by Russell Gold
Gold, R. “Costly Liabilities Lurk for Gas Giant.” Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2012.
Gold, R., and Daniel Gilbert. “The Many Hats of Aubrey McClendon.” Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2012.
Schneyer, Joshua, Jeanine Prezioso, and David Sheppard. “Special Report: Inside Chesapeake, CEO Ran $200 million Hedge Fund.” Reuters, May 2, 2012.
Chapter 10: Celestia
My visit to Sullivan County was greatly enriched by the time I spent with innumerable local residents and community leaders. At the suggestion of former Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Erich Schwartzel, I convinced Commissioner Bob Getz to give me the grand tour of the county. The tour didn’t disappoint. Many of the people I interviewed are in this chapter, but I would specifically like to thank Dick and Lois McCarthy—former farmers, neighbors of the Farm, and local leaders. And thanks to Dean Homer, who serves as both the county’s only undertaker and one of its only accountants. When it comes to death and taxes, see Dean Homer. Ralph Kisberg helped with insights and logistics. Andy Goldberg, a Harvard-trained Wall Street trader turned independent water tester in nearby Clarks Summit, helped me deepen my understanding of water. Tom Murphy, codirector of the Penn State Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research, is a state treasure.
Geological information about Sullivan County came from an old (and undated) pamphlet titled Worlds End State Park, Geologic Features of Interest, published by the Bureau of Topographic and Geologic Survey. Geoscientist Fred Baldassare, who has studied the commonwealth’s rocks for decades, answered my many questions.
The Reibsons’ court case is Chesapeake Appalachia LLC v. Milo K. and Betty Reibson, 4:11-cv-01321-TMB. The lawsuit was settled on November 5, 2012. On November 13 Chesapeake applied for a well permit for the Phillips Unit. The site ID in the state’s Department of Environmental Protection computer system is 739392.
My count of wells in Sullivan and nearby counties was based on the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection Office of Oil and Gas Management’s Well Inventory by County Report, retrieved in August 2012. I counted only “unconventional wells.” Details on the Marc 1 Hub pipeline can be found in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Docket no. CP10-480-000. Especially helpful was the Environmental Assessment, filed in May 2011, and a PowerPoint presentation by Inergy, the company that built the pipeline, on June 28, 2010, and is titled “Project Introduction Meeting with FERC Staff on CNYOG’s MARC 1 Hub Line.”
Information about coal plant retirements is from the Energy Information Administration’s Annual Energy Outlook 2012. MIT’s The Future of Natural Gas report presents a concise overview of the impact of the Powerplant and Industrial Fuel Use Act of 1978. Ronald Reagan’s quote can be found here: www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=34320#axzz1W3ISgYEl. (Last accessed August 2013.)
There have been numerous reports on the wealth generated by shale exploration. I recommend “Oil Boom in Eagle Ford Shale Brings New Wealth to South Texas” by Robert W. Gilmer, Raúl Hernandez, and Keith R. Phillips, published in the Second Quarter 2012 edition of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas publication Southwest Economy. The gas industry has paid for other reports, including The Economic and Employment Contributions of Unconventional Gas Development in State Economies by Mohsen Bonakdarpour and John W. Larson, IHS, published in June 2012. See also America’s New Energy Future: The Unconventional Oil and Gas Revolution and the US Economy by John W. Larson, Richard Fullenbaum, Richard Slucher, et al., IHS, October 2012.
John Pinkerton, the former CEO, and Ray Walker were both very forthcoming about both the missteps and successes of Range Resources’s early involvement in the Marcellus and the difficulties in getting any modern equipment. Walker was the befuddled consultant who made plans to go to Pittsburg, Texas. The company has talked about the Renz #1 well, as well as the number of acres it had leased, on conference calls with analysts. Chesapeake talked about its first Marcellus well in a conference call with Wall Street analysts on August 3, 2007.
I spoke with both former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell and Ed Cohen, former CEO of Atlas Energy, at the Wall Street Journal’s ECO:Nomics conference in March 2012. This is the source of Cohen’s “farmers” quote. Rendell is the source of the statistic that showed the number of well permits to drill in the Marcellus Shale skyrocketing between 2007 and 2010.
