The Boom (31 page)

Sullivan County is the second smallest of Pennsylvania’s counties, with 6,100 residents. It is set amid the Endless Mountains, part of the Appalachian Mountains chain. Deer outnumber year-round residents, and black bear sightings are common. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the town of Eagles Mere was a country resort for New York’s elite. The posh hotels are gone, replaced by small inns and bed-and-breakfasts. There is no McDonald’s or Wal-Mart, and you can’t get cell phone reception in large swaths of the county. There are a dwindling number of dairy farms but many remaining fields of alfalfa, corn, and hay. And there are trees—millions of hardwood cherry, maple, ash, and oak trees—that are chainsawed, cut into boards, and exported around the world to be turned into flooring, cabinets, and caskets. The local timber industry prides itself on sustainable forestry, not clear-cutting.

Below it all is the Marcellus Shale. Generations of farmers, tourists, religious seekers, and city dwellers were drawn to Sullivan’s soil, wilderness, and beauty. What was below the forest floors attracted the petroleum industry geologists beginning around 2006.

The first wave of landmen targeted the largest landowners. Betty and Milo Reibson signed a gas lease in 2006. They are one of the remaining dairy farming families. Their herd of one hundred cows is one of fourteen in the county, down from nearly three hundred at the peak. In their sixties, they remain active farmers even as they turn over more day-to-day responsibility to their son, the third generation of Reibsons to operate the farm. Their pretty two-story white house sits a few feet off the road, up the hill from the barn and two weathered gray silos. On an overcast morning, most of the cows remained in the barn. Eight heifers and cows, the pregnant members of the herd, grazed on a hill behind the house, hemmed in by an electric fence.

The landman’s first offer was $25 an acre to drill on the Reibsons’ land. The conversation didn’t go well. He came and sat at their wooden dining room table with a topographic map. When they asked to see it, he refused. Milo offered to walk the young man around the property to give him a sense of the layout of the fields. The landman, who worked for Anadarko Petroleum, said this wasn’t necessary. This refusal put the Reibsons on edge. They weren’t against gas drilling, but business wasn’t done this way in Sullivan County. The land, its contours and soil and water sources, was all that mattered. If they planned a major change on their property, they would drive down the road to their neighbors for a discussion. The out-of-state landman was operating from a different playbook.

When I arrived at the Reibsons’ house on an overcast day in July 2012, Milo greeted me in a ratty and torn blue checkered shirt. Betty descended the staircase a couple minutes later, asking my forgiveness for her lateness. Her hair was perfectly in place. She wore pressed black slacks and a white blouse. She has a direct manner and a way of looking at people that holds their attention, a political skill that served her well as she rose from being a township supervisor to county commissioner. “If I was to train people to go out and talk to people about their biggest asset and most heartfelt asset, I would train them with more sensitivity,” said Betty.

Despite the culture clash with the landman, the Reibsons didn’t dismiss the offer outright. Farmers had signed leases on and off for decades in Sullivan County. The terms were small, a couple dollars an acre, and no drilling ever took place. Farmers grew accustomed to what was basically a hassle-free stipend. The Reibsons soon realized that this time was different. The money being discussed was several times higher than in the past. As negotiations dragged on for six months, Milo talked the landman up to $85 an acre. (The lease was for 245 acres, so the sign-on bonus was more than $20,000.) With this kind of money on the table, they expected there would be a well drilled. Milo and Betty negotiated an addendum to the lease that gave them the right to consent to the location of any well on their property but required they not withhold permission “unreasonably.” The Reibsons signed a lease with Anadarko. Two years later, Anadarko sold 50 percent of its interest to Chesapeake and designated the Oklahoma City company as the operator.

Chesapeake acquired the majority of the acreage across the northern tier of Sullivan County. The land is divided into thousands of plots, few of which resemble a shape found in grade school geometry. The property lines tend to follow what can be cultivated. Fields have been sculpted into the undulating hills, bought and sold by farmers, leaving behind a crazy quilt of real estate records. Rather than drilling on every property, Chesapeake pooled the plots into units. Each unit was about 640 acres, roughly one-third mile wide and one and a half miles long. The units are long rectangles, running on a southeast-to-northwest axis. As the units were drawn up, property owners received a share of each unit commensurate with the number of acres they owned. In early 2011 Chesapeake created the Phillips Unit. The Reibsons owned about 61 acres in the unit, entitling them to royalties on 9.5 percent of the gas in the unit. The company created an adjacent unit that contained 190 of the Reibsons’ acres. Following convention, Chesapeake named it after a landowner and called it the Milo Unit.

The way the Milo Unit was drawn up, the Reibsons’ parcel sits at the dead center. That’s where Chesapeake wanted to locate its pad: a flattened, compacted piece of earth where it could assemble the machinery needed to drill a cluster of six wells. These wells would then spread out like a spider with six long legs, with the pad as the cephalothorax. Three wells would head to the northwest, running parallel to one another; the other three to the southeast. Once each well had been fracked, the cracks would spread out from each well, covering the units and allowing it be drained of gas in a systematic, efficient manner. Little, if any, of the buried Marcellus Shale would be untouched. The layout was scientific, systematic, and thorough. It was a factory approach to exploiting the shale, the machines placed in the exact spot to maximize production and minimize costs. And it had little regard for the surface. According to Chesapeake’s logic, the pad should be located in the center of the unit. If it were placed at the top of the rectangle, three of the wells would need to be extra long and the other three short, raising costs of the entire operation.

