate leases, the driller had to agree to pay royalties amounting to a one-eighth — 12.5 percent — royalty.

The Leggett case plaintiffs argued — and the previous court ruling agreed — that EQT has been wrongly deducting post-production expenses before paying owners their one-eighth royalty on a tract that had been covered by a 1906 lease that was updated according to the 1982 law.

In Friday’s majority opinion, Loughry wrote that, “Upon rehearing, with all due regard to the previous majority’s consideration of the admittedly complex and subversively entangled issues implicated in this case, we conclude that it did, in fact, misapprehend the applicability of certain common law principles and exceeded its charge in its interpretation of the subject statute.”

Specifically, Loughry wrote that the earlier majority wrongly concluded that the 1982 law contained an ambiguity that needed to be interpreted to “right past wrongs” by prohibiting dilution of royalty payments by post-production costs.

Just before an oral argument in May, attorneys for the royalty owners had sought to stop the rehearing of the case. They argued that Walker should not have taken part in the vote to grant that rehearing and that she should have disqualified herself from any consideration of the issue because her husband, Michael Walker, owned stock in natural gas and energy companies.

Michael Walker loaned his wife’s campaign $525,000 during last year’s election. After information about that motion by the royalty owners was publicized, Walker released an updated decision not to disqualify herself, saying her husband had sold all of his energy stocks.

Friday’s ruling defended the decision to rehear the case.

“While an admittedly uncommon occurrence, rehearing exists expressly for the purpose of ensuring that opinions which are not well-founded due to misapprehension of the issues, the law, or the facts are rectified,” the new ruling said. “Justice demands this procedural remedy, which this Court has judiciously utilized when the issues or outcome demand it.

“When a petition for rehearing compels the Court to conclude that the law may have been misapprehended, neither hubris nor sanctimony should give the Court pause in granting rehearing to correct any such error of law or fact,” it said.

The majority decision and Workman’s concurring opinion acknowledge a difference between the way royalty owners are treated under the court’s rulings in the Leggett and Tawney decisions, and they urge the Legislature to take action to resolve that conflict.

Workman, for example, wrote, “Where the Legislature’s inaction in the face of such significant changes in the industry leaves this Court to intuit its intentions and/or retrofit outdated statutory language to evolving factual scenarios, the will of the people is improperly disregarded.”

Workman also said she wrote a separate opinion to emphasize that the majority decision to allow cost deductions “may not be abuses to the detriment of lessors who are chargeable with pro-rata costs and to urge the Legislature to enact specific protections to assure fairness and reasonableness in the calculation of post-production costs.

“As the majority’s new syllabus point states, only such costs as are reasonable and actually incurred are properly deductible,” Workman wrote. “Accordingly, to the extent that a lessor alleges that cost deductions are artificially inflated or are otherwise not commercially reasonable, he or she may clearly maintain an action against the lessee pending sufficient proof thereof.”

The Leggett case was a major point of discussion during the legislative debate over potential passage of a forced-pooling natural gas bill this session. Various parties were looking for lawmakers to either codify Tawney and the earlier Leggett decision — or to overturn them, depending on which side those parties were on.

Compressor station noise, blow-down, leaks & odors are issues!

Commentary on Fracking in Maryland

[Garrett County already has a huge natural gas storage field at Accident, MD]

In 2007 I was part of a team at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) who reviewed $37 billion-dollar-plus programs.  We were trying to understand why so many DHS programs were failing.  As part of the review we’d have the program principals come in and we’d ask them questions about their program.  The last question was, “What do you want to buy?”  Remember these men and women had their hands out asking for hundreds of millions of dollars.  Many of them couldn’t answer the question.  They wanted the money but didn’t know how they were going to spend it.  They hadn’t done their homework.  Their approach from an engineering perspective was irresponsible.

On Tuesday, December 6^th, I went to the Pre-Legislative meeting in Garrett County.  I asked Delegate Bieztel and Senator Edwards some very basic questions about fracking, which they have supported since the O&G industry became interested in Maryland.  Since then our representatives have been claiming significant economic benefits which would result from fracking.

I asked them to tell me what the economic impact to the county would be especially to the average household.  They couldn’t give me any numbers.  Delegate Beitzel proceeded to tell me how to figure the amount of money land lessors could expect.

I asked them for the number, type, and duration of the jobs that we could expect and whether these jobs would be filled locally or not.  They couldn’t answer those questions except to say one had to make assumptions about lots of things.  I suppose they were telling me that it was hard to derive those numbers.  Maybe so, but if you’re asking people to support a risky proposition you should have done enough analysis to understand the basics.  I also asked them if they would require O&G companies to staff fracking operations with union workers since unions were very careful to protect the well-being (safety) of employees whereas fracking operators are not.  Fracking workers are seven times more likely to die on the job than on other type jobs according to the AFL-CIO.  Our representatives said they would not support a requirement for fracking operators to hire union workers.

