Fracking with our Future

Susan Peehl
Philipstown dot info
May 30, 2011

 
Drilling at the well-head
Courtesy of U.S. Energy Department

I first became aware of the energy industry’s intensified interest in
drilling for natural gas when I tuned in for the 2008 Presidential Debates.
As the program cut to a commercial, on came an 80-year-old man in casual
clothes to introduce himself: “I’m T. Boone Pickens, but you know me.” I did
know of him. It was the same T. Boone Pickens I’d read about six years
earlier, when he’d secured the permit to pump billions of gallons from the
Ogallala Aquifer – the mythic body of water I’d first heard of as a child.
As my dad had explained to me: A giant underground river, with an Indian
name – (OH-GA-LA-LA), supplied all of the High Plains states with water for
irrigation and wells — including lands that had once been affected by the
great dust bowl.

Under Texas law — the law of capture — whatever you can pump from your land
is yours, regardless of how it affects your neighbors. Oilman and corporate
raider, Pickens was negotiating to pump fast and supply the cities of El
Paso and San Antonio with Ogallala water from his panhandle quail hunting
grounds. I thought, “But what of the farmers in the Midwest? Don’t other
states have a say over this?” Apparently not: As of this writing, Pickens
is negotiating to supply water to Dallas, disregarding even his neighbors in
the panhandle. So, while waiting for the debate, I stayed tuned to what
Pickens had to say.

“… [W]hen the candidates talk energy, listen closely. Listen for a plan that
actually reduces foreign oil and remember the only way to reduce imports is
to use something other than foreign oil to run our cars and trucks.”

I caught the next commercial a few weeks later, when Pickens proposed the
use of wind turbines as well as natural gas for his plan (which sounded
uncharacteristically green, before I realized that the wind corridor would
occupy the exact same right-of-way that Pickens has had difficulty obtaining
for his water pipeline to Dallas.)

In 2009, I started seeing ads on Metro-North for cheap, natural gas as New
York’s solution to the energy crisis. Odd, I thought, as I’d just written
up my report for Cold Spring’s comprehensive plan and was told by Central
Hudson that supplying natural gas to the village would be anything but
cheap. I went back to my research. Natural gas for our area of New York has
to be piped in from Canada, Pennsylvania or Connecticut. It fluctuates, as
Central Hudson buys from the market. Why is this? Because what we have
underground has, until recently, been considered unobtainable. Two
impediments have stood in the way: The first, inadequate technology and the
second, legislation.

Amazingly, these two impediments have now been eliminated. Some of
the same technological advances that have enabled deep sea drilling by British
Petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico — horizontal drilling and high volume
hydraulic-fracturing, I’ll explain in a minute — have now made it possible
for companies to extract natural gas from the Marcellus shale. Natural gas,
formed as the result of decaying plant and animal matter under extreme
pressure – extreme, meaning the result of tectonic plate movement — has been
locked into Marcellus shale, 5,000 – 8,000 feet under the southern third of
our state, since the formation of the continents. Now, there’s a race to
burn it up – cheaply, which brings me to the second impediment.

Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which, among other things,
exempted the gas and oil industries’ technologies and chemical use from the
Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. What has
come to be known as the “Halliburton Loophole” was the direct result of the
closed-door energy task force meetings presided over by Dick Cheney, another
oilman and quail hunter from Texas/Wyoming. (He moved during G.W. Bush’s
presidential run because the Constitution forbids two people from the same
state from running together, a clause — as I learned in high school – meant
to hinder any one state’s interests from dominating presidential policy.
Hmmm.)

Now, while New Jersey is moving to ban natural gas drilling, all that stands
in the way of drilling in New York are private landowners and the New York
State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), which is even now
fine-tuning the next draft of its Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact
Statement or SGEIS.

 ?
Diagram of fracking process
Courtesy of U.S. Energy Department

Arguments advanced by the natural gas industry for drilling, why they don’t
hold water, and arguments against them

Pro: Clean energy. Caveat: Although the claim that natural gas in your
home burns more cleanly than say, coal, this doesn’t take into account the
filth of obtaining it, which involves drilling horizontally into the
Marcellus Shale formation and hydraulically-fracturing or fracking – pumping
tons of fresh water at high pressure in combination with sand and a toxic
brew of chemicals (the contents of which, by the Energy Policy Act of 2005,
need never be revealed to the public) to rupture the shale and release the
trapped gas.

