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Battle over Pipelines as State Certification Looms
One of the main opponents of fracking is now setting his sights on proposed pipeline projects in New York.
Walter Hang of Toxics Targeting has documented 114 spills in the state. That's data he says proves the state shouldn't grant what are called Section 401 water quality certifications that projects need to move forward in New York.
This includes the Constitution Pipeline. A spokesperson for that project says the pipeline company has worked with the Department of Environmental Conservation for the past three years to ensure the safety of the project.
"These have probably been granted on a wish and a prayer but now we're going to basically require the Governor to enforce the law and the law is very strict and very onerous," said Hang.
"There's thousands of miles of pipe in New York that operate reliably every single day. The National Transportation Safety Board says that pipelines are actually the safest and most efficient way to transport energy," said Christopher Stockton, Spokesperson for the Constitution Pipeline.
Stockton expects the state to make it's decision on granting the 401 certification soon. Hang says pipelines have caused water quality hazards that have never been cleaned up.
The Promise of Fracking - Pt. 3 - Impact on New York
Underlying the debate over the promises and perils of fracking is an often-overlooked number: 1.35 trillion.
That’s the cubic feet of natural gas New Yorkers consumed last year, according to the federal Energy Information Association. New Yorkers use more than twice the volume of gas consumed by Connecticut and Massachusetts combined.
The economics and risks of leasing, drilling and fracking tend to headline the shale gas story. Yet the promise of fracking is as much about how gas is consumed as how it’s produced. As the top natural-gas-consuming state east of Louisiana, New York is a major player.
By enacting a ban on fracking earlier this year, the administration of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has shown zero tolerance for shale gas risks to the environment and health.
Yet New York’s appetite for cheap gas produced by the shale boom in Pennsylvania and Ohio is big and growing bigger — a jump of nearly 18 percent from 2009, according to figures from the federal EIA.
For New Yorkers looking for cheap energy, the gas boom in Pennsylvania has lived up to its promise.
The Constitution and Dominion pipelines, both of which would bisect upstate New York with routes through the Southern Tier, would carry fracked gas from Pennsylvania to a distribution hub in Albany. From there, the gas would be shipped to New York City and major northeastern markets.
Those pipelines are two of many gas infrastructure projects taking shape in New York. Crestwood Midstream Partners LP, of Houston, is proposing to repurpose salt mines on the southwest shore of Seneca Lake to store 2.1 million barrels of liquid petroleum gas (LPG). The plan, coupled with a related proposal to expand existing natural gas storage in the salt mines just north of Watkins Glen, would turn the facility into a regional distribution hub.
Just up the shore from the Crestwood site, in Yates County, Atlas Holdings, of Connecticut, proposes to recommission a coal-burning, electric-generating plant with natural gas.
The pace of infrastructure development has not kept pace with production.”
The projects, all pending regulatory approval, face opposition from a well-organized group of fossil fuel opponents who, having stopped fracking at New York’s borders, are shifting their focus to keep Pennsylvania’s glut of fracked gas out of New York.
Sandra Steingraber, an Ithaca College scholar and a high-profile activist and organizer in the Finger Lakes region, noted that one gas project feeds another: “Seneca Lake is located upstream from natural gas infrastructure projects throughout New York state, all of which threaten to keep us tied to a ruinous, fossil fuel-dependent past.”
As production surges and prices fall in Pennsylvania, the profitability of drilling hinges on finding ways to get gas to new markets.
Cabot Oil & Gas, a Texas company that drills gas wells in Susquehanna County, has cut its $1 billion capital investment in the region — including jobs — by half, said Cabot spokesman George Stark.
“We are victims of our own success,” Stark said, adding that he expected drilling to pick up again with the laying of new pipelines in New York. “This isn’t a bust. The pace of infrastructure development has not kept pace with production,” he said.
Findings
* Pennsylvania Labor Department inflated figures to make shale gas industry job outlook stronger than it is.
* Industry is generating millions of dollars in “impact fees” to small-town economies to buy good will near drilling sites in lieu of a more costly state tax.
* Fracking has brought both a rise in crime and influx of money to help rural poverty and public safety.
For now, the discussion of shale gas development in New York has a lot to do with pipelines, but the status of the state’s ban on fracking is still a live issue.
The state Department of Environmental Conservation is reviewing a permit request from a group of landowners in Tioga County to frack a well with gelled propane in the Town of Barton. The technology is not specifically outlined in the state’s ban, which applies to water-based solutions.
If the state allows the Barton wells, it would be under policy developed in 1992 for conventional wells called the Generic Environmental Impact Statement (GEIS). In the absence of regulations, the state has traditionally used guidelines outlined in the GEIS that allow regulators discretion in granting and enforcing permits.
Applying a 23-year-old policy to today’s shale gas development flags the overall soundness of the state’s policy, according to some activists.
“The record shows that the state was woefully unequipped to handle the oil and gas industry even before anybody even began talking about shale gas,” said Walter Hang, an anti-fracking activist and community organizer.
Hang, who owns Toxic Targeting, an environmental data firm in Ithaca, cites examples of spills, methane leaks and water pollution associated with conventional wells in western New York that were never fully analyzed or factored into any of the state’s reviews.
“Things have not really changed,” he said. “The fracking ban will not do what everybody thinks it will.”
OUR VIEW: If NY permits fracking, have clear rules and taxes ready
MORE: Impact fees buy goodwill in drilling communities
The state is considering the Tioga landowners’ application as something different from the type of fracking — high-volume hydraulic fracturing — that spurred the shale boom in Pennsylvania and throughout the country.
In New York, high-volume fracking was the subject of a seven-year review that recently produced the Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS) — an amendment to the 1992 GEIS.
The Snyder well application could represent a workaround of the fracking ban. But it raises a larger question: With changing technology, shifting politics, more money on the table, new markets and surging demand, could a new administration rescind the ban altogether?
A “findings statement,” issued with the SGEIS in June, is the lynchpin of the ban. The statement is an interpretation of environmental and public health risks based on the most current information.
In the statement, the negative impacts of shale gas development, such as traffic and environmental degradation, are weighed against the economic returns. A primary justification of the ban, however, is “current uncertainty” about the science of fracking and its impacts on public health.
Joseph Martens, who was DEC commissioner at the time the statement was released, said a state ban could be lifted with changing technology and more complete understanding of fracking’s impacts.
Former DEC commissioner Joseph Martens says the New York fracking ban could be lifted after more studies and changes in technology.