The state investigation of the June 2010 blowout of an EOG well in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, is remarkably thorough. Bedrock Engineering, under contract, produced a Well Control Incident Analysis report in July 2010 that included transcripts of interviews with people involved in drilling the well.
I obtained many documents about drilling in Pennsylvania through Right to Know Law requests. This is the source of the section on Chesapeake’s admission that its wells intersected a fault. I also obtained records related to Shell’s blowout in Tioga County.
The source of McClendon’s “problem identified” quote is from the September 2011 Marcellus Shale Insights Conference. It is archived here: www.chk.com/news/articles/pages/20110911_akm.aspx. (Last accessed January 2013.)
I did not attend the Engelder-Ingraffea debate in Laporte but was able to watch it on YouTube. Here are the relevant videos, in order: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di1JKZEbHyQ; www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u6aqXaI3s4; www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCYUdLJSav8; and www.youtube.com/watch?v=doA5-PCG530. (Last accessed August 2013.)
Bender, D. Wayne, From Wilderness to Wilderness: Celestia. Laporte, PA: Sullivan County Historical Society, 1995.
Boyer, Elizabeth W., Bryan R. Swistock, James Clark, Mark Madden, and Dana E. Rizzo. The Impact of Marcellus Gas Drilling on Rural Drinking Water Supplies Harrisburg, PA: Center for Rural Pennsylvania, 2012, updated.
Brown, Robbie. “Gas Drillers Asked to Change Method of Waste Disposal.” New York Times, April 20, 2011.
Brown, Sara. Unpublished and untitled senior thesis, Elizabethtown College, 2006, available at Sullivan County Historical Society and Museum.
Gold, R. “Faulty Wells, Not Fracking, Blamed for Water Pollution.” Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2012.
Klein, Philip Shriver, and Ari Arthur Hoogenboom. A History of Pennsylvania. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973.
Legere, Laura. “Stray Gas Plagues NEPA Marcellus Wells.” Daily Review (Towanda, PA), July 10, 2011.
McGraw, Seamus. The End of Country. New York: Random House, 2011.
Silver, Jonathan D. “Origins: The Story of a Professor, a Gas Driller and Wall Street.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 20, 2011.
Waples, David A. The Natural Gas Industry in Appalachia: A History from the First Discovery to the Maturity of the Industry. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005.
Wilber, Tom. Under the Surface: Fracking, Fortunes and the Fate of the Marcellus Shale. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012.
Chapter 11: Blessings of the Pope
While some pieces of this chapter have been reported elsewhere, the full story of Aubrey McClendon and Carl Pope has never been told before. I am grateful to Pope, Michael Brune, and other Sierra Club officials, including Ken Kramer, Jeremy Doochin, Barbara Frank, and Roger Downs, for sharing their recollections. Alan Nogee and Tim Wirth talked to me about environmentalists and their response to climate change and natural gas. Scott Anderson at the Environmental Defense Fund has, over many years, helped me find my way through confusing and contradictory statements by the industry and environmentalists.
Details of the 2011 protest march came from participants as well as from uploaded YouTube videos. The source of McClendon’s “We’re cold, it’s dark, and we’re hungry” quote is the September 2011 Marcellus Shale Insights Conference. It is archived here: http://www.chk.com/news/articles/pages/20110911_akm.aspx. (Last accessed August 2013.)
I reviewed copies of the Houston Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman, and other Texas newspapers on microfiche at the Austin Public Library to find the “Coal Is Filthy” ads. These ads were well covered by R. G. Ratcliffe at the Chronicle and Asher Price at the American-Stat
esman. Their articles helped piece together the broader story. The Tom Price quote is from an American-Statesman article. Texas secretary of state records indicate that the Clean Sky Coalition was registered on January 26, 2007, and that it was formed as Delaware nonprofit corporation a week earlier, on January 19. The coal lobby’s “disturbing departure” quote is from an April 22, 2008, Washington Post article, “Breaking the ‘Be Nice’ Rule in the Energy Family.”
Pope’s “Among the fossil fuels . . .” quote is from Nissa Darbonne’s interview with him, “An Unexpected Union.”
