Comment

Comment by Greg Ricks on March 4, 2010 at 7:43am

For SK Miller:

Spoiler Alert-

The secret is that there is no secret.

Sorry! Hope I didn't ruin it for you.

Comment by BuckinghamGasMan on March 4, 2010 at 6:49am

RFS: I know that the paper is not on-line, do you have an on-line subscription or a better way to get articles than I've found?

Comment by Robin Fehrenbach Scala on March 4, 2010 at 5:59am

Here it is:

Hancock Herald, Hancock, NY

Local Water Well Driller offers insight into Marcellus shale drilling Process

2-10-2010

by Sally Zegers

Francis Tully of Poyntelle, Pa., a well driller for most of his life, weighed in recently on drilling for natural gas in the area, based on what he calls the science of the drilling process.
The Tully Drilling Company was started in 1928, by his father, Ben Tully. The elder Tully had been a Ford dealer in the area, during the era when new cars arrived in boxes by train, and the dealers put them together. “Dad excelled with people,” he says.
According to Francis, his father bought a brand new Ford truck and drove it to Ohio to have a drill rig mounted on it. The engine ran both the truck and then the drill rig, once the truck’s back wheels were hoisted off the ground. The Tullys, father Ben and sons Francis and Tom, were in the water well drilling business.
“It was a good business,” Francis said. He learned it from the ground up, literally, after being put to work after graduation in 1942.
He says he tried in vain to enter the Army, turned down seven times because of a large and distinctive hemangioma, or blood cyst, on his lower lip. “The doctors were afraid I’d get hit there and it would bleed heavily,” he says now. “I tried to tell them no one was getting that close to me.”
He returned home and his father “put me to work.” It was easy to learn everything about the process because Ben Tully “didn’t believe in doing a lot of hiring,” and Francis had to run five machines. At that time, he says, it took one to two weeks to drill a water well. With today’s technology, a well can be drilled in a few hours.
Tully Drilling was a major and well respected business in Wayne County for several decades, serving farmers and small businesspeople across the area. “Dad worked with all the farmers. Farmers’ credit was always good,” he says. He recalls his father getting a dozen Rhode Island Reds as partial payment on one job. Unfortunately, he forgot he already had a fighting rooster in the coop, and the family ate a lot of chicken for a while.
Over the years, according to Francis Tully, the company drilled 10,000 wells across several counties and two states, and he still has the files to prove it.
He says the phenomenon of “fracture zone seepage” is relatively common in Susquehanna and Wayne Counties and drillers often found natural gas while drilling for water. The internet features several videos of people “flaring” matches at water faucets in Susquehanna County, which is cited as evidence that gas drilling is damaging private water wells. However, drillers fifty years ago often found that they could flare matches at the faucets. According to Francis Tully, near Clifford, in Susquehanna County, “nearly every well in the area” has natural gas.
The gas is so much deeper underground that it’s under much higher pressure, and is forced up into the level that holds the water, he says. He expects the Equinunk area to be a hot spot for gas, based on his experience drilling wells.
The phenomenon occurs mainly on land near streams and the river. In New York State, he reports, when gas was encountered, it was a 50-50 split between natural gas or sulphur. “You had to be careful not to drill too deeply,” he said, “or you’d get sulphur.”
If you did drill too deep and got sulphur water, you had to plug that well and get the water from a more shallow spot in the drilled hole. To do that, he says, drillers took a piece of wood, and put a staple on top of it. They would cover the wood with burlap and put it down the well, below the spot where they wanted it, then yank it up with great force, lodging the wood at the spot where they wanted the well to be plugged. Then they poured concrete on top of the wooden plug.
Over the years he has encountered almost every situation possible in drilling water wells, from finding gas and even oil, and finding nothing - not even water. He drilled four wells on one property before he struck water for the homeowner. Being hired to find water, he points out, means you have to find water, meaning he only charged the homeowner for the one successful well, and ate the rest of the cost.
Tully Drilling also did a lot of business in Scranton, closing off old mines, and trying to put out mine fires. He’s proud of his family’s work in completely extinguishing one mine fire, a rare occurrence. He admits that it took 99,000 yards of sand, but they got it done.
He worked with geologists over the years, and “picked their brains,” picking up a lot of information on geology. He invented a drill that also takes core samples while drilling, and received a patent on it.
According to Francis Tully, the photographs he’s seen of the well that blew up in Dimock, Pa. on New Year’s Day 2009 lead him to believe that the tank itself blew up. He believes the switch froze in the on position, and it couldn’t switch off, allowing pressure to build and build until the tank blew apart. “Tanks do blow up,” he says, noting that he’s seen it happen many times over the 60 plus years he was in the business. A ccording to him, one tank came up through the floor of a living room, hit the ceiling and ended up on the divan. Fortunately, he says, the homeowner was out of the house at the time, which sounds like a classic understatement.
He believes drilling for natural gas should be “perfectly safe” as long the drillers use three layers of pipe, using surface casing down to 1,000 feet, then drilling 7,600 feet to the Marcellus Shale. Then you case it again and grout it.
The level at which water is found is relatively shallow. Drillers will bore through it with boreholes encased in steel and concrete, to protect the water supply, Tully points out. The Marcellus Shale is more than a mile underground.
The different levels of rock and shale in the earth are like “pages in a book,” he says. He points out that the layers of rock protect the water in the upper level. Fracturing, something water drillers have done for years with dynamite, only fractures the rock close to the well, not the thousands of feet above it.
He has traveled out to Titusville, Pa., to see the original site of oil drilling, and notes that there are “no tar paper shacks” in that area. “They’re prosperous,” he points out.
He considers the entire development of gas drilling an exciting topic. “I wish I was twenty years younger. I’d be drilling,” he says.
He sold the building that housed the business about two years ago, and retired, albeit reluctantly, but still travels around to drilling sites and talks with the men behind the machines. “I don’t have a college degree, so I’m an unpaid consultant,” he smiles.
He regrets junking the first Ford truck that Ben Tully used to start the business, but has accumulated few other regrets over a lifetime of work. Following the flood of 2006, many local wells in the area were underwater, but because of the materials used and the attention to detail, none of the Tully wells was contaminated. He is quietly proud that his reputation, and that of his family, is secure.

