| Record-breaking four-mile deep gas well planned
Chesapeake project hopes to find untapped reserves
by Justin D. Anderson
Daily Mail Capitol Reporter
dailymail.com
CHARLESTON, W.Va. - Chesapeake Energy is planning to drill more than four miles - 22,401 feet - into the earth in search of natural gas.
The average natural gas well in West Virginia is about 5,000 feet.
If the company reaches its goal depth, the exploratory well slated for Roane County will be the deepest ever drilled in the state.
"It's just all that unexplored territory is what drove Chesapeake to look at the east in Appalachia," said company spokesman Scott Rotruck. "The east was blessed with a lot of shallow gas."
Only one-half of one-percent of all wells drilled in the Appalachian Basin have gone below 7,500 feet, Rotruck said. So there's a lot of potentially untapped gas deeper down.
The basin runs from Alabama to Maine and is known for its natural resources reserves.
West Virginia has been undergoing a boom in natural gas drilling, mostly to tap into the Marcellus Shale, a strata of bedrock thought to contain untapped gas reserves. Heavy drilling has been seen in the north central part of the state to tap into this formation.
Chesapeake over the past five years has worked to move operations into the Appalachian Basin to tap into Marcellus and Huron shale. According to a recent company report, Chesapeake has drilled five horizontal wells into the Marcellus with another underway.
Matt Sheppard, another Chesapeake spokesman, said the company in the near term is still focused on drilling in the Marcellus and Huron shale. He said there is "nothing imminent" with respect to the proposed exploratory deep well.
The Roane County Reporter said in its editions last week that the proposed well - which will be located southeast of Walton on Vineyard Ridge - is seeking to tap into the Conasauga Shale, which is currently being drilled in Alabama at the southern end of the Appalachian Basin.
Mike John, Chesapeake's vice president of operations, said of the basin in a recent company report, "There are rocks with potential here below 20,000 feet, and that is not a widely recognized fact."
The Roane paper and the Hur Herald in Calhoun County say only one other gas well has ever gone below 20,000 feet. That was an unproductive exploratory well in the Mount Zion area of Calhoun drilled in the early 1970s by Exxon.
The papers reported that the area of the proposed record-breaking well in the Walton District is near another productive deep well that was drilled to about 10,000 feet in 1999.
Chesapeake applied with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection on Aug. 13 for a permit to drill the Vineyard Ridge well.
The company is seeking to establish a drilling unit and to "pool" un-leased tracts of land in the area of the proposed well. A hearing on the request is set for Dec. 2 before the state Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.
Reports in local papers last week said the company has been working to obtain lease agreements in the area of the proposed drilling. Chesapeake said it has thus far obtained 91 percent of the leases in the 695-acre area.
In 2007, a Roane County jury handed down a penalty of more than $400 million against Chesapeake in a case over unpaid natural gas royalties to landowners.
Some landowners have complained that now the company has put right into the lease agreements that expenses will be deducted from owed gas royalties, which was an issue in the class-action lawsuit.
The 9 percent of leaseholders that have thus far refused to sign on to the project could have their hands forced depending on what the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission decides after the Dec. 2 hearing.
Contact writer Justin D. Anderson at jus...@dailymail.com or 304-348-4843.
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