COFFMAN: WHILE MARCELLUS SHALE GAS STILL SLEEPS BENEATH MY
Posted: Wed Jun 30, 2010 10:21 pmWHILE MARCELLUS SHALE GAS STILL SLEEPS BENEATH MY SWEET COUNTRY HOME
An Assessment of Coming High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State --- and Cautionary Reading of DEC’s dSGEIS
by Steve Coffman October 10, 2009
New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) is in the last sweep up phase of processing public comments before convening a secret bureaucratic conclave to beget the Final Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement that will rule the coming Natural Gas Boom that is about to storm across much of the western and southern tier regions of New York State.
This upcoming gusher is all about the “Marcellus Shale,” an untapped ocean of natural gas that underlies my home, county and region of New York (as well as considerable portions of West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania). The reason that this gas remains untapped is that the technology for profitably extracting it did not exist until the late 1980s when a viable process was developed in Texas, spurred by an enormous gas field called the Barnett Shale. Previously, the impediment to drilling was that the gas was locked in shale 100 to 400 feet thick and, more or less, a mile deep.
The Texas process, most accurately called “High-Volume, Horizontal, Hydraulic Fracturing," (or “Slickwater Fracturing”) entails forcing millions of gallons of fresh water, sand and various chemicals into the shale under sufficient pressure to “frac” it and unbind the gas in numerous places along the strata’s horizontal plane.
The Barnett Shale was considered the largest natural gas reservoir in the United States. In 2003, the U.S. Geological Survey’s assessment estimated that the Barnett Shale held a remaining volume of 26 trillion cubic feet of recoverable unconventional gas, and perhaps as much as 200 trillion cubic feet overall. Eric Potter, associate director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at UT Austin, said that “It compares favorably with the biggest of the old oil booms of the early 20th century.”
How does the Marcellus Shale compare to the Barnett?
A July 2009 study from Penn State’s College of Earth & Mineral Sciences increased a 2002 U.S. Geological Survey assessment of undiscovered gas in the Marcellus Shale from 1.9 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of gas to 2,445 trillion cubic feet, with recoverable reserves amounting to 489 trillion cubic feet. “This remarkable, almost unbelievable, increase in estimated reserves,” the study says, “is due to technological advancements in horizontal drilling technology and techniques, multi-dimensional
seismology, and the implementation of hydrofracturing.”
This suggests that Marcellus Shale contains over ten times as much gas as Barnett Shale!
Despite the fluctuating price of natural gas, the big boys with the big wallets and big eyes are imagining the value in trillions of dollars. In anticipation, NiSource, the Fortune 500 energy service company has recently completed the Millennium Pipeline in New York State, calling its pipeline “the centerpiece of a $1 billion investment in new energy infrastructure.”
Gas servicing giant Schlumberger is planning an 88 acre, $30 million industrial site in tiny Horseheads, NY (pop. 6,500), including a cement plant, chemical mixing station, storehouse for explosives and radioactive materials, and a facility for truck fuel, acid wash, truck maintenance and storage. “Eventually,” says William Coates, President of Schlumberger' s North American Division, “the company's investment in drilling hardware on site will exceed $100 million.”
As of June 2009, over five million acres of Marcellus Shale land has been leased by just six companies (a growing figure that does not include leasing by several other significant players).
What does all this mean for beautiful counties in the Finger Lakes like my own sleepy Yates County? It means that the starting pistol is loaded and raised. Drilling permits have been issued and the rush to drill only awaits completion of DEC’s FSGEIS regulations, which should be finalized in a matter of months.
“The analog would be like a 19th century gold rush,” said Ed Ratchford, geology supervisor for the Arkansas Geological Commission, speaking of recent development in the Fayetteville Shale, “Everyone stakes a claim. You don’t say this place is going to be better than this place. You don’t have time. People were leasing thousands of acres a day.”
What this also means is that New York State’s dairy, wine, and burgeoning tourist industries are at risk (Sherman’s Travel ranked the Finger Lakes as the #1 “lakeside Retreat” in the world, ahead of Lake Kawaguchi in view of Mt. Fuji, Lake Como and Lake Tahoe). Perhaps more importantly, the Finger Lakes themselves, which embody the nation’s second largest reserve of fresh water (only the Great Lakes, shared with Canada, is larger) may be at serious risk, as well.
The Finger Lakes Region is about to be invaded and plumbed by an extremely avaricious and largely-unaccountable Industry, wielding the Big Energy Wildcard that apparently trumps all else.
Presently, with land, milk and wine prices down (and with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads), most local residents still don’t (or won’t) believe what is at stake.
However, one does not need to wait for DEC’s pronouncement (that all is in good hands) to see what is coming. One has only to look west, at the last decade of shale gas extraction in the Texas’ Barnett Shale (and in the gas-rich shales in Wyoming, Colorado, Arkansas, Louisiana) to transpose the likely effects: water problems, earthquake problems, poisoned farm animals, radioactivity problems, toxic drinking water, bucolic countryside turned industrial, pristine air turned into big city air, the essential character of rural communities suddenly divided and debased.
In 2007, my wife and I drove south from New Orleans to Pelican Island and took coastal LA 82 for a hundred or so miles to Port Arthur, Texas, curious to see the effects of Rita and Katrina on the Gulf coast and to enjoy the natural wonders of “The Pelican State.” We did see wonderful birds and wildlife on our way back through Louisiana’s bayou country, but the wreckage of Louisiana’s Gulf coast was a shock--- some of the wreckage due to hurricane damage, but the preponderance resulting
from the ubiquitous offshore drilling and onshore industrial support structure. No more swimming beaches. No more fishing piers. No more quaint motels or seafood shacks. No more juke joints with patrons dancing into sunset and moonrise over the shimmering Gulf. God’s Country had become God’s Own Junkyard. This was a manmade level 5 hurricane, from its bath tub ring of oil-and-debris-littered beaches to its
endless chemical tanks, drilling stations and mountains of rusty pipes and rig parts on both sides of the road. One national treasure destroyed in order to dig for another.
I’m sure it must look like a “money garden” to the rich investors and corporate execs who own it, but what’s also certain is that they live somewhere else.
Yes, of course I know that we as a nation are addicted to fossil fuels, and addicts of every kind often live in dumps, or, at the very least, make wrecks of their lives and the lives of their children and children’s children. Drilling proponents like to say that everyone has to make certain sacrifices for the common good, and, while I certainly agree with that, too---before doling out the sacrifices, we might just want to slow down a little---take a commercial time-out, as it were---to inventory exactly what and whose those “common goods” are.
So far, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has been emblematic of the American, New York State and Yates County divide. Through no fault of its own, the agency has become seriously compromised, split between two antithetical missions in the service of two incompatible masters.
Mission 1. Original 1972 DEC Mission Statement:
To conserve, improve, and protect New York's natural resources and
environment, and control water, air, and land pollution, in order to enhance the health, safety and welfare of the people of the state and their overall economic and social well being."
Mission 2. As redefined in its own 1992 F1992 GEIS (1.E-1):
In 1963 the State Legislature repealed all previous oil and gas legislation and amended the Conservation Law to give DEC greater authority over wells drilled in the fields developed after 1963. The purpose of this law was to foster, encourage, and promote the development, production, and utilization of the natural resources of oil and gas in a manner that would prevent waste, increase ultimate recovery, and protect correlative rights of all the interests involved.
The consequence is that NYDEC presently has a conflict of interest by statute, a split personality by definition. No wonder, when it comes to Marcellus Shale gas drilling, its science seems subordinate to an underlying agenda that often seems intent on justifying a foregone conclusion. DEC cannot be fairly blamed for duplicity when duplicity is endemic to its mission.
The fault here is with the state legislature that has hamstrung DEC with this double bind. The federal government does not task the Environmental Protection Agency to “foster, encourage and promote” the energy, mining and lumber industries. If such activities are to be legitimately governmental, at least put them under the likes of the departments of Energy, Interior and Commerce, and leave the DEC to its hard-enough
job of defending the environment and public health, without also legislating a Trojan Horse into the center of its mission.
This hobbling---drawn even tighter by recent staff and budget cuts---has caused DEC to fall back to a triage strategy of claiming that this new kind of gas drilling is nothing new, just a modest permutation of what is already permitted and regulated, as defined in “The 1992 Generic Environmental Impact Statement on the Oil, Gas and Solution Mining Regulatory Program.”
The 1992 GEIS
In every scope and draft and supplement of its upcoming FGEIS, DEC has remained adamant on one central point, as stated here in its Final Scoping document (released February 6, 2009):
The Department evaluated its oil and gas regulatory program through
development of a Generic Environmental Impact Statement (“GEIS”) which was finalized in 1992 and which sets parameters that are applicable statewide for SEQRA review of gas well permitting. This Final Scope describes the topics related to well permit issuance for high-volume hydraulic fracturing that the Department has identified for review in a draft Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (“dSGEIS”).
In short, the base for the new regulations and permits will be the 1992 GEIS, and only certain department-sanctioned topics concerning “high-volume hydraulic fracturing” will be reviewed or considered for change in the new rules.
The draft Supplement, now released, goes further -- dSGEIS (1.4) :
After a comprehensive review of all the potential environmental impacts of oil and gas drilling and production in New York, the Department found in 1992 that issuance of a standard, individual oil or gas well drilling permit anywhere in the state, when no other permits are involved, does not have a significant environmental impact. . . .
Well stimulation, including hydraulic fracturing, was expressly identified and discussed in the GEIS as part of the action of drilling a well, and the GEIS does not recommend any additional regulatory controls or find a significant environmental impact associated with this technology, which has been in use in New York State for at least 50 years.
In other words, all essential scientific investigation has been done and still stands.
No significant environmental impacts should be expected. Hydraulic fracturing in New York State is old hat and “high-volume” hydraulic fracturing just more of the same.
A closer look at this conclusion, however, reveals some disturbing inconsistencies.
For instance, under Section F (Stimulation), the 1992 GEIS describes hydraulic fracturing:
Water-gel fracs are the most common stimulation technique. Twenty to
eighty thousand gallons of fluid are injected into the producing formation
under high pressure. Approximately 20 pounds of gel are added to every
thousand gallons of water.
But high-volume hydraulic fracturing typically uses between 2 to 5 million gallons of fresh water per well, and adds a variety of new toxic chemicals to the drilling fluids in addition to the gels, surfactants and acids described in 1992. While the industry claims that these chemical additives only amount to about .5% of the total drilling fluid, (100-400 gallons in 1992), in high-volume drilling those amounts rise to 10,000-25,000 gallons per well. And after becoming contaminated by the additives and drilled into the earth, the 2 to 5 million gallons of toxic fluid must be sucked back out, and somehow dealt with.
[Note: The wide disparity of water used varies according to the number of horizontal frackings connected to the main vertical well bore. Each well site can include as many as 16 horizontal frackings, each of which uses a minimum of 500,000+ gallons of water per fracking. As a result, minimum water use for a high-volume well would be 500,000+ gallons (1 fracking), and maximum use (for 16 frackings) could be as much as 8 million+ gallons. According to the Final Scope (1.4.3): “Well operators have suggested that as many as 16 horizontal wells could be drilled at a single well site, or pad.”
To the point, all of these spectacular increases in amounts are only per well. These amounts must also be multiplied by the expected rise in the number of wells, which, if the history of shale drilling in western states hold true, will dramatically increase each year.
No one can say for how long (because the rise in those states is still continuing) but in the Barnett Shale, from 1997 to 2007 (the period after high-volume hydrofracking was developed), the number of wells increased from 400 to 9000 (now close to 13,000 and still rising).
