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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.