On Finding the Location of a Gas Well

By S. Tom Bond, Co-Editor FrackCheckWV, Resident Farmer in Lewis County, WV

If you are one of us who likes to know where a well is located right to it’s immediate surroundings, such as which side of the creek it is on, or where along a road it is, exact placement was a difficult thing to do a few years ago. The Global Positioning System (GPS) which exists today allows designating location very accurately. If you own a GPS apparatus, which is not very expensive, and no more than moderately difficult to learn to use, you can designate position or can find a position with it.

Two numbers are needed, one to designate North-South position and one East -West. The accuracy is about one yard. It can also be used for height above sea level, if needed.

Consequently GPS location is used on well permits, to locate spills, etc. More than one system of numbers can be used. The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has chosen to use the system known as Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM).

A typical location looks like this: 39.2470827763945 -80.5985162840238. This is two numbers, the first of which, 39.2470827763945 is North of the equator and the second is west of the prime meridian, which runs through Greenwich, a suburb of London. These particular numbers give you a Marcellus well site in Doddridge County South of Rt. 50 and West of Rt. 18. (Notice: these numbers are roughly analogous to latitude North of the equator and longitude West of the prime meridian. The difference is well beyond the scope of this article, but easy to find on the net.)

It’s easy to track a well down to the exact location. One way to track down the well would be to use location and go out and walk to it with your GPS. That would be quite time and energy intensive, though.

Well locations can be found on the WV-DEP Internet site, and by the two methods which follow.

Well permits which have been newly processed by the DEP are published daily by SkyTruth Alert. Go to:        http://alerts.skytruth.org/

At that time you designate an area of interest by moving the map location and size to get the area you want news from, then submitt your email address. After signup you receive a feed covering permits in your chosen area as they are published by the DEP. It includes such permit data as drilling company, county, farm name, API Number (a unique serial number for wells administered by the American Petroleum Institute) as well as the geographic (GPS) location. This is accompanied by a small map that shows location with respect to roads, but not topography of the landscape.

There are several well types, which you can determine from the type of permit. Also the newsletter includes reported spills. The UTM numbers given are much longer than necessary. Each succeeding decimal place increases accuracy by one-tenth. Five places after the decimal point establishes accuracy to about a yard, the limit of the civilian GPSystem. (The military has a system that is somewhat more accurate.) Information encoded in the extra digits (presuming there is some) remains a mystery to this author. He asked the DEP and got a run-around.

If you don’t want to walk the well site or don’t own a GPS apparatus you can use Google Earth, another computer application. This will locate the well and is almost as accurate as walking use of the GPS with much less effort. You download the application here: http://www.google.com/earth/download/ge/agree.html

First, enter the UTM numbers by copying from the source and pasting in Google Earth. At first the point is marked on a representation of the whole earth. The scale rapidly changes showing states, then counties and then localities. The imagery in the Marcellus area is from the USDA Farm Service Agency flyovers done last summer. This is sufficiently detailed you can see individual trees. Roads have route numbers or names given at magnifications somewhat less than the most detailed, and also there are marks for certain man-made points of reference, such as dams and some churches.

The user can adjust scale, rising above the earth to get a larger area, or going closer to get local detail. You can move sideways, North, East, South or West by clicking on one set of arrows, and you can rotate right or left and tilt, so you can see further out toward the horizon with a second set of arrows. You can move around and see what went on before the flyover last summer too, such things as pipelines intended for connecting wells in the area and compressor stations, and access roads and drilling platforms.

You must keep in mind that new wells since last summer’s flyover will not be shown on Google Earth, nor will other recent “development.” And you don’t see the well, the roads and the pipelines associated with the well, just the unblemished spot where it is going.

Use of Google Earth to find a well location takes only a couple of minutes.

For wells that are already drilled use FrackTracker. For wells are located in West Virginia at present go to: http://maps.fractracker.org/?webmap=c642c5c97cfa4634b7e42d42b32d1d74

Notice the scale in the upper left corner. This lets you go to a larger scale map. If you are interested in another state, go here: http://www.fractracker.org/maps/

And pick the state you are interested in. They even have one for Wisconsin, which has no shale wells, but is the source of sand used as “propant” in the fracking process. They have a controversy and activist groups there too, because of shale drilling.

To find details on a well you are interested in with FrackTrackr, adjust the scale in the upper left corner so your choice is readily identifiable. This is often necessary to get the particular well you are interested in when they overlap. Then click on a particular well and data comes up, including UTM numbers. The data is frequently several panels, and some panels must have the slider moved to see all the data.

If you look around thoroughly, you will find the two UTM numbers for each well clicked. In my experience, FrackTracker location varies by several miles from Google Earth. I trust Google Earth, because when you use the data supplied by SkyTruth wells with new permits for the same farm and well pad, come up adjacent to each other.

All three sites, FrackTracker, Google Earth and SkyTruth are user friendly and very rich sources for location and administrative detail. In general, FrackTracker shows the accumulated impact, SkyTruth the new drilling permitted, and Google Earth the location right down to the local roads and trees. We are fortunate to have this help.

All three sites have much more information than indicated here, and deserve browsing time for other information.

P.S. >>> An excellent new source for Pennsylvania wells has become known to the author since the above article was written. It is MarcellusGas.Org. There are two levels of membership, one free and the other is very inexpensive. <<<

Tagged as: drilling, fracking, gas wells, marcellus shale, natural gas, PA, wv