The Cumberland Times-News Mon Nov 22, 2010, 07:51 AM EST
— FROSTBURG — Money, water quality and the Marcellus shale are issues on a lot of Western Marylanders’ minds, if the attendance at two Thursday night meetings in Garrett County is any indication.
Approximately 90 people packed into the cafeteria of Route 40 Elementary School for a public meeting on the subject hosted by the Savage River Watershed Association.
The tone of the discussion was mainly skeptical of the natural gas extraction process, and many speakers expressed concerns over its potential impact on the quality of water and of life in the county.
Eric Robison of the group Save Western Maryland said he was skeptical of the Maryland Department of the Environment’s ability to properly regulate the process.
“I really am concerned about how MDE ... is going to be reacting to this,” he said. “This is completely new, and as far as I know they haven’t even written the book on this yet.”
Meanwhile, on the same night, approximately 40 people gathered in the Friendsville Town Hall for a meeting organized by Chief Oil & Gas, a company currently seeking to drill four Marcellus shale natural gas wells in the Friendsville area.
Chief has already secured most of the land leases it will require for those wells and is now pursuing permits required for preparation to drill, according to spokeswoman Kristi Gittins.
The company hopes to apply for its drilling permits in about two weeks, she said.
But first, Gittins said, the company is working on permits for seismic testing, which will allow its engineers to determine the best paths for steering the drills. It has also begun developing an erosion and sediment control plan for the county.
Gittins said the purpose of Thursday’s meeting — the first such the company has held in Garrett County — was “introducing ourselves and explaining how we plan to do business in the area.”
“We had landowners, city council members and the mayor of Friendsville there,” she said. “Both landowners that were leased to us and not leased to us.”
According to Gittins, Chief has been involved in extracting natural gas from shale formations since the mid-1990s, and started drilling its first well in the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania in 2007.
The company now has about 100 wells drilled, and though slightly less than half of those are producing gas, it is collecting an average of 100 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.
Friendsville councilman Jess Whittemore said he was impressed with the polish of Chief’s presentation, in a meeting the company had declared was not public but which was attended by town and county officials and a mix of supporters and opponents of Marcellus shale drilling.
“The environmentalists were hammering them with all the smart questions and they had all the answers,” Whittemore said. “I learned an awful lot about it. They made me think that it could potentially be safe.”
But Whittemore, a self-described environmental advocate and skeptic of Marcellus shale drilling, said he still feels concerned that not enough is known about the impact of the process on the land and water.
“Us dumb people, including the people who run the state of Maryland, we’re sort of at their mercy,” he said. “I just hope the state of Maryland has people to keep us safe. ... I think there could very well be not enough government study on this, and (drilling companies) are able to say these things because there’s no proof against it.”
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