Lancaster County PA is southeast of Harrisburg PA

From an Article by Ad Crable, Lancaster Online, December 19, 2017

“The bottom line is the quality of life is being affected,” says Ed Burns, a retiree who pulls down the blinds and turns up the television to try to keep the intrusions out of his home.

Since November 28th, residents of about 10 homes near Safe Harbor have had an unwelcome front-row seat to a six-day-a-week, all-night unusual work zone: near-constant drilling under the Conestoga River as part of the Atlantic Sunrise gas pipeline. Drilling on a lesser scale began in early October.

And now the residents know their complaints of quality-of-life disruptions have not fallen on deaf ears.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission told LNP on Monday that after resident complaints, a FERC compliance monitor in the last few days confirmed there are indeed noise and lighting problems.

The pipeline builder has been ordered to “look into ways to mitigate the situation so the public will not be inconvenienced,” said Tamara Young-Allen, a FERC spokeswoman.

“We’re sorry for the inconvenience.” Corrective measures will have to be “performance-based,” she said.

Company’s statement

When contacted by LNP, pipeline builder Williams acknowledged the FERC order and issued this statement:

“We have been in contact with two landowners who have expressed concerns recently related to noise or other issues associated with our horizontal drilling operation near the Conestoga River.

“Our, Land, Engineering and Construction teams are coordinating with FERC to ensure any landowner issues are resolved in a prompt and appropriate manner.”

To make way for the Atlantic Sunrise natural gas pipeline, contractors for the Transcontinental Pipe Line are slowly boring under the Conestoga River simultaneously from both sides of the waterway.

One drilling operation is based on a 107-acre farm in Conestoga Township that Oklahoma-based Williams Partners purchased for $2.8 million. Transco is a subsidiary of Williams.

But on the west side of the river, boring is going on nearly non-stop in a farm field that is ringed by houses that sit on higher ground.

Headaches and lost sleep

In addition to complaints about trouble sleeping and a constant hum, some residents worry about cracks to the foundations and walls of their old homes and contamination of wells.

One resident, Troy Thorne, said vibrations have given him headaches. “The noise you can deal with,” Thorne said. “When the vibrations start, it runs you out of the house. You can feel it in your inner ear. It just kind of makes you feel weird.”

“The noise you can deal with. When the vibrations start, it runs you out of the house.”

For his wife, the noise is the foremost disturbance. “It is just horrible,” she said. “It’s just constant.”

She said the family keeps fans turned on to provide white noise in the bedrooms of their three children. Their son was home from college Saturday night and complained that he only got three hours of sleep, she added.

Payments and relocations?

As a result of residents’ complaints, Williams told FERC last week in its weekly summary of pipeline construction that it was investigating new ways to address noise levels at the site, including paying homeowners for the disturbances and offering to relocate them until the drilling is finished.

The company said it had installed a sound wall and baffles on equipment on Oct. 24. Two noise readings by the company taken on December 9th were below the 55-decibel action reading, but one from the front door of a home on Witmer Road was 70.2 decibels.

Seventy decibels is akin to the sound of a vacuum cleaner.

Thorne has taken readings from a cell phone app and has recorded a high of 77 decibels from the road in front of the family’s home. That level is equivalent to the sound of a passenger car going 65 mph as heard from a distance of 25 feet.

Pans on the kitchen wall tap each other and rattle from vibrations given off by the drilling under the earth, says Cynthia Heiland. To block out the noise, she sleeps with ear plugs, but that has created a new problem as she can’t hear the alarm clock.

“And they’re not even drilling with the largest drill yet,” she says. “It could get worse.”

Lack of information

“We didn’t know this was going to be this intense,” adds a woman who lives on Safe Harbor Road and did not want her name used.

All the residents interviewed complained that no one ever approached them to inform them of the impending drilling or what to expect.

“No one has ever come over here to say here’s what we’re doing. There’s no transparency,” said Ed Burns.

“We didn’t know this was going to be this intense.”

Residents said they have complained to Williams, Manor Township officials, FERC and a state legislator, but without noticeable results.

Ryan Strohecker, Manor Township manager, said he checked the township noise ordinance and found that utilities are exempt. He said jurisdiction with the drilling lies with FERC and the pipeline builder.

The drilling under the Conestoga is expected to be complete in early 2018, Williams said.

The $3 billion, 197-mile pipeline is scheduled to be completed in July 2018. About 37 miles of the project run through western and southern Lancaster County.