The history of TXU came from corporate material and the US Interior Department’s announcement that it was expanding the boundaries of the Dallas Downtown Historic District. Its $10 billion coal plan was covered in specialist publications such as Megawatt Daily as well as in the Dallas Morning News. More details are in the “background of the merger” section of TXU’s Prem-14a SEC filing on June 14, 2007. Details of the electrical power generation are from the Energy Information Administration’s Electric Power Annual 2006. Data on natural gas surpassing coal in Oklahoma and equaling coal output nationwide in April 2012 are from table 1.1 of the Energy Information Administration publication Electric Power Monthly. I also used this monthly publication for the changing US electrical mix. The EIA’s Monthly Energy Review was the source for my discussion of falling carbon dioxide emissions; see table 12.1. It must be noted that the sluggish economy, as well as coal-to-gas switching and improved energy efficiency, played a role in lower emissions.
Details of the February 2007 rally can be found in the February 16, 2007, edition of the Austin Chronicle, as well as a report and photographs on the Burnt Orange Report, a blog devoted to Lone Star politics. It can be found here: www.burntorangereport.com/diary/2890. (Last accessed August 2013.)
McClendon hasn’t talked at length about climate change, but his comments to a conference held by the Independent Petroleum Association of America on October 3, 2006, provided quotes and a degree of clarity. His “Coal is the wrong answer for Oklahoma today” quote is from a July 31, 2007, article in the Daily Oklahoman. His letter in the Tulsa World—the source of his quote that “Coal is simply on the wrong side of history”—appeared on August 26, 2007. “What’s the matter with self-interest? . . .” was in a Fort Worth Star-Telegram article on September 27, 2007. “We crave volatility” comes from a panel he appeared on at CERAWeek in 2007. The Thomas Friedman column, titled “Global Weirding Is Here,” appeared in the New York Times on February 17, 2010.
I read several years’ worth of Carl Pope’s bimonthly columns in Sierra, the Sierra Club’s magazine. He wrote about the threat posed by global warming to “all our previous gains” in “A World Transformed” in the March–April 2007 issue. I also read many issues of the Pennsylvania chapter’s newsletter, the Sylvanian, and the New York chapter’s Sierra Atlantic. The Alameda magazine profile of Brune, cited below, is the source of the story of his takeover of the PA system at Home Depot. Pope’s claim, “We will not take money from oil companies,” comes from a speech he gave at the City Club of Cleveland in June 2008. It is viewable here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQBkhXDAZKk. (Last accessed August 2013.) The Sierra Club’s Energy Resources Policy was first published in September 2006 and then updated in May 2009 and July 2011.
To learn more about the Ross #1, I reviewed filings by Gastem, the New York State legislature, and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. The December 4, 2011, New York Times published a profile of actor Mark Ruffalo that included his neighbor’s quote, under the headline “Ruffalo Embraces a Role Closer to Home.”
The IEA data on the impact of increased gas consumption on carbon dioxide emissions that Michael Brune discussed can be found on page 91 of the IEA publication Golden Rules for a Golden Age of Gas, which is cited below. The quote about how people “may find it difficult to accept” that gas helps slow the rise in carbon dioxide is on page 99 of this report.
The Citigroup report I referenced is called Shale & Renewables: A Symbiotic Relationship. It was written by Jason Channell and issued on September 12, 2012.
Birol, Fatih. World Energy Outlook 2011. Special Report: Are We Entering a Golden Age of Gas? Paris: IEA Publications, 2011.
———. Golden Rules for a Golden Age of Gas. Paris: IEA Publications, 2012.
Brune, Michael. Coming Clean: Breaking America’s Addiction to Oil and Coal. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2008.
Casselman, Ben. “Sierra Club’s Pro-Gas Dilemma: National Group’s Stance Angers On-the-Ground Environmentalists in Several States.” Wall Street Journal, December 21, 2009.
Cohen, Michael P. The History of the Sierra Club, 1892–1970. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988.
Darbonne, Nissa. “Dear Sierra Club, Do You Take This U.S. Natural Gas Industry? An Unexpected Union.” Oil and Gas Investor, March 4, 2008.
Devall, Bill. “The End of American Environmentalism?” Nature and Culture 1, no. 2 (Autumn 2006): 157–80.
Freeman, James. “The Weekend Interview with Aubrey McClendon: The Politically Incorrect CEO.” Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2012.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. IPCC Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Kennedy Jr., Robert F. “How to End America’s Deadly Coal Addiction.” Financial Times, July 19, 2009.
