Greenies Won't Allow Progress For Energy Independence

The Saudi Arabia Of Shale
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Energy Policy: New York's governor wants to tap into a shale formation that can supply the entire U.S. with natural gas for 65 years. Will NIMBY environmentalists let him stimulate New York's and America's energy economy?
Last week, David Patterson released a draft report of his Energy Planning Board that does something Democrats are loath to do: It proposes developing a domestic energy resource — the huge amounts of natural gas trapped in the Marcellus Shale formation. New York produces 5% of its natural gas in-state and imports more than 95% from the Gulf Coast and Canada.

The Marcellus Shale stretches from southwestern New York to Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio. A nearby formation of Devonian shale is even more porous, with a superior amount of trapped gas per volume of rock.
Geologist Gary Lash of State University New York at Fredonia and colleague Terry Engelder of Penn State estimate that Marcellus holds 1,300 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. About 20 trillion cubic feet are produced in the U.S. annually.

Lash notes that successful wells have already been drilled in Pennsylvania — one near Pittsburgh and the other in Susquehanna County. A Penn State report that was requested by state legislators predicted that Marcellus could add $14 billion to the state's economy in 2010, create more than 98,000 jobs and generate $800 million in state and local tax revenues. Now that's what you call a stimulus package.
Drilling of the Marcellus in New York state has not yet begun. Gov. Patterson, to his credit, wants to change all that, but he's meeting stiff opposition.
Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Riverkeeper and other greenie groups object to the means of extracting gas and oil from shale — a technique known as fracking.
Fracking involves injecting water, with sand and other additives, into the rock to push the gas into accessible pockets. Improvements in technology allow drilling horizontally from a single, above-ground well, reducing the above-ground hit on the environment.

Kennedy and the rest of the fracking opposition say that since the technique uses a lot of water, we should worry about possible groundwater pollution and the impact on water supplies, rivers and streams. Proximity of the Marcellus formation to New York City's watershed has caused concern.

Roger Willis, owner of a hydraulic fracturing company in the Pennsylvania town of Meadville, says thousands of frack jobs have been done on rock formations above and below the Marcellus shale in New York state with no aquifer damage.

The new fracking technology allows access to deeper, denser shale. "These are surgical operations utilizing the most advanced drilling technology known to man," Tom Price, senior vice president of Chesapeake Energy, told lawmakers at a recent hearing in Albany.

Extracting oil and gas from shale requires less water than is used in the production of ethanol, where increased agricultural runoff has resulted in dead zones in rivers, lakes and offshore waters. Solar panel arrays of the size that might be competitive require huge amounts of water to clean. Water is a rare commodity in areas where the sun shines most — the arid land of the West and Southwest.

"Hydraulic fracturing is a key production method which has aided in U.S. production of oil and gas from more than 1 million wells and continues to aid in the production from over 35,000 wells per year," says Oklahoma's James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

"This 60-year-old technique has been responsible for 7 billion barrels of oil and 600 trillion cubic feet of natural gas," according to Inhofe. "In hydraulic fracturing's 60-year-history, there has not been a single documented case of contamination."

The Potential Gas Committee of the Colorado School of Mines reported in June that the U.S. has 1,836 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas locked up in formations like Marcellus, the Bakken formation centered in North Dakota and the Green River Formation in the Rocky Mountain West.

Drill, Patterson, drill.