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Back in 2008, not long after geologists began to report enormous
potential gas reserves locked up in the Marcellus shale just south of
Syracuse, state and industry officials hoped to be drilling within a
year. Gov. David Paterson ordered the state Department of Environmental
Conservation (DEC) to prepare a supplemental Generic Environmental
Impact Statement (SGEIS) to set the ground rules for hydrofracking. The
draft SGEIS, or draft supplemental, released in September 2009, has
become the battleground on which the fracking debate has been waged.
Since 1992, before the advent of high-volume hydrofracking, gas
drilling was governed under an earlier Generic EIS. Natural gas has
been harvested from beneath New York state since 1821, and there are
thousands of horizontal wells producing gas today, many of them
hydrofracked. But never has the gas industry contemplated fracking at
this volume—injecting millions of gallons of water, a cocktail of
chemicals and sand into the earth. (Low-volume hydrofracking, involving
tens of thousands of gallons, is permitted and is in use today). Hence,
the new study was ordered.
Fracking in the Marcellus shale involves drilling vertically through
thousands of feet, then turning the drill gradually until the well bore
is horizontal. Once the well bore is set, explosive charges blast holes
in the sides of the tube, and the frack fluids are shot into the shale,
breaking it open to release the gas, causing it to flow toward the well
and up to the surface. Much of the frack fluid also returns to the
surface.
Among the many challenges facing the authors of the draft SGEIS
were: Where would all the water come from? Where would the contaminated
water go? How would heavy truck traffic (thousands of trips hauling
water, sand and chemicals to each well) affect rural areas? What
happens if chemicals spill onto the ground or into a stream?
The draft supplemental, an 800-plus-page tome issued last fall, set
out to answer those questions and many more, including the
vulnerability of horizontal wells to earthquake activity. It has been
roundly criticized by many, and will likely be significantly revised
before a new draft is released, probably later this year. More than
13,000 comments have been filed and must be addressed by the DEC. Most
critics opined that the DEC document was too sympathetic to the gas
companies. In many instances the DEC appears to be making
recommendations rather than insisting on safe practices. And fracking
friends and foes alike agree that the DEC has too few personnel to
monitor drilling if and when it begins.
“The draft supplemental is flawed primarily due to a desire to get
it done quickly,” believes Natural Resources Defense Council attorney
Kate Sinding, who sent the DEC her own 300-page commentary on the
draft. “The DEC has a conflict of interest. The Division of Mineral
Resources has been running the show, and they are charged with
protecting as well as developing resources. Those charged with
protecting have not been involved enough.”
While oil producers and leaseholders bemoan the state’s delay, she
sees the problem as needless haste. “They failed to do certain
categories of analyses,” she observes, “and to do them carefully will
take time and money. DEC has some terrific staff, but certainly not
enough eyes on this process.”
Sinding and others felt encouraged recently when the federal
government announced that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
will be conducting its own review of hydrofracking nationwide.
Political pressure had already caused the DEC to exempt the Skaneateles
and New York City watersheds from the draft SGEIS, leaving the Southern
Tier, which appears to hold more gas reserves, ripe for exploitation.
Since then most local politicians, including Rep. Dan Maffei
(D-DeWitt), have taken the position that no permits for high-volume
hydrofracking should be issued until the EPA review is complete.
“Our constituents don’t want fracking,” says Maffei’s chief of
staff, Mike Whyland. “Their voices are loud, and we hear them. The gas
isn’t going anywhere. Until we can be sure that our drinking water is
protected, we should hold off.”
If that position holds, that means no permits in New York for a year
or two. But the anti-fracking forces in Syracuse are nowhere near to
claiming victory.
Grass-Roots Groundswell
George Rossi is on a roll. On a weekday afternoon in his
second-story North Side flat, he is laying out a communications
strategy for his comrades. Rossi repeats the chorus: “a.) If this goes
right, very few people will benefit; b.) if things go wrong, we’re all
screwed; c.) we all share the risk.”
It’s not the kind of riffs he used to lay down as the lead singer
and guitarist for the national touring act Little Georgie and the
Shuffling Hungarians. These days Rossi is all worked up about
hydrofracking.
“It’s un-American,” Rossi says. “They knew this was coming. The 2005
{federal} Energy Act specifically exempted hydrofracking from federal
regulation. Cheney and Bush, both oil men from Texas, slipped through
exemptions for hydrofracking from federal oversight. Now power is in
the hands of the states. If they had to play by the same rules as
everybody else, this {drilling} would not be economic. They have a
different set of rules, which deeply offends me.” According to Sinding,
oil and gas drilling is routinely exempt from federal environmental
legislation.
Later on in the same session Rossi, who grew up on Skaneateles Lake,
attacks the DEC for “governmental malfeasance.” “They’re not divulging
the chemical content of frack fluid. There is no standardized cocktail
and they won’t say what combination of fluids they are using. There are
known endocrine disruptors and mutants in the fluid that goes down, and
radioactive wastewater comes back up. This waste will be transported
over our roads.”
