Land Disturbances Continue in Northcentral Appalachia
By S. Tom Bond, Co-Editor of FrackCheckWV and resident farmer in Lewis County, WV
Everyone generally accepts what the shale drilling industry says talking about the surface area it uses. We will call this the “spoil area,” an analogy to the term used in strip mining. Surface alteration is important because it is a very long term land use change.
The well pad itself is rocked sufficiently with crushed stone to support the weight of rigs and other heavy trucks no matter how wet or cold it may become. This means 12-18 inches of stone. The same is true of access roads. Then there are ditches around the uphill sides of this and frequently diversionary ditches are necessary beyond the drilling platform to protect in case of heavy rain.
There are wide rights of way cut through farmland or forest to lay pipelines. This will be traveled for inspection and repair as long as the collecting pipes are in use – as long as any well on the pad is producing. A right of way is usually 50 to 75 feet wide, but additional width is needed to lay the pipe – frequently there is a 100 foot “disturbance zone.” Likely, if the pipe is worth salvaging after the gas is exhausted, this greater width will be required again. Of course, laying and removal of pipe is not difficult to accomplish with modern earth moving equipment and sufficient dollars.
For comparison, remember a high school football fields is 360 feet long, goalpost to goalpost, and 160 feet wide, sideline to sideline. This is 57,600 square feet, and since 43,560 square feet is an acre, the football field is about 1.3 acres.
In my previous writings, the figures were 5-9 acres for well pad, drainage, access and pipelines. Recently the following email came from an acquaintance who is a highly qualified observer. His work takes him up dirt roads, all over farms and timberland and he must measure and estimate areas daily. Here is what he sent:
“I am seeing more timberland taken for pipelines now vs. well pads. The gas companies want a 100 foot wide disturbance area so every 435 feet of pipeline right of way takes an acre.
“I am seeing a number of pads taking up to 30 acres for the pad, frack and freshwater pits, soil stockpile areas, and roads not including right of ways.
“We have had our farm since 1974, raised our children on it and invested our life with plans to retire here, but with the unknown future of Marcellus and Utica drilling we are seriously thinking of selling out and moving out of West Virginia when I retire. The problem is there are no banks that will finance a house with a contaminated well.” (His land has been.)
This author recently received a disc with aerial photos of well sites in West Virginia. I was astounded. I am familiar with the many pipeline rights of way one finds between a line down the middle of Harrison County west into Doddridge County and over into Ritchie county when using Google Earth. They are long bare lines devoid of trees over the hilltops and show freshly disturbed earth when new. But the disc shows a multitude of drilling sites, mostly with ponds ready for drilling, during drilling and after the rig has been removed before reclamation. One at Mt. Claire, south of Clarksburg, has (or had at the time) no less than six ponds!
A Canadian newspaper recently had an article called “Shale Gas: How Hard on the Landscape?” This talks about “20-acre multi-well pads” and complaints about “industrial traffic, property devaluation, air pollution, ground water contamination and endless noise.”
In a study by Dr. Patrick Drohan of Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences, half of the wells drilled in Pennsylvania are on agricultural land and most of the rest in forest land that was productive of timber. “The loss of agricultural land to shale-gas development presents some concern because, in some areas, drilling is now competing with food production for space on the landscape, the study states.”
And how much spoil area will there be? As they say, “That’s a good question!” In January, Bloomberg carried an article the U. S. Department of Energy reduced its estimate of “reserves” to one-third the previous figure, done by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), down to 141 trillion cubic feet. Reserves represent gas recoverable with present technology beyond areas with present drilling. This August the news had been the U. S. Geological Survey had reduced EIA’s estimate of 410 Trillion to 86 trillion cubic feet. At the same time several publications were printing articles based on industry claims that went to some 210 (originating with Standard and Poor, October), and 330 (IGT Investment, about the same time), etc.
We know the Marcellus and Utica underlie about 100,000 square miles. Marcellus areas in WV and PA are beginning to have the scars over much of this area. Let’s say half this area is economically viable and 50,000 square miles eventually are drilled. And let’s say fifteen acres per square mile for pads, ponds, pipelines, access roads, compressor stations and yards for equipment. Let’s leave out the area in Wisconsin where the sand is obtained and the area where the crushed stone for pads and access roads is obtained, along with the necessary infrastructure.
The 50,000 square miles times 15 acres per 640 acres in each square mile gives 750,000 acres. This is 1712 square miles. This is certainly not an exact figure, but it does represent the magnitude of the effect.
For comparison, Lewis County where I live, is 382 square miles. Harrison, next North is 417 square miles. Let’s throw in Marion and Monongalia Counties – still not as much area. OK, add three-quarters of Doddridge County. This is the same as the area made a “spoil area” for one hundred years or more for a few years gas production. Nearly the equivalent of five West Virginia counties is taken out for Marcellus and Utica development in Appalachia.
Land use change on this scale is unprecedented. Removal of the original forest, converting it to farm land, took generations and did not change the top soil and the biological function as much. The financial scale is warmly unappreciated by both the drilling and the financial industries, but is largely unrecognized by government, scientific and other sectors, including the protest movement. Keep in mind the figures here are for the Marcellus only. The author could find no figures for the area of all shale plays, but looking at the EIA map of shale plays in the United states, one can see that the Marcellus-Utica covers only one third or less, meaning total in the U. S. will be three or more times these figures, and much more world-wide.
No aggregate environmental impact assessment is being considered. Keeping the awareness of so much damage local is part of the industry preference for state, rather than national or local governance. State governments are too far away to sense the full impact of it, the way local governments do, and lack the resources and expertise to look at the dispersed phenomenon on an appropriate scale the way the federal government can.
With the growing population, the ever increasing understanding of Global Warming, and the relentless increase in use of fossil fuels it seems unlikely the world can continue on this path. Political resolve is more necessary than new technology. The old hydrocarbon world is strongly resisting a new world being born at its expense.
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