The Boom (33 page)

Problems cropped up. In June 2010 EOG Resources was completing a well in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, about one hundred miles west of Sullivan County. It was drilling out plugs inserted during the fracking operation when it lost control and spewed thirty-five thousand gallons of frack fluid and brine into the air. A state investigation turned up several problems. The crew—all local hires—had worked for twenty-four hours straight. Neither the crew, nor a more experienced supervisor, had up-to-date well control training. EOG failed to install redundant systems to prevent a blowout. There was only one barrier—a large set of rams at the surface that sealed around the pipe—and that was opened to replace rubber pads. Investigators could not determine who gave the order to open the rams, or if there had been a miscommunication, but concluded, “[T]his type of activity should never be allowed at any time.” Instead of using a modern device to drill out the plugs, EOG used a 1940s rig configured to repair existing wells.

Incidents such as the one in Clearfield make some people in Sullivan County nervous. As the number of wells and pipelines and trucks grew, many local residents came to regret signing gas leases. What seemed like an easy way to supplement their meager incomes morphed into something much different. They had opened the door to these visitors, expecting a brief visit where they ended up pocketing these outsiders’ money. But the folks from Oklahoma and Texas had arrived en masse and industrialized parts of the county to get at the gas. And evidence began to accumulate that the state didn’t have a firm grasp on what was going on and how to keep Pennsylvanians safe. In April 2011, several years after the boom began, the state asked Marcellus drillers to stop sending their wastewater to all public water-treatment facilities. The industry complied and began recycling more of its wastewater, but by then, these public facilities had accepted millions of gallons of water. Some weren’t equipped to clean up all the radioactive elements, such as radium, and pollutants, including strontium and barium. The water, after treatment, had been released into rivers—in some cases, upstream from public drinking water intakes.

Concerns about the state’s water metastasized. Many worried that fracking would create cracks that allowed chemicals and gas to move up into shallow aquifers. It turned out to be drilling, not fracking, that caused the problems. In southern Bradford County, one of the largest documented cases of water contamination related to gas exploration occurred after a well had been drilled, before any fracking took place. A state investigation concluded that Chesapeake had failed to cement its wells adequately, allowing gas to leak from pipes into the groundwater. The company agreed to pay $900,000 in fines and payments to the state but never acknowledged publicly that it caused the problem. According to letters from Chesapeake to the state, the company said that its wells had intersected a fault in the earth that may have allowed gas to travel from the wellbore into a nearby beaver pond, where it bubbled to the surface. Chesapeake later agreed to pay three landowners $1.6 million to settle a lawsuit.

All of the early confirmed cases of escaping gas from the Marcellus Shale occurred in counties close to Sullivan County. What was going on in this part of Pennsylvania? There are a couple possible answers. There hadn’t been many deep wells drilled in this area, so gas companies lacked a good grasp of the complex rock strata and didn’t have time to wait to piece together the puzzle. The amount of geological upheaval in this area is remarkable. One geologist I spoke with pointed out that in Texas’s oil-rich Permian Basin or Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, rocks lay on one another in flat lines, like a stack of pancakes. The area around Sullivan County is more akin to a bowl of spaghetti. Some gas from the Marcellus, over millennia, had used the fractures and folds in the rock to migrate upward until it encountered shallow sections of sandstone and siltstone. The gas entered these rocks and saturated the pore spaces. When gas escapes from new, poorly cemented wells, it encounters gas-saturated rock strata. There is no place for it to go, like a rush-hour commuter trying to board a packed subway car. It keeps moving from rock strata to strata looking for an opening, until it finds a pathway upward toward a water aquifer or residential well. In other parts of the state, there are more low-pressure rocks for gas to seep into long before it finds a path up to the surface.

With several thousand wells drilled since the beginning of the Marcellus boom, and tens of thousands more planned, there have been some localized problems with water contamination. How many is hard to track. Pennsylvania reports how many wells have been drilled and how rapidly oil and gas production is growing. But it does not report how many complaints about gas in water have been called in, or how many homes can no longer use their water wells.

Chesapeake’s former CEO Aubrey McClendon, in a speech in Philadelphia in 2011, conceded that poor well design had caused the “limited gas migration incidents.” He pointed out that working with state officials, new cement and casing standards had been implemented. “Problem identified. Problem solved. That’s how we do it in the natural gas industry.” But that is not quite the case. In June 2012, a month before my trip to Sullivan County, Royal Dutch Shell was fracking several wells in nearby Tioga County when a resident driving down a dirt road a half mile away came upon a geyser of methane-laced water that shot twenty to thirty feet into the air. It was coming from an old 1932 well that had been plugged, abandoned, and forgotten. Shell mobilized a small army of engineers to figure out the problem and began venting several wells to relieve underground pressure. Members of a hunting club were barred from their cabin, and methane turned up in some other nearby wells. The state reported that Shell had to fix its cement in one of its new wells, suggesting that gas from the new well had escaped into the old well. Pennsylvania didn’t even have the 1932 well in its list of abandoned wells. “The list is a work in progress. There are possibly thousands of those wells in Pennsylvania,” said a spokesperson for the state’s oil regulator.

The Shell well wasn’t far from my parents’ land. One afternoon I drove over. Even without an address, it was easy to find. A waitress at a local restaurant gave me turn-by-turn directions up a steep dirt road. Shell was flaring off gas from one of its recently drilled wells to bleed off pressure and prevent more gas from migrating out of the wellbore. There were a couple dozen pickups parked at the well and engineers trying to figure out how to undo the damage. On the next ridge of hills were several large wind turbines, a visual juxtaposition of two possible energy futures. Despite a small wind, the giant 230-foot-long sleek blades were motionless. They weren’t generating any power.

