As fracking looms, NC officials worry about road damage

Some of the quiet country roads of central North Carolina might not be so quiet much longer.

The first permits for natural gas exploration in the state could be issued in the spring, and N.C. Department of Transportation officials are trying to assess how the state’s rural roads will be affected by thousands of truckloads of chemicals, water, sand and mechanical equipment associated with hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

Some roads “are going to experience a lifetime of truck traffic in just a few weeks,” said Brandon Jones, a NCDOT division maintenance engineer.

No one knows how big the natural gas boom will actually be in the Deep River shale basin, which stretches across several counties in the central part of the state.

But Jones said NCDOT’s Oil and Gas Exploration and Production Committee was already focusing on potential impacts to the state’s secondary road system, composed of around 60,000 miles of small roads in primarily rural areas.

“The secondary system was really built for small agriculture,” said Jones, who is on the committee. “Most of these secondary roads were really built with minimal pavement structure because the purpose wasn’t to carry a lot of trucks or heavy weights.”

Jones said that could result in potholes and deteriorated road conditions.

Road damage common

This isn’t unusual. Rural roads in North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Texas have experienced damage from truck traffic associated with shale development, according to a September report by the Government Accountability Office.

Extraction methods such as fracking –where water, sand and chemicals are pumped deep underground to release fossil fuels from shale rock – have fueled boom times in areas of the Bakken Shale in Montana and North Dakota; the Eagle Ford Shale in south Texas; and the Marcellus Shale, which includes areas of New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

But fracking has not come without controversies, from the payments to landowners to concerns about air and water quality around fracking sites, as well as damage to rural roads. The committee is hoping to learn from the experiences of these other states in order to protect North Carolina’s rural roads.

Road-use agreements

“Even if the (Deep River Shale) operations are reduced from what you might see in those states, we are going to have damages to our roads,” said Ricky Greene, deputy chief engineer for NCDOT’s Division of Highways.

Unlike many other states, North Carolina counties do not maintain any roads; the state is responsible for overseeing and maintaining one of the largest roadway systems in the country.

But in states with fracking, “it has been much more difficult to predict where the biggest road deterioration is going to happen because it depends on the location and intensity of shale development,” the GAO found.

To lessen the damage, North Carolina might follow the practices of other states and set up road-use agreements, in which drilling companies work to repair and maintain the roads they use extensively.

Pennsylvania uses these road-use pacts, also known as maintenance agreements, to maintain roads in areas with heavy truck traffic, said Scott Christie, deputy secretary for highway administration at the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.

Pennsylvania’s lessons

But Christie said the process came with a learning curve. “There was probably an initial period where the (oil and gas) industry was not quite aware of how weak our secondary road system is,” Christie said. “But they quickly got up to speed.”

He said companies had spent more than $500 million in the past five years repairing state roads under the agreements. They also have to pay for state inspections of road damage in areas under the agreements, he said.

“Those (rural) roads really can’t take a thousand water trucks and cranes coming in a brief period of time to start the drilling operations,” Christie said.

The North Carolina oil and gas exploration committee has looked extensively at lessons learned from Pennsylvania and has met with PennDOT officials about their efforts to maintain rural roads.

“It gave us good perspective on a very busy area in this industry,” Jones said.

NCDOT state maintenance operations engineer Emily McGraw said the committee must turn in its findings to the North Carolina legislature in January.

This story was originally published November 23, 2014 at 3:06 PM.