BECKLEY — Though the state failed to pass any meaningful reform to the laws and regulations surrounding drilling in the Marcellus shale this session, one southern West Virginia county is getting ahead of the game with its own efforts.

Though Monroe County was only aware of one oil company exploring oil and gas interest in its borders, it took proactive steps to maximize the positive effects of a potential economic boom in its community. What started as a plan to set up various ordinances soon turned into a “gentlemen’s agreement” with one of the drillers interested in the county.

The agreement spells out a deal between the county and the drilling company that includes a broad range of issues, from water quality and transportation guidelines, to comprehensive emergency plans in case something would go wrong. Monroe County Commission President Shane Ashley said the agreement came out of a need to protect some “special things” in Monroe County.

“We have people on both side of this issue: those that want to drill and those that don’t want to drill,” Ashley said. “We have some special things in this community; our water is special to us. We have bottling plants. Most of our people on, say, Rock Camp on up are on well water. It’s critical because of the way the water flows underground. If it gets contaminated, it can move a long distance.”

Water contamination is of special concern to Monroe County citizens, who, like their neighbors in Greenbrier County, sit atop a special karst geology. Karst regions are geological areas with characteristics such as sinkholes, underground caves and streams that sink underground.

These formations, geologist Rocky Parsons said, make water contamination particularly vulnerable because water can travel long distances in a short period of time.

“Groundwater usually travels a few yards a month; here, water can travel miles a day underground,” Parsons said. “We have done dye tracing in this area, and cavers have dye-traced where water sinks and comes back out in springs, and we’ve plotted it on a map.”

The 55 square miles under Lewisburg, Parsons noted as an example, is drained underground and exits Fort Springs. A water system so interconnected requires special concerns on behalf of oil and gas drillers.

“If you’re drilling into that, you want to make sure you don’t spill anything into a sinkhole because that ends up in the groundwater system,” Parsons said. “If you’re fracturing, you want to make sure there is enough casing in the well to prevent any frack fluid getting into the groundwater system.”

Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing are not new technologies, but the discovery of the Marcellus shale has brought them to West Virginia for the first time. Relative inexperience in the technologies has left the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection without specific regulations for the deep drilling required of Marcellus, and the Legislature failed to pass such specific regulations in its recent session.

“We knew there wasn’t going to be a whole lot of movement in the legislation,” Ashley said. “We thought we needed to get proactive and try to protect ourselves as much as possible.”

The lack of state regulations, Monroe County Planning Commission Chair Rod Graves said, prompted county officials to look at a proactive approach to protecting the needs of the county. A “boom town effect” that threatened to encroach on Monroe County, possibly with great economic benefits, needed to be managed carefully, he said.

“The issue we took, entering into this issue, is we can’t stop it,” Graves said. “It’s not a matter of whether we support it or don’t support it. We need to make the best of it.”

So, with the blessing of the county commission, Graves and Parsons undertook a fact-finding mission in Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia townships to assess the needs of their own community. Graves said the overwhelming consensus was that communities and their officials need to work alongside the companies that will be drilling.

“One of the pieces of advice we got, particularly from the Pennsylvania township leaders, was, ‘Keep the dialogue open with the company. Do not treat them as an enemy,’” Graves said. “That was the first thing we established in the county. We reached out to a company, and they returned in kind.”

That company was Gordy Oil. Graves said Gordy immediately reached out and met with citizens and officials. As a result of looking at maps of the karst areas, Parsons added, Gordy even moved one of its drilling locations away from a mature karst area.

Though the county originally thought of passing ordinances, it instead leveraged its ability as a county with planning commission authority under Chapter 8 of the State Code to negotiate a memorandum of understanding with Gordy Oil.

“This is just an agreement between us — what we’ll do, what they’ll do. It’s a memorandum of understanding just like any other,” Ashley said. “If the agreement is broken, the understanding is over.”

The MOU took the concerns of other Marcellus communities Graves and Parsons found in their fact-finding trips and resolved them with representatives of Gordy Oil.

“I think Monroe County is ahead of the game with this memorandum of understanding,” Parsons said. “It talks about school buses, the traffic control … just the fact they are willing to sit down and work with us goes a long way. It shows good faith.”

That good faith — something many didn’t expect from the coming drillers — has led to an agreement between the county and the driller that aims to stymie the possibility of adding to the horror stories of other communities who may have been a little too excited about the possibility of drawing in a few extra jobs and tax money.

“They felt somewhat powerless, somewhat, in the face of the energy play,” Graves said of many communities they visited. “They had good stories and bad stories.”

Staying away from the bad stories, Graves said, was an idea that came to him after meeting in Charleston with a speaker who warned of the boom town effect where you start with a “laid-back rural community” that “brings in this highly profitable business that interrupts your environment, your social structure and adds to your economy.”

“If you’ve invested in the wrong infrastructures, if you foolishly wasted your boom town resources, you’re left with an infrastructure that drags you down; it’s an anchor,” Graves said.

Graves said the idea in Monroe County was to not throw up walls to the drillers, but to “manage our way through this event” and keep it from overwhelming the county when drillers leave years later. When Gordy Oil took a seat at the table and showed a willingness to cooperate, Graves said, a valuable partnership began to form.

Gordy, whose representative did not return attempts to contact it, has had public meetings with Monroe citizens and had a special meeting with cavers and geologists. Though the company has yet to begin drilling in Monroe County, it is currently exploring whether drilling would be economically feasible in the thinner layers of Marcellus shale that exist beneath Monroe County, Parsons said.

Parsons said Gordy has gone “above and beyond” other drillers, but he recognized not all drillers may be as eager to work with counties and municipalities. Parsons said his advice for other communities is to reach out to drillers who are applying for permits in their areas.

“Communities should offer to sit down and talk with companies, and hopefully the companies will be responsive,” Parsons said.

When Gordy decides to drill, it has agreed to hire a third-party consultant to train Monroe emergency workers on how to respond to any potential crisis as a result of its activities. Gordy also agreed to take special consideration in karst areas, and vowed not to use sinkholes for fracture fluid impoundments.

Special considerations for periodic testing of water near karst-area drill sites and providing that information to county officials and the county Health Department are also included.

Rights for landowners, particularly notification of intent to drill via a personal visit and granting landowner input into drilling sites, are also a term of the MOU.

— E-mail: tkuykendall@register-herald.com