Clean Natural Gas? Not in My Backyard
Got bubbles? Alarms have been ringing for months about the risk that natural gas drilling poses to drinking water supplies, but recent reports of water contamination just a few hours away have prompted representatives from New York City to once again appeal to the state government to ban drilling inside the watershed serving 9 million city residents.
In a report to be issued tomorrow, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer cites two dozen cases across the country where drilling pollution appears to pose a threat to public health. Most of those cases were originally documented in a series of stories by ProPublica.
At issue are plans to begin widespread drilling of the Marcellus Shale, a deeply buried gas-rich layer that underlies the southern part of New York state and Pennsylvania. The Marcellus is believed by some geologists to hold as much as 400 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas, equal to 20 years of the United States’ current total production, and its development could be worth $1 billion a year to New York’s economy—money that is desperately needed to fill Albany’s gaping budget hole.
But much of the drilling would underlie the giant reservoirs and watershed that provides unfiltered drinking water to New York City. City officials have already protested that any pollution in the watershed could jeopardize the city’s permit to provide unfiltered water and force it to build a $10 billion water treatment plant. Now Stringer says he’s concerned the state—which has not held any of its public hearings on the issue in New York City—may drive forward regardless.
“We can’t allow those pressures to push us into hasty decisions that come at the cost of New Yorkers’ health—or the state’s long-term interests,” Stringer said in a statement issued with the report.
ProPublica’s investigations have shown that the state has done little to study the impacts drilling might have on water supplies and is unprepared to treat the copious amounts of waste water it produces.
Most concerning are a suite of chemicals used in the key process of hydraulic fracturing, where millions of gallons of fluids are pumped underground at extremely high pressure to break up the rock and release the gas. The identities of some of the chemicals are protected trade information that has never been released to governments or to the public, but which are believed to be highly toxic.
Scientists have had difficulty measuring any threat because they can’t trace the source of pollution without knowing the names of the chemicals used in fracturing. It is also unclear whether any of the water treatment facilities in New York and Pennsylvania, the heart of the Marcellus deposit, are capable of cleaning the waste before it is released back into the region’s rivers and lakes.
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6 comments
Evan Romer
Feb. 28, 2009, 11:36 a.m.
Good article, but the focus should not be only on the NYC watershed. The drinking water of a huge part of upstate NY is threatened by the same problems. If we protect just the NYC watershed, that still leaves a lot of people at risk.
Keep up the good work.
—Evan
Mary Sweeney
Feb. 28, 2009, 9:53 p.m.
This is another great article to add to ProPublica’s coverage of unconventional natural gas extraction. Good work!
It’s important to recognize, however, that Marcellus Shale development poses many, many threats to the environment and to public health, including threats not just to NYC’s drinking water supply, but to the drinking water of the millions of people in PA, NY, W. VA, & Ohio who live above the shale.
Purple Girl
March 1, 2009, 10:15 a.m.
America made a lot of mistakes while we built the industrial revolution- some out of ignorance, some out of shortsightedness, some out of pure disregard coupled with greed over profitablity.
We now have the science and much of the technology to negate such things moving forward. But what still remains to be addressed are the two which are a result of Human behavior- Disregard & Greed.
I have no doubt if we put our minds to it we can develop safe forms of energy recovery & implementation- NG & Coal. But it will require US to recognize When we have reached those techonoligical advances and when we have not yet achieved those objectives. It will require we stop disregarding the facts and rein in the greed willing to forego Ethics for profitablity.
We may not be able to control at what speed we learn new things though science & Tech, but we can control our impulses to ‘leap before we look’and “most toys Wins” attitude.
Shellinaya
March 10, 2009, 11:22 p.m.
I read in Scientific American that this protected method of drilling for natural gas was invented by Halliburton.
And who is pushing the use of “clean” natural gas?—Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who owns between $50,000 and $100,000 investment in T. Boone Pickens natural gas company. Our Congress will now be in the business of advocating for natural gas drilling, flying blind because they don’t know for sure what chemicals are being injected into the environment. They know one is benzene, which causes leukemia. But apparently that’s just fine with Pelosi and Pickens.
And natural gas is only about 25% “cleaner” than burning coal when it comes to CO2. I’m trying to spread the word that natural gas isn’t clean or “renewable” like Pelosi claims, so articles like this are appreciated.
robinlowemi7
May 4, 2009, 1:56 p.m.
Great Article.
But could Natural gas really harm drinking water?
Rob
AffiloBlueprint
Mary Sweeney
May 5, 2009, 2:03 p.m.
Robinlowemi7 asks: Could natural gas really harm drinking water?
Short answer: yes.
Longer answer: Methane, the main component of natural gas, can and has made its way into water supplies in areas where natural gas drilling has occurred, causing well water explosions and resulting in flammable tap water. In Bainbridge, Ohio, methane entering a house via the water caused an explosion serious enough to make the house uninhabitable.
Also, the methane is only one part of the problem. Various dangerous chemicals used in the extraction of natural gas present serious problems for drinking water.
For more on this, see an earlier article in Propublica, “Buried Secrets: Is Natural Gas Drilling Endangering U.S. Water Supplies?”.
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