My thoughts on Natural gas drilling- why i think it is a horrid idea

This past weekend I took a trip up to the Catskill sand stayed at this little amazing place that had been restored. The owner was an amazing woman who told me all about the local efforts she was a part of in order to stop the drilling for natural gas- I am going to try to go up for the next town meeting.

A few classes back i think we spoke a bit about the moratorium on drilling for now in class- but I wanted to find more about what went on and how people who live there feel. It's so hard to understand how the vice president of government relations for the Independent Petroleum Association of America, can say with a straight face that the city's worries are unfounded because the waste water will be managed and is regulated under state law. "I don't see this hypothetical risk to New York's drinking water as realistic at all," he said.

But the identity of the chemicals used in hydrofracking- (which is the shooting millions of gallons of water and drilling chemicals at explosive pressure deep underground to break up the rock, and drilling the Marcellus would require more water than most other types of drilling ), which are toxic are protected as a "trade secret"! And it has been recorded that drilling in other states has resulted in more than a thousand waste water spills that have affected drinking water. There is also immense amounts of water needed for the hydrofracking and there is not a lot of disclosure about where the water would come from (most likely Delaware river), or how it would be disposed of after it was used.


http://www.propublica.org/feature/natural-gas-drilling-watershed-806
http://www.wnyc.org/news/articles/96537

PART 2

This was a response to a classmate of mine at pratt who was arguing that natural gas is a good 'transitional' fossil fuel......

Thanks for your response- I hear your point about as a society not being able to immediately switch over to all renewable energy and that there will be a transitional period- however while weighing the pros and cons- we need to do a full life cycle assessment of what the effects of extracting natural gas are, not just what happens when it is burned. After doing an LCA can we say it is worth the environmental and economic damage to gain another energy source for the next 20 years max before the natural gas in the Marcellus shale runs out given the current population and energy needs of the US- leaving us again where we are today?

Everyone can probably already guess my answer- no.

Why?

My reasons can be broken down into three major parts-

1- While it is true that as you stated "...Compared to the average air emissions from coal-fired generation, natural gas produces half as much carbon dioxide, less than a third as much nitrogen oxides, and one percent as much sulfur oxides at the power plant. "

However natural gas has the highest pre-combustion Co2e emissions due to gas leaks from pipelines- Pre- combustion effects are responsible for 5-20% of the total emissions associated with all fuel used in a building.

2- Also currently nyc doesn't have to treat its water- and if hydrofracking occurs a $10 billion water treatment facility will need to be built.

3- Pollution of ground water and the surrounding ecosystems- which I covered in my first two posts-from the exemption of hydro fracking from the EPAs Safe Drinking Water Act is a major concern on an environmental level, and an economic level (falling property values from contamination and decrease in tourism) and from a health and safety stand point.

You can read a lot of personal stories about the effects and concerns around pollution at :
http://blogs.wvgazette.com/coaltattoo/2009/09/21/more-on-dunkard-creek-fish-kill/
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104565793&ps=rs


Some more places to learn about the issue:
http://www.propublica.org/article/clean-natural-gas-not-in-my-backyard
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112978060

Also I thought this header on the http://www.cleanskies.org/ was very informative:

"Natural Gas: Myth vs. Fact
CLEAN, ABUNDANT, AFFORDABLE, AMERICAN "

I honestly think Natural Gas made very good at the beginning of its marketing- and we are told that it is fair safer and cleaner- because it is clear- where coal is dirty and sooty- I think their advertising/marketing group did a fantastic job-