Sometimes things seem fated to happen: Sir Isaac Newton watched an apple fall from a tree and discovered the theory of gravitation. Terry Engelder, Ph.D., grew up along the Genesee River in Wellsville, N.Y., in the 1950s. This river helped to instill a love of geology in Engelder from a young age.

“The Genesee River cut across glacial terrain, and as the river eroded down through the glacial till, it would pick up exotic granites from the Canadian Shield. These were ice-transported boulders, and I’d take them home and ask my father, ‘What is this stuff?’” Engelder told Midstream Business.

As chance would have it, his father had an office next door to Art Van Tyne, who was chief of the New York State Geological Survey’s Oil and Gas Division. Engelder’s father took him to visit with Van Tyne, who explained what the rocks were and from where they originated.

Blue-ribbon winner

Shortly afterward, Engelder took part in a National Science Foundation science fair at his high school with a blue ribbon-winning poster that detailed faulting in western New York.

So why is this important? Because it created a seemingly lifelong affiliation between Engelder and the Marcellus Shale. I have that poster hanging in my office right now. In the layers, you can actually look right at the Marcellus.… I noted that great pockets of oil were forming under folds of the Earth’s crust.… I chuckle because, of course, I had no idea that anything like the Marcellus would become relatively important,” he said.

Little did he know that nearly a half- century later, one of his calculations would verify that the Marcellus is one of the world’s largest and most important gas plays. However at the time, the Marcellus—a long-known formation but not yet de-coded—wasn’t much of anything in the eyes of the oil and gas industry.

Lucky break

Instead it was the Bradford oil field extending from Pennsylvania into New York that was the important play in the region, albeit one in rapid decline. In 1965, after his freshman year of college at the Pennsylvania State University, Engelder worked as a roustabout for Bradley Oil Co.

“By the 1960s, the Bradford oil fields were in collapse and companies were spending a lot of time cleaning up the mess of the last nearly century of oil production,” Engelder recalled.

While working for Bradley Oil, Engelder had his finger broken when it was crushed between two pieces of pipe casing. “The company didn’t want to have a lost-time injury on their record. The head geologist knew I was an undergraduate major in geology and said, ‘We don’t have any place in this company for a one-handed roustabout, but we can sure use a one-handed geologist,’” he said.

Thus ended Engelder’s short career as a field hand and began his career in the field of geology. For the rest of that summer, Engelder was tasked with mapping shallow sands in the Upper Devonian sands above the Marcellus Shale.

The role of government

While work on the Marcellus would have to wait, the very early stages for the shale revolution were beginning to take hold as the federal government was helping to fund hydraulic fracturing experiments through the Carter administration’s Eastern Gas Shales project.

This project was aimed at increasing production out of the Appalachian and Michigan basins. Although the combination of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling unlocked the Marcellus and Utica shales after other plays like the Barnett and Haynesville, the Appalachian Basin was among the first shale plays to be targeted for fracking experiments.

“Shale gas was part of my system starting way back then. If it weren’t for federal research dollars in the 1970s, shale gas would certainly not have made as much progress as it has,” he said. “Early research in the industry requires huge risks, and there’s a very important role for the government in helping mitigate these risks. The public should never lose sight of that. There’s a debate going on right now over subsidies for renewables, but that’s another young industry that clearly needs and deserves support, and the government is well justified in spending tax dollars helping out. Shale gas technology is an example of the kind of success that can be achieved when these federal dollars are used smartly.”

The investments don’t have to be large amounts, according to Engelder. He noted that the science fair in which he won a blue ribbon was sponsored by the federal government in response to the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik 1. The U.S. began to invest more heavily in science education.

“My seminal moment was that 7th grade science fair. My interest in geology had already manifested itself and the federal government sealed the deal. I don’t think it cost the government a nickel to run that science fair in Wellsville, N.Y., in 1959, but by a policy shift, I’m discussing my career with Midstream Business,” he said.

Early success

After completing his post-graduate work at Texas A&M University, Engelder spent 12 years at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory where his first fracking experiments were supported by a combination of the U.S. Department of Energy, Exxon Corp. and Schlumberger Ltd. In 1978, his work was also supported by a federal grant that allowed him to study gas shales with a focus on natural hydraulic fracturing.

By the time that he moved to the faculty of Penn State in 1985, his work on gas shale fractures had become so well known that Royal Dutch Shell Plc asked him to help understand how gas was produced from the Antrim Shale in Michigan.
Interestingly, Engelder also met M. King Hubbert, the brilliant geoscientist who developed a peak oil theory that was largely believed to be true until the shale gale unlocked new reserves of oil and gas. In what was perhaps a sign of things to come, Engelder found that an interpretation in one of Hubbert’s papers was incorrect.

While he didn’t disprove Hubbert’s peak theory, he did offer another interpretation for an outcrop mentioned in one of his professional papers, noting that Hubbert had cited the wrong geological example in what is known as the “beer can experiment.”

“I would not presume to question his basic science. He came up with a very important thesis on how large faults can slip a long way. It said that if there is water pressure along a fault zone, the fault can slip more easily. He cited the Muddy Mountain Overthrust, which I pointed out was not a good example of a fault associated with high pore pressure. He agreed with me and was kind enough to sign my paper,” Engelder said. Similarly, Hubbert’s peak oil theory was sound—it simply didn’t account for production out of tight shales.

