Marcellus shale drilling in Bradford County, Pennsylvania

From an Article by Jon Hurdle, StateImpact Pennsylvania, March 31, 2022

Renewed attempts by Pennsylvania House Republicans to boost natural gas production by ending a ban on new drilling on public lands, among other measures, are unlikely to succeed because the industry already owns many unused leases on those lands, and because it lacks the pipeline capacity to take any new gas to market even if it was produced, analysts said.

In early March, GOP members introduced a raft of bills and resolutions designed to increase gas production and so lessen national dependence on imported energy at a time when Russia, a major energy exporter, has invaded neighboring Ukraine.

The measures seek to halt Gov. Tom Wolf’s moratorium on new drilling under state forests; urge the Delaware River Basin Commission to end its ban on fracking in the basin; ask the governors of New York and New Jersey to allow pipeline construction so that more Pennsylvania gas can get to market; and boost domestic consumption of natural gas by stopping Pennsylvania’s plan to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

But all the initiatives are likely to miss their targets, and represent another Republican attempt to enact familiar measures at the behest of the natural gas industry, analysts said.

“All these are things that they have been suggesting on behalf of the natural gas industry for years,” said David Hess, who was secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection from 2001 to 2003 under Republican governors Tom Ridge and Mark Schweiker. “It’s nothing new.”

Hess said that even if the Legislature approves the plan to open up state lands to new drilling, it wouldn’t result in the desired production increase because some two-thirds of the leases already held by drillers are unused, showing that it’s not the ban on opening up public lands that’s holding back production.

In fact, he said, drillers have avoided developing many leases because of low market prices, at least until the middle of 2021. More recently, expansion has been slowed by a labor shortage, supply-chain snarls, and even a shortage of sand for fracking. “It would be a little silly to open more land to leasing when they haven’t developed what was considered prime leasable land back in 2008,” Hess said.

Cindy Adams Dunn, secretary of the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, told lawmakers in a Senate budget committee hearing on March 2 that 65 percent of existing shale gas leases in state forests have not been developed.

Quoting data from Pennsylvania’s nonpartisan Independent Fiscal Office, Hess noted that the industry produced gas from 10,322 wells in the fourth quarter of 2021, compared with 13,395 drilled, showing that more than 3,000 wells are shut in.

“Right now, today, they have multiple options if they wanted to increase production out there,” he said. “So far, they have not shown any interest in doing that.”

Despite Republican calls for higher gas production, IFO figures show it actually increased by 6.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2021 compared with a year earlier, suggesting more downward pressure on prices.

Natural gas futures prices rose to around $5.50 per million British thermal units in late 2021, their highest in more than a decade, after years when abundant production from the state’s Marcellus Shale kept the price at around $3. On Tuesday, the futures price in New York closed at $5.33.

Before the recent spike, the market slump deterred energy companies from adding new production, even from some wells that they had already drilled, and led some investors to pull back on their support of the Pennsylvania industry after returns had not been all they had hoped.

“Investors in these companies want to get their money out,” Hess said. “They learned their lesson. The finance folks who invest in these companies are holding them on a tighter rein than they did before.”

House majority leader Kerry Benninghoff (R-Center/Mifflin) said the United States should use Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an opportunity to wean itself off energy imports from countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, and instead ramp up domestic production from places like Pennsylvania.

“Gas-producing areas need to do their part to step up; and while President Biden and other world leaders are looking to countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia—countries that do not share our values—to increase production and make up the difference, they really should be looking to places like Pennsylvania,” Benninghoff said at a news conference on March 8.

Legislation to allow new drilling on state lands was made by Rep. Clint Owlett (R-Bradford/Tioga/Potter) who said production from those areas could be increased without disturbing the natural environment by siting well pads outside the preserved area and extracting gas by sub-surface horizontal drilling.

Revenue generated from leasing subsurface rights would “most importantly put us on a path where we as a country are not relying on Russian gas,” Owlett said in a statement on March 7. The next day, President Joe Biden signed an executive order banning the import of oil, liquefied natural gas and coal from Russia to the United States.

Jason Gottesman, a spokesman for House Republicans, denied that Biden’s order undermined the GOP proposals. He argued that the order doesn’t have the force of law, and could be changed by the current executive or the next one. He said Pennsylvania is a victim of years of federal energy policy that has “deprioritized” domestic energy production, but the state now has the potential to make up a shortfall.

“Pennsylvania has the ability right now to once again invest in and export freedom by being a leader in American energy independence, which makes our country and our allies more secure by no longer needing to be reliant on countries like Russia and other geopolitical actors that do not share our values to heat our homes and fuel our cars,” Gottesman said.

Wolf accused the GOP of trying to use the Ukraine crisis to meet longstanding demands from the gas industry. Although he supports bipartisan moves to cut Pennsylvania’s financial ties with Russia, he issued a statement dismissing the plans to boost gas production as “simply ​natural gas industry giveaways.”

Other measures proposed by lawmakers included one from Rep. Jonathan Fritz (R-Wayne/Susquehanna) who highlighted a bill urging the Delaware River Basin Commission to end its ban on fracking in the basin that covers parts of four states, including eastern Pennsylvania. The DRBC is a federal/state government agency responsible for managing the water resources within the 13,539 square-mile river basin.

And Rep. Stan Saylor (R-York) introduced a resolution that would urge the governors of New York and New Jersey to allow construction of natural gas pipelines so that Pennsylvania gas could reach markets in New England, which Saylor said have been “walled off” by anti-pipeline policies in those two states.

Analysts said there was little prospect of New York and New Jersey allowing new gas pipelines, given their pursuit of clean-energy goals, New York’s ban on fracking beginning in 2014, and a decision last year by the PennEast company to end a controversial plan to build a natural gas pipeline from Luzerne County to central New Jersey. That project faced strong community opposition, especially in New Jersey, and was withdrawn after seven years on the drawing board.

“I don’t think a resolution urging New Jersey and New York to change their own energy policy that they adopted for whatever reason is going to have any impact,” Hess said. And he argued that any policy change by the DRBC would require the unlikely approval by the governors of all four basin states – all Democrats – as well as from the federal government.

Matthew Bernstein, senior analyst for shale exploration and production at Rystad Energy, a Norway-based research firm, said lifting the ban on new drilling under state lands would do nothing to boost production because output is restrained by a shortage of pipeline capacity.

