Digging for answers

While two brine injection wells are in the permitting process for Sodom Hutchings Road in Vienna, questions asked of residents in that area and other parts of the Mahoning Valley show a knowledge gap when it comes to injection wells and the brine disposal process.

Matt Kleese of Kleese Development, which owns the Vienna wells, said both wells are former Clinton Shale gas wells that were no longer producing.

But residents in the area, though familiar with talk about the oil and gas industry, admit to being unfamiliar with the details.

"I don't know anything about it," said Jeremiah Schoenfeld of Sodom Hutchings Road in Vienna.

Cindy Williams, 1213 Sodom Hutchings, said she shares state Rep. Bob Hagan's concerns and thinks more study needs to be done before drilling continues.

"There was a lot of mining around here," she said. "You just don't know what's underground."

Hagan, D-Youngstown, a vocal critic of the drilling process, has repeatedly called for an indefinite halt on injection wells to study their impact on the environment.

Williams said she also has concerns about brine contaminating the water supply, but admitted she doesn't know much about the process. Her son Bill said he, too, is unfamiliar with the brine disposal industry.

And while Frank and Karen Lauer of Sodom Hutchings in Liberty have a producing gas well on their property, they admit they know little about injection wells.

"They bring all the brine in from Pennsylvania and they're dumping it here because they don't want it over there," Frank Lauer said. "It doesn't fit, but they're making it fit."

A lack of information doesn't end with residents.

The issue was the subject of a state legislative hearing Tuesday at Youngstown State University in the wake of a New Year's Eve earthquake near an injection well off Salt Springs Road in Youngstown. At 4.0 magnitude, it was the strongest of the 12 quakes in the region since March.

While there has been no official link made between the earthquakes and the injection process, on Wednesday all applications for injection wells were put on hold statewide pending a review of the earthquakes that occurred near the Youngstown well.

The operators and officials from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources say the process is highly regulated and monitored.

Heidi Hetzel-Evans, ODNR spokeswoman, said the state now has 190 permitted Class II wells, and 176 of those are active. Thirteen of those are in Trumbull County across 10 sites, including in Newton, Hartford, Fowler, Vienna, Liberty and Warren townships.

There are eight injection wells in Mahoning County, including the Youngstown well and others in Green, Smith, Coitsville and Beaver townships.

Hetzel-Evans said 11 to 12 permits also are in the application process but remain on hold while ODNR conducts seismic research.

What goes in the ground

As for what goes into the Class II wells, state law permits only three types of liquids.

Pit water is the fluid from drilling and cementing operations; a mixture of drilling mud, freshwater and formation brines; and flowback or frac water, which is the excess industrial fracking water that comes back to the surface during the drilling and hydraulic fracturing process.

Brine usually has a very high salt content. The nature of brine differs with each well site and depends in part upon the rock composition into which the well is drilled, according to experts.

More than 80 percent of fluid used in fracking or naturally occurring during the drilling process remains in the bore hole. The rest rises to the top and is siphoned off as brine waste. For much of the industry's infancy in Ohio, the waste was stored nearby in pits to evaporate. ODNR says groundwater contamination was widespread during that period.

In 1985, evaporation pits were outlawed as a means of oil and gas drilling waste disposal.

Hetzel-Evans said fracking fluid must be injected or recycled and may not be used for surface spreading - such as for dust or ice control on roads. Only naturally produced byproduct can be spread and no shale drilling byproduct is ever used. Of the brine permitted for surface spreading, only two percent makes it onto winter roads.

The rest is either recycled and reused or it is injected.

Where the brine goes

Many questions have arisen about drilling into what is called the Pre-Cambrian rock layer, especially following last week's temporary ban on further injection well drilling in the state.

Ohio State University geophysicist Jeff Daniels describes Pre-Cambrian as the "basement" rock of earth.

"They are the ancient rocks that underlie everything," he said.

Depending on the depth, Pre-Cambrian rock runs multiple miles in thickness all the way to the bottom of the earth's crust and is also extremely hard and impermeable.

Daniels said Pre-Cambrian rock contains fracture zones, or "faults," created from the stress put upon it by high pressure and high temperature. Drilling into faults can cause rock formations to shift unnaturally and could produce earthquakes. He cautioned, though, that drilling into a fault in no way guarantees seismic activity will occur.

"It depends on the fracture zone itself, the length and breadth of those zones," he said. "Just drilling into one on its own will not necessarily cause anything. It's not like it's fragile. These are very dense impermeable rocks, in general, occasionally broken by fractures."

The maximum allowable drilling depth in the Mahoning Valley is 8,000 feet, which is where the Pre-Cambrian rock sits in this part of the state.

No well in either Trumbull or Mahoning counties exceeds 9,300 feet in depth, and 15 of the 21 wells in the two counties are between 3,886 and 5,620 feet deep.

However, Daniels did say that wells drilled in Youngstown exceeded the depths he would expect.

"I think it's safe to say that the depth that it went into the Pre-Cambrian in Youngstown is well beyond what is normal," he said.

What makes a well

Newer wells are drilled or, as in Kleese's case in Vienna, old gas wells can be converted to injection wells by filling empty gas pockets with waste.

Kleese, whose family operates 75 Clinton Shale gas wells, said each injection well has its own "personality" and takes water differently. He said gravity or natural vacuums usually suck water straight into the well. Pumping equipment set to ODNR regulated pressures aids in the injection process.

According to Kleese, the state places guidelines on each well individually outlining allowable pressure.

''When you reach that pressure, it's because the well doesn't want to take any more and usually, 90 percent of time, you just plug it.''

Plugging, Kleese said, also is a highly regulated and specialized process.

The process involves removing all the well tubing and casing, and then filling the hole. According to the Ohio EPA, the fluid-filled portion of the well can either be capped with cement or with a "cast iron bridge plug." If a cement cap is used, it must be covered by at least 250 feet of cement. A CIBP requires only 50 feet of cement coverage. The EPA says a combination of CIBP and cement plugs is best for preventing pressurized fluids from escaping. The cap must also be at least 50 feet below the bottom of any underground sources of drinking water.

The well owner / operator is then responsible for reclamation, the process of restoring a well site to the way it looked before the well was drilled.

''We remove all the equipment, and try to restore the area to original condition or as close to it as possible,'' Kleese said.