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More liked postsCuomo expects fracking decision before 2014 election
In a meeting with the Syracuse Post-Standard’s editorial board, Gov. Cuomo said he thought the Department of Health would have made a recommendation by now:
Cuomo, a Democrat in his third year, says he’s waiting for the results of a review by his state health commissioner, Dr. Nivah Shah. Those results should be ready within several weeks, Cuomo said Wednesday during an editorial meeting with The Post-Standard and Syracuse Media Group.
“I expected it to be concluded already,” Cuomo said, adding that Shah has said the review of potential health effects from the deep drilling method should be done in the next several weeks. “It’s not in the distant future. But it’s not done yet.”
The contentious debate on whether hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, contaminates drinking water bubbled to the surface Thursday during a Senate panel discussion.
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) pressed environmentalists to name a specific site where fracking had polluted groundwater at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee natural gas roundtable.
“I keep hearing from the environmental groups that there are many examples of contamination of groundwater. And I keep hearing from the industry … that they don’t know of a single incident,” Landrieu said. “Please do not give me theories — just give me one site.”
Amy Mall, senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), pointed to an article that indicated water pollution in Pennsylvania communities.
It’s not clear whether any officials on the panel read this study from Duke University, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2011 and, according to the school, the subject of 1,700 media stories worldwide.
The NY State Assembly passed a two-year moratorium on fracking in March. The bill is now sitting in the Senate’s Environmental Conservation Committee.
According to the Times-Union, it’s not clear whether the moratorium will ever come up for a full vote:
Its prospects are unclear due to the unprecedented power-sharing arrangement in which Republicans wield power in the chamber with the four-member Independent Democratic Conference. Their compact gives both Dean Skelos and Jeff Klein, respectively the leaders of the GOP and IDC conferences, a veto over what legislation makes it to the floor of the Senate for a vote.
With a few exceptions, Senate Republicans are eager to see fracking, which involves the use of a large amount of water and a small brew of chemicals to break up gas-bearing rock, move ahead in the massive Marcellus Shale region along the state’s Southern Tier. Environmentalists and industrial groups have spent years arguing about the technique’s potential economic and natural impacts.
The IDC has introduced its own moratorium bill, but their version would leave the decision in the hands of the Cuomo administration:
The IDC’s David Carlucci has introduced a bill that would block the technique for two years, or until the state Health Commissioner has determined that sufficient research on its potential health impacts existed to make a recommendation to the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which is finalizing its regulatory blueprint on hydrofracking.
Carlucci’s bill has yet to make it to the floor.
“All four members of the IDC stand behind Sen. Carlucci’s bill,” said IDC spokesman Eric Soufer. “In the meantime, we have not received any indication that the governor has imminent plans to move ahead with hydrofracking.”
Scranton newspaper: Drilling damage in 161 Pennsylvania water supplies
The Associated Press reported today that the Times-Tribune of Scranton has obtained documents from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection showing that 161 water supplies had been affected by gas and oil drilling in the state between 2008 and 2012.
The Times-Tribune of Scranton said about 17% of the investigations indicated that water supplies were either temporarily or seriously disrupted enough to require companies to replace the source. Faulty wells channeled natural gas into the water supplies for 90 properties.
According to a poll from the Center for Local, State and Urban Policy at the University of Michigan:
The survey shows general support for gas extraction in Pennsylvania. Forty-nine percent of respondents approve, and 40 percent oppose.
But almost two-thirds support a drilling moratorium in order to study the risks. Pollster and University of Michigan professor Barry Rabe says that’s not such a contradiction.
“A moratorium is not a ban,” says Rabe. “A moratorium is taking some time out and taking some time to develop a policy and process as opposed to completely prohibiting. So if there is a mixture of possible benefits and risks, support for a moratorium might be viewed as a way to view all those risks and minimize them before going forward.”
Most polled view Pennsylvania’s natural gas reserves as a public, rather than a private resource. And 59 percent of those polled view fracking as a major risk to water resources. When it comes to full disclosure of fracking ingredients, 81 percent of Pennsylvania residents “strongly agree.”
Compressed natural gas filling stations spreading
The Scranton Times-Tribune reports on a new natural gas filling station planned by a local beer distributor:
Work on the station could begin this year and vehicles should be fueling up by 2014, said Leonard Verrastro, LT Verrastro vice president.
“This is a commitment, but it’s the right thing to do,” he said.
