In the beginning, which was about the year 2007, a rural
community in the northeast corner of Wayne County, PA discovered it was in the “sweet
spot” of the “Marcellus Shale Gas Play.” That is, there was lots of natural gas
some 7,000 feet underground, and many drilling companies were offering to lease
the land to put down wells.
Land agents, fluttering sheaves of papers, urged
land owners to sign up fast lest the valuable gas be pumped out from under them
from their neighbors’ lands.
Most people didn’t sign. Instead, the woman who
headed the county farm bureau’s information department began offering speakers –
the top authorities in their fields of geology, environmental protection,
drilling technologies and contract law regarding drilling leases. She charged
five dollars per person for attending these talks and the gymnasium in which
they were held was jammed with local land owners.
But there were hold-outs. While much of the county
is large farms, the eastern-most sector, the township of Damascus, is
subdivided into small lots for the vacation homes of New Yorkers and New
Jerseyites. City dwellers with jobs that kept them away from the region for all
but a few weekends and summer vacations.
These city folk who, having small
lands, paid minimal taxes, were fearful their splendid views of rolling farm
lands (which pay crushingly high taxes) would be spoiled. They did not attend
the meetings, did not inform themselves, but organized a resistance group to
drilling: The Damascus Citizens for Sustainability.
Among them was Josh Fox, an aspiring playwright who
made a documentary film of numerous spots in the United States where oil or gas
drilling had caused problems. His aim was not to inform, but to oppose, and to
use the popularity of environmental issues to raise his own career.
In a world-wide
culture of free floating fear that is perpetually looking for a cause, his
film, Gas Land, became a call to action, a popular cause with broader appeal
even than gay rights and women’s equality. And the handy word “fracking”, which
signifies a process used safely in the gas drilling industry for over 40 years,
became an obscenity.
Now opposition to gas drilling has become an
international movement. People fear their drinking water will be polluted, or
used up by some unimaginably vast consumption and tainting of water resources.
In fact a gas drilling operation uses tractor
trailers to haul water to the site, and uses 5 million gallons at most. And
that’s recycled rather than discarded. While that sounds like a lot when you
think of the space a gallon of milk takes up in the fridge, that much water
would lower Wayne County’s Belmont Lake (at 172 acres, one of over 50 lakes in
the region) by 1.1 inches.*
But decent, thoughtful citizens, not only in Wayne
County but all over the world, have come to fear and strenuously oppose gas
drilling.
Who benefits from this movement? Well of course Josh
Fox has done very well. So have oil companies in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia,
because cars could be retro-fitted to use the much cheaper liquefied natural
gas instead of oil.
Few buildings are heated with natural gas – the heating
oil and propane used could all be replaced, so a change to natural or liquefied
natural gas would be bad for the oil companies too. And the gas drilling
companies, for the most part, are not the same companies as the big oil
companies.
Electricity generating plants could use gas and
cease using coal and nuclear reactors. The New Yorkers who fear the well at
their summer cottage might be polluted would better turn their attention to the
Indian Point nuclear power plant just up wind and up river of New York City: a
plant far more out-of-date and with less security than Fukushima.
But a larger issue has developed recently.
Russia threatens to withhold or raise the price of
it gas exports to the numerous countries in Europe that are dependent upon
Russia’s Gazprom. While Putin agrees that people in the West should fear “fracking”
– it will make black stuff come out of their water faucets – he’s able to
manipulate dependence upon Russia’s export to blackmail Europe into restraint
regarding the Ukraine – or whatever other issue he chooses. (Apparently he
doesn’t fear any black stuff coming out of Russians’ faucets.)
Obama has countered with an offer to supply Europe
with exported American liquefied natural gas. Such a move could reduce Russia’s
export earnings by 30%. We’re seeing The Showdown at the Okay Gas-well.
What is the truth about fear regarding water?
Water pollution from gas drilling, in so far as it poses
any problem, would only affect rural home owners’ wells immediately local to
the drilling site – either through a leak from the well into the aquifer or
from a surface spill.
