April 22, 2013
TO: FRED KRUPP, Environmental Defense
Fund
FRANCES BEINECKE, Natural Resource Defense Council
MICHAEL BRUNE, Sierra Club
PHILIP JOHNSON, Heinz Endowments, and
Other fellow leaders in the environmental community:
While confined in the Chemung County Jail, here in the southern tier of
upstate New York, I have had to
think deeply and long about the environmental community’s response to the
boom in natural gas extraction from shale via hydraulic fracking, which is
now sweeping the nation, from west to east. I write to share with you my
insights regarding the split within our community over whether to embrace a
regulatory approach to fracking, or to press for bans and moratoria.
I’ll begin by explaining why I am in jail. Last month, on the west shore
of Seneca Lake, I stood with
other local residents on a driveway owned by Inergy, LLC.
In so doing, we blockaded a gas compressor station site and prevented a
company truck, carrying a drill head in its truck bed, from going where that
truck wanted to go. When we refused to disband, we were arrested and charged
with trespassing. When three of us further refused, at our arraignment on
April 17th, to pay the resulting fine, we were each sentenced to
15 days in jail. I am writing to you on day 6 of my incarceration.
As the nation’s largest energy storage and transportation company, Inergy
provides the infrastructure for fracking – including within states like New
York, where high-volume, horizontal fracking is not allowed. Missouri-based
Inergy has purchased more than 500 acres of lakeshore property along the
banks of our state’s largest and deepest lake. Seneca Lake
is so large and deep that it creates its own temperature stabilizing
microclimate, which provides the necessary ecological conditions for our
state’s world-class Riesling grapes. Wineries flourish on the hillsides about
both banks of the Finger Lake.
Inergy is interested in neither the wine grapes nor our unique climate. It
does not care about Seneca Lake’s designation as the
Lake Trout Capital of the world, nor the tranquil views that draw tourists
and fill summer cottages. Nor, more basically, with the fact that Seneca
Lake is the drinking water source for 100,000 people.
Inergy’s interest is, instead, focused on the landscape below the surface
– namely the abandoned caverns left over from a century of solution salt
mining that lie 1,500 feet beneath and beside the lake shore. Inergy’s plan
is to repurpose these salt caverns to serve as storage for billions of
barrels of fracked gases, which will be brought to Seneca Lake
by rail and by truck from other states. However, these fuels will not be
stored in barrels. The caverns themselves will serve as the receptacle for the
pressurized, liquefied, explosive gases.
The Seneca Lake 12 – as we arrestees call ourselves – fear that Inergy’s
planned storage facilities pose serious risks, including calamitous ones. As
journalist Peter Mantius reports in DC Bureau, salt caverns represented
only 7 per cent of the nation’s 407 underground storage sites for gas in
2002, but, between 1972 and 2004, they were responsible for all ten
catastrophic accidents involving gas storage. In Belle Rose, Louisiana,
the 14-acre sinkhole that is now making headlines was caused by the collapse
of a gas-filled salt cavern. As a result, surface and groundwater have been
contaminated,and an entire community faces relocation.
In addition to the risk for outright catastrophe, we Seneca
Lake 12 object to the heavy industrialization of the pristine Finger
Lakes region that we call home. Along with the 24-hour light
pollution from the industrial lighting of the drill rigs and the 24-hour
noise from the compressors, this facility will fill our scenic highways with
fleets of diesel trucks and send train cars of hazardous, flammable cargo
over our rickety rail trestles. A 60-foot flarestack will send carcinogens
and ozone precursors into our air. (My home is 15 miles downwind; my eleven
year old has a history of asthma.) Our deepest concerns are for the water.
Inergy’s hillside pits have already leaked, salt geysers have already spewed,
lake side vegetation has already died and, in spite of the fact that Inergy’s
discharges of effluent chemicals into the lake have been out of compliance
for the past twelve consecutive quarters, Inergy applied for and received
from the State of New York a permit to discharge 44,000 additional pounds of
chloride into the lake. Every single day.
In a larger way, our act of civil disobedience - for which I now wear an
orange jumpsuit and reside in a six by seven foot cell – is directed at the
practice of shale gas extraction itself. This is why, with our arms linked,
we unfurled a banner with the words, “Our Future is Unfractured.” Clearly, a
massive build-out of fracking’s infrastructure – the storage facilities; the
pipelines, the compressors and condensers; the access roads; the underground
injection wells for the disposal of fracking waste; the ethylene “crackers”
that turn the byproducts of wet gas into ingredients for the petrochemical
industry – is a necessary precondition for fracking to occur. As it boasts in
its communiqués to investors and clients, Inergy intends to serve the
Marcellus shale gas boom by turning the Finger Lakes
region into the Northeast’s storage and transportation hub for the vaporous
gases so obtained. Thus, taking a stand against infrastructure projects that
aid and abet fracking not only draws attention to the public health and
environmental harms created by the projects themselves but also signals
objection to fracking and, even more fundamentally,to the further
entrenchment of fossil fuel dependency in a time of climate emergency.
