Seismic What?

First we saw cables strung alongside the road (Rte 33, between Ripley WV and Spencer WV). What on earth? The cables hooked to power boxes with outlets, and new cables plugged into the boxes picked up the line. The power boxes seemed to be about 100 feet apart.

Theory 1: Spencer had a serious power outage and the whole town was running on this extension cord that ran from the Ohio River to Spencer.

Theory 2: My son who returned recently from Iraq saw the power boxes and immediately thought: IEDs! (individual explosive devices, i.e. roadside bombs)

Theory 3: The aliens are coming.

Then a few days later we saw this sign. Seismic? Here? In Jackson County?

I scoured the local newspaper for an explanation. Although there is great coverage of local high school football and assorted wedding announcements, there is nothing about seismic activity in the county. Maybe no one noticed any tremors, or the miles of cable stretched through town, across major intersections and along the highway for about 40 miles?

Next we saw this--a truck on top of a hill with a big antenna sticking up. Signaling Mars? Seismic cosmic activity, perhaps? We were still clueless.

The bizarre posed willingly with the rural--a tractor and hay rake with a sign that says...


Monster trucks along the road, with big flat platforms under them seemed to be vibrating to some beat all their own.

Okay.

I haven't heard about any earthquakes around here lately. So what the???

I saw the name of the company on the side of the trucks and looked them up online. Dawson Geophysical. According to their website, they test under the surface for the likelihood of oil and gas.

Duh. Drilling has been frantic in this area for the past two years. So why are they testing now? Who is paying for this extensive test? Why should we, the taxpayers who must travel this road every day, have to deal with these crews blocking traffic for a profit-making endeavor that will undoubtedly lead to more inconvenience, destroyed land and probably people being ripped off for their mineral rights? Who authorizes/approves such things?

The Dawson website shows these imaging trucks in action at the Dallas Fort Worth Airport--did you know they're drilling for oil and gas on the airport grounds? That made me wonder--does the governor of West Virginia plan to drill for natural gas below the highway? He is, after all, all about big business and bringing business to WV.

I have to say the crews doing this work did a good job of placing warning signs, directing traffic and keeping the operation as smooth as possible. I think there was at least one accident due to the stopped traffic, if I interpreted the skidmarks, scattered gravel and oil stain in the highway in a bad curve correctly.

I would like to think these trucks are here to find out why the road is falling apart so badly--even though all of us who travel Rte 33 know that the reason for its terrible condition is the hundreds of gas drilling trucks, logging trucks that travel the road weekly, and general lack of maintenance under the current governor.

But I think the real reason for the "seismic crews" is even more extensive exploration of the natural gas and oil fields that lay beneath this part of West Virginia, and I wonder if we're in for even more disruption in the months to come as drilling activity rises to a fever pitch.

Or maybe they found nothing except a few buried junk cars, a Big Foot skeleton and the missing White House emails.

What You Can Meet on the Way to Work

The other day I posted the kind of things I usually see on the way to work--turkeys, flowers, deer...

A convoy of ten trucks passed as we waited on the side of the road last week. Our road is one lane--there's no passing these guys.

But this is something we see more and more often on our narrow country road--drilling trucks for gas wells. Right now there are at least two wells in progress. The noise has to be heard to be understood.

These trucks are the ones that come to "frac" (fracture) a well. They blow nitro (I'm not sure what that exactly is) into the drilled hole, and the force fractures the rock far below the surface, allowing the gas to pool into the well--I think that's how it works anyway. The noise is like a high-pressured balloon losing air, loud and prolonged, sometimes lasting several hours. Dust flies, too, something I had not realized until the well about a half mile away was frac'ed this weekend. The dust blew across our land for several hours--probably a combination of steam and dust, actually.

View of the steam/dust from the well on Bucket run

Tonight as Larry and I sat outside enjoying the fire pit and the Little Dipper hanging over our house, another well, several miles away, was being frac'ed--or maybe it was some other process. Every now and then we'd hear a noise like the air brakes being let off a giant truck. A surprising sound out here in the middle of nowhere.

There have been many well drilled along this ridge in the past two years--I'd guess there are at least twenty. These are natural gas wells. Where does the gas go? I don't know, but it's a safe bet that it's out of state.

Who gets the money? If the landowner owns the mineral rights, they get 1/8 of production usually. We own 50% so we get 1/16th. That means that if the well produces $14,000 worth of gas, we might get $900 after the costs that are deducted before we're paid. The landowner might also get free gas for household use.

