This is to discuss the effect on our water of the gas exploration that is coming to our valley.
First, I want to stress, it's coming. I know of nobody besides ourselves and Dean Starner that has not leased their land for drilling. I am in dialogue with Dean about the impact of what happens on his property in relation to ours and offering to help him in the negotiation of a lease.
So, let's examine the potential drilling sites near our property:
Larry Kneller's woodlot property right next door is large enough to put a drill pad right on top of the hill, but road access is too restricted to get to it without going on someone else's property so I think it's unlikely.
Pete Hatton's land on the other side of us (bordering the new land donated to the Manse by Dar) is also large enough to put a drill pad on, but there is no road access to it except from his contiguous pieces on the other side of it that they'd have to drive over to get to the parcel next to us, and his other pieces of land are more suitable for drilling operations and I think the Gas company would prefer them.
This makes it unlikely that we will have drilling uphill from the Manse. Jay Chadwick, on the other hand, has a lovely flat farm field right on top of a gas pipeline and right next to the road that is just suited down to the ground for gas drilling........
Well, who knows what goes on in the mind of a Gas Company. We can only guess, but best guess is that we'll be to the side or at a higher elevation than whatever gas drilling occurs. I believe that Jay will have a rig, and there will be another in the Camptown flats. Just my opinion. Remember that one drill pad services a 1 square mile pool so they're not really that close together.
The closest wellhole is Randy Brigham's well up behind Spring Hill. It's two valleys away so I don't fear it's pollution. There are 3 more permits granted for that area. There are currently no permits granted in the Camptown/Merryall valley. It is, however, only a matter of time.
The horizontal portion of the gas well is 7,000 feet down. Water tables around here are about 50 to 100 feet down. The rock all the way down to the horizontal well is stratified in horizontal layers some of which are very porous, others of which are very impervious. What happens down 7,000 feet is unlikely to percolate up on its own to where we would interact with it on the surface.
But........the vertical portion of the well pierces every layer. Each vertical well hole is cased with a steel casing surrounded by cement which is supposed to seal up what comes up the wellhole from going into the surrounding rock, but does it? Nobody knows and you can't tell until it's too late.
And, if it does leach out of the hole somehow, then because it has pierced the entire 7,000 foot layer cake of rocks it has provided a route between layers through which fluids like gas or water or frackfluid can migrate from one layer to another.
Once it invades a layer, it can travel along that layer. We've all seen this in the large rock cuts for the highway where water (or ice in the winter) seeps in large quantities out from the middle of the cut, flowing possibly for miles along some split between layers of rock deep in the mountain. This is all theory. I haven't observed it, nor seen any evidence of it, but to say it couldn't happen is simply false.
The fracking operations in Colorado resulted in a total of 800 reported spills and leaks during the 4 or 5 years that this type of drilling was implemented. On the otherhand, nobody was out in them thar hills watching them thar drillers.
In Susquehanna County (just east of Bradford County) one well had three spills of frack fluid in two weeks. Killed some fish in the creek and some small trees. Nobody's checked on long term effects because it happened two months ago. But somebody caught them and the DEP came there and shut the operations of the entire company down for 30 days while they came up with a plan.
Mind - just the one well (they're operating 17 wells up there) was bringing them about $60,000 a day in revenues, so that little spill cost them upwards of 25 million dollars in lost revenue for the month for all their wells. These guys do NOT want to be shut down. So, local vigilance makes a big impact.
This sounds dramatic, but it's well documented. The problem comes in directly linking it to a specific human activity. So, just some ideas here. The Barnett shale formation which endured a couple of years ago the same profile of leasing/drilling that is currently happening here has recorded alot of minor earth tremors.
Local feeling is that they're feeling the gradual compression of the fracked horizontal wells as the gas is removed and the pressures are relieved. Earthquakes are known to have happened when large resevoirs behind dams are filled, also the gradual collapse of abandoned coal mines.
How serious is it with Horizontal drilling and fracking? Nobody knows. But, the process intentionally pulverizes a 300-foot-thick layer of the ground, and if it is up to the Gas company they will do this on every one of Bradford County's 1,000 square miles. Will the whole county drop 300 feet into a 1,000 square mile sinkhole when they're done? Nobody knows.