Photo: AP
Deborah Goldberg, a senior council for EarthJustice, a national environmental advocacy firm, called the state’s existing framework an “ad hoc system that is ancient, designed for conventional wells and updated permit by permit by special consideration.” She added, “we would sue in a minute if they tried to proceed under this system.”
In short, the fracking fight would begin anew.
Landowners in favor of shale gas development are ready to take up the fight.
Dewey Decker, Town of Sanford supervisor and second-generation farmer, leased 1,150 acres in the Town of Sanford to XTO Energy for $2,400 an acre in 2008, when the potential of the Marcellus Shale in New York was drawing international attention. XTO was later bought by Exxon Mobil, while the company’s leases in eastern Broome County have been extended indefinitely.
Decker, who was $2.76 million richer after signing the lease and a firm believer in domestic energy production of all kinds, says it’s just a matter of time before the fracking ban is lifted. When it is, he is ready for gas wells on his property.
The seven-year review that produced the state’s supplemental impact statement represents “the most sophisticated, advanced regulations in the country,” Decker said. “We’ve done a lot of homework. How much can you study the same issue?”
For now, at least, the status of the ban is not a pressing issue in Albany.
“We don’t have the public support or interest (in fracking),” said Assemblywoman Donna Lupardo, who sat on an advisory board to Cuomo considering shale gas development policy.
“Not one poll shows us that (fracking) is a path we want to go down,” she said. “If somebody runs on this issue, it will not be a positive outcome.”
New York’s energy policy represents an odd push-pull of demand and resistance at the core of two different energy visions.
Just as state officials consider permits for pipelines and storage projects to move fracked gas to New York markets and beyond, they also are advocating Reforming Energy Vision — a plan unveiled earlier this year by the New York Public Service Commission to break fossil fuel dependency by rebuilding the energy grid from the bottom up.
A hearing on Reforming Energy Vision drew about 100 people to Binghamton City Hall.
(Photo: File photo)
Though natural gas for home heating has an important place in the state’s broader energy plan, fossil-fuel energy plants connected to the fracking fields of Pennsylvania would eventually disappear under this vision.
Rather than depend on fossil-fuel plants, the vision supports fast-tracking a decentralized network of renewable energy sources, featuring wind and solar.
This comes with a list of ambitious goals: by 2030, reduce greenhouse emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels, and generate 50 percent of the state’s energy from renewable sources.
Drawing on a $5.3 billion Clean Energy Fund, New York communities can claim $40 million in grants to build local energy systems, called microgrids. Also in the plan: $13 million to finance solar projects in low- and moderate-income areas, improvements to cut energy use in all state buildings and a $1 billion “Green Bank” for public- and private-sector financing of green-energy projects.
Public hearings throughout the state are bringing unions, customers, renewable-energy advocates, public utilities, energy companies and other stakeholders to the table.
Anthony Belsito, an attorney with the Public Service Commission, said the plan was “a big push from the governor on down for greenhouse gas reduction.”
A hearing on Reforming Energy Vision drew about 100 people to Binghamton City Hall.
(Photo: File photo)
Belsito was speaking before more than 100 people at a hearing recently at Binghamton City Hall. Some held placards that read “No Need For More Gas.” Others, including unionized utility workers, held signs that read “New York Power. New York Jobs.”
“We have a lot of ideas, but we don’t have all the answers,” Commissioner Gregg Sayre told the group.
Critical details, yet to be worked out, involve how and how much stakeholders pay into the system. “We don’t have a sense of what that looks like now,” said Darren Suarez, director of government affairs for the Business Council of New York State, who was preparing to testify at a similar hearing in Syracuse the following night. “What some see as an investment, others see as a cost.”
At one time, renewable-energy development was all about a shortage of domestic energy. That discussion has changed since fracking opened vast new domestic petroleum horizons, including the Marcellus Shale and Utica shales underlying much of the northeast.
Now the discussion is less about running out of fossil fuel than an attempt to find a better plan for the future.
The Reforming Energy Vision project will establish new markets by saving electric infrastructure costs, reducing pollution and providing “local empowerment and resilience” in the system, said Karl R. Rábago, executive director of the Energy and Climate Center at Pace University, in a recent interview.
“The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones,” he added. “Technological shifts happen for a number of reasons, not just scarcity.”
When Cornell University’s 30-megawatt natural gas-burning plant went online in 2009, it phased out the annual burning of some 65,000 tons of coal, which comes with emissions of toxic mercury, particulates and damage from mountaintop removal in Appalachian back country.
At the time, natural gas was widely touted as a “bridge fuel,” cleaner than coal and a step toward zero emissions.
Cornell’s $82 million plant was hailed by then-President David Skorton as a step in meeting a goal of no net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, said the national environmental nonprofit would “be holding up Cornell as a showcase” for clean energy.
The plant represented fulfillment of fracking’s promise for Cornell and other plants that discontinued coal. As a result, statewide natural gas generation for electricity has nearly doubled from 2003 to 2013, according to figures from the federal Energy Information Administration.
But after witnessing the impacts from fracking over seven years, many environmental campaigns are rejecting the idea that natural gas is an acceptable replacement of coal
Some 50 miles from Cornell University, more than 150 people packed the fire hall in the Village of Dresden in early November for state Public Service Commission hearings. For three hours, the majority spoke out against an application by Greenidge Generation LLC and Greenidge Pipeline LLC to repurpose the former coal plant with natural gas and build an adjoining natural gas pipeline.
This served as a stark contrast to the ribbon-cutting welcome that the Cornell plant received just prior to the acceleration of New York’s anti-fracking movement.
In six years of witnessing the environmental impacts of fracking — a brief period on the scale of long-term energy policy — the Sierra Club had gone from a shale gas backer to one of its strongest critics, reflecting a trend by environmental groups to reject the promise of fracking.
“While fracked gas was once thought of as a bridge fuel, overwhelming evidence shows it is actually a gangplank to climate disaster and a threat to clean and safe drinking water,” Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in a recent email.
The turnaround is due to a growing awareness of the downside of shale gas development’s impact on water, both from drilling and waste disposal. But it also recognizes a challenge to the long-held belief that natural gas is less likely to accelerate climate change than other fossil fuels. Although it burns cleaner than coal and does not last in the environment like carbon, methane is a potent greenhouse gas.
Brune hailed the state’s fracking ban, the energy vision goals and Gov. Cuomo’s recent rejection of a proposed terminal for liquefied natural gas off the Long Island coast as “the kind of leadership we need to move the Empire State and all of America beyond fossil fuels and toward … an economy powered by 100 percent clean, renewable energy like wind and solar.”
Industry supporters argue that vision is unattainable, naive and economically backward.
