Hydraulic Fracturing Update: Fight Against 'Fracking' Heats Up in New York and the Marcellus Shale

GREEN IS GOOD
by Margaret Smith

New York's most notable feature may be the city that never sleeps, but a new trend that's been sweeping the nation over the past couple of years has finally made ground. And when we say "made ground" we're talking literally here, because it plans on drilling its way thousands of feet underground in New York state.

Yes, New York has become the new epicenter for the hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," debate. A popular technique used by natural gas and oil companies, fracking is a way to easily extract natural gas from rock fissures. A chemical mixture of sand and fluid is injected under high pressure deep within rock formations to break open pores and easily release natural gas. From there, the natural gas is directed toward a production well where it can then be brought to the surface.

For New York, plans have been set aside to drill out of the Marcellus Shale. Part of the Devonian Black Shale Succession, the Marcellus Shale is a 575-mile long shale formation that extends through Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and West Virginia. A profitable move? Definitely. Natural gas as energy has been commonly used in New York for over two centuries. Recently it found that the Marcellus formation contained a mind-blowing amount of natural gas, and now New York stands to make more than a trillion dollars from its production.

But at what cost? That's what many New Yorkers have been asking themselves lately as plans to drill keep moving forward and problems such as wastewater treatment, local impact, and mining remain to be solved.

"People are just honestly questioning if this can be done safely at all," said Wes Gillingham, program director at Catskill MountainKeeper, a nonprofit, grassroots, environmental organization aimed at protecting the Catskills. The Catskills, as well as the Delaware River Valley, sit on top of the Marcellus Shale Formation.

For many environmental organizations in New York, one of the key problems is wastewater. In Pennsylvania, the Department of Environmental Protection found that its oil and gas wells disgorge 9 million gallons of wastewater a day, and some estimates indicate that number is at the lower end of the spectrum.

Since drilling hasn't officially started yet, New York hasn't had to deal with those problems. When the time comes, though, many wastewater treatment plants  say that they can't handle it in that volume. New York isn't set up to deal with all that sludge, and for the first time, the state has been asked what they're going to do about it.

What's worse is that some of that wastewater may even be radioactive. New York's Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) analyzed 13 samples of wastewater that was brought thousands of feet to the surface from drilling. After further study they found that the water contained levels of radium-226, a derivative of uranium, as high as 267 times the limit safe for discharge into the environment, and thousands of times the limit that's safe for people to drink. According to the investigative nonprofit Propublica, radioactive content brings its own set of problems:

The findings, if backed up with more tests, have several implications: The energy industry would likely face stiffer regulations and expenses, and have more trouble finding treatment plans to accept its waste -- if any at all. Companies would need to license their handlers and test their workers for radioactive exposure, and possibly ship waste across the country. And the state would have to sort out how its laws for radioactive waste might apply to drilling and how the waste could impact water supplies and the environment.

What is less clear is how the wastewater may affect the health of New Yorkers, since the danger depends on how much radiation people are exposed to and how they are exposed to it. Radium is known to cause bone, liver and breast cancers, and the EPA publishes exposure guidelines for it, but there is still disagreement over exactly how dangerous low-level doses can be to workers who handle it, or to the public.

Dangers such as those are what the state is trying to measure right now with a Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS). Most recently, the comment period on the draft SGEIS on potential gas drilling activity in the Marcellus Shale Formation just ended, with multiple environmental organizations, agencies and even congressman retorting that the current draft is fatally flawed.

Many say that a large part of the problem is that the current SGEIS relies on the 1992 Generic Environmental Impact Statement on oil and gas drilling -- a document that took over a decade to compile -- and presumes that it adequately protects human health and the environment.

But it doesn't, says Walter Hang, President of Toxics Targeting, a small research firm that provides up-to-date information on toxic environmental hazards. On his Web site, Hang has a list of 270 occurrences of environmental damages related to gas production since 1979. The current regulations fail to safeguard citizens against impacts of water quality, land use and economic and cultural resources.

"The state of New York is under bone-crushing pressure," said Hang. "There have been incredible efforts to say 'You can't possibly go forward with this initiative.'"

A state ban on gas drilling, however, still seems very unlikely, and both New York Governor David Paterson and DEC Commissioner Pete Grannis have dug in their heels and said they are moving forward.

"Paterson's really in a hard place, because we do have a deficit," said Lisa Wright, point person for the media working group with Shaleshock Alliance, an organization of working groups aimed at protecting local communities and the environment from gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale. "And to somebody that doesn't really look at the whole picture, this seems like an easy solution to the problem."

Part of the problem with going back and revising the SGEIS is the political implications it would mean for both Gov. Paterson and Commissioner Grannis. If Paterson ordered the DEC to go back and rewrite the whole statement it would undercut Commissioner Grannis and vice versa. According to Wright, though, with the combined power of all the gas companies fighting away at the issue, neither politician is likely to do so.

The gas companies were hammering away this morning at the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Energy and Environment hearing titled "The Exxon Mobil-XTO Merger: Impacts on U.S. Energy Markets." At the hearing, many congressmen were concerned about fracking regulations rather than the actual safety of the process. Energy company representatives, on the other hand, only advocated that hydraulic fracturing was a safe way to become energy independent and create more jobs.

"We've had no examples... where there's evidence that we've contaminated fresh water," Bob R. Simpson, Founder and Chairman of XTO Energy Inc., said at the hearing this morning. "I believe the process is safe."

Exxon stipulated that in the merger, if Congress outlaws fracking or if new regulations make the process commercially nonviable, it can back out of the XTO deal.

The final draft of the SGEIS is still in process. To protest hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus Shale, though, a rally has been planned in Albany this upcoming Monday, January 25. Catskill MountainKeeper is one of the many groups that will be in attendance.

"We basically trash energy-producing parts of our country," Gillingham said. "I hope that's changing now."

GREEN IS GOOD