If the landowner does not own the mineral rights, they get nothing except one "surface disturbance" payment, and perhaps right-of-way damages. They might get a gas tap but have to pay for the gas produced on their land.

However, everyone in the area has to deal with the noise, the big trucks, the damage to the roads, and the runoff into the streams because of inadequate erosion control. Eventually the drilling in this area will be finished (because there are regulations that control how close wells can be drilled to each other). The big trucks will leave, the erosion will slowly end. The road will probably never be fully repaired and we'll always have to deal with the additional traffic of the well tenders on our roads and on our property.

America will have more natural gas, and the lucky landowners will have a little more cash. I wonder though, if it's worth the damage and the change to our environment? I vote no. Even the royalty check and free gas don't make up for the damage to the land (most wells are drilled on prime locations for building, on meadows and good pastureland, or in woodlands that could have had marketable timber).

And nothing can make up for the noise that disturbed an otherwise lovely country evening tonight.

How to Get Free Gas

In my last post, I mentioned that I could have free gas and not have to deal with wood heat anymore. I've been asked, what did I mean by "free gas"? Here's what it is and how you can get it:

What it is: in this part of the country, there are many coal reserves below the mountains. In my area, the coal is too deep to mine profitably at this time (although who can tell what technology the future may bring?). Trapped within those geological layers is natural gas. Drilling for that gas is profitable, and it's been done for around 200 years. At first the wells were shallow, but now the driller companies have equipment that can drill over 5000 feet to hit gas. They sometimes also hit oil. Around 1900 many speculators bought the mineral rights under farmland. The practice continues to his day, and continues to cause problems for many landowners. Farmers didn't know what they were selling usually, and simply thought it was easy money. Little did they know that what they sold was far more valuable than the surface rights they retained.

How to get free gas:

Last winter a natural gas well was drilled on our land. The mineral rights were sold on that piece of property in the early 1900's and passed from owner to owner. A company quietly went about purchasing the rights from owners and heirs until they had a large continuous tract of mineral rights on our ridge. We're fortunate in one way--the 50 acres on which our home is situated still retains the mineral rights. But the 30 acre tract rights were purchased and there was nothing we could do to stop the well being drilled. We tried, to no avail.

But since we owned the surface, we were paid "surface disturbance" fees of $2500. We were also given the right to a tap on the well. While we won't collect royalties, we will get free gas if we run all the gas line and install the gas appliances in our home.

So to get your own free gas you can do one of two things: buy land with mineral rights and find a drilling company interested in drilling. In that case, you'd get free gas and royalties. You would need to be careful about the contract you signed, protect your water sources, and be knowledgeable about your rights as landowner and mineral owner. The other thing you can do is buy land without mineral rights and hope someone decides to drill.

For us, free gas comes with its own costs. The well is a half mile at least form our home. That's a lot of pipe. We'd need to replace all appliances. That's a lot of money. We'd need to run the gas lines in the house. That's time, money and know-how. Know-how we probably have, time and money are pretty scarce. We're set up for wood heat and our electric bill is fairly low. Would we actually save anything if we installed the gas? Probably, but it would have been a lot more valuable to us if we were 20 years younger. On the other hand, wood heat is hard work and we're not getting any younger.

You can read about the drilling here. It was messy, upsetting, and aggravating. It caused our big 4WD to wreck. It damaged my little green car because the road was ruined by the heavy trucks. It caused loss of sleep as the drilling got noisier and noisier--especially when they "fracced" the well with nitro. We had to pester to get our surface disturbance money, and still haven't been paid by Hard Rock Drilling for the right to cross our land with their gas line.

But it was fascinating too--the tall drilling tower, the men who worked 24/7 to get the well drilled, and who worked in sub-zero weather, the efficiency of their operation, and their seeming ignorance of the difficulty of drilling in this terrain in winter. I can't fault a man who is trying to make a living, and this is a hard way to do it. I can fault companies who have so little regard for the people whose lives they disturb and the conditions they expect their men to work under.

So that's how to get free gas. Buy land in the right area, get a drilling company interested in drilling a well, and tap on. Worth it? That's up to you to decide--I still haven't figured it out.

Truck!

It's back! After a week without the Chevy 4WD pickup, it's home again with slightly different look.

The drillers were trying to deal with the snow and ice on the ridge, and were spreading sand on the blind hill close to our driveway. As my husband came down that hill he could not see them or stop on the ice. His Chevy took out two Fords, but it took a hard lick that knocked out the grill, lights, bumper, hood and miscellaneous parts.

