Walking the Land Where the Drilling Rigs Will Go

New York Times
Editorial Observer
28 July 2009
By Verlyn Klinkenborg

I spent a weekend near Hancock, N.Y., along the East Branch of the Delaware River. This is an old fishing haunt of mine and in some ways, not a lot has changed. The woods were bright with leaves, and there was still a sharp boundary between well-kept farms and the wildness beyond.

There is plenty of change in the Catskills, much of it driven by energy development. The great scar of the Millennium Pipeline, which will someday bring natural gas from Ontario to New York City, comes straight over the mountains and down to the river. Yet that is nothing when measured against the huge changes that will come if New York State gives the go-ahead to gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale.

The Marcellus Shale is an enormous, subterranean layer of rock that runs from the Lower Adirondacks down through the Catskills and to western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. Geologists believe there are colossal amounts of clean-burning natural gas trapped there. And for many months now, representatives from energy companies, whose job is to persuade property owners to sign development leases, have been fanning out across New York’s Southern Tier with contracts in hand. While prices have fluctuated, some landowners have gotten as much as $3,500 per acre, plus 20 percent royalty, far more than people who signed early leases received.

The question of whether you have signed or not has created a new social fault line in local society. Some owners argue that they have not only a right, but an obligation to exploit the resources on their property. Others insist their duty is to protect the land. Before the drilling starts, New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation must decide where wells can safely be drilled and devise rules to prevent pollution. The rules, which the department expects to release in the fall, should be tightly drawn. At a bare minimum, they should protect municipal water supplies. Drilling should be forbidden altogether in Ulster, Greene and Delaware Counties, where there is lots of shale and New York City’s water originates.

It isn’t easy getting the methane out of the rock. First, the drilling rigs bear down and sideways, and then millions of gallons of water — drawn from local lakes and rivers — are shot in at high pressure to fracture the shale and release the gas. In time, the water will return to the surface, contaminated and in need of treatment.

Even knowing all of that, it is still hard to imagine how much this effort will transform the landscape. I walked with a friend along a gravel road near Peas Eddy. In a relatively flat spot in the woods, we came upon a surveyor’s stake. If the state gives the go-ahead, that subtle opening will be replaced by an industrial-sized clearing to make space for a drilling rig and all the machinery needed to fracture the shale and extract and pump the gas. All of that equipment will travel on the gravel road we had just walked, which runs along a stream bank.

My friend has refused to sign a mineral lease for his land. Yet his refusal makes no difference. Once a certain percentage of landowners in a development block have agreed to sign — and the state gives the green light — the drillers can go ahead. The rigs will run up and down the roads, and the woods will take on the look of a heavy construction zone, all in the immediate vicinity of people who have tried to hold out against the drilling.

I’ve seen all of this before in the explosion of coal bed methane development in Wyoming over the past decade. The same arguments have been advanced — energy independence — and the same alternative, a sober national approach to energy conservation, has been ignored.

It takes a reasonably practiced eye to see the damage coal bed methane development has done. But when the infrastructure for pumping natural gas out of the Catskills has finally been put in place, there will be no mistaking its impact — no missing the gaping holes in the forest canopy, the artificial ponds full of “fracking” fluid, the industrial damage done.

The estimates of the energy trapped below ground in the Marcellus Shale are indeed staggering. But to get that energy, we will have to give up a good share of the biological integrity of the land that lies above it. To stand in a glade in the Catskills is to realize what a deeply troubling trade-off that is.