I parked at a nearby farmhouse. A deeply tanned man wearing a baseball cap and loosely holding a large pair of pruning shears in his hand walked out of a field of four-foot-tall fir and spruce trees, planted in neat rows and destined for sale to landscapers across the East Coast. He introduced himself as Andy Proteus. He said that he leased the land his family owns to Shell for $100 an acre in 2007, not expecting much to happen. “The whole thing makes me nervous. It definitely makes me think twice before I lease my ground again,” he said. Then he closed the door to his pickup truck. He was done talking about it. His trees weren’t going to prune themselves.

There was a much smaller environmental headache on my parents’ property. A few months after I visited the Farm, I received a panicked call from my father. Chesapeake had just called. While the company was boring a hole on the property to run a gas gathering line under a creek, some of the drilling fluid had escaped into the water. It wanted to take immediate action and needed the landowners’ permission. I put him in touch with Wylie Norton, the Sullivan County commissioner whose land backs up onto the creek a few hundred feet downstream of the leak. State inspectors were already aware of the problem. Within a couple days, Chesapeake had completed the cleanup. Fish in the creek had been killed, perhaps by toxins in the drilling mud used to lubricate the drill bit and carry off rock cuttings or maybe from being deprived of oxygen in the water. The state Department of Environmental Protection didn’t issue any violations or fines.

Afterward, I asked Norton, who favors fracking, if the incident had changed his mind at all. “We always have some concerns about environmental damage to our area and special concern about drinking water safety,” he replied in an email. A few sentences later, he vented his growing frustration about how acrimonious the debate over fracking had become. “Unfortunately, similar to the political climate in DC, there are two extreme groups debating the gas issues that refuse to objectively look at issues. I will always question the ‘drill, baby, drill’ folks as well as the ‘Frac no’ people,” he wrote. “Are the gas companies looking for profits? Sure. Do they have absolutely no regard for the environment? No. Will there be problems and accidents when there is this large scale of an operation? Sure!”

While landowners each made individual decisions about leasing their land, the future of the county will be determined by the combined impact of hundreds of wells. In early 2011, two prominent geoscientists—one a booster and the other a critic—met for a public debate in the Sullivan County High School auditorium. The topic was “The Cumulative Environmental Effects of Gas Drilling.” It might as well have been called “Fracking: Is It Worth It?”

Terry Engelder spoke first. A Penn State University professor of geosciences and fracture mechanics, he grew up a couple counties away from Sullivan across the state line in western New York and spent his career focused on rocks and their natural fractures. He has good reason to hold a grudge against oil companies. As a teenager, the ring finger on his right hand was crushed between two pipes while he worked as a laborer in an aging Pennsylvania oil field. But he has become an unabashed supporter of shale development. His interest in the Marcellus Shale was piqued when he was asked a few years earlier how much gas was in the rocks. Stumped, he made some rough calculations on a piece of scrap paper he pulled out of the recycling bin under his desk. The answer he came up with was as much as 516 trillion cubic feet. “I didn’t believe it,” he said. He called up a colleague and asked him to do the same calculation. He too came up with roughly the same figure. As the size of the gas field sunk in, he said it was like an “out-of-body experience.”

On the stage at the high school, Engelder, a slender man with deep creases in his face and a bulbous nose, wore a blue ski sweater and blue jeans. He described himself to the skeptical audience as a “shale gas enthusiast.” Quoting President John F. Kennedy’s famous call for sacrifice—“Ask not what your country can do for you”—he talked about the importance of the shale for the future of the United States. “The people of Sullivan County are being asked to sacrifice,” he said. “The sacrifice, of course, is that this is an industry that can’t come in without leaving some scars behind. It is necessary to build drill pads, it is necessary to run pipelines and whatnot to exploit this energy. The question comes down to one of how does America move forward into the future? What is its energy?” He said he had an abiding “faith in American industry’s ability to do it right.” There will be some mistakes along the way, he admitted. He felt bad for people who lived where the industry had drilled bad wells. But shale development is a force for good, he said, and there must be some “necessary sacrifice.”

Energy, he said, is joined to economic growth. The American lifestyle depends on energy. If we turn our backs on shale gas, we’d be eliminating 20 percent of the energy Americans need to live our lives. Taking this point to an extreme, he recommended the audience read a couple postapocalyptic books, including Cormac McCarthy’s fictional
The Road
. If the United States says no to new energy development, the result would be economic ruin. “In terms of environmental devastation, nothing is more severe than total economic collapse,” he said. The audience squirmed.

Anthony Ingraffea spoke next. He is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University, an Ivy League college where students can major in comparative literature but not petroleum engineering. He is a prominent critic of fracking and coauthored a controversial paper that suggested so much methane gas leaked from wells during their lifetime that shale gas might produce more greenhouse gases than oil or even coal. The paper’s conclusions have been attacked by a number of subsequent researchers, some of whom were funded by the industry and others who were independent. He was dressed in a suit and tie and had a shock of white hair above a round, fleshy face.

“Tonight we are here to talk about cumulative environmental impact. Cumulative environmental impact doesn’t mean what goes wrong when one cement job fails. Cumulative environmental impact doesn’t mean what goes wrong when one set of wells on one pad goes sour. Cumulative environmental impact means what is happening in a county with fifty pads? What is happening in a region like Pennsylvania with ten thousand pads?