At an average of 3.5 million gallons per well, 9000 wells would require 31.5 billion gallons of fresh water, and would produce 31.5 billion gallons of toxic water to be accounted for.
A further complication is that the “flowback” or “return water” (the water pumped back out after fracking) is not only contaminated by the additives, but also picks up a variety of additional contaminants from a mile deep---arsenic, mercury, iron, lead, salt, radioactive elements, for instance. And the amounts of these substances has likewise increased by a hundred fold and must be dealt with, as well.
I use the term “dealt with” advisedly, because only about half of the contaminated fluid is, in fact, returned. The other half remains a bit of a mystery. That it is somewhere flowing in the ground is sure. But where? And for how long? How much might it migrate, those multi-millions of poisoned gallons? What will be their long-term destination? Aquifers? Surface waters? Evaporation into toxic fog? Or will they merely settle down in the depths and innocently sleep for another 300 million years?
Wouldn’t it be prudent to know this before drilling permits for this technology are issued?
And, of the water that is returned, wouldn’t it be prudent to know how and where it will be treated to safely remove and dispose of the salt and numerous toxins before they are left to dot the countryside in plastic-lined holding pits while awaiting those answers?
And don’t these voluminous increases also demand the mega-questions: How much would be too much? How much increase would it take to qualify as a “significant environmental impact”?
DEC comes to the opposite conclusion.
The GEIS does not recommend any additional regulatory controls or find a
significant environmental impact associated with this technology, which has been in use in New York State for at least 50 years. ---dSGEIS, September 30, 2009 (1.4.1)
In fact, this statement is doubly deceptive.
THE HISTORY OF HIGH-VOLUME HYDRAULIC FRACTURING
In 1992, no high-volume wells had been drilled in New York, and even the Barnett Shale was still only in the experimental phase and would not be in full use for another five years. [See: Powell Barnett Shale Newsletter Research 03/27/2008.]
In an article of the history of high-volume hydraulic-fracture horizontal gas drilling, Eric Potter, associate director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin, writes:
By the late 1990s, they [Four Sevens Oil Company] had perfected the technique in vertical wells and started applying it to several hundred wells. That’s when it came to the attention of industry.
Potter quotes Larry Brogdon, partner and chief geologist for Four Sevens Oil: It took George Mitchell 18 years to make it work. He is the father of the Barnett Shale. He was tenacious. He started in 1981 and it really didn’t take off until 1999. And even then, it took a long time to develop it.
In one of its latest website posting “Hydraulic Fracturing Considerations for Natural Gas Wells of the Marcellus Shale” DEC states:
Hydraulic Fracturing of the Marcellus Shale has been used in the Appalachia area since the early 1960s.
DEC’s reference for this statement comes from a 2008 article “The Marcellus Shale—An Old ‘New’ Gas Reservoir in Pennsylvania” by Penn State geologist John A. Harper in Pennsylvania Geology (2008), which does indeed say:
“Since the early 1960s, Pennsylvania’s oil and gas industry has used hydraulic fracturing . . . to enhance the recovery of oil and natural gas.”
But the same article goes on to say:
“But it was not until development of the Barnett Shale play in the 1990s that a technique suitable for frac[k]ing shales was developed.”
In fact, Harper’s article is highly instructive on the history of gas drilling techniques in this region, and clearly distinguishes between these drilling techniques:
Five wells [were] drilled and cored during the Eastern Gas Shales Project study of the 1970s and 1980s. . . . The furor over the Devonian shales faded during the early 1980s due to . . . lack of sufficiently useful technologies for extracting the gas. . . . Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale play began in 2003. . . . Through experimentation with drilling and hydraulic fracturing techniques borrowed and revised from those used on the Mississippian Barnett Shale gas play in Texas, it [Pennsylvania] began producing Marcellus gas in 2005.
Clearly, from DEC’s own source, high-volume drilling has NOT been used “in thousands of wells across the state during the past 50 or more years, has NOT been “common in New York, has NOT “been used in New York since at least the 1950s,” has NOT “been used in the Appalachia area since the early 1960s.”
The disparity is crucial because DEC uses this manipulated timeline as the lynch pin of its conclusion that “high-volume hydraulic-fracture horizontal gas drilling” is an old process, one that DEC has already exhaustively studied in its 1992 GEIS base document, one which the agency has decades of experience in regulating.
Thus, concluding that its long and benign history with this process in New York requires little more scientific study (certainly nothing like a new technology to NY, with a trail of significant environmental damage elsewhere, would normally demand) DEC is putting Marcellus Shale gas drilling on the fast track---with energy companies, investors and politicians champing at the bit.
The contention is not that energy companies, investors and landowners shouldn’t have the right to pursue their economic interests. But that there is a vital need for the DEC (or some regulatory agency) to counterbalance those interests in order to:
“protect New York's natural resources and environment, and control water, air, and land pollution, in order to enhance the health, safety and welfare of the people of the state.”
Unfortunately, there is no other regulatory agency that can step up. One of the legacies of Dick Cheney’s 2001 “Secret Energy Task Force” was the specific exemption of hydraulic fracture gas drilling from the federal Clean Drinking Water Act an the Clean Air Act, effectually removing the EPA and any federal oversight of the process, thus relinquishing it to the states and beneficence of the energy companies.
Compounding federal loss of accountability, New York State’s long tradition of Home Rule has also been gutted by preemptive State law:
FGEIS 1-1 B. 3)
Lead Agency - In 1981, the Legislature gave exclusive authority to the
Department to regulate the oil, gas and solution mining industries: "The
provisions shall supersede all local laws or ordinances relating to the
regulation of the oil, gas and solution mining industries; but shall not
supersede local government jurisdiction over local roads or the rights of local governments under the real property tax law." (section 23-0303(2))
Reiterated in the September 2009 dSGEIS:
ECL §23-0303(2) provides that DEC’s Oil, Gas and Solution Mining Law
supersedes all local laws relating to the regulation of oil and gas development except for local government jurisdiction over local roads and the right to collect real property taxes.
Likewise, ECL §23- 1901(2) provides for supercedure of all other laws enacted by local governments or agencies concerning the imposition of a fee on activities regulated by Article 23. thus shrinking local control of the gas drilling process to little more than road permitting, road bonding, local taxes and emergency safety training.
Local entities have otherwise lost all power: to protect their own water, air and soil; to control the traffic, storage or use of toxic substances; to prevent eminent domain land grabs for gathering lines and pipe networks; to limit the number of gas wells or where they can be placed; to limit the amount of water that can be taken from any source; even to ensure adequate treatment of the millions of gallons of poisoned drill water before its ultimate return to local land and local waters. All of these protections---inalienable, one would think---have been usurped and now belong only to DEC, as Lead Agency and to their corporate permittees.
HEDGING ALL BETS
In its October 2008 announcement “Public Meetings Set for Developing Scope of Environmental Review for Horizontal Drilling in the Marcellus Shale,”DEC Commissioner Pete Grannis wrote:
This is just the first step in what will be a careful process designed to look at environmental issues unique to the high-volume hydraulic fracturing of
horizontal wells in these deep rock layers.
Horizontal drilling is not new. Hydraulic fracturing is not new. And drilling into the Marcellus Shale is not new. But the drilling operations proposed involve all three of these elements, along with greatly increased water use. This review is designed to ensure that if the drilling goes forward, it takes place in the most environmentally responsible way possible.
So what are we to think? A piece from here a piece from there. Is this process “old” or “new?” “Common” or “unique?”
If you have three elements used separately, is that the same thing as using them together. Is hydrofracking using 80,000 gallons of water the same process when using five million gallons? Is a half-acre drill pad the same as a 5-8 acre drill pad?
And what would you pay a surveyor who said so?
In the Final Scope of SGEIS, Commissioner Grannis’ Executive Summary further expands the differences of “old” and “new”:
Aspects of high-volume hydraulic fracturing identified in this Final Scope for further review include the potential impacts of (1) water withdrawals, (2) transportation of water to the site, (3) the use of additives in the water to enhance the hydraulic fracturing process, (4) space and facilities required at the well site to ensure proper handling of water and additives, (5) removal of spent fracturing fluid from the well site and its ultimate disposition and (6) potential impacts at well sites where multiple wells will be drilled during a three-year period. Noise, visual and air quality considerations are noted, along with the potential for cumulative and community impacts.
Surely, this must either mean that this list of factors was not part of the
“comprehensive review” in the 1992 GEIS, or that “high-volume hydraulic fracturing” involves a significantly different technology from what was described in the 1992 GEIS and, therefore, cannot simply be viewed as more of the same.
Yet, this is exactly the tightwire that the agency continues to balance upon:
Well stimulation, including hydraulic fracturing, was expressly identified and discussed in the GEIS as part of the action of drilling a well, and the GEIS does not recommend any additional regulatory controls or find a significant environmental impact associated with this technology. ---dSGEIS, Sept. 30, 2009 (1.4)
A look at the Commissioner’s new list of reviewable factors sheds even greater doubt on these conclusions.
1) WATER WITHDRAWALS - - From the 1992 GEIS to the new process, the maximum water use per well increases from a maximum of 80,000 gallons to a maximum of 8 million gallons. How many wells will be drilled in NYS? 1000-10,000?
This commonly estimated range would translate into 5 to 8 billion gallons of fresh water.
Considering such a dramatic increase in the use of fresh water resources, one would think there would be clear open answers to the questions: Where will this water come from? Who will be responsible for deciding?
However, the available answers to such questions are about as clear as the Mississippi.
Not long ago, a friend of mine passed by a tanker truck backed up to Keuka Lake and being filled with water. My friend asked what the water was for and what kind of permit had been obtained for the water withdrawal. The truck driver responded that he didn’t need a permit. When asked who had told him that, the man replied that it was from local officials.
My friend got the driver’s name and company and, for several weeks, set out on a goose chase to see if any of that was true and, in fact, who would have authority to permit a withdrawal of 80,000 gallons of water from Keuka Lake. What my friend discovered was that nobody knew! That every agency named somebody else. Wasn’t it the DEC? The Susquehanna River Basin Commission? The Great Lakes Commission? The EPA? Some local water commissioner? Permit? I don’t think anyone needs a permit for taking water from the lake, just for dumping stuff into it.
You need permission from the lake property owners, DEC told him, before you could back your tanker trucks up their docks. And that a permit was required to take more than 100,000 gallons per day average (over a 30 day period). Over 36.5 million gallons a year. If anyone’s checking.
But does “100,00 gallons” mean: Per truck? Per company? Per project? Could 50 different truckers (or companies) take 99,999 gallons a day each---in perpetuity---with no permit required? And again---who is measuring? Who would know? Metering and reporting of water withdrawals is only triggered by self-reporting of a taker exceeding
the 3 million gallon a month benchmark. The effectiveness of the “Honor System” in monitoring gas company haulers would seem worthy of doubt.
From DEC’s 2009 dSGEIS:
4.2.1 Water for hydraulic fracturing may be obtained from groundwater
withdrawals or withdrawals from surface water bodies away from the well site. . . . Withdrawal from surface water bodies such as rivers and streams . . . may require permits.
May require permits?
4.2.1.4 The dSGEIS’s proposed parameters for well-specific review of water sources in the Susquehanna and Delaware River Basins will be based upon the Department’s conclusions regarding the adequacy of the reviews done, respectively, by SRBC and DRBC.