Rogersville shale exploration for oil & gas

Be careful, Cabell and Wayne counties, about shale development in SW WV

Letter to the Editor by Bill Hughes, Huntington Herald-Dispatch, April 7, 2017

The fracturing operations of the Marcellus shale gas exploration and production in West Virginia began 10 years ago in Wetzel County, in the Northwestern part of West Virginia. It remains a major center of natural gas activity.

Since I live in the center of Wetzel County, I was interested in reading the recent article in The Herald-Dispatch about the success story on Cenergy manufacturing company located in Milton. It is definitely good to know that there is an expanding, well managed business, providing professional design and manufacturing to the shale gas industry. Cenergy provides good jobs and is benefiting from the shale gas operations taking place to the north in the active gas field. Unfortunately, the unemployment rate here stays well above the West Virginia average. Here, we live in what is called the sacrifice zone. That means your gain is our pain.

Any time there is a new target of drilling opportunities like the Rogersville shale in the Cabell and Wayne counties area, the same industry sales and marketing pitch is broadcast. A leasing frenzy starts. Wetzel residents heard all the landsmen’s partially true promises of the natural gas industry when Chesapeake Energy first appeared here to claim rights to dominate our rural communities. And like most advertising and public relations strategies, there is always a sliver of truth to the tale.

We should always think twice when an industry needs to spend millions of dollars to tell you it will be marvelous to have their industrial operation in your residential or farming neighborhood. Landsmen have the script memorized. The general themes go like this. Shale gas drilling and fracking is: a dependable, proven technology; fundamentally safe; delivers cheap, clean fuel; and will create jobs and be an economic boon for West Virginia.

Before Cabell residents swallow these statements whole, we might wish to dissect them. Is this a proven process? Well, when Chesapeake invaded Wetzel, we were definitely a shale gas guinea pig in the state. The process we experienced was not 50 years old. It was still very much experimental. The process is improving now. It has gotten better in some respects. But keep in mind that any time the fracturing equipment fleet shows up with canisters of Cesium 137 on them, this is definitely not your grandfather’s well drilling.

These newer well bores need high-volume, high-pressure slick water fluids for fracturing their very long laterals. Your grandfathers’ wells were safe and simply vertical only. And the low level radioactive drill waste products now should have some special disposal requirements.

These “advertised as safe” wells have had their problems with gas releases due to well blowouts, explosions, fires and accidents. But unlike local chemical plants contained within walls and roofs, these accidents happen in our communities.

What about the clean fuel claim? Yes, it is true that natural gas, when finally burned, is cleaner that coal when it is burned. Unfortunately, that is a very narrow slice in the overall cradle-to-grave environmental impact and is hardly the only metric to use. It is a very narrow window to look through.

Also, to categorize shale gas as a safe fuel requires us to ignore the diesel fumes from over 30,000 horsepower of fracturing pump engines and the subsequent combustion fumes from the well pad gas processing equipment. And for the cheap fuel label to be true, we must ignore the major externalized costs to public health, water quality and exposure to silica dust. We must also ignore the daily community inconvenience to the traveling public and the public costs to repair infrastructure damage caused by oversized vehicles. And these funds might have to come from an already stretched thin general state budget. After 10 years of drilling, we are still a poor state. So much for the economic boon from shale gas.

Some free advice from the sacrifice zone in Wetzel to prospective targets in Wayne and Cabell: Do your homework. Residents living there above the Rogersville shale must become better informed; review the 10 years of drilling history here. Discount the self-serving sales pitch of the natural gas industry. Consider the future you wish to leave to you grandchildren. And try to resist the flash of cash since there is no hurry to sign any lease. The Rogersville shale is not going anywhere soon. It can wait until you are better informed.

Bill Hughes, a resident of Wetzel County, WV, has been monitoring the Marcellus shale development from the beginning.

See also:  Marcellus-Shale.US

Open Letter to Gov. Jim Justice and DEP Sec. Austin Caperton

TO: Jim Justice & Austin Caperton. From: Tom Bond, Lewis County
 
How is the air down there in Charleston?  Still clean?  Do you plan to move out into the country near some of the new Marcellus drilling industry?  Maybe near a compressor station with eleven of those big engines, roaring and belching 24 hours a day?
 
Or perhaps near a well pad where there is 24 hour light and noise and chemicals and diesel smoke with lots of PM-2.5 coming out the exhaust.  Particulate matter 2.5 microns or less is now known as a cause of Alzheimer’s-like effects, you know.  Going to bring along your grandchildren and your Mom along?   Families like that live out here, and the young and the old are particularly susceptible to toxic chemicals, smoke, fumes, and dust.
 
