As Domestic Gas Drilling Takes Off, Controversy Erupts in NY
(image: greencollarrap.files.wordpress.com)
Natural gas is a fossil fuel, like coal or oil. Like coal, the United States has significant domestic reserves of natural gas. Natural gas also emits less carbon than other fossil fuels, and is convenient to use in many ways—it can be blown through pipes as a gas, or liquefied for compact storage. These qualities have made natural gas the darling of the fossil fuel world—available domestically in larger quantities than oil and burning cleaner than our most abundant fuel, coal, has made it seem an energy silver bullet.
Of course, as the old saying goes, “there ain’t no free lunch.” Natural gas may not emit as much carbon as oil, let alone coal, but it has its own significant health and environmental risks: it is a powerful greenhouse gas (almost 60 times as powerful, pound for pound, as carbon dioxide), and its combustion creates nitrogen oxides, which cause smog and acid rain. There’s also the little fact that its extraction can release methane into water supplies, leading to flammable tap water—an admittedly rare, but scary (and very photogenic!) side effect of gas drilling.
Even with those issues, you’ve probably seen the commercials touting natural gas as the cure for our country’s energy woes. If you live in New York or Pennsylvania, natural gas is an even hotter topic with some important local connections. It’s been discovered that those states are sitting an enormous reservoir of natural gas—enough to meet the nation’s needs for 20 years, according to a November 1 article from Crain’s New York. The wealth and jobs that gas drilling could bring—not to mention the tax revenue—have created a “gas rush” in the Appalachians, an area that’s had too little economic good news for too long.
Technically, the gas was not recently discovered; we’ve long known that there’s natural gas in the Marcellus Shale formation that stretches from Ohio and West Virginia up through Pennsylvania and into New York. What’s new are two factors:
• Only recently has the full size of the gas-rich formation been appreciated
• New technology has made it practical to extract gas that we couldn’t have tapped previously
That new technology consists of horizontal drilling—being able to reach out further from a single well—and hydraulic fracturing, also called “hydrofracking.” Hydrofracking involves injecting fluids at high pressures down wells in order to fracture, or break up, the shale, allowing the gas within it to move more freely. Hydrofracking is used in a variety of contexts, ranging from reviving dried-up domestic water wells to extracting unconventional oil from shale and other rock formations.
(image: bossintl.com)
These new drilling and extraction technologies—coupled with the previously unrealized scope of the Marcellus reserves—have brought the fossil fuel industry to a corner of America far removed from the Texan, Alaskan, or Gulf oil fields it’s usually associated with. The industry has brought vast sums of money with it. With drilling rights going for more than $5,000 an acre—plus, in many cases, a continuing royalties on the gas taken from the land—natural gas can be seen as monetary mana from heaven, not just for landowners, but also for the state and city governments that stand to profit through taxes. Then, on top of that, you have the J-word: jobs.
But again, there ain’t no free lunch. Hydrofracking involves injecting a toxic brew of chemicals underground—but they don’t stay underground. They get into water supplies and come back to the surface. They’ve been implicated in livestock deaths, and since there’s nothing that will kill a cow or pig that won’t also kill humans, the health concern is obvious and inescapable. Out of those concerns, New York City fought a determined, and so far successful, action to keep natural gas drilling out of the upstate New York watershed, an area that provides drinking water for over 8 million people in NYC and surrounding counties.
Worse, not only do the hydrofracking chemicals come back up, but so do other trapped liquids—including a radioactive “brine.” This brine is water that’s been marinating in radioactive rock in the Marcellus formation for thousands of years or more. Much of the Earth is radioactive, at least at low levels—did you know that your granite kitchen countertop gives off radioactivity?—so the mere fact of radiation isn’t a concern. It’s the amount that’s worrisome: test samples from New York gas drilling show radium-226 (a derivative of uranium) at up to 267 times the limit for safe environmental discharge and thousands of times over the safe limit for drinking. While it’s much less radioactive than spent fuel from nuclear reactors, the potential volume of radioactive waste water is also vastly greater. At present, the NY/PA area has no facilities capable of dealing with it.
The Marcellus natural gas reserves have significant potential—both good and bad. It’s important to make sure that we fully appreciate, and can deal with, the latter as we attempt to harvest the former.
As a born and bred Upstate New Yorker, I always root for anything that could boost the always-flagging economy up there, but I don’t know if this is it. There are a lot of downsides to natural gas, especially if getting to it means rampant toxicity. I say leave it in the ground. Let’s get to some real energy alternatives.
