The End of Country

by Seamus McGraw

  Then come the earthmovers, huffing into the new clearing dotted with stumps, sap still oozing from them, to push the fallen trees aside, and behind that to scrape out a flat spot, a few hundred feet by a few hundred feet, where the rig will sit. The gas industry usually claims that they need between three and five acres per drill pad, a space about half the size of a city block. But that doesn’t include the land they need to clear around the well pad for roads and staging areas and to make sure that there’s enough room to maneuver in case of an unforeseen emergency like a blowout or a spill of fracking fluids, diesel, or other toxic substances. All those precautions can and often do double the size of the clear-cut. Once the vegetation is cleared, they’ll carve out a pond, usually no more than a quarter to a half acre in area and a few yards deep, to catch the chemically laced water that will come rushing back to the surface, along with traces of other elements, zinc and iron and arsenic, that have been trapped below the surface since the gas was formed (though increasingly, drillers are using closed tanks to catch the flowback water).

  They’ll also carve out a spot for the tanks that will hold the 1 to 3 million gallons of water it will take to frack the well. In the earliest days of the Marcellus, all that water was drawn from the state’s rivers and streams, but in recent years, as a way of reducing the amount of fresh water drawn from the state’s rivers, and also to reduce the amount of discharged tainted water requiring treatment, more and more of it has been recycled from previous frack jobs. In fact, some of the drillers have recently begun collecting water from old coal mines. In some regards, it makes sense. Rather than further depleting the state’s water supply, the drillers can actually help, if only in a small way, to dispose of an environmental hazard left over from the last great energy boom in Pennsylvania. But the process also poses risks. The mine water is tainted, and thus additional precautions, such as the construction of more secure berms around the tanks, are often required onsite, and there are additional risks of accidents or spills when transporting that water to and from a site.

  Once all of that is done, the rig will arrive. It’s a massive skeletal structure of steel, decked out in primary colors and rising 90 feet for a vertical well, often 120 feet for a rig designed to drill a horizontal well. Just getting it to the site in the rugged mountains of Pennsylvania can be a challenge: imagine having to make a hairpin turn on a one-lane gravel road while towing a battleship behind you. Once in place, it looms high above everything, even the neighboring hilltops. The roughnecks attach a drill bit called a mill to the end of a ninety-foot-long pipe; more pipe will be added every thirty yards as it bores an eight-inch-wide hole into the ground until it breaks through the rock of the Marcellus. These days, the drillers often use a tri-cone diamond bit, actual industrial diamonds, hard enough to bore through the stone, attached to tungsten carbide steel. Those bits are so precious that when they were first sold, the manufacturer shipped them in large velvet-lined jewel boxes.

  It can take a few days of round-the-clock drilling to reach the shale a mile or more below. There, the horizontal drilling begins. This involves a device called a “mud motor,” a self-propelled bit that chews into the shale, lubricated by a slick, additive-laden mud, often containing oil or synthetic oil to keep it from hardening or breaking down under the heat—120 degrees or hotter—down there.

  The mud motor is guided down the vertical shaft from the surface, where the operator usually sits in a small trailer nearby. He can watch its progress on monitors and guide it with remarkable precision. It’s sort of like using a robotic arm to cut a diamond, except that they’re doing it by remote control from the next room. The operator knows within a matter of millimeters where the drill bit is at any moment. In a horizontal operation, as many as six wells can ultimately be drilled on a single well pad—as each well is completed, the rig can be moved, sometimes as little as fifteen feet to the right or left, and another is drilled—and each horizontal leg can stretch out as much as a mile underground.

  Before those horizontal legs are drilled, the section of the well that runs straight down from the surface to the shale is cemented in place. A special cement, usually brewed using fly ash from burned coal and other elements to strengthen and stabilize it, is forced down through the eight-inch drill pipe until it begins to ooze back up outside it. It’s sort of like blowing yogurt through a straw. The idea is to leave the inside of the pipe open, so that when the times comes, water can be pumped into it and gas can rise out of it, while on the outside of the pipe, there is an impermeable seal between the well and the higher strata of ground that surround it, and especially to isolate it from any aquifers—groundwater deposits—that might be nearby. It usually works. Sometimes it doesn’t. In fact, in most documented cases in which a gas or oil well has blown out under pressure, or where natural gas has seeped into underground deposits of drinking water, poor cement jobs are at fault.

