A First-Hand View of Fracking in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale

• Producing shale gas requires drilling numerous wells, often in regions that have seen little or no oil & gas activity for decades. Addressing environmental and other community concerns is crucial to acceptance.
• On a recent visit to a shale operation in Lycoming County, PA, I was impressed by the rigorous attention I saw to safety, spill prevention, soil conservation, and other impacts. 

It’s easy to talk about the shale gas revolution in the abstract and forget that it is the cumulative result of thousands of operations in locations across the country. It combines the technological marvel of precisely planned and executed drilling more than a mile below ground with the efforts of teams of skilled workers on the surface, and affects the surrounding community in many ways. Last month I had my first opportunity to visit one of these sites, near Williamsport in north-central Pennsylvania. I also saw several nearby sites in different stages of development. Although I was consistently impressed, I also tried to observe with the concerns of shale gas critics in mind.



The Anadarko Petroleum well site, or “pad” that I toured is located in Cogan House Township in rural Lycoming County, atop the Marcellus shale formation. API arranged this site visit for bloggers and other media and paid for accommodations in Williamsport. Anadarko provided experts from its local engineering and public affairs staffs and hosted a dinner with members of the community the evening before the site tour. No one paid me to write about the visit, nor was there any expectation that I would report anything other than my candid, objective opinion of what I saw.

I’m no stranger to industrial sites or oil fields. I’ve also invested countless hours researching and discussing shale drilling and hydraulic fracturing. When it comes to complex technical subjects like this, however, no amount of reading or Youtube videos can substitute for seeing the real thing and being able to talk to the people actually doing the job about how it all works.

One example of that is safety. Safety plans, targets and slogans are important, but it carries more weight when the site engineer looks you in the eye and says emphatically in his own words, “The most important thing is that everyone goes home at night,” and then proceeds to explain the stop-work rules, the “red zones” that have to be clear of workers when the fracking pumps are running, and other aspects of onsite safety. We were constantly reminded to watch where we stepped and to make sure we had multiple points of contact with the ground whenever we looked at something or photographed it.

Concern for environmental impacts was similarly thorough. I consider surface spills a much bigger potential risk to groundwater than fracturing a layer of shale thousands of feet below any aquifer. The first thing I noticed at the site, all five wells of which had already been drilled and prepared for fracturing, was the floor. The entire pad was covered with a three-layer mat of black felt, HDPE plastic and fabric, to isolate any spills from the ground. The pad was also surrounded by a berm to contain any spills, which would promptly be vacuumed up by a waiting truck. They even vacuum up rainwater. Yet the real key to spill control is prevention, which in Anadarko’s case is reinforced by its “Eyes On” program. This requires an extra observer any time a liquid other than fresh water is being handled or transferred. Soil conservation efforts looked similarly scrupulous.

Another issue I asked about was noise. I couldn’t gauge it for myself, because aside from trucks delivering supplies the site was shut down during our visit. It’s not prudent to have untrained people wandering around when 30,000 HP of truck-mounted pumps are running, injecting fluids down a well at nearly 10,000 psi. When I inquired, I was told that the pumps themselves were loud, requiring ear protection nearby but not at the perimeter of the site. How far the sound carries beyond the site is a function of terrain, foliage and weather conditions.

Then there were the fluids themselves. An Anadarko engineer described the company’s approach to the five wells at this site as minimal and “green”. The fracking fluid was a simple “slickwater frac”. The main ingredients consisted of around 4 million gallons of water per well--much of it filtered and recycled from nearby gas wells--and 4-6 million pounds of sand, to prop open the fractures created by high-pressure water. The formula also includes a little hydrochloric acid for downhole cleanup, and two other ingredients: a low dose of “biocide” to prevent corrosion from bacterial growth in the well, and a friction reducer, without which significantly higher fracking pressure would be required. The details of the chemicals used at the pad will be available on the public disclosure site www.FracFocus.org once the wells are complete.

I also inquired about methane emissions during well completion. Some critics claim--incorrectly, per independent analysis--that such emissions, along with other leakage, negate the climate benefits of shale gas. Although I was told Anadarko wasn’t specifically employing “green completion” techniques at this site, it was taking steps to minimize emissions, starting with having the gas gathering pipeline ready to go. As each well is completed, it’s hooked up to production so no methane escapes. That maximizes revenue. The site also had a temporary flare to burn off any excess gas from operations before the well could be connected to the pipeline. That sounds wasteful but is environmentally preferable to venting gas.

Of course for all the precautions and evident best practices there’s no disguising that while it is being prepared, drilled, fractured and completed, each drilling site is a compact industrial operation and hub of activity. Numerous trucks carry water, sand, chemicals and equipment back and forth. Anadarko has improved over 200 miles of country roads to handle this traffic, while minimizing freshwater haulage by the use of water pipelines connecting its sites.