Thank goodness for the neighbor men who work at body shops! They gathered up parts and got the truck back on the road in time for the snows and ice this week. One of the many joys of country living--neighbors who know how to do things, and are willing to do them to help you. Yes, we paid them, but nothing like what it would have cost at a body shop. In Spring when the weather warms up a paint job will have the old truck looking like new.

The drillers? I have no idea what they did with their beat-up trucks. By rights, the accident should be charged to them since they had no flagger on the hill or signs to warn anyone the road was blocked. But that's for insurance companies to fight about. I baked cookies and took to them a few days later--no one should have to work outside when the temperature is below zero, and these guys are, after all, just working men trying to make a living. Just wish they were making it somewhere else.

Change Comes to the Ridge

I've lived on this mountain for thirty years. In that time there have been changes, certainly. When we bought this land, there was no access except by tractor or, in the summer, by four-wheel drive. We spent a lot of time walking for the first few years. I remember a snowstorm with drifts over 10 feet deep that broke the axle in our 4WD truck. That winter, we walked a mile in, and the boys missed school for over a month. We survived quite well, the boys went back to school and found they were ahead of their classes because of the schoolwork we had done at home. In March, the state roads brought out a huge endloader and cleared the road so we could drive in once again. One of my vivid memories of that summer was leaving our non-electric home to walk a mile out to our truck so that we could go to town to watch the movie "The Wilderness Family." It struck me as we hiked home in the darkness with our four sons that our life was probably more difficult and more exciting that the movie.

In 1984, we got a telephone by paying $600 to have the line run in. By then I was working 50 miles from home and the phone was necessary. In 1989, we added electricity. At that time, we had a year-old baby (in addition to our 4 teenage sons) and my husband's elderly father, and I was a sophomore in college. Dealing with kerosene lamps and the other tasks associated with a non-electric home was too difficult. So we signed up, paying to have the line run over a mile to our house. In some ways the change was good (laundry by hand is not fun, and neither is a laundromat), in others it was hard to take. I mourned the quiet and the independence we enjoyed without power. We'd been set up pretty well with spring water, bottled gas for stove and hot water, and wood heat. We kept the spring and wood heat, gave up the gas and changed kerosene lamps for electric lights.

Years passed, the spring dried up and we drilled a 730-foot deep well. Until 1993, our nearest neighbor was a mile away. That changed when his children grew up and built homes on the hill, and civilization crept closer. They had children and petitioned for mail and bus service on our road, which by this time had been graveled and tamed into a mostly passable road. As the road improved, we saw more traffic. Gone were the days when the sound of an engine would send us all to the windows to see who it was. Now four-wheelers invaded the quiet, roaring across the ridge every weekend.

Still, our land protected us. With eighty acres around us, and no house within sight of ours, we were still pretty isolated. We let the trees grow along the road, and that and our quarter-mile driveway kept things quiet around our home.

This fall, another change came to our ridge. A gas company has bought up most of the mineral rights up here (except for those under our 50 acres) and planned to drill gas wells. Although I didn't like it, there was nothing I could do to prevent them from drilling on our 30-acre parcel. Since the first of the year, they've been moving closer and closer, and two weeks ago set their drilling rig up on our land.

I have to admit that I'm fascinated by the whole process. The drillers work all night, the rig roars, the lights shine, and the flags fly from the top of the 40-foot rig. It's very industrial and so foreign on this hill. They finished our well in 10 days and moved out the ridge to the next site.

Did they hit gas or oil? Who knows? Not us--they have not told us anything yet. Will we get anything from the well? Since we didn't own the mineral rights, we're not entitled to royalties. What we can get is free gas for our home, if we run the line a mere half-mile to the well. Of course, we'll have to change all our appliances too, and add ductwork if we want to replace our wood heat with a gas furnace. Is it worth it? Maybe, but I'm not convinced. The well adds value to our land of course, but since we don't plan to sell it that's a moot point. The profile of the hill is forever changed by the excavation for the drillsite, and that is hard for me to take.

More change is coming, since the company will also be laying a gasline along the ridge. After that, things might quiet down again and give us a chance to adjust to the recent intrusion.

When I moved here, I wanted peace, quiet, and distance from manmade things. It seems that no matter how far you run, change follows. I suppose we are fortunate that it has been so slow in coming, and came in stages rather than all at once. But in my heart, I want it like it was when I came here, no electric lines, no phone, no bus, no mail, and few people. I know it can't be, but I will always remember those days as some of the best of my life.