Leaton, James. Unburnable Carbon—Are the World’s Financial Markets Carrying a Carbon Bubble? London, UK: Carbon Tracker Initiative, 2011.
McKibben, Bill. “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” Rolling Stone, July 19, 2012.
Pope, Carl. Sahib: An American Misadventure in India. New York: Liveright, 1972.
Pope, Carl, and Paul Rauber. Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2004.
Robbins, Noelle. “Speak Softly and Carry a Big Green Stick: Michael Brune Kicks Butt for the Rainforest Action Network.” Alameda, July–August 2009.
Shogren, Elizabeth. “Natural Gas as a Climate Fix Sparks Friction.” NPR Morning Edition, February 23, 2010.
Walsh, Bryan. “How the Sierra Club Took Millions from the Natural Gas Industry—and Why They Stopped.” Time, February 2, 2012.
Chapter 12: Ghost Ridin’ Grandpa
The YouTube video of Claude Cooke and his wife ghost riding is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBPJTK1YBvs. When I last watched it, in August 2013, it had nearly 2.8 million views. Cooke first contacted me after my “Faulty Wells, Not Fracking, Blamed for Water Pollution” article appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in March 2012.
The source of the estimation that about $5 billion is spent on cementing, out of a total outlay of $105 billion, comes from correspondence with Richard Spears of Spears & Associates. He admits that determining the actual spending is difficult and the $5 billion figure should be treated as an informed estimate.
Details on the sixteen families whose properties were bought by Chesapeake can be found in the federal court case Phillips et al. v. Chesapeake Appalachia LLC in the Middle District of Pennsylvania. Also, the state Department of Environmental Protection press release “DEP Fines Chesapeake Energy More Than $1 Million,” dated May 17, 2011.
I have met and talked with Claude Cooke—and his grandson Brian Smiley—numerous times. The biographical material about Cooke came from interviews. The American Petroleum Institute’s calling Cooke’s work a “revelation” is from API Recommended Practice 65—Part 2, Isolating Potential Flow Zones During Well Construction (1st ed., May 2010). API Technical Report 10TR1, “Cement Sheath Evaluation” (2nd ed., September 2008), provides a thorough account of cement-testing technology and praises the isolation scanner, though it notes that the tool’s advanced sensor capability “does not probe deeper into the cement sheath” (section 9.8.5).
I constructed Marvin Gearhart’s biography largely from an 1982 o
ral history interview by Floyd Jenkins, available through the University of North Texas Oral History Program, Denton, Texas. This was the source of information about Gearhart Industries and the quote “I got it in my blood.” I also relied on contemporary newspaper accounts of the merger with Halliburton, published in the Dallas Morning News and Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and Halliburton filings with the SEC.
Mark Zoback’s quote “There are three keys—and those are well construction, well construction, and well construction” is from an interview and first appeared in my March 2012 Wall Street Journal article.
The radial differential temperature tool was issued US Patent no. 4,074,756 and the related US Patent no. 4,109,717. In addition, I relied on Cooke’s publications, the most important of which are cited below.
Information about the role of cement and the failed negative pressure test is from numerous sources compiled by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, including the chief counsel’s report, which went into detail about cementing. The quote “cementing an oil well . . .” is from page 99 of the report Deep Water: The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling—Report to the President. The detail about BP ordering well integrity testing is on page 95 of the chief counsel’s report Macondo: The Gulf Oil Disaster. Three key reports are cited below. Further information about what happened was first reported by my colleague Ben Casselman and me in the May 27, 2010, Wall Street Journal article “Unusual Decisions Set Stage for BP Disaster.”
Information about the Flatirons well comes from the “Evaluation of Precompletion Annular Gas Leaks in a Marcellus Lateral” paper cited below and from conversations with Jeff Jones, a managing director at the company, and Bob Ging, an attorney who represented Brockway Borough. Further details are from Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection internal reports and documents obtained through Right to Know Law requests. The well is DU 3-6-1H in Snyder, Pennsylvania. Among the papers I obtained that were important were daily inspection reports; a summary of a Section 501 conference meeting held on August 3, 2011; a Flatirons PowerPoint presentation dated February 23, 2011; and a Flatirons presentation discussing the pros and cons of remedial cementing, dated July 27, 2011.
