By Kate Coil for The Register-Herald : Mon Jan 17, 2011, 12:02 AM EST

UNION — Though acting Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin has announced he intends to utilize the natural gas of the Marcellus shale, residents of Monroe County, who live above the shale, say drilling into the area will decimate their culture, safety and even endangered species in the area.

Jill Fischer, co-president of the Save the Water Table organization, said drilling on the Marcellus shale puts citizens at risk.

“It sounds to me like Gov. Tomblin wants to exploit West Virginia,” Fischer said. “The state has been a supplier of the nation’s coal and supplies power and industry. Though we supply all of these corporations, if you look around at our income, health and other factors, we are at the bottom when compared to every other state.

“What has been exploited in West Virginia is not our natural resources but our people. We are facing a pretty hard thing. When it comes to them prospecting for drilling sites, Monroe County’s prospects aren’t good.”

Fischer said county residents are working to prevent hydrofracture drilling or “fracking” in their area. Fracking is a process in which a well is drilled several thousand feet into the ground. From that one well, several other well holes are then created in a variety of directions with multiple horizontal bores, covering a wide area underground.

Next, Fischer said around 1 million to 2 million gallons of water are injected into the well holes, augmented with various chemicals to release natural gas within the shale. Each drilling site requires 4 to 5 acres of land and are in constant operation.

Fischer said Save the Water Table has been working to energize the rural communities in Monroe County about the issue.

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SavetheWaterTable.org recently hosted members of the WV Office of Environmental Health and the DEP.  We are incredibly appreciative that they offered us their time and energy, and took the time to travel to Monroe County and visit with us.  We look forward to another visit in the near future.

After having discussed a wide variety of questions (of which we may hope to provide a written narrative in the future), we as a community feel increasingly educated as to the powers at work and the systems in place (and/or not in place) surrounding the hydraulic fracturing enterprise.

Writing as a resident of Monroe County who attended this meeting, I would like to offer a couple simple summations from my perspective.

• The answer to a great deal of questions concerning how hydraulic fracturing would affect the environment, and in particular, fracking in karst, is:  We don’t know.  The DEP knows there are many unanswered questions.  And we are very pleased to know that their follow-up is:  We don’t know, but we intend to find out – which is why the DEP is performing a PROGRAM REVIEW in which they are reviewing all ordinances and regulations as well as the processes themselves to determine what additional measures may be required to frack safely.
• The proposal for this Program Review is set for November 1st, and it will be conducted on a timeline to be determined at some point thereafter.
• It is during this program review, I am confident the DEP will find enough wrong with hydraulic fracture in its current state and enough additional risks associated with performing the operation in karst or within watersheds – that they will disallow the process in this area completely until further technologies insure that it can be done with zero/minimal impact to the environment.
• The DEP has a lot of power.  A LOT OF POWER.  They give the permits to the operators which allows them to drill.  Not only do they have carte blanche the power and the responsibility to determine whether permits should be given AT ALL – but they also have the power to include additional provisions in the permits that require the operation to go above and beyond the policies laid out by current legislation.  This is monumental strength – it means that in advance of the completion of a full Program Review and the resulting change in policy, as a protective measure, the DEP can deny all permits to hydro-frack until more information is gathered and better policy is enacted.
• As for current legislation – there are special requirements for karst in other states – but as of yet, not in WV.  This desperately needs to change ASAP!
• The DEP is horrifically understaffed, which we can extrapolate to mean underfunded.  Our government must find a way to correct this and fast!  There are currently 17 inspectors in WV to cover all drilling activity.  This is terribly under-prepared.  Even if we end up with good policy and ordinance, they are useless if they are not enforced with an iron fist.
• VERY IMPORTANT: The permits to drill in WV have a two-year life.  The conditions and policies active on the day the permit is signed remain active for the length of that two years, regardless of whether the relevant policies change in the interim.  That means if a company was permitted to drill BEFORE the Program Review is completed – despite the possibility that the Review would ultimately create policy that would further regulate the process or may even disallow it completely – the active permits would remain alive, and those operators could continue to conduct business as usual for the full two years.  That’s a long time – and an incredible amount of damage could take place as our county plays guinea-pig in hydraulic fracturing in karst 101 class, having just missed the new legislation that is designed to protect us.  We cannot allow that to happen.
• Accordingly – as a community, we must focus!  URGE THE DEP TO NOT ISSUE PERMITS!  And at a bare minimum, to not issue permits until the Program Review has been completed, water can be tested, an environmental impact study can be completed – and the smart and savvy members of the DEP and EPA and state offices, health departments, geologists, water technicians and community leaders can each and all assure us that no harm will come to our land, no harm will come to our water at the hands of this “clean” energy endeavor.  If this cannot be promised, then a moratorium should be established immediately until further time when such assurances can be made with confidence.