“The main issue surrounding increasing production in Pennsylvania is not a lack of land to drill, but rather a lack of the necessary takeaway capacity to bring the gas to market,” he wrote in an email. “No material increase, with or without lifting the ban, is possible in the short-term, and is then dependent on whether future pipelines taking gas out of the basin come online.”

Rystad projects Pennsylvania gas production will remain flat in 2022 because drillers are already producing as much as they can, regardless of the market price, given transmission restraints.

John Walliser, a senior vice president at the nonprofit Pennsylvania Environmental Council, said current gas production is restrained by the industry itself, and not by a shortage of land to drill on.

“There was so much gas being produced that it drove prices down,” he said. “There were questions from the investment side on whether they were getting the return they wanted. I’m personally not of the mind that what’s holding back the industry at the moment is regulation.”

Penna. Republican lawmakers and the U.S. Capitol attack

As part of WITF’s commitment to standing with facts, and because the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was an attempt to overthrow representative democracy in America, we are marking elected officials’ connections to the insurrection.

Reps. Benninghoff and Owlett supported Donald Trump’s 2020 election-fraud lie by signing a letter urging members of Congress to object to Pennsylvania’s electoral votes going to Joe Biden. The election-fraud lie led to the attack on the Capitol.

What we know about the upcoming vote to decide the fate of fracking in the Delaware River

From an Article by Kathryne Rubright, Pocono Record, February 23, 2021

The Delaware River Basin Commission will vote Thursday on a proposal that would ban high volume hydraulic fracturing, a natural gas extraction process also known as fracking, in the watershed.

The regulations proposed in 2017 would not ban the exportation of water for fracking elsewhere, or the importation of fracking wastewater, but the activities would be subject to DRBC review. Additionally, “new conditions, including stringent treatment and discharge requirements” would be imposed on wastewater, the DRBC said in an FAQ document regarding the proposed regulations.

The basin drains 13,539 square miles, about half of which is in Pennsylvania. This includes all of Bucks, Delaware, Lehigh, Monroe, Montgomery, Northampton, Philadelphia and Pike counties and parts of Berks, Carbon, Chester, Lackawanna, Lancaster, Lebanon, Luzerne, Schuylkill and Wayne counties.

The fracking ban would affect the Pocono region and other northeastern counties sitting entirely or partly over Marcellus Shale: Carbon, Monroe, Lackawanna, Luzerne, Pike, Schuylkill and Wayne.

High volume hydraulic fracturing “presents risks, vulnerabilities and impacts to the quality and quantity of surface and ground water resources,” the DRBC says, citing, among other concerns, the amount of water required to fracture shale and the sometimes-unknown nature of chemicals added to that water.

The Marcellus Shale Coalition, a natural gas industry group, has noted its members disclose chemical information via the registry at fracfocus.org.

Where does fracking stand now?

The DRBC does not have an official moratorium on fracking, but it did vote in 2010 to put off considering well pad dockets until regulations were adopted.

“Since then, the Commission has not received any applications for projects to be conducted on a well pad site – a situation that has sometimes been referred to as a ‘de facto moratorium,’” according to the FAQ.

Who decides this issue?

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf has a seat on the commission, along with Gov. John Carney of Delaware, Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey and Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, all Democrats.

Brigadier General Thomas J. Tickner, commander and division engineer of the North Atlantic Division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is the federal representative.

Wolf, Carney and Murphy have previously expressed support for fully banning fracking in the Delaware River basin. New York has already banned fracking.

From 2019: Gov. Wolf says he supports full fracking ban in Delaware River basin

The Delaware River Frack Ban Coalition is expecting a vote to ban fracking in the basin, but would prefer a fuller measure, saying it has “fiercely opposed the halfway measure of banning fracking but allowing frack wastewater to be dumped in the river and water to be exported and consumed to spur fracking.”

Some landowners in the watershed have questioned the DRBC’s authority to prevent them from profiting from natural gas under their property. The proposed rules note that the commission was given authority to control pollution by the compact that established it in 1961.

How to watch or listen to the meeting —

The meeting will be conducted at 10:30 a.m. Thursday on Zoom at this link: bit.ly/3kffleG. The meeting requires an ID (957 5916 5248) and a passcode (528513).

It will also be livestreamed on the DRBC YouTube channel: bit.ly/3qLZGpZ

Several phone numbers are available for dialing in, including 929-205-6099. See the DRBC’s meeting notice at bit.ly/2ZHzdhb

The meeting does not include time for members of the public to make comments. Public input was gathered at six public hearings in 2018 and through an online submission form.

LNG leaks, accidents, explosions and fires are risks that are unacceptable in high population areas

By Hannah Chinn, WHYY, StateImpact Pennsylvania, September 11, 2020

The LNG export terminal proposed for Gibbstown, New Jersey, will have to wait a bit longer, now that the multistate Delaware River Basin Commission has postponed a vote on the project until data and documents in the case can be reviewed.

The project would involve construction of a new dock and partial dredging of the Delaware River off Gloucester County. It’s part of a plan by developer Delaware River Partners — an affiliate of New York hedge fund Fortress Investment Group — to ship liquefied natural gas from Wyalusing, in Pennsylvania’s gas-rich Marcellus Shale region, to Gibbstown, where the gas would be loaded onto ships and exported elsewhere.

To reach Gibbstown, the gas would be transported in trucks or rail cars, following federal approval last month of the nation’s first LNG-by-rail permit.

Plans for the LNG terminal were initially approved by the DRBC in June 2019, but that move was appealed by the Delaware Riverkeeper Network and subsequently reviewed in a May adjudicatory hearing and public comment period. The officer overseeing that hearing ultimately recommended that the commission uphold its earlier approval.

DRBC members are required to vote publicly on whether to accept the hearing officer’s recommendation or reject it. On Thursday, they opted for a third option and delayed the decision, citing a need for more time.

“Given the size of the record, the technical nature of much extensive evidence, and the submission of briefs as recently as last week, completing a careful and thorough review by all of the commissioners by this meeting has not been possible,” the commission’s general counsel, Kenneth Warren, said Thursday. “Additional time for review and deliberation is required.”

The Gibbstown vote was not listed on the formal agenda for Thursday’s meeting, although local governments and environmental advocates hustled to oppose the decision and lobby their state’s representatives on the commission. The urgency may have stemmed, in part, from the fact that, if no action was taken, the developer could have begun constructing a dock and dredging the Delaware River as early as next week.

