Drilling Down on the Family Farm

Farmer in Pennsylvania shares his story about deciding to allow shale gas drilling on his family's farm in Ellsworth Hill, Pa.

"I thought I was prepared for it.  I had seen this operation before, on other people's land.  I had even been mildly impressed by the military precision of it all, by the way the roughnecks moved wordlessly among the massive water tanks arrayed around a drill pad the size of a high school football stadium, ....".

Piotr Redlinski for the New York Times

It takes as many as 400 truck trips to complete a single well, and that’s not even counting the fuel-guzzling equipment needed to alter the ancient land to carve out the three- to five-acre drill pad itself. Once that’s done, the diesel drill rigs arrive, towering diamond-tipped syringes that work round the clock, often for two weeks at a stretch, to bore down 7,500 feet or so into the Marcellus before making a 90-degree turn to bore another mile and a half laterally. It’s a dirty, noisy, energy-intensive process, and despite the industry’s boast that natural gas burns 30 percent cleaner than oil, in the Marcellus the hunt for it is still fueled almost entirely by diesel.

And that’s not the only resource that’s consumed. It takes millions of gallons of water to break up the shale, and at least 30 percent remains underground forever. The rest of it, along with the slightly radioactive, highly saline and heavy-metal-laden water that has existed alongside the shale for 400 million years, flows up to the surface over the lifetime of the well.

IT’S a perilous process. There is the risk of surface spills — of the fracking fluid or flowback water, or even of diesel, whether held on the site to fuel the process or dumped when a driver fails to navigate the hazards on back roads never meant to handle this kind of traffic. Groundwater has also been fouled by drifting methane that migrated because the drillers, by dint of ignorance or carelessness or just plain bad luck, failed to properly isolate those deposits with cement.

This will never be a perfectly safe operation. No industrial process ever is. There will always be risks of accidents, mechanical failures, human error. That’s every bit as inevitable as the development of the Marcellus itself. There will never be enough regulators to police all the trucks and tanks and rigs that will cover the Marcellus from New York State to the Kentucky state line in the next few decades. In the end, the responsibility for monitoring this, for holding the industry to its promises and responsible for its failures, will fall where it has always fallen — on the shoulders of the people on the ground, the people whose lives will be most directly affected.

Standing there in what used to be our pasture on that light summer night, watching as the machinery of progress blasted the rock a mile beneath my feet, I realized that was what scared me the most. Not that this was inevitable, but that its impact depended so much on me, on whether I had the character to come out from behind the convenient shield of “are you for it or against it” ideology and find the strength, the will and the means to do what I can to make sure this is done in the best way possible.
I still don’t really know the answer. Link