New York’s natural gas infrastructure build-out “is not just some boardroom-developed plan by the industry,” said Steve Everley, senior adviser for Energy In Depth, an industry public-relations firm in Washington, D.C. “We’re seeing plans for new pipelines because consumers in the Northeast are demanding natural gas to heat their homes and to keep the lights on.”
The shift of the anti-fracking fight from gas production to infrastructure build-out, according to Everley, is sustained by “a small but loud group of ideological activists … who want to pretend that consumers will be just fine without any new pipelines.”
Regardless of the underlying dynamics, the trend for gas consumption is not likely to reverse anytime soon.
While the New York State Energy Plan, updated this year, reflects the energy vision’s goals to cut fossil fuel emissions and launch an aggressive expansion of renewable energy, it also encourages expansion of natural gas infrastructure to replace heating oil, which is dirty, expensive and a significant heating source in urban areas downstate and elsewhere.
Nuclear power –— which is tallied as renewable energy and generates about a third of the state’s electricity — is a weighty factor in New York’s energy equation. As gas prices fall, other forms of energy, including nuclear, lose ground competitively.
Cost plays a big role. In 2014, New York had the fourth-highest average electricity prices in the United States, according to the federal Energy Information Agency.
With recent reports that the Cuomo administration plans to generate half of New York’s electricity from renewable sources by 2030 as a mandate rather than a goal, more public hearings are likely in the offing over how that comes to pass and who pays.
The Promise of Fracking - Pt. 2 - The Environment - Lessons from Pennsylvania
Without warning, a New Year’s Day explosion blew a massive cement cover off a residential water well in northern Pennsylvania and destroyed the plumbing in the hole.
The explosion on Norma Fiorentino’s seven acres in Dimock, Pennsylvania, just south of Montrose, marked the start of 2009 with a bang. In many ways, it also would become symbolic of problems with the promise of fracking, and environmental side effects cropping up across rural Pennsylvania.
The shale gas boom was taking off in woods and fields around the Fiorentino homestead – about 20 miles south of the New York border – where Cabot Oil & Gas had leased property to drill into the Marcellus Shale, one of the most prolific gas-producing formations in the country.
What happened to the Fiorentino water and hundreds of other water wells near drilling sites in Pennsylvania would fuel concerns and eventually contribute to the 2014 fracking ban in New York.
The Dimock explosion embodied issues – lack of disclosure, regulatory breakdowns and plenty of spin – that would become the crux of a controversy.
Since the gas rush began in 2007, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has logged about 260 cases of water pollution caused by the drilling. A true total is unknown because of a long-held practice of drilling companies to settle complaints about water quality privately with landowners near gas well operations.
“The biggest problem that Pennsylvania confronted was there were no rules in place on the front end of this,” said Auditor General Eugene DePasquale in an interview earlier this month. “There was no process. It was everyone for themselves and the state has been playing catch up ever since.”
To reach the Marcellus gas, operators had to drill through the water table. And to ease concerns among skeptics, the industry promoted the notion fracking had never polluted a single-water well. When natural gas – known as methane when in the ground – leaked into the Fiorentino well, the company and the industry stood by that claim.
The state of Pennsylvania was taking a learn-as-you-go approach to managing a shale gas boom unprecedented in scope and intensity.
One of the biggest lessons had to do with who controlled the information to assess and address problems. State inspections relied heavily, sometimes exclusively, on industry reports. Many of these reports were incomplete, and some were not filed until after problems began appearing.
An audit by DePasquale’s office released in 2014 found lapses ranging from bad bookkeeping to bad judgment. Nearly 8 percent of inspection reports were incomplete and 29 percent included errors in dates, names, locations, results and permit numbers. In 14 of 15 cases of polluted water, the DEP sought voluntary compliance rather than order drillers to fix the problem.
With the release of the audit, DePasquale likened the state’s regulatory efforts to “firefighters trying to put out a five-alarm fire with a 20-foot garden hose.”
He concluded: “There is no question that DEP needs help and soon to protect clean water.”
Findings
* Pennsylvania Labor Department inflated figures to make shale gas industry job outlook stronger than it is.
* Industry is generating millions of dollars in “impact fees” to small-town economies to buy good will near drilling sites in lieu of a more costly state tax.
* Fracking has brought both a rise in crime and influx of money to help rural poverty and public safety.
In the time after Norma’s water well explosion, DEP investigations showed methane escaped Cabot’s pressurized gas wells and contaminated an aquifer that supplied the Fiorentino well and at least 17 others.
Independent tests arranged by property owners found other chemicals in the drinking water, including solvents and petroleum distillates. Some people complained about rashes, stomach problems and headaches, although they had no proof drilling was making them sick.
The burden of proof was high.
Although Cabot spokesman George Stark refused to comment for this article, the company has made its position clear in the past: Methane is naturally-occurring phenomenon in water supplies and sometimes water wells go bad due to natural circumstances. When they do, nearby drilling operations can become scapegoats.
In a full-page advertisement that ran in regional papers in 2010, Cabot CEO Dan Dinges stated: “Cabot does not believe it caused these conditions and intends to fight these allegations through its scientific findings.”
Cabot blamed the problem on naturally occurring methane in the ground. The driller offered water filtration systems and bottled water to the affected families, which some accepted. In other cases, homeowner’s deemed Cabot’s filters ineffective and unreliable. At least 32 of the residents complaining of water problems sued in a legal battle of more than three years, ending in a 2012 settlement that was not publicly disclosed.
Since the Fiorentino well exploded, requirements legislated with Act 13 in 2012 have strengthened reporting requirements on paper. The question remains whether the DEP, which DePasquale recently characterized as “radically understaffed,” has the resources to oversee one of the country’s most powerful industries, or the political will and legal wherewithal to enforce sanctions against it.
Pennsylvania state regulators have long advocated “working with the industry” rather than cracking down, a point of pride in the administration of former Gov. Tom Corbett. DEP files documenting water complaints are full of form letters from state officials assuring homeowners the agency was “working with [company name] in an effort to resolve the matter.”
Anti-fracking activists contend the record shows a culture of deference within the DEP, putting industry interest over public welfare. “It’s like if somebody robs a bank, the police say they won’t punish them if they put the money back,” said Steve Hvozdovich, Pennsylvania Campaigns Coordinator for Clean Water Action, an environmental group.
Complaints about the DEP’s oversight are not limited to fracking critics.
When discussing fracking, MaryAnn Warren, a Susquehanna County Commissioner, enthusiastically points to the many benefits gas drilling has brought to northern Pennsylvania, including boosting business for local hotels and restaurants, creating construction jobs and providing money ranging from housing to capital improvements for local government projects and buildings.
