ExxonMobil Gets in NY's Stalled Shale Gas Queue: Two Tickets to Sanford, Please

Two full-on Marcellus shale drilling applications from ExxonMobil subsidiary XTO Energy popped within New York State's electronic records yesterday — mapped with pins marking top and bottom holes below, and summarized at the end of this post (together with links to detailed maps of the proposed units).

(The map has since been updated with three additional applications from XTO, as covered here.)


View XTO Energy (ExxonMobil subsidiary) — Five Marcellus shale gas applications in NYS in a larger map

It's the first of any sort of drilling application statewide for XTO, and the first horizontal shale gas request from a well-known, well-funded developer — at least since New York State started informally refusing such applications sometime during the early months of its now 4.5-year-old moratorium.

Both wells propose more than two miles of drilling, if you count the vertical, one-mile-plus trip down to the Marcellus layer.

XTO's projects are both within Broome County's easternmost Sanford, a township which adjoins the politically significant NY-PA state line (though the shale has been sitting for many years under both jurisdictions without knowing the difference).  Sanford also straddles the equally politically significant watershed divide between the incapacitated Delaware Basin, and the much more accommodating Susquehanna River drainage area.  (Yes, they're both free-flowing rivers; but, again, it's just that the bureaucracies are different.)

The surface pads for both of these XTO wells — including the Dew Dec A 1H, which I'm told is named for landowner Dewey Decker, Sanford Town Supervisor, and an early advocate for upstate's budding lease opportunities — are proposed for hilltop wooded terrain draining to Oquaga Creek, which in fact feeds the Delaware.

What this all means is that XTO — for reasons that probably only an optimist could explain — is now ready and eager to get into a line that's been long blocked, not by one, but by two, shale gas moratoriums.

For the first moratorium, New York environmental officials have been flat-footed since Feb. 15, 2008 (the date of the first such stalled application anywhere statewide from industry).  Then — since July 23, 2008, the birth date for the tortured and still-unresolved SGEIS process — these officials were busy coping with studious delay, and unprecedented public commentary, on this question.

For the second moratorium, the federal-state compact Delaware River Basin Commission has been stymied from reaching a consensus (or even just taking a vote) on its own version of over-lapping regulations governing such activity.  Unlike the similar, adjoining federal-state compact Susquehanna River Basin Commission, the DRBC decided early on it had to do much more than simply regulate water withdrawals in its zone of influence.  But then the DRBC's proposed, over-the-top regulatory scheme got bogged down in politics, same as in New York — a pool of quicksand from which the path of least (short-term) resistance always seems to mean... don't sink; don't swim; don't even struggle; just delay, delay, delay.

These XTO applications also represent a challenge to anti-leaning observers (most mainstream reporters, and a handful of pseudo-journalistic bloggers), as well as to basically-burned-out well-wishers for progress (such as myself, at least on certain days) — all of whom have become increasingly hopeful/fearful that indigenous shale gas will never be produced from under gridlocked New York.  (At least not within the foreseeable future.)

It's true that Norwegian penny stock Norse Energy has made similar filings — camping out in the DEC's stalled shale gas queue since July 2011 with 29 new, mostly horizontal, Marcellus and Utica shale applications.  But it's been easy for many to ignore Norse's efforts as a persuasive stunt, or as a prop to the hopefulness of its investors, or as a sweetening to its underlying assets for an eventual sale.

But, as of just this week, we also have an arm of Carrizo Oil & Gas — a Houston, TX-addressed driller never before active in New York State — nearing completion on a nearly one-mile-deep Marcellus Shale vertical test well in the Town of Owego, Tioga County, NY.  I reported the original application here back in May 2012, but until very recently nobody had noted that the job had actually gone beyond the paperwork stages. 

Here's how that happened:  NYS DEC computers have been mutely showing Carrizo's Wetterling 1 had been "spudded," or started, as far back as Sept. 18.  But ordinary citizens on the ground appear to have only noticed when the larger rig was moved in and erected to breach the treeline off the sparsely populated McHenry Road.  (So much for the supposed industrialization of the landscape; it took neighbors three weeks to even notice.) 

These folks alerted anti blogger Heavenrich, whose posting in turn was noticed by anti blogger Wilber.  And that publicity appears to have finally spurred a short AP story datelined Owego, NY — which somehow managed to spell the developer's name wrong, use the amateur word "digging" for the professional reality of "drilling," and to also deploy yet again this freakout description for the whole shale gas completion process:  "Fracking injects millions of gallons of chemical-laced water into the ground to crack rock and release gas."  [Underlining is mine.  "Laced" is neutral?  And why can't these guys just say "into the shalebed"?]

To my knowledge, nobody's asked Carrizo these questions yet:  Are you just gonna test the shale flakes in a lab?  Or are you gonna frack it vertically, at permissible low volumes, and see what happens?

And now XTO gets in New York's line. 

Here's the cheap, conspiratorial angle, which I'm sure will have great appeal for both audiences — those demanding at last some headway, and those who are deathly afraid of it:  What now has mighty ExxonMobil come to know — or come to believe — about the Cuomo Administration's ultimate plan for finally, reluctantly, coming to terms with this log jam?

Cue ominous background bass noise.  Shouldn't be too hard to get a "no comment," or a "no call back," from the XOM flacks — which always adds some zazzle to the suspicious subtext.  Plus I bet you could get the Mountainkeeper or the Riverkeeper out in the field for an outraged soundbite; they're really good at that stuff.  But, whatever you do, don't bother trying to get ahold of Dewey Decker, or his fellow Sanfordians, perched above the potential wellbores.  Most of them are probably pretty busy working for a living, anyway.  And it's only technically, on paper, their land, their resource, their leases, and their economic (and environmental) futures.  In reality — and because it's journalistically more rewarding — this conflict belongs to all of us.

API Well Number:  31007300060000 (proposed unit map obtained and uploaded off-site here)

Well Name:  Dew Dec A 1H

Company Name:  XTO Energy

Well Type:  Not Listed

Well Status:  App to Drill/Plug/Convert

Objective Formation:  Marcellus

County:  Broome

Town:  Sanford

Status Date:  10/11/2012

Permit Application Date:  10/3/2012

Well Orientation:  Horizontal

Surface Longitude:  -75.519335

Surface Latitude:  42.064837

Bottom Hole Longitude:  -75.506605

Bottom Hole Latitude:  42.054007

True Vertical Depth:  -75.506605

Bottom Hole Total Measured Depth:  6050

Drilled Depth:  11000

Proposed Well Type:  Gas Wildcat

Spacing: 

Spacing Acres:  619.1

Integration: 

Last Modified Date:  10/11/2012

API Well Number:  31007300070000 (proposed unit map obtained and uploaded off-site here)

Well Name:  Cempa Unit A 1H

Company Name:  XTO Energy

Well Type:  Not Listed

Well Status:  App to Drill/Plug/Convert

Objective Formation:  Marcellus

County:  Broome

Town:  Sanford

Status Date:  10/11/2012

Permit Application Date:  10/3/2012

Well Orientation:  Horizontal

Surface Longitude:  -75.503886

Surface Latitude:  42.079922

Bottom Hole Longitude:  -75.514772

Bottom Hole Latitude:  42.091136

True Vertical Depth:  6077

Bottom Hole Total Measured Depth:  10795

Drilled Depth:  10795

Proposed Well Type:  Gas Wildcat

Spacing: 

Spacing Acres:  635.2

Integration: 

Last Modified Date:  10/11/2012