The DEC draft lists hundreds of chemicals used in frack fluid, and
the hazards of each are listed at each drill site, but fracktivists
contend that the information is useless since it does not indicate the
proportion of each item stirred into the cocktail.
Rossi has been coaching his friend and colleague Laura Brazak on
this bullet point communication strategy. Together with fund-raiser and
consultant Julie Benzo they have developed a Facebook page called “You
Can’t Drink Money.” The page has nearly 3,400 fans, making it quite
possibly the most widely viewed forum on the subject of hydrofracking
anywhere. The trio has also formed a not-for-profit corporation, the
Upstate Sustainability Alliance (USA), and is currently raising money
to help grass-roots organizations seeking to ban hydrofracking.
“When I first heard of it I was sputtering,” says Brazak of the
practice. “I called George and screamed, ‘We have to do something!’”
Let Rossi and Brazak go on long enough and they will make comparisons
to the banking crisis, the thalidomide scandal of the 1950s, and the
involvement of Halliburton in Iraq. A number of chemicals used in
hydrofracking are, in fact, produced by Halliburton.
Brazak is the face and the voice of You Can’t Drink Money. On a
regular basis she posts video clips of herself staring into the camera,
keeping her Facebook followers abreast of news and views related to the
cause. A longtime photographer whose favored subjects include rock
bands and exotic dancers, she has been, by her own telling, completely
obsessed with the dangers of hydrofracking since late last year. She
seethes with anger at the gas companies and the government, and spends
her free time sounding the alarm.
Brazak wants hydrofracking out of the state’s hands and under
control of the federal government. “This whole process was designed to
be an end run,” she says, referring to the draft supplemental. “It’s
kind of a miracle that we haven’t had a disaster yet. They are taking
New Jersey levels of industrialization and bringing them into Central
New York, with smog coming up over the hills into Syracuse. What
happens if a truck overturns into a feeder stream? Or one of the cement
casings leaks into Skaneateles Lake? These endocrine disruptors that
are being injected and coming back up—one truck of fluid overturns, and
we wouldn’t know the impact for 30 years! This is a nightmare waiting
to happen: Do you want to wait until we have babies with flippers?”
That’s the kind of question that leaves Don Siegel and David Palmerton shaking their heads with frustration. Speaking to the Syracuse New Times
after a forum on the topic held at the SUNY College of Environmental
Science and Forestry, where he is a professor of geology, Siegel says
that failed wells are caused by poor cementing, not hydrofracking. He
believes that New York’s proposed regulations are sufficient to protect
the groundwater. In a letter to the editor, Palmerton compared the
anti-frack arguments to phrenology, or pseudo science, a reference he
now attributes to frustration. Rossi responds by calling Palmerton a
tool of gas company interests.
“I’m not saying ban hydrofracking,” insists Rossi. “I use natural
gas. I don’t want to freeze. What we want to do is throw sand in the
machine, slow it down. We will lose nothing if we wait. This rush,
don’t ask, hit the accelerator, is bad public policy. The fact that the
rush is there means that something is wrong,” he says suspiciously.
“They are hiding something. There’s a veil of secrecy.”
One of the things Rossi and Brazak find most undemocratic is the
legal tenet known as “compulsory integration.” As Sinding describes it,
landowners who chose not to sign a lease can be forced to give up their
mineral rights if 60 percent of their neighbors sign up. “These holdout
landowners or ‘non-voluntary’ lessors can be forced into leases. They
get royalty payments,” she says, “but a lesser amount.”
Jobs, Baby, Jobs
Steve Palmatier of Chenango County found that his property had been
compulsorily integrated into a drilling project run by Norse Energy to
fish for gas in the Herkimer sandstone. This involved only vertical
drilling, and low-volume hydrofracking using 70,000 gallons of water.
Nonetheless, Palmatier, a semi-retired machine shop operator with a
background in mechanical engineering, wanted to keep an eye on things.
“I spent 12 hours a day for eight days watching and observing as
they drilled,” he claims. He had been told that the frack water would
come back highly acidic, so he personally tested the pH of the water as
it came out. His finding: “the limestone under the ground neutralized
it.” In the process he became convinced that the dangerous aspects of
hydrofracking can be dealt with through regulation and technology, and
began his own odyssey as a promoter of natural gas drilling in the
region.
“I didn’t want to get rolled over,” he says.
He has now signed on as a consultant for Chenango County, to help
develop jobs and industries based on gas drilling. “One Sunday I got a
call from Norse Energy to help their surveying crew site a road, and I
asked where the crew was from. They said Pennsylvania and Buffalo. I
said no, not until you get a local crew, and I gave them the names and
numbers of local surveyors. That’s how you create local jobs.”
Palmatier has been trying to get SUNY Morrisville’s Norwich campus
to begin training programs for people in the natural gas industry, and
is working with the county to recruit industries that see proximity to
natural gas as a cost saver. He figures to create six jobs for every
well drilled, and, he says, that’s just the start.
While he believes in the promise of natural gas, Palmatier doesn’t
want to see his community treated like some of the places he’s
witnessed in northern Pennsylvania. To that end he organized a field
trip for local residents and officials from Chenango County to Dimock,
Penn.