  The next step is to frack the well. There is perhaps no uglier and more controversial word in the entire lexicon of drilling than “fracking.” It’s a crude-sounding word, at once vaguely sexual and somehow malignant, and over the past several years it has come to represent everything coarse and menacing about the entire drilling industry. I have no doubt that the drillers who first coined the word—it’s shorthand for “hydraulic fracturing”—now wish they had called it something else. There are a handful of companies in the United States that are proficient in this operation, or at least claim to be, among them Halliburton, which pioneered the process. The different companies’ procedures differ only slightly. They begin the process by sending down a kind of subterranean pipe bomb, a small package of ball-bearing-like shrapnel and light explosives. The package is detonated, and the shrapnel pierces the bore hole, opening up small perforations in the pipe. They then pump up to 7 million gallons of a substance known as slick water to fracture the shale and release the gas. It blasts through those perforations in the pipe into the shale at such force—more than nine thousand pounds of pressure per square inch—that it shatters the shale for a few yards on either side of the pipe, allowing the gas embedded in it to rise under its own pressure and escape. But it isn’t water alone that’s being pumped down there at a rate of more than nine thousand gallons an hour. Water makes up more than 98 percent of slick water, but the stuff that isn’t water is a mixture of chemicals and other substances, some of which are relatively benign, the kind of stuff you might find under your own kitchen sink, while others are, in many cases, dangerously toxic.

  First, there is propant—what the drillers refer to as “sand,” but which is actually a proprietary mix of natural or manufactured balls used to hold the newly created fractures in the rock open. Although the ever-secretive firms try to keep their individual propant formula under lock and key, they are required to provide basic information about its composition to the state, and so it is no secret that the stuff is usually made up of bauxite or similar synthetic material.

  It wasn’t the sand that worried me as I struggled with the decision whether to lease our farm. It was the other stuff, the laundry list of chemicals. More than five hundred of them have been identified as having been used at one time or another in the fracking process, though drillers insist that only a dozen or so are used in each well, and among them is methanol, which in large doses is lethal and in smaller amounts has been linked to birth defects, liver and kidney problems, and respiratory ailments. There are things like toluene and xylene, which in large doses can affect a person’s central nervous system, and naphthalene, which is a carcinogen. There’s also hydrochloric acid, which, in addition to causing breathing problems and burns, can also depress the immune system when it is exposed to the air. There’s ethylene glycol, which can, in sufficient doses, cause breathing problems. There is no disputing that prolonged exposure to any of those chemicals will cause serious problems, and even death. And it’s cold comfort when the drillers contend that the chemicals are used in such low concentrations—even in their most potent formula, le
ss than 200 parts of methanol per million, and less than 84 parts per million of hydrochloric acid—that they are effectively harmless. They note that most of the chemicals are part of the average domestic household.

  There is some truth to that. Ethylene glycol, for example, is a key component of the antifreeze you put in your car, and methanol is the key component of your windshield wiper fluid—though it should be noted that when you pick up a jug of windshield wiper fluid, it’s clearly labeled as a poison, and the label includes a detailed set of steps you should take if you accidentally swallow some. Four fluid ounces of the stuff is enough to kill you, and less can cause blindness. It should also be noted that you use about a pint of the stuff at a time in your car; when drillers use it, they use it by the barrelful. And there’s comparatively little danger that I’m going to accidentally spill 17,000 gallons of windshield wiper fluid into my mother’s drinking supply. At least not without good cause.

  Despite the drillers’ assurances, the state and the federal government consider the used frack water to be sufficiently dangerous that they list it as the most toxic byproduct of gas development.

