"No Fracking Way!"

Natural gas drilling causes a stir around Ithaca, but isn't the end of the world

The Tompkins County Council of Governments is hosting a public hearing on Thursday at the State Theatre.

The Finger Lakes region is awash with controversy surrounding plans for natural gas drilling around Tompkins County and the Southern Tier. In fact, the likelihood that natural gas drilling is slated to occur near your home is quite high if you live between NYS Route 79 in Tompkins County and the Pennsylvania border.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has issued an 800-page draft supplemental generic environmental impact statement, or dSGEIS, featuring information about the geology of the Marcellus shale and its deeper cousin, the Utica shale, and about the proposed drilling plans. Public comment will be collected at the State Theatre of Ithaca on Thursday, November 19th in a meeting organized by the Tompkins County Council of Governments (TCCOG), and written comments will be accepted by the DEC until December 31st.

The "Map Tompkins" project at www.tcgasmap.org notes that 37 percent of the county is leased to gas exploration companies, but that land is owned by only 6 percent of the county's population. They make the odd claim that only that handful of landowners will benefit financially from the drilling, as if having thousands of well-paid people move to the area will have no cascading effect through the commercial sector. Many opponents of the drilling decry the imminent destruction of the "rural peace and quiet" of the Finger Lakes and Southern Tier, as if the region had not been clear-cut of its timber and farmed for 150 years, and as if mills and factories had not lined nearly all the streams in all the towns in the area until the early twentieth century.

Geology

Briefly, the Marcellus Formation is a 385-million-year-old shale that formed from mud deposited in an inland sea. The source of the sediment was the "Acadian Mountains," which rose then in what is now New England. The formation extends from Ohio and West Virginia to the Catskills, and it is thickest in the east -- closest to the sediment source -- and thinnest in the west.

The bottom of the sea was oxygen-poor, so the organic matter that rained down and accumulated did not decompose entirely before being buried. After several thousand feet of sediment accumulated above this mud, the consequent temperature and pressure transformed the organic matter into methane (four hydrogen atoms arranged in a tetrahedron around a carbon atom).

Not all of the Marcellus has enough gas in it to make it commercially exploitable; the portion of the formation worth drilling is called "the fairway." The Marcellus fairway has been estimated to hold 500 trillion cubic feet of gas, of which 10 percent is extractable. This could fully supply the natural gas needs of the United States -- accounting for some 20 percent of all our energy consumption -- for two years. It's the largest known reserve on the continent.

The Marcellus is called a "tight" formation because it is tightly compacted, and the gas is trapped in pores that are not well connected to each other. This impermeability has caused the natural gas to remain in the formation (a "source rock") rather than migrate upward into a "reservoir rock," a formation with greater pore space and more permeability, typically a sandstone or a limestone. Conventional gas exploration has been tapping reservoir rocks since 1821, when the first well was drilled in Fredonia, New York. That well was "fracked," or fractured, in order to get it to produce more gas. Back then they used dynamite; today's process is a bit more sophisticated.

Because the Marcellus is only 50 to 100 feet thick in this region, it needs to be drilled horizontally. Because it is tight and a source rock, it needs to be hydraulically fractured to increase permeability (connect the gas-filled pores) to yield commercially significant amounts of gas.

Drilling Techniques

Fracturing of wells has been used from the inception of gas exploration in the 1820s, but hydraulic fracture -- using water under high pressure -- to break the rock has only been around since 1947. This process is also frequently used to improve the performance of water wells. The use of chemicals to change the viscosity and other physical properties of the water began in the 1980s and has undergone -- and will undergo -- continual refinement by industry. Innovators in this area of "oil/gas field services" include the much-talked-about Halliburton and the lesser known, but equally large, Schlumberger.

The chemical additives, which make up 0.5 percent of the fracking fluid -- the rest is water and sand -- are designed to preserve the drilling equipment against the corrosive subterranean environment, seal off the fractured area from the surrounding rock to prevent gas from leaking away from the well, lubricate the fractures that have been opened in order to clear them of debris that would inhibit the flow of gas to the borehole, and kill bacteria that would gum up the works.

The Chesapeake Energy Group, one of the companies exploiting the Marcellus shale, has released a fact sheet that details what is in their fracturing fluid mixture. The mixture is made up of salts and organic compounds that are also used in household disinfectants, laundry detergents, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals, and as food additives. This, at least, is the portion of the mixture that the company has chosen to make public. One of the demands of the DEC dSGEIS is that the entire recipe be made public. When this happens, the companies will most likely change their recipes immediately.

