Hinchey Calls for Air Quality Standards to Protect People in Gas Drilling Areas

A fracking operation near a home in PA

Congressman Maurice Hinchey (NY) is calling on President Barack Obama to enforce stronger protections from air pollution caused by shale gas drilling. In a letter signed by 20 of his House colleagues, Hinchey asks for the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) New Source Performance Standards to be finalized. These standards will address growing air pollution and public health impacts related to the rapid expansion of drilling in the United States, Hinchey says.

“We need the President to act immediately to sign off on the proposed air quality standards so that drillers cannot pollute our air without consequence,” Hinchey told the press. “We cannot let the rush to drill blind us from the need to ensure the safety of our environment and public health.”

Hinchey pointed to the pollutants that shale gas drilling emits: smog-forming chemicals, Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC’s), hazardous air pollutants such as benzene, and methane. These pollutants contribute to serious health problems. He highlighted a recent report published by the Colorado School of Public Health. The report, based on three years of air quality monitoring, found higher cancer, respiratory and neurological health risks (including headaches, chronic dizziness, eye irritation and difficulty breathing) among people living closest to drilling sites.

People living near wells breathed in volatile organic chemicals at five times the level at which the emissions are considered potentially harmful to public health, Hinchey noted. He also pointed to the Medical Society of New York which recently urged caution with expanded drilling and called for more study on those impacts before more drilling moves forward. 

The EPA’s proposed New Source Performance Standards, when fully implemented, would cause significant air pollution reductions, including: 540,000 tons of smog-forming chemicals, an industry-wide reduction of 25 percent; 38,000 tons of toxic air pollutants, an industry-wide reduction of almost 30 percent, and; 3.4 million tons of methane, an industry-wide reduction of about 26 percent.  The lion’s share of these reductions come from ending the wasteful practice of venting or flaring pollution from new hydraulically fractured gas wells directly into the atmosphere, said Hinchey. The new rules would require companies to capture these emissions, a time-tested technique that can be readily implemented.

You can read his letter to the President here.

Could Gas-Fracking Fuel a NY Gas Boom?

Yesterday members of the Tioga County Landowners Coalition (NY) got an e-mail titled “We Have a Deal”. For the past 11 months, landowner group representatives have traveled to Houston, TX. By their count they’ve placed brochures of the group’s offering (135,000+ acres) in the hands of about 84 companies. They’ve had face-to-face meetings with the CEO’s of 11 companies.

But no one was interested. As they tell it, the combination of low gas prices and the movement of drilling rigs to “wet gas” areas along the OH/NY border led to a “complete lack of interest from every company we met”. However, the group managed to find one interested operator and, over the past eight weeks, has been "working creatively with a major operator to create opportunity” for the lease-hungry landowners.

That opportunity: an unconventional leasing arrangement with eCORP wherein landowners will receive a majority share of the profits earned by a “sharing company” made up of contiguous parcels with their neighbors. Details to come, but the deal will be a “very lucrative financial arrangement” with the upmost attention given to environmental responsibility.

The plan, outlined in their press release, is to fracture the shale using liquefied petroleum (LPG) developed by GASFRAC. This will be better than hydro-fracking, says the landowner group, because LPG fracking uses no water and has no waste. So that should translate into reduced truck traffic and a smaller pad footprint.  

More importantly, this kind of fracking just might get around the state’s moratorium on hydro-fracking. But while the landowner coalition points to Chevron’s reports of successfully gas-fracked wells, Chevron’s own reports indicate that they are still evaluating the process.

Using gas to fracture gas wells sounds like a nifty idea, but it’s not risk free. According to Cornell professor Tony Ingraffea, who heads the “fracture” group, gas-fracking still relies on chemicals added to the gelled LPG. The process also needs compressors to re-condense propane/butane that returns from the well for reuse.

As for reduction of truck traffic, he notes that LPG has to get to the wellsite somehow, and currently that mode of transport is truck – only instead of hauling water, they’re transporting a hazardous material. And there’s still the problem of what to do with the waste fluids that return to the surface.

Fracking with gelled LPG does not eliminate many of the problems associated with hydro-fracking:

• there is still opportunity for waste fluid to travel to the surface via faults and old open wells;
• methane migration can still happen due to casing failures and leaks;
• surface spills of frack waste and/or drilling waste is still an issue;
• and there’s the added danger of propane, a heavier-than-air gas leaking and pooling in low spots near the well pad in large amounts and causing an explosion hazard.

 Not to mention that the process itself can be explosive.  Last year there were two separate explosions – or “flash fires” caused by LPG fracking in Alberta, Canada (here and here)

And fracking with gas is more expensive, initially, though propane can be recovered and used again. Still, the process needs to be “proved”, and according to the local media, that’s what the landowners hope to do – help prove that the process works, and it’s viable for extracting shale gas from the numerous layers beneath Tioga County.

Right now the question is whether gas-fracking falls within the rules of the existing environmental impact study for oil and gas drilling. Ingraffea says the science isn’t there to evaluate either the environmental impact or the safety of LPG fracks.

