http:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/view\/2014\/01\/30-10 <\/p>\n
Published on Thursday, January 30, 2014 by TomDispatch.com<\/p>\n
Is Fracking About to Arrive on Your Doorstep?
\nby Ellen Cantarow\t<\/p>\n
For the past several years, I\u2019ve been writing about what happens when big oil and gas corporations drill where people live. \u201cFracking\u201d — high-volume hydraulic fracturing, which extracts oil and methane from deep shale — has become my beat. My interviewees live in Pennsylvania\u2019s shale-gas fields; among Wisconsin\u2019s hills, where corporations have been mining silica, an essential fracking ingredient; and in New York, where one of the most powerful grassroots movements in the state\u2019s long history of dissent has become ground zero for anti-fracking activism across the country. Some of the people I\u2019ve met have become friends. We email, talk by phone, and visit. But until recently I\u2019d always felt at a remove from the dangers they face: contaminated water wells, poisoned air, sick and dying animals, industry-related illnesses. Under Massachusetts, where I live, lie no methane- or oil-rich shale deposits, so there\u2019s no drilling.<\/p>\n
But this past September, I learned that Spectra Energy, one of the largest natural gas infrastructure companies in North America, had proposed changes in a pipeline it owns, the Algonquin, which runs from Texas into my hometown, Boston. The expanded Algonquin would carry unconventional gas — gas extracted from deep rock formations like shale — into Massachusetts from the great Marcellus formation that sprawls along the Appalachian basin from West Virginia to New York. Suddenly, I\u2019m in the crosshairs of the fracking industry, too.<\/p>\n
We all are.<\/p>\n
Gas fracked from shale formations goes by several names (\u201cunconventional gas,\u201d \u201cnatural gas,\u201d \u201cshale gas\u201d), but whatever it\u2019s called, it\u2019s mainly methane. Though we may not know it, fracked gas increasingly fuels our stoves and furnaces. It also helps to fuel the floods, hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, and ever-hotter summers that are engulfing the planet. The industry\u2019s global-warming footprint is actually greater than that of coal. (A Cornell University study that established this in 2011 has been reconfirmed since.) Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2) and an ecological nightmare due to its potential for dangerous leaks.<\/p>\n
According to former Mobil Oil executive Lou Allstadt, the greatest danger of fracking is the methane it adds to the atmosphere through leaks from wells, pipelines, and other associated infrastructure. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has found leakage rates of 2.3% to 17% of annual production at gas and oil fields in California, Colorado, and Utah. Moreover, no technology can guarantee long-term safety decades into the future when it comes to well casings (there are hundreds of thousands of frack wells in the U.S. to date) or in the millions of miles of pipelines that crisscross this country.<\/p>\n
The energy industry boasts that fracking is a \u201cbridge\u201d to renewable energies, but a 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology study found that shale gas development could end up crowding out alternative energies. That’s because as fracking spreads, it drives natural gas prices down, spurring greater consumer use, and so more fracking. In a country deficient in regulations and high in corporate pressures on government, this cascade effect creates enormous disincentives for investment in large alternative energy programs.<\/p>\n
The sorry state of U.S. renewable energy development proves the case. As the fracking industry has surged, the country continues to lag far behind Germany and Denmark, the world\u2019s renewable-energy leaders. A quarter-century after the world\u2019s leading climate change scientist, James Hansen, first warned Congress about global warming, Americans have only bad options: coal, shale gas, oil, or nuclear power.<\/p>\n
Living in Gasland<\/p>\n
There\u2019s been a great deal of reporting about \u201cthe drilling part\u201d of fracking — the moment when drills penetrate shale and millions of gallons of chemical-and-sand-laced water are pumped down at high pressure to fracture the rock. Not so much has been written about all that follows. It\u2019s the \u201ceverything else\u201d that has turned a drilling technology into a land-and-water-devouring industry so vast that it\u2019s arguably one of the most pervasive extractive adventures in history.<\/p>\n
According to Cornell University\u2019s Anthony Ingraffea, the co-author of a study that established the global warming footprint of the industry, fracking \u201cinvolves much more than drill-the-well-frack-the-well-connect-the-pipeline-and-go-away.\u201d Almost all other industries “occur in a zoned industrial area, inside of buildings, separated from home and farm, separated from schools.” By contrast, the industry spawned by fracking “permits the oil and gas industries to establish [their infrastructures] next to where we live. They are imposing on us the requirement to locate our homes, hospitals, and schools inside their industrial space.”<\/p>\n
