Natural gas and the shale resistance

ON DECEMBER 13, Craig and Julie Sautner from rural Dimock, Pa., stood in front of then-New York Gov. David Paterson's office on 3rd Avenue in Manhattan and testified to the press about the water contamination they've experienced from "vertical hydro-fracking"--the new energy industry practice of pumping water, sand and chemicals into the ground at high pressure to fracture rock formations and release pockets of natural gas.

The press conference concerned Paterson's veto of a frack moratorium bill that would have prevented new land leases and drilling in New York state until May 15. He instead issued an executive order, extending a moratorium on horizontal drilling until July 1, but exempted vertical fracking.

This has been called the "Paterson Loophole"--after the "Halliburton Loophole" in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which, with the support of Vice President Dick Cheney, exempted fracking from requirements of the Safe Water Drinking Act and other regulatory oversight.

Actor Mark Ruffalo, who lives with his family where land is leased for drilling, said the moratorium was a victory, but more struggle still lies ahead. "I don't care how anyone characterizes this; we won," he said. "But it's the first game in the playoffs, alright? And we've still got plenty of games ahead of us."

THE NATURAL gas boom crept up on us in many ways. It may have been loudly reported in the financial and fossil fuel worlds that natural gas was on the rise in the last decade, but the new technology that allowed the boom to take place--and its potentially damaging impact on the environment--was barely mentioned in the mainstream news before rural landowners were offered money for their mineral rights.

The energy companies had many justifications for fracking: It's green; it will protect us from terrorism; it could supply us with energy for decades; and the best part is you'll be rich. For a farmer in this day and age, this might sound almost too good to be true. Deals were made with farmers and rural landowners long before "hydrofracking" became a term known even in the environmental movement.

In a 2009 Wall Street Journal op-ed article titled "America's Natural Gas Revolution," Daniel Yergen and Robert Ineson called the extraction of natural gas through hydrofracking "the biggest energy innovation of the decade."

Things weren't looking so good for the industry until it developed hydrofracking on a scale that the process was able to access shale rock. There are about 20 "shale plays," or deep bedrock, in the United States alone.

The rush began in the Barnett Shale play around Fort Worth, Texas, about 10 years ago. The largest play in the U.S. is the Marcellus Shale, which extends across western New York, Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, West Virginia and part of Maryland. In other words, from an area where mountaintop removal coal mining has been affecting people for years to the area around Mark Ruffalo's house, where fracking hasn't been allowed to start.

The dangers of fracking can be imagined by visualizing the process. Water, sand and toxic chemicals are blasted down a well to fracture the shale. Half of that water comes back up, hundreds of trucks carry it around, and it has to be put somewhere. Depending on the site, the water may be left in open evaporation pits, injected deep into the ground or treated in a wastewater sewage plant and sent back into a body of water.

Meanwhile, the fracking process frees methane particles that may work their way into aquifers that provide drinking water for many communities and generally run about a thousand feet below the surface.

According to the investigative news organization ProPublica, there have been "over a thousand cases" of water contamination due to fracking, many of which resulted in lawsuits.

Interviewed on 60 Minutes, Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy and chairman of industry-backed American Clean Skies Foundation, responded with the comment, "When people are involved accidents are going to happen." In other words, fracking isn't dangerous, but workers do make mistakes.

Although CEOs make errors, too, McClendon is right that workers do make mistakes. That is part of the story of fracking--of trucks leaking frack fluids, well explosions and faulty underground well casings. However, history shows that fossil fuel extraction is generally difficult and dangerous for workers themselves. Regardless of who's responsible, McClendon at least admits to accidents, unlike other drilling advocates who claim "there has never been a proven case of water contamination by hydraulic fracturing."

Mistakes aside, contamination happens. The Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania is one of many bodies of water that has been found bubbling, and this has been caught on film. Although it may be a result of methane from below, these bodies of water have also been subjected to disposal of treated wastewater. That any facility can fully treat frack fluid is in tremendous doubt.

Socially, the rush to drill has forced landowners to take sides, often resulting in chaotic public hearings of hundreds of people.

Many landowners identify as pro-safe drilling. Safe drilling might involve closed chambers for storing frack fluids, hiring more state overseers or upgrading technology. Really safe drilling would cancel many leases, as it would have to be done where there is more available water and less vulnerable underground water.

Nor does the "safe drilling" position even consider other effects, such as local air pollution, all-day noise pollution, degraded scenery and damaged roads.

According to a report by The Earth Institute at Columbia University, "Most of the subsidies to corporate gas companies apply to the exploration phase of natural gas extraction, rather than production. Since taxes and royalties are not paid to townships and residents until gas production reaches a minimal level, gas companies have nothing to lose in leasing, exploration and drilling. It also means that abandoning drilled wells without remediation can be a possibility."

The money doesn't get distributed equally, either. Some concerned citizens drew a detailed map of gas leases in the Finger Lakes region in upstate New York, and concluded: "Although at least 39 percent of the land area of Tompkins County now has a gas lease, these leases are owned by only 6 percent of the adult, non-college-student residents of the county. Thus, a very small proportion of the total population that will be impacted by gas drilling will reap any possible financial benefits."

But, of course, everyone in the area would be affected by frack drilling.

ANOTHER EFFECT of the "natural gas revolution" has been to eclipse efforts for renewable energy--there are dozens of small renewable energy companies in New York state alone.

Local farms are being further pushed into decline by natural gas leases, including those that specialize in sustainable agriculture. "You should understand that the industrialization and pollution of rural upstate New York will kill the production of organic and sustainable food in this region," a New York state farmer wrote on the CivilEats.com Web site.

Wealth would be spread more equally with a shift to renewable energy. Just as work comes and goes from town to town with natural gas rigs, it also does with renewable energy projects--but these projects don't have the same impact on the environment.

Subsidies could be shifted from both fossil fuels and industrial agriculture to renewable energy and local agriculture. The International Energy Agency recently reported that "fossil-fuel consumption subsidies amounted to $312 billion in 2009" whereas renewable energy got only $57 billion.

Along with Pittsburgh's ban on fracking passed last year, New York state has the potential to help reverse the gas boom, and this can become of a rallying point for the sustainability movement. Suspicion of fracking sparked community meetings across the state, and internationally, the movement has had other successes, including a moratorium on fracking in Australia.

In New York, it's common to see the Shaleshock Action Alliance signs on front lawns, with the word "FRACK" with a red circle around it and a line through it. The alliance is comprised of existing environmental groups in upstate New York and newborn shale-resistance community groups such as ROUSE (Residents Opposed to Unsafe Shale-Gas Extraction) and F-Leased, which is for people who signed gas leases, but now regret it.