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.

Three Studies Confirm Shale Gas Is Not Worse Than Coal

For most of this year the enormous potential of shale gas has been clouded by controversy over its alleged climate impact. This began with the draft and later the leaked pre-publication version of a paper from a Cornell professor suggesting that the greenhouse gas emissions from gas were no better than those from coal and might even be worse. When I examined Dr. Howarth's analysis in two postings last December and this April I found that his methodology and assumptions were sufficiently flawed to undermine his conclusions. However, I also recognized the informal nature of my assessment and suggested the need for further scrutiny of this issue by organizations with more resources. That has now taken place, though I claim no credit for it. Within the last month three separate teams have issued reports bearing on this question, and not one of them validates Dr. Howarth's findings against shale gas.

The first of these studies comes from IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, addressing not just Dr. Howarth's paper, but also the EPA's estimates of methane leakage that were a key input for its calculations of greenhouse gas emissions from shale gas. Although a skeptic might find reasons to dismiss a study from a consultancy with a large energy industry clientele, the other two studies have connections to groups with unimpeachable environmental/sustainability credentials. One is a collaboration between Worldwatch Institute and Deutsche Bank, while the other paper, published in Environmental Research Letters, is from a team at Carnegie Mellon University with financial support from the Sierra Club. I encourage you to read them, but here are the highlights:

The Carnegie Mellon team focused on shale gas from the vast Marcellus formation underlying several eastern states. (See Friday's posting for some perspective of the scale of this resource.) They found that while the current techniques for developing and completing a Marcellus shale gas well do result in higher methane emissions than from conventional gas wells, the extra methane only increases lifecycle emissions from well to burner tip by 3% on average. This is the case because, "The life cycle emissions are dominated by combustion that accounts for 74% of the total emissions." As a result, when burned in a combined cycle power plant to generate electricity, shale gas results in emissions per kilowatt-hour (kWh) that are 20-50% lower than those from coal, depending on equipment and sources. This is the crucial comparison that Howarth's paper gave short shrift. They also compared shale gas emissions to those from LNG, which we'd now be importing in large quantities had shale gas development not ramped up as it did a few years ago. The Mellon team found shale gas and LNG roughly comparable, with both emitting around a quarter less CO2 equivalent per BTU than diesel fuel. That suggests that shale gas isn't just a lower-emitting fuel for power generation, but also for transportation. Finally, they looked at the possibility of shale gas wells being fractured multiple times, rather than just once during their production life, and found that it would take more than 25 fracturing events to negate gas's advantage over coal.

The Worldwatch/Deutsche Bank study considered both top-down and bottom-up views of shale gas emissions, including that of Howarth. They looked at the average US natural gas supply including current proportions of shale gas and found that the emissions from gas-fired power plants beat coal-fired plants by an average of 47%, even with the EPA's higher figures for methane venting during gas production. They also found that among bottom-up assessments of shale gas emissions, including the one from Carnegie Mellon and another from the DOE's National Energy Technology Laboratory, Howarth's results appear to be an outlier, and that shale gas is materially lower than coal in lifecycle emissions for power generation. And while their analysis was performed using the standard 100-year global warming potential for methane of 25 times CO2, they considered sensitivities ranging up to a GWP of 105:1, at which extreme gas still performed better than coal.

It's probably too much to hope that these independent studies will alleviate all of the concerns that have been raised about the greenhouse gas emissions from shale gas, which will only improve as technology and standards progress. (The studies also highlighted both the need and potential to reduce methane emissions from shale gas development, in order to minimize the extra greenhouse gas contribution, irrespective of any comparison to other fuels.) I also get that with the current mood in much of this country, claims for the game-changing energy potential of shale gas must sound too good to be true, without some fatal flaw. Yet everything I see indicates that the problems associated with shale gas development are all manageable, and that while it isn't a panacea, it does represent an extraordinary opportunity for the US from an economic, energy security and environmental perspective. It's time to recognize this as the tremendous gift that it is.

How Small Is That Revised Marcellus Estimate?

I see in The Hill that some critics of shale gas drilling are pointing to a revised estimate of the shale gas resources in the Marcellus formation as evidence that there's not enough gas to justify any risk from hydraulic fracturing. Earlier this week the US Geological Survey updated its previous estimate to 84 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of natural gas, a figure substantially less than the estimate of 410 TCF from the Department of Energy. Now, I'd have thought that even without doing the math on this, 84 TCF would still sound like a heck of a lot of gas, even if trillions have become the new billions in another context.

Perhaps cubic feet of gas don't convey quite the same degree of familiarity as barrels of oil, which most people can visualize, so it might be useful to think of this gas in its oil-equivalent terms. Using standard conversion factors, that 84 TCF in the Marcellus equates to roughly 14.5 billion barrels of oil. For comparison, that's half again as big as the original estimate of 9.6 billion barrels for the Prudhoe Bay field on the Alaskan North Slope. (FYI, Prudhoe Bay had produced a cumulative 11.5 billion barrels as of the end of 2007 and was still estimated to have a few billion barrels to go.) In that light, does anyone still want to argue that the Marcellus resource is inconsequential?