So are they justing making up stories about water pollution and gas drilling?

KATE COIL Bluefield Daily Telegraph

UNION — As the debate over drilling on the Marcellus shale continues, a Mercer County resident and engineer who has worked in the development of hydrofracture drilling said he wants to set the record straight.

Dr. L. Zane Shuck is a former West Virginia University and West Virginia University Tech professor as well as a retired professional engineer who worked early on with the development of hydrofracture technology. Shuck served with the U.S. Department of Energy for six years and has drilled more than 65 oil and gas wells as well as conducted more than 250 hydraulic fracturing stages. Shuck has also patented 12 energy recovery processes.

Currently, Shuck spends his time between homes in Mercer County and Morgantown and said that he finds much of the public in both areas of the state to be ill-informed of what hydrofracture drilling is really about. Shuck said the new horizontal drilling technology is much more effective at recovering natural gas.

“It takes one horizontal drill to access the same acreage as 22 vertical drills,” Shuck said. “Horizontal drilling is the best friend of the landowners, the ecologist and our environment. It minimizes the total societal disturbance. Horizontal wells are at least 50 to 100 times more effective in the recovery of reserves than a vertical well. When they intersect a natural fracture, it exhumes huge amounts of gas. The way hydrofracture is designed is that the fracture height is controlled by limestone cap rocks above and below. Fractures cannot grow out of the zone of the Marcellus shale. It’s the perfect circumstances to extract gas.”

According to Shuck, there is no evidence that hydrofracture drilling could pollute water supplies in wells.

“Many people are concerned about water wells, but Lisa Jackson, chief administrator for the EPA, has said there is no record in all of history where hydrofracture drilling has ruined a person’s water well,” Shuck said. “As an engineer, it is highly improbable that could ever happen. Now we are implementing the horizontal drilling technology and the fracture wells are contained. The new hydrofracture wells are thousands of feet deep as opposed to water wells, which are around 300 to 400 feet deep. The new drilling is a huge improvement in safety and prevents the intersecting of aquifers and water wells.”

Shuck said horizontal drilling technology will only disturb a minimal amount of land, compared to older drilling methods.

“These shale wells will produce at least 50 or even up to 75 or 100 years worth of energy,” he said. “This is a one-time, short-term disturbance that can provide us with long-term energy. It’s an optimization of all energy recovery with minimal disturbance. One horizontal drill would do the work of multiple vertical drills and would cut down on needed development, access roads, and traffic as it would cut down on the size of the drilling site. Instead of disturbing 22 acres of land, you can go to a remote area of the community, away from the farms and tourists, and drill out thousands of feet in one direction. Any energy recovery process or manufacturing process will disturb the area to some degree. We are somewhat of a spoiled society, and we have to deal with that to maintain and sustain our standards of living.”

According to Shuck, there are many benefits to drilling.

“There are tremendous economic benefits to everyone who lives in West Virginia,” he said. “It can help reduce taxes for every individual in West Virginia. Counties will be able to reduce property taxes and we will have a domestic energy source, so we don’t need to import energy from other countries. We are creating our own energy supply and converting that natural gas into a new product. It stimulates the economy. Natural gas is the cleanest energy we can recover and the easiest to procure.”

Most of all, Shuck said he is concerned that not enough information is getting out about the positive side of drilling.

“My concern is this: the Marcellus issue is not a major issue in this area yet for cities, but it will be,” Shuck said. “The irony is the public is protesting this new, effective technology and still allowing the ineffectual technology to continue due to a disturbing lack of public knowledge. There is only one side of the story that seems to be made public. There is a lot of negative information out there that lacks the technological information and facts. People need to know the facts. The bottom line is, as one who helped develop the technology that is applied today, there are more advantages to the to this technology, which has been developed in West Virginia for more than 40 years.”