Wells, flanked by batteries of vats, tanks, and diesel trucks, often stand less than a mile from homes. So do compressor stations that condense gas for its long journey through pipelines, and which are known to emit carcinogens and neurotoxins. Radioactive waste (spewed up in fracking flow-back and drill cuttings) gets dumped on roads and in ordinary waste sites. Liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals that move this energy source for export are a constant danger due to explosions, fires, spills, and leaks. Every part of the fracking colossus, it seems, has its rap sheet of potential environmental and public health harms.<\/p>\n
Of all these, pipelines are the industry\u2019s most ubiquitous feature. U.S. Energy Information Administration maps show landscapes so densely veined by pipelines that they look like smashed windshields. There are more than 350,000 miles of gas pipelines in the U.S. These are for the transmission of gas from region to region. Not included are more than two million miles of distribution and service pipelines, which run through thousands of cities and towns with new branches under constant construction. All these pipelines mean countless Americans — even those living far from gas fields, compressor stations, and terminals — find themselves on the frontlines of fracking.<\/p>\n
Danger Zone<\/p>\n
The letter arrived in the spring of 2011. It offered Leona Briggs $10,400 to give a group of companies the right to run a pipeline with an all-American name — the Constitution — through her land. For 50 years Briggs has lived in the town of Davenport, just south of the Susquehanna River in New York\u2019s Western Catskills. Maybe she seemed like an easy mark. After all, her house\u2019s clapboard exterior needs a paint job and she\u2019s living on a meager Social Security check every month. But she refused.<\/p>\n
She treasures her land, her apple trees, the wildlife that surrounds her. She points toward a tree, a home to an American kestrel. \u201cThere was a whole nest of them in this pine tree out here.\u201d Her voice trembles with emotion. \u201cMy son was born here, my daughter was raised here, my granddaughter was raised here. It\u2019s home. And they\u2019re gonna take it from us?\u201d<\/p>\n
Company representatives began bullying her, she says. If she didn\u2019t accept, they claimed, they\u2019d reduce the price to $7,100. And if she kept on being stubborn, they\u2019d finally take what they needed by eminent domain. But Briggs didn\u2019t budge. \u201cIt\u2019s not a money thing. This is our home. I\u2019m sixty-five years old. And if that pipeline goes through I can\u2019t live here.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Constitution Pipeline would carry shale gas more than 120 miles from Pennsylvania\u2019s Susquehanna County through New York\u2019s Schoharie County. This would be the first interstate transmission pipeline in the region, and at 30 inches in diameter, a big one. Four corporations — Williams, a Tulsa-based energy infrastructure company, Cabot Oil & Gas, Piedmont Natural Gas, and WGL Holdings — are the partners. Williams claims the pipeline \u201cis not designed to facilitate natural gas drilling in New York.\u201d But it would connect with two others — the Iroquois, running from the Long Island shore to Canada, and the Tennessee, extending from the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast into Pennsylvania\u2019s frack fields. This link-up, opponents believe, means that the Constitution would be able to export fracked gas from New York, the only Marcellus state to have resisted drilling so far.<\/p>\n
In 2010, a high-pressure pipeline owned by Pacific Gas and Electric Company exploded in San Bruno, California, killing eight people and destroying 38 homes. It was the same size as the proposed Constitution pipeline. What makes that distant tragedy personal to Briggs is her memory of two local pipeline explosions. In the town of Blenheim, 22 miles east of her home, 10 houses were destroyed in 1990 in what a news report called \u201ca cauldron of fire.\u201d Another pipeline erupted in 2004 right in the village of Davenport. From her front porch, Briggs could see the flames that destroyed a house and forced the evacuation of neighbors within a half-mile radius. \u201cThat was an 8-inch pipe,\u201d she says. \u201cWhat would a 30-inch gas line do out here?\u201d<\/p>\n
Carl Weimer, executive director of Pipeline Safety Trust, a non-profit watchdog organization, says that, on average, there is \u201ca significant incident — somewhere — about every other day. And someone ends up in the hospital or dead about every nine or ten days.\u201d This begs the question: are pipelines carrying shale gas different in their explosive potential than other pipelines?<\/p>\n
\u201cThere isn\u2019t any database that allows you to get at that,\u201d says Richard Kuprewicz, a pipeline safety expert and consultant of 40 years\u2019 experience. \u201cIf it\u2019s a steel pipeline and it has enough gas in it under enough pressure, it can leak or rupture.\u201d Many pipelines, says Kuprewicz, aren\u2019t bound by any safety regulations, and even when they are, enforcement can often be lax. Where regulations exist, he continues, corporate compliance is uneven. \u201cSome companies comply with and exceed regulations, others don\u2019t. If I want to find out about what\u2019s going on, I may [have to] get additional information via subpoena.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2013 alone, Williams, one of the partners in the Constitution pipeline, had five incidents, including two major explosions in New Jersey and Louisiana. These were just the latest in what an online publication, Natural Gas Watch, calls \u201ca lengthy record of pipeline safety violations.\u201d As for Cabot, its name has become synonymous with water contamination in Dimock, Pennsylvania. Even that state\u2019s Department of Environmental Protection, historically joined at the hip to gas companies, imposed sanctions on Cabot in 2010. (The corporation later settled with 32 of 36 Dimock families who claimed contamination of their water supplies.)<\/p>\n