Both issues are addressed by reasonably safe
drilling practices: casing the drilling bore with concrete to a level below the
aquifer (in Wayne County PA the aquifer is no deeper than 1,500 feet maximum,
the gas target area is 7,000 feet down), and by careful maintenance on the
surface to avoid spillages. Pennsylvania and many other states have stringent
laws regarding pollution by well drilling operations, including, in PA, closing
down all a company’s operations in the state if there is one incident until the
problem is repaired.
Property owners’ leases can determine much of
drilling practices, especially when property owners gather in associations to
defend their rights and contracts and the undefiled quality of their land – as has
happened with the Northern Wayne Property Owners Alliance (with a drilling
lease that is used as a model by the World Bank and Harvard Business School.)
It’s strikingly ironic that the anti-drilling
movement began simultaneously with the landowners’ own pro-drilling and environmental
preservation movement in an obscure corner of Pennsylvania. But the panic story
promoted by the anti-drilling group has entranced the media, and the landowners’
program of safe drilling has been almost unheard beyond the drilling industry
itself.
Most private foundations have long ceased to be
eccentric disbursals of wealth by individuals, and have become the work largely
of hired professionals guided by other professionals who set forth a list of
causes considered important, which of course they are: world peace, kids at
risk, the environment…
So the anti-drilling movement found ready support in the
world of private foundations. Writers and professors could get a grant for “proving”
the harmfulness of gas drilling. Already existing environment preserving
organizations had a new topic for their fund raising. Actors, who are urged by
their agents to have a public image supporting a worthy cause, saw an easy opportunity
for visibility as defenders of the earth.
But the fact remains that natural gas, neither in
its production nor its use, is as polluting as most of our other sources of
energy. A switch from oil to natural gas would reduce our carbon emissions and
the ever increasing greenhouse effect and global warming.
Would gas drilling discourage the use of solar and
wind energy?
China can deploy forests of wind mills – but in the
U.S. there is opposition to windmills for the sake of birds, and often even the best sites have no wind.
The U.S. has deserts where solar panels could be
useful almost every day – but there are those who oppose solar panels for the
sake of desert wild life. And the highest use of electricity is not in the
deserts, but in regions that don’t have enough reliable sunshine for their
energy needs to be met by solar panels.
It will be interesting to see what the emergence of
geopolitics into the gas drilling issue will do.
* In the cradle of the anti-drilling movement: Here
are some notes pertaining to the northeast corner of Pennsylvania, gas drilling
and its water use. While concern over water use would be appropriate in the American
southwest, here the irrationality of the gas drilling opposition movement is
particularly evident.
Delaware River (which forms the eastern boundary of Wayne Co. PA) Specs
from the National Park Service
http://www.nps.gov/upde/planyourvisit/planningrivertrip.htm
Average Water Level
Depth: 2 1/2 - 4 feet
Flow: 790 - 2,530 cubic feet/second
River current: 2 m.p.h.
Pick an average spot in the river, and the flow would
be:
790 + 2,530 = 3,320/2 = 1,660 cubic feet per second
60 x 60 = 3,600 and 3,600 x 1,660 cf/sec = 5,976,000
cf/hour
5,976,000 x 7.48 gallons = 44,700,480 gallons per hour
It's safe to say that at an average spot on an average
day along the Delaware River, nearly 45-million gallons of water flow by in an
hour.
________________________________________________________________ If
someone drew 1-million gallons of water from a 100-acre pond, it would lower
the water level of that pond by less than 3/8ths of an inch. If someone drew
6-million gallons from the pond, the drop would be about 2-1/4 inches.
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If one-half inch of rain falls on 100 acres, that's
more than 1.3-million gallons (1,348,397 gallons, actually).
According to the National Weather Service, the average
yearly precipitation (rain, snow, etc.) at the Binghamton, NY Airport(nearest
report to Wayne County, PA)is 40.76 inches, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to
assume that a 100-acre parcel gets 40 inches of precipitation annually, that's
nearly 108-million gallons (107,871,773 gallons)
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