Our water supply is a spring. The watertable that feeds this spring is judged to be no more than 20 or 30 feet deep on the side of the hill behind the house and is restricted to the rainwater that runs off that hill. I believe (but have not confirmed) that it is not fed by any other springs or streams from anyone else's property.
The catchbasin for our spring is almost entirely on our property, thanks to the recent purchase and donation of the contiguous 23-acre land parcel from Dar (Yay!). If we signed a lease that allowed drilling, the only, indeed the perfect, place to put a 5 acre drill pad is exactly in the center of that watershed. I submit that doing so would permanently and irretrievably damage the water system.
One way to pollute this watershed would require surface spilliage or dumping in the catchbasin. That means you have to get your poison at a higher elevation than the spring, pour it on the ground up there and have it percolate into the catchbasin. I think this is extremely unlikely since our non-surface-disturbance lease would prevent any activity on our property of any kind.
Another way to pollute this watershed is to force pollutants at high pressure through the natural seams that divide the layers of shale that make up the mountain under the catchbasin from some outcropping of that seam on another part of the mountain.
This can happen with Fracking a gas well that isn't cased properly with a steel lining. If Dean Starner or Pete Hatton put a drill rig on the other side of the hill, but at an elevation higher than that of our spring, escaping pressures during fracking in an improperly cased well could force pollutants through the hill along any open seams into this side of the hill and out into the catchbasin for our water.
I think this unlikely, but it's possible. Nothing we can do about it except talk to Dean and persuade him to stipulate in his lease that the gas company can't drill on that side of his hill (it's too late for Pete - he's already leased, so the Gas company can put a rig anywhere they damn please). I am talking to Dean currently to persuade him of this and he seems receptive.
I don't think that runoff from any of the potential or likely drilling operations that I believe are coming will pollute the spring. Fracking, I don't know. But, I don't see it coming from spillage. I see only the remote possibility that it will seep through the hill. Nobody's documented such a thing, but it's not been out there long enough for anyone to document either.
Wells are very susceptible to the process of fracking. Lots of documentation and evidence that fracking drives all kinds of crap into the water table and it collects in people's wells. Methane, grit, etc. If that's migrating into people's wells, what about the fracking fluid? Well, nobody knows, hey? It's not been around long enough to really really conclusively tell. So, my opinion? I'm glad we don't have a well!
Streams are very vulnerable to runoff. Drill pads are a mess. They do try to contain runoff, but they're primarily doing drilling, not soil conservation. Also, there's 50 trucks a day going in and out during construction of the pad and drilling the wells, to say nothing of 150 fracking storage stations and 450 tankers full of frack fluid to serve them.
All this happens in the 30 to 45 days of drilling. And, every frack tank is filled by three tankers through a hose - they have to hook it on and take it off for every one of the 450 tankers. Do they shake the handle? Dunno. When it rains? Well, everything gets washed and it all goes away.......So, my opinion? I won't be swimming in the creek for a while.
But, hey - the Magnificent and Beautiful Susquehanna River down which we canoe, in which our children have happily swum, has riverbottom sediment so polluted with the heavy metal concentrate dumped in the first half of the 20th century by the industry leaders of the Towanda basin that the Dept of Environmental Protection recommends leaving it lay rather than risking the health hazard of disturbing it during the attempt at removal.
We're being experimented on at this time. The problem many people have with Frack fluids is similar to that of the heavy metal sediments - it's not the hydrochloric acid type things in it that kill everything on contact; you can see that impact, it's the invisible long-term cancer type stuff that sits around for ever unseen and leeches the life out of the place.
Choose your target on this issue.
I belive it's done. Everyone but us and Dean has leased. I believe they're going to drill for gas in the valley at some point whether we lease or not.
Please consider that at the moment we have neither the legal right, nor the personal influence over the decision of our neighbors to bring drilling indelibly to our locale whether we lease or no. All we can do is limit its presence on our own property, educate the neighbors who are still undecided, and let the coming drill crews know that we're watching.
The advantage to us all about leasing is that it is an agreement between victim and perpetrator dictating the use of the land. Both parties are not only bound by its terms, they both have an aligned and vested interest in holding to those terms.
Just make sure during the negotiation that the lease actually does dictate the use of the land to the best advantage of both parties, spells it out, leaves nothing hidden, no loopholes that bring unexpected consequences. That's the challenge.