  It would be one thing if all that water stayed down there, a mile or more below the earth. But it doesn’t. Most of the water remains down in the formation, where most geologists, and not just those who depend on the gas companies for a living, believe it is likely to remain, insulated from water supplies at or near the surface by thousands of feet of stone and earth. But for every million gallons of water injected into a well, anywhere between 200,000 and 400,000 gallons will be regurgitated back to the surface, carrying with it not only the chemicals it included in the first place, but traces of the oil-laced drilling mud, and all the other noxious stuff that was already trapped down there in the rock: iron and chromium, radium and salt—lots of salt.

  In many cases, it pours out into those flowback ponds, large toxic swimming pools lined with thick plastic tarps intended to keep any of it from leaching into the surrounding soil or contaminating the underlying aquifers while it waits to be carted away for treatment or recycling. The frack ponds are an improvement over the early days of hydraulic fracking, when the drillers would simply let the stuff evaporate. Mounting protests from environmentalists effectively put a stop to that, at least on the Appalachian plateau. But the ponds are far from foolproof. There have been several documented cases in Pennsylvania where, because of tears in the liners or poor construction, small amounts of frack fluid have leaked out of the ponds. So far, none of those leaks have been severe, but there remains the chilling possibility that one day one of those spills will be severe enough, and the efforts to contain it haphazard enough, that those chemicals could soak into the ground and contaminate aquifers, or render surface water supplies unusable for people or for livestock. In fact, there have been cases in which precisely that appears to have happened. In one case, a farmer was forced to destroy several beef cows for fear that they might have consumed water contaminated by a fluid spill, because there was no reliable way to make sure that they hadn’t been contaminated without first slaughtering them.

  It was in part as a response to those issues that drillers recently began recycling the flowback water, collecting it in closed tanks that eliminate the need for holding ponds and shipping it to the next job, where it is used again. That, of course, poses its own environmental risks, because now millions of gallons of that stuff has to be transported, most of it by fume-spewing diesel trucks, raising not only the carbon footprint of natural gas production but also the specter of accidents or spills along those same treacherous backcountry roads that made development of the Marcellus so challenging in the first place.

  And even with the new focus on recycling, a significant amount of that water will sooner or later have to be treated. As the Marcellus Play began to heat up, the issue of how, precisely, to deal with that tainted water became one of the most critical challenges surrounding its development. The state had no real mechanism to deal with the wastewater. There were no purpose-built treatment plants that could reliably remove all the chemicals and dissolved solids. Nor was the geology of the state particularly conducive to the development of deep-well injection systems, the method preferred by the federal Environmental Protection Agency for disposing of the wastewater, which involves drilling even deeper holes into porous rock and squirting the stuff back into the ground, deep enough that there would be virtually no risk that it could contaminate anything. Technology that could scrub the water clean of the iron-eating salts so that it could be reused by the drillers was also in its very earliest stages, so that, too, was, at least at first, not a particularly good option.

  The immediate response to all of this, from the drillers and from the state, was to cobble together a patchwork of facilities across the state—existing water treatment plants—that would be given special dispensation to treat the frack water until a better solution came along.

  There were other environmental concerns as well. There have been plenty of cases where careless or negligent or simply accident-prone roughnecks have spilled diesel fuel while drilling, and there have also been cases of surface spills of chemicals mixed together and used in the fracking process at the nation’s 450,000-plus drill sites. There were also the dangers posed by the volatile nature of the fuel itself and the risks raised by gathering large quantities of gas. That risk was tragically and spectacularly underscored in 2000 near Carlsbad, New Mexico, when a corroded pipeline exploded with such fury that it incinerated seventeen people who were camping hundreds of yards away from the blast.

  As real as those concerns were, there was a sense among many, myself included, that they were manageable. Care, caution, and proper oversight could address them. But for many in Pennsylvania, all those concerns, like the scars left in the earth by the last energy boom, were blocked out, at least at first, by the pleasant picture of an unobtrusive well siphoning up vast stores of clean, green energy, and the green money that would follow it, all without disturbing the mountain laurel that surrounded it.