At the same time, she said the DEP needs to rely less on industry reports and more on close inspection of all critical phases of drilling and fracking.
“They [energy companies] came in like cowboys,” she said. “Things were unruly and unregulated, and they [the DEP] didn’t know what they were doing.”
Things have improved but not enough, she said. “They need to be on site more … They need more boots on the ground. They need to be more proactive than reactive.”
That could be a tall order in a Pennsylvania political culture sympathetic to a powerful gas industry lobby with continual complaints about the burden of regulation and taxation.
Current Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf advocates a severance tax on the industry, but the Republican-controlled General Assembly opposes replacing the present impact fee program with the potentially more lucrative tax. Meanwhile, Wolf has been stymied in his attempt to restore funding to the DEP’s budget, cut during the Corbett administration.
The DEP’s 100 inspectors are tasked with overseeing 131,283 active oil and gas wells. Since 2006, the agency has issued more than 20,000 permits for the larger and more complicated unconventional gas wells.
“There is no way they can keep up given the volume of permits that have been issued,” said Nadia Steinzor, eastern program coordinator for Earthworks, an environmental lobbying group.
In some cases, pollution from gas drilling has turned into high profile cases and large penalties. This summer, an $8.9 million penalty was assessed by the DEP against Range Resources, of Fort Worth, Texas.
The penalty came after Range refused to fix a methane leak from a cement casing on a natural gas well that polluted water in Lycoming County in central Pennsylvania, according to the DEP findings. Range denies the finding and is appealing the fine.
But environmental groups say fines are discretionary, come too infrequently, reserved for serial offenders, and small compared to the money and health and environmental issues at stake.
“For every one of the high-profile cases, there are hundreds of other violations that remain unresolved and unaddressed,” Steinzor said.
Water problems in Dimock, where the well cover blew off the Fiorentino family well, have proven to be chronic.
Every Tuesday is water delivery day for Ken Morcom and Kim Grosso, owners of a hog farm off State Route 2023 in Dimock, about a mile and a half from the Fiorentino property, which now sits vacant after Norma used her settlement money to move to a small house in Elk Lake.
Morcom recalls the day they stopped using their farm’s well water, shortly after Cabot Oil & Gas fracked a nearby gas well in 2013.
“I came home one night and turned on the faucet and it was coming out brown as coffee ... They [the DEP] knew it was caused from the gas pressure underneath the water table forcing it up through the well,” he said.
Already a common and persistent problem, methane from another gas well – this one near Morcom’s farm – was leaking into the water table, the DEP determined.
Methane is not acutely toxic. But it can cause explosions when it seeps into enclosed spaces – with sometimes fatal results. In 2004, gas from drilling operations collected in the basement of the Harper residence in Jefferson County in western Pennsylvania. Charles Harper, his wife Dorothy, and their grandson Baelee were killed when the furnace kicked on and triggered an explosion, according to DEP records.
As methane escapes faulty well casings and pushes through the ground, it can stir up unhealthy or toxic elements such as brine, arsenic and heavy metals.
In response to the pollution on Morcom’s hog farm, Cabot drilled a new water well, Morcom said. But that well also was polluted with methane percolating from the ground and stirring up sediment.
Now, the every-Tuesday water delivery is made on the doorstep – five gallons for drinking. Water for other purposes – animals, laundry and washing – is stored in large plastic holding tanks and refilled periodically by Cabot contractors.
Cabot’s Stark had no comment on this case.
The Morcom hog farm sits within a nine-square mile area where the DEP has determined drilling has polluted water wells. DEP files show 19 cases of drilling-related water pollution documented in Dimock, although that number does not appear to square with more some 32 plaintiffs who settled with Cabot in 2012.
Victoria Switzer, one of the plaintiffs who agreed to a settlement, declined to discuss the case.
But Switzer has this general advice for anybody who lives over a shale gas resource: “Suck it up and work with the company on friendly terms. You won’t get anywhere on your own, and the state is not going to help you.”
Switzer, who lives off State Route 2023 near the Morcom farm, added: “It continues to be the driller’s dirty secret: Play nice and you get water. Buck the system and you’re on your own.”
Cabot also refused to discuss the settlement.
As part of the settlement, Cabot bought the Dimock house of high-profile anti-fracking activists Craig and Julie Sautner. The ranch, located between the Morcom farm and the Fiorentino property, was valued at $167,500.
Cabot hired a wrecking crew to tear it down.
When all traces of the house were gone, the crew filled the basement with dirt and sold the 3.3-acre parcel to a neighbor for $4,000. A “land covenant,” or condition, was written into the deed: No residence could ever be built there under any circumstances.
Stark said the company maintains the mineral rights to the property. As for the surface, he said, “we thought it should be preserved for green-space.”
County records show that in 2013, around the time the Morcom hog farm’s water went bad, Cabot paid $140,000 for the 12-acre property of Michael Ely, who lived a half mile from the Sautners, and less than a quarter mile from the hog farm.
Ely also had explosive levels of methane in his water. The company removed a doublewide modular home from the lot, which now remains vacant and posted with a sign that reads “Danger. No trespassing. No smoking. Authorized personnel only.”
A similar story unfolded on Paradise Road in Bradford County, where Chesapeake Oil and Gas in 2012 paid three families $1.6 million, minus legal fees, ending years of litigation about the source of pollution in their water.
The three upscale homes, on the country road with scenery that lives up to its name, remain padlocked and vacant with security cameras stationed at the main entrances.
“The reason nobody lives there is they can’t fix the water – it’s ruined,” said Michael Phillips, a math teacher at Wyalusing Valley High School who owned one of the homes and moved with his wife and infant daughter to another neighborhood.
County records show that the Phillips’ house, which Chesapeake bought for $225,000, is now appraised at $36,902. As part of a settlement, Chesapeake bought neighboring houses at market values of $250,000 and $150,000, which are now appraised at $35,520 and $29,400 respectively. All of them are near a problem gas well.
While some affected families received enough from settlements to move, Morcom and Grosso, who support gas development as a matter of principal, are resigned to living with water problems.
“If you get a lawyer, this is done,” Morcom said, pointing to a grey shed that houses his water supply – a plastic reservoir called a “water buffalo.” “You will loose. They have hundreds of lawyers and very deep pockets.’
Ken, loquacious and upbeat, is animated when he talks about his farm, his pigs, and the economic boost shale gas has brought to the area. He, like some other gas proponents, believes the benefits of fracking outweigh the problems.
