In a last-ditch effort to block construction of a controversial natural gas pipeline in northeastern Pennsylvania, campaigners urged an interstate regulator on Friday to review the project’s environmental impact.
The 44-mile section of pipeline, the Northeast Upgrade, would become part of a longer pipeline moving natural gas extracted from the Marcellus Shale in northern Pennsylvania to a terminal in Mahwah, N.J. In a letter, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, an environmental group, urged the Delaware River Basin Commission to study the potential impacts, arguing that the project would result in the loss of forest and the degradation of wetlands if construction were allowed to begin.
Opponents argue that in approving the project, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission did not conduct a thorough environmental review. Last week they suffered a setback when the federal Court of Appeals in Washington denied an emergency motion by Delaware Riverkeeper and others for an injunction to rescind commission’s approval. Read more…
PHILADELPHIA – A coalition of academic researchers in the United States is preparing to shine a rigorous scientific light on the polarized and often emotional debate over whether using hydraulic fracturing to drill for natural gas is hazardous to human health.
Some five years after the controversial combination of fracking and horizontal drilling in the gas-rich Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania and surrounding states got under way, a team of toxicologists from the University of Pennsylvania is leading a national effort to study the health effects of fracking.
The university’s Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology has organized a working group with researchers at other top universities including Columbia, Johns Hopkins and the University of North Carolina to investigate and analyze reports of nausea, headaches, breathing difficulties and other ills from people who live near natural gas drilling sites, compressor stations or wastewater pits.
The administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo extended the deadline for its pending regulations on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a controversial technique used to extract natural gas from shale formations. The governor said the delay would allow time for completion of a state-authorized health study. [WNYC]
Concerned about a sharp decline in its wildlife populations, the southeast African country of Botswana will ban hunting beginning in 2012. [BBC]
New research indicates the Grand Canyon is far older than currently believed; a new process for measuring radioactive decay in minerals form the canyon puts its age at 70 million years, not the five- to six-million-year estimate currently used. The 280-mile gorge was formed not by the Colorado River, but by an earlier river flowing in the opposite direction, the study says. [New York Times]
Avner VengoshResearchers tested an aquifer near a fracking site in Montrose, Pa.
A new study enters the debate over the safety of hydraulic fracturing: researchers report that naturally occurring paths in the rock bed in northeastern Pennsylvania allowed some contaminants to migrate into shallow drinking aquifers. They found no direct connection between the contamination and shale-gas drilling operations in the region, however.
“The good news is there is no direct link between this finding with saline water and shale gas extraction,” said Avner Vengosh, a geochemist at Duke University and a co-author of the report, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The bad news is that we think there are natural pathways that exist between the Marcellus formation and the shallow groundwater.”
Hydraulic fracturing involves pumping water, sand and chemicals into horizontal gas wells deep underground to crack open shale and extract natural gas. The use of the process has expanded in recent years in the northeastern United States and is under way in Poland, China, Australia and New Zealand.
The Marcellus Shale formation is a stretch of sedimentary bedrock that extends around much of the Appalachian Basin in the eastern United States and is thought to be the largest shale gas reservoir in the country. Located about a mile underground, the formation’s shale contains natural gas reserves and highly saline water laced with salts, metals and radioactive elements.
The researchers found that some of this Marcellus brine, which has a salinity about 10 times that of seawater, has seeped into shallow aquifers used for local drinking water.
To arrive at this determination, they collected 426 samples of shallow groundwater from aquifers in six counties overlying the Marcellus Shale formation and from past studies. Read more…
The town of Dryden in upstate New York doesn’t have foundries or auto manufacturing plants. Its residents say they cherish their trees, meadows and farms and local officials said they wanted to preserve what one called “our country way of life” when they passed zoning laws to keep heavy industry away.
So it was not surprising when the town board last year passed a ban on hydrofracking. But Dryden’s town lawyer for more than 30 years, Mahlon R. Perkins, said the court victory this week upholding the ban was more about land use rights than natural gas drilling.
The ban, he said, was actually an amendment to a local zoning ordinance clarifying that oil and gas drilling was included in the prohibition that already precluded heavy industrial activity within Dryden’s borders.
“It’s about the ability of cities, towns and villages to determine what the appropriate use of land is in their respective jurisdictions,” Mr. Perkins said. “The real issue is whether a town can say, ‘not in this town.’”