The bottom line for me is our representatives are asking us to support fracking and its associated risks (costs) because of the benefits, and yet they don’t know what the benefits really are.  They are asking the average household to buy-in to their ideas without any idea how the average household will benefit.  That is, they want us all to assume the economic, health, and environmental risks associated with fracking even though they don’t know if any of us (other than land lessors) will benefit.  I ask myself and you, does it make sense to buy anything and not know the benefits?  I also ask myself if they really don’t know the basics about the benefits what do they really know about the costs (risks)?

As I think about this I become very angry.  I’m angry because they use their influence to gain support for fracking.  We trust these men to do what’s in our best interests and they exploit that trust.  I’m also angry (maybe angrier) that they don’t feel they’ve been irresponsible.  They think there’s nothing wrong with asking us to get on board even though they obviously don’t understand the benefits and probably don’t understand the costs.  We should ask these men to do their homework or perhaps find someone else to represent us.   They are after all, acting irresponsibly.

From:  Jim Guy, OldTown, Allehany County, MD

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How Fracking May Impact Your Health (Learning from Pennsylvania)

>>> From Engage Mountain Maryland, www.EngageMMd.org, EngageMountainMaryland@gmail.com

When the fracking rush consumed Pennsylvania, little was known about how industrial gas development could impact their residents’ health. With years of citizen complaints and health studies, evidence shows documented threats from fracking operations.

Studies by institutions have revealed issues such as respiratory problems, headaches, high blood pressure, anemia, heart attacks, and cancers as a result of gas drilling. Damaging effects have also been discovered on immune and reproductive systems, child development, and low birth weights for infants born near fracking sites.

Two guest speakers will be visiting Garrett County from Southwestern Pennsylvania who have been on the front lines, assisting victims of fracking. Raina Rippel, Director of  The Environmental Health Project (EHP) along with Jill Kriesky, MS, PhD, Associate Director, will be delivering a compelling program that outlines common health risks associated with communities engulfed in natural gas development.

This informative public session is to help the public better understand health risks associated with natural gas development and fracking. The general public is invited to attend this free event as well as health professionals who could greatly benefit from the program and share its content with others.

Wednesday, December 14 at 6:00PM

Ace’s Run Restaurant & Pub (lower level)

20160 Garrett Highway

Oakland, MD 21550

Alberta Canada Earthquakes & Fracking

Groundbreaking Study Shows Direct Link Between Fracking and Earthquakes

From an Article by Lorraine Chow, EcoWatch.com, November 18, 2016

IMAGE: Seismicity of northwestern Alberta, Canada for the period 1985−2016. The size of the dot correlates to the magnitude of the earthquake. Xuewei Bao and David Eaton

Geoscientists have revealed a direct link between hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and earthquakes in Canada. The groundbreaking study found that earthquakes can even occur intermittently over several months after drilling operations end.

According to a new study published in the journal Science, seismic activity in northwest Alberta over the last five years were likely caused by fracking, in which chemically-laden water and sand is injected at high pressures into shale formations to release oil or gas.

The article, Fault activation by hydraulic fracturing in western Canada, was authored by Xuewei Bao and David Eaton from the University of Calgary.

For the study, the researchers mapped out more than 900 seismic events near Duvernay shale drilling sites around the Fox Creek area dating back to December 2014. This included a 4.8-magnitude earthquake in January in northern Alberta that’s likely the strongest fracking-induced earthquake ever.

They found that there were two main causes for quakes. The first was immediately from pressure increases as the fracking process occurred. “We were able to show that what was driving that was very small changes in stress within the Earth that were produced by the hydraulic fracturing operations,” Eaton told DeSmogBlog.

The second cause comes from pressure changes from lingering fracking fluid. According to the Globe and Mail, a fault shakes when fluids infiltrate tiny spaces in the porous rock and increases pore pressure. “If that pressure increases, it can have an effect on the frictional characteristics of faults,” Eaton told the Globe and Mail. “It can effectively jack open a fault if the pore pressure increases within the fault itself and make it easier for a slip to initiate.”

Per the study abstract, “Patterns of seismicity indicate that stress changes during operations can activate fault slip to an offset distance of >1 km, whereas pressurization by hydraulic fracturing into a fault yields episodic seismicity that can persist for months.”

Eaton told DeSmogBlog that a “majority of injection-induced earthquakes are actually linked to hydraulic fracturing” in Canada.

