The End of Country

by Seamus McGraw

  It’s possible that their description of how gas field drilling works in deep shale deposits like the Marcellus was the only time in their lives that the unctuous landmen ever understated anything. It would be almost another two years before Ken and Victoria and their neighbors and I got our first taste of just how disruptive—how explosively, bone-jarringly disruptive—natural gas drilling actually is.

  I got my first taste of it miles away from Dimock, on a hilltop in southwestern Pennsylvania. The wild roar of the diesel generators was deafening, to be sure, but it was nothing compared to the sound of the drill, the screech of iron on iron, of carbide on stone, a bone-rattling thunder that shook the distant trees and churned the dull gray mud that covered my boots to the ankles. “What do you think?” the company man standing beside me shouted. It was the third time he had asked the question. I hadn’t heard him the first two times.

  “I can’t think,” I shouted back. “It’s too goddamned loud to think.”

  I wasn’t exaggerating. All I could do was feel, right down to my core, the raw, angry industrial intensity of it all. This is what it must have felt like when they drilled those first few wells in Dimock. This was what it was going to be like if the day ever came when they drilled a well on my mother’s farm.

  It had taken some doing to get invited to that drill site to see for myself what the operation looked like. I had asked a few drillers if I could take a peek. They had either not responded at all to my request or politely turned me down. It hadn’t been enough just to be an interested party, a guy whose mother might end up with one of them someday. I had to have a solid professional reason for being there. Fortunately, I soon managed to come up with one.

  It was my wife’s idea to pitch a magazine story about the Marcellus. I did, and quickly found a home for the story at Radar, a new venture that was equal parts serious journalism and gossip and that, much like my own marriages, had shown real promise only to fail twice (Radar twice suspended publication and was now making a third stab at the market, which, they assured me and anyone else who would listen, was guaranteed to succeed). I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt not because I believed them but because I was flat broke and they’d pay me $2 a word for the piece—upon acceptance, of course.

  On the personal front, from my mother’s very first telephone call, I had been struggling with a moral dilemma. Maybe it was my guilt-ridden Irish Catholic upbringing. Maybe it was my way of trying to distance myself from my own avarice, or from my inability to choke back the sense of humiliation I felt over the fact that at the age of fifty, I was still struggling enough that money from my mother would have helped. In any case, from the moment my mother first offered to split half the proceeds with me and my sister if wells were ever drilled on her land, I had been trying to find some way to hold that promised money at arm’s length.

  I told myself that no matter what happened, I wouldn’t take a red cent, because I hadn’t done anything to earn it. It was, in my mind, tainted. In that attitude, I was tapping into a deep vein of arrogant neurosis that I could trace back through a hundred years of my family’s legends. In the late 1880s, during his sea journey from the desolate coastal corner of County Mayo, where he had been raised, to the New World, my thickheaded paternal great-grandfather Mark had hurled himself over the ship’s railing to rescue the young daughter of a man who turned out to be rich.

  As the story has been handed down, the girl’s grateful father offered to set up my great-grandfather in business in Kentucky. Mark refused, arguing that he hadn’t done anything that warranted such a reward. I’m told that Mark never publicly said anything about any regrets he might have had about his decision, though periodically, for the rest of his life, he would disappear on days-long benders.

  It was that hereditary inability to accept a windfall that was now gnawing at me. It wasn’t as if I’d even saved someone’s life. I wasn’t being rigid about it. I told myself that it would be all right if the money went to my kids, and there was certainly nothing wrong with my wife’s taking some of it. My sister and her husband were entitled to it, too. But I wasn’t.

  My contract with Radar, however, altered the equation. At least that’s what I told myself. Now that I was getting paid to write about the Marcellus—even if it was only enough to cover two months’ mortgage with just enough left over to take my wife and kids out to a single dinner at the local Chinese buffet—I could, at least for the moment, remain aloof from the seamy monetary aspects of all this. It was bullshit, of course. My sister knew it, my mother knew it, and deep down inside I knew it. But at least for the moment, it allowed me to keep up a front.

  There was also a much less subjective benefit to having the contract with Radar. The professional fig leaf meant that I could now use my status as a working journalist to further my exploration of the Marcellus. And use it I did, wangling an invitation from Range Resources to visit a couple of active drill sites in western Pennsylvania, where the development of the Marcellus was in a somewhat more advanced state than it was in my family’s neck of the woods. They even assigned me a guide, who would carefully instruct me not just in the mysterious ways of drilling but in all the steps Range was taking to make the operation as painless as possible.

  I had thought I had a pretty good idea of how the whole process worked. But seeing it, actually standing on the ground and feeling the astounding force—that, I was not prepared for. It was the difference between reading a book about Niagara Falls and standing under it in a shower cap.