To buttress the administrative determination noted above, the SRBC also
undertook a final rulemaking change, effective January 15, 2009, that
established a new Approval by Rule process to regulate all consumptive use activity associated with development of the Marcellus and Utica Shales. Under the new rule, consumptive use approvals are issued on a drilling pad basis.
Finally, in accordance with SRBC policy to not duplicate State programs, SRBC does not regulate the disposition of the hydraulic fracturing fluids that flow back after well stimulation, which have commingled with deep connate water.
4.2.1.3 Great Lakes Basin
In New York [in parts of 34 counties] the Great Lakes Basin is the watershed . . . Effective December 8, 2008, the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact . . . prohibits any new or increased diversion of any amount of water out of the Great Lakes Basin of New York with certain exceptions.
The Great Lakes Commission does not have regulatory authority similar to that held by SRBC and DRBC to review water withdrawals and uses and require mitigation of environmental impacts. However, the new Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Water Resources Council has specific authority for the review and/or approval of certain new and increased water withdrawals. Review by this Compact Council will require compliance with the Compact’s Decision-Making Standard and Standard for Exceptions.
Whatever that means!
from October 2008 Draft Scope for the dSGEIS
4.2.1.3 Great Lakes Basin
[U]nder the federal Water Resources Development Act of 1986 ("WRDA"), any diversion of Great Lakes water out of the basin must be approved by the Governor of each Great Lakes state. The approval process for New York is set forth in ECL §15-1613, and the diversion also requires approval of the Legislature.
But when Sue Heavenrich of Shaleshock queried Don Zelazny of NYDEC on the subject, he said: “Under current NYS Water Resources law, companies drilling for gas are not required to get permits for water withdrawals from within the Great Lakes Basin.” ---- which includes all the Finger Lakes and the St. Lawrence River.
At the end of the goose chase, my friend gave up in exasperation. Nobody, at any level, wanted to know the name of the driver or company or how much water was taken or what it was going to be used for. Every agency or official suggested someone else he needed to call, and the circle of non-oversight went round and round until the goose finally got tired of the chase and flew away.
Back to the Commissioner’s list of topics still open for review in the dSGEIS:
2. WATER TRANSPORT - - the 1992 GEIS: maximum 80,000 gallons, which can be transported by 8.3 tanker truck loads.
In comparison, five million gallons for a high-volume fracking well would require 522 truck loads.
3. ADDITIVES --- Under “Additives,” the 1992 GEIS described: gelling agents, surfactants, acid and sand (GEIS 9.d-h):
d. Most wells in New York State are drilled on compressed air. If formation
water does not occur naturally in the well, a small amount of fresh water is
sometimes added at the blooie line to control dust. Surfactants and small
quantities of additives are also regularly added to the well during drilling.
Soaps are also sometimes added to maintain circulation when water intrusion becomes a problem. The components of greatest environmental concern in the waste fluids from drilling are the chlorides (salt), trace metals and surfactants.
e. Frac Fluid - Most wells in New York need to be fraced (pronounced fracked) before then can produce economic quantities of oil or gas. The frac fluid base may be brine, freshwater or oil. Gelling agents are often added to the frac fluid to make it viscous enough to carry sand or some other proppant into the producing formation. Other chemicals similar to those used in drilling fluids are also added. The components of greatest environmental concern in the spent frac fluid are the gelling agents, surfactants, and chlorides.
f. During rock formation, some water (connate water) is trapped inside the
rock's pore spaces. When a well is later drilled into the rock, some formation water may be released and mix with the drilling fluid present in the wellbore. It is usually the largest component of pit waste fluids. In addition to chloride and low concentrations heavy metals, the production fluid may also contain small amounts of corrosion inhibitors, bactericides and other additives used.
Now, however, the new dSGEIS (Table 6.1) lists 197 chemical products comprising 260 unique chemicals used or proposed for high-volume drilling in NYS, including 78 chemicals found in Marcellus Shale flowback water.
Other than that, the “additives” are pretty much the same. Except that most of the new additives are also known to be highly toxic to both humans and aquatic life, and some are so new that they have yet to be evaluated.
4. SPACE AND FACILITIES REQUIRED AT THE WELL SITE --- 1992 GEIS (XVI
B-1): “Generally access road and site construction disturb less than two acres of land.”
High-volume wells average about 5 acres per site, but that does not include access roads. The new dSGEIS describes access roads (5.1.1):
The proposed disturbed access road acreage for these sites ranges from 0.1 acres to 2.75 acres, with the access roads ranging from 130 feet to
approximately 3,000 feet in length. Widths would range from 20 to 40 feet
during the drilling and fracturing phase to 10 to 20 feet during the production phase.
This not only adds to the drilling site but describes a 20 to 40 foot swath of
disfigurement over half a mile long, per well. Access roads will also be needed for the centralized compression facilities. And high-volume drilling requires significantly more fluid storage space, truck space, supply space, truck garage space, pit space for returned toxic water, heavy equipment space, worker housing camp space, etc.
But in dizzying combination of funny math and statistical prestidigitation, the new dSGEIS (5.1.3.2) concludes that the anticipated high-volume wells will actually only disturb one sixth as much land as the 1992 conventional wells.
How could this be?
Well---because horizontal drilling could allow high-volume sites to drill 6-8 wells from each pad site---it would only need 10 wells to cover a 6400-acre (ten square mile) unit, while and single-well vertical drilling would require 160 wells. Thus, the 10 highvolume well pads would only disturb 50 acres (@ 5 ac. per pad), while the 160 single well pads would disturb 480 acres( @ 3 acres per pad).
1. Note how the 1992 GEIS: “Generally access road and site construction disturb less than two acres of land” has suddenly morphed into 3 acres per pad, not including access roads.
2. 10 pads @ 5 acres per pad would be 50 acres. 6-8 wells per pad, would be 60-80 wells. 60-80 single-well pads @ 2 acres per pad, would be 120-160 acres, not 480.
3. Moreover, in the same section (5.1.3.2) dSGEIS states:
“Nine, instead of 16, [horizontal drilling] spacing units would fit within a square mile. . . . Vertical infill wells [wells drilled between known producing wells to better exploit the reservoir] may be drilled, with justification, from separate surface locations in the unit. However, a far smaller proportion of vertical infill wells than 15 per 640-acre unit is expected.”
The prose here is somewhat turbid, but not so murky as to completely obscure these “up-to-15 additional infill wells,” that presumably would also take up space and create some additional “disturbance” of their own, despite the fact that this is not mentioned in the Table 5.1 analysis.
4. Most importantly: When Table 5.1 hypothesizes 160 single-well pads in 10 square miles, this totally ignores reality. In Yates County, for instance, DEC’s Gas & Oil Database lists only 15 gas wells active in the whole county. 160 single-well pads per ten square miles is an imaginary number never even contemplated in the pre-Marcellus Shale world.
In devastating contrast, the suppositions of high-volume well density in Table 5.1 are not only being contemplated but specifically being planned for. Not only planned for, but sugarcoated for public over-consumption, as evidenced by Table 5.1 itself. Again illustrating that---even more destructive than high-volume drilling may be---is the danger from its overwhelming scale.
5. REMOVAL OF SPENT FRACTURING FLUID FROM THE WELL SITE AND ITS ULTIMATE DISPOSITION --- 1992 GEIS (7a): “The remainder of the wastes produced during drilling operations are disposed of at special, industrial treatment plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio or other out-of-state disposal facilities. On occasion, a local sewage treatment plant may elect to accept drilling wastes if they will not upset the plant's operations. There are no economical treatment methods presently available for removal of large scale chloride contamination. Citizens are encouraged to report any leaks, so the Department can order timely repairs.”
How will “citizens” have access to this inspection, and how can it be their
responsibility---given that all of their rights of control and oversight have been negated?
Is it not irresponsible (if not absurd) to think that trucking toxic water to Pennsylvania and Ohio is a reasonable water treatment plan? Because of its Marcellus Shale drilling (still only in its early-stages), Pennsylvania is already experiencing a watertreatment crisis of its own. (Maybe its plan will be to truck its toxic waste to NY.)
The ultimate disposition of X millions of gallons of highly toxic brine is not only problematic because treatment plants adequate for dealing with such combinations and quantities do not yet exist and are exorbitantly expensive to build, but the history of gas drilling (in both NY and PA) has often been that less-than-adequate facilities have been used in their absence---the environmental effects of which have been insufficiently studied, but can hardly be good.
According to Joaquin Sapien of ProPublica: "’Cha-ching!’ is how Francis Geletko, financial director for the municipal sewage treatment plant in Clairton, PA, described his first thought when he learned that drillers would pay 5 cents a gallon to get their wastewater processed at his plant.”
But are local treatment plants (intended to break down sewage) equipped to desalinate brine that, according to Pennsylvania’s DEP, contains “so much TDS [Total Dissolved Solids] that it can be five times as salty as sea water?”
Not to mention the mixture from the dSGEIS’ list of 78 other chemicals known to be in flowback fluid.
6. POTENTIAL IMPACTS AT WELL SITES WHERE MULTIPLE WELLS WILL BE DRILLED DURING A THREE-YEAR PERIOD. NOISE, VISUAL AND AIR QUALITY CONSIDERATIONS ARE NOTED, ALONG WITH THE POTENTIAL FOR CUMULATIVE AND COMMUNITY IMPACTS
It appears that, at this point, the Commissioner was either running out of patience or wanted all of these additional factors to fit on one page.
NOISE: while the 1992 GEIS (4.1.1) suggests “Temporary, short-term noise impacts” during the “several days” of drilling.
Under high-volume drilling, that period often extends to several months or longer and may be refracked several times, each operation usually continuing 24 hours a day---24/7 of hammering, pumping, trucking, flaring---in areas used to being disturbed only by the likes of Canada geese and barking dogs.
VISUAL: the dSGEIS Summary says that it “will propose thresholds for site-specific reviews of potential visual impacts in close proximity to the Catskill Forest Preserve, the Upper Delaware Scenic Byway and the Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River.”
Which is laudable. But why is the scenic beauty of the Finger Lakes region any less essential to its identity, history and well-being than those downstate areas? Any less obnoxious for our rolling farmland and lovely woods to be crisscrossed by trucking roads, pipeline routes, fifteen acre industrial sites including plastic-lined pits of stinking goop? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course (especially when it’s big-money green).
AIR QUALITY: turning country air into city air (see below) . . .
COMMUNITY IMPACTS: the 1992 GEIS does not cover this, likely because the kind of drilling being done in 1992 did not involve the importation of an army of rugged, young, out-of-state men into quiet rural counties, working them 80 hour weeks under difficult, hazardous conditions at low pay. In analogous drilling shales, methamphetamine use in order to fight fatigue is a serious problem, while increases in crime, school overcrowding, stressed social services and other community impacts are legion.
Using truck traffic as an example: In the 1992 GEIS, this was such a minor
disturbance as to remain unmentioned. But concerning high-volume drilling, in the dSGEIS high-volume drilling truck traffic necessitates a whole section, and no wonder:
dSGEIS (6.13.1) [truck traffic for a single pad with eight wells]:
Drill Pad and Road Construction Equipment 10 – 45 Truckloads
Drilling Rig 60 Truckloads
Drilling Fluid and Materials 200 – 400 Truckloads
Drilling Equipment (casing, drill pipe, etc.) 200 – 400 Truckloads
Completion Rig 30 Truckloads
Completion Fluid and Materials 80 – 160 Truckloads
Completion Equipment – (pipe, wellhead) 10 Truckloads
Hydraulic Fracture Equipment (pump trucks, tanks) 300 – 400 Truckloads
Hydraulic Fracture Water 3,200 – 4,800 Tanker Trucks
Hydraulic Fracture Sand 160 – 200 Trucks
Flow Back Water Removal 1,600 – 2,400 Tanker Trucks
As many as 8900 truckloads. That’s not crossing the George Washington Bridge into New York City---that’s on two-lane macadam roads in formerly peaceful and picturesque Yates County, pop. 24,603. And that’s one pad!