In April 2010 Chesapeake mailed the Reibsons a surface-use agreement proposing to place the Milo Unit pad on a hill behind their house. An enclosed sundeck on the back of their house contains their television, couches, and a mounted black bear that Milo shot. The sundeck looks out across a picnic pavilion, a small patch of blueberries, and up a small hill. The left flank of the hill would be the new drill pad. The proposed access road would go right through their yard, passing within a couple dozen feet of their bedroom. The Reibsons said no. In addition to the trucks rumbling past their house, the pad sat atop their water. A spring flowed out of the bottom of the hill, where they collected the water in a reservoir and pumped it back uphill to the barn and the house.

The Reibsons were furious. Chesapeake’s proposed well location required drilling through their water supply. Any accidental spill could contaminate it. Milo had negotiated the addendum so this wouldn’t happen. Milo Reibson is a lean man with the body of someone who has engaged in physical labor his entire life. He is tall and bald, with a trim mustache. He looks like an ex-ballplayer who has stayed in shape. Sitting in his living room, fiddling with an unopened Mountain Dew, he explained that he’d insisted on the addendum specifically “so I would have some say-so, and they wouldn’t sit on my water or my very best fields.” The Reibsons’ anxiety about their water is understandable. The concern was repeated all across the county—and everywhere in rural Pennsylvania where drilling into shale has taken place. Without a good source of groundwater, a dairy farm won’t survive. The spring is the only source for the four thousand to five thousand gallons that the Reibsons’ herd of milk cows drinks daily. It also provides water for the couple’s kitchen and showers. There are no municipal water connections nearby. If the spring loses its freshwater, an auctioneer to sell off the herd would be close behind, ending the Reibsons’ six-decade run of dairy farming.

The Reibsons rejected the surface-use agreement. They didn’t think they were being unreasonable for a minute. And so began a long battle between the Reibsons and Chesapeake over siting the well pad that would end up in federal court in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Lawyers for Chesapeake, the plaintiff, argued that the Reibsons were being “arbitrary and unreasonable” and wanted to stop the company from drilling on their property. The Reibsons’ lawyer countered that it was Chesapeake being unreasonable. The company concocted its Sullivan County map of well locations and unit boundaries “to maximize its production and profits—irrespective of whether those sites caused any harm to the landowners’ business or quality of life.”

This was a clash between two different modes of capitalism. Chesapeake was developing a factory in rural Pennsylvania for the extraction of gas molecules. Its maps and leases were all sensible and legal, designed to lower costs and increase profits. From faraway Oklahoma City, the rectangular blocks being created for Sullivan County made all the sense in the world. They were the output of geologists who studied the alignment of the shale, the angle of natural fractures, and the optimal placement for man-made fractures. But from a farmer’s perspective, Chesapeake was both blind and arrogant. Placing a well pad atop the farm’s only reliable water source? Plotting it out without consulting with the landowner? It was downright disrespectful and out of step with a modern dairy farm operation.

Over the next few months, the Reibsons proposed alternative locations. And so did Chesapeake. The exact details of who rejected which location was disputed in the lawsuit. Milo Reibson said the gas companies haven’t bothered to understand what’s important to farmers. His farm has 150 acres of heavy clay soil and 75 acres of red shale-flecked soil. The rest is forest. The red shale is the good stuff, generating higher yields of corn and alfalfa. He kept trying to steer Chesapeake’s pad onto his clay soil. If he was going to lose a handful of acres, taken out of production forever, it only made sense to lose the bad soil. Chesapeake kept coming back to the good soil.

The conflict was soil versus rock, farming versus petroleum engineering. There were two conflicting ways of viewing the property. The Reibsons looked at their farm and saw the cows, land, and water and how they all fit into a long-term management plan. Chesapeake saw the gas potential and desired to drill wells and accelerate the depletion of the resource to speed up its payout.

I asked Milo if I could see where the pad would end up being built and where Chesapeake had proposed putting it. Milo Reibson pulled on a pair of work boots. We walked up the hill behind the house. He warned me to keep my distance from the pregnant cows, who had stopped chewing and were watching us warily. When we reached the crest of the hill, below us was a pond with a couple ducks and the spring that had provided an uninterrupted supply of freshwater since the 1960s. The cows turned this water into millions of gallons of milk sold in grocery stores. He told me the story of coming home one day to find stakes in the ground. A gas company surveyor had trudged up the hill and laid out where the pad would be. Milo chuckled. There was an ornery bull along with the pregnant cows that day. It was a wonder the surveyor didn’t get chased, he said.

We headed toward a barbed wire fence that ran along a line of trees. On the other side of the fence was one of his fields—a good one with red shale. It’s farther from the house than the first location Chesapeake wanted to use, but where it had agreed to place the pad. He expected to lose the field forever. There’s the Marcellus, he explained, but even deeper is the Utica Shale. In Ohio, the Utica Shale has just begun to yield oil wells. After the Marcellus wells have been drilled and fracked, Chesapeake or some other company that Chesapeake has sold its lease to will return and explore the Utica potential. “They will never leave this pad,” he said. “Once they get you locked up, they never leave.”

Betty Reibson had told me that they couldn’t afford a lawyer—the federal government had been cutting the regulated price at which that milk can be sold—but hired one anyway. She told me she hoped that they could all find a way to coexist. “We’re going to have to,” she said. “They’re here, and we’re here.”

A few weeks after my visit, months of negotiations with a federal magistrate serving as the middleman between Chesapeake and the Reibsons produced a tentative agreement about the pad’s location. The lawsuit was settled out of court in early November. A week later, Chesapeake applied to the state for permission to begin drilling a well.