About 40 miles northeast of Davenport lies the town of Schoharie, where James and Margaret Bixby live on a well-tended, 150-year-old farm. The day I visited, their 19-acre pond glimmered in the early fall sunlight. As we talked, Bixby listed all the wildlife in the area: bear, raccoon, beavers, muskrats, wood ducks, mallards, mergansers, cranes, skunks, and Canadian geese. He began telling me about the last of these. \u201cPretty soon they\u2019re going to come in by the hundreds, migrating north. A dozen will stay, hatching their young. We have wild turkeys, just about everything. I don\u2019t care to live no place else.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Bixbys were offered more money than Briggs — more than $62,000 — for a pipeline right of way and they, too, turned it down. He and his wife are holding fast and so, he says, are 60 neighbors. \u201cThey don\u2019t want it to bust up this little valley.\u201d Pointing, he added, \u201cThere\u2019s gonna be a path up our woods there as far as you can see, [and] there\u2019s gonna be another one over there. That\u2019s nothing nice to look at.\u201d<\/p>\n
Driving around New York and Pennsylvania you\u2019ll spot odd, denuded stretches running down hillsides like ski jumps. On the crests of the hills, the remains of tree lines look like Mohawk haircuts on either side of shaved pipeline slopes. This is only the most obvious sign of pipeline environmental degradation. The Constitution pipeline would also impact 37 Catskills trout streams, endangering aquatic life. According to Kate Hudson, Watershed Program Director at Riverkeeper, one of the state\u2019s most venerable environmental watchdog organizations, the pipeline would \u201ccross hundreds of streams and wetlands by literally digging a hole through them\u2026 Any project that jeopardizes multiple water resources in two states is clearly against the public’s interest.\u201d<\/p>\n
Holding the Line<\/p>\n
Longtime residents aren\u2019t alone in opposing the building of the Constitution pipeline. This tranquil region has been attracting retirees like Bob Stack, a former electrical engineer. In 2004, he and his wife, Anne, bought 97 acres near Leona Briggs\u2019s home. Their dream: to build a straw bale house, a sustainable structure that uses straw for insulation. No sooner had engineers visited the land to start planning than the couple got a letter from Constitution Pipeline LLC. \u201cWe were absolutely clueless. We knew nothing about fracking or about pipelines. Fracking was about as remote from us as oil in Iraq or someplace else,\u201d says Anne. \u201cWe just looked at each other and said, \u2018What an outrage!\u2019\u201d The Stacks, who moved east from Nevada, are now living in limbo.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce you have this pulsing fossil fuel energy coming through, it will\u2026 industrialize the Susquehanna River valley,\u201d says Anne Marie Garti, who in June 2012 co-founded a local activist group, Stop the Pipeline. (\u201cThe unConstitutional Pipeline\u201d reads the organization\u2019s website banner.) \u201cThey\u2019re going to start building factories. There\u2019s an interstate, a railroad, there\u2019s cheap labor, and there\u2019s a river to dump the toxins in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Garti, a small, quietly assertive former interactive computer software designer, is now a lawyer; her aim: helping people like Briggs and the Bixbys. She grew up in the town of Delhi, near Briggs\u2019s home. In 2008, she found herself among a small group of activists who convinced New York\u2019s then-Governor David Paterson to impose a moratorium on fracking. Under the measure\u2019s shelter a powerful grassroots anti-fracking movement grew, using zoning ordinances to ban drilling in municipalities.<\/p>\n
Mark Pezzati, a graphic designer, helped get his town, Andes, in New York\u2019s Delaware County to enact a fracking ban. \u201cPipeline news wasn\u2019t high on the radar [then],” he says. “Most people were concerned about drilling.\u201d In 2010, Pezzati was shocked to discover that a pipeline called the Millennium had penetrated his state.<\/p>\n
It turned out that local land use laws govern only drilling. Under the 1938 Natural Gas Act, pipelines and compressor stations represent interstate commerce. \u201cSuddenly there was this frantic flurry of emails, where people were saying, \u2018We\u2019ve got to meet and make people aware.\u2019\u201d (The meeting took place and 200 people flocked to listen to Garti.) \u201cAs time went on,\u201d adds Pezzati, \u201cit became apparent that you really can\u2019t frack without a pipeline. There\u2019s no point in drilling if there\u2019s nowhere for the gas to go. So a light bulb went on. If you could stop pipelines you could stop fracking.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was when Pezzati and his friends, used to arguing for bans at town board meetings, came up against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which, among other responsibilities, regulates interstate natural gas transmission. It tilts to corporations, and even Garti found the bureaucratic hurdles it posed daunting. “I have some experience and training in environmental law and it took me a month to figure out the intricacies of FERC’s process,” she told me.<\/p>\n
