New Driller to NY, Carrizo, Proposes Vertical Marcellus Test in Tioga County

View Carrizo Vertical Marcellus Drill Permit Application in a larger map

This popped as of May 29:  Carrizo (Marcellus) WV LLC — a Houston, TX-addressed driller never before active in New York State — on May 17 asked the DEC for a permit to get cracking on a nearly one-mile-deep Marcellus Shale vertical test well in the Town of Owego, Tioga County, NY.

The location is about 3.4 miles by direct line northeast of the Village of Owego's main downtown crossroads, adjoining a hayfield uphill from the dead end portion of a sparsely populated McHenry Road.

Assuming less than 80,000 gallons of water would be needed to sample full-scale production potential through hydraulic fracture stimulation (sounds-reasonable spin), a/k/a fracking (perjorative spin), the enterprise could go forward regardless of the outcome of the state's repeatedly extended shale gas moratorium — which has, for four long years now, killed off any full-scale efforts through state-of-the-art horizontal drilling.

Vertical tests in both Marcellus and Utica shale have already occurred a number of times previously statewide — sometimes openly, sometimes by initially disguising the purpose by listing a slightly deeper conventional formation, and sometimes by re-purposing an already drilled well that proved dry at the intended horizon.  How many of them were actually fracked at permissible low volumes is unknown.

Statewide since 2008 — the year when Upstate's Shale Gas Genie was let out of the bottle, at least so far as the public was concerned — I count spuds of 10 verticals listing Marcellus as the "objective formation," and 6 Utica's.

One such operator — Gastem USA, parented in Canada — went about its business with a lot of fanfare and publicity, even going so far as to invite skeptical representatives of the Sierra Club and Pro Publica to witness a frack job at an Otsego County drillsite.

None of prior vertical projects, however, was in Tioga County, NY, a locality that adjoins two of the most actively drilled Marcellus shale counties in PA, Bradford and Susquehanna.

And relatively few of them have occurred in the last couple years, a time period when the anti-fracking campaign has worked itself into a corner, demanding a blanket opposition to any local development tied to fossil fuels (except, of course, for End Consumer delivery of such fuels, some proportion of which would have to have been fracked from out of state).

Could get interesting.
Wetterling 1 Spacing Unit Map

Here are the specs on Carrizo's drilling permit application:

API Well Number:  31107265020000
Well Name:  Wetterling 1
Company Name:  Carrizo (Marcellus) WV LLC
Well Type:  Not Listed
Well Status:  App to Drill/Plug/Convert
Objective Formation:  Marcellus
County:  Tioga
Town:  Owego
Status Date: 
Permit Application Date:  5/17/2012
Well Orientation:  Vertical
Surface Longitude:  [-]76.201622
Surface Latitude:  42.122425
True Vertical Depth:  5000
Bottom Hole Total Measured Depth:  5000
Drilled Depth:  5000
Proposed Well Type:  Gas Wildcat
Spacing:  Conforms to statewide spacing under Title 5
Spacing Acres:  43.52
Integration:  No integration order required
Last Modified Date:  5/29/2012