Mike Lovegreen has no ax to grind. He just tells it like he sees it. And see it he has. A Bradford County (PA) Conservation District staffer doing his job day after day for over 25 years, Lovegreen has become intimately familiar with every acre of the rolling hills, forests, and abundant dairy farms some 60 miles northwest of Scranton. With thick mustache, mutton chops, and unruly hair, he does not look the part of someone charged as District Manager with stewarding the natural resources of Pennsylvania’s second largest county—and the one with the first and most numerous natural gas wells using hydro-fracturing in the state.
I met him last week tagging along on this newspaper’s fact finding journey up the Susquehanna River. In our six hours and endless miles touring with him, Lovegreen guided us through the good, the bad, and the ugly of gas drilling with little editorializing and few hints of emotion.
The good: We saw booming restaurants, motels, and retail stores; met farmers and landowners now out of debt; and observed restored gas line rights-of-way. The bad: We heard about the huge influx of workers, a big increase in 911 calls, and about skyrocketing rents forcing people on fixed incomes to leave the area. We crawled through traffic jams in Troy, PA, population 1,457; and we witnessed paved state roads that had been reduced to mud by gas production activity. (“Expect bad roads for the next fifty years,” said Lovegreen. “That comes from a gas official, not me.”)
As for the ugly: We learned that the local residents should anticipate an average of 3000 tanker truck trips per drill pad meaning some 8-9 million truck trips over the duration of the gas play in that region alone. We toured a scenic countryside now blanketed with a spider web of gas lines, access roads and a patchwork of 4-5 acre drilling pads and 2 acre containment ponds (full of fresh water for the fracking process). We rode past crop after abundant crop of survey ribbons sprouting in virtually every field signaling the drilling to come.
“Eighty five, probably 90% of the land in this county has been leased to the gas companies,” said Lovegreen. “The DEP is so busy now, all they have time for is administrative approval in an office somewhere—just so long as the gas company’s engineer has stamped the papers. Some wells have never had an inspection.”
Reflecting upon his day-to-day job, Lovegreen said, “I feel bad making some little guy jump through hoops for six months or more just to put a tiny pond behind the house. The gas companies can apply for a 2-3 acre containment pond on one day and have it built 12 days later.”
Terry Lutz, Supervisor of Troy, met up with us for lunch at the Edgewood Family Restaurant on Elmira Street. Business was brisk for a Wednesday. “There’s only 200 wells now and we got nonstop truck traffic and beat up roads,” he said, “but just wait until all the main lines and connecting lines are in place. There will be thousands (of wells) and these guys are going to be here in a big way for a long, long time.”
Lutz cited the 17 year life of a well which can then be refracked. He also rattled off the names of gas bearing shales deeper than the Marcellus—the Oriskany, the Utica, and the Black River Formations—which could be tapped in time with existing and improved technology. “We’re looking at our children’s generation and beyond,” he concluded.
Lovegreen agreed. “This gas play is all tied up with national security and energy issues,” he said. “The Energy Policy Act exempted them from regulation under the Clean Air Act and Safe Drinking Water Act. They pretty much can do anything they want. We’re just a throw away zone.”
“National sacrifice zone” is the term that West Virginians apply to their region under assault for decades by poorly regulated coal extraction and now mountaintop removal mining. The gas industry points out that their own production does not alter the environment nearly as much as strip mining; and the land can be made to look much the same as it did before drilling ever began. In theory, the thousands of well pads in field after field could be scraped of their millions of cubic yards of gravel and graded back to match the contour of the land (albeit not the soil’s original fertility). Pipelines buried in fields are already indistinguishable from the surrounding pasture (although those going through forestland will always be an unnatural straight swath of grass).
Lovegreen and Lutz held out the probability that the massive presence of the gas industry in Bradford County would subside in time. Though the statistics, they said, are stacked against them regarding any happy outcome from a boom and bust era (studies show that a region is usually worse off after the boom than it was before) life could return to normal—but not for several generations.
Heading home back down the Susquehanna, I kept trying to take the measure of 60 years. Depending upon your perspective, those decades might seem a tolerable sacrifice for “homegrown energy” and for the wealth that will come to some. Unless, of course, you would prefer not to live in a region wholly dominated by an industry in boom mode. And unless, of course, the fracking fluids—benzene, toluene, and their sister chemicals—have contaminated an entire aquifer—in which case, 60 years becomes forever.
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