Prompt Blog #5: PA’s Marcellus Shale Policy: FUBAR

I wracked my brain all week to decide what I wanted to blog about for this week’s prompt. There are so many issues that are close to my heart because they’re close to my home. I thought about writing about the siltation problem on the Susquehanna because of the lack of a riparian zone in the mostly agricultural landscape of Central Pa. I thought that I could write about the thermal pollution in the lower Susquehanna, caused by the reissuing of “cooling” water from power plants, which causes some areas of the lower river to reach summer time temperatures into the 100’s. Then there was the vanishing smallmouth bass population on the Susquehanna, which no one can explain except with vague generalities!

But then, I realized that you can’t really “rant” on any environmental issue in PA right now if you don’t rail upon the Marcellus Shale fracking boom that is currently going on in the state. For those of you who are not in the know, a large geologic formation called the Marcellus Shale lies underneath West Virginia Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York.  Scientists and drillers have known for decades that the shale has held natural gas, but it used to be thought of little economic value because traditional drilling techniques only yielded modest production (however, those older wells are still producing without much decline in production, so “A patient investor might make a profit from these low yield wells with slowly declining production rates”) (Geology.com).

As most of us know, though, industry has little to no time for patience (or sustainability). So when Terry Englander, a geoscience professor at Pennsylvania State University, and Gary Lash, a geology professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia, found that you could extract a lot more gas in a much shorter time with hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling (new techniques used in Texas to extract natural gas from the Barnett Shale), then the industry pounced on the area like a hungry cat on a mouse (Geology.com).

It is estimated that this formation holds 500 trillion square feet of natural gas (Savethewatertable.com). This kind of production would supply the whole East Coast with enough natural gas for…wait for it…if you can believe it…I’m not making this up: 50 years (Buffalonews.com)! While that seems like a long time, it’s a geologic blink of the eye, and when one considers the potential environmental costs, it’s not worth a dime!

Hydraulic fracking is not all it’s cracked up to be. In the process, “millions of gallons of water brewed with toxic chemicals,” and sand is forced into the well to “frack” the shale, releasing the gas (Buffalonews.com).  This in and of itself is not that bad, considering that the well is lined and sealed with concrete and used fracking water is supposed to be recycled, reused, or refined before being placed back in watersheds.

That would be the ideal situation. But when you consider that with PA’s current economic crisis (8 years of budget dispute included), the Department of Environmental Protection has seen a vast reduction in funding and personnel, so there is less oversight and applications for wells are passing without sufficient review. Consequently, oil and gas companies (from your small, local mom-and-pops to the big boys like Shell and Mobile) have a free ticket to drill for maximum profit.

Maximum profit means minimal environmental protections. First of all, these fracking operations are on the Allegheny Plateau and are drawing water from the headwaters of many streams and rivers that originate up in the mountains. This depletes the flow below and warms the waters, causing stress on aquatic wildlife. Furthermore, fracking water cannot be used indefinitely, and local water treatment plants don’t have the means or the capacity to treat toxic water, so these companies use “holding wells” to store this infected waste. Failure of these wells, spills, blowouts, or seepage through cracks in the seals of the gas wells can let this water into the local ground water, polluting residents’ drinking water. In Colorado, another state that has allowed hydraulic fracting, many have complained that the drilling waste has spoiled their drinking water (Savethewatertable.com).

It has even happened in PA. In Dimock, PA, many personal wells have been contaminated by methane leaking into the ground, and a spill into a local wetland led to a fish kill in the stream further down in the watershed (Buffalonews.com). There also was a blow-out in the central Northern Tier of PA and thousands of gallons of polluted water dumped into the ground (Savethewatertable.com).

So how has this happened? Don’t we have the Clean Water Act? Don’t we have a collective conscience or at least enough knowledge of history to remember the last 100 years where we had allowed the coal industry to run wild and now we’re still cleaning up their Acid Mine Drainage mess?

I guess not. Because we are the only state to have allowed the oil and gas companies free reign to destroy our landscape. In New York, there is a moratorium in place and no new gas wells can be drilled using the fracking technique until either more strict safeguards are in place or a better method is found to extract the gas. West Virginia has allowed drilling but oversees it closely; consequently, only a few hundred wells have been drilled (Buffalonews.com). In PA? 1,500 wells have already been drilled and 3,500 more permits are currently being processed (Savethewatertable.com).

Why do we allow this to happen? Greed. Individually, people who have property over the shale want to get rich quick by leasing their land to the drilling companies and earn royalties for the years to come. It has been a depressed area for many years. And the industry capitalizes on that. As one Washington D.C.-based industry economist said, “Before you put something in place that could dramatically affect this opportunity, think about the poor folks up there."

Listen to the rhetoric: “poor folks.” I barf at that paternalism. Having lived in Lock Haven, PA for 7 years, I was never a “poor folk,” even if money was tough. And I never would consider prostituting out the land just so that I could have it a little bit better. But others don’t care as much, and the industry won’t impose self-regulatory policies because “it believes state oversight is sufficient and worries the new EPA study will lead to new and costly safety and environmental rules that would rob them of decades of profit” (Buffalonews.com). Those rules may cost the industry money, but not having them will cost us generations of clean up.

Yet, no one seems willing to do anything about it. Republican Governor Tom Corbett wants to open up more state lands for drilling, yet he won’t impose a severance tax on gas extraction to help pay for clean-up and oversight. And the Democratic side of the state government isle isn’t proposing much else in the name of the environment. They do want to tax, but they do not support lessening the number of wells allowed to be drilled in PA. They too received campaign funds from the industry.

What’s worse, even if there are no accidents, even if we do everything “right” as far as protecting our watersheds, our forests and farms are going to vanish, replaced by gas well sites. New roads and open space will be clear cut in our woods to make way for the heavy equipment, pipelines, maintenance vehicles. Penn’s Woods will shrink even further. Our ridge tops, which have been held, almost sacredly by the hands of the Bureau of Forestry, Parks, or Game Commission will be trashed to make other people money (because don’t believe the hype, that money will not stay in PA unless it is in the form of a tax). Deforestation will lead to the fracturing of our woods, which will negatively impact wildlife. There will be greater runoff into our creeks, less shade for the headwater streams, increased water temperatures, fish kills, etc., etc., etc.

We live our lives in et ceteras. We blur over what’s truth and try to forget about it. Please write to your local representative and the governor if you live in PA. Ask for a moratorium on hydraulic fracking, or at least more oversight, a severance tax, and no more wells drilled on state lands.