Dear?Editor,

At the WTOV9 “Energy Boom” Town Meeting broadcast on Thursday Rhonda Reda, Executive Director of the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program delivered at least two misleading answers.

In response to the question about unitization, Reda said: “Ohio is a spacing state [If] 95% of the land owners . . . wanted their property to be leased for oil and gas and this gentleman did not, . . . and it would have to be a very small minority, . . . mandatory pooling does mean that he must be compensated . . .”

That is misleading, because mandatory pooling is rarely used today. The industry is using unitization, which only requires them to lease 65% of the acreage in a unit before they can force unwilling land owners into the unit.

On the topic of water used for fracking, Reda said: “If you actually look at the average horizontal well today we are actually using less water. . . . With horizontal wells, what we are doing is drilling the equivalent of 32 vertical wells. If you add up the water you would use for each one of those 32 wells, we have actually reduced the water . . .”

She is following the industry practice of confusing the issue by saying that if shale gas was accessed by vertical wells it would require more wells. But that is a meaningless point, because it would be totally impractical to access shale gas from vertical wells.

Utica shale wells in Belmont County Ohio use an average of over 10.7 million gallons of water per well, (data from the industry’s fracfocus website) which is over 130 times as much as the of 80 thousand gallons that are used to frack vertical wells.

For the premise of her answer to be correct, there would have to be fewer than .8% (.008) as many shale wells as conventional wells. However, one industry expert said it will require about 6,000 shale wells to access most of the shale gas inventory in Belmont County. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources website has record of 3,223 conventional gas and oil wells in Belmont County. It remains to be seen how many horizontal wells will be drilled, but even if the numbers of shale and conventional wells ends up being equal, the premise of her answer was off by more than 12,000%.

Since shale gas is distributed everywhere in the play, the wells and laterals have to be distributed everywhere. So it is likely to require more shale wells to access the “inventory” than the conventional wells that were clustered over pockets of gas in the past.

John M Morgan

Beallsville