The consolation for the neighbors is that the entire process runs its course like any construction project. A few weeks or months of intense activity are followed by years of unobtrusive operation, during which gas flows into pipelines and royalties into the community. The employment and other local economic benefits this creates are significant, especially for communities that have lost many of the industries that sustained their economies in the past.

Several of the participants at the dinner the evening before drew comparisons to wind turbines, which are much taller than the drilling rigs used for gas wells, and remain on-site for decades. That got me thinking about relative energy contributions. At Anadarko's estimated lifetime gas production (EUR) of 8 billion cubic feet each well could generate more than 1.1 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity in an efficient gas-fired power plant. By comparison, a 1.5 MW wind turbine would normally generate less than 80 million kWh over 20 years. So when brought online the five wells on the one pad I visited will together produce energy equivalent to a wind farm of more than 70 turbines.

Even if the ultimate recoveries from these wells turned out to be closer to the lower figures estimated by third parties from the limited data available to them, compared to those used in Anadarko's calculations, it would still represent a very substantial energy yield for such a small site.

I came away from the tour with a strong impression of a well-trained and experienced team, focused on doing the job right — safely and with minimal impacts, because this is where they and their families live; the landowners from whom they lease their sites are their neighbors. And for all the truly impressive technology deployed, what really counts is the people using it.I can understand skepticism about the balance of risks and benefits from shale gas development--this is a skeptical age--but nothing I observed in Williamsport would validate such concerns. Instead, I saw a well-tuned operation that is a microcosm of the biggest US energy revolution of the last 40 years.

A different version of this posting was previously published on Energy Trends Insider.

Are Films the Answer to Understanding Energy's Complexities?

The issues and choices surrounding our use of energy have rarely been more complex than today, yet our main channels for information about them are discouragingly shallow.  The web is often more effective at spreading misperceptions than fact-based analysis.  When our visual media focus on energy, it's usually to flash bad news before flitting on to the next story, leaving behind images of burning oil platforms or blacked-out cities.  One bright spot is the recent wave of documentary films on energy topics.  Films engage us on a deeper level, and the energy challenges we face deserve such longer-form treatment. August seems like a perfect time to suggest a few of them to you.  If you're reading this blog, then I'm betting you might at least consider watching a movie about energy instead of the latest summer blockbuster.   

Although it was hardly the first serious film about energy, the recent trend seemed to start with "Gasland". For all its inaccuracies, which have been documented by groups outside industry, that film helped start a national conversation about the right way to develop the enormous unconventional oil and gas resources that new combinations of technology have unlocked. In the spirit of making that dialog more constructive and even-handed, you should also know about two other documentaries covering the same topic and region from a different angle.  To many of the farmers and other landowners in depressed counties of New York and Pennsylvania, fracking is not a curse but an actual or potential lifeline. Seeing "Truthland" and "Empire State Divide" might not convert fracking skeptics into gas industry supporters, but it should at least fill in some of the gaps left by the "Gasland's" starkly one-sided portrayal of shale gas.

Another energy film I recently ran across, "spOILed", offers a timely reminder that despite oil's many problems it remains an essential ingredient of our global civilization, providing affordable mobility and a host of products that have made our lives much easier than those of our ancestors--or of people in countries that still lack reliable access to energy.  "spOILed" is also very much a movie about the dangers of Peak Oil, which envisions a world in which declining oil production, rising demand in developing countries, and geopolitical risks create persistent and growing shortages of oil.  This is particularly sobering when combined with a sense of just how challenging it will be to obtain the services that oil now provides from other energy sources.   Unfortunately, the film's message was undermined by occasionally jarring choices of visuals, some hyperbolic claims--no indoor plumbing without oil?--and by political overtones that might limit its effectiveness with the wider audience it appears to target. 

The energy film project that I'm most excited about is one aimed consciously at finding and cultivating "The Rational Middle" in the energy debate.  According to its director, Gregory Kallenberg, it started with a TED talk following his previous film, "Haynesville", which examined the impact of shale gas in Northern Louisiana.  As I understand it, the current project consists of 10 short videos on energy, four of which have been released on the group's website so far.  From the episodes I've seen, Mr. Kallenberg's team assembled an impressive group of experts, including Amy Myers Jaffe of the Baker Institute at Rice University, Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations, former Energy Information Agency Administrator Richard Newell, and Dr. Michael Webber of the University of Texas. The series is being launched with a road show featuring panels of some of the same experts interviewed in the films, starting with a session at this year's Aspen Ideas Festival.  The films are focused on information and process, rather than on selling one point of view. Aside from a few assertions in a couple of interviews, the factual presentation in the initial videos was very sound.  I expect to have more to say about The Rational Middle as additional episodes become available. 

If the we are to develop effective energy policies for the 21st century, the public's desire for clean, secure, reliable and affordable energy must be grounded in facts and figures that help us to differentiate realistic expectations from wish fulfilment.   I'm encouraged that a growing number of filmmakers seems willing to explore energy issues in the depth they deserve, with production values that will connect with today's audiences, rather than turning them off. Enjoy!