BAD DEEDS: A Dylan Hunter Thriller (Dylan Hunter Thrillers) by Robert Bidinotto Read Free Book Online Page B

once more over their expectant faces. All watching him. He felt the faint, familiar pangs of sad loneliness. No, they were not like him. So few were like him.
    Which was why only those few, though not Dawn— especially not Dawn—could ever know certain things about him.
    Things he had done.
    Things he was about to do.
    He took a step forward, then began to speak …
     
    Adair led them out a short distance onto the pad and stopped.
    “Normally, it’s so noisy here with the pumpers going that you wouldn’t even hear me. So I told the guys to knock off for a few minutes.” He tapped his boot on the pad surface. “We’re standing above the Marcellus Shale Formation. It’s a layer of sedimentary rock over a mile down, and it runs all the way from the southern half of New York, down through much of Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, West Virginia, and into far western Maryland and Virginia.”
    He reached into his jacket pocket, drew out a piece of dark rock and tossed it to Hunter, who caught it and turned it over in his hand.
    “That’s a chunk of Marcellus shale from this site. It came from sediment deposited 400 million years ago. Under time and pressure, the sediment compressed into black shale, trapping the organic matter that later became petroleum and natural gas. The Marcellus is the second-largest natural gas play on earth. It’s—”
    “‘Play’?” Annie asked.
    “Sorry. A ‘play’ is a natural gas reservoir that we're working. The Marcellus is located here in the East—the country’s biggest natural-gas market. And it’s the most important source of energy since 1859, when Edwin Drake drilled the first commercial oil well just west of here in Titusville.”
    Adair pointed to the derrick in the center of the pad. “We have to drill down over a mile to reach the shale. The hole is called the ‘wellbore.’”
    He turned to them. “Lots of folks worry that our drilling will pollute their water. The first thing you need to know is that we drill down way past the groundwater that people use for drinking water. The deepest groundwater lies only about three hundred feet deep. Well, thousands of feet of solid rock separate the shale layer from the aquifer at the surface. It’s physically impossible for what we’re doing over a mile below the surface to pollute the aquifer.”
    “But can’t your pipes break or leak?” Hunter asked.
    Adair shook his head. “You see, after we do the first drilling phase, we insert what we call a ‘conductor casing’—that’s a steel pipe, almost fourteen inches in diameter—down the hole about sixty feet. We then pump cement down through the pipe and out of it, filling the entire hole around it. The cement fixes the casing in place, and it also creates a second barrier to protect the groundwater. And we pressure-test the casing to make sure there are no leaks.”
    Adair began to cross the pad, heading toward the derrick.
    “But that’s just the beginning. Next, we insert the drill back inside that casing and continue drilling three-to-six-hundred feet, down past the aquifer. Then we insert a second pipe inside the first one, and fix that casing into place with a new layer of cement. We repeat this process again, with a third casing and cement layer inside the first two, which goes down two-to-three-thousand feet. When we reach the shale layer, we use special equipment to change the path of the wellbore and start drilling horizontally through the shale. And we finish with a fourth pipe. It goes all the way to the end of the well, also surrounded by a layer of cement. That’s the pipe that ultimately carries the natural gas back to the surface.”
    He paused to let his words sink in. “All those concentric rings of steel and cement,” he said, making circular gestures, “create multiple barriers to protect the groundwater. And as I said, the fracking process itself takes place thousands of feet below the aquifer, separated from it by millions of tons of