Marcellus Shale oil and gas development began in 2004 with little fanfare except for the occasional 911 calls from local residents who saw fire burning from a flare stack in a farmer’s field but didn’t know why. A few drilling rigs and flares were the initial observed evidence of the oil and gas industry exploring to see if the hydraulic fracturing techniques used in the Barnett Shale could successfully unlock the Marcellus Shale. The upstream segment of the oil and gas industry is called the E&P industry because first the companies explore for natural gas and then, if they find it, they produce it. Nothing was certain in these first years of development, and bonus payments and royalties reflected that uncertainty.
As a lawyer who was actively involved with the companies that drilled the first Marcellus Shale wells, I was asked to help with virtually every issue these companies were facing. In the early days, I was meeting with local residents and elected officials to explain operations and why these huge flares were an indication there was much more natural gas than had been produced from the hundreds of thousands of conventional oil and gas wells that had been drilled in Pennsylvania since the Drake Well in 1859.