Maybe you are like the famous story on Rex Tillerson, who has inflicted that kind of misery on many thousands of people? Then he complained when a water tower to enable fracking was erected in sight of his own piece of earth.
 
Do you think those who drink water without the taste of chlorine shouldn’t complain when their well is poisoned with a complex mixture of water slickers, detergents, and anti-oxidants, antibacterial compounds, and God-only-knows what else?  Maybe they deserve car-busting roads and interminable delays when they use public roads too? 
 
I can see you demurring all the way from here. I think that you are like Rex Tillerson, the ultimate not-in-my-back-yard guy!
 
So you are going to govern the state for all the people.  For all the people of West Virginia – like John J. Cornwell was governing West Virginia for all the people, including the miners, at the time of the battle of Matewan? Oh yes!  Those corporations provided good living for officers and investors, but not miners.  It’s been like that since the beginning of the State.  Wealth carried off, mostly north and east, but occasionally to build a motel in Florida.
  
So I’m being a little hard on you. You are just doing it to bring jobs, jobs, jobs, you say?  You do realize gas and oil extraction are capital intensive and labor weak, don’t you?  That once the drilling is done by those fellows brought in from elsewhere, they will go away and leave few permanent jobs? You certainly know several companies are developing automated drilling, so drilling labor will go the way of coal labor, too.
 
Oh yes!  Obama killed coal the fable says.  You really know better than that, don’t you?  Coal companies, going to more mechanization, especially long wall and surface mining that can use huge equipment, killed coal jobs.  That Obama fable was a tool, using prejudice and diversion of the truth, to affect voters who were slow to catch on.
 
What moral code do you have that allows collateral damage to rural residents in peacetime to profit private industry? Forget for the moment all the externalized costs, the true cost of the extraction, the damage to other industries, global warming, destruction of surface value for farming and timber, recreation and hunting.  What justifies forest destruction, land disturbances, public annoyances, and public health for fossil fuel extraction? Especially when last year 39% of new electrical capacity was solar and 29% was wind power.  (Coal has been showing a decrease for the last two years.)  No CO2 from the renewable resources!
 
How do you decide people are unworthy of protection?  Simply because of rural residence?  Those who can’t afford to move elsewhere, or too attached to the family plot? 
 
Hey guys, people out here are probably more astute than you think. Some of us don’t think very far ahead, and few are articulate, but, given time, it all becomes too clear.
 
West Virginia has the highest rate at losing population in the nation.  We have the lowest ratio of employment to employable people in the nation.  College kids have been heading for the door, and so are a lot of high school grads.
 
Is corrupting the environment and allowing the wealth of our State to be carted off by favored industries your best game? That is the past, present (and future?) of Almost Heaven! Us country folks keep hoping for better!
 
An eighth generation West Virginian
 
S. Thomas Bond, Jane Lew, WV

Promises! Promises! Promises!

‘G-35-D posted on the website Monday, January 30, 2017’

From an Article by Ken Ward, Jr., Charleston Gazette-Mail, February 11, 2017

During a series of interviews before he left the WV-DEP last month, Randy Huffman talked about his belief that the agency needed to continue to do more to help address the on-the-ground effects of the natural gas boom on residents in those communities — and about how the standard agency inspectors should apply to what is acceptable for industry to do really wasn’t that complicated.

“When we run into issues out there that are subjective in the regulatory world, like the noise and light and mud on the road, the degree of a lot of that is subjective,” Huffman said. “I tell my folks there’s an easy standard here. The easiest one is to say if you lived in that house, how would you do it? Use your mother, if your mother lived in that house.

“If you approached every person who had an issue out there with an activity that we regulate, if you approached them with the same sensitivity you would if it were your mother, because that is somebody’s mother, and they don’t need to be subjected to these kinds of inconveniences and nuisances in their lives. I have this notion that we need to be very sensitive to that.”

In late December, Huffman’s WV-DEP had put out for public comment a revised version of the general permit, this time called G35-D. The new version was simply to include the changes the air board had ordered the WV-DEP to make. Because those didn’t include the noise and light language the board had upheld, citizen groups didn’t really pay much attention to the issue.

Huffman’s last day on the job was January 13, the Friday before Justice’s inauguration, on January 16. The Justice transition team announced Caperton’s appointment on Jan. 13. Austin Caperton visited the WV-DEP office and Huffman introduced him to some of the senior staff.

