Perils, promise of shale explored

June 28, 2012 at 12:09a.m.

FAIRLAWN

A panel of experts discussed the pros and cons of hydraulic fracturing before a crowd of more than 100 concerned citizens at a local parish here Wednesday.

The event was sponsored by the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland and co-sponsored by the Catholic Diocese of Youngstown to educate the public on the perils and promise of the rapidly rising shale industry throughout Northeast Ohio.

Peter MacKenzie, of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association, a trade group that represents oil and gas producers in the state, kicked off the discussion by reminding attendees that the Buckeye state is not the first in the country to see a surge in natural gas and oil exploration.

He made a case for the “current reality” of the country’s energy issues by pointing out that the U.S Energy Information Administration, an extension of the U.S. Department of Energy, predicts that both natural gas and oil consumption will dramatically spike between now and 2035.

“They’re projecting this for some time to come,” he said. “We need to be thinking about the future and a carbon-constrained world and asking ourselves how we meet our rising energy demands.”

This, coupled with Mac- Kenzie’s estimation that all of Ohio’s oil and gas combined holds the potential to produce more than $1 billion a year for decades to come, were just a few of the reasons he put forth in support of the industry.

But if Mackenzie was decisive, John Stolz, a professor of environmental microbiology at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania, was skeptical.

“You just don’t understand the magnitude until you get up in the air and see this stuff,” Stolz said as he ticked off slides showing aerial photographs of arid farmland and the stressed environments of West Virginia and Pennsylvania that were caused by both vertical and horizontal injection wells.

Stolz said the industrialized process required to extract oil and natural gas from thousands of feet below the surface has no place in the residential and agricultural parts of the country.

He said many aspects of the drilling process are often overlooked by the towns, cities and landowners that agree to lease their land to oil and gas producers.

For instance, Stolz said the areas required to house drilling equipment and the area required to store the thousands of gallons of water needed to drill are only part of the equation.

He said large refineries are also required nearby, to separate the various gases that are drawn from the earth during the drilling process. All this, Stolz said, comes in addition to the pollution caused by all the trucks necessary to move such equipment.

“It’s an industrial process; fine, let’s treat it that way, but don’t use this process in a residential or an agricultural area,” he said. “Furthermore, if anything happens to the casing between the rock formations and the ground water, it provides a conduit, a way for gas to migrate into the aquifer and pollute it.”

Stolz also made a distinction between the multiple companies that are called upon during each phase of drilling. He said many of the tradesmen come from places like Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas, where there are different rock formations and different issues.

For Stolz, this is a primary concern, as workers may not be as familiar with the “abundance of groundwater” found throughout the northeastern United States.

But MacKenzie said all well-sites are reviewed prior to drilling to ensure that gas is both plentiful and relatively easy to extract.

“We don’t want to spend any additional money, or any additional time creating fractures anywhere else besides the reservoir,” MacKenzie said. “This idea that we create fractures that invade water supplies is just simply not true.”

MacKenzie added that the industry has created more than 14,000 jobs this year alone. He also said that the technology has evolved in the 60 years since the first oil and gas wells were drilled in the U.S.

Ohio has drilled more than 273,000 oil and gas wells to date, according to the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program. The state ranks fourth in the nation for such wells, behind Texas, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania, respectively.

In 2011, the state drilled 460 new wells and produced 4.9 million barrels of crude oil and 73 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

This year, a total of 52 drilling permits have been issued in the Mahoning Valley, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.