LET'S COOL IT

  In the past few weeks an impetus has been building  in New York to delay the commencement of the natural gas play until the EPA concludes its two-year study on hydraulic fracturing.  Activist groups have petitioned the DEC to hold off issuance of its final sGEIS until the report is in.  Meanwhile, a bill is circulating in the legislature providing for a two-year moratorium on gas drilling.

For nearly two years now, many of us have been questioning what  the hurry was, anyway, because of the bad news on the impacts of “unconventional” gas development in Texas, Colorado and Pennsylvania.   We knew the gas in the Marcellus Shale,  then as now, was not in danger of drying up or dribbling away.  Since that time, facts have come to light about the drilling process and the industry, about international energy dynamics, and about politics, culminating in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, that have helped to reveal the forces behind the pressure to drill and to put the drilling debate in perspective. There’s no sound reason for New York to hurry.

The industry continues to pound impatiently on New York’s door and to warn that if the state gives it too hard a time it will have to hurt us all by walking away. Never mind my personal response to this threat.  Even from the industry’s own point of view, it makes no sense. True, a dollar today is worth more than a dollar two years from now.  But the price of gas is presently depressed, and will presumably go lower yet as more of it is recovered.  That means gas companies will realize less value for each mcf of New York gas they drill now than they will if they wait until a time when it is in scarcer supply. As there is no present capacity for stockpiling gas, there is no price float to benefit them, either.

The same is true for the state, in terms of taxes to be realized, and for landowners in terms of royalties payable to them, since both are measured by the price of the gas produced.  I, for one, am unsympathetic to the respective interests of the State fisc and the hard-up landowners in getting a “quick fix” now, because evidence is mounting on the extent of collateral damage that may be inflicted upon our citizens in order to provide it to them.  Part of that evidence suggests that the losses to the state and its communities from an immediate gas play, even in purely economic terms, may end up outweighing the gains. (I advert here to the study that was the subject of my March 31 post, and to another look at the economics in a webinar.

So, a quick fix for the state from the riches of the Marcellus Shale is probably a pound-foolish delusion.  As for the landowners who believe that “their” gas entitles them to special consideration, they need to be reminded that when they leased away certain rights in their own land, they also gave away, free of charge, many of the rights of their neighbors to enjoy their own lands,  as well as the security of the water supplies of people in distant downstream regions. That somehow fails to make their needs a priority for the rest of us.

Two years will serve to cool many heads. By the end of  two years, there should be some useful published statistics on the human health impacts within drilling communities in other states, and on the communities’ economic health as well.  There should also be  progress in the unsettled matter of how to treat and safely dispose of the large-scale toxic wastes produced by hydraulic fracture drilling.

 In two years, too, technology will change.  The Halliburton formula could by then be superseded by something far safer.  Whatever happened to fracking with propane, the process tested in eastern Canada and alleged to be safer and more efficient ?  Could it work in deep shale?

In the meanwhile, two years lost to gas drilling will mean two years of confidence that the water we drink won't have stuff like toluene in it, and two years for safer sources of energy to take hold in New York.

By way of a postscript,  I add that moving precipitously ahead with drilling in New York will NOT aid U.S. efforts to become energy-independent.  Gas will not supplant mid-eastern oil until such time as gas applications become as broad as oil’s.  We will need to keep importing oil until we’ve got natural gas cars and trucks. We’re not there yet.  In the interim, New York’s supply , given the current glut in the U.S., will doubtless flow overseas: perhaps (who knows?) to Saudi Arabia.

EPA TO THE RESCUE

It seems that, of all Obama’s appointments, the EPA’s Lisa Jackson is emerging as the best friend of the people who elected him –  albeit under considerable pressure from Congress and demonstrators.  Lately the agency has not only undertaken to review the environmental effects of hydraulic fracture gas drilling nationwide, but, in West Virginia, has proposed to veto a permit that the Army Corps of engineers had already approved for a large mountaintop-removal coal mine.  This is a big reprieve for poor West Virginia.  In recent years it has had to endure the despoliation of its land and communities by both Granddaddy Coal and its fat and gassy stepchild, which is now drilling in southern edge of the Marcellus shale.  Of course, that’s in part because West Virginia is ... poor.  But the fact of politics is that this kind of large-scale despoliation happens in rich states, too.

    I listened this morning to a WBAI interview with Jeff Biggers, author of a new  book about coal, Reckoning at Eagle Creek.  A journalist and the grandson of a coal miner, Biggers outlined the deceptive mantras of the coal industry which, together with massive political contributions, successfully kept legislators and regulators off its back for generations.  Jimmy Carter, having promised to ban strip mining during his campaign, apparently learned how difficult it was push back against such a powerful industry, and never acted on his promise.

    Coal was cheap as long as no one tallied its environmental and health consequences or gave any thought to cleaning up its messes, and it’s been long embedded in our national culture as the principal source of electric energy.  The “jobs” mantra has played a substantial role in the schmeer effort by Big Coal even though it has turned out that jobs have considerably shrunk over time, owing in part to the mechanization of the strip mining process. Over the same time, the governmental response to coal issues, Biggers says,-- even where the causal connection between strip mining and environmental or health damage was demonstrated -- has been a predictable compromise:   to minimize the environmental damage rather than to curtail the particular practice that perpetuates it.

    Now, Coal has convinced many, including Obama himself, that it can be “clean”. The industry has spent not one dime, says Biggers, to develop clean coal, but it claims that underground sequestration of carbon will curb the emissions that contribute to global warming.  The industry doesn’t mention that the sequestration process in itself requires considerable energy,  and thus more coal to burn and more money in Coal pockets.

    Here in New York’s portion of the Marcellus region, the not-so-flush southern tier, West Virginia history seems about to repeat itself with natural gas. Gas may be cleaner than coal, but not while it’s being produced.  The promise of tax revenues and other income to the state from gas drilling, and the deceptive promises of local community revival which I have reviled in previous posts, have blinded officials to the vast environmental damage that will result if anything like the officially projected quantity of deep shale wells is ever realized.  Our New York regulator is firmly rooted to the compromise strategy of minimizing environmental damage from natural gas drilling by, e.g., providing setbacks measured in 100 or fewer feet (your pond must be at least 50 feet downstream of a gas well), and resolutely ignoring the compounding of negative impacts where more than one well is sited in a particular environment. The spills, methane migrations, and illegal dumpings across the border in Pennsylvania and in other gas-rich states, the unusual concentrations of disease symptoms within drilling communities, the economic ill health of many post-drilling communities – none of these things is leading toward any official determination in New York that drilling should be banned or limited.  It seems instead to have brought on one-upmanship – Hey, our guys (all sixteen of them) can do this better than you!

    We can hope that the EPA’s promised new study of “hydrofracking” won’t be too little and too late to avert serious toxic disaster. It is an entirely new EPA from the one under the Bush administration which simply cleared the path for whatever industry wanted to do. The agency’s 2004 study of the process, which concluded that hydraulic fracturing posed “little or no threat to drinking water”, did not even involve
water testing.  It is that flawed conclusion that the gas industry touts every time it fears that state officials will wise up to the true facts.

    If you are a New Yorker, be sure to sign the  petition to the DEC demanding that it wait for the EPA study results before issuing any permits for hydraulic fracture drilling.