Drillers aim to prove aquifers are safe

Philadelphia Inquirer

ROARING BRANCH, Pa. — The frack job was frozen.

Deep beneath an icy Tioga County, Pa., farm recently, an effort to extract natural gas from the Marcellus Shale shuddered to a halt. The culprit was not the 14-degree weather, but an innocuous material more often associated with beaches: sand.

The procedure known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is designed to liberate gas locked in the shale by injecting pressurized fluid into a well to shatter the rock. But this frack job in north-central Pennsylvania was stalled: Sand contained in the frack fluid had clogged up the bore.

“These things happen,” said Greg Carder, a contractor employed by East Resources Inc., of Warren, Pa., to frack the well.

Another contractor was summoned to dislodge the blockage. The one-day delay idled about 100 workers and the fleet of assembled machinery, adding tens of thousands of dollars to the well’s $4 million price.

In the grand scheme of things, the clog amounted to a minor glitch in the high-tech construction of a modern natural-gas well.

Far bigger and costlier obstacles loom for hydraulic fracturing.

As the Marcellus gas bonanza accelerates, the practice of fracking wells to stimulate production has come under fire. Officials in New York, worried that gas drilling threatens the city’s watershed, have called for a ban. In northeastern Pennsylvania, Marcellus drilling is stalled because of opposition in the Delaware River basin.

U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., has co-sponsored legislation requiring federal regulation of fracking. “This legislation will ensure that hydraulic fracturing does not unnecessarily jeopardize our groundwater,” he said.

The oil and gas industry says hydraulic fracturing is not a threat to groundwater supplies and is already closely monitored by state regulators. They say federal oversight would retard domestic gas exploration.

But Exxon Mobil Corp. was so concerned about the growing opposition that it included a clause that would allow it to back out of its $41 billion offer last month to buy natural gas producer XTO Energy Inc. if Congress made fracking illegal or “commercially impracticable.”

Gas drillers say they have been hydraulically fracturing wells for more than six decades. Without fracking, “unconventional” shale plays such as the Marcellus would not be feasible.

“Over the years, our company has drilled thousands of wells, and every one of them is fracked,” said Terrence M. Pegula, the chief executive of East Resources. “I can’t believe we have to sit now and try to explain it.”

Pegula acknowledged that the industry was unprepared for the attention hydraulic fracturing had attracted as the lucrative Marcellus efforts had expanded into areas unaccustomed to gas drilling. The Marcellus lies under much of Pennsylvania, plus eastern Ohio, western New York and West Virginia.

“I think we have done an absolutely horrible job of defending ourselves against people who are criticizing a technique that has been used for 60 years,” Pegula said.

Last month, East Resources agreed to donate $750,000 to the Susquehanna River Basin Commission to install a network of devices to remotely monitor water quality in the streams near wells. The monitors will alert regulators if any serious spills occur.

So confident is he that properly constructed gas wells will not leak, Pegula said, that he has ordered his company to begin installing water-monitoring wells next to all its drilling sites, to collect groundwater data before and after drilling.

Much is at stake for Pegula, who grew up near Scranton and was a petroleum engineer in Texas. He founded East Resources 27 years ago in Warren County, Pa.