Pipeline services by Access Midstream of the Industrial Park at Jane Lew

Perspectives on Fracking in Central West Virginia

Commentary by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor & Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

By luck of the draw, I happen to be in a good spot to observe activity in the Southern Marcellus area. The farm I have lived on for over 50 years is about two miles from the Lewis County Industrial Park, one of the largest concentrations of drilling industry in the Marcellus. The Park has numerous companies with familiar names and smaller outfits are situated in and around it. Being on I-79, these have access to work as far north as Washington, Pennsylvania and all the way to the edge of the region south. The main truck stop between Fairmont and Flatwoods is at the intersection of Jesse Run, the road by my farm and I-79. It does a huge amount of business with fracking industry trucks.

All of us living now are fortunate that we have the Internet to communicate. The democratization of information which we have contrasts with former times when communication depended on newspapers, letters and personal contact. (Incidentally, democratization of information, that is, having information readily available to all, is being threatened by attempts to change the present rules by certain corporate interests.)

Now, to what I observe. Last summer, when Consol Energy bought the right to drill in Dominion’s Lost Creek Storage Field, it looked as though activity would pick up soon. Thumper Trucks went up and down the roads, finding the depth and slant of the Marcellus and there were specific locations of “the first three wells to be drilled in this area (right around Jane Lew)” in the wind. The spacings given were rational from what I knew about drilling patterns, and rights of way were specified for more locations. It looked as if the onslaught was coming.

Oil prices began to drop and voices in the wind just tapered off through the fall. I subscribe to SkyTruth Alerts, which reports new drilling permits. About the time oil hit $80 they began to drop off.

You have to understand the huge capital expenditure involved in drilling. Acquisition of land, acquisition of data (such as the information gained by thumper trucks) and location of the wells are expensive as well as the cost of the drilling rig itself, and the pipes, water and chemicals are very costly. For the drilling companies this money must be borrowed or obtained from stock sales, which in turn cost dividends instead of interest. Time is hugely important because of the cost of use of money.

Remember the old adage “fools rush in where angels fear to tread?” Shale drilling is very much an enterprise where you might come out looking brilliant (if you win), but very much the other if you lose. By this time ($46 a barrel) new permits have trickled to very few.

SkyTruth posts the coordinates of new wells permitted. This allows you to go to Google Earth and look where they would be drilled. You can fly around over the area and find well pads and pipelines in existence when the satellite pictures on which Google Earth is based were taken, a few months previously.

The permits coming out now are almost entirely on existing well pads. This means that the expense of acquisition and land preparation has been completed so the only cost is drilling the well itself. Even most of the cost of connecting the completed well is avoided, because no new long pipelines must be constructed.

The truck stop is still busy. Water trucks are rare – one assumes they are hauling away flowback water, which continues as long as the well produces. Sand trucks are still to be seen. I saw 18 in the truck stop one day around Christmas, but they seem to be thinning down two weeks later. Hauling in the sand is evidence of the actual fracking itself. Water is stockpiled, but sand must come in “just in time” as they say.

The big effort by the drilling industry now is to get the large diameter long distance pipelines built. This is an act of faith. If the price of oil stays down they are in trouble. The oversupply of gas and consequent low U. S. price of natural gas is something the frackers have done to themselves by their over-exuberance.

The excess gas supply has caused many electrical generating companies to substitute gas for coal. A few new power stations are under construction. But, existing power plants can use natural gas. They were designed to use coal by grinding it to a fine powder, which is blown into the combustion furnace. This can be turned up and down like it was gas. These plants are also equipped with gas entry into the combustion space, originally intended for temporary overload capacity (and heatup on start up). What the electricity producers have done is turn down the coal and turn up the gas. That can be done quickly.

If it can reasonably be expected, the cost of gas will stay down and new plants will be built using technology that takes gas as the primary fuel. If they use a combined cycle design it is actually more efficient (gets more electricity from the same gas) than the old coal burners, so coal is OUT FOREVER. The claims for gas to cause less global warming than coal when heat alone is used, are demonstrated false by Anthony Ingraffia, but the myth is very strong, and coal does put out contaminates in addition to carbon dioxide.

It appears the frackers are desperate to install the large diameter long distance pipelines and lock in a need for their gas. The natives are in an uproar, however. Nobody with a view reaching to the end of the pipe’s service life wants it on their property because the incendiary effects of an explosion of a 42 inch high pressure gas line are like having 2000 pound “blockbusters” dropped. And nobody wants the environmental effects of putting it in and maintaining it. I have heard that in the High Appalachian mountains it must be left exposed to the elements, rather than buried, because of the very hard rock and (relatively, don’t laugh Westerners) high altitude.

Once these pipelines are in, the electric utilities will be encouraged to build new electric generating plants dedicated to the use of gas, and the only place it can come from in volume is the Marcellus shale. Never mind the fact that when the drillers get out of the hot spots the gas will become more and more expensive, and the energy return on energy invested (EROEI) will drop well below 10, where it is now.

EROEI was over 50 in the past, and EROEI of 1 means you are putting in as much useful energy as you are taking out. The practical limit is somewhere above 5.

In effect, if the pipelines are built, all those people south of us are going to be paying for gas when they buy electricity no matter how high it gets. The only way out then is to substitute some non-conventional source, such as solar or fusion.

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See also:  www.Appalmad.org and www.WVMatters.org