Warren City Council members now have a deeper understanding of oil and gas drilling in the city.

Council members recently heard a presentation by Sam Harvey, president of Bull Run Resources LLC, an energy exploration and development company operating over 1,000 oil wells. The company has six wells in Warren that were drilled starting in 2013 on the Whirley property.

Harvey described the typical well inside the city limits as a shallow conventional well. While shallow, these wells go well below the water table, with a depth reaching 450 to 1,000 feet deep into a layer of sandstone below the city. By contrast, wells that go into the Marcellus shale tend to be 5,000 to 9,000 feet deep.

“They have nothing to do with the Marcellus Shale, the Utica Shale, long laterals, all the new stuff that’s happened since about 2011. The wells that are being drilled now and have been drilled since the 1960s in this area are basically the same as they’ve been since the 60s,” Harvey said.

Wells inside the city can only be drilled on industrial territory. Many wells in Warren are what are called slant wells, which can be distinguished by the pump jack that people see being set at an angle. That allows drillers to install their equipment in an area zoned industrial – the only places drilling is allowed in the city limits – into other areas, such as was proposed recently near Betts Park. Slant wells in Warren reach between 400 and 500 feet. Similar wells in the Marcellus Shale, Harvey said, can extend horizontally for miles.

“Basically, instead of drilling straight down you’re drilling at an angle,” Harvey said.

Drillers work to get beneath any local freshwater drinking water to protect freshwater drinking sources. A 450 foot hole in Warren is below the water table, Harvey said.

“Everything to do with the regulations is about keeping the oil and the gas out of the freshwater and from the producer’s side keeping the freshwater out of your oil and gas,” he said.

Some of these sites use the gas onsite for heating local businesses. The wells go down at slight angle and are coated in cement to keep them from leaking.

“This technology has been used for decades and is pretty secure” according to Harvey. “The biggest problem is when the cracks created by fracking hit an old well and the stray gas goes somewhere unexpected.”

The different products from the well are split and go to different places. Crude oil goes to the refinery. Brine water is either treated – there is a plant in Ridgeway -, reinjected into another well or used to frack a new well. Methane, propane and butane gas produced by the wells are sent to a plant – including one in Warren – that strips the various gases and sells it to wholesalers for consumption.

“Generally in Warren you’re making a lot more oil than brine – fortunately. There are a lot of places where you’re making a lot more brine than oil so it becomes a sneaky expense,” Harvey said.

Gas wells in the city tend to be very productive for their first few years, but production falls off sharply. A five year old well may only pump gas out for 5 or 10 minutes a day, but work for 30 to 35 years as a marginal gas well. If a well is abandoned there likely won’t be a pump jack on it.

“That’s how a well gets plugged in normal circumstances,” Harvey said. “We look at the production from that area and say as things break down hole, it’s not worth going in and fishing that all out and fixing it and putting it all back together. It would take too long to get our money back. At that point you pull all the guts out and reuse all that’s reusable – the pump jack, the motor, everything like that. Then you fill the hole basically with cement. Warren city had older production from prior to the 1960s. Some of those wells may or may not have been plugged correctly. They’re basically gone at this point. They’re underneath. Who knows where they’re at. Those don’t seem to be causing any problems.”