Marlinton — Pocahontas County Commissioners continued their probe into the issues surrounding Marcellus shale gas drilling and extraction during a special meeting Monday afternoon with Timothy Carr, of West Virginia University's Department of Geology and Geography.

Speaking to commissioners and about 25 county residents who filed into the courtroom of the Pocahontas County Courthouse, Carr stated that he is "pro energy" and excited about the potential of the Marcellus shale to reshape the energy landscape of the United States. However, during his two-hour presentation, Carr repeatedly stressed the need for better monitoring, more state inspectors and transparency from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and drilling operators.

Carr explained the international pressures that are making the Marcellus shale such an attractive field for the energy industry. With estimates of the gas trapped in the shale formation as high as 1,300 trillion cubic feet, the Marcellus shale-which stretches from northern New York into West Virginia-ranks among the top four or five natural gas reserves in the world.

Currently, the U.S. price for a cubic foot of natural gas is $3.50, but on the European market, it is four times that, at nearly $14 per cubic foot. Asian prices are in the same range, said Carr. Even with shipping costs factored in, exporting U.S. natural gas could prove to be highly profitable for energy companies.

Gas production from Marcellus shale could make the U.S. a net exporter of natural gas in just a couple of years, Carr predicted.

Despite this potential, Carr said it would be unlikely that significant drilling activity would come to Pocahontas County, because the Marcellus shale differs in composition from the Allegheny Front to the Ohio Valley. In Pocahontas County, the shale is very thick, which is ideal for drilling, but the shale itself appears to contain much less gas than it does elsewhere, said Carr. Toward the Ohio Valley, the shale is richer in organic matter, which is what produced the gas now trapped in the shale, he explained. But as the Marcellus shale extends eastward toward Pocahontas County, it is lower in organic matter and higher in clastic, or mineral, content from other rock.

"I would say that the probability of Marcellus wells in Pocahontas County is fairly low," said Carr. "You have thick Marcellus, but it's clastic rich, and not as organic rich as it is farther to the west."

Additionally, the county as a whole presently lacks any infrastructure to get gas to market, with the exception of the far northern part of Pocahontas County, where a small field of gas storage wells and a small field of production wells are tied into the Northeast Region Natural Gas Pipeline Network. However, according to county commissioners, most of the Marcellus gas leases in the county are concentrated much further south in the county, around Edray and Hillsboro.

Even in an area like Morgantown which has an existing natural gas infrastructure, the capacity of that infrastructure has limited the growth at a well pad within the city, according to Carr. A well pad operated by Northeast Natural Energy currently has two active wells each producing about 3 million cubic feet of natural gas each day, said Carr. The pad has the potential to add four more wells, but because the nearby, existing pipeline is too small to handle more gas from the site, those wells will have to be drilled in phases over the course of several years, as production from the first two wells declines.

If drilling does happen to come to the area, Pocahontas County Commissioners-and many county residents who are wary of the industry-have voiced particular concern over the practice of hydraulic fracturing to release gas from the shale.

To fracture wells in the Marcellus shale requires an average of five million gallons of water and a mix of industrial chemicals. A single well is typically fractured or "fracked" between five and seven times, according to Carr. A well pad tapping into the Marcellus formation typically contains as many as five or six wells, explained Carr, so the potential water use for a single well pad can amount to hundreds of millions of gallons of water.

Among the concerns of opponents of the practice is the considerable volume of water that must be used and the potential for contamination of streams, springs and wells for drinking water.

Carr only touched briefly on the issue of volume, saying that the state should require companies to withdraw water from local streams only at times of high flow.

As for the potential for contamination, Carr said the risk isn't from the fracking that takes place thousands of feet below ground, but from poor casing construction closer to the surface and poor management practices at the surface of the well pad.

"Well pads need to be well-constructed at the surface, and the surface casing and intermediate casings need to be well-cemented and well-designed," Carr said. "They need to be inspected by the inspectors and tested to make sure that they're well-done."

Carr again turned to the well pad in Morgantown-this time as an example of a model operation. Among the things Northeast Natural Energy did right on the site, Carr said, was to have a berm around the perimeter of the pad and placing a liner under the entire pad to contain any contaminants at the surface.

Additionally, Carr said the company is not burying the cuttings from the drilled wells onsite, but rather hauling them to a landfill for proper disposal. Return water from the wells is similarly trucked off-site, then reused at other drilling operations. These are practices that Carr says all operators should be employing and that should be made law.

"It's just like driving," Carr said. "We have tremendous regulation on driving, because it's a dangerous activity."

But there also need to be an adequate number of inspectors to make sure those regulations are being followed, Carr added.

"I don't care how many rules you have; if you don't have any cops out there, I'm driving fast," he said.

New rules may be coming soon.

The same day county commissioners met with Carr in Marlinton, The U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, led by Sen. Joe Manchin, met in Charleston to hear from state legislators, regulators and industry representatives about how to best regulate the booming industry at the state and federal levels. New state regulations are currently working their way through a legislative committee and may lead to a special session of the West Virginia legislature before the year is over.