January 23, a week after the inauguration, was the final day of the public comment period on the revisions to the general permit.

That day, Blankenship sent the DEP a letter on behalf of the oil and gas association. Among other things, Blankenship urged the DEP to reverse itself and get rid of the noise and light language. The letter raised the same issues the industry group brought up in its appeal before the air board.

“The West Virginia Division of Air Quality has no authority to regulate noise and light, and it cannot impose limitations in the Draft General Permit that purport to regulate noise and light,” Blankenship wrote. “Even if it could, the prohibition of a ‘nuisance’ and ‘unreasonable noise and light’ is too vague to enforce, as it gives the permittee no guidance as to what constitutes permitted behavior. This section should be eliminated from the General Permit.”

Four days later, on the morning of January 27, it was the end of Caperton’s second week on the job at the DEP. Before noon, he fired Radcliff from the agency’s environmental advocate office and also dismissed Kelley Gillenwater, DEP communications director.

Later in the day, Durham signed the revised general permit, but not before removing the noise and light language. In a letter to Blankenship, the DEP said it was now the agency’s opinion that state law “does not require this permit condition” and therefore it was removed.

At 5:07 p.m. that Friday, Durham sent an email to Caperton and to DEP general counsel Kristin Boggs. “DAQ removed the noise and light provision contained in section 3.2.8 and issued the Natural Gas Compressor general permit G35-D today. It will be posted on the website Monday (1/30/17).”

>  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >

-   See the full Article at: http://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/20170211/dep-eliminates-protections-for-noise-light-from-natural-gas-facilities#sthash.vwRK3CSU.dpuf 

• >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  > 

Noise Pollution from Oil and Gas Development May Harm Human Health

 Press Release, PSE Healthy Energy, December 9, 2016

 Modern oil and gas development techniques such as directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” produce noise at levels that may increase the risk of adverse effects on human health, including sleep disturbance, cardiovascular disease and other conditions that are negatively impacted by stress, according to a study by authors at the nonprofit science and policy research institute, PSE Healthy Energy and West Virginia University. It is the first peer-reviewed study to analyze the potential public health impacts of ambient noise related to fracking operations.

“People living near oil and gas development may bring up concerns like air pollution, traffic and groundwater safety, but many also complain about noise,” said Jake Hays, Director of the Environmental Health Program at PSE Healthy Energy, and lead author of the paper, which was published December 9 in Science of the Total Environment. ”But until now, most of the research relevant to public health has focused on the impacts of air and water pollution,” Hays said.

Fracking technologies have unlocked oil and gas deposits from formations like shale and tight sands that previously were not considered economically viable. But the environmental and public health effects of such operations are still emerging. To understand whether noise from fracking might impact the health of surrounding communities, PSE Healthy Energy researchers gathered all available data and measurements of noise levels at oil and gas operations and compared the information to established health-based standards from the World Health Organization and other groups.

They found that noise from fracking operations may contribute to adverse health outcomes in three categories:

• Annoyance: Sustained noise may produce a host of negative responses such as feelings of anger, anxiety, helplessness, distraction, and exhaustion, and may predict future psychological distress.
• Sleep Disturbance: Awakening and changes in sleep state have after-effects that include drowsiness, cognitive impairment and long-term chronic sleep disturbance.
• Cardiovascular Health: Studies have found positive correlations between chronic noise exposure and elevated blood pressure, hypertension, and heart disease.

Environmental noise is a well-documented public health hazard. Numerous large-scale epidemiological studies have linked noise to adverse health outcomes including diabetes, depression, birth complications and cognitive impairment in children. Noise exposure, like other health threats, may disproportionately impact vulnerable populations such as children, the elderly, and people with chronic illnesses.

High-decibel sounds are not the only culprits; low-level sustained noises can disturb sleep and concentration and cause stress.

“Oil and gas operations produce a complex symphony of noise types, including intermittent and continuous sounds and varying intensities,” said PSE Healthy Energy Executive Director Seth Shonkoff, who is also a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and an affiliate of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. For example, compressor stations produce a low rumble; drilling a horizontal well is a loud process that can take four to five weeks 24 hours per day to complete; and using large volumes of water at high pressure results in pump- and fluid-handling noise. 

Compound or synergistic effects also may be at play, Shonkoff said. For example, noise reduction technology may lower negative impacts, and synergistic effects of noise and air pollution may create a new health threat or amplify an existing one.

Researchers note that data collection methodologies varied across public and private entities and types of drilling operations, requiring some estimates in the data. They say additional research is needed to determine the level of risk to communities living near oil and gas operations.