The new study is not related to the recent spate of induced earthquakes currently rocking midwestern states, most notoriously Oklahoma. Those quakes are not likely caused by fracking itself but from the injection of large volumes of oil and gas wastewater into deep underground wells.

“The key message is that the primary cause of injection-induced seismicity in Western Canada is different from the central United States,” Eaton told the New York Times, adding that their study could help regulators craft guidelines to avoid more human-caused earthquakes. 

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It’s Official: Injection of Fracking Wastewater Caused Kansas’ Biggest Earthquake

From Lorraine Chow, EcoWatch.com, October 14, 2016

The largest earthquake ever recorded in Kansas—a 4.9 magnitude temblor that struck northeast of Milan on Nov. 12, 2014—has been officially linked to wastewater injection into deep underground wells, according to new research from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The epicenter of that extremely rare earthquake struck near a known fracking operation.

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Oklahoma’s Latest Fracking-Related Earthquake Sparks Demand for Withdrawal of Oil and Gas Leases

From the Center for Biological Diversity, EcoWatch.com, November 8, 2016

Sunday’s earthquake that damaged dozens of buildings near an oil and gas pipeline hub in Cushing, Oklahoma, is further proof that fracking and wastewater injection are too dangerous to people and property to be allowed to continue, the Center for Biological Diversity said Monday. In May, the organization called on the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to withdraw 11 proposed oil and gas leases in Oklahoma because of earthquake risks. The BLM has yet to respond to that request.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

EQT on schedule to drill Utica well in Wetzel County WV

From an Article by Jim Ross, State Journal, May 9, 2015

EQT Corporation still plans to drill at least one gas well in the Utica Shale in Wetzel County, and it may drill four more in its territory before the end of the year despite problems with the first well it is drilling in Pennsylvania.

Steven Schlotterbeck, EQT executive vice president and president of exploration and production, said drillers completed drilling the well with a final lateral length of 3,300 feet. They are currently running reservoir tests and plan to begin fracking in early June, he said. The well had a setback when drillers encountered pressures that were higher than expected and had to bring in a larger rig, he said.

“Despite this timing setback, we continue to be excited and optimistic about the dry gas Utica potential beneath our acreage,” Schlotterbeck said.

This year will be one of testing the Utica wells, and EQT will likely spend next year gathering and evaluating data before deciding whether to shift part of its capital expenditures from Marcellus Shale wells in West Virginia and Pennsylvania to the Utica, he said.

EQT’s first Utica well is using ceramics instead of sand underground, and that has added to the test well’s cost, Schlotterbeck said. “Our reservoir engineering at this point is suggesting that it might be possible to use sand in these wells, so that’ll be something we’re testing, probably not in these first two wells, but in subsequent wells,” he said.

As to the length of the lateral, the original plans were for it to be 3,000 to 4,500 feet. Engineers figured they needed at least 3,000 feet to get the reservoir test they really wanted, but they were willing to go as far as 4,500 feet.

“We had a lot of difficulties on this well, and the costs were pretty high, and when we got to 3,300 feet, there were some indications that more problems could be developing,” Schlotterbeck said.

EQT figures the first Utica test will cost $12 million to $17 million. For the first quarter, EQT reported net income of $173.4 million, down from $192.2 million a year ago. Operating income also was down, to $314.8 million from $356.8 million.

The company sold 145.2 billion cubic feet equivalent in the quarter, which was 37 percent more than the first quarter of 2014 and 6.2 percent higher than the fourth quarter 2014. The average realized sales price was 39 percent lower than last year, which more than offset the impact of the increase in sales volume.

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“Fight the gas companies”

Letter to Editor, Washington PA Observer Reporter, May 9, 2015

Our farm was in a quiet country setting for 18 years. In 2013, EQT Corp. started drilling gas wells all around us. I, like many residents, did not own my mineral rights, so we did not have the money to move away from all the dust, noise and pollution. We complained at the supervisors’ meeting in Washington Township, which is nearby, but we were shunned and ignored.

Our roads were never constructed for such heavy and overloaded trucks, and the repairs have been nothing more than a Band-Aid. We constantly complain about noise from engine brakes from caravans of trucks. The noise is so bad it rattles the windows in our house. Because of this, I now use medication to sleep.

This insanity has to end. But everyone we’ve contacted on the township, county and state levels tells us there is nothing they can do.

If any of these companies try to come into your communities, fight them with everything you have. Once they are there, your quiet, pristine community will be destroyed.

Robert L. Thomas, West Bethlehem Township, Washington County, PA

See also: www.Marcellus-Shale.us