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A law firm's take on drilling
- Thread starter Future Fanatic
- Start date
bkill
Quest for the Two Headed Trout
Who do you think their clients are???
"Our client base includes large and small companies as well as individuals. For example, we represent a number of institutional clients in major energy projects, including oil and gas development, production, and transmission."
They are just another pig putting its face in the troth...Not exactly what I would call an objective point of view..They have lots to gain from drilling...
Now if you post a similar position from an independent environmental organization that has nothing to gain or lose...Then it might have some meaning....
From my experience in working for a developer for the last 13 years, you can get a report or a professional to say anything in your favor...
"Our client base includes large and small companies as well as individuals. For example, we represent a number of institutional clients in major energy projects, including oil and gas development, production, and transmission."
They are just another pig putting its face in the troth...Not exactly what I would call an objective point of view..They have lots to gain from drilling...
Now if you post a similar position from an independent environmental organization that has nothing to gain or lose...Then it might have some meaning....
From my experience in working for a developer for the last 13 years, you can get a report or a professional to say anything in your favor...
Dr. Gonzo
Stuck in my cabana, livin on bananas and blow.
Seems he's just doing some PR for his clients. I bet he billed a lot of hours for that cute powerpoint.
The New Gold Rush :: New York 2009 :: September 2009 :: By Courtney Mault :: Article :: Super Lawyers
The New Gold Rush :: New York 2009 :: September 2009 :: By Courtney Mault :: Article :: Super Lawyers
WBDluver
Official NEFF pot stirrer
this would be funny if it happend to the gas zombies on this site that worship at the feet of the drilling rig.
They must have missed one or the "four layers of protection" for this poor guys water.
YouTube- Freedom, NY, Natural Gas Release: Homes Evacuated, Water Wells Polluted
They must have missed one or the "four layers of protection" for this poor guys water.
YouTube- Freedom, NY, Natural Gas Release: Homes Evacuated, Water Wells Polluted
Future Fanatic
Nirvana
I guess I'd be a "gas zombie", huh? "worshipping at the feet of a drilling rig"?
You are as over the top as some of the others on this site that would use a you tube video as some sort of proof that gas drilling in the Marcellus shale is evil and will harm us all.
Let's review your meek attempt to sway us.
It was drilled as an OIL WELL, NOT a gas well.
It was drilled into the Onandoga formation, NOT the Marcellus.
It was drilled in 1996, NOT with 14 years worth of experience and improved equipment in 2010.
It was a vertical well, NOT a fracked horizontal well.
In the video he states they smelled gas; natural gas is supposedly odorless.
Calves died when they drank the water but they did fine on milk replacer. Milk replacer is dry, you add water to it. Probably the same water that they supposedly died drinking, hmmm. BTW, natural gas is NON TOXIC.
Did this well cause problems? It absolutely seems so. But this video does NOT represent the situation with wells drilled in 2010 into the Marcellus shale to extract natural gas. That said, accidents DO happen. The gas companies SHOULD pay for their mistakes. Just as fuel oil delivery companies should pay for spills or leaks THEY are responsible for.
Nice try, luver.
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Future Fanatic
Nirvana
I never said they were unbiased. I do believe they have argued on BOTH sides, gas companies and environmental groups, though. The drilling business will certainly keep them busy, I'm sure.
BUT, biased or not, won't you agree that the information they present is more factual than a lot of what you see from the anti-drilling side?
When looking through it, be as skeptical as you want, but keep open the possibility that what they present is closer to the truth than other things you have heard.
Trouser Trout
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
So, what's the answer.... We all need either gas, oil or electric, or some combination of the three. I would like it if any poster who opposes any of the three or the exploration and implentation thereof offer a realistic alternative. For me, the answer is in nuclear energy. keeps our dollars here, runs clean, creates jobs, and is extremely reliable.
Kilgour Farms
I took the one less traveled by
I found this in the Hancock Herald. He must be a gas company shrill??
Here is a person with over 60 years of experience drilling water wells in the NE PA and southern tier of NY and what he has to say about his drilling experiences.
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.
Here is a person with over 60 years of experience drilling water wells in the NE PA and southern tier of NY and what he has to say about his drilling experiences.
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.
mbwmn
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
Very pretty.
I would have photo-shopped in a rainbow, w/ a hidden, but slightly glimmering gold area at the bottom of it, near the derrick.
Given the date today I might have hidden a smiling pic of my uncle Mickey in there somewhere, in a green suit.
I feel much better now knowing that all the frac fluid is recycled:
"Currently recycling / reusing nearly 100% of produced water".
Oh wait, that's "produced water". they don't say anything about the percentage left in the ground...hhhmmm...
Additionally they have a special "northern" frac mix now. It uses the GOOD hydrochloric or muriatic acid. That stuff i etched the concrete floor of my garage with was horribly toxic...nice to see it's just "swimming pool chemicals and cleaner" kinds of hydrochloric and muriatic acid...and, they use the GOOD ethylene glycol...not that car anti-freeze kind kills cats and dogs that drink it. The kind in the 'northern mix' is the same stuff used in paint and caulk.
Just don't spread this info around. Those poor southern bastards who aren't getting all the good stuff from the 'northern mix', they're fucked!
The "projected water use" is looking good! Isn't this stuff, like...well... just WATER? (Water is like nachos: don't worry...we'll make more.)
nu'-cleer waste disposal holes.
nook-eh-lar' waste disposal holes.
I like the sound of it, no matter how you say it!
I would have photo-shopped in a rainbow, w/ a hidden, but slightly glimmering gold area at the bottom of it, near the derrick.
Given the date today I might have hidden a smiling pic of my uncle Mickey in there somewhere, in a green suit.
I feel much better now knowing that all the frac fluid is recycled:
"Currently recycling / reusing nearly 100% of produced water".
Oh wait, that's "produced water". they don't say anything about the percentage left in the ground...hhhmmm...
Additionally they have a special "northern" frac mix now. It uses the GOOD hydrochloric or muriatic acid. That stuff i etched the concrete floor of my garage with was horribly toxic...nice to see it's just "swimming pool chemicals and cleaner" kinds of hydrochloric and muriatic acid...and, they use the GOOD ethylene glycol...not that car anti-freeze kind kills cats and dogs that drink it. The kind in the 'northern mix' is the same stuff used in paint and caulk.
Just don't spread this info around. Those poor southern bastards who aren't getting all the good stuff from the 'northern mix', they're fucked!
The "projected water use" is looking good! Isn't this stuff, like...well... just WATER? (Water is like nachos: don't worry...we'll make more.)
nu'-cleer waste disposal holes.
nook-eh-lar' waste disposal holes.
I like the sound of it, no matter how you say it!
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Here is a summary of today's ruling on Royalty Issues in Marcellus Shale Land leases issued today by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. It is from the "Legal Intelligencer" in Philadelphia.
Justices OK royalty Terms In Marcellus Shale Land Leases.
"The state Supreme Court has validated leases between gas companies and landowner-lessors in the Marcellus Shale that marks a win for Natural Gas Drillers in Pennsylvania."
More info should be available in tomorrow's papers.
Bob K.
Justices OK royalty Terms In Marcellus Shale Land Leases.
"The state Supreme Court has validated leases between gas companies and landowner-lessors in the Marcellus Shale that marks a win for Natural Gas Drillers in Pennsylvania."
More info should be available in tomorrow's papers.
Bob K.