“Given its existing government approvals, [Delaware River Partners] could commence construction anytime after Sept. 15,” Warren said. “The commissioners may wish to preserve the status quo by staying the docket approval until the commission issues a final determination resolving the administrative appeal.”

Warren added that the decision to “stay” would not be indicative of any future choice by the commissioners to allow or deny the project.

The motion to postpone passed 3-1-1, with “yes” votes from New Jersey, New York and Delaware. Lt. Col. David Park voted “no” on behalf of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, while Pennsylvania abstained.

“I want to be clear: Delaware’s support is for us to reasonably complete the process and should not be read as anything else,” said Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control Secretary Shawn Garvin, who serves as that state’s commissioner and current DRBC chair. “Our focus is and will be on those things that fall under DRBC’s jurisdiction, but at this point, we do need some extra time to make sure that we have fully and thoughtfully reviewed all of the information that was recently provided to us.”

More than 90 people tuned in to the commission’s third-quarter public hearing to hear the results of the vote. Environmental advocates praised the decision in a public comment session afterward, saying the commissioners were “making the right move.”

“As we face the future here in the Delaware River Watershed, the health of our river and its 13,000-square-mile watershed depends in large part on the big-picture decisions you make at these meetings,” Tracey Carluccio, of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, told the commissioners as she thanked them for a “thoughtful delay.”

“Any time you delay a bad project, it’s a win for the environment,” added New Jersey Sierra Club president Jeff Tittel. Plans that support fracking, or that send “bomb trains” through vulnerable communities could be devastating, he said, noting that “the more we know, the more we realize how bad it is for the environment.”

On Wednesday, representatives of both organizations had delivered flash drives to the governors of New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Delaware, as well as the Army Corps of Engineers, which holds the fifth vote on the commission. The drives contained 50,962 petitions, resolutions from local governments along the proposed LNG shipping routes, and multiple letters from community groups, scientists, and environmental groups opposing the LNG export terminal.

Among others participating in the petition campaign were 350 Philly, Better Path Coalition, Catskill Mountainkeeper, Clean Air Council, Clean Water Action, Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, Empower NJ, Food and Water Action, Friends of the Earth, Mark Ruffalo for Move.On, Natural Resources Defense Council, Protect Northern PA, and Surfrider NJ and NY. A group of health professionals and 133 environmental group representatives, as well as actor-activist Ruffalo, also submitted letters to DRBC calling for a no vote on the project.

That public opposition appears to be mounting, as local government units including Lehigh County, Kutztown Borough, and Clarks Summit in Pennsylvania and Runnemede Borough in New Jersey have passed legislation opposing the transport of LNG through their communities. Several Philadelphia City Council members have indicated similar concerns, noting that a rail route through the city would expose Black, brown and low-income communities to the most intense zones of impact in the event of a derailment or explosion.

And then there are the people of Gibbstown, who would be directly affected. “I’m just a mom,” said Vanessa Keegan, one of the last to offer a comment at the meeting Thursday. She turned the camera to her 3-year-old son, Theo.

“Those signs in the Pennsylvania report that just came out, kids with the bloody noses and problems, that’s going to be us. And I am begging you to save my family — and that’s all I really wanted to say today, is that there are real people here, and I hope you protect us.”

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See also: GENERAL COUNSEL REPORT AND VOTE ON GIBBSTOWN ADMINISTRATIVE APPEAL, September 10, 2020

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See also: Marcellus LNG “Bomb Trains” Approved for Travel thru Philadelphia to New Jersey, FrackCheckWV, December 11, 2019

Ohio River Watershed is quite extensive & important

Environmental Law & Policy Center – Hoosier Environmental Council – Indiana Wildlife Federation – Kentucky Waterways Alliance – Lower Ohio River Waterkeeper – National Wildlife Federation – Ohio Environmental Council – Ohio River Foundation – Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition – PennFuture – Prairie Rivers Network – Sierra Club, Cumberland (Ky.) Chapter – Sierra Club Hoosier Chapter – Sierra Club Illinois Chapter – Sierra Club Ohio Chapter – Valley Watch – Watershed Organizations Advisory Committee – West Virginia Rivers Coalition

Groups Applaud Progress on Ohio River Protections

From: Vivian Stockman, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, 10/4/18

LANSING, W.VA. (October 4, 2018)—Environmental groups applauded a move to keep clean water protections for the Ohio River. The regional body charged with overseeing the health of the river, the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission, today decided not to vote on a controversial proposal that sought to replace 70 years of regional cooperation among eight states bordering the river in setting pollution control standards. The commission stated they intend to continue deliberations on the matter, and conservation groups see this as an opportunity for more meaningful dialogue about its implications for the future health of the river.

More than 5 million people depend on the Ohio River for their drinking water, and conservation groups staunchly opposed the move to outright scrap the current pollution-reduction arrangement. Massive public input in favor of regional cooperation helped convince commissioners to take a step back and reassess their options.

After the meeting, conservation groups applauded the action by the commissioners and by the governors who appointed them, including Govs. Bruce Rauner (Ill.), Eric Holcomb (Ind.), Matt Bevin (Ky.), Andrew Cuomo (N.Y.), John Kasich (Ohio), Tom Wolf (Pa.), Ralph Northam (Va.), and Jim Justice (W.Va.).

Environmental groups said:

“This is a positive step for the Ohio River and the 5 million people who depend on it for their drinking water, jobs, and way of life. We thank the commissioners and governors who decided to take a step back to assess the consequences of overturning 70 years of collaboration and cooperation around pollution standards. We also thank the over 6,500 members of the public for standing up and advocating during the comment process for a clean and healthy Ohio River, which is the foundation of our environment, economy, and regional identity.

“Serious problems such as sewage contamination, toxic pollution and harmful algal blooms continue to threaten the Ohio River and its many communities—and we firmly believe that the most effective, efficient and fair way to prevent pollution into the river is to work together. Pollution that enters the river upstream can impact communities downstream, which is why we need consistent, strong protections to protect people no matter where they live along the river.

“We appreciate the commissioners taking the time to gather the information that is needed to make an informed decision on the best way forward to reduce pollution into the Ohio River. We hope that the process moving forward will welcome additional input from the many stakeholders along the river and will continue to be transparent, inclusive, fair, and effective. We look forward to working with the states to improve the health of the Ohio River so that we can protect our drinking water, public health, economy, fish and wildlife, and way of life now and for generations to come.”

