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Mon, 2013-04-29 11:44Sharon Kelly
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Faster Drilling, Diminishing Returns in Shale Plays Nationwide?

Today's shale gas boom has brought a surge of drilling across the US, driving natural gas prices to historic lows over the past couple of years. But, according to David Hughes, geoscientist and fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, in the future, we can expect at least the same frenzied rate of drilling – but less and less oil and gas from each well on average.
 
“It’s been a game changer,” Mr. Hughes said of the shale gas boom at a talk last week in Maryland, “but I would say a temporary game changer.”
 
After crunching data from hundreds of thousands of oil and gas wells across the U.S., Mr. Hughes found that just five of the country's 30 best shale plays have been responsible for 80 percent of domestic shale gas production: the Haynesville shale in Louisiana; the Barnett shale in Texas's Fort Worth region; the Marcellus shale, which underlies New York, Pennsylvania, and parts of Maryland and West Virginia; the Fayetteville shale in Arkansas; and Oklahoma's Woodford shale. When it comes to natural gas, all of the other plays pale in comparison to these five regions.
 
But the data reveals that in four of these top five shale-gas plays, drillers have been less and less successful in hitting the next big strike-it-rich well. Average well productivity in four of the five best American shale plays has been falling since 2010, Hughes found. The exception, at least for now, is the Marcellus.
 
Read more: Faster Drilling, Diminishing Returns in Shale Plays Nationwide?
Mon, 2013-04-22 11:05Sharon Kelly
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Josh Fox's Gasland Part II Faces Aggressive Oil and Gas Public Relations Campaign

“It’s coming,” a baritone voice warns as images of a fiery hellscape flash across the screen. “Lies. Deception,” someone whispers, just before the narrator launches into a diatribe about Josh Fox’s new documentary, Gasland Part II, in a youtube clip whose esthetic falls somewhere between b-horror movie and election season attack ad. It’s the sort of video that might be campy if it wasn’t made with an actual budget.

Posted last November under the account energyforamerica, the faux trailer is one of the first hits in a Gasland 2 youtube search.

 “I think it’s kinda unprecedented,” Mr. Fox said after the mock trailer appeared on youtube five months ago. “I don’t know of any other trailer that has attacked a film before even the actual trailer of the film has come out.”

Mr. Fox, the documentarian who made the Emmy-winning Gasland in 2010, and whose new movie Gasland Part II is now making its world premiere at Tribeca, has already withstood an aggressive P.R. campaign the likes of which few journalists and film-makers have ever experienced. The man who forever linked fracking to flaming tap water in the public mind has found himself, once again, in the oil and gas industry’s doghouse.

With funding from an array of oil companies, front groups like Energy in Depth have created entire websites devoted to “debunking” the first-hand reports shown in the first Gasland, produced their own film titled Truthland, and maneuvered behind the scenes to undermine Gasland’s credibility amongst the media.

Now the oil industry is gearing up for a new campaign to attack the sequel. And early signs indicate they plan to pull out all the stops.

Read more: Josh Fox's Gasland Part II Faces Aggressive Oil and Gas Public Relations Campaign
Thu, 2013-03-28 05:00Sharon Kelly
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More Financial Worries Coming to Light in Domestic Shale Drilling Industry

Virtually anyone who has followed the onshore drilling bonanza knows the name Aubrey McClendon and the company he co-founded, Chesapeake Energy.

McClendon was the hard-driving CEO and chairman of one of America’s most aggressive drilling companies, but he was brought down earlier this year after a string of financial scandals and potential conflicts of interest came to light. It turned out that at the heart of the natural gas industry’s poster child lay financial practices that drew the ire of investors, the attention of SEC investigators and the fixation of the news media.

But in the past several months there have been a series of largely under-reported events that demonstrate that Mr. McClendon's problems are by no means distinct.

Might the drilling industry have broader financial issues?

Read more: More Financial Worries Coming to Light in Domestic Shale Drilling Industry
Mon, 2013-03-18 11:00Sharon Kelly
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Obama's Energy Strategy -- Too Little, Too Late?

A year ago, President Obama set forth his vision of America’s energy policy. “We need an energy strategy for the future," he said in a message still prominently displayed on the White House website, "an all-of-the-above strategy for the 21st century that develops every source of American-made energy.”

During the presidential debates, he hammered repeatedly an "all of the above" theme, though he also surprised many by making a strong statement about the urgency of confronting climate change during his second term.

This week, President Obama once more talked about his "all the above" strategy as he announced that he was setting aside $2 billion for research and development on alternative transportation fuels.

Things are looking up for renewable energy, right? Not so fast.

Obama's choice for new directors of the three agencies with the most relevance to climate change -- the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy and the Department of the Interior — do not sew confidence that real change is coming.

Read more: Obama's Energy Strategy -- Too Little, Too Late?
Tue, 2013-03-05 05:00Sharon Kelly
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Pennsylvania Failing to Sanction Drillers for Fracked Well Failures

For the past several years, the shale gas industry has argued that oversight of fracking is getting tighter and that the amount of methane gas leaking from their wells is less than some have speculated.

In Pennsylvania, however, the opposite is true, according to a white paper delivered to New York state regulators by Cornell engineering professor, Anthony Ingraffea. Inspection data from the state indicate that over 150 Marcellus shale wells in Pennsylvania had severe flaws that have led to sometimes large leaks and yet the operators of those wells were never issued violations by regulators for these breaches of state law.
 
By failing to cite drillers when things go wrong, Pennsylvania environmental regulators have for the past three years obscured the rate at which Marcellus wells leak, creating a falsely optimistic picture. Leaks at dozens of wells were described by state inspectors in their report notes, but violations were never issued.

Read more: Pennsylvania Failing to Sanction Drillers for Fracked Well Failures
Tue, 2013-02-05 09:22Sharon Kelly
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Shale Industry Moves to Ship Fracking Waste via Barge, Threatening Drinking Water Supplies

A large barge passes Pittsburgh. Image from Shutterstock.

It was meant to go unnoticed. A small announcement out of a commissioners’ meeting signaled plans to transport fracking wastewater by barge down the Ohio River. But it caught the eye of locals and offers a further reminder of why handling and disposal of the wastewater is truly one of the shale drilling industry’s most important and overlooked concerns.
 
Construction is already completed at one barging facility in the Marcellus region. A Texas-based company, GreenHunter Water, has built a shipping terminal and 70,000-barrel wastewater storage facility on the Ohio River in New Matamoras, Ohio. GreenHunter officials have said they are currently accepting about 3,000 barrels of fracking wastewater per day.

The U.S. Coast Guard is now reviewing plans to barge fracking wastewater in the region’s rivers, which serve as the drinking water supplies for over half a million people.  
 
These plans have raised alarm for many reasons. In the event of a barge accident, the drinking water for major cities like Pittsburgh could be immediately contaminated; the barges themselves could become radioactive because Marcellus shale wastewater carries unusually high levels of radium; spills or illegal dumping could be harder to detect in water than on land.

Read more: Shale Industry Moves to Ship Fracking Waste via Barge, Threatening Drinking Water Supplies

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