For several years now, advocates of "natural gas" extraction have aggressively promoted their fuel as a "clean alternative" to coal and oil, a bridge to an alternative energy future.
That may be good PR, but it isn't the truth.
Among other destructive impacts, "natural gas" development fragments wildlife habitat, destroys the pristine beauty of wildlands and makes people sick.
In communities in the western United States, air pollution from concentrated gas development has become a major public health problem. In little Pinedale, Wyoming (population 6,000), for instance, intensive gas development has resulted in code red ozone days that keep kids indoors and send asthmatics to the hospital.
As aggressive gas extraction spreads to the east, Pennsylvania communities are being hit with the same public health effects.
Gas extraction in states like Pennsylvania has been enabled by a relatively new – and environmentally destructive – extraction technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Almost overnight, the rapid deployment of fracking technology has enabled the drilling industry to produce gas from our country's previously impervious bedrock: in Texas, Louisiana, the Rockies and a wide swath of eastern states, including Pennsylvania and New York State.
As of 2009, there were 75,000 fracked wells in Pennsylvania alone.
Fracking adds to the air quality problems created by conventional extraction methods new threats to water quality and public health as the result of "slick water" drilling: millions of gallons of water are sucked out of regional waterways -- as is now being done to the Susequehanna River -- mixed with a proprietary witches' brew of toxic chemicals to create fracking fluid, and blasted deep into rock formations to release trapped gas.
The toxic wastewater produced by this process is then dumped back into our waterways, untreated.
"Natural gas" has been touted as clean because it is less polluting to
burn than coal or oil. It's true that burning gas doesn’t cause mercury poisoning, pollute our lungs with soot, or cause acid rain, like coal, and produces less carbon than coal or oil,
but its proponents have omitted the costs of producing "natural gas".
Methane, the main component of "natural gas", is a far more important greenhouse gas, and hence a bigger driver of climate change, than carbon dioxide. According to several recent studies, the methane leaked and vented during the gas drilling cycle, including production and transportation, makes gas almost as carbon-intensive as coal. So "natural gas", when you look big-picture at the production lifecycle, isn't clean at all.
Gas power, seen as a back-up for renewable sources like wind and solar, is cheap now only because fracking has evaded government regulation, but
the honeymoon won't last forever. Eventually, liability -- in the form of lawsuits, legislation and regulation -- will catch up to the frackers, and the costs so far shifted to landowners and local residents will be shifted back to the drillers -- after they have ruined our water, our land and our health.
In the meantime, "natural gas" could kill the economics of renewable energy, just emerging as a cost-competitive alternative.
"Natural gas" is the fossil fuel industry's Hail Mary pass. Right now, a
"natural gas" pipeline is being snaked up the Jersey coast to mainline fracked gas into New York City -- even as New Yorkers fight to keep the drilling industry out of our pristine watershed.
Advocates of clean energy fear that, before New Yorkers know it, we will find ourselves locked into buying costly shale gas for generations to come, while the emerging wind and solar markets pass us by.
The
article from Earthjustice.
