Drilling into Shale for Gas Taps Concerns

By Brian Bowling, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Jun. 16–The Marcellus Shale is bringing some prosperity and some worry to Pennsylvania.

Stretching from eastern Ohio and West Virginia to New York, the rock formation a mile underground crosses the state diagonally from Washington to State College to Scranton.

With a recent study saying it could hold as much as 50 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas, the shale has become a magnet for oil and gas companies.

Thomas Murphy, a Pennsylvania State University professor, said companies are likely to spend as much as $1 trillion over the next 20 years.

“We’re seeing the very early edge of it,” he said.

The companies are renting hotel rooms, buying restaurant meals and, in some cases, buying materials and hiring local labor to prepare drilling sites and the roads leading to them.

“You’re seeing some pretty big impact already,” Murphy said, who added that the companies are buying leases from landowners. “Those dollars are easily flowing into the local economy.”

Murphy, who works for Penn State’s Cooperative Extension Service, has been holding seminars in the affected areas to advise landowners how to negotiate favorable leases and how to handle their windfalls so that the owners get a long-term benefit. The average price for a lease has jumped from $60 per acre to $2,500 to $3,000 per acre, he said.

If the shale holds as much gas as predicted, the effort to extract it should boost the state’s economy for about 20 years, Murphy said. A similar rush on the Barnett Shale in Texas started in the 1990s and is still occurring.

“It’s going to go faster (here) than it went down in Texas and some other places because they’ve perfected the technology,” Murphy said.

In some areas, it’s already gone too fast. The state Department of Environmental Protection ordered partial shutdowns of two drilling operations in Lycoming County in May because they were drawing too much water from streams.

DEP Secretary Kathleen McGinty met with 150 oil and gas representatives Friday to go over the state’s drilling regulations.

“These rules are in place to protect our natural treasures, and we will not compromise on them,” she said.

After the Lycoming County incidents, the state stepped up its inspections of drilling sites and found companies were using poorly built and even dangerous retaining pond dams, had inadequate control of erosion and sediment, were improperly disposing of waste and fluids from their operations and were drawing too much water from streams, she said.

DEP spokesman Tom Rathbun said the Marcellus Shale has attracted many companies with no prior experience drilling in Pennsylvania. Accustomed to the arid conditions of Texas, they’re not used to the precautions needed to protect water sources and trout streams, he said.

Bryan Swistock, a water resources specialist with Penn State’s extension service, has been holding seminars for landowners about how they can protect their wells and springs. He advises landowners to require pre- and post-drilling testing to verify the water hasn’t been contaminated. Typically, there’s a minimal chance of that happening, he said.

“It’s not common, but it does happen,” he said.

Some types of contamination can be cleaned up quickly, but others can take months or years to treat, he said. Drilling also can cause the permanent loss of a water source.

Swistock said that so few of the Marcellus sites have been drilled that it’s hard to guess how much of a risk the state faces.

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