What all ten of the Commissioner’s newly-reviewable impacts share is that they all very much beg the same question:
At what point does a matter of SCALE cross over to a matter of KIND?
Are a whisper and a scream the same thing except for scale? A tear and an ocean are both salt water. A tabby and a tiger are both cats. A flooded basement and a flood that devastates several counties are both water. But are their differences only a matter of SCALE? No, because in certain cases SCALE is sufficiently transforming as to also necessitate distinguishing such seemingly homologous entities in KIND---because,
in terms of societal and environmental impacts, they unequivocally are.
Similarly, the most essential difference between the kind of hydraulic fracturing described in the 1992 GEIS and the high-volume hydraulic fracturing now in question may be a matter of SCALE, but, in terms of societal and environmental impacts, the difference in SCALE has also crossed over into a difference in KIND---from a tabby into a tiger, from a basement leak into a flood.
The evidence for this is the ongoing history of high-volume hydrofracking in other states. From its point of going full-bore in the Barnett Shale in 1997 to its present proliferation through Pennsylvania and up to New York borders, there has been and continues to be one mess after another of societal and environmental problems in its wake.
WATER SAFETY --- Despite DEC’s assurance (dSGEIS -- 2.4.6) that “no documented instances of groundwater contamination are recorded in the NYSDEC files from previous horizontal drilling or hydraulic fracturing projects in New York,” the strong likelihood of water contamination being caused by high-volume hydraulicfracture
horizontal gas drilling follows the industry like oily footprints.
In the Denver Post (April 22, 2009), Abrahm Lustgarten of ProPublic reported on a Garfield County, Colorado study that concluded that gas drilling has degraded water in dozens of water wells:
The three-year study used sophisticated scientific techniques to match
methane from water to the same rock layer---a mile and a half underground---where gas companies are drilling. The scientists didn't determine which gas wells caused the problem or say exactly how the gas reached the water, but they indicated with more clarity than ever before that a system of interconnected natural fractures and faults could stretch from deep underground gas layers to the surface. They called for more research into how the industry's practice of forcefully fracturing those deep layers might increase the risk of contaminants making their way up into an aquifer.
Despite the difficulty and expense of definitively proving a cause and effect between a mile-deep fracking and nearby water contamination, such instances of extreme coincidence have occurred from Cleburne, Texas to Pavilion, Wyoming to Dimock, Pennsylvania, etc. According to ProPublica, over 1500 water contamination complaints have been documented in Colorado alone.
Says New Mexico rancher, Tweeti Blancett, whose family has operating the same ranch since the 1870s:
“My water when it comes up, ninety-seven percent of the time, it’s deadly,” she said. “It’s full of heavy metals, petroleum products and things you don’t even want to talk about. We didn’t know we were going to have these problems when they started drilling out here. . . . [New York officials] have an open invitation to come to the ranch. You don’t want what we have.” ---quoted by Dusty Horwitt, JD (Senior Analyst for Public Lands) in a presentation to the New York City Council Committee on Environmental Protection, September 10, 2008
Cases of ostensible contamination links in Texas, Colorado and Pennsylvania are currently in the courts Establishing “scientific” and “legal” evidence is further complicated because wells and aquifers have not been tested beforehand, it often being impossible to test them
because the exact chemical formulas of most fracking fluids have been protected by companies as confidential proprietary information, making it impossible to know what to test for.
Predictably, the industry response is cynical and coy. How do we know your well wasn’t already polluted? How do you know it was us? Even if we did use 2-butoxyethanol to frac a well near your home and 2-BE ended up in your well, can you prove that your 2-BE was our 2-BE.
Our 2-BE or not our 2-BE?---that is the question!
Such games are unbecoming by the industry, and even more so when mimicked by environmental protective agencies.
In its Final Scope (4.2.2 Groundwater Quality -- Drilling Through Aquifers), DEC brazenly states:
Standard casing and cementing practices required for every well . . . eliminates the POSSIBILITY of fracturing fluids or naturally occurring contaminants contacting fresh groundwater during any phase of operations. [emphasis mine]
The history of high-volume hydrofracking and common sense dispute this
“impossibility,“ a statement of amazingly unscientific certainty. Accidents do happen.
As do floods, earthquakes and sinkholes. Unknown consequences have had a nasty and hardly uncommon habit of humbling such human hubris.
AIR QUALITY
The 1992 GEIS (XVB-2.g. 16. 9) states: “Most air quality impacts associated with oil and gas, solution mining and gas storage operations are usually short-term and minor.”
But in areas of high-volume hydraulic fracturing like Cleburne, Texas and Sublette, Wyoming, damage to air quality would hardly seem minor.
Wyoming resident Alexandra Fuller writes in “Drilling’s Darker Side,” [CNN Money, October 27, 2008]:
“[T]he air in Sublette County has become so polluted that regular toxic-air alerts warn vulnerable residents to stay indoors. Additionally, more than a dozen water wells on the high plains have recently tested positive for highly carcinogenic hydrocarbons. Cancer rates are now reported to be the highest in the state and, for many days of the year, a thick, brown stain of pollution hangs against the mountains, sometimes obliterating them from sight altogether.”
In DISH, Texas, after a company study showed no detectable air pollution, the town paid for an independent assessment, published in September 2009:
Laboratory reports confirmed the presence of multiple Recognized and
Suspected Human Carcinogens in fugitive air emissions present on several
locations in the town of DISH. The compounds identified are commonly known to emanate from industrial processes directly related to the natural gas industrial processes of exploration, drilling, flaring and compression. . . . In addition, several locations confirmed exceedences in a chemical identified by TCEQ [Texas Commission on Environmental Quality] with the capability for “disaster potential.”
The town of DISH has virtually no heavy industry other than compression
stations. there is no other facility with the capability to produce the volume of air toxins present within miles of the town.
According to an article in the Dallas-Fort Worth Star-Telegram (June 3, 2009):
State environmental officials say that an SMU researcher was correct: Gas
drilling in the Barnett Shale contributes about as much air pollution to the
Dallas-Fort Worth area as car and truck traffic.
But the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality doesn’t plan on taking any action about chemicals released during gas drilling because they typically happen in rural areas, not in the immediate metro area, where the EPA is forcing state and local governments to control air pollution.
In my research, I have oddly come to identify with the town of Cleburne, Texas, an area of beautiful rolling farmland evocative of Yates County (even if less green and without the lakes). Yates County has about 24,000 people, and, before the Barnett drilling boom, Cleburne had about 26,000. In less than a decade of high-volume drilling, though, Cleburne has added 95,000 new jobs, has seen its air quality degraded, seen significant increases in crime and amphetamine use, discovered toxic waste injected into abandoned wells, as well as evaporated and spread onto its farmland.
“The air smells like diesel fuel, and is noxious. it is making me sick and my livestock. The dust is settling on my pasture and my livestock is eating it!!” bemoans, Dick Ross of nearby Itasca, Texas (as quoted on the comprehensive drilling reform site Bluedaze.)
Meanwhile, still on DEC’s Marcellus Shale main page:
Q: Did New York recently approve a new type of drilling?
A: No. Governor David A. Paterson recently approved a bill that extends uniform gas well spacing rules and establishes boundary setbacks to protect the interests of adjacent property owners. This new law has been widely misreported as allowing a new type of drilling, or somehow making it easier to get the environmental permits necessary for drilling. In fact, the new law only addresses well spacing. It authorizes nothing new nor in any way does it reduce the environmental review needed before a drilling permit is issued.
Nothing new. It’s all the same as 1992. Just more. The tiger still just a big calico.
50,000-250,000 gallons of microbicide just a bigger squirt of 409. The Exxon Valdez the same as a dropped quart of oil in your driveway, only more.
The matter of scale is not the only concern over high-volume hydrofracking, but it is the catastrophic multiplier of concern, which needs to be factored in to every study and every part of the plan.
For this to happen, clearly DEC needs to only be the Department of Environmental Conservation, and not also the Department of Environmental Exploitation. Surely, this is a legislative more than an agency failure, and expectations for such a change by the NYS Legislature are less than dim. In the meantime, what is the DEC to do?
I sincerely commiserate with Commissioner Grannis’ untenable and schizoid position. I don’t doubt that he’s doing his best to accommodate the clamoring greed for energy wealth with the careful pace demanded by good environmental science. But the lion and the lamb may well lie down together in peace before we see the Energy Industry make nice with our natural environment.
The Energy Industry’s mission is not split. It is singular---to maximize profits for its investors. And what that singularity guarantees is that the energy industry will only regulate itself (or protect the people and places it uses) to the degree that it would be less profitable not to do so.
Which does not mean that its product is not presently necessary and useful. But it does mean that if other values are to be protected and preserved, that task must also be undertaken in a singular way, as it was in the DEC’s original mission: “You are the Industry and We are your Regulator.” For the DEC to be the Industry’s regulator and also its “promoter” and “fosterer” is impossible for it to do in a responsible way, and it is disingenuous to claim otherwise.
WHAT CAN DEC DO?
1. A helpful first step would be for DEC to openly tell the legislature that its two missions are incompatible---rather than continuing to suggest that the agency can somehow compartmentalize its double-vision into complementary tasks, as if they were two different aspects of environmental regulation, two hands washing each other for the benefit of both and the common good.
2. In the nearer term, as regards gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, DEC (as “conservator”) needs to ignore its avaricious side and necessarily proceed at a credible scientific pace, not at the boomtown pace urged by energy companies, investors and leaseholders. The bloated scale and multiplier effect of boom mentality is a priori the opposite of circumspect objectivity and wise conservation.
3. DEC needs to admit that High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing is a NEW type of drilling in New York State, one that should require incremental implementation suitable to investigation and study. Not in order to stall the permitting process, but rather as a way of proceeding with enough deliberation for the agency to fulfill its original mission: “to conserve, improve and protect New York's natural resources and
environment and to prevent, abate and control water, land and air pollution, in order to enhance the health, safety and welfare of the people of the state and their overall economic and social well-being.”
If that frustrates investors and the industry, the shale gas will wait.
The same can be said for our national energy needs. The gas has been locked in rock a mile deep for 300 million years. If we need it in the future, it will still be there after the questions about its safety have been answered and all prudent preparations have been made. If it turns out that, in the future, we don’t need the gas because alternatives to massive earth disruption and rampant use of fossil fuels have been outmoded and left in the fossilized dust, then that will prove to be an even greater
common good for us to just let it be.
Meanwhile, here in the Finger Lakes, the rustic and beautiful Finger Lakes Region, summer is over, the grapes and apples are being harvested, maple leaves turning their brilliant red and orange. As usual, Labor Day was celebrated on Keuka and Canandaigua lakes by ringing the lakes in fires and flares. For many, it is a last-partyof-summer kind of thing when cottages are closed, school about to start.
For others, it is also a connection to Genundowa, the Seneca Nation’s Festival of Lights, an ancient ritual of giving thanks for peace and in praise of Mother Earth for her bounty and the natural beauty of this place, her legacy to the Senecas as Keepers of the Faith.
Our own legacy is still under construction. A tabby purring by the fire. A tiger snarling at the door.
