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.