Conservation Groups on the Ground in West Virginia include:

Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (W. Va.): Robin L. Blakeman, robin@ohvec.org, (304) 840-4877
West Virginia Rivers Coalition: Angie Rosser, arosser@wvrivers.org, (304) 437-1274
Lower Ohio River Waterkeeper (Ind./Ky.): Jason Flickner, Jason@ohioriverwaterkeeper.org, (502) 276-5957
National Wildlife Federation: Jordan Lubetkin, lubetkin@nwf.org, (734) 904-1589
Ohio Environmental Council: David Miller, dmiller@theoec.org, (614) 487-7506

Other Groups willing to comment on the action include:

Environmental Law & Policy Center (Ill.): Madeline Fleisher, mfleisher@elpc.org, (857) 636-0371
Hoosier Environmental Council (Ind.): Marianne Holland, mholland@hecweb.org, (317) 981-3210
Indiana Wildlife Federation: Emily Wood, wood@indianawildlife.org, (317) 875-9453
Ohio River Foundation (Ohio): Rich Cogen, rcogen@ohioriverfdn.org, (513) 460-3365
PennFuture (Pa.): Stephanie Rex, rex@pennfuture.org, (412) 463-2942
Sierra Club, Cumberland (Ky.) Chapter: Hank Graddy, hank.graddy@gmail.com, (859) 229-4033
Sierra Club Hoosier Chapter (Ind.): Bowden Quinn, bowden.quinn@sierraclub.org, (317) 695-3046
Sierra Club Illinois Chapter: Cindy Skrukrud, cindy.skrukrud@sierraclub.org, 312-251-1680 x1015
Sierra Club Ohio Chapter: Cheryl Johncox, cheryl.johncox@sierraclub.org, (740) 360-0420
Valley Watch (Ind.): John Blair, Blair@valleywatch.net, (812) 464-5663

Multiple states and millions of people depend upon the Delaware River

From an Update by Miguel Cordon, S&P Global Market Intelligence, August 22, 2018

A New Jersey agency in charge of protecting state ratepayers asked a federal appeals court to review the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approval of PennEast Pipeline’s 1.1-Bcf/d natural gas pipeline project.

The New Jersey Division of Rate Counsel in a Monday letter asked the US Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit to review a FERC order that issued a Natural Gas Act certificate to the project and another order that turned down a request that the commission reconsider that approval. The state agency said it was “aggrieved” by the FERC rulings.

The New Jersey agency has disagreed with the federal commission’s conclusion that the project was needed. During the pipeline’s federal review, the state agency submitted evidence that it said demonstrated a lack of gas demand from New Jersey gas utilities (US Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit docket 18-2853).

FERC recently issued a number of orders that shut down challenges to its approvals of major interstate gas pipeline projects. One of these orders rejected a rehearing request by the Delaware Riverkeeper Network related to the FERC approval of PennEast. The environmental group has asked the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review the FERC approval and rehearing orders on PennEast.

The PennEast pipeline would run from Pennsylvania to New Jersey to deliver gas from the Marcellus Shale. Shippers for the project, including local distribution companies and electric power generators, have subscribed to about 1 Bcf/d of the project’s firm transportation capacity in binding precedent agreements. The project would consists of a 36-inch-diameter pipeline running 120 miles from Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, to an interconnection with Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line in Mercer County, New Jersey (CP15-558).

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Kayakers call for ‘full’ fracking ban in Delaware River basin

From an Article by Kyle Bagenstose, The Doylestown PA Intelligencer, August 21, 2018

Demonstrators launched a protest from Bordentown Beach, saying they want New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy to ban importation of wastewater from drilling operations.

Call them kayak-tivists.

A group of demonstrators took their self-powered watercraft to the Delaware River on Tuesday morning, along with a banner carrying their message to “Ban Fracking and Frack Waste” in the river’s basin. A small contingent also took a three-hour excursion up the Crosswicks Creek in Bordetown, New Jersey, forgoing an earlier plan to cross the Delaware River to Bristol Borough due to an ominous weather forecast.

The demonstration is the latest iteration of a nearly decade-long effort to ban hydraulic fracturing, a natural gas drilling technique, in the basin. The focus is directed on the Delaware River Basin Commission, an inter-state regulatory agency whose five-member voting body comprises the governors of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and New York, along with a federal government representative.

The DRBC is currently mulling regulations on fracking, which has been de facto banned in the basin since the commission punted on the issue in 2010 following intense public pressure.

Draft regulations presented in late 2017 would ban the use of hydraulic fracturing to reach natural gas deposits, a technique that has propagated throughout much of central and western Pennsylvania over the past decade. But they would allow for the regulated importation of waste from fracking operations elsewhere into the basin for treatment, and for clean water to be withdrawn from the basin for use in drilling operations.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie abstained from a vote last year that advanced the draft regulations, and activists on Tuesday directed the most attention toward current Gov. Phil Murphy.

“We want him to stand with us to defend the Delaware River, and vote at the (DRBC), where they will be voting before the end of the year,” said Tracy Carluccio, deputy director of the nonprofit Bristol-based Delaware Riverkeeper Network. “We want all three of the activities to be banned.”

Kate Schmidt, a spokeswoman for the commission, wrote in an email the DRBC has “no set schedule” for when it will vote on the regulations. “As always, the Commission may adopt final rules only at a duly noticed public meeting,” Schmidt added.

Whenever the vote does come, Murphy’s ability to change the course of regulations is uncertain. After they were proposed last year, the governors of Delaware, New York, and Pennsylvania all voted in favor of advancing to a formal review, with New Jersey abstaining and the federal government voting against. If that majority holds when the draft regulations are taken up for an official vote later this year, New Jersey’s vote would be extraneous.

Jeff Tittel, president of the New Jersey Sierra Club, said Tuesday he thinks Murphy could still exert influence. He pointed out Murphy is now the chairman of the commission.

“We want him to lead as chair to amend the rules, to take out the fracking waste and withdrawal of water,” Tittel said. “If you give them the water for fracking, and then they turn around and give you the waste back, it doesn’t make any sense.”

Tittel added he believed the Murphy administration is waffling from a campaign trail commitment to support a full ban. He said Kathleen Frangione, Murphy’s chief policy advisory, and Catherine McCabe, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Agency secretary, said recently they were “studying” the issue of banning wastewater importation.