“You hear about all the negativity,” he said. “There are many positives that you don’t hear about.” Those benefits have a lot to do with the welfare of his friends who have found work driving trucks and landing construction and contracting jobs, he said.
“Some people have more patience than others,” he added “We have way more patience then most.”
But, his wife added about the every-Tuesday water deliveries: “It’s getting old.”
John Hanger was DEP Secretary under the administration of former Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell when the Cabot investigation began in Dimock. In 2010, Hanger ordered Cabot to install a $12 million water line to restore water to the homes in an attempt to resolve the issue in Dimock once and for all.
But Cabot outlasted Hanger, who left office when Corbett took office. The company refused the water line, but offered landowners systems to filter their water, and cash payments worth twice the value of their property if they dropped all current and future litigation – a deal said to total just over $4 million.
After an unsuccessful run for governor, Hanger now serves as Director of Planning and Policy for Tom Wolf. Although he was a harsh critic of Cabot, Hanger defends both the DEP and shale development, which he says is good for the state and the country.
“I don’t want to understate the problem for the families who are affected,” he said. “For them the probability of impact is 100 percent.”
But, he added, fracking represents a minor environmental threat compared to run-off from agriculture, burning of coal that emits mercury and acid drainage from coal mines polluting more than 5,000 miles of Pennsylvania’s water ways.
“There needs to be an honest discussion on both ends of this [fracking],” he said. “There were those who thought it would be the end of the world and those who said there had never been a problem. We know that both of them are wrong.” He added, “It’s not fracking that’s polluting the Chesapeake Bay. It’s sewage, sedimentation and agricultural run-off.”
Don Siegel, an industry consultant and hydrology professor at Syracuse University who specialized in drilling issues, said lessons from Pennsylvania show “that small leaks and spills and assorted regulatory violations of various things happen at drilling sites, but we see no evidence of harm from these.” Damaged ecosystems “naturally repaired themselves—much like what happens after any salt spill.”
The Pennsylvania DEP has been working on upgrading regulations to address health and environmental issues of shale gas development since April 2011.
Reforms, expected to be issued by the end of this year and rolled out in 2016, will be the most recent product of a contentious learning curve featuring hearings, intense lobbying efforts and more than 30,000 public comments from interested parties and the public at large.
Rules, now in draft form, are “long overdue,” said DEP Secretary John Quigley.
The overhaul deals with a spectrum of impacts, ranging from noise to public health protections including “vital considerations” for public resources like playgrounds, nursing homes, and schools.
Open waste pits would be restricted and the scope of pre-drilling surveys to establish a baseline for water quality would be increased. One important provision would require water supplies polluted by drilling to be restored to conditions better than before, or compatible with Safe Drinking Water Act standards.
With more comprehensive surveys and tests to gauge water quality prior to drilling, proving cases of water pollution will be easier, but enforcement may be still problematic.
Loopholes in federal laws allow drillers to inject the ground with undisclosed chemicals. They also provide exemptions from hazardous waste disposal laws that allow fracking waste to disposed of at treatment plants and landfills.
Not knowing the specific chemicals that drillers work with makes it hard to track problems when they show up in wells, Susan Brantley, professor of geosciences at Penn State University, said in a recent interview.
The DEP determined that the polluted water wells on Paradise Road contained methane. But the water was also curiously foamy, Brantley said, which is not typically a characteristic of methane contamination.
Using a set of instruments not typically used by commercial laboratories, Brantley and a team of researchers found traces of 2-n-Butoxyethanol, or 2-BE and a broad category of “unresolved complex mixtures” in the foamy water on Paradise Road. The elements did not appear in previous tests by the DEP or environmental consultants, and the Penn State study concluded they were from drilling additives or fracking fluids.
Although the pollutants were found in trace amounts at levels not known to pose health risks, the fact that they were there at all had important implications, Brantley said, because it showed something the industry has always denied – that chemicals injected into the ground to produce a well can end up in drinking water wells.
The study shows the need for more public disclosure, Brantley said, so testing equipment and protocols around drilling sites can be upgraded to suit the unique environmental threats that might be going undetected. “Airplanes occasionally have problems and fall out of the sky, and we don’t tolerate it,” Brantley said. “We demand science to tell us what went wrong so we can fix it. But we have to start with data … we have to put a black box on this airplane called fracking.”
Chesapeake Spokesman Gordon Pennoyer did not return calls for this article.
Fracking’s environmental controversy has a lot to do with what goes into wells to stimulate gas production. It also has a lot to do with what comes out, and what remains indefinitely trapped in the ground.
Flowback, the main waste product of shale gas production, is a cocktail of the unidentified compounds injected by operators and naturally occurring elements freed by the process. What goes into each well — biocides, acids, anti-corrosives, lubricants, and friction reducers — comes out with millions of gallons of brine, metals, and radioactive material common to black shales.
Flowback goes to treatment facilities or to depleted production wells, mostly in Ohio, where it is injected back into the ground. Tony Ingraffea, a Cornell University engineering professor who specialized in the mechanics of fracking, views injections of undisclosed chemical mixtures as a catastrophic practice, whether its for production or waste disposal.
Ingraffea, formerly a consultant for the fracking industry and now one of its harshest critics, is a founder of Physicians, Scientists and Engineers for Health Energy, which compiles an archive of peer-reviewed literature on fracking and other issues. “You have to go by the rules, and the gas industry is free to ignore those rules,” Ingraffea said in a recent interview. He cited the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, which has restrictions and disclosure requirements about what can and cannot be put in the ground.
Under an exemption, commonly known as “the Halliburton Loophole,” drillers and companies inject millions of gallons of pressurized fracking solution into each well to stimulate production, and they recover a fraction of it. The exact percentage is not documented and varies from well to well. The rest stays in the ground or comes out with the gas over time and is bled off into holding tanks.
From an environmental standpoint, the production wells with the un-retrieved flowback present the same risk as waste injection wells, in Ingraffea’s view, although they are not subject to the federal standards or oversight that apply to injection wells.
“Somewhere down the line, somebody will discover that Susquehanna County is sitting over a massive pool of waste that is uncontained, unconstrained and undefined,” Ingraffea said. Even under the best circumstances, cement casings that separate pressurized chemicals and gas from water tables break down over time.
Scientific consensus, including a comprehensive review of the literature by the Federal Environmental Protection Agency released earlier this year, now supports that both fracking and drilling can pollute water. But there are few reliable numbers that quantify the risks, and much is open to interpretation.
The Promise of Fracking - Pt. 1
Nowhere did the promise of fracking Marcellus Shale shine brighter than the banquet hall of the Binghamton Regency in late May of 2008.