Back to the Marcellus

By 2006, Engelder’s path would once again come across the Marcellus Shale as Mitchell Energy & Development Corp. and other companies were using new technologies to unlock shale reserves in the Barnett Shale. It turns out that Range Resources Corp. was doing Barnett-style fracking in the Marcellus for several years, led by the findings of geologist Bill Zagorski.

Engelder still has the notebook that contains the “back of the envelope” calculations done in 2007 that determined the Marcellus’ reserve size is 25 times larger than previously estimated— and created a land rush in the play.

Two decades after Engelder had worked with Shell on fracturing experiments in the Michigan Basin, Dominion Resources Inc. approached him to work on fractures in the Marcellus as more information came on about the success Range was having in the play.

Shortly afterward he was appointed the American Association of Petroleum Geologists’ distinguished lecturer for the 2007 to 2008 academic year. He sought to correct inaccurate statements that were made about the Marcellus in these talks.
After a lecture presented to Jefferies LLC, he was asked by an investment firm’s senior analyst how large the reserves in the play were.“We scientists don’t like to be caught with our pants down, and this time I was caught, because I didn’t know,” he said.

After getting off the call, Engelder began to calculate the potential reserves and then compared them to the official estimates for the play’s potential. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated it was 1.94 trillion cubic feet while the number he came up with was 25 times larger. He noted that the survey’s calculations are based on known production and the Marcellus was not producing anything at the time.

“At that point, I was so surprised that I redid the calculation a number of times. I called up Gary Lash from Fredonia University and asked him to check it since it was so out of line with anything else I’d ever seen on these gas shales. He came up with virtually the same number I did,” he said.

After speaking with Lash, Engelder realized he knew something very few people in America knew: The U.S. was about to undergo an energy renaissance. He had the figure vetted by a member of the Potential Gas Committee, and this member admitted that he had never considered the possibility of shale gas being anything significant.

“If you look at the Potential Gas Committee’s evolution for the amount of gas that can be recovered in America, there’s a step jump that occurred after my calculation, not before,” he said.

One group that knew of the true size of the Marcellus was Range Resources Corp., which was quietly buying up acreage in the play and had released production data in Dec. 2007 on its activity.

Unfortunately for other producers, following Range’s release of its data and Penn State’s publication of Engelder’s calculation on the size of the Marcellus, lease rates jumped from $25 or $50 per acre to as much as $5,000 per acre in Pennsylvania, which brought hundreds of millions of dollars to mineral-rights owners in the state.

Campaign of disinformation

For about a year there was a great deal of widespread enthusiasm over the emergence of domestically produced shale gas until the anti-drilling/anti-fracking movement began to take shape in 2009. Given his lengthy history with both fracking and the Appalachian Basin, Engelder said that there is a definite disinformation campaign against the industry.

“The most succinct statement I’ve ever heard made came from Christopher Joyce, NPR’s science correspondent. He said that in his 30-year science career, he’s never come across anything in which there is more disinformation than fracking. Joyce added that he was surprised by how much of it is either inadvertent or purposeful disinformation,” Engelder said.

He added that Josh Fox’s “Gasland” documentary is the ultimate example of the purposeful disinformation campaign. The film is famous for a scene in which a person lights on fire a well that has drilled through a bed of coal. “The implication is that it’s a consequence of fracking. Even Fox has been recorded as saying, ‘It’s irrelevant whether that had anything to do with fracking or not.’ A good story is a good story; that’s the way Hollywood works. The facts don’t matter.”

This disinformation campaign must be disproved, due to the significance of shale oil and gas production for the domestic economy and security, Engelder said.

“The importance is immeasurable. The biggest crisis that mankind faces is global climate change and everyone agrees that greenhouse gases are the culprit. The U.S. has become the only industrial nation in the world to nearly come into compliance with the Kyoto Accord from the 1990s. This was done not by government regulation, but by marketplace decisions. Gas prices became so attractive that many coal-fired power plants are being retired with gas-fired plants taking their place,” he said.

The benefits of new volumes of natural gas are obvious, but there are negatives attributed to this production: increased noise and traffic are unfortunately par for the course for oil and gas production. These side effects have also been increased in the Marcellus and Utica shales due to the need for new infrastructure in a region of the country that hasn’t been a production center in decades.

“Not everyone has the pleasure of living over a gas shale, having the extraction process imposed on them. Not everyone has to put up with the truck traffic, the noise, the cutting of pipelines through woods. The people that are subjected to that sort of stuff are being asked by the rest of the nation to make a sacrifice for the greater good of the nation,” he said.

While these sacrifices are unfortunate, they aren’t unheard of, according to Engelder.“There’s been a lot of pushback against this spirit of sacrifice for the greater good, particularly by people who say, ‘I bought a place in the country so I could have peace and quiet. I didn’t ask for this—no one asked me to make a sacrifice.’ But it is an indication that the wealth of this country is not uniformly distributed. We all pay into a system of tax collection so people can be given welfare and unemployment benefits. Taxpayers are also a group of people making a sacrifice for the greater good of the country, and this is very much in the same spirit and ought to be regarded as that.