A news release still on Murphy’s campaign website also includes the text of a letter he submitted to the DRBC in June 2017 advocating for a full ban. “I fully support a ban on the importation of fracking wastes into New Jersey — to protect against an accident or spill that would harm our lands and waters,” Murphy wrote.

However, Murphy’s office did not say Tuesday whether the governor would take any actions to pursue a full ban. Asked for the governor’s position, deputy press secretary Liza Acevedo pointed in part to a February 2018 letter Murphy wrote to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf.

In the letter, Murphy wrote only that he “Supports a ban on fracking and the commission’s efforts to drive this policy through these draft regulations.”

Acevedo later added “The Governor does not comment on draft regulations, particularly ones that received a high volume of comments that are being reviewed by staff.”

Carluccio and Tittel said they are primarily concerned about toxic materials in wastewater from fracturing operations reaching the basin’s waterways. Particularly of interest is the Delaware River itself, which serves as a source of drinking water for millions in the region.

Carluccio said she’s concerned wastewater treatment processes are not capable of fully removing toxic substances from the wastewater before discharging them back into the environment. Much of what’s in wastewater is uncertain due to trade secrecy, although it’s known the water can also pick up contaminants such as barium and radium from underground.

She added she’s worried that as the gas industry runs out of underground injection wells in which to discharge wastewater, they may focus on exporting it to areas such as the basin for disposal.

However, the Marcellus Shale Coalition, a drilling industry group, provided figures stating the industry recycles more than 90 percent of its wastewater for use in other wells.

The coalition also argues hydraulic fracturing can be done safely and with little impact to water resources. Often cited is the Susquehanna River basin, which encompasses drilling areas and has its own commission, the SRBC.

“For more than a decade now, the SRBC has safely managed water resources, while allowing for responsible development of property rights,” David Spigelmyer, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, told state lawmakers at a June hearing. “The unconventional natural gas industry has worked closely with the SRBC to ensure that water withdrawals and water usage within the basin are done in a safe and responsible manner.”

Commission officials also are adamant that the draft regulations would be an improvement over what currently exists and discourage the importation of waste water. Schmidt said the current moratorium on drilling does not extend to importation, and the commission can only review any permit applications when they involve withdrawing more than 100,0000 gallons of water or importing more than 50,000 gallons of wastewater per day. Instituting the regulations would place new scrutiny on any such activities for drilling activities, officials said.

Percent Change in Jobs with & without Fracking

The false promise of fracking and local jobs

From an Article by Susan Christopherson, Professor, Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University, January 27, 2015

In a surprise decision that led to consternation in the oil and gas industry and elation among fracking opponents, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in December banned fracking in the state. He attributed his decision to unresolved health risks associated with this drilling technique, but the governor surely also weighed the economics and the politics.

During the past five years, I’ve researched and written about the economic impacts of fracking and, as a long-time resident of New York, I have observed its fractious politics. What I’ve found is that most people, including politicians and people in the media, assume that fracking creates thousands of good jobs.

But opening the door to fracking doesn’t lead to the across-the-board economic boon most people assume. We need to consider where oil and gas industry jobs are created and who benefits from the considerable investments that make shale development possible. A look at the job numbers gives us a much better idea of what kind of economic boost comes with fracking, how its economic benefits are distributed and why both can be easily misunderstood.

Not a recession buster

Pennsylvania is one of the centers of dispute over fracking job numbers. In Pennsylvania, the job numbers initially used by the media to describe the economic impact of fracking were predictions from models developed by oil and gas industry affiliates. For example, a Marcellus Shale Coalition press release in 2010 claimed:

“The safe and steady development of clean-burning natural gas in Pennsylvania’s portion of the Marcellus Shale has the potential to create an additional 212,000 new jobs over the next 10 years on top of the thousands already being generated all across the Commonwealth.”

These job projections spurred enthusiasm for fracking in Pennsylvania and gave many people the impression that oil and gas industry employment would lead Pennsylvania quickly out of the recession. That didn’t happen.

Pennsylvania’s unemployment roughly tracked the national average throughout the state’s gas boom. While some counties benefited from the fracking build-up, which occurred during the “great recession,” the state economy didn’t perform appreciably better than the national economy.

Nationally, the oil and gas industry employs relatively few people compared to a sector like health care and social assistance, which employed over 16 million Americans in 2010. The drilling, extraction and support industries employed 569,000 people nationwide in 2012, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Although it grew faster than other sectors of the economy, the core of oil and gas employment constitutes only one half of one percent of total US private sector employment. This total includes jobs unrelated to shale development and jobs that preceded the shale boom. As for job growth, the EIA indicates that 161,600 of these jobs were added between 2007 and 2012. Drilling jobs specifically increased by only 6,600.

Impressive growth percentages notwithstanding, that is not a lot of jobs. In 2010, more than 143 million people were employed in the US, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

In Pennsylvania, the Multi-State Shale Research Collaborative (MSSRC) report on shale employment in the Marcellus states found that shale development accounts for 1 out of every 249 jobs, while the education and health sectors account for 1 out of every 6 jobs.

FedEx drivers?

The central issue with job projections is how many additional jobs are credited to oil and gas development beyond the relatively small number of people directly employed in oil and gas extraction.

In December 2014, Pennsylvania’s Department of Labor and Industry reported that just over 31,000 people were employed in the state’s oil and gas industry. That figure was higher than the federal data indicates, but appears to be reasonable. However, what’s striking is that the Department attributed another 212,000 jobs to shale development by adding employment in 30 “ancillary” industries.

All employment in these related industries – including such major employers as construction and trucking – was included in this attributed jobs figure. Thus, a driver delivering for FedEx or a housing construction worker were “claimed” as jobs produced by the shale industry.

This is eye-rolling territory for economists. They know that attributing two additional jobs to every one directly created in an industry is very generous. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania attributed seven additional jobs to each one created in the oil and gas industry.

Depending on how broadly you define the state’s oil and gas industry, between 5,400 and 31,000 people were employed in Pennsylvania before many of the rigs started pulling out in 2012 to head west. Certainly, jobs in other sectors were also created, but a generous estimate would be 30,000 to 60,000 rather than the hundreds of thousands claimed by industry promoters.

QCEW is the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, a federal-state cooperative program that is based largely on the quarterly Unemployment Insurance reports filed by employers. Multi-State Shale Research Collaborative, Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, Author provided.

