Offshore drilling. (image: sun-sentinel.com)

Tuesday’s News-Press out of Fort Myers, FL carried an impassioned op-ed by county commissioner Adam Cummings against proposed oil and natural gas drilling off the Florida coast. The core of Cummings’ argument is not personal politics, but an analysis done by the Energy Information Administration on drilling in currently restricted areas of the Gulf of Mexico, which found that oil extraction at all sites would diminish US dependence on foreign oil by only 2.5 percent over the next 20 years, with negligible impact on prices. Florida’s share of these untapped reserves would account for only .625 percent of that already small reduction, causing Cummings to question the wisdom of potential environmental damage to Florida’s greatest resource: its famous beaches, and the tourism and retirement industries they support.

The area in question, the South Florida Basin, includes all the coast south of St. Petersburg to the Keys, as well as Miami, West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale on the Atlantic side. While tourism is currently in a slump due to the economic downturn, leading some to call for the opening of the restricted reserves, millions of dollars of investment and years of waiting would be required before these sites would yield anything, and Florida’s share of that return would be, in Cummings eyes, insufficient to justify the local impact. Drawing on his own experience working in the Gulf oil industry in Louisiana, Cummings says:

My observations of the communities where the [drilling] operations were based were that they appeared to enjoy few of the economic benefits. In fact the vast majority of people near Cameron [Lousiana] choose to live near the interstate instead of the coastline…Look around Cameron and neighboring Lake Charles to see whether you think it would fit with the lifestyle of Southwest Florida.

Florida is not alone in having to weigh these considerations: all over the US, the energy industry is looking to previously untapped domestic resources in the name of shifting our energy infrastructure away from foreign sources. 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 Shale formation, where prices have reached $5,000 an acre for drilling rights, not including continued royalties. The new process, though, entails serious ecological hazards not limited to contamination of underground and surface water, local increases in radiation above safe levels, and the release of unburned natural gas – a greenhouse gas 60 times more powerful than carbon dioxide – into the atmosphere. Cummings’ solution to the dilemma of balancing local needs with questions of such a global scale, is that communities should focus on investing in the growing green energy sector instead, which would bring as least of much of a return in terms of the total change to our national and regional energy dependence, and without the potential environmental costs.

(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.