Both the gas industry and landowners who have leased their lands for drilling have vowed to continue challenging in court this and other similar bans around New York. The company suing over Dryden’s ban, the Anschutz Exploration Corporation, had already paid leaseholders $5.1 millions for access to more than 22,000 acres in the town of 14,000 people.
For now, ban supporters are rejoicing.
Dave Makar, a former member of Dryden’s five-member board who voted for the fracking ban, said plans for a celebration were underway. When he heard of the court decision Tuesday, he said, “I texted woo-hoo!”
At the Dot Earth blog, Andy Revkin writes about Jennie Shanker, an artist who fashions clay pots and cups from soil collected at Marcellus shale outcroppings in Sullivan County. Her project is both a scientific exploration of what “the Marcellus” is and an epistemological attempt to get past the reductive arguments for and against hydrofracturing.
Like the blind man and the elephant, the politics of gas drilling depend a lot on where you look.
Michael Forster Rothbart
for The New York TimesJennifer Huntington, a dairy farmer in Middlefield, N.Y., favors gas drilling, but her town has banned it.
A Quinnipiac University poll released last week found residents of New York State almost evenly split on drilling, with 44 in favor because of economic benefits and 43 percent opposed because of environmental concerns. That represents a modest trend toward skepticism. In August, the poll found 47 percent to 42 percent in favor.
But polls, some more scientific than others, in many of the areas most likely to see gas drilling tend to show overwhelming opposition of two-thirds or more, particularly to horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a controversial process that injects chemicals and massive amounts of water into shale to free natural gas. (As I noted in an article in Sunday’s Times, the divide has led to ill will, often intimate and intense, in small towns and rural areas.)
Ken Jaffe of Slope Farms in Meredith, N.Y., cited surveys by Pulse Opinion Research showing 72 percent of respondents in Delaware County and 69 percent in Sullivan County opposing fracking in their towns. Read more…
Guy Solimano for The New York TimesPeople seeking to extract themselves from drilling leases attended a meeting in Lafayette, N.Y.
New York’s charged debate over the natural gas extraction process known as hydrofracking will soon move to the face-to-face stage. At hearings set for November, pro- and anti-drilling forces will get a chance to address state regulators directly.
New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, which is tasked with regulating the drilling, has announced that it will hold public hearings in four places — New York City, Dansville, Binghamton and Loch Sheldrake — on its draft environmental impact statement and proposed regulations for high-volume hydraulic fracturing. Each public hearing will include an afternoon and an evening session, the department said.
The hearings are part of an extended public comment period that ends Dec. 12 and is intended to ensure that the rules are tough enough to guarantee that drilling is conducted safely. Still, the state has come under criticism from environmental groups and some elected officials for issuing the proposed rules this week while the environmental impact document is still a work in progress. Read more…
Bloomberg NewsA drilling rig in Washington County, Pa., where the E.P.A. will study the impact of fracking on water quality.
The Environmental Protection Agency has chosen seven natural gas drilling sites where it will conduct case studies to evaluate the impact of hydraulic fracturing on local drinking water.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves freeing of natural gas trapped in shale rock by injecting copious amounts of water at very high pressure. It has become increasingly controversial as companies have turned to drilling horizontally at significant depths. Communities fear that this form of drilling may cause serious environmental damage, particularly if the chemicals enter the drinking water supply. Yet companies, arguing that natural gas is a cleaner energy source than coal, are eager to tap these bountiful underground reserves.
Last year Congress mandated that the Environmental Protection Agency study whether the drilling is damaging the environment and to what extent. After a public review process in which 40 places were considered, the agency chose the case study sites by considering the proximity of drinking water supplies to the fracking activity and by striving for geographic diversity. The E.P.A. says the results will be peer-reviewed and made public, and that the data will be contribute to computer modeling and other efforts to evaluate the drilling’s impact.
The agency said that two spots — in Haynesville Shale in DeSoto Parish, La., and Marcellus Shale in Washington County, Pa. — were selected because fracking had not yet begun there. Thus the E.P.A. will be able to study the impact of the process through the entire life cycle of a gas well.