The MSSRC report demonstrates that only a tiny portion (under 1%) of jobs in many of these 30 industries could be related to shale development activities, and further, that Pennsylvania employment in these industries overall changed little before, during, and after the shale boom.

The real winner: Texas

Beyond the exaggerated numbers, a geographic blindness obscures our view of fracking jobs. Where do the workers extracting gas in Pennsylvania or Ohio live and spend their money? Where are the best jobs located? While the fracking industry may support the national economy as a whole, some places are winners and others are losers.

In Ohio, where extraction continues because its shale holds both natural gas and other valuable “wet gas” hydrocarbons, a series of investigative reports by The Columbus Dispatch showed that at least a third of the workforce in drilling areas are transient workers. In the four Ohio counties with the most shale permits, the number of local people employed actually decreased between 2007 and 2013.

This tells us that the production sites aren’t necessarily the places that get the economic boost. The most skilled workers on drilling crews are from Texas and Oklahoma and they return home to spend their earnings. Northern Pennsylvania drilling crews spent much of their money in the Southern Tier of New York.

My own research on the geography of shale jobs shows that Texas has derived the lion’s share of the benefits from US fracking. Texas has consistently had around half the jobs in the oil and gas industry (currently 47%). During the 2007-2012 shale boom, Pennsylvania gained 15,114 jobs in the drilling, extraction and support industries, but Texas gained 64,515 – over four times as many jobs. Texas not only has much of the skilled drilling workforce, but the majority of the industry’s managers, scientists and experts, who staff the global firms headquartered in Houston. Still, even in Texas, energy-related jobs constitute only 2.5% of the state’s now more diversified employment.

What does this tell us about New York’s decision on fracking? Andrew Cuomo may have decided that the state would do better providing finance capital to the oil and gas industry from Wall Street rather than taking on high-risk, low-reward fracking production. _________________________________

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

HALT! Fracking is Too Risky

Risks of shale oil drilling apply in West Virginia, too

Op-Ed by Barbara Daniels, Morgantown Dominion Post, Page 2-D, January 11, 2015

On December 17^th, joining New Jersey, Quebec, the Delaware River Basin and several nations, and due to much hard evidence presented by the public, New York state switched from a six-year moratorium on hydrofracturing (fracking) to a complete ban.

One of the documents most responsible for this historic action is the Grass Roots Environmental Education Summary Report on Health Risks From Proposed Hydrofracturing in New York state.

With the caveat that there is far more evidence, the report lists 26 of what it conservatively terms “risks.”  A like-mined petition to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo sums them up: “New data … associated with frack operations expose … intractable, irreversible problems” that even “th best imaginable regulatory frameworks” cannot protect against.

As fracking is little different in West Virginia, these risks might apply here as well.

Foremost is the enormous quantity of chemical-laden, radioactive, frack-brine in constant need of disposal.  If discharged from sewage plants, it contaminates rivers and streams.  In its most common use as a de-icer on public roads, these contaminants will also be carried into water supplies.  The radioactivity, mainly from radium 226, is soluble in water; but, as dust, can lodge in carpets, upholstery – and lungs.  Radium is colorless, odorless and tasteless.  Even in low doses, once ingested by breathing or drinking, it causes anemia, cataracts, lung and bone cancer, and death.

Secondly, New York state regulators reported that Marcellus-produced gas contains radon at average levels of eight times the allowable limits.  This radioactive gas is liberated whenever the fuel leaks or is burned, as in flares, power plants and homes.

Additionally listed were:

#3. Air pollution from the myriad on-site diesel engines plus the thousand or so truck trips, per well, carrying water and machinery through rural areas.  Diesel exhaust produces ground-level ozone (smog) and particulates.  These pollutants cause asthma in children and lung cancer in adults, and are linked to bladder and breast cancer, stroke, heart attack, cognitive decline and premature death.

#4. Flaring – which releases gasoline-type chemicals, such as benzene and xylene, plus other poisons.  Though the EPA ban on flaring starts in 2015, there are loopholes.

#5. The radiological contamination of ground water that will persist for thousands of years from landfilled frack drill cuttings and sludge.

#6. The certainty of polluted aquifers as frack waste and methane, coming from deteriorating cement well casings, follow old gas wells and fissures into water.

#7. Chemical combinations under heat and pressure with unknown effects.  For instance, 4-NQO, a carcinogenic chemical, even in parts per trillion, and not found in nature, is thought to be so created.  It has been recorded in toxic amounts in 24 out of 24 randomly chosen frack waste samples from Pennsylvania and West Virginia wells.

#8. The gas industry’s ability to fund colleges and research so as to generate false findings that cover up hazards.  These misleading reports create a state of leniency wherein existing rules are ignored and new ones stifled.

The West Virginia Mountain Party is working for a moratorium on mountaintop removal and fracking.

Note:  Barbara Daniels is a writer for the West Virginia Mountain Party, who lives in Richwood, WV.

SENECA LAKE -- The deepest Finger Lake averages 290 feet and is 40 miles long from Watkins Glen up to Geneva, NY

FERC Approves NY Methane Storage Project at Seneca Lake

From a News Article by Peter Mantius, Natural Resources News Service, October 3, 2014

Brushing aside warnings of dangerous geological risk, federal regulators say construction can start immediately on a methane gas storage project next to Seneca Lake that has galvanized opposition from wine and tourism businesses across the Finger Lakes in upstate New York.

The  decision by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission represents a major breakthrough for Houston-based Crestwood Midstream. The company has been waging a five-year campaign for permission to convert long-abandoned lakeside salt caverns into a regional storage hub for both methane gas and liquid petroleum gas, or LPG, from fracking operations in Pennsylvania.

FERC has jurisdiction over the methane gas storage portion of the project, while the state Department of Environmental Conservation has the final say over the storage of LPG, mostly propane and butane. The company has been trying to persuade both agencies that the old caverns are ideal storage sites for highly-pressurized, volatile hydrocarbons. Scientists who are not paid by the company disagree and have warned of the caverns’ unstable geology.

In May, after 14 months of review, FERC granted conditional approval of Crestwood’s request to expand its existing methane storage into a cavern that has a history of instability. Meanwhile, the NY-DEC has been evaluating the LPG portion of the project since 2009. It announced in August plans to hold an “issues conference” to further weigh the evidence before ruling.

