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20 comments on Plan for Hydro-Fracture Drilling for Unconventional Natural Gas in Upstate New York
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20 comments on Plan for Hydro-Fracture Drilling for Unconventional Natural Gas in Upstate New York
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I live in Albany NY and have a pretty high level of awareness on this issue. The article and interview posted above were atrocities of one-sided, hit-job journalism. The Times-Union should be deeply ashamed to have published such a poorly researched article. This is a good story that needs to be told, but not in the way it was done in this article.
A few major points:
There is a lot of excitement over the Marcellus Shale in NY and leases are going for record amounts. Both finding a good source of water for the frack jobs and disposing of the water are significant issues that are being discussed every day in both the NYS DEC and in industry. The discussion has moved way beyond the issues raised in this article. Most of the people in the areas where the drilling will occur are very excited about it becasue it is bringing jobs and huge amounts of money to an economically depressed area.
One problem with the article is that no one from industry and hardly anyone from government were interviewed so only the viewpoints of environmentalists who have an automatic anti-drilling agenda were heard. I am sure they mean well but they are woefully misinformed on some key issues and their deep mistrust of government and industry is never balanced by the other side.
The article makes it sound like the DEC is just doing the bidding of industry without regard to the environment. Nothing could be further from the case. The NYS DEC does a great job. We have some of the most stringent environmental regulations in the country. Brad Field is a smart, stand-up guy who is dedicated to making regulations that will allow gas drilling and production to proceed only if there is no harm to the environment. It is his job to protect the environment and he would be fired if he did not do that. Many companies don'w want to work in NY because the DEC has so many more environmental regulations than other States.
There are many factual errors in the article. The article says the Marcellus is 9000 feet deep and that there is no experience with deep wells in NY. The Marcellus is one of the shallowest drilling targets in the State. It outcrops near Albany and along the Heldeberg escarpment south of Lake Ontario. The deepest it gets is about 6000 feet. there are many wells currently producing high rates of gas that are more than 10,000 feet deep in NY. The gas is not in pockets, most of it is in very small pores in the shale.
The article says that it is not possible to inject the frack water into deeper formations in NY and PA. I do not know why they would say this. I think it is being injected in PA currently and no one has even tried in NY. The article suggests that the water will simply be discharged onto the surface because it can't be injected. That is absurd and will never happen. What I hear is that companies are looking into cleaning up and reusing the frack water which would solve both the problem of where the water will come from and how to dispose of it. For some reason this is not mentioned in the article.
Companies will need to get permits to both obtain the water and dispose of the water and this will be closely monitored. this is not mentioned either.
It should also be understood that while many who work for oil companies are not great friends of the environment, no one wants to poison drinking water. this is bad because it is wrong but it also makes very poor buisiness sense. These companies want to make money and discharging toxic substances into the environment is a very poor business decision as it will end up costing many times more to clean it up than it would to dispose of it properly. They know they will be caught here because the DEC is pretty rigorous in their inspections and there are a lot of concerned citizens.
The article makes it sound like frack water causes cancer but provides no actual evidence that this is true. Read it closely though and you will see that it is an tricky linking of unrelated incidents that helps the writer arrive at this position. A woman in Colorado thought that she got cancer from a nearby well that was fracked (this is not substantiated and no more info is given). So a scientist went to a place where a truck carrying frack water was in an accident and found traces of Benzene there which might cause cancer. Therefore we should all worry that anyone who is anywhere near any of these wells will get cancer. That is outrageous and really shoddy journalism. I am disappointed to see it reposted here. But this is how it works. Someone writes a crappy article about it and pretty soon everyone is convinced that they are going to get cancer from drilling for shale gas.
just my two cents, but as a person who cares about the future of the planet I hate to see resources and anger focused on the wrong things.
So you have no idea what they are going to do with the frack water but it's all going to be alright. Good luck to you. I see a superfund site in your future that the taxpayers (you) will have to pay to clean up. Or just live with.
I frac for one of the major service companies and it is very sad to see how misinformed they are. You only use 6 million gal of water if you do a WaterFrac, a type of frac where you pump at high rate and very low prop (sand) concentration. In that case you only add two chemicals to the water, a friction reducer and a clay stabilizer, both very harmless.
I would imagine they would go for a multi layer frac development in a these shallow wells (7,000 ft is shallow!!), using a normal water based guar frac fluid. In that case you would use more additives, like oxidizers, surfactants, cross linkers and while I don't suggest you eat them for lunch, then they are approved for using in the North Sea and can safely be handled on location and separated when flowing the well.
