Marcellus Shale Protest Brings 100 to Courthouse
Residents speak up
Morgantown Dominion Post
19 May 2011
By Jim Bissett
Rallygoers and others who want to continue the protest can attend a
meeting at 7 p.m. Friday, in the Morgantown High School cafeteria.
John Barnes tapped right to the source of the angst Wednesday morning
as he stood on Courthouse Square to protest the planned drilling of two
Marcellus shale wells in the Morgantown Industrial Park.
“I’m telling you, if we don’t step up, it’s going to be like a
moonscape around here,” said Barnes, who was among the crowd of 100 who
turned out to discuss ways to persuade (or force) the gas industry to
slow up on the extraction process that he says ruins streams and makes
farmland barren.
Barnes was talking about work that started a week and a half ago in the
city’s industrial park near Westover to extract natural gas from the
Marcellus shale, a 450,000-year-old geographic formation running
thousands of feet under Appalachia and the Allegheny Mountains,
including most of West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Northeast Natural Energy, of Charleston, is planning the work.
Energy experts say the shale’s wellspring of natural gas can meet the
United States’ energy needs for the next 10-15 years.
But it doesn’t yield its treasures easily.
The formation lies at least 8,000 feet beneath West Virginia’s mainly
rugged, and mostly rural, terrain.
Drilling in the shale means using about 6 million gallons per well of
chemically treated water to fracture, or “frack,” the buried rock to
release the gas.
The water must first be drawn from area streams. Then, in its
incarnation of “frack water,” it must be pumped back out. In the
industrial park, water is a triple issue, since the wells will be drawn
around 1,500 feet from a drinking water intake for the Morgantown
Utility Board.
That’s too close, Barnes and others on Courthouse Square said.
There’s always the danger of the well blowing out, they said. Or the
chance of chemically treated water leaking into the ecosystem from
normal wear on pipes as water is funneled in — then back out again —
after the extraction.
The rush to tap into the shale’s reserves, he said, is creating a
frenzied, boomtown economy ripe for accidents that can lead to injuries
and environmental disasters.
Several protestors carried signs with water themes to that effort: “I
bathe and I vote,” read one. “Don’t frack with our water,” was written
across another.
Brett Loflin, a vice president of regulatory affairs Northeast Natural
Energy, said Wednesday afternoon from Charleston that residents need
not worry about the Morgantown project wrecking the ecosystem or
compromising the water supply.
Loflin said his company employs environmental practices that “go
beyond” current regulatory standards, such as steel tanks for frack
water storage — “We won’t discharge any fluids into earthen pits,” he
said — and the use of synthetic liners to catch any water in the event
there is a spill.
“We’re a West Virginia company,” he said. “We live here, we work here.
We hunt and fish here. We’re not going to do anything to hurt the
environment here.”
Barnes isn’t so sure.
“This is just the beginning,” said Barnes, who lives in Morgantown and
grew up in Fayette County, Pa. “Pennsylvania has been run over
roughshod.”
WVU professor Jim Kotcon, an environmental activist and West Virginia
Sierra Club member, said everyone on Courthouse Square needed to write
a letter — preferably, right then and there, he said — to acting Gov.
Earl Ray Tomblin.
“He can’t read your mind,” Kotcon said.
“Unless you tell him, he doesn’t know it. But I can guarantee you, he
knows what the gas companies are doing.”