What’s new in exploration

 Vol. 232 No. 12

Shale gas is bringing scrutiny to many areas outside of the traditional oil patch, leaving some US states scrambling to create or revise regulatory frameworks to govern exploration, production, and transportation. Lawmakers are increasingly calling upon university geoscientists to examine data, evaluate or even introduce new technologies, and interface with local landowners.

The Appalachian basin is rich in shales, from the Upper Ordovician Trenton-Black River and Utica formations to the Middle Devonian Marcellus shale.

The Marcellus fairway falls short of the Finger Lakes, but Ithaca, New York does sit above producible Utica shale. Cornell University faculty members have become increasingly involved in the shale gas debate. Larry D. Brown, Chair of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS), along with fellow researchers Teresa Jordan, Louis Derry and Jason Phipps-Morgan, have been working under a grant from the NY State Energy Research and Development Authority to look at gas recovery in central New York state. Another grant from the National Science Foundation funds an effort to help landowners understand drilling in the Marcellus, which is 3,000–7,000 ft deep in southern New York state, and outcrops north of Syracuse.

In Houston last month, Brown characterized “Marcellus Madness” and the current shale debate as a test case for looking at the tradeoffs between protecting the environment and securing our energy future. “It gives university researchers tangible, immediate exposure to issues,” he said. And there is a need to share factual geological information in a non-biased forum. In what is best characterized as a symbolic response to citizens’ concerns, the City of Buffalo passed an ordinance, in February, forbidding hydraulic fracturing, even though the Marcellus is not found within city limits.

The landman cometh. Aside from his academic career as a geophysicist, Brown has personal, backyard experience with shale gas. His home overlies the Soderblom unit, about 25 mi southwest of the university. Geoscientists conducted a helicopter-assisted 3D survey in addition to a dynamite survey through the woods near his house. He has 75 acres leased to Talisman and describes the wellhead on his neighbor’s property as “unobtrusive”.

Brown countered one argument about the “excessive” use of water for gas well development in local perspective. He estimated that a hydraulic fracturing job uses 3–9 million gal per well, but the Bolton Point power plant on Lake Cayuga uses 2.55 million gal every day. The City of Ithaca uses 3.75 million gal/day, and Cornell Univ. uses 1.34 million gal/day. In addition, Cayuga Lake level fluctuates seasonally, and each drop of 1 m represents 45 trillion gal. “Water [requirements for hydrofracturing] is a non-issue,” Brown concluded. Yet Cornell banned hydrofracturing on university property in 2010.

Tour de Frac. Cornell Professor Chuck Greene is an avid cyclist whose “personal mission is to advocate for developing clean-energy solutions,” according to the Cornell Chronicle. In September, the Finger Lakes Cycling Club hosted a local cycling event through the countryside surrounding Ithaca, visiting areas where land has already been leased for shale gas drilling.

“We want participants to think about the financial hardships faced by people not very far from Ithaca and realize that some of the people living there see gas drilling as an opportunity to rise above their current economic hardships,” Greene said.

“In addition, we all need to come to grips with the reality that the coal Ithaca currently relies on to provide much of its electricity is mined, often by mountaintop removal, in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. These practices are much more environmentally destructive than the gas drilling with hydrofracturing already going on in Pennsylvania and proposed for New York. We need to meet our local energy needs,” Greene said, “but we also need to maintain a sustainable environment.”

Brown announced that Cornell’s EAS Department has designed a new professorship in Environmental Balance for Human Sustainability, because “we’ve got to find solutions.”

Fighting propaganda. Studying the numbers and bringing honest analyses to the public is important, Brown said, because the choice of words and interpretation of statistics in a controversial issue belies inappropriate bias. He was chagrined that a recent screening of the Gasland movie on campus generated no academic discussion. He questions why “horizontal drilling” is perceived as environmentally unfriendly technology, and why casing gas leakage is perceived as more of a potential problem in New York than in all the cased wells around the US.

Debate certainly occurs within the university community itself. In May 2011, Prof. Robert Howarth and Renee Santoro from the Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Prof. Anthony Ingraffea from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering published a letter in Climatic Change Journal suggesting that shale gas emissions could be as dirty as coal. Their conclusions were refuted in a study published by Carnegie Mellon University researchers in August.

Brown also challenges the Howarth analyses, because it was based on heat, rather than electricity, thus downplaying the greater efficiency of natural gas in electricity generation.

Brown’s commentary, written with colleagues Larry Cathes, Milton Taam and Andrew Hunter, will be published in early 2012.  

ERRATA
In the November column, “Non-radiogenic neutron generation for downhole logging,” the nGen plasma neutron generator output that is equivalent to a 4-Curie Am-Be source should have been 10 million D-D neutrons/second (1E7 DD n/s).