We’ve posted two more videos on YouTube for our GasWellStudy channel. The earliest video is titled Natural Gas: Trashing the Surface Owner and is about how operators leave a lot of trash at gas well sites. Some of this trash is from when the well was drilled (such as abandoned portolets) and some is from the production of the well (such as scrap valves and storage tanks). This situation encourages others to leave trash at sites and at one we’ve seen old diapers, tires, bricks, and more dumped.

The more recent video, Bad Well Bad Well Bad Well, was posted last Friday. It’s about gas wells with condensate storage tanks not having adequate secondary containment as required by law. We looked at three older sites along the Pocatalico River with typical problems. The possibility of contamination of the River by crude petroleum is very real. We had a tank at a well near us overflow a couple of years ago. There was no secondary containment so the oil went down over the hillside toward a creek.

We’ve done another video, this one about blacksmithing, that’s also up on YouTube, though at a different channel. The video shows the forging of a Suffolk latch bar and gives an idea of the work that we do in our shop.

We’re loving the video camera though the learning curve has been really steep for the camera and editing software. We think we’re beginning to get a better idea of how to do things. We certainly are a lot more relaxed with the camera.

More soon! Maybe some cat videos.

Last Saturday Molly and I drove to a gas well site several miles east of us. The surface owner met us part way there and led us over narrow twisty roads past farms and houses.

The well we visited was drilled and completed in autumn 2008. This is one of a number of recently drilled wells that have adversely affected local groundwater and soil.

The pad was covered with lush tall clover, except for large bare areas. The owner said the clover is a recent attempt after a number of unsuccessful tries to get something to grow. He didn’t expect it to last.

He pointed out the lack of deer trails through the clover, said that the local deer population dropped dramatically after the well was fractured, with dead bodies being found in the hollow below the well.

Molly noticed right off the numerous dead trees at two edges of the pad. He said that was where the gas drilling crew blew the fracture flowback while they sat in their trucks around a curve, away from the pad. He said that some of the trees’ bark began to fall off within a day.

When there was a forest fire that burned some acres of our woods in the 1980s, it was so hot that all the organic matter in the soil was destroyed. In spite of this, sassafras trees were springing up in the bare soil a year later.

There were no sassafras trees in the blighted area at this well site.

At the well site on Saturday, we took soil samples and in the bare areas on the pad found chloride at 595 parts per million. In one of the bare areas pit liner was visible along about 35 feet.

The surface owner is angry, understandably so. He’s become disabled due to heavy metal poisoning, which he attributes to his tainted water supply.

Flowback is what drillers call the liquid that comes up out of a well after it’s been fractured — a mixture of chemicals, brine, crude petroleum, and naturally occurring substances (like radium and arsenic).

Flowback is also the anger individuals and communities feel because of how they’ve been treated by an oil and gas industry that is more interested in money than people and the environment.