# # #
Steve Coffman
Dundee, NY
Email: stevecoffman@frontiernet.net
An Assessment of Coming High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State --- and Cautionary Reading of DEC’s dSGEIS
by Steve Coffman October 10, 2009
New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) is in the last sweep up phase of processing public comments before convening a secret bureaucratic conclave to beget the Final Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement that will rule the coming Natural Gas Boom that is about to storm across much of the western and southern tier regions of New York State.
This upcoming gusher is all about the “Marcellus Shale,” an untapped ocean of natural gas that underlies my home, county and region of New York (as well as considerable portions of West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania). The reason that this gas remains untapped is that the technology for profitably extracting it did not exist until the late 1980s when a viable process was developed in Texas, spurred by an enormous gas field called the Barnett Shale. Previously, the impediment to drilling was that the gas was locked in shale 100 to 400 feet thick and, more or less, a mile deep.
The Texas process, most accurately called “High-Volume, Horizontal, Hydraulic Fracturing," (or “Slickwater Fracturing”) entails forcing millions of gallons of fresh water, sand and various chemicals into the shale under sufficient pressure to “frac” it and unbind the gas in numerous places along the strata’s horizontal plane.
The Barnett Shale was considered the largest natural gas reservoir in the United States. In 2003, the U.S. Geological Survey’s assessment estimated that the Barnett Shale held a remaining volume of 26 trillion cubic feet of recoverable unconventional gas, and perhaps as much as 200 trillion cubic feet overall. Eric Potter, associate director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at UT Austin, said that “It compares favorably with the biggest of the old oil booms of the early 20th century.”
How does the Marcellus Shale compare to the Barnett?
A July 2009 study from Penn State’s College of Earth & Mineral Sciences increased a 2002 U.S. Geological Survey assessment of undiscovered gas in the Marcellus Shale from 1.9 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of gas to 2,445 trillion cubic feet, with recoverable reserves amounting to 489 trillion cubic feet. “This remarkable, almost unbelievable, increase in estimated reserves,” the study says, “is due to technological advancements in horizontal drilling technology and techniques, multi-dimensional
seismology, and the implementation of hydrofracturing.”
This suggests that Marcellus Shale contains over ten times as much gas as Barnett Shale!
Despite the fluctuating price of natural gas, the big boys with the big wallets and big eyes are imagining the value in trillions of dollars. In anticipation, NiSource, the Fortune 500 energy service company has recently completed the Millennium Pipeline in New York State, calling its pipeline “the centerpiece of a $1 billion investment in new energy infrastructure.”
Gas servicing giant Schlumberger is planning an 88 acre, $30 million industrial site in tiny Horseheads, NY (pop. 6,500), including a cement plant, chemical mixing station, storehouse for explosives and radioactive materials, and a facility for truck fuel, acid wash, truck maintenance and storage. “Eventually,” says William Coates, President of Schlumberger' s North American Division, “the company's investment in drilling hardware on site will exceed $100 million.”
As of June 2009, over five million acres of Marcellus Shale land has been leased by just six companies (a growing figure that does not include leasing by several other significant players).
What does all this mean for beautiful counties in the Finger Lakes like my own sleepy Yates County? It means that the starting pistol is loaded and raised. Drilling permits have been issued and the rush to drill only awaits completion of DEC’s FSGEIS regulations, which should be finalized in a matter of months.
“The analog would be like a 19th century gold rush,” said Ed Ratchford, geology supervisor for the Arkansas Geological Commission, speaking of recent development in the Fayetteville Shale, “Everyone stakes a claim. You don’t say this place is going to be better than this place. You don’t have time. People were leasing thousands of acres a day.”
What this also means is that New York State’s dairy, wine, and burgeoning tourist industries are at risk (Sherman’s Travel ranked the Finger Lakes as the #1 “lakeside Retreat” in the world, ahead of Lake Kawaguchi in view of Mt. Fuji, Lake Como and Lake Tahoe). Perhaps more importantly, the Finger Lakes themselves, which embody the nation’s second largest reserve of fresh water (only the Great Lakes, shared with Canada, is larger) may be at serious risk, as well.
The Finger Lakes Region is about to be invaded and plumbed by an extremely avaricious and largely-unaccountable Industry, wielding the Big Energy Wildcard that apparently trumps all else.
Presently, with land, milk and wine prices down (and with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads), most local residents still don’t (or won’t) believe what is at stake.
However, one does not need to wait for DEC’s pronouncement (that all is in good hands) to see what is coming. One has only to look west, at the last decade of shale gas extraction in the Texas’ Barnett Shale (and in the gas-rich shales in Wyoming, Colorado, Arkansas, Louisiana) to transpose the likely effects: water problems, earthquake problems, poisoned farm animals, radioactivity problems, toxic drinking water, bucolic countryside turned industrial, pristine air turned into big city air, the essential character of rural communities suddenly divided and debased.
In 2007, my wife and I drove south from New Orleans to Pelican Island and took coastal LA 82 for a hundred or so miles to Port Arthur, Texas, curious to see the effects of Rita and Katrina on the Gulf coast and to enjoy the natural wonders of “The Pelican State.” We did see wonderful birds and wildlife on our way back through Louisiana’s bayou country, but the wreckage of Louisiana’s Gulf coast was a shock--- some of the wreckage due to hurricane damage, but the preponderance resulting
from the ubiquitous offshore drilling and onshore industrial support structure. No more swimming beaches. No more fishing piers. No more quaint motels or seafood shacks. No more juke joints with patrons dancing into sunset and moonrise over the shimmering Gulf. God’s Country had become God’s Own Junkyard. This was a manmade level 5 hurricane, from its bath tub ring of oil-and-debris-littered beaches to its
endless chemical tanks, drilling stations and mountains of rusty pipes and rig parts on both sides of the road. One national treasure destroyed in order to dig for another.
I’m sure it must look like a “money garden” to the rich investors and corporate execs who own it, but what’s also certain is that they live somewhere else.
Yes, of course I know that we as a nation are addicted to fossil fuels, and addicts of every kind often live in dumps, or, at the very least, make wrecks of their lives and the lives of their children and children’s children. Drilling proponents like to say that everyone has to make certain sacrifices for the common good, and, while I certainly agree with that, too---before doling out the sacrifices, we might just want to slow down a little---take a commercial time-out, as it were---to inventory exactly what and whose those “common goods” are.
So far, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has been emblematic of the American, New York State and Yates County divide. Through no fault of its own, the agency has become seriously compromised, split between two antithetical missions in the service of two incompatible masters.
Mission 1. Original 1972 DEC Mission Statement:
To conserve, improve, and protect New York's natural resources and
environment, and control water, air, and land pollution, in order to enhance the health, safety and welfare of the people of the state and their overall economic and social well being."
Mission 2. As redefined in its own 1992 F1992 GEIS (1.E-1):
In 1963 the State Legislature repealed all previous oil and gas legislation and amended the Conservation Law to give DEC greater authority over wells drilled in the fields developed after 1963. The purpose of this law was to foster, encourage, and promote the development, production, and utilization of the natural resources of oil and gas in a manner that would prevent waste, increase ultimate recovery, and protect correlative rights of all the interests involved.
The consequence is that NYDEC presently has a conflict of interest by statute, a split personality by definition. No wonder, when it comes to Marcellus Shale gas drilling, its science seems subordinate to an underlying agenda that often seems intent on justifying a foregone conclusion. DEC cannot be fairly blamed for duplicity when duplicity is endemic to its mission.
The fault here is with the state legislature that has hamstrung DEC with this double bind. The federal government does not task the Environmental Protection Agency to “foster, encourage and promote” the energy, mining and lumber industries. If such activities are to be legitimately governmental, at least put them under the likes of the departments of Energy, Interior and Commerce, and leave the DEC to its hard-enough
job of defending the environment and public health, without also legislating a Trojan Horse into the center of its mission.
This hobbling---drawn even tighter by recent staff and budget cuts---has caused DEC to fall back to a triage strategy of claiming that this new kind of gas drilling is nothing new, just a modest permutation of what is already permitted and regulated, as defined in “The 1992 Generic Environmental Impact Statement on the Oil, Gas and Solution Mining Regulatory Program.”
The 1992 GEIS
In every scope and draft and supplement of its upcoming FGEIS, DEC has remained adamant on one central point, as stated here in its Final Scoping document (released February 6, 2009):
The Department evaluated its oil and gas regulatory program through
development of a Generic Environmental Impact Statement (“GEIS”) which was finalized in 1992 and which sets parameters that are applicable statewide for SEQRA review of gas well permitting. This Final Scope describes the topics related to well permit issuance for high-volume hydraulic fracturing that the Department has identified for review in a draft Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (“dSGEIS”).
In short, the base for the new regulations and permits will be the 1992 GEIS, and only certain department-sanctioned topics concerning “high-volume hydraulic fracturing” will be reviewed or considered for change in the new rules.
The draft Supplement, now released, goes further -- dSGEIS (1.4) :
After a comprehensive review of all the potential environmental impacts of oil and gas drilling and production in New York, the Department found in 1992 that issuance of a standard, individual oil or gas well drilling permit anywhere in the state, when no other permits are involved, does not have a significant environmental impact. . . .
Well stimulation, including hydraulic fracturing, was expressly identified and discussed in the GEIS as part of the action of drilling a well, and the GEIS does not recommend any additional regulatory controls or find a significant environmental impact associated with this technology, which has been in use in New York State for at least 50 years.
In other words, all essential scientific investigation has been done and still stands.
No significant environmental impacts should be expected. Hydraulic fracturing in New York State is old hat and “high-volume” hydraulic fracturing just more of the same.
A closer look at this conclusion, however, reveals some disturbing inconsistencies.
For instance, under Section F (Stimulation), the 1992 GEIS describes hydraulic fracturing:
Water-gel fracs are the most common stimulation technique. Twenty to
eighty thousand gallons of fluid are injected into the producing formation
under high pressure. Approximately 20 pounds of gel are added to every
thousand gallons of water.
But high-volume hydraulic fracturing typically uses between 2 to 5 million gallons of fresh water per well, and adds a variety of new toxic chemicals to the drilling fluids in addition to the gels, surfactants and acids described in 1992. While the industry claims that these chemical additives only amount to about .5% of the total drilling fluid, (100-400 gallons in 1992), in high-volume drilling those amounts rise to 10,000-25,000 gallons per well. And after becoming contaminated by the additives and drilled into the earth, the 2 to 5 million gallons of toxic fluid must be sucked back out, and somehow dealt with.
[Note: The wide disparity of water used varies according to the number of horizontal frackings connected to the main vertical well bore. Each well site can include as many as 16 horizontal frackings, each of which uses a minimum of 500,000+ gallons of water per fracking. As a result, minimum water use for a high-volume well would be 500,000+ gallons (1 fracking), and maximum use (for 16 frackings) could be as much as 8 million+ gallons. According to the Final Scope (1.4.3): “Well operators have suggested that as many as 16 horizontal wells could be drilled at a single well site, or pad.”
To the point, all of these spectacular increases in amounts are only per well. These amounts must also be multiplied by the expected rise in the number of wells, which, if the history of shale drilling in western states hold true, will dramatically increase each year.
No one can say for how long (because the rise in those states is still continuing) but in the Barnett Shale, from 1997 to 2007 (the period after high-volume hydrofracking was developed), the number of wells increased from 400 to 9000 (now close to 13,000 and still rising).
