Yesterday’s article in The Post-Journal about the Library’s entry into a Medina Sandstone Society made my head spin with recalled memories of my days in the oil and gas production business. The reason was because I saw this entry process as a chance to explain a few things I learned in that production business. Look at the Library, look at the stone that’s it’s made from. Now, listen while I explain that that very same stone, buried down about five thousand feet below Chautauqua County, is where your natural gas comes from. How could that possible be, you exclaim, it’s “stone.”

The reason is because that stone (sandstone, in this case) has pores in it, and what’s more important, those pores are interconnected. Yes, those pores are small and the interconnection links are even smaller, nevertheless those pores contain methane gas in large quantities.

Somewhere below that five thousand foot deep layers of sandstone are what are called “source beds.” That’s where the decayed flora and fauna of a billion years ago morphed into methane gas and it migrated upward through who knows how many layers of sedimentary formed “stone” to be trapped in the Medina Sandstone by an overlaying section of rather non-permeable shale. Permeability is the term describing the interconnection of the rock’s pores. Shale, another rock section formed by intense pressure, was also formed by the decayed primeval surroundings.

Let me explain here that these layers of stone are sometimes named for the locations where they reach the surface. In this case the Medina Sandstone, because of the tilt in the earth’s crust, comes to the surface near Medina. There was a quarry there where it was mined for both buildings and walls for the Erie Canal and its locks. In Chautauqua County it’s between four and five thousand feet deep, that’s quite a tilt. The Grimsby section of the Medina surfaces near Grimsby Ontario and the Whirlpool section at the Whirlpool at the bottom of Niagara Gorge.

As my company was drilling gas wells in western New York and northwestern Pennsylvania, I took the time to learn just enough about petroleum engineering and oil and gas geology to be dangerous. My real job was as a Landman and a Lease Agent, meaning I found prospective acreage for drilling and got the landowners signed up for drilling rights. In my off hours I was hungry to learn and observe and hung around drilling rigs and meetings between engineers and geologists. Anyway, I learned a little about the Medina formation and speak about it now through this letter.

The Medina sandstone was laid down in two different formations separated by some non-permeable rock. The top section, the red or Grimsby formation, is rather pink. The pink coloration in the Library stone reflects this coloration. The lower section of Medina is a drab gray color and is referred to as the Whirlpool. If you stand at the Niagara Gorge on the US side you can see both formations way down almost to the river of both of these sandstones. It’s also a good place to view all the different layers of sedimentary rock making up the walls of the Gorge. In the Library there are also sections of the Whirlpool gray rock used. Notice the coloration difference.

To continue my treatise, I’m also writing to explain why “fraccing” (hydraulic fracturing) is so necessary to produce natural gas from such apparently solid rock as sandstone. In order to produce methane gas in monetarily viable quantities, if one drilled into the Medina formations it is necessary to fracture the stone to vent multiple faces of the rock to the well bore. That causes methane production to increase and makes drilling viable.

Fraccing is a dirty word in New York as well as many other states. The process includes combining high pressure air, water, frack sand and a chemical concoction intended to fracture the stone (vertically in deep wells and horizontally in shallow wells less that one thousand feet deep) with the pressure and incompressible water and to have the water carry the frack sand back into the crevices created. Once the pressure is released the frack sand is meant to remain in the crevices and prop open the fractures. Frack sand is quite different from playground sand and is very, very hard and has extremely sharp edges. I discovered the sharp edges once I tried handling some and came away partially erased. Fraccing pressures are a bit less than five thousand p.s.i. in my experience, and held at this level to prevent fracturing the pipe transporting the sand and water into the formations. I don’t know much more than that about fraccing. I do know that without it we wouldn’t have natural gas an energy source. Make up your own minds about the safety and viability of the fraccing process.

Kenneth Corey is a Bemus Point resident.