However, initial evidence suggests that policies and mitigation techniques are warranted to limit human exposure to unsafe noise levels from fracking. Policies can specify setbacks from residents and communities – in particular vulnerable populations such as schools and hospitals – noise mitigation techniques such as perimeter sound walls, and location siting decisions that make use of natural noise barriers like hills and trees.

Michael McCawley, the Interim Chair of the Occupational and Environmental Health Department at West Virginia University, was also a coauthor on the study, titled “Public health implications of environmental noise associated with unconventional oil and gas development.”

 ###

PSE (Physicians, Scientists and Engineers) for Healthy Energy is a nonprofit research institute dedicated to supplying evidence-based scientific and technical information on the public health, environmental and climate dimensions of energy production and use. We are the only interdisciplinary collaboration of physicians, scientists and engineers focused specifically on health and sustainability at the intersection of energy science and policy. Visit us at psehealthyenergy.org and follow us on Twitter @PhySciEng.

Rural Oil & Gas Industrialization

Why damages “never” occur in oil and gas extraction!

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

The human animal is a creature of habit. Analysis of our behavior involves the expenditure of energy, which is abhorred by our animal nature; and so custom, precedent and habit, lag behind change. Occasionally the spirit soars when understanding comes on a higher level, but to change our society is very difficult.

Oil and gas extraction began a long time ago, very gradually. Little energy was required, in fact little was available. The return was great, and since little area was disturbed by extraction, damages could be ignored. Most of what was used, lumber and nails, most of the waste oil and gas were removed by natural microbiological processes, and the iron machinery was valuable enough to be removed for junk. The marks down the hillside caused by salt water are still there, but grassed over – I have worked over them all my farming life. The oil on the creeks has washed away. The drilling platform was made by pick and shovel and occasionally by horse drawn slip scraper, and you can still find them, but they are not conspicuous.

Another factor was that the West was still open, so land was cheap. Cash money was hard to come by – think of the inflation since then. Much of the time in those days the wage for farm workers was “a dollar a day and all you can eat” – one good meal!

So it didn’t occur to people who owned both land and petroleum to separate the total return from the minerals into two parts – damage and mineral payment – it looked like a lot of money, just take it and smile.

When their children decided to move to town, some clever lawyers figured out a way to allow them to continue receiving the “royalty” payment for the specified minerals, and allow some land hungry person to buy the “surface.” This is called “separation of estates.” Invariably the mineral owner retained the “right to remove the (specified) minerals,” by methods unspecified. The new surface owner doubtless thought of the methods then in use and land value then current. He could hardly have been expected to think of changes in technology that would occur in 100 years.

Those early wells were drilled by spudding. That is raising and dropping a weight of solid iron about 6 inches in diameter weighing about a ton. Water was pumped out of the well, not brought to it, and the road was only wide enough for the oxen to drag up the engine block and later one track to allow a standard truck to come up and go down the hill one way at a time. Little rock was used, because it had to be broken up to the preferred size by hand. Qualitatively it was a different technology.

Fracking up to the 1950′s was done by dropping a bottle of nitroglycerin “down the hole.” In the early years the bottle was brought to the site by a horse and buggy which everyone on the road very carefully avoided. The remains of this extraction method are not conspicuous in 2015.

Today fracking involves 1000 truck-loads of water, carrying 4,000,000 gallons of water, truck-loads of chemicals of known and unknown toxicity. This is for each well and each well produces an average of 1,000,000 gallons of toxic flow-back carrying not only the chemicals sent down the well, but chemicals dissolved in the 180 degree temperature below. Trucks must pass, so the roads are often wider than the public road they hook up to. Drill pads and roads use acres and acres of land covered with thick crushed limestone that will be readily identifiable 2000 years from now. And acres and acres of pipeline right of way that will not be producing timber for 70 or more years after the production is abandoned. The return on capital and energy expended in drilling has diminished from over 50 to 1 to something like 10 to 1. Environmental damage has increased as a consequence by a similar factor.

And still there is no damage in the gas field, they say. Technology has outpaced custom and law. The rules are the same as they were in the beginning – the damage can be ignored because the return is so large. The owner of the minerals is not the owner of the damage, however. With separation of the minerals from the surface estate, separation of the income from the damage also took place. The surface owner took the environmental damage, the risk to his/her family from contamination of air and water, the inconvenience of the operation on the farm with fences to be rebuilt, areas cut off from the rest of the farm, diversion of storm water from its original path, toxic effects on the crops and livestock, and inconvenience to living standards. He still pays the same property tax while drilling and extraction is going on and in spite of the reduced productivity afterwards.