Spread before farmers on fine china over white linen was a feast of tenderloin tips, roasted vegetables, and chocolate mousse. They ate as they awaited turns at the “signing table.” Dinner was hosted by XTO Energy, the Texas drilling company seeking mineral rights to 50,000 acres in eastern Broome County.
That afternoon, and at two later banquets, XTO paid $110 million to 500 landowners for mineral rights to their land. For some, the single XTO check was more earned than in years of farming.
Gas prices were nearing an all-time high, and XTO was on a quest to tap the northern reaches of the mother of shale gas formations, extending from New York’s Southern Tier through Pennsylvania and parts of Ohio and West Virginia.
To many, these were just the beginnings of the promise coming true.
First came the promise of leases worth millions. Then came the promise of jobs from drilling and related business. Royalty checks on natural gas flowing from tens of thousands of wells would further enrich landowners. Economic prosperity. Clean energy.
A Broome County study in 2009 projected gas extraction would generate $15 billion over 10 years, support more than 16,000 jobs and result in $792 million in salaries and wages and $85 million in state and local taxes.
The promise seemed too good to be true. And, for New York, the promise wasn’t enough.
After a long review, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration a year ago found environmental risks outweighed potential economic gains in New York State. The decision isn’t necessarily permanent – a new political administration could embrace the promise of fracking, the extraction of petroleum from bedrock by injecting the ground with pressurized chemical solutions and sand.
While New York politicians and regulators weren’t sold on the promise, those in Pennsylvania have embraced it. In the seven years of fracking just across the state border, about 9,500 wells have been sunk on rolling farmland.
In terms of sheer production, the Marcellus has exceeded all expectations. Of all the nation’s natural gas “pay-zones” enabled by unconventional development, none has been prolific as the Marcellus Shale. Since 2007, Marcellus production is more than twice the next two largest natural gas formations, each in Texas.
For many, the promise of fracking in Pennsylvania came true.
Some landowners have received life-changing windfalls. Pennsylvania communities have benefited with an infusion of cash for housing, hospitals, roads and public safety, and cheap abundant fossil fuel is now flowing into New York markets.
But hindsight in Pennsylvania shows initial economic projections and job estimates were grossly inflated, much of the wealth has left the area, industry has alienated some of its most supportive allies, economic returns remain precarious as prices fall and regulators have failed to protect the public against predatory exploitation.
Ultimately, the impact of the gas rush might be judged more favorably if not measured against such inflated expectations.
In Pennsylvania, is the best already over, or is even more to come? How long can the economics of shale be sustained, and at what cost?
Findings
* Pennsylvania Labor Department inflated figures to make shale gas industry job outlook stronger than it is.
* Industry is generating millions of dollars in “impact fees” to small-town economies to buy good will near drilling sites in lieu of a more costly state tax.
* Fracking has brought both a rise in crime and influx of money to help rural poverty and public safety.
Walter Brooks, of Springville Pennsylvania, was on the front line of the Marcellus gas rush. He was among the first owners to be approached by landmen, the first to lease his land, and the first to experience the consequences.
In 2006, Brooks, thinking nothing would come of it, signed a standard industry lease that gave Cabot Oil and Gas of Houston Texas mineral rights to his 212 acres for just $5,300, or $25 an acre. This amounted to less than a tenth or less of what landowners would get once word got out that they were sitting over trillions of cubic feet of natural gas.
“If only I knew,” Brooks said in a recent interview. “But you could say that about a lot of things.”
As Cabot began drilling wells on his land, the farmer held hope that royalties would make things right.
When the water supplying the family farmed turned brown shortly after the start of drilling, Brooks said, the company immediately delivered water to his house, and the problem cleared up soon after that. That didn’t bother him. But his patience is now being tested with the way Cabot does business.
“You better get it on paper,” he said. “Word of mouth and a handshake means nothing to these guys.”
The complaint is widespread. In Pennsylvania, lawsuits and investigations over business practices are as much a part of the shale gas story as landmen, roughnecks and striking it rich.
When the land rush began, disputes tended to be over exploitive leasing practices. Now, with the flow of gas, Brooks and other landowners face an endless battle over deductions companies take from royalty checks.
While it is established in convention and practice that landowners do not pay to produce gas, case law has not settled the issue of who pays “post-production” costs of preparing and transporting gas to market.
Post-production costs typically are spelled out in the fine print of leases, vary from case to case and is open to wide interpretation. Landowners complain that the costs often show up as arbitrary and unaccounted deductions from their share of the bounty.
“We would like there to be accepted standards and basic rules that they would have to follow,” said Jackie Root, a landowner in Tioga County, lease negotiator and president of the Pennsylvania Chapter of the National Association of Royalty Owners.
In 2013, a group of Pennsylvania landowners filed a suit against Chesapeake Energy, a company headquartered in Oklahoma City with Marcellus operations centered in Bradford County. But arguing the nuances and complexities of lease fine print with company attorneys has proven an ambitious legal undertaking.
“For landowners to go to court to file a class action suit every time their royalty payments come up short – it puts them in a situation where they have to decide: ‘do I give it to the gas company or to the attorneys?’ ” Root said.
Root and her organization support a bill designed to clarify Pennsylvania’s 1979 Guaranteed Minimum Royalty Act, which landowners claim the industry is exploiting. The industry, proficiently equipped to handle both legislation and litigation, has so far successfully lobbied to keep the changes in the Act from a vote in the Pennsylvania legislature.
Industry officials say the debate over post-production costs are a contractual matter between landowners and business. “They get what they negotiate,” said Cabot spokesman George Stark. “There is nothing untoward. When price of gas is high, the fee isn’t so noticeable. But it is a fixed fee, and it looks bigger when the royalties go down.”
Landowner complaints spurred an investigation by Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane. However, that has been weighed down by Kane’s own morass: she lost her law license, faces criminal charges and possible legislative dismissal following a scandal involving leaked documents.
The fight over post-production costs is testing the trust of some of the industry’s strongest allies. Despite their complaints, Brooks and Root– like many who receive income from the industry and support gas development as a matter of principal– bristle at the argument that fossil fuel development is an ecological disaster.
Root called New York’s ban “a crime” and a result of “an insane activist movement.”
As Brooks drove his red Ford pickup over his land to survey operations on a recent fall afternoon, he turned onto a gravel access road framed by an open gate with a padlock dangling from the latch. At the top of the hill were six wells.
Brooks wondered aloud who might be on his property: Likely a Cabot worker but this could be “friend of foe,” Brooks said, noting that he got along better with some than others.