Five places where hydraulic fracturing has already occurred were also chosen: Bakken Shale in Kildeer and Dunn counties, N.D.; Barnett Shale in Wise and Denton Counties, Tex.; Marcellus Shale in Bradford and Susquehanna Counties, Pa.; a different spot in Marcellus Shale in Washington County, Pa.; and Raton Basin in Las Animas County, Colo.
Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesA canal for returning water from the Indian Point nuclear plant to the Hudson in Buchanan, N.Y.
New York State is poised to take a new step to protect its water: a just-approved bill awaiting Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s signature would impose new restrictions on withdrawals of large volumes of water from lakes, rivers and streams.
Officials with the state Department of Environmental Conservation say that the restrictions, requiring for the first time that more than 400 industrial, commercial and agricultural users obtain a state permit for major water withdrawals, will allow for better monitoring of water supplies and conservation needs. In drafting the bill and advocating more regulation, the officials cited projections of increased demand for the state’s water, both as a result of population growth and natural gas drilling upstate in the Marcellus Shale. (Several million gallons of water would be required to capture the gas from each well drilled.).
“The Senate and Assembly’s passage of D.E.C.’s water withdrawal bill are positive steps to even the regulatory playing field while protecting the state’s finite water resources,” the officials said in a written statement after the Senate version passed last week.
The bill requires a permit for withdrawals of 100,000 gallons or more a day, which is comparable to what other states with similar permit programs demand. Currently the state mostly regulates water withdrawals involving public water supplies to ensure adequate quantities of potable water. Read more…
Environmental groups seeking to mobilize opposition to the gas industry’s plan to drill extensively in the Marcellus Shale in upstate New York have pulled out the big guns: celebrities, of course.
In a new online video, a group of New York-based actors, including Ethan Hawke, Mark Ruffalo and Zoë Saldana, sing the praises of the state’s water while making tea, fly-fishing and, in the case of Mr. Hawke, taking a bath. Referring to allegations of water contamination and other environmental and economic problems in parts of the country where fracking is already taking place, the video warns viewers that their drinking water is at stake.
“My family moved to our quiet farming town on the Delaware River so we could enjoy a simple, healthy life outside of the bustling city,” Mr. Ruffalo said in a statement. “We want to enjoy that peace down the road, and know that the tap water we drink, and bathe our children in, is safe.”
The video, also featuring the actors Amy Ryan, Josh Charles and Nadia Dajani, is the latest salvo in an advertising campaign organized by a coalition of major environmental groups that are trying to bring attention to the risks of the controversial method of natural gas drilling known as hydrofracking. The effort comes as New York officials write drilling regulations that are intended to ensure the safety of water supplies and the environment. Read more…
James Leynse for The New York TimesRobert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, co-authored a study suggesting that unconventional natural gas development is worse than coal for the climate. The natural gas industry begs to differ.
Not surprisingly, a new study suggesting that the greenhouse gas footprint of unconventional natural gas development is far worse than coal is already undergoing a furious deconstruction.
As I write in Tuesday’s Times, Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, concluded in an analysis published this week in a peer-reviewed journal, Climatic Change Letters, that somewhere from 3.6 percent to 7.9 percent of methane, the chief component of natural gas and a potent greenhouse gas, is leaking into the atmosphere at various points along the shale gas production life cycle.
This would make unconventional natural gas production — the sort associated with the contentious practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking — worse than coal for the climate.
The group questions, for example, some of the assumptions made by the Cornell team made about a metric dubbed “lost and unaccounted-for gas,” or L.U.G. — essentially the difference between the amount of gas collected at the wellhead and the amount that eventually makes it to market. Not all of that missing gas is necessarily puffed into the atmosphere, the group argues.
Also worth considering: Mr. Howarth and his fellow researchers build estimates for industry-wide transmission and distribution methane losses based on data that appear to come exclusively from long-distance runs in Russia and Texas. But how relevant are such measurements, the industry critics ask, when considered against new shale gas plays in the Marcellus Shale, where the well-to-market pipeline span is just a fraction of those distances?
Fair questions, all. But the real debate over the study, at least in climate circles, is likely to be over time frames. Read more…
Meet the New York Water Rangers, the stars of an advertising campaign by environmental groups seeking to mobilize opposition to the natural gas drilling method known as hydrofracking.
New York Water RangersA promotion intended to counter the gas industry’s plans for hydraulic fracturing in New York States.