NB: It is frac and NOT Frack!
Why the assumptions that A)the industry will create a superfund site and b)that the NYS DEC will allow that to happen? These fracks are done twice a day in the Fort Worth Basin in the Barnett Shale and I have not heard anything a bout a superfund site there. No company wants that on their hands. Times have changed. 50 years ago industry did make a lot of messes. That is why we now have the DEC. None of the current superfund sites in NY that I know of were created in the last thirty years. It is good to be vigilant on these matters and I want a clean State. I also like my gas range and my water heater and we have to get the gas from somewhere. Why not keep the money here at home?
great posts. I liken the ignorant component of the environmental movement to the dogmatic religious right.
I find your lack of distrust disturbing. You're not even curious what they're going to do with the frack water. Don't get me wrong, I am 100% in favor of drilling in your backyard. I was absolutely in favor of drilling everywhere until I moved to Santa Barbara and learned for myself what all those environmental regulations and agencies are worth. I guess everyone has to learn for themselves. Well good luck to you. The circus is going to come to town, spill their toxic waste all over and leave. Extraction companies have a track record you can look at if you care.
I might trust these companies if they put the entire remediation costs in a bond before they started. Otherwise, no way in hell.
After the last seven years, I can't believe anyone is still using the argument that private companies would never do anything illegal because it would cost them money long term. That's a laugher by itself.
In theory they post a bond for the remediation costs. In practice, the bond is nowhere near what cleaning their mess will cost. They pay themselves huge salaries and dividends and when the resource runs out, they just declare bankruptcy. See Asarco.
I live in NY in the Marcellus shale area and attended a meeting last week put on by the NY DEC. That's Department of Environmental Conservation, keep that in mind. I went in a bit naive it turns out as I had assumed they would give a reasonably balanced view. This is a rural area of small farmers and very low suburban population. It began with long boring introductions and the next hour plus consisted of five officials propounding on how wonderful the whole thing is. Not a single negative that I recall. They even used gas company lingo with words like "play" and such. Additionally that hour was also quite boring with repetitious info and a really crappy powerpoint type presentation. At one point excitement was created when someone got up between speakers and for about a minute spoke on things the officials weren't telling us. Some booing and a bit of clapping. At which point someone asked a state policeman to come down and stand behind the speakers with his arms crossed. Yikes a small show of force. The speaker following, the last one to speak, was particularly full of oil company speak. He trailed off into almost mumbling blather toward the end.
Next came a break and people could write their questions on cards and they would select them for the next hour. They read them and almost all were answered by one speaker. As in the first hour plus no questions from the audience were allowed. And during the answers this did not allow any real follow up on their answers. I saw utter boredom settling in and at least 60% of the people left during this time. It came to me that this was the plan. It was likely arranged this way to allow as little "disturbance" as possible. They did not finish with the card questions and finally it was time for the people to directly ask questions. There were some good ones but this was a weekday night and I could tell most were just ready to go home.
Some things I think I got after this meeting:
The officials had no idea what the chemicals are that are added to the water. Only some "soft" guesses. Maybe they would test the toxic frac water that would be treated in Pennsylvania ????
A total of 19 employees in the entire department (I assume the 5 speakers were of that 19) to oversee all leasing, inspecting, etc of the entire state of NY.
If 60% of the property owners in a "unit" choose to have this drilling occur, the rest have no choice. It will come under their land too. A unit was 640 acres, and is concocted by the gas companies. This is being changed to 40 - 640 acre units.
I thought we the tax payers paid the salaries of the DEC, whoops I guess we do but someone else gives a better bonus.
To trust our DEC is basically to trust the gas companies. And somehow trusting them to Environmental Conservation goes way beyond naive.
I am not really getting what your problem is with the DEC. Units were made so that people didn't drill way more wells than necessary. If you are an environmentalist, then you should be FOR units. Back in the old days, you could lease a half an acre and start drilling and try to drain all of the surrounding land. This led to a hundred wells being drilled where ten well placed wells would have effectively drained the reservoir. The DEC wants to see the gas produced with the least number of wells so there is as little surface disruption as possible. Does that sound bad to you?
You are calling it toxic frac water but do you know if it is toxic? For all I know it could be but I would like to see some evidence that is the case.
I suggest trying to get more facts before forming an opinion.
The DEC is a little short staffed as NY had a relatively small oil and gas industry prior to the Marcellus play. That will change with all this activity.