Chesapeake CEO: No 'Lasting Environmental Damage' from Fracking
Times-Shamrock
9 April 2011
By Charles Sschillinger
DALLAS, TEXAS - Issues of water contamination in Northeast Pennsylvania
are due to the region's geology, and they have not - and likely will
not - be seen elsewhere, the CEO of Chesapeake Energy Corp. told
reporters and editors at a business journalism conference Friday.
Aubrey McClendon, CEO of the Oklahoma City, Okla.-based company, said
the drilling issue with Northeast Pennsylvania's "very unusual surface
geology" has been solved and should hopefully mean there are no future
incidents of water contamination, but did not elaborate on what
contamination incidents he was referring to.
There has been no "lasting environmental damage" from hydraulic
fracturing drilling, he added.
Pennsylvania recently established stronger well casing and cementing
standards meant to help prevent methane from migrating into water
supplies.
In his keynote address, the CEO told business media that while there
are stories worth writing on truck traffic, noise and even drilling
company transparency, "fracking is not the story."
McClendon also said an agency would on Monday announce a major step
forward for gas drilling companies releasing chemicals used in drilling.
The Groundwater Protection Council and the Interstate Oil and Gas
Compact Commission will debut the new online registry of chemical
additives used in hydraulic fracturing jobs at fracfocus.org. The
well-by-well information is being supplied voluntarily by major natural
gas operators. The data is culled from materials safety sheets, which
critics have argued are vague and incomplete.
McClendon went on to say "there is no such thing as clean coal" and
blasted efforts to produce clean coal as a "waste of money."
The CEO said fracking has "fundamentally changed the price of gas." The
price ranges around $4 per 1,000 cubic feet now, compared to $8 per
1,000 cubic feet several years ago. But he said the national conversion
from using oil as a fuel to natural gas is likely still two decades
away.
In a separate panel discussion at the conference, David P. Poole,
senior vice president and general counsel for Fort Worth, Texas-based
Range Resources Corp., said "it is physically impossible for you to
frack a Marcellus well ... and have any impact on groundwater."
Asked what the cause of groundwater contamination is if it is not
fracking, he acknowledged that's something the industry has to address.
"Unless we can prove we are innocent, we are not," he said, adding that
doing baseline testing of water wells before companies do drilling
would show what the water quality is beforehand and would also show if
there was already contamination.
Contact the writer: cschillinger@timesshamrock.com.