As he drove to the top, a large man stepped out of a truck, donned a Cabot hard hat and greeted him cordially as “Mr. Brooks.” The farmer’s demeanor eased as he recognized worker Matthew Faux.
Faux personifies the fulfillment of the natural gas promise. He graduated from Montrose High School in 2009 and worked in a local stone quarry. About that time, the gas boom took off. He landed a job with Guy Parish, a local contractor that fixed tractors and sold mulch to farmers.
Parish had quickly adapted his Montrose agricultural business to meet the gas industry’s needs. He began hiring semi-skilled young men like Faux – with mechanical aptitude and experience with equipment -- who could drive trucks and operate heavy equipment, serve as roustabouts and plumbers and didn’t mind working 12-hour night shifts and heavy lifting.
Jobs were now becoming scarce, however, as Cabot began $500 million in cutbacks in capitol expenditures in Susquehanna County due to a market glut and falling natural gas prices.
Conversation at the well site turned from the status of the Brooks wells to the status of pipelines. The well fields were connected to regional markets, but they needed more lines to bigger markets. Without them, industry expansion will be choked off.
Faux said it was just a matter of time before the Constitution pipeline – now awaiting permit approval in New York State – would connect to major markets to the northeast. Things would pick up then. The industry was counting on it.
Despite the cutbacks, Faux, who has a year-old daughter and a fiancé, is not worried. He just bought a trailer and is saving for a house. When he graduated from high school he said he “couldn’t imagine owning a new vehicle or anything like that … I think I will be long retired and they will still be doing stuff here.”
The promise of jobs rising from fracking has been the mantra ever since the rise of drilling coincided with the onset of the deep recession in 2008. Soon after, an industry report published by Penn State University projected shale gas development would create more than 175,000 statewide jobs over the course of a decade – most of them blue collar.
With the veneer of academic credibility, the report made huge headlines, even though the university administration later distanced itself from the findings after an internal review found authors Timothy Considine and Robert Watson failed to disclose funding and “may have well crossed the line between policy analysis and policy advocacy.”
Still, the promise was reinforced by official numbers released from the Pennsylvania Department of Labor under the administration of former Gov. Tom Corbett. Industry jobs reached 230,000 in 2014. Corbett rounded the number up to 250,000 in some of his speeches.
Economists, checking the math, complained the Department of Labor was misleading the public by counting every worker in steel, construction, government regulatory agencies and certain other sectors regardless of whether they had anything to do with shale gas development.
Under current Gov. Tom Wolf, the Department of Labor switched to accepted methodology and projected jobs fell to under 90,000 – just over 1 percent of the state’s total number of jobs.
John Hanger, director of planning and policy for Gov. Wolf, characterized the revised figures as representing an “important” contribution to the state’s economy. But, regarding the previous calculation, “frankly, it was truly absurd,” he said.
For everyone like Faux who found employment with the drilling boom, there are hundreds like Eric Williamson, a licensed plumber from Kunkletown in Monroe County, Pa.
About the time Faux landed the job with Cabot, Williamson donned his best suit and tie and drove two and a half hours to a job fair at the River Inn in downtown Towanda. He found a line of more than 200 people in the parking lot drawn by the fracking promise: engineers, plumbers, machinists, laborers, truck drivers and a legion of other job seekers, nearly all of them men.
Hundreds more packed in shoulder-to-shoulder inside, all waiting for a brief moment to shake hands and pitch their credentials to representatives from Chesapeake Energy and various contractors. After several hours of standing in line, Williamson got his turn.
“I was sure I would at least get a call after that, but I never did,” recalled Williamson, who had been out of work for two years and now works for a plumbing and heating company unrelated to gas production.
The glowing promise of jobs has since dimmed
When Faux first came to work for him at the height of the gas rush, Guy Parish had 40 workers. Now he is down to 25, and he expects he will be back to four or five as he shifts his business from the needs of gas drilling back to agriculture.
“The rumor mill has it that the work will be back when they get the pipelines in,” Parish said. “If it doesn’t, I will move on. It was good while it lasted.”
At the height of the leasing frenzy in New York in 2009, Barb Fiala, Broome County Executive at the time, called shale gas development the “the next IBM” – the company that once employed more than 10,000 people in the village of Endicott and supported tens of thousands of jobs elsewhere in the Southern Tier.
Fiala’s administration was so confident in the promise that it budgeted $5 million in lease and royalty revenue expected from county property for two years in a row. Like the Pennsylvania Department of Labor projections, Fiala’s IBM analogy and budget projections were gross miscalculations.
While fracking’s economic gains may boost local economies, the greatest financial benefits go to stakeholders far from Pennsylvania.
Two of the largest operators in Northeast Pennsylvania, Cabot and Chesapeake, are headquartered in Texas and move operations and crews throughout the country based on changing dynamics of energy markets and production costs.
When a manufacturer moves into a community, a plant is built or renovated, local workers get steady employment and local businesses provide goods and services.
When a natural gas driller moves in, the initial burst of economic activity is strong but tapers off after wells are established and hooked to pipelines. Far fewer workers are needed to keep the wells running.
Economists call this funneling of income and resources out of an area “leakage,” and studies have shown that small rural communities in general and northern Pennsylvania drilling communities in particular tend to suffer from it the most.
As head of regional economic development agency Progress Authority, Tony Ventello is focused on figuring out ways to incorporate the bonanza of gas into local economies over the long-term rather than relying on dynamics tied to the ebb and flow of demand from distant markets and drilling crews that come and go.
“The big question is – how can we use this asset to build our local economies?” said Ventello, whose agency evolved from the Central Bradford County Economic Development Authority and the Towanda Area Industrial Development Corp.
Perhaps the most impressive example of this regionally is a multibillion complex to turn Marcellus Shale natural gas into feedstock for chemical production – an ethane cracker plant – that Shell Oil Co. is proposing for Beaver County near the prolific gas fields in southwestern Pennsylvania.
Northern Pennsylvania has no equivalent to this, as of now – and there are still some question of whether the cracker plant will get built in Beaver County. But Ventello points to many smaller success stories.
Fracking has allowed schools, hospitals, housing complexes and government buildings to convert to natural gas to upgrade antiquated systems. The Susquehanna County Court House, once powered by a hodgepodge of coal, electric and oil requiring paid help on weekends and holidays to shovel coal and empty ashes, has been refurbished with a natural gas system.
Athens and North Towanda now have filling stations for natural gas vehicles, and more gas–fired electric generating plants are coming on line throughout the region.
The political calculation that has allowed fracking in Pennsylvania, however, is different than in New York, where environmental and health risks are weighty considerations.