The groups, including Riverkeeper, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Catskill Mountainkeeper, are trying to recruit New York State residents to call attention to what they view as the dangers of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling as state officials write new regulations to govern such drilling. Timed to a rally held on Monday morning at the Capitol in Albany, the rangers want to stymie the gas industry’s plan to drill extensively in the Marcellus Shale region upstate by sending a positive message: average citizens can enlist as rangers to help protect the safety of their water.
People can sign up at www.cleanwaternotdirtydrilling.org and pledge to “share my concerns with state leaders and tell my friends and neighbors about the dangers of dirty gas drilling.” For extra appeal, the campaign encourages campaigners to don superhero costumes, like a cape and goggles.
“We’re inviting New Yorkers to ‘rangerize’ themselves by taking a photo in front of their favorite body of water,” said Erica Ringewald, a spokeswoman for Environmental Advocates of New York. “The superhero gear they choose is up to them, as is the particular body of water, which could be a river or lake or even the kitchen sink.”
“Gasland,” a film that turns a harshly critical eye on the perils of natural gas drilling, has earned an Academy Award nomination for best documentary.
The Oscar nod guarantees even wider exposure for the controversial film, which uses images of flames leaping from kitchen faucets and polluted streams to make an argument for the dangers of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a drilling technique where water and chemicals are injected at high pressure deep underground to free up previously inaccessible natural gas deposits.
The spread of fracking has vastly expanded the nation’s gas reserves and brought prosperity and jobs to some depressed areas, but environmental advocates featured in the film charge that it has done so at the cost of widespread damage to the environment and human health.
“Gasland” made its television debut on HBO last summer and previously won the prize for best documentary at the Sundance Film Festival.
“This is a great moment that will bring more attention to the problem,” Josh Fox, the director, told The Times Herald-Record, which serves areas in Pennsylvania and New York where fracking has divided residents. “It’s all about drawing more attention to the problem and the families who’ve been hurt by drilling.”
The natural gas industry reacted scornfully to news of the film’s Oscar nomination.
“While it’s unfortunate there isn’t an Oscar category for propaganda, this nomination is fitting, as the Oscars are aimed at praising pure entertainment among Hollywood’s elite,” said Lee Fuller, executive director of Energy In Depth, a pro-drilling group.
The film has been criticized by the drilling industry and some state environmental regulators for including dubious claims about the perils of drilling. Regulators in Colorado and Pennsylvania have conducted investigations that appear to debunk several alleged instances of pollution that Mr. Fox’s film associates with fracking.
“This is a deeply disappointing development given that Gasland’s allegations have been widely disproven,” said Tom Amontree, executive vice president for America’s Natural Gas Alliance. “State and federal regulators investigated the claims made in the film and found them to be false.”
Mr. Fox is pushing back hard against assertions that episodes in the film have been debunked. “The movie is absolutely factually accurate — we are compiling responses to every one of their claims,” he said in a recent interview.
In a review of the film for The Times in June, Mike Hale found the film compelling but sloppily executed at times, opening the door to criticisms. In one “particularly unfortunate” sequence, Mr. Hale wrote, the film features an audiotape of an anonymous caller accusing Halliburton of illegally dumping chemicals in a Pennsylvania creek.
“It’s maddening to see how easy he makes it for the film’s critics to attack him, and how difficult for sympathetic but objective viewers to wholly embrace him,” Mr. Hale wrote.
“Mr. Fox shows a general preference for vivid images — bright red Halliburton trucks, beeping but unidentified scientific instruments — over the more mundane crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s of investigative journalism,” he added.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo is receiving plaudits from environmental groups for nominating Joseph Martens as the new commissioner of New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation.
Open Space InstituteJoseph Martens
Since 1998, Mr. Martens has served as president of the Open Space Institute, a nonprofit that works largely in the northeastern United States to acquire lands for conservation and sustainable development and farming. Mr. Martens also served as deputy state secretary of energy and the environment from 1992-94, during the gubernatorial administration of Mr. Cuomo’s father, Mario.
Last fall the Department of Environmental Conservation was rocked when David Paterson, then governor, dismissed the well-respected Alexander B. Grannis after the public disclosure of a memo that Mr. Grannis had written about the negative impact that a new round of layoffs would have on the agency. He has since been hired to work for the state’s comptroller. Read more…
