At a workshop this week, American Petroleum Institute reviewed recommended practices for hydraulic fracturing in Charleston.
The industry organization has developed a number of standards and guidance documents related to hydraulic fracturing. The API presented some of those standards and practices to a group of industry representatives, emergency personnel and environmental regulators Thursday.
API standards are frequently referenced in state law books, including in guidance documents for West Virginia drillers. Rolf Hanson, senior director of state government relations for API, said there are a number of advantages to supplementing a state's regulatory agency knowledge with API standards.
"In short, it is technical expertise … you need the people that are actually on the ground actually doing the work and their input into developing the standards," Hanson said.
Jack Harrison of the West Virginia Petroleum Council added that API standards are good for drillers as well. By implementing industry-wide standard sizes, business is not only safer, but less hassle.
"These standards comfort companies in the sense that when they ask for an API standard pipe, they know what they are expecting to get," Harrison said. "It takes a lot of the guesswork out of them operating on their own."
The documents are constantly changing to adapt to issues that spring up, Hanson said.
"These are not static documents, they are currently updated," Hanson said. "You can go to the API website and look at the 2012 plan. They are addressing issues that have arisen in the past couple of years over Marcellus shale development. The stray gas migration issue is a direct result of some of the issues that have arose in Pennsylvania."
Making money doesn't have to be exclusive from protecting the environment. Hanson said the two are actually very compatible.
"You look at the average price of drilling a Marcellus well — $4 (million) to $5 million dollars," Hanson said. "If you're going to have companies making those kinds of expenditures, No. 1 they want to make sure they aren't losing any of those hydrocarbons that they are supposed to be producing out of that reservoir. It's incumbent on companies to do it right, because if they do it right, they get the best return on the investment from drilling that well."
In fact, Hanson said, companies that don't drill responsibly will eventually find themselves answering to their stockholders.
"Environmental protection goes hand in hand with operating in a community and being part of that community," Hanson said. "… If you're not welcome and a partner in the community in which you are operating, that's a privilege, and you have to do everything you can to honor that privilege."
A part of the problem, Hanson said, has been the drillers' past behavior.
"Early on, the industry didn't do a very good job of community engagement. Some companies did a very good job (and) others didn't, but as a whole it wasn't there," Hanson said. "I think they learned from that, and now I think it's widely accepted that you need to go down and talk to people."
Jeff Brami, a geologist of Brami Consulting who presented at the conference, said the API standards and documents are the results of thousands of hours of expert discussion and planning.
"You might see something that looks like a bullet list of a dozen points, but you've had some of the very top people of that particular specialty … who come to agreement and say this is a good way to do it," Brami said.
The API standards, Brami added, give smaller companies a chance to utilize resources they may not otherwise be able to afford. While big drillers can employ a staff of scientists and engineers to develop the best practices, often a smaller company must rely on the collective knowledge of other drillers.
"You have smaller companies that can take these same standards and say we're going to do this the same way these people have," Brami said. "We're going to take these documents that are recognized as a good way to work, and we're going to go by this."
The battle, the API presenters said after presentation, is convincing the public that hydraulic fracturing is a safe practice.
"The purpose is to allay people's fears," Brami said of the API workshop. "There's a lot of emotional effort, and it's mostly easily addressed. You go out and tell people this is not as bad as you may have been led to believe."
Hanson said "misinformation" is the biggest challenge for gas drillers in the Marcellus shale play. He pointed out that out of 6,000 horizontal wells drilled in Pennsylvania, only one has resulted in a drinking water contamination issue.
That case, in Dimock, Pa., he said was the result of poor well casing that did not follow API standards.
"What it gets down to is proper construction in casing of the well and making sure that you're isolating the hydrocarbon that you're producing from the water. If that is done properly, you don't have an issue."
Harrison agreed that fracturing is a safe process, but only if the well casing and cementing process is done well.
"If the well casing and cementing process is done properly, you're less likely to have any problems with that well," he said. "Critical standards need to be applied to isolate that well bore from the water and from the earth around it."
Harrison said he believes West Virginia's recently passed Marcellus shale legislation is sufficient for protecting the state.
"Our law is pretty comprehensive here," he said. "It addresses all of the issues that were brought up by every kind of group going — roads, air, water, dust, noise — all of those things were addressed in the comprehensive law. The casing and cementing standards which are really critical to drilling a well are referenced in their guidance documents."
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