Comment by BuckinghamGasMan on March 4, 2010 at 5:55am

The Hancock Herald, Hancock, NY recently interviewed one of those old well drillers who echoed the point about hitting gas in water wells. The paper is not on line.

Comment by Robin Fehrenbach Scala on March 4, 2010 at 5:24am

Thank you Ron, very on target.
Local water well drillers are a fantastic source of information about the conditions present under the surface in a gas area. Several people I know have lately had extensive conversations with water drillers who run into as much gas as water in the field.
This, as you say, will become more commonly known very soon and the general public can then become educated instead of freaked out over nothing.
By the way, I am also dying to see how the court rules.

Comment by Ron Erickson on March 4, 2010 at 5:17am

To amplify on what Ruby_99 said - the incidents near Dimock that lead to all the bad press recently was the Cabot O&G company's sub-contractor Halliburton and the improper handing of frac-water-line hoses while configuring for a Frac Job.
That shut down Cabot for 14+ days and lead to vastly improved rules for handling of any water at a well site. Butler was the Water sub-contractor, and endorsed the improved rules.

Per the Well Explosion from Naturla Gas accumulation - we live in Coal Country, and there are a lot of hydrocarbons in the land under our houses. From time to time surface water conditions and the occasional minor earthquake cause things to shift a bit and Gas can be released from rock layers just a few hundrred feet down, having nothing directly to do with the Marcellus and the Drilling activity. They are in court to actually reach the most accurate conclusions based on the best evidence, and the historical record will be a part of that process I am sure.
Several professional Water Well drillers have spoken (that I have read anyway) that for the last 50+ years they would be drilling a residential well and hit a gas pocket. On other occasions they report that after 25+ years the local water vel drops and the well produces methane in the water, etc.
Historical context should replace hysterical comment sometime soon. We'll see what the Court results are.

Comment by Robin Fehrenbach Scala on March 4, 2010 at 5:17am

You got that right, James.
Love that global warming. I keep waiting for it but it just never comes!

Comment by Robin Fehrenbach Scala on March 4, 2010 at 4:29am

I am not hidden. Look at the top of your browser and you will see my complete real name - Robin Fehrenbach Scala. I do not work for anyone but myself. I am disabled.
As a landowner in PA and NY I have spent the last two years on a daily basis learning about the natural gas business. Have you?
If you had, you would already know what kind of garbage will be fed to people at that meeting.
Honestly, we are way past the "fracking will kill people" stage now. Even the rabid obstructionists don't bother with that rhetoric anymore.

Comment by BuckinghamGasMan on March 4, 2010 at 4:06am

SK MIller: I think that you need to tone down your rhetoric a little. Making scurrilous statements about someone's motives does not help any discussions and tends to point you out as a radical and lessens your ability to persuade or dissuade. The use of capital letters should be avoided as well.

Comment by SK Miller on March 4, 2010 at 4:00am

Tell me what your qualifications to denounce Ron Gulla who is not hiding lies like gas companies do. Are you one of those on the other side of the fence... HIDDLEN UNDER THE NAME OF RFS?
We can attest that Ron Gulla knows what he is talking about. Can you? If not, then please shut your mouth, stop protecting poisonous toxic chemicals which are in the water near natural gas drilling. We do not get a pay check to promote Ron Gulla. Who pays you?

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