  I was standing there stiff as board, my jaw clenching, steeling myself against the noise and the vibration, when my guide, noticing that I was in sensory overload, took pity on me and led me far enough away from ground zero for me to regain my composure. He escorted me to a spot at the far end of the drill pad and pointed down the hill, toward a spot a half mile or so away where a few cows grazed languidly. In the center of the small herd there was a man-sized metal canister, painted green, with a couple of pipes running to and from it. It was so unobtrusive, so much a part of the serene, pastoral landscape, I almost didn’t notice it at first. It was the complete opposite of the kind of residual devastation I had become accustomed to seeing in the played-out coal fields where my parents had been raised. “That’s what it’ll look like when we’re done,” my guide said.

  I had seen the end result of the process before, or at least a picture of it, on a billboard on the southeast edge of Scranton on Route 81, touting the benefits of natural gas. The billboard is set atop an old slag heap left over from the anthracite mining days. If you drive along there now you can still see traces of the scars that the coal industry left behind. Up until fifty years ago, this depressed hollow was the epicenter of the last great energy boom in this part of Pennsylvania, and though that boom has been over for decades, this city, this valley, and all the people who live here are still paying the price.

  As Ken had said, the land will recover, most of the time, but you can push it too far, and Scranton was a place where the land had been pushed past the breaking point. Great efforts have been made in recent years to reclaim the land that was ripped open and in many cases poisoned by the coal industry. But the damage that was done over the course of more than a century of coal mining is almost impossible to erase. At this very moment, alongside the highway, bulldozers lumber across shattered shale and slag, trying to rip down massive hundred-foot-high piles of tainted rock that had been pulled out of the mines and dumped there. They level the ground as best they can. When they’re done, they lay down turf, as if a little bit of new grass could make up for a century of abuse. It can’t. Even in those places where the grass has sprouted, the ground is still wounded. It still looks as if it has a massive surgical scar, as if an arm, or a leg, or a breast has been lopped off. Beneath the ground, it’s worse. It’s not uncommon in what used to be coal country for the ground to settle, sometimes dropping dozens of feet as old mines collapse. It’s so common, in fact, that the state even offers mine subsi
dence insurance to homeowners. And that’s not all. Acids and iron seep up from those buried pits, oozing into surface water in places, and here and there, if you look closely enough, you’ll find what was once a mountain stream now dead and running rust-red.

  Most of the out-of-state gas drillers traveling to and from the gas fields around Dimock had to pass through this valley. To some of the more enlightened among them—or at least to those who were more sensitive to the public relations problems the industry might face as it developed—this valley and dozens of others just like it across Pennsylvania’s coal country were a cautionary tale, a graphic, toxic warning about what can happen when energy companies are allowed to run amok. As one gas industry leader put it in the early days of the Marcellus rush, “My biggest challenge is convincing people in Pennsylvania that we’re not coal.”

  The billboard, erected primarily to introduce a skeptical public to a new industry in the state, also serves to obscure the view of the work that’s going on to reclaim the injured coal fields. I don’t know whether the company that put it up chose that site specifically to draw a distinction between the environmental impact of gas drilling and that of coal extraction. Maybe it was just serendipitous, but that’s the way it worked out. The billboard shows a pristine hilltop ringed in a spray of mountain laurel—the state flower of Pennsylvania—and beyond that, everything in the picture is lush and green. You can just barely make out the wellhead, a small, unimposing fire-hydrant-looking thing that seems to blend into the landscape. The text on the billboard praises the promise of natural gas—and of the Marcellus in particular—as a seemingly boundless source of cleaner, more environmentally friendly energy and, as the mountain laurel attests, a domestically produced energy source. And it is not entirely wrong. As a fuel, natural gas produces about 45 percent less carbon dioxide than coal, and some 30 percent less than petroleum. It produces far less sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide.

  But that billboard that blocks the view of the ravages of the last energy boom, that bucolic depiction of natural gas blending seamlessly into the environment, is only part of the picture. The billboard doesn’t tell you that methane itself, unburned, is a greenhouse gas. Nor does it show the invisible wafts of methane leaking out of the well or its holding tank, or its compressor stations or its pipelines, leaks that environmentalists estimate send an estimated 3 trillion cubic feet of the stuff soaring into the world’s overheating atmosphere every year. It doesn’t show the land around the well, crisscrossed by buried pipelines and gravel access roads. And it doesn’t show the disruption to the land, and to the lives of the people who live on it, when the traveling circus that is a drilling operation comes to town.

  For all the real benefits that natural gas offers the country at large—as a fuel that lowers greenhouse gas emissions and creates less particle pollution, that could not only foster greater energy independence but could also provide the raw material for fertilizer to grow more crops for food and for biofuels, provide the hydrogen for a fuel cell future, and even run the steel mills that will, perhaps, someday manufacture our wind turbines and solar panels—it is still a fossil fuel, and the pursuit of it is fraught with peril for those at ground zero. There are some, like filmmaker Josh Fox, the young director behind the controversial—some say polemical—documentary Gasland, for whom the benefits that could accrue from natural gas matter far less than the dangers posed by drilling for it. Fox stops short of saying that there should be no drilling at all, but he argues that “this is hardly the time to let industry profits trump public safety.” To bolster his arguments, he has compiled a kind of travelogue of problems that he encountered while traveling across the country.

