This article originally provided by The Charleston Gazette

June 6, 2011

S. Thomas Bond: W.Va. must not repeat past mistakes for Marcellus development

It's clear by this time that the Marcellus development is being promoted with a balance sheet that has only one side, assets. Liabilities are never mentioned. You read about all the money that will flow, the growth that will result, vague projections for a golden future, largely unquantified. The degradation of resources and the influence on people is never mentioned by the developers.

So what are these costs? In the case of the Marcellus, one is the very resource being extracted. The resource is fantastically large, but only 10 percent is removed; 90 percent is left behind, degraded. The problem now with virgin Marcellus is to bring the gas up from a mile or more deep. After drilling, the water pressure at the bottom of a well is much the same as it is that far down in the ocean. This restrains the production of gas now, and makes an additional, very serious problem, for secondary recovery in future generations.

Marcellus extraction is grab-it-now, as much as you can, to hell with tomorrow. The notion that water on the surface and in aquifers does not get contaminated has been disproven over again. There is a regular constellation of problems that occurs everywhere horizontal wells with hydraulic fracturing occur. It not only includes water contamination and damage to streams by removing too much water and dumping in them, but also air and noise pollution, large disturbed surface areas, rural roads crowded and destroyed, and large demands on local services that the drilling companies do not pay for. And very serious health problems.

Although reliable observers, primary care physicians are quite unlikely to publish their cases, and there is no agency collecting data, nor any likely to be in the present regulatory atmosphere if it must be paid for by government!

This is the way coal was promoted, too. No one ever looked at the decades of mine water, now being slowly remediated at public expense, nor the subsidence, nor the toll of miners, nor the blighted communities that take many decades to recover when the mines play out. The "big boys" got away with the money, though.

The Marcellus will play out, too. Probably in half a lifetime, the way the game is now being played, in a little longer time at best. The rate of decline of shale wells is notorious -- the fantastic early production is very brief. The decline is usually presented on a logarithmic graph by the industry, in terms of months. This is a tool to fool the unwary. Fifty to 60 percent of the production is in the first year, less time than it takes to get the investment, get a permit and bring the well into production. The well is exhausted in a few more years.

Remember the early coal industry? Lots of jobs all right, but deadening, routine jobs where people and families had to turn into themselves to survive. No opportunity to travel, no opportunity to enjoy the better things of life, no opportunity to educate their children and most of all, no chance to change their circumstances. Technically, they could leave, but the absence of surplus resources, the absence of other experience and contact with the outside held them to the mining towns like serfs on a medieval manor. Jobs provided by Marcellus will be similar. Deadening, dangerous work, long hours in all kinds of weather. Marcellus will keep Appalachia right where it is in the national scheme of things, a sort of internal third world nation.

And look at our government! We are as helpless as the people in the Niger delta, Peru, or the Middle East. Was there advance planning to effectively utilize the resource, to regulate the industry to protect other interests, to minimize damage to us natives? Not on your life! Perhaps the most damning thing is that the most important force changing our future that could be controlled in the state was effectively bypassed by our government. The governor couldn't see fit to call a special session for a few days to iron out regulations for the industry.

Why? The best indication is that at least one legislator relates he has been openly threatened that he will never be elected to another term because of his support for regulation. Can it be that other legislators are unaware of the same for themselves?

"A politician's first duty is to get himself re-elected," they say. Will historians of the future look back and see funds for his campaign are more important to most politicians than his or her record of public service?

Bond, a farmer near Jane Lew, is an inorganic chemist, a retired teacher and a member of the Guardians of the West Fork and the Monongahela Area Watersheds Compact.