Fiala left her position as Broome County Executive to accept a position from Gov. Cuomo as commissioner of the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. More recently, with Cuomo’s endorsement, she made an unsuccessful bid for the state senate. Whether due to politics or through lessons learned in Pennsylvania, the promise of shale gas has lost its luster for her. Fiala now supports New York’s decision for a ban.
“I don’t know what the balance sheet was in Pennsylvania,” Fiala said recently. “In New York, we have found a lot of the environmental issues outweigh the economic issues. A lot of people have benefited but a lot of people have suffered."
The future of the fracking promise in Pennsylvania will depend on demand for natural gas. Fracking has made gas so cheap and so abundant, it overtook coal as the top source of U.S. electric power generation for the first time ever last spring
“The scale of this resource is just incredible,” said Hanger, Pennsylvania’s planning director who sees the current lull as part of the cyclical nature of the industry. Even with low prices, he said, advancing experience and economies of scale inherent continue to drive down production costs, making drilling viable at lower prices. And despite record production, there is no sign of the resource depletion.
Terry Engelder, a geologist at Penn State, was featured in a Time Magazine cover story as the first to calculate the amount of gas in the Marcellus back in 2008. His early projections of 490 trillion cubic feet of “technically recoverable” gas and 227 trillion cubic feet of “economically recoverable” gas raised eyebrows and was seen by critics as hype to draw investment into the industry.
Unlike many other projections made about the promise of fracking, Engelder’s projections appear to be realistic. The biggest part of the reserve is in Pennsylvania, which produced more than 4 trillion cubic feet in 2014 alone. Even as drilling has subsided, production remains enormous. Below the Marcellus is the Utica formation, which has produced impressive results with the early exploration.
Both the Marcellus and the Utica extend under the Southern Tier of New York. Their economic viability remains uncertain, and they will not likely be explored anytime soon given cut backs at existing sites in Pennsylvania.
As for the future?
“Of course, maybe we (America) do not need more natural gas,” Engelder said earlier this month. “The transition to renewables will not be made because we have run out of natural gas.”
Gas companies may sue N.Y. State over fracking ban
A natural gas drilling rig at in Zelienople, Pa.
(Photo: AP)
ALBANY – When Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration first said it would ban large-scale hydraulic fracturing, it was hailed as a victory for vocal environmentalists and fracking opponents and a stunning defeat for the natural-gas industry.
Now, ten months later, gas companies are still weighing whether to sue ahead of a fast-approaching deadline. And fracking critics aren’t taking any chances, even as some shift their focus to other states and different sectors of the energy industry.
“New York’s ban has really been embraced by not only the advocacy community, but elected officials around the world -- from the local, state and national level,” said Julia Walsh, an organizer with New Yorkers Against Fracking and Frack Action. “If it’s not safe for New York, it’s not safe for ‘X’ country or ‘X’ state.”
Cuomo’s administration first announced Dec. 17 that it would move to ban high-volume hydrofracking, the much-debated technique using water, sand and chemicals to help access natural gas in underground shale formations. The announcement marked the beginning of the end of a nearly seven-year review process that spanned two governors and three environmental commissioners.
Since then, New Yorkers Against Fracking, the coalition of like-minded groups that shadowed Cuomo at events and campaign stops across the state, has remained active, with some of its leaders traveling to other states -- and even other countries -- to speak about the successful push against drilling in New York.
The Park Foundation, an Ithaca-based philanthropic fund, has also continued to fund state-based anti-fracking efforts despite the ban, including a $125,000 grant to New Yorkers Against Fracking earlier this year.
Overall, the foundation awarded more than $700,000 in grants to fracking-related causes from January through June across the country, including to efforts in North Carolina and California. An $80,000 grant went toward the making of the third installment of “Gasland,” the documentary series that casts fracking in an environmentally negative light and helped bring national attention to the technique.
On the other side of the oft-contentious debate, trade groups representing the natural-gas industry face a key Oct. 27 deadline to file what’s known as an Article 78 claim, which is used to challenge a judgment or action by a state agency.
Should they file the document in court, it would challenge the validity of the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s “findings statement” -- the 43-page document that formally put the ban into place on June 29.
If they let the deadline pass, they forfeit their right to file an Article 78 claim. Separately, pro-fracking groups could also consider a lawsuit claiming damages from lost oil and gas rights, though similar efforts have been unsuccessful thus far.
So far, the industry has held its cards close, declining to say whether a lawsuit is on the way. But API New York, the deep-pocketed American Petroleum Institute’s state chapter, hasn’t ruled anything out, whether it’s a challenge to the findings statement or some other legal avenue.
“We are considering our options,” said Karen Moreau, executive director of API New York, the state chapter of the American Petroleum Institute. “All options are still on the table.”
The Joint Landowners Coalition of New York, a Binghamton-based organization representing landowners who had hoped to lease their gas rights to energy companies, had previously sued the Cuomo administration in an unsuccessful attempt to force a decision on fracking prior to the ban.
But unlike its previous legal effort, the coalition has not been raising funds for a possible lawsuit this time around.
“Various groups are looking at a variety of options,” said Scott Kurkoski, the coalition’s Vestal, Broome County-based attorney.
Other fracking supporters are looking at ways around the ban, which only applies to fracking operations using more than 300,000 gallons of water.
Tioga Energy Partners, a limited liability company, has filed an application with the state Department of Environmental Conservation seeking approval to use a propane-based, waterless form of fracking to help access gas in the Tioga County portion of the Marcellus and Utica shale formations.
Propane-based fracking isn’t covered under the state’s ban. But approval of the permits is far from a foregone conclusion: The DEC could order an environmental review similar to the one that tied up high-volume, water-based fracking in New York for more than seven years before Cuomo’s administration decided to ban it.
Walter Hang, an Ithaca-based organizer and owner of environmental database firm Toxics Targeting, has focused his efforts on stopping the propane-fracking applications.
The state’s fracking ban, he said, should be widened to include fracking with more than 5,000 gallons of any substance, not just 300,000 gallons of water. He’s urged his mailing list, which has thousands of recipients, to call Cuomo’s office and nudge him on the matter.
“Shale fracking really hasn’t been prohibited, and I’m not convinced that the actual prohibition has so many giant loopholes that the industry could frack any time it wants to,” Hang said. “Waterless alternatives aren’t included in any way, shape or form.”
What’s next
- Gas-drilling supporters have until Oct. 27 to file a challenge to the state’s ban on high-volume fracking.
- Fracking opponents from New York are hoping to spread their successful strategy to other states and countries.
- A pair of applications for propane-based fracking in Tioga County remain pending with the state Department of Environmental Conservation.