Effect of Marcellus Drilling on West Virginia Fisheries Could be
Profound
Charleston Gazette
19 February 2011
By John McCoy
Fisheries scientists and conservation groups worry that gas drilling in
the Marcellus Shale might affect fishing, particularly in small streams
and more particularly in the Tygart and Little Kanawha river
watersheds, the current hotbeds of Marcellus activity.
As West Virginia's lawmakers work on a bill that would regulate
natural-gas drilling in the state's Marcellus Shale deposits, one point
has become abundantly clear:
The process revolves around water - water that would be pumped from
creeks and rivers; water that, once used, would be polluted with
chemicals and toxic metals; water that, if later allowed to escape,
could contaminate the very streams and rivers it was drawn from.
"I don't think the average West Virginian understands the sheer amount
of water required for these wells," said Frank Jernejcic, a district
fisheries biologist for the state Division of natural Resources. "It
takes 1 million to 5 million gallons per well. Most tanker trucks hold
about 4,500 gallons. If a well needs a million gallons, the driller
would need 220 trucks to transport the water to the well site. If the
well needs 5 million gallons, it's going to take around 1,000
truckloads to do the job."
The water is used for a process called hydraulic fracturing, or
"fracking." Drillers add chemicals to the water and pump it into the
well under intense pressure, where it fractures deep-lying rock strata
and frees up additional volumes of gas.Companies are already drilling
in the Marcellus formation, and much of the water they're using is
pumped from streams located near wellheads. Many of those streams are
quite small.
Jernejcic and his colleagues believe too much pumping, or pumping
during dry spells, could dewater some streams to a point where fish and
other aquatic life would die.
"We currently have no law regulating water withdrawal from streams, and
we need one," Jernejcic said. "The [Division of Environmental
Protection] has an 'interactive water withdrawal tool' on its website
that recommends to drillers when a stream is too low to pump from, but
it's really only a suggestion and it has no teeth."
Janet Clayton, a DNR biologist who specializes in mussel research, said
several beds of mussels were left high and dry last summer on streams
where Marcellus pumping was taking place.
"We don't know definitively if pumping led to those mussel beds being
stranded, but companies were removing water from those streams during a
drought," Clayton said. "You can't dewater a stream and expect aquatic
life to live."
One endangered mussel species - the clubshell mussel - is known to
exist in the Little Kanawha River and Middle Island Creek watersheds,
both Marcellus-drilling hotspots. A second species common to those
streams, the snuffbox mussel, is currently under consideration for
endangered status.
"Theoretically, a company withdrew enough water from those streams to
kill a snuffbox or a clubshell, the company would be in violation of
the federal Endangered Species Act," Clayton said.
Biologists also worry about the amount of sediment being stirred up by
Marcellus-related activity by road building, stream crossings and
well-site development.
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"Some of the stuff that's going on is pretty bad," Jernejcic said. "The
big, bad example is in the Fish Creek drainage of Wetzel County. One of
the companies built a road right up the streambed of a little stream
named Blake Run. They bulldozed a waterfall and filled it in. It's a
road now. The [federal] EPA is investigating that one."
Large rivers such as the Ohio and Monongahela would appear to be
environmentally friendlier water-withdrawal sites, but Jernejcic said
those watersheds have a couple of strikes against them.
"First there are the transportation costs," he explained. "It takes a
lot less fuel to move 200 trucks a few miles from a little headwater
stream than it would take to move them 25 or 30 miles from a major
river.
"And then there concerns about the potential loss of water that could
be used to supplement river flows for navigation. The [U.S. Army] Corps
of Engineers has already expressed misgivings about having water taken
from Tygart and Stonewall Jackson lakes."
Yet another fisheries-related concern is the potential for water
pollution caused by escaped frack water. Twenty to 50 percent of the
water used to frack a well returns to the surface. Companies can truck
that water to storage or treatment facilities, pump it to small
reservoirs built for that purpose, or re-inject it into the earth deep
below existing water tables.
The legislation under consideration largely deals with issues related
to truck transportation. Larry Orr, acting environmental vice-president
for the Kanawha Valley Chapter of Trout Unlimited, would rather see it
focus on the amount of water being withdrawn and with preventing frack
water from poisoning streams.
"From a fisherman's point of view, water quantity and quality have to
be the main concerns," said Orr, a retired chemical engineer. "My
concern is how they handle all that [frack water] brine. My concern is
that they want to start injecting it underground without treatment.
They say it isn't ever going to [resurface]. I have a problem believing
that."
Even as the legislative wrangling takes place, companies are building
the infrastructure needed to support Marcellus drilling on an even
larger scale.
"Some of the companies are building big pits where they can store
millions of gallons of water," Jernejcic said. "They're building
pipelines so they can pump the water up from the rivers. In Wetzel
County, there must be dozens of those pits. They're up to 5 acres in
size, and 30 to 40 feet deep.
"And the companies are continuing to apply for drilling permits. Those
permits are good for two years, so you have accountants in corporate
offices deciding where to drill based on where they can get X million
gallons of water. I visited one well site perched way up on the side of
a steep slope. I asked the boss why they chose that spot, and he told
me someone in Oklahoma City had sent him the [GPS] coordinates.
"The bottom line is that people outside West Virginia are making
decisions about what is going to be done here, and we don't have a
coherent regulatory apparatus in place. We need one. We need a bottom
line so if someone messes up, [state officials] can give them a proper
kick in the ass."
Reach John McCoy at johnmc...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-1231.