  MAYBE, IN A WAY, we were anesthetized by the gas in the Marcellus. I could certainly see how that could happen. That afternoon, after leaving the last of the drill sites, the company man, the engineer, and I drove back to Range’s local headquarters, now in the Pittsburgh suburb of Canonsburg.

  The engineer was downright giddy as he led me into the corner of his office, though calling it an office may be overly kind. The place looked more like the utility closet in a high school science lab, full of crates and boxes stuffed to the brim with rock samples in opaque plastic containers, some of which until recently had contained Cool Whip and processed slices of smoke-flavored turkey breast. There were stacks of papers and reports and books and charts everywhere. There was good reason for the chaos: in addition to his regular responsibilities, the engineer was now assigned to travel from school to school, “educating” the local children about the mysterious industry that was taking root all around them.

  I was starting to wonder whether the kids were having at least as big an impact on him as he was on them. I couldn’t help but notice that the engineer, a guy in his late forties, had the kind of conspiratorial grin a teenager gets when he first introduces his buddies to the wondrous cache of mood-altering chemicals he’s just discovered tucked away in his mother’s cleaning cabinet. He cracked open one large Tupperware container after another, until finally he stumbled across the right one. I could tell by the look in his eyes that it held the mother lode, the Easy-Off of the energy industry.

  He ripped open the large airtight container and slowly revealed a two-foot-long hunk of black rock that had only days before been cored out of the ground about a mile down, not far from the very spot where we now stood. He grabbed a small rock hammer from the massive pile of detritus on his desk. “This is something I show the kids,” he bubbled as he gave the rock a quick, sharp shot. A fist-sized chunk of black shale sheared off, perfectly perforating along one of the almost invisible myriad layers in which it
had been deposited.

  “Here,” he said, shoving the rock shard into my hand. “Take a whiff.”

  It had been thirty years since I had huffed anything—I hadn’t even had a drink since 1983, when I had wrecked my 1973 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, with its rusted fender skirts and paisley interior, on the Market Street Bridge in Wilkes-Barre. That was when I had finally acknowledged that I was part of the commonwealth’s most stubbornly consistent demographic: alcoholics. But I still remembered the protocol.

  I cupped the rock in my two hands, brought it to my face, and inhaled deeply. A faintly cold sensation rippled up through my sinuses, and for just a nanosecond, my frontal lobe did that old familiar jig.

  I don’t know why I was so surprised. Long before I ever got that first heady whiff of shale gas, I already knew how intoxicating the Marcellus Shale could be. It was a potion and it was a poison, and just like booze and drugs, how it affected you depended almost entirely on who you were, on your genetic makeup, on your psychological strength and that of all the people who surrounded you.

  FIVE

  An Unlikely Alliance

  This was most certainly not what Victoria had expected when she and Jim signed up with Cabot. This was supposed to have been an exploratory operation, and in her mind that meant small-scale, a rig here or there, but not this, the relentless truck traffic, the round-the-clock noise, the diesel spills, the creeping industrialization, as she saw it, of her precious hollow.

  She had wanted to be on the cutting edge of a new energy age, and now she was. It just hadn’t dawned on her until now how much cutting that actually involved.

  It was just a few months after she and her neighbors had signed when Cabot first started clear-cutting for the well they planned to drill on Cleo Teel’s place, which sat about a half mile from Victoria’s place. And when that well was done, they drilled another, and another. Every week, it seemed, they were edging closer, until Victoria felt surrounded by the clanking chaos of the operation. It wasn’t just that they were carving out the three to five acres where the wells themselves would soon sit, felling trees and tearing up topsoil and gouging out pond-sized holes in the ground for their flowback pits; they were also clearing land to make way for access roads and pipelines. They had been given an inch and they were taking a mile. Now, they had cut and clawed their way almost to Victoria’s property line and were busily at work on the top of the ridge down and across the road from Victoria’s place, where yet another rig and road and pipeline would soon be built.