A FEW KILOMETRES from Ken Summers’s home, a stout pipe bristling with rusty valves and thick bolts protrudes from the middle of a cleared field.

Summers says it represents the beginning of a potential environmental nightmare for Nova Scotia.

The device is a wellhead. It sits atop an exploratory natural gas well drilled in 2008 by Elmworth Energy, Canadian subsidiary of Denver-based Triangle Petroleum Corp.

Summers, a carpenter who has lived in Minasville for 20 years, says he and his neighbours weren’t concerned about the test well until they started learning more about hydraulic fracturing, the extraction process used on at least two of the company’s five test wells east of Windsor.

"The industry does thousands of wells wherever there’s a major producing field," Summers says, noting that the wells are now idle. "It would be like living in an industrial zone plopped down in a place that was previously quite rural."

Read More

The Chronicle Herald