No damage done in the gas field? Deep mendacity. Mental laziness. Conservatism in the worst sense of the word – no thought.

The notion that environmental damage is less with slick water horizontal drilling and fracture is the invention of those who look at maps, not people who look at the result. It is not what the parties had in mind with separation of estates 70 years ago. It can absolutely ruin the small owner. Continuation of this practice is the result of the difficulty of making mental and legal rearrangement with a gradual change which has now become a revolution.

There is a precedent for making such a change, however. When strip mining first came into use a similar severance claim was the rule with coal. The miner obtained the coal and striped it with no compensation to the land owner. This unfairness was so obvious it was soon changed. By the late 1940′s the usual division was half for the land owner and half for the coal owner.

The original notion that the minerals belong to the land owner is somewhat arbitrary. In many countries they do not. In Poland and Australia, for example, the government owns the minerals. In Australia they famously say, “The landowner owns post hole deep.” Probably the reason minerals belong to the landowner in the United States is three fold: because of the huge abundance of land when the country was taken from the Indians, the fact the land owner was likely to be the one who extracted mineral value as well as agricultural value, and the desire to keep the government (of the individual states) corruption free and sensitive to citizen interests. At that time the Federal Government was concerned with defense, currency and diplomacy, and little more.

Separate mineral ownership is somewhat of a two edge sword for the oil and gas people. Royalty is a very good deal for the remote owner, with only tax to pay, no loss such as the landowner bears, so they are likely to grab what is offered. On the other hand such royalty is often very fragmented. And, it is hard to get agreement on price and all necessary signatures. Still the convenient fiction continues “no great damage in the extraction of oil and gas.” Yes, sometimes a nominal sum is paid. But, as the company man says, “Well, we find that West Virginians are mostly docile.” So, payments for damages aren’t typically very much.

The truth is that if damages were fully accounted for, present and future loses to agriculture, fracking wouldn’t be economic. Corporations seldom try to look much beyond seven years in any but the most hazy way. (Think about global warming and the inexoriable rise of world temperature.) The era of burning hydrocarbons is just a blip on the scale of human time, now understood at least in general outline for some 12,000 to 14,000 years.

Yes, damage occurs on that time scale (in more than one way). But not in the minds that are doing fracking or deep ocean drilling or mountian top removal or in the minds of those regulating these.

Severe Road Damages are Widespread

Road damages shown here; see also:  www.FrackCheckWV.net and  www.Marcellus-Shale.us

Conaway Lake on Tyler County road

W.Va. wildlife land fracking could yield $6M, royalties

From an Article by the Associated Press, Huntington Herald Dispatch, November 21, 2014

Charleston, WV — A company has bid $6.2 million plus royalties to drill for natural gas and oil under state wildlife conservation land in Tyler County. Denver-based Antero Resources is offering to pay more than $12,000 an acre for fracking rights under Conaway Run Wildlife Management Area, state Commerce Secretary Keith Burdette said.

The bid includes a 20-percent royalty on what’s extracted, and the lease would likely last three years. The bid on the 518-acre wildlife area’s oil and natural gas rights was unveiled Friday in Charleston. The land is used for hunting, fishing and camping, and includes a 100-yard rifle range.

It’s the second time West Virginia has offered to let companies drill horizontally under its land. Leasing the land for the technique called hydraulic fracturing, commonly called fracking, is a new venture for West Virginia, and officials think it could produce plenty of money during uncertain budget times.

In West Virginia’s first try at fracking leases, officials opened bids for 22 miles of state land under the Ohio River in September. Six miles are under contract negotiations and another 11 miles are out for bid or will be shortly. Seven additional miles are being considered for bid openings.

Environmental groups cautioned Gov. Early Ray Tomblin to reconsider the Ohio River leases, since they would allow drilling beneath a river that provides drinking water to millions of people. Burdette said the drilling would occur about a mile under the river. State environmental regulators would still have to approve permits for the operations. All drilling equipment would need to be off-site of the state lands, Burdette added.

Other properties the state is thinking about leasing rights for include: 131 acres under Fish Creek in Marshall County; Jug Wildlife Management Area in Tyler County; and 24 acres in Doddridge County.

No fracking contracts have yet been finalized, however. All the money from the state’s fracking leases would go back into Division of Natural Resources needs, like upgrades at state parks.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net