  On the other side, there are those who believe that the industry is doing just fine, balancing whatever environmental concerns it might cause with its responsibility to its bottom line. Among them are guys like Aubrey McClendon, the flamboyant chief executive officer of Chesapeake Energy, a guy who will tell you in one breath that he’s “a card-carrying member of the Sierra Club” and in the next that “environmentalism is regressive,” that whatever dangers might arise from the desperate pursuit of natural gas are regrettable but insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and that if you don’t support the natural gas industry “you’re supporting coal and you’re supporting nuclear energy.”

  As is always the case in such political battles, there is a little bit of truth, and a lot of distortion, on both sides.

  It is true that in recent years there have been more than a thousand instances across the country in which surface and underground water supplies have been contaminated by natural gas. There have been cases of water supplies so contaminated that residents could actually light their tap water ablaze, though despite Fox’s depiction of one such incident in his film and his suggestion that it was linked to natural gas drilling, most of those incidents occurred in places where the gas deposits were far closer to the surface than in the Marcellus and where the geology was far different, and in some of the most publicized cases of flaming water faucets, it was determined that the gas was actually naturally occurring, though its path into the water wells and aquifers may have been opened up by shoddy drilling practices.

  It is also true that when the drilling and the fracking are done, what remains is very much like what appears in that billboard, a tiny speck of iron poking up modestly out of the earth with an access road, often looking surprisingly like a gravel-strewn cow path, leading toward it.

  But for months leading up to that point, that quiet mountain scene in the picture is an industrial site, crammed with equipment and men and thundering with the deafening roar of drills and generators and trucks.

  When drillers first approach a deep shale deposit like the Marcellus, their first order of business, after securing their leases, is to gather together the parcels that will make up a drilling unit. Vertical wells, often placed on forty-to-eighty-acre sites, usually involve only a single landowner, while horizontals, which can suck gas out of more than a square mile of shale from a single drill pad, almost always involve multiple landowners, often signed with different companies, and before a driller can poke into that, he has to make sure he controls all those leases. Usually, that requires some good old-fashioned horse trading between the various drilling companies, and it is not at all unheard of for a driller to pay another driller thousands of dollars more per acre than the farmer who owned the land received in the first place.

  The next step is that the driller has to map out his new holdings to identify the sweet spots, the places deep below the surface where the gas-rich shale is thickest and where the shale itself is most likely to fracture easily, allowing that pressurized gas to escape. Often, though not always, they call in the ominously named “thumper trucks” to do that, large lumbering rigs that use mighty hammers to pound the ground, sending shock waves down to the rock below and then measuring the echoes bouncing back. If a thumper truck isn’t immediately available, drillers will sometimes resort to a cruder but no less effective method: they plant small explosive charges in the ground and use them to paint a sonic picture of the buried shale. It’s a critical step; a driller who skips it to save time or money or both often comes to regret it. Not only does he run the risk of missing the most promising target when he starts drilling, but, worse, without a complete picture of the lay of the underground land, he can fail to find real hazards, things like free-floating deposits of natural gas near aquifers, or subterranean deposits of gravel that can trap his bit when he’s drilling or make it difficult to seal off underground drill pipe, raising the risk of leaks or even blowouts.

  Once the mapping is done, the site designer, the engineers, and the geologists will put their heads together to try to come up with a plan, a design for their well. It’s an exacting process. You don’t just stick a drill bit down into the shale, within which is the ossified organic material where the gas is trapped. You have to position your rig so that it drills into the shale at the correct angle, into the exac
t spot where the shale is under the most pressure, before you pump millions of gallons of chemically treated water and sand into the hole to drive the gas up and out of it. The correct angle is typically northwest to southeast, as was the case with the Marcellus. If you hit it at the wrong angle or in a spot with not enough pressure, the shale will not fracture enough to allow the gas to flow freely, and you’ve lost the roughly $3 million it takes to drill a single well. Once you’ve figured out your drilling plan, you design a site plan that includes the precise layout of the well, and you submit it to the state Department of Environmental Protection’s Division of Oil and Gas Management, which reviews not only the drilling plan and the list of chemicals—some of them frighteningly toxic—but also the roster of equipment that will be used. Then, finally, the real work begins.

  Because much of the Marcellus Shale is buried beneath mountains, it’s a considerable challenge to find and clear a spot where the drill pad can be built. As often as not, that involves carving roads across fields overgrown after decades of neglect, plowing straight through dense thickets and groves of young saplings. The first sounds to pierce the air are usually the screech of chain saws or, when the wood is more mature, the almost prehistoric grunting of diesels powering bulldozers equipped with gigantic whirling saw discs and the thunderous crack of falling trees. It’s a horrific din, the shriek of the blade against fresh wood, the crack of the trees as they snap off at their base, and then the thud as they hit the ground. It takes less than two seconds to fell a fifty-foot tree that took forty years to grow, and the man behind the controls seldom rests between trees.