Contact Gene Smith, a gracious member of the DEP who visited with us on Monday.  He is very knowledgeable and a great communicator and works together with James Martin, Chief of the Office of Oil and Gas of the DEP.   Send him an email : gene.c.smith@wv.gov

• The karst forming unit in Monroe is the Lower Carboniferous Greenbrier Limestone which covers about 70 square miles centered around Union, Pickaway and Sinks Grove, with smaller patches around Greenville and Wolf Creek.
• A count of 168 large sinkholes was determined from the central zone giving a density of four per square mile.
• No surface streams occur over much of the karst except near the margins where the flow can be shown to be underground during dryer seasons, confirming that underground flow occurs most of the time.  This is true of Indian Creek and its tributaries, Laurel Creek and Hans Creek around Greenville.
• The Greenbrier Limestone has low porosity so polluted water entering the cave system would not benefit from the natural filtration effects of the groundwater table, but would pass directly into wells and beyond into the Greenbrier and New Rivers.
• The Greenbrier karst phenomenon is limited to Monroe, and adjacent Greenbrier Counties and to a smaller extent, Pocahontas County.  (Caves are present in the folded rocks of the Valley and Ridge Province of the Appalachians but are mostly limited to the much older Cambro-Ordovician formations which are not subject to deep drilling.)
• Surface exposures of the Greenbrier Limestone are riddled with fissures so the general picture is of an anastomosing meshwork of large and small caves which continue to be discovered and mapped but have not been fully tested with die tracers to determine flow patterns.
• The conclusion is that the Greenbrier Limestone poses a major challenge to proposed gas drilling.
• Questions arising are:
  • How could wells be adequately cased in such a formation?
  • How could failures of the highly pressurized “fracking” process be avoided?
  • How will the containment ponds be designed to avoid rupture?
  • How will trucking accidents be avoided on the narrow, switch-back roads typical of Monroe County?

Fred Ziegler | Geologist | Professor Emeritus, The University of Chicago

Source : New York Times

CANONSBURG, Pa. — The streams of people came to the public meeting here armed with stories of yellowed and foul-smelling well water, deformed livestock, poisoned fish and itchy skin. One resident invoked the 1968 zombie thriller “Night of the Living Dead,” which, as it happens, was filmed just an hour away from this southwestern corner of Pennsylvania.

The culprit, these people argued, was hydraulic fracturing, a method of extracting natural gas that involves blasting underground rock with a cocktail of water, sand and chemicals.

Gas companies countered that the horror stories described in Pennsylvania and at other meetings held recently in Texas and Colorado are either fictions or not the companies’ fault. More regulation, the industry warned, would kill jobs and stifle production of gas, which the companies consider a clean-burning fuel the nation desperately needs.

Just as the Gulf of Mexico is the battleground for the future of offshore oil drilling, Pennsylvania is at the center of the battle over hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which promises to open up huge swaths of land for natural gas extraction, but whose environmental risks are still uncertain. Natural gas accounts for roughly a quarter of all energy used in the United States, and that fraction is expected to grow as the nation weans itself from dirtier sources like coal and oil.

The Environmental Protection Agency has been on a listening tour, soliciting advice from all sides on how to shape a forthcoming $1.9 million study of hydraulic fracturing’s effect on groundwater.

Read more >>

Cattle were quarantined in PA after toxic waste fluids from a natural gas hydraulic fracture well were found leaking from a containment pond.

http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/blog/with-focus-on-bp-dont-lose-sight-of-fracking-issues-04369.html

Inform yourself, Google “hydraulic fracture drilling” and see if you think it’s safe.

From Wikipedia: Considerable controversy surrounds the current implementation of hydraulic fracturing technology in the United States. Environmental safety and health concerns have emerged and are being debated at the state and national levels.