Crestwood’s storage hub would be located in a cluster of several dozen salt caverns on the west shore of Seneca Lake less than three miles north of the village of Watkins Glen, population 1,859. The company continues to mine salt at the site, and it already uses a former salt cavern to store methane gas. FERC has allowed it to expand its working gas capacity from 1.45 billion cubic feet to 2.0 bcf.

Typically, methane gas is transported to the caverns by pipeline, while LPG storage would require truck and rail transport. If Crestwood wins DEC approval, it would store LPG in two other caverns less than a quarter mile away from the compressed methane.

The company has asserted that the history of the storage caverns, including details of their flaws, is a trade secret. And state and federal regulators have complied with the company’s requests to keep most cavern information out of the public eye. But reports dating back decades by engineers employed by the caverns’ owners — tracked down in Internet searches — candidly spell out their defects.

Opponents of Crestwood’s proposed storage hub have expressed alarm over FERC’s brisk dismissal of potential risks, but safety issues are not their only concern. They also fear increased air and noise pollution, a steep increase in LPG truck traffic through the village of Watkins Glen and new LPG rail traffic over a spindly 80-year-old trestle that spans the Watkins Glen gorge, one of the state’s Top 10 tourist destinations.

In March, two internationally renowned vintners who recently purchased 65 acres directly across Seneca Lake from Crestwood’s property wrote Gov. Andrew Cuomo to urge him to block the LPG portion of the plan.

“The potential for accidents, the threat to fresh water quality and the visual impact of a 60-foot flare stack with massive compressors is not compatible with developing the tremendous potential of the region,” wrote Paul Hobbs, owner of the Paul Hobbs Winery in Sonoma County, California, and Johannes Selbach of the Selbach-Oster estate in Germany’s Mosel Valley.

“For the past several years we have explored the vineyards and wineries of the Finger Lakes in search of an ideal parcel for growing world class Riesling,” Hobbs and Selbach wrote the governor. The site chosen on the east side of Seneca Lake just outside Watkins Glen, which features steep slopes, low-PH scale shale and slate soils and a cool growing season, “is unquestionably one of the premier places in the world for high quality winegrowing,” they added.

The Seneca Lake Wine Trail already has about three dozen member wineries. Michael Warren Thomas, who helped recruit Hobbs and Selbach to join them, recently met with a top aide to Cuomo to point out that their arrival could easily stimulate significant new investment in the Finger Lakes wine industry. Already, Thomas noted, Louis Barruol of Chateau St. Cosme and Master Sommelier Christopher Bates have floated the idea of building a visitor center near Watkins Glen in a bid to draw from around the world.

“These are not bulk wine producers,” Thomas said of Hobbs and Selbach. “They are people looking to make the best wine in the world in small quantities. We ought to pay attention when we have the best in the world deciding to make wine in our backyard.”

While Hobbs and Selbach arrived without invitation, hoopla, political backing or government incentives, Crestwood has been backed — both overtly and quietly — by a coalition of politicians

More than 400 people participated in a mass protest at a legislative hearing.

FERC’s decision to grant a green light for construction on the methane storage cavern preceded any public announcements of approval from the state. By law, the DEC must agree to modify Crestwood’s current underground storage permit for methane gas, and the state geologist must certify that the storage cavern is safe. However, as a practical matter, the state does not have the legal authority to block the methane storage project, if legal precedents involving federal-state jurisdiction are any gauge.

The best the public can hope for in the future is diligent monitoring of the methane storage facility for leaks and roof and wall collapses, said H.C. Clark, a Houston geologist who has sharply criticized FERC’s analysis of the cavern.

Clark pointed out in January that FERC had neglected to assess the safety implications of a massive roof collapse in the cavern. He learned about the event in a detailed report written in the late 1960s by Charles Jacoby, an engineer who worked for the cavern’s owner at the time.

During its analysis of the project, FERC had pointedly asked Crestwood if it knew of any cavern roof or wall collapses anywhere within its Seneca Lake cavern field. The company issued a qualified denial. If fact, a 400,000-ton chunk of rock — roughly the size of an aircraft carrier — had given way in the very cavern that the company proposed to use for methane storage.

After Clark disclosed the roof collapse to the public and DCBureau.org and other media outlets publicized it, FERC addressed the issue. It attributed the roof collapse to the fact that LPG and brine had been cycled in and out of the cavern at the time, eating away at its salt walls and weakening its structure. LPG has not been stored in the cavern since 1984, and it is now mostly filled with brine.

In its May 15 order conditionally approving the reopening of the cavern for methane storage, FERC concluded that after all brine has been removed and methane gas is added, “dissolution of the salt in the gallery will not occur.”

But Clark, who holds a Ph.D. in geophysics from Stanford and taught the subject for many years at Rice University, said in an interview October 1 that it would be “absurd” for FERC to imply that removing brine from the cavern removes all risk of further collapse. “This is an old — ancient by now — cavern sitting there with a broad, flat rock top, which is not what salt cavern folks want to hear,” he added. “The compressed natural gas will work its way up through any kind of abnormality.”

In August, Dr. Rob Mackenzie, a retired CEO of the Cayuga Medical Center, a hospital about 20 miles east of Watkins Glen, sought to quantify the safety risk of Crestwood’s methane gas storage operation to Schuyler County residents. An experienced risk analyst, Mackenzie prepared a formal quantitative risk analysis of the Crestwood methane gas proposal.

Mackenzie analyzed accident events — major fires, explosions, collapses, catastrophic loss of product, evacuations — at salt cavern storage facilities in the United States dating back to 1972. He concluded that the risk of an “extremely serious” salt cavern event within Schuyler County over the next 25 years is more than 35%.

Citing data from the Energy Information Administration, Mackenzie noted that in 2012 there were 414 underground gas storage facilities in the United States, including 40 in salt caverns. Aquifers and depleted oil and gas reservoirs are much more commonly used for hydrocarbon storage, and they have dramatically better safety records than salt caverns. “Worldwide, the percentage of incidents involving casualties at salt cavern facilities as a percentage of facilities in operation in 2005 was 13.6%, compared to 0.63% for depleted reservoirs and 2.5% for aquifers,” Mackenzie reported, citing a 2008 study by British health officials.

Between 1972 and 2012, there have been 18 “serious or extremely serious incidents” at U.S. salt cavern storage facilities, Mackenzie wrote, citing EIA data. “With the average number of (salt cavern) facilities in operation through most of the last two decades at close to 30, the U.S. incidence is about 60% (compared to 40% worldwide), and the frequency is about 1.4% per year,” he said. “Most other regulated industry sub-segments with a persistent serious to extremely serious facility incident rate of over 30% would be shut down or else voluntarily discontinued, except in wartime.”

