After some gas wells were drilled in Dimock, PA, natural gas was found in the water wells of a few nearby homes. As usual, the anti-drilling crowd made a major production of it, igniting the water coming out of the kitchen faucets and featuring the story and videos on their anti-drilling web sites. But according to professional WATER WELL drillers, this is nothing new and, in certain geographic locations, it happens even where drilling has NOT occurred.
We recently found an interesting article on the pagaslease.com web site that attributes the following quotes to an article in the Hancock Herald. Below are excerpts from the article.
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"Local Water Well Driller offers insight into Marcellus shale drilling Process"
2-10-2010 by Sally Zegers
"Francis Tully of Poyntelle, Pa., a well driller for most of his life, weighed in recently on drilling for natural gas in the area, based on what he calls the science of the drilling process. The Tully Drilling Company was started in 1928, by his father, Ben Tully."
" Tully Drilling was a major and well respected business in Wayne County for several decades, serving farmers and small business people across the area. Over the years, according to Francis Tully, the company drilled 10,000 wells across several counties and two states, and he still has the files to prove it."
"He says the phenomenon of "fracture zone seepage" is relatively common in Susquehanna and Wayne Counties and drillers often found natural gas while drilling for water. The internet features several videos of people "flaring" matches at water faucets in Susquehanna County, which is cited as evidence that gas drilling is damaging private water wells. However, drillers fifty years ago often found that they could flare matches at the faucets. According to Francis Tully, near Clifford, in Susquehanna County, "nearly every well in the area" has natural gas."
"According to Francis Tully, the photographs he’s seen of the (water) well that blew up in Dimock, Pa. on New Year’s Day 2009 lead him to believe that the (water) tank itself blew up. He believes the (pressure) switch froze in the on position, and it couldn’t switch off, allowing pressure to build and build until the tank blew apart. "Tanks do blow up," he says, noting that he’s seen it happen many times over the 60 plus years he was in the business. According to him, one tank came up through the floor of a living room, hit the ceiling and ended up on the divan. "
"He believes drilling for natural gas should be "perfectly safe" as long the drillers use three layers of pipe, using surface casing down to 1,000 feet, then drilling 7,600 feet to the Marcellus Shale. Then you case it again and grout it. The level at which water is found is relatively shallow. Drillers will bore through it with boreholes encased in steel and concrete, to protect the water supply, Tully points out. The Marcellus Shale is more than a mile underground. The different levels of rock and shale in the earth are like "pages in a book," he says. He points out that the layers of rock protect the water in the upper level. Fracturing, something water drillers have done for years with dynamite, only fractures the rock close to the well, not the thousands of feet above it.
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2 comments:
Just because gas is "found naturally" in many places doesn't invalidate the concerns of many who feel that it is the activity of the drilling itself-the high pressures used and the horizontal methods covering a greater area in the rock, that might create problems where they never would have existed. Rocks, even underground, MOVE if they are disturbed. This may not happen all at once, but over a period of time. There have been many cases of people never having a problem with their water, and then the gas companies got there, and suddenly there WAS a problem. Are all these instances just unhappy coincidence?
Add to this the problem of well casings that fail, and this does not add up to being a coincidence. Until gas drillers put some kind of tracer in the well when they drill, there is no way to trust that all these instances are "just coincidence" or "natural" no matter how bad you want to believe it.
Mr. Tully - I am very glad to see you actively involved with the discussion. As a young geologist, I worked with you on a number of projects in Wayne County. I agree with the use of multiple steel protective casings. Thanks for taking a leadership role.
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