Con: Toxic brews have been showing up in people’s wells and reservoirs and
are affecting people’s health in parts of the country where this technology
has been deployed. According to a recent Riverkeeper report:

Con: Natural Gas — primarily methane but also other gases —
is dangerous and difficult to contain once dislodged. It can seep upward,
causing explosions and tainting water supplies. See Josh Fox’s film, Gasland,
and you can watch people from around the country set their tap water on fire.

Just last year, Cold Spring had to rely on New York City’s water supply when
our own reservoir ran frighteningly low. So, what affects New York City’s
water can affect ours, and while the Catskill State Park is constitutionally
off-limits for vertical drilling, portions of New York’s watershed are
located outside of the designated park area, and (just as with pumping the
Ogallala in Texas) there is nothing to prevent gas from being obtained
horizontally from beneath parks or any other lands. Do we want fracking
underneath the watershed?

Pro: “Towns… are being revitalized by the economic boom.” Caveat: While
jobs would be great and so would royalties, wouldn’t it also be comforting –
progressive even — to think that our work and our booming abundance
could be positively linked to our quality of life, our health and our water?
And what happens after the boom? Superfund sites?

Con: Competing interests for fresh water and no plan for waste. Where are
the 2.4 – 7.8 million gallons of fresh water per fracking going come from?
And where are they going to go when roughly only half of the waste remains
in the ground while the rest comes back to the surface? As many as 16 wells
can be drilled per square mile, and each well can be re-fracked up to 10
times.

Another Con: Ill preparation for accidents and disasters: “On April 19,
2011, less than one year after the BP Gulf oil spill, a catastrophic blowout
of a Chesapeake Energy natural gas well in Leroy, PA, resulted in a release
of thousands of gallons of hydro-fracking fluid, much of which spilled into
the nearby Towanda Creek.” Of the three companies to request permits, none
are from New York and only one has an office in the state. We need only
look to our neighbors in Pennsylvania to understand the significance of what
that means when there is an explosion or fire. They’ve waited over 10 hours
for help from Texas to put out the flames.

Pro: Solution to the energy crisis. Caveat: This is a stopgap measure
because, like oil, natural gas cannot be replenished. And what of the risks?

Con: Burning fossil fuels affects our climate. Isn’t it ironic that the more
fossil fuels we burn, the more extreme our weather becomes, and the more
extreme our weather becomes, the more fossil fuels we need to combat it?

Pro: Economic gains. This argument isn’t being put forward by the industry
to all New Yorkers. It’s being directed towards investors, and it’s why I
started with the question I did. The companies requesting permits stand to
make a lot of money – as fast as they can pump. Their interests aren’t tied
to the land, or to the water; nor are their interests tied to neighboring
lands or parks. Their interests are in exploiting what’s under the ground
for the purpose of profit; so it is with their shareholders and so it is
with the Wall Street community. In fact, stocks in the natural gas sector
are predicted to be the next big investment opportunity.

Guess whose second largest holding in his portfolio is the parent company
(Chesapeake Energy) of one of the three companies (Chesapeake Appalachia,
LLC, Fortuna Energy, Inc., and Vertical Resources, Inc.) to have requested
permits to drill in New York’s Marcellus Shale Formation? Hint:
http://stockpickr.com/pro/portfolio/T-Boone-Pickens-BP-Capital/  

Caveat: What’s in it for the rest of us to offset our risks? Shall we
invest? What of those individuals who would sell their land rights? Would
they be informed? Would they be compromised by this economy so that they’d
have to sell? Would they even consider their neighbors’ interests and
futures?

What do the great dust bowl, T. Boone Pickens, Texas Law and the Ogallala
Aquifer have to do with fracking in New York State?

T. Boone Pickens and the promotion of drilling as the solution to a crisis,
with high-stakes profit margins as the primary motivation. Do we want these
interests to rule our water? Do we want to absorb all the risks for certain
individuals’, a few companies’ and their shareholders’ benefits? Who really
stands to gain from drilling in NY’s Marcellus Shale?

We DO have a say in this. In the month of August, a 60-day comment period
will begin for we, the public, to weigh in on what we think about opening up
our state to horizontal drilling and high-volume hydraulic fracturing. I
intend to make a comment. Will you?

I’ll follow up with information as it’s released, when the comment period
begins.

Susan Peelh is a documentary filmmaker and resident of Philipstown.