Mackenzie also found that nine of the 18 salt cavern incidents involved large fires and/or explosions; six involved loss of life or serious injury; eight involved evacuations of between 30 and 2,000 residents; and 13 involved extremely serious property losses.

FERC, the regulatory agency, saw no need to further question the suitability of Crestwood’s salt cavern storage.

Concerns and Plans for the Future, Part 3

From a Speech by Sandra Steingraber, New Environmentalism Summit, Brussels, Belgium, June 3, 2014

Fracking destroys water. With no method to turn poisonous frack waste back into drinkable water, gas companies have resorted to pumping the waste back into the ground via deep-well injection. But this solution—which considered a “best practice”—has triggered earthquakes by stressing geological faults and making them vulnerable to slippage

In the United Kingdom, Canada, Mexico and Ohio, geologists have also linked fracking itself to earthquakes. Members of the Seismological Society of America warn that geologists do not yet know how to predict the timing or location of such earthquakes, but they do know that they can occur tens of miles away from the wells themselves.

In New York State, both the certainties and the uncertainties about the risk of earthquakes from fracking operations raise serious, unique concerns about the possible consequences to New York City’s drinking water infrastructure from fracking-related activities. No other major U.S. city provides drinking water through aging, 100-mile-long aqueducts that lie directly atop the shale bedrock. Seismic damage to these aqueducts that results in a disruption of supply of potable water to the New York City area would create a catastrophic public health crisis.

Now let’s look at fracking-related air pollution.

Air pollution arises from the gas extraction process itself, as well as the intensive transportation demands of extraction, processing and delivery. And yet, monitoring technologies currently in use underestimate the ongoing risk to exposed people.

Fracking-related air pollutants include carcinogenic silica dust, carcinogenic benzene and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that create ozone. Exposure to ozone—smog—contributes to costly, disabling health problems, including premature death, asthma, stroke, heart attack and low birth weight.

Unplanned toxic air releases from fracking sites in Texas increased by 100 percent since 2009, according to an extensive investigation.

Rural areas with formerly pristine air now top the list of the nation’s 25 most ozone-polluted counties. In these areas, questions about possibly elevated rates of stillbirth and infant deaths in the area have prompted an ongoing investigation.

Finally, community and social impacts of fracking can be widespread, expensive and deadly.

Community and social impacts of drilling and fracking include spikes in crime, sexually transmitted diseases, vehicle accidents and worker deaths and injuries. We know that traffic fatalities more than quadrupled in intensely drilled areas even as they fell throughout the rest of the nation.

Even as evidence of harm continues to emerge across the United States, reviews of the science to date note that investigations necessary to understand long-term public health impacts do not exist.

To explain why science is missing in action, we emphasize in our letter to the governor of New York the obstacles faced by researchers seeking to carry out the needed research. These include industry secrecy on the part of the gas industry which routinely limits the disclosure of information about its operations to researchers and routinely uses non-disclosure agreements as a strategy to keep data from health researchers.

Thus has the anti-fracking movement in the United States sprung up as a human rights movement to reclaim our right to live in a safe environment with clean air and clean water and not be enrolled as unconsenting test subjects in a vast experiment whose risks remain unassessed and unquantified.

In spite of remaining uncertainties, important studies continue to fill research gaps and build a clearer picture of the longer-term and cumulative impacts of fracking. Many such studies currently underway will be published in the upcoming three–to–five year horizon. These include further investigations of hormone-disrupting chemicals in fracking fluid; further studies of birth outcomes among pregnant women living near drilling and fracking operations; further studies of air quality impacts; and further studies of drinking water contamination.

Angela Knight of Energy UK asks for an energy policy that is “properly costed.”  So do I.

And a properly costed energy program must take into account the economic consequence of the resulting health impacts. In the densely populated Northeastern region of the United States where fracking has now penetrated, the medical costs for treating those affected by the resulting water contamination and air pollution have never been tallied.

Doing so would require conducting a comprehensive Health Impact Assessment with an economic analysis that monetizes the costs. These costs could be considerable. In the densely populated continent of Europe, the health costs of energy security based on fracking could also be considerable.

Angela Knight of Energy UK asks for an energy policy not based on emotions. So do I.

And I submit that an energy policy based on gold fever that has oversold the benefits, underpriced the costs and overlooked long-term risks is not emotionless. As described by Bloomberg in a story headlined, “Shale Drillers Feast on Junk Debt to Stay in the Treadmill”:

People lose their discipline. They stop doing the math. They stop doing the accounting. They’re just dreaming the dream, and that’s what’s happening with the shale boom.

Sounds like a highly emotive state to me.

We Americans and Europeans share a common destiny. We each live above bedrocks that are ancient sea floors suffused with bubbles of methane. These bubbles represent the vaporized corpses of sea lilies and squid that lived 400 million years ago. Biologically speaking, our bedrocks are a cemetery of vaporized corpses.

The U.S. plan is to frack them out of the ground, liquefy them and send them over here—all in the name of freeing you from Russian gas. And to encourage you to frack your own bedrock.

If that’s the future you choose, it is not possible to also create a circular economy and attain zero waste, which is the stated goal of the EU Commission’s Green Week, because in this shale are many other hydrocarbon vapors that are liberated along with the methane during fracking. Ethane is one.

In the United States, we have so much excess ethane—a waste product of fracking—that we are planning to build a massive ethane cracker in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania that will turn this waste product into ethylene.

Allegheny County, Pennsylvania is the birthplace of Rachel Carson. It is a county that already suffers from high levels of air pollution and excess rates of cancer. Ethane crackers are notorious air polluters.

By turning ethane into ethylene, this facility will solve a waste problem for the gas industry and create the feedstock for the manufacture of disposable plastic. Ultimately, this plastic will end up in our oceans as nanobits of non-biodegradable petrochemical.

If this is not what you had in mind, if a new, vigorous environmentalism is what you want, I ask you stand with us in calling for a moratorium on fracking in the EU, just as we have called for a moratorium on fracking in the U.S.

Our future is unfractured. Thank you.  Sandra Steingraber

>> Ecologist, author, and cancer survivor Sandra Steingraber, PhD, is recognized for her expertise on the environmental links to cancer and reproductive health. <<