In the tiny township of Dimock, a stretch of road is referred to as
ground zero by fracktivists. The term “ground zero” has never been
trademarked; originally it was used for the place where the atomic bomb
landed in Hiroshima, and nine years ago it became the accepted term for
the resting place of the World Trade Center. Currently it is used to
describe Carter Road off Route 29 in Dimock, a township less than an
hour’s drive from Binghamton.
Sitting in the shadow of a well rig operated by Cabot Oil and Gas is
a nicely decorated trailer owned by Jean and Ron Carter. In late
October 2008, their well water turned bad, just after Cabot had
vertically fracked the nearby well. A few months later a strong odor of
gas came into the house when they opened their faucets. In December
2009, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP)
shut down their wells, and ordered Cabot to supply them with fresh
water and bottled drinking water. The company has complied, but never
accepted responsibility. Since then DEP has fined Cabot $250,000 and
insisted that the company shut three of its gas wells.
The Carters are one of 14 families whose wells Cabot’s drilling
practices ruined. Although often used to illustrate the dangers of
hydrofracking, the damage in this case was done by wells that were
neither horizontal nor high-volume fracked. The problem, according to
the Carters, Palmatier and others who have looked into the case, was
the cementing and the well casing. Ron Carter, who has been on a
disability retirement since 1991 and gets substantial checks from
Cabot, says he might well sign a lease again if he had the opportunity,
“but there would be a lot more stipulations.”
Fracktivists point to the case of Cabot’s operations in Dimock as
evidence of hydrofracking’s inevitable risks. Palmerton says they are
an example of “bad operators” within the industry, those who need
greater oversight. Pennsylvania’s head of environmental protection,
John Hanger, echoes this view, referring in published reports to what
happened in Dimock as “a black eye for the industry.” In the past two
years Pennsylvania has more than doubled the number of staff dedicated
to enforcing drilling regulations and raised permit fees to cover the
cost.
The Ground Water Protection Council, a nonprofit organization of
state environmental officials, has concluded that “state oil and gas
regulations are adequately designed” to protect groundwater.”
Environmentalists are hard pressed to explain scientifically how gas
can migrate through the thousands of feet of rock that separate
groundwater from shale, but nonetheless the fears are real.
Power Play
What got Palmatier most upset was the condition of the local roads
while Cabot was drilling. Mark Scheuermann, general counsel for the
Calgary-based Talisman Energy, concedes that the worst impact on a
community is during the six weeks when the hydrofracking operation is
installed. “We have a Good Neighbor program,” says Scheuermann. “We
coordinate with the communities. That’s six weeks and the life of the
well is 25 years. We have probably dug 150 sites in the Trenton-Black
River shale, and I defy you to find one of them without a guide and a
compass”
Although many have complained of the noise of the trucks going by
and the noise of well drilling, it didn’t seem to bother the Carters
much. “We slept,” says Ron. “The dog?” He slept too. The bluebird
houses in the front of their yard were shaken by the trucks, but one
spring later a healthy crop of hummingbirds and cardinals has returned
to nest in their yard. An uncovered swimming pool, 500 feet from the
well head, appears clean.
In the hydrofracking debate a large number of people get most of
their information through social media, which is to say from passionate
people with whom they agree. Some of the most important decision
makers, the landowners, get most of their information from companies
who are in a position to write them checks in life-transforming
amounts.
Is there any real chance of a debate on the facts and merits of the
issue? Numerous public forums on hydrofracking have been characterized
by audience disdain for those with whom they disagree. Letters from
pro-frack parties like Palmerton accuse drilling opponents of being
willfully ignorant, and some fracktivists lump those who would drill
for gas in the shale with Sarah Palin’s “Drill, Baby, Drill” call for
drilling oil near our ocean beaches.
Each side can find enough reasons to advance its position, but how
do we create a public forum to decide an issue so complex it took the
DEC 800 pages to outline it?
Prominent environmentalists who believe the green advantage of gas
over coal and oil makes hydrofracking worth considering are afraid to
say so in public. They make the case that 85 percent of U.S. energy use
still comes from fossil fuels; natural gas accounts for 22 percent of
energy use in domestic homes and businesses. If the most conservative
estimates of Marcellus shale gas are accurate, the United States will
have enough homegrown energy to heat and light the Northeast for
decades, which is the timeframe when experts believe renewables might
claim a majority share of power generation.
The suspicion of government, on the anti-frack side, and the
frustration with the slow pace of government on the industry side,
bears a striking similarity to the Tea Party movement. But maybe it’s
not about the environment after all. Maybe it’s about something deeper
than the shale. “It’s a culture war,” says Rossi.
“I don’t think it’s all about the science. I think this is about
people’s philosophical feelings about hydrocarbons,” says Scheuerman.
“It’s the usual capitalistic, militaristic way of seeing the world,”
charges Vera Scroggins, an activist in Montrose, Penn., where the
natural gas industry in the Marcellus shale is growing year by year.
“Some people want to make money, and we are collateral damage.” She
asks, in all sincerity, “Who would trust a corporation?”