[...] to sort through the issue. As HeatingOil.com’s Steven Zweig reported last week, the proposal is fraught with environmental and safety concerns, so it’s crucial to hear all sides of this particular [...]
[...] method in which a cocktail of chemicals are used to break up the rocks and release the natural gas. According to HeatingOil.com, the chemicals used in hydrofracking are known to infiltrate water supplies and have been [...]
[...] To access the oil in Birdbear, oil companies will need to use the same technique they’ve developed for the Bakken and Three Forks-Sanish patches—horizontal drilling. Horizontal drilling has opened up new possibilities for oil and gas companies. The controversial drilling method known as “hydrofracking”—most widely used in drilling for natural gas—relies in part on horizontal drilling, though the threat hydrofracking poses comes from the fluids that are released into wells in order to break up the earth, which can release toxic chemicals that find their way into soil and drinking water. [...]
[...] In western New York and Pennsylvania, for example, the new extraction technique known as “hydrofracking” has opened up the possibility of tapping the sizeable natural gas reserves of the Marcellus [...]
If no “accidents” ever happened in horizontal natural gas drilling, it would threaten our water supply only by requiring so much fresh water: between 1.5 and 8 million gallons per fracking job (multiply by thousands of wells projected in Southern Tier of NY; multiply times ten, amount of times a well can be fracked). But there is no place where horizontal natural gas drilling has occurred where there has not been leakage or spillage. In a fracking job that uses 1.5 mill. gallons water,if only 1% of the fluid is leaked or spilled, that’s 750,000 gallons. It is extremely difficult to remediate water. Once an acquifer is contaminated, it cannot be decontaminated. Should the New York State government jeopardize the state’s MOST precious resource–water–in order to get at this other resource, natural gas, before safety procedures and regulations have been developed? No!
The Governor would make a terrible mistake in allowing permits for hydrofracking at this point, when existing regulations (the supplement to the 1992 environmental impact statement) are drastically inadequate. (For instance, that document doesn’t address how you get rid of the wastewater or drilling cuttings). E mail or call his office asking him to withdraw the dSGEIS, the “draft supplemental generic environmental impact statement,” the hopelessly inadequate document on which drilling permits could start to be granted as soon as January! Call 518-474-8390 or e mail via
http://161.11.121.121/govemail.
(The Gov.’s regular e mail site is temporarily down, 12/2/09. http://161.11.121.121/govemailis the address at which his office can still be reached)and ask Gov. Paterson to WITHDRAW THE DRAFT SUPPLEMENTAL ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENT. There’s no need to jeopardize our water by rushing to get at our natural gas before the knowledge and regulations exist about how to do it safely.
[...] families in the small towns of Broome and Delaware counties, the Times adds new layers to the debate, which pits landowners in the Rust Belt of Western New York against one another over the future of [...]
[...] XTO has expertise in tapping unconventional gas resources, such as the shale gas discovered in formations such as the Marcellus Shale. Recently, large amounts of gas—and oil, too—have been found in unconventional reserves [...]
[...] natural gas due to advances in natural gas extraction from shale beds in the US (of which the Marcellus shale formation in the Northeast is the largest). Perhaps the most relevant EIA prediction concerns the future of [...]
[...] While these significant price bumps don’t necessarily dictate where prices will head in the energy sector, they do, as Gold aptly noted, shine a light on natural gas. Natural gas is, as he writes “efficient, versatile and releases half as much carbon as coal to generate the same amount of power.” As the profile of natural gas rises, many theorize, so will the price. However, that price may be offset by some of the discoveries of potentially rich natural gas reserves, such as the one in the Marcellus Shale formation in the U.S. [...]
[...] hydrofracking chemicals get out into the environment. That’s bad under any circumstances, but worse when it occurs in or near the water source for millions of people, such as the New York City [...]
[...] Indeed, 2010 is a bit of a gauntlet year for big oil and impending legislation. First off, the EPA made a big move in early December, declaring greenhouse gases a public health hazard, and therefore opening them up to regulation by the agency. In the Senate, climate change legislation is currently in the works that would place a cap on greenhouse gas emissions. There is also legislation on the table attempting to regulate hydraulic fracturing, a controversial technique currently being debated in Upstate New York as a way to access natural gas in the Marcellus Shale formation. [...]