Chesapeake CEO: No 'Lasting Environmental Damage' from Fracking

Times-Shamrock
9 April 2011
By Charles Sschillinger

DALLAS, TEXAS - Issues of water contamination in Northeast Pennsylvania are due to the region's geology, and they have not - and likely will not - be seen elsewhere, the CEO of Chesapeake Energy Corp. told reporters and editors at a business journalism conference Friday.

Aubrey McClendon, CEO of the Oklahoma City, Okla.-based company, said the drilling issue with Northeast Pennsylvania's "very unusual surface geology" has been solved and should hopefully mean there are no future incidents of water contamination, but did not elaborate on what contamination incidents he was referring to.

There has been no "lasting environmental damage" from hydraulic fracturing drilling, he added.

Pennsylvania recently established stronger well casing and cementing standards meant to help prevent methane from migrating into water supplies.

In his keynote address, the CEO told business media that while there are stories worth writing on truck traffic, noise and even drilling company transparency, "fracking is not the story."

McClendon also said an agency would on Monday announce a major step forward for gas drilling companies releasing chemicals used in drilling.

The Groundwater Protection Council and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission will debut the new online registry of chemical additives used in hydraulic fracturing jobs at fracfocus.org. The well-by-well information is being supplied voluntarily by major natural gas operators. The data is culled from materials safety sheets, which critics have argued are vague and incomplete.

McClendon went on to say "there is no such thing as clean coal" and blasted efforts to produce clean coal as a "waste of money."

The CEO said fracking has "fundamentally changed the price of gas." The price ranges around $4 per 1,000 cubic feet now, compared to $8 per 1,000 cubic feet several years ago. But he said the national conversion from using oil as a fuel to natural gas is likely still two decades away.

In a separate panel discussion at the conference, David P. Poole, senior vice president and general counsel for Fort Worth, Texas-based Range Resources Corp., said "it is physically impossible for you to frack a Marcellus well ... and have any impact on groundwater."

Asked what the cause of groundwater contamination is if it is not fracking, he acknowledged that's something the industry has to address.

"Unless we can prove we are innocent, we are not," he said, adding that doing baseline testing of water wells before companies do drilling would show what the water quality is beforehand and would also show if there was already contamination.

Contact the writer: cschillinger@timesshamrock.com.