Can Pennsylvania’s State Forests Survive Additional Marcellus Shale Drilling?

September 12, 2011 | 10:56 AM

By Scott Detrow

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Penn­syl­va­nia is strapped for cash. The state has run bil­lion dollar-plus deficits for three straight years. But since 2009, roy­al­ties and bonus pay­ments from Mar­cel­lus Shale drilling in state forests have brought in hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars.  Some offi­cials say addi­tional drilling is the solu­tion to the commonwealth’s finan­cial prob­lems. That’s rais­ing the ire of peo­ple like Butch Davey, who worry addi­tional leas­ing would dam­age the forests forever.

• StateIm­pact Forests ReportOur Radio Report On Drilling In State ForestsDown­load

Davey loves the woods. The 72-year-old gets vis­i­bly excited as he turns his black pickup truck  — a truck with a Smokey the Bear head on its antenna –  into the state for­est.  “I just have a favorite for­est,” he says, as he motors down a gravel road, “and that’s the Sproul. I think this is one of the spe­cial spots in the state.”

The Sproul cov­ers 476 square miles. It’s Pennsylvania’s largest state for­est, and Davey ran it for 21 of the 41 years he spent with the Bureau of Forestry.

But the Sproul has changed since Davey retired in 2003. More often than not, vis­its make him sad these days. That’s because of nat­ural gas drilling. Dozens of Mar­cel­lus Shale wells have been drilled here in the last three years. More are being approved at a rapid pace, espe­cially since about 2,700 addi­tional acres of the for­est were leased for drilling in 2010.

The 4 acres well pads turn the for­est into a con­struc­tion zone. They look like big gravel park­ing lots, with trail­ers, water trucks and drilling equip­ment parked on top. “Looks pretty grim, doesn’t it?” asks Butch as he dri­ves past one site. “A lot of trees died back here.”

Drilling on state for­est land isn’t new. It’s been tak­ing place since 1947. In fact, when Davies became Sproul’s dis­trict forester, one of the first things he had to deal with was a new gas lease. “A small wild­cat driller drilled a well down in a place called coun­cil run,” he recalls, “and they found a very good gas well. On track 231 well 1. I can remem­ber it well. Because I had just come up here in 1982, and low and behold, we were in the gas business.”

The shal­low gas wells the dot the Sproul, but they’re small – about the size of a sin­gle gas pump, with a home air con­di­tion­ing unit plunked down next to it. The Mar­cel­lus sites, with their acres of cleared land, dozens of trucks, and rigs stretch­ing high into the sky, dwarf the older wells.

And it’s not just the wells that are big­ger – it’s the rev­enue, too. From 1947 to 2009, lease pay­ment and gas roy­al­ties put about 150 mil­lion dol­lars into Pennsylvania’s Oil and Gas Lease Fund.

That fig­ure dou­bled on the very first day of Mar­cel­lus leases, in 2009. (For a year-by-year look at the fund’s annual rev­enue, scroll to the bot­tom of this post.)

“My heart was just in my throat,” recalls for­mer Depart­ment of Con­ser­va­tion and Nat­ural Resources Sec­re­tary John Quigley, who was work­ing as DCNR’s chief-of-staff dur­ing the Jan­u­ary 2009 sale. “The first bid we opened was 38 mil­lion dol­lars. And in that after­noon, the total win­ning bids on that 74-thousand acre lease sale was 198 mil­lion dollars.”

The new rev­enue ter­ri­fied him. “That kind of free money is just enor­mously tempt­ing,” Quigley recalled.

His fears proved cor­rect: Demo­c­ra­tic Gov­er­nor Ed Ren­dell and state law­mak­ers and took more than $399 mil­lion from the fund to help bal­ance the next two bud­gets, forc­ing more lease sales in the process.

Click here for sta­tis­tics and maps of the land DCNR has leased out for Mar­cel­lus and tra­di­tional gas drilling. 

Quigley points out until 2009, oil and gas rev­enue had been reserved for con­ser­va­tion, flood con­trol and recre­ation pur­poses. “Por­tions of 30 state parks were pur­chased with Oil and Gas Lease money. Dams were built, park and for­est roads and other build­ings were built.

Granted, before Mar­cel­lus Shale, the fund was only get­ting between two and four mil­lion dol­lars a year. By 2015, the Cor­bett Admin­is­tra­tion pre­dicts the fund will make about $300 mil­lion a year.

Repub­li­can Gov­er­nor Tom Cor­bett has not called for addi­tional leas­ing, yet. But this sum­mer, his sec­re­tary of Com­mu­nity and Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment, Alan Walker, said turn­ing addi­tional land over to drillers could bring in 60 bil­lion dol­lars over the next three decades. “That allows us to solve just about every eco­nomic prob­lem we have that is hang­ing out there,” he told Capi­tol­wire. “Includ­ing unfunded pen­sion lia­bil­ity, infra­struc­ture prob­lems. In my opin­ion, we would be fool­ish not to use that money.”

More than 700,000 acres of for­est land have already been leased – about twenty per­cent of that for Mar­cel­lus pads. A DCNR study pre­dicts more than 1,000 drilling rigs may dot the forests, once pro­duc­tion is at full capac­ity. (Scroll down to the bot­tom of this post to read the full DCNR report.)

That would lead to “death by a mil­lion mos­quito bites,” accord­ing to Jim Weaver. It’s Weaver’s job to think about the future: he’s the plan­ner in Tioga County, a drilling hotbed. Weaver argues north­east Penn­syl­va­nia has a long his­tory of caus­ing long-term envi­ron­men­tal dam­age, for short-term gain.  “You know, in the 1800s, our first extrac­tion occurred, with the tim­ber,” he says. “And they took every tree out of this coun­try. There were no trees. And we have pho­tos that the moun­tains were bare. And then they came and took the coal.”

Dri­ving through Tioga State For­est, Weaver says he knows the coun­try needs nat­ural gas. And he can per­son­ally vouch for the Mar­cel­lus Shale’s ben­e­fits. Two of his three sons hold drilling-related jobs – along with what seems like nearly every­one else in the region. “If you’re not work­ing in Tioga County now, it’s because you don’t want a job,” he argues.

But Weaver wants state offi­cials to just slow down the pace, when it comes to drilling in the forests.  “I can say this eas­ily by a quote from a gas worker. ‘I want to be able to go some­where where I can’t smell my job.’ I don’t think you need to say any­thing more.

Corbett’s eco­nomic devel­op­ment sec­re­tary, Alan Walker, says the trees will grow back. “It’s a min­i­mum impact on the state for­est prop­erty, and in a mat­ter of a cou­ple years, it’s going to be re-vegetated.”

That’s not how retired ranger Butch Davey sees it, as he stands on the edge of a four-acre well pad, look­ing at 40-foot oaks to his left, and gravel to his right. He’s asked how long it would take for the trees to grow back to their full height, once the land is reclaimed. His blunt answer: “It would take 75 years at least. Maybe longer. It would depend whether you could get trees to grow in here or not.”

The Depart­ment of Con­ser­va­tion and Nat­ural Resources is doing what it can to reg­u­late drilling – it holds energy com­pa­nies to 156 pages of guide­lines, reg­u­lat­ing every­thing from well place­ment to what hours drilling is allowed. (You can read the full doc­u­ment below.)

But Davey and oth­ers worry even the most care­ful drilling pos­si­bly might endan­ger the forests for those future gen­er­a­tions, as long as acres at a time are being turned into indus­trial sites.

Oil and Gas Lease Fund Rev­enue, From 1947 To 2010

DCNR’s Drilling Guidelines

DCNR’s Impact Study on Future Leasing