Free The End of Country by Seamus McGraw Page A

it, it seemed. Eight days after the initial blowout, there was still no end in sight. The Andover
News
, the local weekly newspaper, led its edition with the screaming headline BIG EMPIRE GASSER STILL RUNNING WILD , and quoted baffled crewmembers who could only marvel that “the well was still holding up approximately the same pressure as when it first blew last Wednesday night.”
    They had no way of knowing back then what was going on underground. It would take decades before geologists would surmise that Cochran and his men had unwittingly stumbled across a naturally fractured chunk of the then still unexplored Marcellus, a chunk containing 60 million cubic feet of highly pressurized gas just waiting for some unwitting roughneck to turn it loose. The gush of gas continued for three long weeks before enough of its 60 million cubic feet of fury was spent that it could be finally tamped back down into the ground.
    The worst was over. But for a year afterward, the residue of that noxious cloud clung to everything. Even the maple syrup harvested from the sugar trees at Earl Green’s place that spring and the next fall tasted of salt and gas.
    In time, of course, the eruption was forgotten. After a few weeks, its rage spent, the gas again became compliant, yielding more or less willingly to Cochran and the other drillers, floating obediently, if not serenely, to market when it was bidden, and in the months and years that followed, neither Cochran nor any of the men who had been there wasted much breath talking about the Crandall Farm blowout. As far as they were concerned, it was just one of those things that sometimes happen in the gas field.
    That was an understandable attitude. As much as that incident near Wellsville might have looked like the end of the world, it wasn’t. After all, unlike other gas field mishaps, no one had been killed. No one had even been injured. In fact, it wasn’t even the only blowout ever to have occurred. Up and down the spine of the Alleghenies, from New York state to the West Virginia state line, dozens of hapless drillers who accidentally pierced the unpredictable shale had similar, if less spectacular, experiences over the years. As early as the 1920s,blowouts of a couple of hundred thousand cubic feet had been reported in the southwestern part of Pennsylvania; by the 1950s, there had been several such incidents in that region. These were hardly the sort of resources that they could reliably exploit, certainly not with the technology they had at the time.
    And so, because natural gas was a sideshow—oil and coal were the real treasures—and shale gas, intriguing it might have been, was beyond current ability to safely and effectively develop, the Wellsville blowout was largely forgotten.
    As the decades passed, the technology would improve to the point where it was possible to harness the power of the dense shales like the Marcellus, but even in the 1970s and beyond, the grim science of economics didn’t permit it. There was, it was assumed, plenty of energy in Saudi Arabia or Venezuela or even in the Gulf of Mexico, where, as America would learn in 2010, blowouts were also a threat, but that was then believed to be more easily and cheaply gotten. And so the Marcellus was largely forgotten.
    E VEN BY THE BEGINNING of the second half of the last century, there were still a few cockeyed optimists left, guys who continued to insist that the Appalachian energy fields were still vital, still worth exploring, that somewhere down there an as-yet-undiscovered pool of gas or oil still waited, a field that would prove big enough and cheap enough to extract that would thrust Appalachia back into the energy limelight and revitalize its fading towns and cities. But by the late 1980s, all but the most steadfast—or delusional—among them had given up. There were still a few strippers pulling a week’s wages out of dying wells, a few mom-and-pop drillers who, largely because they didn’t know how to