The U.S. Forest Service has just released a technical report titled Effects of development of a natural gas well and associated pipeline on the natural and scientific resources of the Fernow Experimental Forest. It can be downloaded from this page or you can download it directly.

The report deals with the expected and unexpected effects resulting from a natural gas well drilled in the Fernow Experimental Forest in Tucker County, West Virginia in 2008. The site is on karst, a problematic location for a well, and is located close to a cave where endangered Indiana Bats overwinter and in an area with other endangered species.

This well is a vertical well into formations below the Marcellus and shows some of the limitations of West Virginia’s regulatory program. We have serious issues with erosion and sediment control at sites. The state requires the use of a 1993 Erosion and Sediment Control Field Manual which is sorely in need of revision. We’ve found that operators after almost 20 years still don’t understand the requirements of the manual. The report documents sediment control overwhelmed on the site, including sediment going into a sinkhole (sinkholes and caverns are features in karst limestone formations).

While drilling out a fracture plug the operator lost control of the well and flowback sprayed onto the pad and into the surrounding woods, killing vegetation. The state has a history of spills, blowouts and other events not being reported to the regulatory agency and that appears to have happened this time also. PEER obtained some documents related to the well by FOIA request and a scientist stated that the area the spray hit had a burned appearance.

This state allows the land application of liquid drill waste and fracture flowback using a permit created in the 1980s (it’s currently being revised, at long last). In this case the liquid waste killed vegetation and trees and that is documented by Forest Service scientists. The state also allows solid waste to be buried on site. At this well, the waste is leaching to the surface through the action of several seeps where it was buried. As far as I know (the report doesn’t explicitly state this) the state has had no response to either the death of vegetation nor the leaching of waste.

We have a section on our website dealing with the Fernow land application debacle. We’ll be updating it and including material from this report. We’ve been able to reproduce, on a small scale, some of the effects seen on vegetation at Fernow using chloride solutions. We have not been able to reproduce the high soil concentration of chloride found by scientists after the application was done in 2008, nor have we been able to reproduce the effects on a broad spectrum of species. It’s entirely possible that other factors were involved in the death of even large trees, but the land application permit requires analysis of only a few constituents, such as iron, aluminum, chloride, etc. No heavy metals, and there is no load factor for chloride.

Articles are appearing in various venues on the web based on this Forest Service report. A good one is on the ProPublica site.