At an average of 3.5 million gallons per well, 9000 wells would require 31.5 billion gallons of fresh water, and would produce 31.5 billion gallons of toxic water to be accounted for.
A further complication is that the “flowback” or “return water” (the water pumped back out after fracking) is not only contaminated by the additives, but also picks up a variety of additional contaminants from a mile deep---arsenic, mercury, iron, lead, salt, radioactive elements, for instance. And the amounts of these substances has likewise increased by a hundred fold and must be dealt with, as well.
I use the term “dealt with” advisedly, because only about half of the contaminated fluid is, in fact, returned. The other half remains a bit of a mystery. That it is somewhere flowing in the ground is sure. But where? And for how long? How much might it migrate, those multi-millions of poisoned gallons? What will be their long-term destination? Aquifers? Surface waters? Evaporation into toxic fog? Or will they merely settle down in the depths and innocently sleep for another 300 million years?
Wouldn’t it be prudent to know this before drilling permits for this technology are issued?
And, of the water that is returned, wouldn’t it be prudent to know how and where it will be treated to safely remove and dispose of the salt and numerous toxins before they are left to dot the countryside in plastic-lined holding pits while awaiting those answers?
And don’t these voluminous increases also demand the mega-questions: How much would be too much? How much increase would it take to qualify as a “significant environmental impact”?
DEC comes to the opposite conclusion.
The GEIS does not recommend any additional regulatory controls or find a
significant environmental impact associated with this technology, which has been in use in New York State for at least 50 years. ---dSGEIS, September 30, 2009 (1.4.1)
In fact, this statement is doubly deceptive.
THE HISTORY OF HIGH-VOLUME HYDRAULIC FRACTURING
In 1992, no high-volume wells had been drilled in New York, and even the Barnett Shale was still only in the experimental phase and would not be in full use for another five years. [See: Powell Barnett Shale Newsletter Research 03/27/2008.]
In an article of the history of high-volume hydraulic-fracture horizontal gas drilling, Eric Potter, associate director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin, writes:
By the late 1990s, they [Four Sevens Oil Company] had perfected the technique in vertical wells and started applying it to several hundred wells. That’s when it came to the attention of industry.
Potter quotes Larry Brogdon, partner and chief geologist for Four Sevens Oil: It took George Mitchell 18 years to make it work. He is the father of the Barnett Shale. He was tenacious. He started in 1981 and it really didn’t take off until 1999. And even then, it took a long time to develop it.
In one of its latest website posting “Hydraulic Fracturing Considerations for Natural Gas Wells of the Marcellus Shale” DEC states:
Hydraulic Fracturing of the Marcellus Shale has been used in the Appalachia area since the early 1960s.
DEC’s reference for this statement comes from a 2008 article “The Marcellus Shale—An Old ‘New’ Gas Reservoir in Pennsylvania” by Penn State geologist John A. Harper in Pennsylvania Geology (2008), which does indeed say:
“Since the early 1960s, Pennsylvania’s oil and gas industry has used hydraulic fracturing . . . to enhance the recovery of oil and natural gas.”
But the same article goes on to say:
“But it was not until development of the Barnett Shale play in the 1990s that a technique suitable for frac[k]ing shales was developed.”
In fact, Harper’s article is highly instructive on the history of gas drilling techniques in this region, and clearly distinguishes between these drilling techniques:
Five wells [were] drilled and cored during the Eastern Gas Shales Project study of the 1970s and 1980s. . . . The furor over the Devonian shales faded during the early 1980s due to . . . lack of sufficiently useful technologies for extracting the gas. . . . Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale play began in 2003. . . . Through experimentation with drilling and hydraulic fracturing techniques borrowed and revised from those used on the Mississippian Barnett Shale gas play in Texas, it [Pennsylvania] began producing Marcellus gas in 2005.
Clearly, from DEC’s own source, high-volume drilling has NOT been used “in thousands of wells across the state during the past 50 or more years, has NOT been “common in New York, has NOT “been used in New York since at least the 1950s,” has NOT “been used in the Appalachia area since the early 1960s.”
The disparity is crucial because DEC uses this manipulated timeline as the lynch pin of its conclusion that “high-volume hydraulic-fracture horizontal gas drilling” is an old process, one that DEC has already exhaustively studied in its 1992 GEIS base document, one which the agency has decades of experience in regulating.
Thus, concluding that its long and benign history with this process in New York requires little more scientific study (certainly nothing like a new technology to NY, with a trail of significant environmental damage elsewhere, would normally demand) DEC is putting Marcellus Shale gas drilling on the fast track---with energy companies, investors and politicians champing at the bit.
The contention is not that energy companies, investors and landowners shouldn’t have the right to pursue their economic interests. But that there is a vital need for the DEC (or some regulatory agency) to counterbalance those interests in order to:
“protect New York's natural resources and environment, and control water, air, and land pollution, in order to enhance the health, safety and welfare of the people of the state.”
Unfortunately, there is no other regulatory agency that can step up. One of the legacies of Dick Cheney’s 2001 “Secret Energy Task Force” was the specific exemption of hydraulic fracture gas drilling from the federal Clean Drinking Water Act an the Clean Air Act, effectually removing the EPA and any federal oversight of the process, thus relinquishing it to the states and beneficence of the energy companies.
Compounding federal loss of accountability, New York State’s long tradition of Home Rule has also been gutted by preemptive State law:
FGEIS 1-1 B. 3)
Lead Agency - In 1981, the Legislature gave exclusive authority to the
Department to regulate the oil, gas and solution mining industries: "The
provisions shall supersede all local laws or ordinances relating to the
regulation of the oil, gas and solution mining industries; but shall not
supersede local government jurisdiction over local roads or the rights of local governments under the real property tax law." (section 23-0303(2))
Reiterated in the September 2009 dSGEIS:
ECL §23-0303(2) provides that DEC’s Oil, Gas and Solution Mining Law
supersedes all local laws relating to the regulation of oil and gas development except for local government jurisdiction over local roads and the right to collect real property taxes.
Likewise, ECL §23- 1901(2) provides for supercedure of all other laws enacted by local governments or agencies concerning the imposition of a fee on activities regulated by Article 23. thus shrinking local control of the gas drilling process to little more than road permitting, road bonding, local taxes and emergency safety training.
Local entities have otherwise lost all power: to protect their own water, air and soil; to control the traffic, storage or use of toxic substances; to prevent eminent domain land grabs for gathering lines and pipe networks; to limit the number of gas wells or where they can be placed; to limit the amount of water that can be taken from any source; even to ensure adequate treatment of the millions of gallons of poisoned drill water before its ultimate return to local land and local waters. All of these protections---inalienable, one would think---have been usurped and now belong only to DEC, as Lead Agency and to their corporate permittees.
HEDGING ALL BETS
In its October 2008 announcement “Public Meetings Set for Developing Scope of Environmental Review for Horizontal Drilling in the Marcellus Shale,”DEC Commissioner Pete Grannis wrote:
This is just the first step in what will be a careful process designed to look at environmental issues unique to the high-volume hydraulic fracturing of
horizontal wells in these deep rock layers.
Horizontal drilling is not new. Hydraulic fracturing is not new. And drilling into the Marcellus Shale is not new. But the drilling operations proposed involve all three of these elements, along with greatly increased water use. This review is designed to ensure that if the drilling goes forward, it takes place in the most environmentally responsible way possible.
So what are we to think? A piece from here a piece from there. Is this process “old” or “new?” “Common” or “unique?”
If you have three elements used separately, is that the same thing as using them together. Is hydrofracking using 80,000 gallons of water the same process when using five million gallons? Is a half-acre drill pad the same as a 5-8 acre drill pad?
And what would you pay a surveyor who said so?
In the Final Scope of SGEIS, Commissioner Grannis’ Executive Summary further expands the differences of “old” and “new”:
Aspects of high-volume hydraulic fracturing identified in this Final Scope for further review include the potential impacts of (1) water withdrawals, (2) transportation of water to the site, (3) the use of additives in the water to enhance the hydraulic fracturing process, (4) space and facilities required at the well site to ensure proper handling of water and additives, (5) removal of spent fracturing fluid from the well site and its ultimate disposition and (6) potential impacts at well sites where multiple wells will be drilled during a three-year period. Noise, visual and air quality considerations are noted, along with the potential for cumulative and community impacts.
Surely, this must either mean that this list of factors was not part of the
“comprehensive review” in the 1992 GEIS, or that “high-volume hydraulic fracturing” involves a significantly different technology from what was described in the 1992 GEIS and, therefore, cannot simply be viewed as more of the same.
Yet, this is exactly the tightwire that the agency continues to balance upon:
Well stimulation, including hydraulic fracturing, was expressly identified and discussed in the GEIS as part of the action of drilling a well, and the GEIS does not recommend any additional regulatory controls or find a significant environmental impact associated with this technology. ---dSGEIS, Sept. 30, 2009 (1.4)
A look at the Commissioner’s new list of reviewable factors sheds even greater doubt on these conclusions.
1) WATER WITHDRAWALS - - From the 1992 GEIS to the new process, the maximum water use per well increases from a maximum of 80,000 gallons to a maximum of 8 million gallons. How many wells will be drilled in NYS? 1000-10,000?
This commonly estimated range would translate into 5 to 8 billion gallons of fresh water.
Considering such a dramatic increase in the use of fresh water resources, one would think there would be clear open answers to the questions: Where will this water come from? Who will be responsible for deciding?
However, the available answers to such questions are about as clear as the Mississippi.
Not long ago, a friend of mine passed by a tanker truck backed up to Keuka Lake and being filled with water. My friend asked what the water was for and what kind of permit had been obtained for the water withdrawal. The truck driver responded that he didn’t need a permit. When asked who had told him that, the man replied that it was from local officials.
My friend got the driver’s name and company and, for several weeks, set out on a goose chase to see if any of that was true and, in fact, who would have authority to permit a withdrawal of 80,000 gallons of water from Keuka Lake. What my friend discovered was that nobody knew! That every agency named somebody else. Wasn’t it the DEC? The Susquehanna River Basin Commission? The Great Lakes Commission? The EPA? Some local water commissioner? Permit? I don’t think anyone needs a permit for taking water from the lake, just for dumping stuff into it.
You need permission from the lake property owners, DEC told him, before you could back your tanker trucks up their docks. And that a permit was required to take more than 100,000 gallons per day average (over a 30 day period). Over 36.5 million gallons a year. If anyone’s checking.
But does “100,00 gallons” mean: Per truck? Per company? Per project? Could 50 different truckers (or companies) take 99,999 gallons a day each---in perpetuity---with no permit required? And again---who is measuring? Who would know? Metering and reporting of water withdrawals is only triggered by self-reporting of a taker exceeding
the 3 million gallon a month benchmark. The effectiveness of the “Honor System” in monitoring gas company haulers would seem worthy of doubt.
From DEC’s 2009 dSGEIS:
4.2.1 Water for hydraulic fracturing may be obtained from groundwater
withdrawals or withdrawals from surface water bodies away from the well site. . . . Withdrawal from surface water bodies such as rivers and streams . . . may require permits.
May require permits?
4.2.1.4 The dSGEIS’s proposed parameters for well-specific review of water sources in the Susquehanna and Delaware River Basins will be based upon the Department’s conclusions regarding the adequacy of the reviews done, respectively, by SRBC and DRBC.
To buttress the administrative determination noted above, the SRBC also
undertook a final rulemaking change, effective January 15, 2009, that
established a new Approval by Rule process to regulate all consumptive use activity associated with development of the Marcellus and Utica Shales. Under the new rule, consumptive use approvals are issued on a drilling pad basis.