Marcellus Not the Only Game in Town

The NY Department of Environ-mental Conser-vation (DEC) hasn't completed the SGEIS (Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement) yet for high-volume hydro-fractured wells in the black shales. But that doesn't mean companies have stopped drilling.

Don Zaengle, a petroleum geologist who spent 20 years with Shell Oil Company, told Tioga County (NY) landowners that DEC issued more than 550 permits last year. "Companies are drilling into Oriskany, Trenton Black River and other gas-bearing strata under existing regulations that permit vertical wells," he said. Last year NY wells produced about 45 billion cubic feet (bcf) of natural gas. "That's enough to heat 650,000 homes," Zaengle added.

The number one producer last year: the Nowlan 1 well in Erin, a small town in Chemung County. "Despite what you hear about a moratorium, there's significant activity going on in the state,” Zaengle said. Of course, he added, there's much more drilling activity in PA because Marcellus is where many of the companies want to invest their drilling energy.

"Unfortunately, Cabot has done a lot to create bad publicity for Marcellus exploration," Zaengle said, criticizing what he feels has been haphazard drilling in Dimock. "Their operation there is not clean, good quality production. He hopes the company will go to more ‘environmentally friendly’ drilling in the future -  placing six wells on a single pad instead of the current scattering of vertical and horizontal wells across the landscape.

Still, Zaengle noted that geologists have learned much from Cabot’s production figures. Wells in the 7-square mile Dimock gas field are producing 100 million cubic feet (mmcf) each day. "At $4.75 per thousand cubic feet (mcf), that gas is bringing in $475,000 each day - $173 million per year," he said. 

The length of lateral well bores has increased as well, Zaengle said. He claims that most horizontal wells in PA are being drilled with 5,000-foot laterals, and that Range Resources has been drilling 7,000-foot laterals. They do 18 stages of frack, Zaengle pointed out. Ironically, as companies pursue gas trapped in the tight Marcellus shale, one of the most productive wells drilled in PA is in the Purcell limestone.

Meet Marcellus Up Close & Personal

Pick up a chunk of Marcellus shale and you immediately understand why energy companies are interested in it: it’s dark, like coal, and leaves a greasy smear on your hand. Like all sedimentary rock, the Marcellus shale was created by compressing layers of mud together for a long, long time. 

If you could slice through the earth here in upstate NY, you’d notice that the rocks stacked up like layers of a birthday cake  –  11,000 feet of sandstones, limestones and shales. And Marcellus shale is only one of the gas-bearing layers; Oriskany sandstone, located just below Marcellus, and Trenton-Black River, another four to five thousand feet down, also produce gas in this area.

Unlike sandstone, Marcellus shale is composed of fine-grained clay particles so tightly packed that there are very tiny spaces – pores – between the particles. Those tiny spaces are where the natural gas is trapped - and that's what makes getting the gas out so difficult. Not only that, the pores are not connected to each other which means that gas can’t travel from one pore to the next. The only way to extract gas from a stone with such low porosity and low permeability is to break it apart using a process called hydraulic fracturing.

Hydraulic fracturing may seem like a new-fangled invention, but according to Tony Ingraffea. Ingraffea, a civil engineering professor at Cornell, the technique could have been used for hundreds of years. He believes the Romans introduced water into cracks to aid in breaking rock. Hydro-fracking is all about physics, Ingraffea says. A rock is strong when you push on it, but weak when you pull on it, or put tension on it. Engineers use water pressure to put tension on rock, taking advantage of the rock's weakness.

Initially hydro-fracking of oil and gas wells was used to open existing cracks - to "stimulate" the flow of oil or gas by making existing fractures bigger.  "As long as the pores in the rock are interconnected, you can get oil to flow," Ingraffea says. But in shale the pores are not interconnected, which makes the rock impermeable to water. "That's good from a fracking point of view," Ingraffea says, "because the water will create fractures without going into the rock." And the way shale is made - with thin layers of mud compressed together - means the rock will fracture more easily on those planes, going further than, say, a crack trying to travel through a crystalline formation.

But fracking is just one small piece of the picture, Ingraffea says. People don't understand just how industrialized the process of extracting gas from shale is, and the number of wells that will be required to make extraction economically viable for the energy companies.According to new research from Terry Engelder at Pennsylvania State University, we'll be eventually looking at multiple wells on 80-acre units. As others have already said, gas drilling will be the most profound land use issue to face this region.

Concerned citizens + 24 hours + internet access = crowded town hall meeting

(photo of the Pulteney Town Board meeting by David Walczak)
On Tuesday, January 12 not many people in the Finger Lakes region knew that Chesapeake Appalachia LLC had submitted an application to convert a natural gas well into a disposal well for gas drilling wastewater. But 24 hours later the news had been sent to list-serves across the region and by the time the Pulteney town supervisor gaveled the town meeting to order on Wednesday, 60 people had managed to cram into the meeting room and another 20 or so packed the vestibule just outside.

At issue: Conversion of the Bergstrasser 1 natural gas well into a disposal well. The Bergstrasser well, drilled in 1997 to tap gas trapped within the Trenton-Black River formation, is located just northeast of the intersection of Armstrong Road and County Route 78 in the town of Pulteney – less than one mile west, and uphill, from Keuka Lake. The area is home to a number of vineyards and wineries, and is not only part of the wine trail but a tourist attraction.

