The Albany Times Union had a front page article today that should be mandatory reading for anyone who thinks we can get all the oil and gas we need if we just go drilling for it. As it happens, there's known deposits of natural gas in New York state waiting to be tapped - but the costs could be rather heavy from the side effects.
Upstate New York's looming natural gas nightmare
Regulators asleep as lawmakers attempt to declare vast acreage open to the energy industry's iffy underground fracturing technique
By ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN, ProPublica / Special to the Times Union
First published: Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Read the article, then be very afraid of what the oil and gas companies are doing to us while the President runs interference for them.
Here's a few highlights:
On May 29, top state environmental officials assured state lawmakers that plans to drill for natural gas near the watershed that supplies New York City's drinking water posed little danger.
A survey of other states had found "not one instance of drinking water contamination" from the water-intensive, horizontal drilling that would take place across New York's southern tier, the officials said.
But a joint investigation by ProPublica and New York City public radio station WNYC revealed hundreds of instances of drinking water contamination in states where comparable drilling has been done.
In New Mexico, oil and gas drilling using waste pits like those proposed for New York has caused toxic chemicals to leach into the water table at some 800 sites. Colorado has reported more than 300 spills affecting its ground water.
DEC officials told ProPublica and WNYC they were not aware of those incidents, even though that information could have been found through a rudimentary internet search. They apparently hadn't understood that the new drilling techniques pump trace amounts of toxic chemicals into the ground, and they couldn't say for sure how New York would dispose of the millions of gallons of hazardous fluids that are the byproducts of this type of drilling. Four days after one interview, the DEC sent a letter to the drilling companies asking for detailed information about the type and amount of chemicals they will use.
emphasis added
What kind of hazardous fluids?
The gas in the Marcellus is held in tiny pockets, like bubbles in a brick of Swiss cheese. To extract it, a mixture of water, sand, and chemicals is shot into the earth with such explosive force that it fractures the rock, releasing the bubbles to the surface. Along with the gas comes most of the water that was shot down the well. But by the time the water re-surfaces, it is laden with natural toxics from the shale layer below, as well as the chemicals added by industry. The U.S. Department of Energy lists produced water from gas drilling as among the most toxic of any oil industry byproduct. When that water is returned to the surface, it must be dealt with as toxic industrial waste.
In 2004 Theo Colborn, a widely respected scientist who specializes in the health effects of low-dose chemical exposure, began to investigate the makeup of drilling fluids. She was spurred by the story of a Colorado resident who suspected her cancer was tied to water contamination from a nearby gas well.
To figure out what was in the water, Colborn collected shipping manifests that trucks must carry when they haul hazardous materials for oil and gas servicing companies. When an accident occurred - a well spill in Colorado, or an explosion at a drilling site in Wyoming - she took water and soil samples and tested them for contaminants.
Colborn's list eventually grew to more than 200 chemicals, from suspected cancer-causing compounds like Benzene to a compound called 2-BE, which she connects to serious human health problems.
Colborn's findings are supported by studies in New Mexico and Wyoming. Tests done by the New Mexico Office of Oil Conservation on mud and water from two gas drilling pits showed Benzene, Toluene, Naphthalene and other substances.
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Read the entire article. The complete article is much more alarming than the snippets posted here. It's a horrifying prospect on the fast track while voters are being tormented by high gas prices and politicians are scrambling for quick fixes. The local regulatory agencies are not ready to oversee the industry, and don't have the resources in any case. Multiply that by all of the potential sites across the country and offshore where Bush is calling for lifting of all restrictions on drilling, and it should scare everyone who's worried about the mess to come.
Bush has gutted all of the federal agencies that might exercise oversight, filling them with industry friendly drones. The damage to the environment will be widespread, difficult to deal with, and toxic for decades if not longer. Once the groundwater is poisoned, there's no easy way to clean it up - if any. It's already happening in the west; farmers and ranchers are seeing their land devastated by run off from these kinds of operations.
To make the picture even more bleak, while the companies may be approaching land owners with the prospect of payments for rights to lease their land for drilling, pitting landowners against oil/gas company lawyers is not an even contest by any means. An item reblogged from The Albany Project lays out here some of the money and other considerations at stake. Across the border in Pennsylvania they're wrestling with some of the same issues. From the Times Leader:
"There's a great disparity in knowledge between the companies' land men and the landowners. This could open them (landowners) up to some risk," Golden said.
Zucosky's group, which is accepting new members, owns 1,500 contiguous acres in Franklin Township.
Zucosky said he got involved nearly a year ago when a Texas company offered to buy the mineral rights on his 100 acres for $300 per acre. Initially, he suspected it was akin to an e-mail scam, but some Internet researching convinced him the offer was genuine and that he could probably get a better one.
"I saw that contract. You have to be pretty naive to sign something like that," he said. If the situation is as experts suggest, Zucosky said, "there's a whole bunch of money involved."
He's already witnessing the rush. An offer of $2,000 per acre increased by $500 within a few days without any prodding from owners, he said.
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It's not merely the money; landowners need to address how the drilling companies will handle the wastes, control environmental damages, and how the whole liability issue will be handled. The energy industry does not have a good reputation for any of that, and we're talking about something that will have to be carefully monitored for decades.
There should be no need to even discuss how John McCain would deal with this: he's made it clear he supports the Bush approach to energy. Give the industry everything it wants, and get out of its way.
Al Gore has laid out another path. Anything we can do to move away from carbon based non-renewable energy supplies is a good thing, and not just because of the impact on climate. The kind of development proposed above risks contaminating the drinking water of millions of people - and drinkable water is fast becoming another resource where we're hitting the limits.