Finally, in accordance with SRBC policy to not duplicate State programs, SRBC does not regulate the disposition of the hydraulic fracturing fluids that flow back after well stimulation, which have commingled with deep connate water.
4.2.1.3 Great Lakes Basin
In New York [in parts of 34 counties] the Great Lakes Basin is the watershed . . . Effective December 8, 2008, the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact . . . prohibits any new or increased diversion of any amount of water out of the Great Lakes Basin of New York with certain exceptions.
The Great Lakes Commission does not have regulatory authority similar to that held by SRBC and DRBC to review water withdrawals and uses and require mitigation of environmental impacts. However, the new Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Water Resources Council has specific authority for the review and/or approval of certain new and increased water withdrawals. Review by this Compact Council will require compliance with the Compact’s Decision-Making Standard and Standard for Exceptions.
Whatever that means!
from October 2008 Draft Scope for the dSGEIS
4.2.1.3 Great Lakes Basin
[U]nder the federal Water Resources Development Act of 1986 ("WRDA"), any diversion of Great Lakes water out of the basin must be approved by the Governor of each Great Lakes state. The approval process for New York is set forth in ECL §15-1613, and the diversion also requires approval of the Legislature.
But when Sue Heavenrich of Shaleshock queried Don Zelazny of NYDEC on the subject, he said: “Under current NYS Water Resources law, companies drilling for gas are not required to get permits for water withdrawals from within the Great Lakes Basin.” ---- which includes all the Finger Lakes and the St. Lawrence River.
At the end of the goose chase, my friend gave up in exasperation. Nobody, at any level, wanted to know the name of the driver or company or how much water was taken or what it was going to be used for. Every agency or official suggested someone else he needed to call, and the circle of non-oversight went round and round until the goose finally got tired of the chase and flew away.
Back to the Commissioner’s list of topics still open for review in the dSGEIS:
2. WATER TRANSPORT - - the 1992 GEIS: maximum 80,000 gallons, which can be transported by 8.3 tanker truck loads.
In comparison, five million gallons for a high-volume fracking well would require 522 truck loads.
3. ADDITIVES --- Under “Additives,” the 1992 GEIS described: gelling agents, surfactants, acid and sand (GEIS 9.d-h):
d. Most wells in New York State are drilled on compressed air. If formation
water does not occur naturally in the well, a small amount of fresh water is
sometimes added at the blooie line to control dust. Surfactants and small
quantities of additives are also regularly added to the well during drilling.
Soaps are also sometimes added to maintain circulation when water intrusion becomes a problem. The components of greatest environmental concern in the waste fluids from drilling are the chlorides (salt), trace metals and surfactants.
e. Frac Fluid - Most wells in New York need to be fraced (pronounced fracked) before then can produce economic quantities of oil or gas. The frac fluid base may be brine, freshwater or oil. Gelling agents are often added to the frac fluid to make it viscous enough to carry sand or some other proppant into the producing formation. Other chemicals similar to those used in drilling fluids are also added. The components of greatest environmental concern in the spent frac fluid are the gelling agents, surfactants, and chlorides.
f. During rock formation, some water (connate water) is trapped inside the
rock's pore spaces. When a well is later drilled into the rock, some formation water may be released and mix with the drilling fluid present in the wellbore. It is usually the largest component of pit waste fluids. In addition to chloride and low concentrations heavy metals, the production fluid may also contain small amounts of corrosion inhibitors, bactericides and other additives used.
Now, however, the new dSGEIS (Table 6.1) lists 197 chemical products comprising 260 unique chemicals used or proposed for high-volume drilling in NYS, including 78 chemicals found in Marcellus Shale flowback water.
Other than that, the “additives” are pretty much the same. Except that most of the new additives are also known to be highly toxic to both humans and aquatic life, and some are so new that they have yet to be evaluated.
4. SPACE AND FACILITIES REQUIRED AT THE WELL SITE --- 1992 GEIS (XVI
B-1): “Generally access road and site construction disturb less than two acres of land.”
High-volume wells average about 5 acres per site, but that does not include access roads. The new dSGEIS describes access roads (5.1.1):
The proposed disturbed access road acreage for these sites ranges from 0.1 acres to 2.75 acres, with the access roads ranging from 130 feet to
approximately 3,000 feet in length. Widths would range from 20 to 40 feet
during the drilling and fracturing phase to 10 to 20 feet during the production phase.
This not only adds to the drilling site but describes a 20 to 40 foot swath of
disfigurement over half a mile long, per well. Access roads will also be needed for the centralized compression facilities. And high-volume drilling requires significantly more fluid storage space, truck space, supply space, truck garage space, pit space for returned toxic water, heavy equipment space, worker housing camp space, etc.
But in dizzying combination of funny math and statistical prestidigitation, the new dSGEIS (5.1.3.2) concludes that the anticipated high-volume wells will actually only disturb one sixth as much land as the 1992 conventional wells.
How could this be?
Well---because horizontal drilling could allow high-volume sites to drill 6-8 wells from each pad site---it would only need 10 wells to cover a 6400-acre (ten square mile) unit, while and single-well vertical drilling would require 160 wells. Thus, the 10 highvolume well pads would only disturb 50 acres (@ 5 ac. per pad), while the 160 single well pads would disturb 480 acres( @ 3 acres per pad).
1. Note how the 1992 GEIS: “Generally access road and site construction disturb less than two acres of land” has suddenly morphed into 3 acres per pad, not including access roads.
2. 10 pads @ 5 acres per pad would be 50 acres. 6-8 wells per pad, would be 60-80 wells. 60-80 single-well pads @ 2 acres per pad, would be 120-160 acres, not 480.
3. Moreover, in the same section (5.1.3.2) dSGEIS states:
“Nine, instead of 16, [horizontal drilling] spacing units would fit within a square mile. . . . Vertical infill wells [wells drilled between known producing wells to better exploit the reservoir] may be drilled, with justification, from separate surface locations in the unit. However, a far smaller proportion of vertical infill wells than 15 per 640-acre unit is expected.”
The prose here is somewhat turbid, but not so murky as to completely obscure these “up-to-15 additional infill wells,” that presumably would also take up space and create some additional “disturbance” of their own, despite the fact that this is not mentioned in the Table 5.1 analysis.
4. Most importantly: When Table 5.1 hypothesizes 160 single-well pads in 10 square miles, this totally ignores reality. In Yates County, for instance, DEC’s Gas & Oil Database lists only 15 gas wells active in the whole county. 160 single-well pads per ten square miles is an imaginary number never even contemplated in the pre-Marcellus Shale world.
In devastating contrast, the suppositions of high-volume well density in Table 5.1 are not only being contemplated but specifically being planned for. Not only planned for, but sugarcoated for public over-consumption, as evidenced by Table 5.1 itself. Again illustrating that---even more destructive than high-volume drilling may be---is the danger from its overwhelming scale.
5. REMOVAL OF SPENT FRACTURING FLUID FROM THE WELL SITE AND ITS ULTIMATE DISPOSITION --- 1992 GEIS (7a): “The remainder of the wastes produced during drilling operations are disposed of at special, industrial treatment plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio or other out-of-state disposal facilities. On occasion, a local sewage treatment plant may elect to accept drilling wastes if they will not upset the plant's operations. There are no economical treatment methods presently available for removal of large scale chloride contamination. Citizens are encouraged to report any leaks, so the Department can order timely repairs.”
How will “citizens” have access to this inspection, and how can it be their
responsibility---given that all of their rights of control and oversight have been negated?
Is it not irresponsible (if not absurd) to think that trucking toxic water to Pennsylvania and Ohio is a reasonable water treatment plan? Because of its Marcellus Shale drilling (still only in its early-stages), Pennsylvania is already experiencing a watertreatment crisis of its own. (Maybe its plan will be to truck its toxic waste to NY.)
The ultimate disposition of X millions of gallons of highly toxic brine is not only problematic because treatment plants adequate for dealing with such combinations and quantities do not yet exist and are exorbitantly expensive to build, but the history of gas drilling (in both NY and PA) has often been that less-than-adequate facilities have been used in their absence---the environmental effects of which have been insufficiently studied, but can hardly be good.
According to Joaquin Sapien of ProPublica: "’Cha-ching!’ is how Francis Geletko, financial director for the municipal sewage treatment plant in Clairton, PA, described his first thought when he learned that drillers would pay 5 cents a gallon to get their wastewater processed at his plant.”
But are local treatment plants (intended to break down sewage) equipped to desalinate brine that, according to Pennsylvania’s DEP, contains “so much TDS [Total Dissolved Solids] that it can be five times as salty as sea water?”
Not to mention the mixture from the dSGEIS’ list of 78 other chemicals known to be in flowback fluid.
6. POTENTIAL IMPACTS AT WELL SITES WHERE MULTIPLE WELLS WILL BE DRILLED DURING A THREE-YEAR PERIOD. NOISE, VISUAL AND AIR QUALITY CONSIDERATIONS ARE NOTED, ALONG WITH THE POTENTIAL FOR CUMULATIVE AND COMMUNITY IMPACTS
It appears that, at this point, the Commissioner was either running out of patience or wanted all of these additional factors to fit on one page.
NOISE: while the 1992 GEIS (4.1.1) suggests “Temporary, short-term noise impacts” during the “several days” of drilling.
Under high-volume drilling, that period often extends to several months or longer and may be refracked several times, each operation usually continuing 24 hours a day---24/7 of hammering, pumping, trucking, flaring---in areas used to being disturbed only by the likes of Canada geese and barking dogs.
VISUAL: the dSGEIS Summary says that it “will propose thresholds for site-specific reviews of potential visual impacts in close proximity to the Catskill Forest Preserve, the Upper Delaware Scenic Byway and the Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River.”
Which is laudable. But why is the scenic beauty of the Finger Lakes region any less essential to its identity, history and well-being than those downstate areas? Any less obnoxious for our rolling farmland and lovely woods to be crisscrossed by trucking roads, pipeline routes, fifteen acre industrial sites including plastic-lined pits of stinking goop? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course (especially when it’s big-money green).
AIR QUALITY: turning country air into city air (see below) . . .
COMMUNITY IMPACTS: the 1992 GEIS does not cover this, likely because the kind of drilling being done in 1992 did not involve the importation of an army of rugged, young, out-of-state men into quiet rural counties, working them 80 hour weeks under difficult, hazardous conditions at low pay. In analogous drilling shales, methamphetamine use in order to fight fatigue is a serious problem, while increases in crime, school overcrowding, stressed social services and other community impacts are legion.
Using truck traffic as an example: In the 1992 GEIS, this was such a minor
disturbance as to remain unmentioned. But concerning high-volume drilling, in the dSGEIS high-volume drilling truck traffic necessitates a whole section, and no wonder:
dSGEIS (6.13.1) [truck traffic for a single pad with eight wells]:
Drill Pad and Road Construction Equipment 10 – 45 Truckloads
Drilling Rig 60 Truckloads
Drilling Fluid and Materials 200 – 400 Truckloads
Drilling Equipment (casing, drill pipe, etc.) 200 – 400 Truckloads
Completion Rig 30 Truckloads
Completion Fluid and Materials 80 – 160 Truckloads
Completion Equipment – (pipe, wellhead) 10 Truckloads
Hydraulic Fracture Equipment (pump trucks, tanks) 300 – 400 Truckloads
Hydraulic Fracture Water 3,200 – 4,800 Tanker Trucks
Hydraulic Fracture Sand 160 – 200 Trucks
Flow Back Water Removal 1,600 – 2,400 Tanker Trucks
As many as 8900 truckloads. That’s not crossing the George Washington Bridge into New York City---that’s on two-lane macadam roads in formerly peaceful and picturesque Yates County, pop. 24,603. And that’s one pad!