Chesapeake sent an Environmental Assessment form to NY Department of Environmental Conservation on October 2, around the same time they filed an application for a UIC (Underground Injection Control) well permit with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

According to reports from those who attended the Pulteney Town Board meeting last Wednesday, January 13, Town Supervisor Bill Weber made it clear that the town had only learned of the proposal some two weeks ago the DEC asked him to let the DEC be the lead agency on the SEQRA review of the project. Without consulting the rest of the town board, Weber gave DEC the nod to take over as lead agency. His reasoning: the town board would have reached the same decision. 

Weber also said that the town has no involvement with the project – the town will only be involved when Chesapeake applies for a special use permit, and that had not been done yet. He assured people that the town Planning Board will schedule public hearings. Weber also mentioned that because he has leases with Chesapeake he will recuse himself from any decision-making processes on the application.

What Weber neglected to say was that he had been corresponding with ALL Consulting, who was completing the environmental assessments for Chesapeake. On September 23, Weber sent Steve Dutnell of ALL Consulting an e-mail letter noting that this was bound to be a hot topic and warning Dutnell to “get all your EPA and NYS DEC permits in place” before approaching the town for the necessary special permits.

Turning old Trenton-Black River wells into disposal wells may just be the trend of the future. Last year Fortuna received a permit from DEC to test the Mallula well in Van Etten, to see if it would be suitable for use as an injection well. Public outrage has kept the injectivity tests from happening, though the permit to conduct the testing may be renewed every 6 months over the next four years.

As more wells are drilled in the region – especially if the number of Marcellus wells is anywhere near the thousands anticipated – wastewater disposal will become an increasingly critical issue. While dumping salt water down old gas wells looks like a good solution to the DEC and the EPA, it looks like a lousy solution to residents who worry about contamination of their drinking water wells.

Paper Chase: getting a copy of the new Marcellus drilling regs

Want to read a copy of New York State’s new regulations for drilling in Marcellus Shale? Hope you’ve got a computer because the DEC (Dept. of Environmental Conservation) isn’t planning on printing them for a broad distribution.

On September 30, after more than a year of waiting, the DEC released their draft Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (dSGEIS) – but on-line only. It’s not just the folks living on top of the Marcellus shale who’ve been waiting to read this document; industry folks have been yammering for publication of the regs since spring.

What’s the big deal? The draft SGEIS is an environmental assessment that outlines safety measures, protection standards and mitigation strategies specifically for gas wells that rely on horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.

It’s a hefty document - 809 pages, about the length of the most recent Harry Potter book. Unlike the Harry Potter book, print copies of the dSGEIS will be as rare as dragon teeth. Oh, they’ll be available – just not in convenient places.

“First we’ll make sure print copies are available in DEC offices,” said Yancey Roy. He’s the DEC spokesman who gets to answer all the hard questions. Then the DEC will place copies in certain libraries that are document repositories. In my library system, which serves five counties, there are 33 libraries. Only four will receive bound copies – that’s not even one per county!

The kicker – Yancey says that beyond that puny effort, DEC is “making no provisions to provide print copies to the public.” Not only would the cost be prohibitive but a large printing would level a small forest.

That means that the average Joe will need to go on-line to read the proposed regulations. And quickly, too, because comments are due by November 30.

Because the regulations outlined in the draft SGEIS impact everyone living above Marcellus shale, there is much public interest in the recently released document. But for people living in rural areas, many without access to high-speed Internet and some without home computers, reading the dSGEIS online is not a viable option.

The impending comment deadline has local municipal officials and county legislators scrambling for their reading glasses and other folks scrambling to figure out how they’re gonna read the document in 2-hour chunks at the library – assuming they’ve got a way to get to the library. Not so easy a thing to do in the rural areas.

Our library, which happens to be one of the regional repositories for DEC documents, is only open three hours each afternoon, and a couple hours in the mornings two days a week, plus Saturdays. Oh yeah, there’s a couple hours on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, too – but those are also the nights for Village and Town Hall meetings, not to mention that most people are probably down at the high school cheering on our “can we make it to state again” volleyball team.

So, while DEC dithered about printing costs, a bunch of local folks downloaded the draft SGEIS onto flashdrives and headed to the nearest copy center. Turns out it cost ‘em close to $77 to get the entire document printed, but they cracked open their piggy banks and donated copies to their communities. In one town where there isn’t a library folks can drop by the local market for a cuppa coffee and peruse a chapter or two whilst catching up on the latest gossip.

Of course Shaleshock has a copy or two up in their office for folks to read, and they made extra copies for the county library – which is a repository but didn’t get the document from DEC until late last week.

As one person said, if the DEC can’t get a print document to the stakeholders, how will the DEC be able to tackle the much larger issue of regulating the thousands of gas wells expected over the next couple of years?

No answer from Yancey on that one yet…. but if you want to read the document you can, at
http://www.dec.ny.gov/energy/58440.html