Because FERC refused to disclose the names of landowners in the pipeline\u2019s path, Garti, Pezzati and about a dozen other volunteers had to pore over county tax databases, matching names and addresses to the proposed route. \u201cFirst we sent letters, then we did door-to-door outreach,\u201d says Garti. Her basic message to landowners along the right of way: \u201cJust say no.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are kind of impressed that you came all the way to their house,\u201d Pezzati points out. \u201cThere\u2019s not that many landowners in favor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Garti attributes local resentment against the pipeline corporations and their threats to exercise eminent domain to a \u201cfierce\u201d regional \u201cindependence\u201d dating back to the anti-rent struggles of tenant farmers against wealthy landlords in the nineteenth century. \u201cPeople don\u2019t like the idea of somebody coming on their land and taking it from them.\u201d<\/p>\n
The activists drafted a letter refusing entry to corporate representatives and circulated it to local landowners. By October 2012, Stop the Pipeline was able to marshal a crowd of 800 for a public hearing called by FERC — \u201ca big crowd for a sparsely populated rural area,\u201d Garti recalls. The vast majority opposed the pipeline\u2019s construction. By January 2013, 1,000 people had sent in statements of opposition.<\/p>\n
The organization has created a website with instructions about FERC procedures and handouts for local organizing, as well as a list of organizations opposing the pipeline. These include the Clean Air Council and Trout Unlimited. Among state and federal agencies expressing concerns to FERC have been the Army Corps of Engineers and New York State\u2019s Department of Environmental Conservation, known in earlier fracking battles for its collusion with the gas industry.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust like we have a fracking story that\u2019s different in New York State, we have a pipeline story that\u2019s different,\u201d says Garti. \u201cThe force of the opposition to pipelines is in New York State. And we have a shot at winning this thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Coming Home<\/p>\n
Having covered the environmental degradation of Pennsylvania\u2019s shale gas fields, the wastelands that were Wisconsin\u2019s silica-rich hills, and tiny New York towns where grassroots fracking battles are ongoing, I now have a sense of what it means to be in the crosshairs of the fracking industry. But it was nothing compared to how I felt when I learned Spectra Energy had its sights set on my hometown, Boston.<\/p>\n
Fracking isn\u2019t just about drilling and wells and extracting a difficult energy source at a painful cost to the environment. Corporations like Spectra have designs on spreading their pipelines through state after state, through thousands of backyards and farm fields and forests and watersheds. That means thousands of miles of pipe that may leave ravaged landscapes, produce methane leaks, and even, perhaps, lead to catastrophic explosions — and odds are those pipelines are coming to a town near you.<\/p>\n
Spectra\u2019s website explains that the Algonquin pipeline \u201cwill provide the Northeast with a unique opportunity to secure a\u2026 domestically produced source of energy to support its current demand, as well as its future growth.\u201c Translation: Spectra aims to expand fracking as long as that\u2019s possible. And a glance at any industry source like Oil & Gas Journal shows other corporations hotly pursuing the same goal. (A new New-York-based group, Stop the Algonquin Pipeline Expansion, is the center of opposition to this project.)<\/p>\n
It remains to be seen whether the people of Massachusetts will undertake the same type of grassroots efforts, exhibit the same fortitude as Bob and Anne Stack and Leona Briggs, or demonstrate the same organizing acumen as Anne Marie Garti and Mark Pezzati. But Massachusetts citizens had better get organized if they want to stop Spectra Energy and halt its plans to run the Algonquin all the way from Texas northward to Boston and beyond. Fracking is on its way to my doorstep — and yours. Who\u2019s going to hold the line in your town?
\n\u00a9 2014 Ellen Cantarow
\nEllen Cantarow\t<\/p>\n
Ellen Cantarow, a Boston-based journalist, first wrote from Israel and the West Bank in 1979. Cantarow has written on women in the labor force, social activism, and the Middle East. Her work has been published in the Village Voice, Grand Street, and Mother Jones, among other publications, and was anthologized by the South End Press. More recently, her writing has appeared at Counterpunch, ZNet, TomDispatch and Common Dreams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
http:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/view\/2014\/01\/30-10 Published on Thursday, January 30, 2014 by TomDispatch.com Is Fracking About to Arrive on Your Doorstep? by Ellen Cantarow For the past several years, I\u2019ve been writing about what happens when big oil and gas corporations drill where people live. \u201cFracking\u201d — high-volume hydraulic fracturing, which extracts oil and methane from deep shale — … Continue reading Common Dreams: No Pipe Dream: Why We’re All Living on the Frontlines of Fracking<\/span>