Natural gas, unnatural risk: Hydrofracking endangers our water

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2010/07/25/2010-07-25_natural_gas_unnatural_risk.html

Sunday, July 25th 2010

Natural gas, unnatural risk: Hydrofracking endangers our water

There is no higher priority for New York’s state and federal legislators than to put the brakes on the idea of opening areas upstate to the controversial form of natural gas drilling called hydraulic fracturing – “fracking,” for short.

While the technique has been around for 60 years, critics say the modern version of fracking is unsound, leaving broad swaths of land poisoned and polluted.

“Gasland,” an award-winning documentary that airs tonight on HBO (gaslandthemovie.com), shows communities in Pennsylvania, Colorado and elsewhere rife with sick people, animals that have lost their fur, and water so polluted that it actually ignites when a match is held near a kitchen tap.

The problem is a byproduct of modern fracking, which involves shooting millions of gallons of water and a cocktail of extraction chemicals deep underground – on average, 8,000 feet below the surface.  The pressurized water and chemicals shake loose natural gas that is then captured and piped away.

Remnants of the chemicals and half of the millions of gallons of water, however, stay behind and begin rising. The tainted water can end up polluting fresh drinking water, which tends to be only 1,000 feet below the surface.

Worst of all, a mysterious process called methane migration can leak combustible gas into the water table as well. That gives some residents in fracking areas tap water that explodes on contact with an open flame.

“It’s really quite shocking and strange and, and weirdly kind of thrilling when you see it,” the director of “Gasland,” Josh Fox, told me when describing the polluted water that turns to fire. “And then all of a sudden it hits: It’s really a huge problem.”

The film shows people assembling complicated 500-gallon bottled water systems, bemoaning lost property values and complaining of brain lesions, exhaustion and other health issues.

Fox blames the problem on the so-called Halliburton loophole of 2005, provisions in that year’s Energy Policy Act that exempted gas drilling companies from the Safe Water Drinking Act of 1974 and allowed them to not disclose the 500-plus chemicals that get shot underground during fracking.

Passage of the law set off a wave of fracking that has reached 34 states. Fox himself became aware of the trend when a gas company offered him $4,000 per acre to let them frack on land he owns near Delaware – an offer that would have brought him $100,000. After studying the process and its effects around the country, Fox rejected the money outright.

His land, like all of upstate New York, sits atop a vast underground deposit of natural gas, the Marcellus Shale, that stretches from New York to West Virginia and could be a veritable Saudi Arabia of natural gas.

Hopes of exploiting these and other major gas reserves are the reason energy magnate T. Boone Pickens made TV ads advocating more extraction of “clean, natural gas” to wean America off of foreign oil. Pickens was persuasive, patriotic and profit-driven. I just hope he plans more commercials to explain the potential of frack-induced pollution.

A growing number of people are already saying: Not so fast. The New York City Department of Environmental Protection has warned that fracking near the upstate watershed could pollute the drinking water for the 16 million people who live in or near our city.

Environmental groups are calling for a moratorium on leasing any land in New York for fracking, and Albany is considering a law imposing a one-year moratorium on fracking. A federal bill would give the federal Environmental Protection Agency the power to regulate fracking.

These are all good starts at what must be a top priority for elected officials: saving New York from environmental horrors that have already shown much of America the false promise of fracking.

elouis@nydailynews.com