What all ten of the Commissioner’s newly-reviewable impacts share is that they all very much beg the same question:
At what point does a matter of SCALE cross over to a matter of KIND?
Are a whisper and a scream the same thing except for scale? A tear and an ocean are both salt water. A tabby and a tiger are both cats. A flooded basement and a flood that devastates several counties are both water. But are their differences only a matter of SCALE? No, because in certain cases SCALE is sufficiently transforming as to also necessitate distinguishing such seemingly homologous entities in KIND---because,
in terms of societal and environmental impacts, they unequivocally are.
Similarly, the most essential difference between the kind of hydraulic fracturing described in the 1992 GEIS and the high-volume hydraulic fracturing now in question may be a matter of SCALE, but, in terms of societal and environmental impacts, the difference in SCALE has also crossed over into a difference in KIND---from a tabby into a tiger, from a basement leak into a flood.
The evidence for this is the ongoing history of high-volume hydrofracking in other states. From its point of going full-bore in the Barnett Shale in 1997 to its present proliferation through Pennsylvania and up to New York borders, there has been and continues to be one mess after another of societal and environmental problems in its wake.
WATER SAFETY --- Despite DEC’s assurance (dSGEIS -- 2.4.6) that “no documented instances of groundwater contamination are recorded in the NYSDEC files from previous horizontal drilling or hydraulic fracturing projects in New York,” the strong likelihood of water contamination being caused by high-volume hydraulicfracture
horizontal gas drilling follows the industry like oily footprints.
In the Denver Post (April 22, 2009), Abrahm Lustgarten of ProPublic reported on a Garfield County, Colorado study that concluded that gas drilling has degraded water in dozens of water wells:
The three-year study used sophisticated scientific techniques to match
methane from water to the same rock layer---a mile and a half underground---where gas companies are drilling. The scientists didn't determine which gas wells caused the problem or say exactly how the gas reached the water, but they indicated with more clarity than ever before that a system of interconnected natural fractures and faults could stretch from deep underground gas layers to the surface. They called for more research into how the industry's practice of forcefully fracturing those deep layers might increase the risk of contaminants making their way up into an aquifer.
Despite the difficulty and expense of definitively proving a cause and effect between a mile-deep fracking and nearby water contamination, such instances of extreme coincidence have occurred from Cleburne, Texas to Pavilion, Wyoming to Dimock, Pennsylvania, etc. According to ProPublica, over 1500 water contamination complaints have been documented in Colorado alone.
Says New Mexico rancher, Tweeti Blancett, whose family has operating the same ranch since the 1870s:
“My water when it comes up, ninety-seven percent of the time, it’s deadly,” she said. “It’s full of heavy metals, petroleum products and things you don’t even want to talk about. We didn’t know we were going to have these problems when they started drilling out here. . . . [New York officials] have an open invitation to come to the ranch. You don’t want what we have.” ---quoted by Dusty Horwitt, JD (Senior Analyst for Public Lands) in a presentation to the New York City Council Committee on Environmental Protection, September 10, 2008
Cases of ostensible contamination links in Texas, Colorado and Pennsylvania are currently in the courts Establishing “scientific” and “legal” evidence is further complicated because wells and aquifers have not been tested beforehand, it often being impossible to test them
because the exact chemical formulas of most fracking fluids have been protected by companies as confidential proprietary information, making it impossible to know what to test for.
Predictably, the industry response is cynical and coy. How do we know your well wasn’t already polluted? How do you know it was us? Even if we did use 2-butoxyethanol to frac a well near your home and 2-BE ended up in your well, can you prove that your 2-BE was our 2-BE.
Our 2-BE or not our 2-BE?---that is the question!
Such games are unbecoming by the industry, and even more so when mimicked by environmental protective agencies.
In its Final Scope (4.2.2 Groundwater Quality -- Drilling Through Aquifers), DEC brazenly states:
Standard casing and cementing practices required for every well . . . eliminates the POSSIBILITY of fracturing fluids or naturally occurring contaminants contacting fresh groundwater during any phase of operations. [emphasis mine]
The history of high-volume hydrofracking and common sense dispute this
“impossibility,“ a statement of amazingly unscientific certainty. Accidents do happen.
As do floods, earthquakes and sinkholes. Unknown consequences have had a nasty and hardly uncommon habit of humbling such human hubris.
AIR QUALITY
The 1992 GEIS (XVB-2.g. 16. 9) states: “Most air quality impacts associated with oil and gas, solution mining and gas storage operations are usually short-term and minor.”
But in areas of high-volume hydraulic fracturing like Cleburne, Texas and Sublette, Wyoming, damage to air quality would hardly seem minor.
Wyoming resident Alexandra Fuller writes in “Drilling’s Darker Side,” [CNN Money, October 27, 2008]:
“[T]he air in Sublette County has become so polluted that regular toxic-air alerts warn vulnerable residents to stay indoors. Additionally, more than a dozen water wells on the high plains have recently tested positive for highly carcinogenic hydrocarbons. Cancer rates are now reported to be the highest in the state and, for many days of the year, a thick, brown stain of pollution hangs against the mountains, sometimes obliterating them from sight altogether.”
In DISH, Texas, after a company study showed no detectable air pollution, the town paid for an independent assessment, published in September 2009:
Laboratory reports confirmed the presence of multiple Recognized and
Suspected Human Carcinogens in fugitive air emissions present on several
locations in the town of DISH. The compounds identified are commonly known to emanate from industrial processes directly related to the natural gas industrial processes of exploration, drilling, flaring and compression. . . . In addition, several locations confirmed exceedences in a chemical identified by TCEQ [Texas Commission on Environmental Quality] with the capability for “disaster potential.”
The town of DISH has virtually no heavy industry other than compression
stations. there is no other facility with the capability to produce the volume of air toxins present within miles of the town.
According to an article in the Dallas-Fort Worth Star-Telegram (June 3, 2009):
State environmental officials say that an SMU researcher was correct: Gas
drilling in the Barnett Shale contributes about as much air pollution to the
Dallas-Fort Worth area as car and truck traffic.
But the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality doesn’t plan on taking any action about chemicals released during gas drilling because they typically happen in rural areas, not in the immediate metro area, where the EPA is forcing state and local governments to control air pollution.
In my research, I have oddly come to identify with the town of Cleburne, Texas, an area of beautiful rolling farmland evocative of Yates County (even if less green and without the lakes). Yates County has about 24,000 people, and, before the Barnett drilling boom, Cleburne had about 26,000. In less than a decade of high-volume drilling, though, Cleburne has added 95,000 new jobs, has seen its air quality degraded, seen significant increases in crime and amphetamine use, discovered toxic waste injected into abandoned wells, as well as evaporated and spread onto its farmland.
“The air smells like diesel fuel, and is noxious. it is making me sick and my livestock. The dust is settling on my pasture and my livestock is eating it!!” bemoans, Dick Ross of nearby Itasca, Texas (as quoted on the comprehensive drilling reform site Bluedaze.)
Meanwhile, still on DEC’s Marcellus Shale main page:
Q: Did New York recently approve a new type of drilling?
A: No. Governor David A. Paterson recently approved a bill that extends uniform gas well spacing rules and establishes boundary setbacks to protect the interests of adjacent property owners. This new law has been widely misreported as allowing a new type of drilling, or somehow making it easier to get the environmental permits necessary for drilling. In fact, the new law only addresses well spacing. It authorizes nothing new nor in any way does it reduce the environmental review needed before a drilling permit is issued.
Nothing new. It’s all the same as 1992. Just more. The tiger still just a big calico.
50,000-250,000 gallons of microbicide just a bigger squirt of 409. The Exxon Valdez the same as a dropped quart of oil in your driveway, only more.
The matter of scale is not the only concern over high-volume hydrofracking, but it is the catastrophic multiplier of concern, which needs to be factored in to every study and every part of the plan.
For this to happen, clearly DEC needs to only be the Department of Environmental Conservation, and not also the Department of Environmental Exploitation. Surely, this is a legislative more than an agency failure, and expectations for such a change by the NYS Legislature are less than dim. In the meantime, what is the DEC to do?
I sincerely commiserate with Commissioner Grannis’ untenable and schizoid position. I don’t doubt that he’s doing his best to accommodate the clamoring greed for energy wealth with the careful pace demanded by good environmental science. But the lion and the lamb may well lie down together in peace before we see the Energy Industry make nice with our natural environment.
The Energy Industry’s mission is not split. It is singular---to maximize profits for its investors. And what that singularity guarantees is that the energy industry will only regulate itself (or protect the people and places it uses) to the degree that it would be less profitable not to do so.
Which does not mean that its product is not presently necessary and useful. But it does mean that if other values are to be protected and preserved, that task must also be undertaken in a singular way, as it was in the DEC’s original mission: “You are the Industry and We are your Regulator.” For the DEC to be the Industry’s regulator and also its “promoter” and “fosterer” is impossible for it to do in a responsible way, and it is disingenuous to claim otherwise.
WHAT CAN DEC DO?
1. A helpful first step would be for DEC to openly tell the legislature that its two missions are incompatible---rather than continuing to suggest that the agency can somehow compartmentalize its double-vision into complementary tasks, as if they were two different aspects of environmental regulation, two hands washing each other for the benefit of both and the common good.
2. In the nearer term, as regards gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, DEC (as “conservator”) needs to ignore its avaricious side and necessarily proceed at a credible scientific pace, not at the boomtown pace urged by energy companies, investors and leaseholders. The bloated scale and multiplier effect of boom mentality is a priori the opposite of circumspect objectivity and wise conservation.
3. DEC needs to admit that High-Volume Hydraulic Fracturing is a NEW type of drilling in New York State, one that should require incremental implementation suitable to investigation and study. Not in order to stall the permitting process, but rather as a way of proceeding with enough deliberation for the agency to fulfill its original mission: “to conserve, improve and protect New York's natural resources and
environment and to prevent, abate and control water, land and air pollution, in order to enhance the health, safety and welfare of the people of the state and their overall economic and social well-being.”
If that frustrates investors and the industry, the shale gas will wait.
The same can be said for our national energy needs. The gas has been locked in rock a mile deep for 300 million years. If we need it in the future, it will still be there after the questions about its safety have been answered and all prudent preparations have been made. If it turns out that, in the future, we don’t need the gas because alternatives to massive earth disruption and rampant use of fossil fuels have been outmoded and left in the fossilized dust, then that will prove to be an even greater
common good for us to just let it be.
Meanwhile, here in the Finger Lakes, the rustic and beautiful Finger Lakes Region, summer is over, the grapes and apples are being harvested, maple leaves turning their brilliant red and orange. As usual, Labor Day was celebrated on Keuka and Canandaigua lakes by ringing the lakes in fires and flares. For many, it is a last-partyof-summer kind of thing when cottages are closed, school about to start.
For others, it is also a connection to Genundowa, the Seneca Nation’s Festival of Lights, an ancient ritual of giving thanks for peace and in praise of Mother Earth for her bounty and the natural beauty of this place, her legacy to the Senecas as Keepers of the Faith.
Our own legacy is still under construction. A tabby purring by the fire. A tiger snarling at the door.
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Steve Coffman
Dundee, NY
Email: stevecoffman@frontiernet.net