Regional Extent of Drilling

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According to USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) geologist Bill Kappel, this will determine the northern limit of Marcellus Shale drilling, at least initially, as the formation "dips" southward. It is exposed at the surface at the north end of the Finger Lakes -- the town of Fayette is a good place to see it -- and descends at a rate of about 50 feet per mile toward the Pennsylvania border. It is about 2,500 to 3,000 feet below downtown Ithaca and about a mile below the surface at the border.

However, the draft SGEIS also discusses the Utica shale, another gas-rich formation that's hundreds of feet deeper than the Marcellus. This formation may be targeted for drilling in northern Tompkins and Seneca counties. The same technologies employed for the Marcellus drilling will be used to extract gas from the Utica shale.

Real Dangers Associated with Drilling

Many of the reported contamination incidents are associated with leaking frack fluid lagoons; they are lined only with polypropylene plastic and open to the elements. One current effort among drilling protesters is to prevail upon the DEC to change the existing regulations regarding storage and disposal of fracking fluid, with two strategies possible. Regulations could tighten the requirements for engineering of the lagoons, minimizing the danger of leakage or overflowing, or the lagoons could simply be prohibited. An alternative method, called the "closed-loop drilling fluid system," never exposes the fluid to the surface environment on site. Sue Heavenrich-Smith, a free-lance writer in Candor, wrote an article for the Broader View Weekly in October 2008 that explained the benefits of the closed-loop system in detail. In addition to reducing the possibility of spills, the method also reduces the amount of fresh water needed for fracking, because 80 percent of the water can be processed and re-used on site. Some have argued that it may even be less expensive than pits because of the cost of hauling more water. Industry likely avoids this approach in preference to pits because the required infrastructure takes more time and money to build.

The potential density of well sites on the landscape is a source of worry to many in the region. These are industrial sites that will generate noise, light, and traffic 24/7 for several years. One well is allowed every 40 acres; there are 640 acres per square mile. The Marcellus shale (and the Utica shale) underlies the entire region, and the math is straightforward. Although an outright ban on drilling is unlikely and possibly not even supported by a majority of the population, further regulation of the density of wells is entirely within the purview of the DEC.

The state can also insure that the small rural roads that will be heavily used by trucks weighing between 20 and 100 tons will be repaired after they are inevitably damaged. Several attempts have been made to create local laws that would require the gas companies to sign bonds that would have them making payments to insurance companies that would then pay for the road repair. According to Seneca County Attorney Frank Fisher, Chemung County has successfully bonded its roads by invoking a provision in the Highway section of the Consolidated Laws of New York State. Seneca County plans to follow suit. However, town roads are not protected by this law, and no local law has withstood scrutiny as yet.

The final legal issue is that of leasing one's land to the gas companies. In New York State, landowners do not own the minerals beneath the surface. Whoever brings those resources to the surface becomes the legal owner. The DEC has instituted a practice called "compulsory integration," which was intended to make sure that no landowner was deprived of royalties associated with gas drilling. The DEC web site provides the necessary details. In brief, a "spacing unit" is drawn around a proposed drilling site. When landowners sign leases for 60 percent of the spacing unit area, the owners of the remaining 40 percent are invited to a hearing where they have several options for economic involvement in the drilling. Even landowners who do nothing whatsoever are still entitled to 12.5 percent of the royalties from the wells, but no drilling can take place on their property.

Many landowners have signed leases without consulting attorneys at all, or after consulting attorneys with no experience with gas leases. The leases are often extremely bad deals for the landowner in a remarkable number of ways. For one thing, a bank will not give anyone a loan to buy property that has been leased, making it virtually impossible to sell leased property.

Helen Slottje, an environmental attorney based in Ithaca, is leading a campaign to remedy this problem. Information about Slottje is available through Shaleshock.org, an information provision non-profit focusing on regional gas drilling, and from Cornell Cooperative Extension. Slottje is, among other things, urging the formation of a landowners' association to create a bloc that will make coherent and extensive demands of gas companies, ensuring that the environment is protected and property owners do not get the shaft.

One risk of the animated attempts to drum up opposition to the drilling is that the spread of misinformation might backfire when it comes to defending regulations. Pretending that fracking and horizontal drilling are new, that the safety record of the industry is poor, that gas will leak into the water supply, or that industrial activity does not belong in rural areas is all just ammunition for the industry to use against the opposition to the drilling.

Bill Chaisson is a former adjunct professor of geology at the University of Rochester. He is now a staff writer for the Finger Lakes Community Newspapers and, with his wife Deirdre Cunningham, owns McLallen Bed & Breakfast in Trumansburg.