The grant will cover 20 to 30 percent of the filling station costs, then Verrastro will have to swap out older vehicles for CNG-ready vehicles, which cost about $50,000 more than conventional trucks. Various grants could reimburse half that premium. The first year, Mr. Verrastro said he’ll purchase five CNG trucks. Over the following six years, he’ll replace a total of 50 trucks and cars with CNG. In the first year, the project will reduce Verrastro’s diesel use by 25,000 gallons. When fully converted, the move will reduce diesel consumption by 250,000 gallons annually.
Even with the grants, the project is costly, Mr. Verrastro said, and will take years to reap savings. Natural gas is selling for just below $2 per gallon equivalent. The average regular unleaded price locally is about $3.48 per gallon.
Associated Press finds that gas leases don’t die easily
Five years into New York’s hold on fracking, many of the leases signed when the drilling boom started in Pennsylvania are expiring. And while that might be good news for anyone who leased their mineral rights for two or three dollars an acre or now wants nothing to do with fracking, getting out of the contract is proving to be a challenge:
Many have clauses giving the drilling company the right to extend them for another five years. Gas companies have tried to extend thousands of leases by claiming an unforeseen barrier — the moratorium — has prevented them from drilling. And even when a lease has expired, landowners often have to take several legal steps to clear their land of claims.
An Associated Press analysis of Pennsylvania’s impact fee, the tax charged on natural gas operations, found that the state’s revenues from the fracking industry could be $10 or $15 billion less after 20 or 30 years than if they taxed the industry the way most other states do, based on the amount of gas produced.
The Times-Union has an interesting profile of Karen Moreau, the vocal head of New York’s chapter of the American Petroleum Institute:
In January 2012, a little-known local lawyer with deep roots in the region appeared on Fox News promoting natural gas drilling and her documentary “The Empire State Divide.” A few days after her cable TV appearance, the novice filmmaker won the top job in New York for the energy industry.
Moreau, 52, has exploited contacts from her days as a counsel under Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno and friends such as New York Post State Editor Fred Dicker and Business Council of New York State President Heather Briccetti. In the past 16 months, her speeches about downstaters and wealthy backers of extremist environmental groups holding back hydrofracking have become staples.
The state’s second highest court, the Appellate Division for the 3rd Department, has ruled in favor of New York towns with bans on gas drilling.
In two separate rulings Thursday, the state’s Appellate Division, Third Department has ruled that the state’s Oil, Gas and Solution Mining Law (OGSML) does not preempt municipal land use laws.
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public found that residents near fracking operations in Pennsylvania attributed 59 health concerns to drilling.
The most commonly cited concern was stress, which 76 percent of participants said they’d experienced. Among the leading causes of stress reported by the participants were feelings of being taken advantage of, having their concerns and complaints ignored, and being denied information or misled.
“Many of these stressors can be addressed immediately by the gas drilling industry and by government,” said senior author Bernard Goldstein, M.D., emeritus professor and former dean of Pitt Public Health.
…
In addition to stress, perceived health issues included rashes, headaches, shortness of breath, nausea and sore throats.
“Exposure-based epidemiological studies are needed to address identified health impacts and those that may develop as fracking continues,” said [the study’s lead author Kyle] Ferrar.
The study will be published in the May issue of the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health.
DEP clears driller of methane contamination
Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Conservation has determined that high levels of methane found in water wells in Franklin Township, Pa. did not come from nearby fracking wells.
NPR’s State Impact Pennsylvania reports that the methane found in the water wells did not match the natural gas coming from wells owned by WPX Energy. But the DEP did not take into consideration the possibility that the methane was released by drilling through a shallow pool of methane:
Isotopic testing and historical data are two ways to trace methane migration. But that area of the state has a complicated geology with shallow pools of methane. Drilling with poorly constructed well casings can create a pathway for the shallow pools of gas to migrate into the water supply. In that case, the isotopic “print” of the gas would not necessarily match the methane extracted from the deep Marcellus formation. That’s what the DEP determined happened in Dimock, Pa.
The Wall Street Journal looks at how Pennsylvania distributed its impact fee to municipalities in 2012:
Pennsylvania collected $204 million last year in levies on 2011 gas-drilling activity and disbursed more than half of that to local governments. Cumberland, with 6,500 residents, received the most fee money among the state’s 1,500 municipalities. Coalmont, a couple of hours to the east, was among the least paid. It got a check for $5.26, which was used to buy stamps. “You really can’t do a whole lot with five bucks,” said Dolly Ford, secretary of Coalmont, which has about 120 residents.
From the Associated Press:
A new report from the federal Environmental Protection Agency has dramatically lowered estimates of how much of a potent greenhouse gas is being leaked by the natural gas industry despite rapid growth in production.
The EPA now estimates that from 1990 to 2010, the U.S. natural gas industry released about 20 percent less methane into the atmosphere than previously thought, even though production increased by about 38 percent during that period.
