Drilling Worries River Group

State doesn’t have enough inspectors to keep up, they say

Morgantown Dominion Post
4 December 2010
By Jim Bissett

Members of the Upper Monongahela River Association (UMRA) said Friday that these days, energy companies in West Virginia have a lot in common with that spendthrift shopper just itching to try out his new credit card at the mall. That is, UMRA said, neither is thinking about what happens when the bill really comes due.

In the case of the companies, it’s not the mall. It’s the Marcellus shale. Marcellus shale, a 450,000-yearold geographic formation rich in natural gas, runs thousands of feet below a large chunk of Appalachia and the Allegheny Mountains, including West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and parts of Ohio.

Experts say the shale’s wellspring of natural gas can supply the United States’ energy needs for at least 10 years — maybe even 15.

But it isn’t giving up its treasure easily, and that’s what has UMRA’s Barry Pallay worried.

He told a packed conference room in Morgantown’s Municipal Airport at Hart Field that the state doesn’t have enough inspectors working in the field to oversee responsible extraction of the shale’s natural gas.

Especially, he said, with so many drilling companies applying for well permits.

In West Virginia, he said, there are about 59,000 working wells, and more than 3,000 permits in the approval process so companies can punch more holes in the ground to get to the shale.

Pallay said only 17 state inspectors, plus one supervisor, make sure all the companies are working in compliance.

“How is that possible?” he asked the room full of lawmakers, energy professionals and environmental activists. “That’s our question of the day.”

And it’s also a question for the environmental ages, he said, since tapping into the shale is hardly a tidy process.

The formation lies as deep as 8,000 feet below West Virginia’s terrain, which, more often than not, is rural and rugged. Isolated, even.

Drilling into Marcellus shale means using about 6 million gallons per well of chemically treated water to fracture, or “frack,” stone below the ground to release the gas. That so-called “frack water” doesn’t go away when the job is done.

But before you can use the water for fracking, you have to get it, said Bill Hughes, an environmental activist and member of the Wetzel County Action Group.

That means pulling it from streams, which he said turned out to be an environmental assault not far from his Wetzel County house.

To illustrate, he showed before-and-after pictures of Blake Run stream, which is about three miles from his house. The first shot, from 2007, showed a bubbling stream and waterfall, lined by trees.

The second, from this year, showed a muddy road — put in by Chesapeake Energy — where the stream used to be.

“The stream is completely gone,” he said. Taking its place, he said, are emissions from trucks and chemical fumes from the tanks used to store the frack water.

That’s a toxic fallout for his backyard, and everyone else’s too, he said.

“Pollution doesn’t know boundaries,” he said.

In the meantime, UMRA has spent the past several months trying to establish boundaries in the state’s newest industry.

The organization is drafting and overseeing a treatise for state lawmakers and regulatory industries that takes in everything from ways to safely dispose of frack water to more stringent air-monitoring at drilling sites.

Pallay said the idea is to have an all-encompassing document ready for lawmakers when the Legislature convenes in Charleston next month.

What UMRA taps out today, he said, will play a big factor in what comes out of the tap in your kitchen sink tomorrow.

“One million people drink water from the Mon, and we haven’t even started on the aquatic life that is being affected,” Pallay said. “We’re not keeping up with the industry.”