Marcellus Shale Drilling

The high-paying jobs available today in the Marcellus Shale gas industry are expected to multiply in the future due to the need of work force, meeting the needs of gas companies’ efforts to increase drilling and production across the region. In addition to all of the jobs that go into directly operating gas drilling rigs, opportunities are also available in a number of professional and skilled areas. Some of the areas that most people could work in are:

• Engineering and surveying

• Construction and earthmoving

• Equipment manufacturing, service and repair

• Environmental permitting

• Water transport/wastewater management

• Well servicing

• General labor

• Legal, accounting and other professional services

There are still many more job areas

On average there were two wells per pad, or roughly 3,200 pads in the state. Each pad consumes between 5 and 8 acres of land. This means that, as of 2012, Marcellus Shale drilling had affected about 20,800 acres of land, which is .07% of the total land area of the state. Each drill site requires between 3 and 5 million gallons of water per frack. Based on about 1,500 horizontal wells fracked in 2011, Pennsylvania used about 12-20 million gallons of water per day for Marcellus Shale drilling, which represents about .5-.8% of the 9.5 billion gallons of water the state uses daily. Drilling companies must identify where wastewater, or flow back, will be treated and stored as part of the drilling permit application process. They must also adhere to the guidelines created by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) for water disposal. DEP dictates that flow back must be treated to have a total dissolved solids (TDS) concentration of 500 parts per million or less for discharge into surface water bodies, which is consistent with as of August 2011, there is currently only one facility in the state, in Williamsport, that is capable of treating water according to this standard. The Marcellus Shale lies underneath about 90,000 square miles of Pennsylvania, New York and West Virginia. It lies at varying depths from the surface to 9,000

In the subsurface, the Utica Shale is located a few thousand feet below the Marcellus Shale, which has become widely known as a source of natural gas. The Utica Shale is currently receiving a lot of attention because it is yielding large amounts of natural gas, natural gas liquids and crude oil to wells drilled in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. The United States. Geological Survey's mean estimates of undiscovered, technically recoverable unconventional resources indicate that the Utica Shale contains about 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, about 940 million barrels of oil, and 208 million barrels of natural gas liquids. Geologists have long considered the Utica Shale to be an oil and natural gas source rock. Natural gas and oil generated in the Utica Shale have migrated upwards and are produced from reservoirs in overlying rock units. An even greater quantity of oil and natural gas is still trapped in the Utica