To this end, there are many fracking infrastructure projects near my home in
upstate New York where I might
have chosen to plant my flag as a first-time civil disobedient. In
Horseheads, there is a storage depot for fracking chemicals headed for the
gas fields of Pennsylvania. In
Painted Post, a processing facility for fracking sand. Near the jail where I
am housed here in Elmira, a
landfill accepts radioactive drill cuttings from out-of-state operations. So,
why protest at a compressor station site? The answer, for me, is highly
personal. My son Elijah was born in a birth center on a hill overlooking Seneca
Lake, just down the road from the new compressor station.The
west shore of Seneca
– where I walked when in labor – is a charmed place for me. And the burial of
explosive hydrocarbon gases beneath it is, for me, a desecration.
But particulars aside, it’s the generic, cumulative, systemic and
ubiquitous impacts of drilling and fracking operations and their associated
infrastructure projects across the nation that is the first topic I want to
raise with you in this letter.
Fracking, and the multitude of corollary activities that enable it, is
turning this nation inside out. Consider that, by weight, the new number one
commodity sent beyond its borders by the State of Wisconsin
– which does not even engage in fracking – is silica sand. (Prized for its
ability to withstand the lithostatic pressure of the earth without crumbling,
grains of silica sand are shot into the shards of shale during fracking
operations in order to prop the cracks open, so that the oil or gas can flow
out of them.) In other words, Wisconsin
is now exporting itself. The sand counties of Aldo Leopold are being loaded
onto barges, trucks, and railcars headed for the fracking fields of America.
Hills, bluffs, coulees: they are all going. Big parts of formerly rolling Wisconsin
are now, thanks to frack sand mining, as flat as Illinois.
In the process, surface water is silted, groundwater is threatened, and air
fills with silica dust – a known lung carcinogen and a known cause of the
disabling disease silicosis. Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania,
drilling and fracking operations fragment millions of acres of intact,
interior forests – along with the ecosystem services they provide.
Nationally, thanks to fracking, energy extraction has become the number one
land use; the U.S.
has more acreage leased for oil and gas than planted in wheat or soy.
Against this backdrop of epic transformation of the landscape and mass
industrialization of rural America,
the policy discussions about fracking emerging from your respective organizations
are remarkably narrow and conciliatory. Partnering with industry,
Environmental Defense Fund focuses on calculating methane emissions rates
from well pads and, together with the Heinz Endowments, promulgating
voluntary standards for fracking based on “best practices.” The dubious
notion of “sustainable shale” aside (by what definition of “sustain” can any
non-renewable fossil fuel be described, let alone the methane bubbles trapped
inside the Marcellus Shale, whose recoverable reserves have been re-estimated
sharply downward by geologists and are now believed to provide only six years
worth of U.S. gas usage), the Center for Sustainable Shale fails to consider
the devastating collateral damage created by all the corollary activities
that necessarily accompany shale gas extraction: strip-mining for sand, clear
cutting of forests, and destruction of productive farmland are just three.
While you consider industry best practices such as green completion,
recycling of fracking fluid, and strict engineering standards for well
casings, you entirely ignore the massive amounts of steel and cement – miles
and miles of it for every well – that must be manufactured, transported, and
entombed in the Earth for the one-time,short-term, un-recyclable use of shale
gas extraction (in the case of the Marcellus Shale, a one-time use for six
years of gas).
Should Governor Cuomo decide to pursue full development of shale gas via
high-volume horizontal hydrofracking, the amount of steel alone that would be
buried in New York State will exceed, by 2.5 times, the entire tonnage of the
U.S. Navy Fleet(as calculated by Cornell engineer Tony Ingraffea). To my
knowledge, no one has estimated the amount of steel and concrete consumed by
the fracking industry on a national basis for use as well casings and casing
strings. Consider, however, that the production of both materials is
fossil-fuel intensive and that, on a worldwide scale, cement manufacturing
along is responsible for six percent of total greenhouse gas emissions. Those
same resources – and the jobs they provide– could be directed toward the
construction of renewable energy infrastructures and the smart grid they
require.
The advocacy of “sustainable shale” is provincial not only because it
fails to consider radical alterations to land use wrought by fracking and the
costly sacrifice of carbon-intensive resources, but also because it utterly
ignores the ongoing fracking-driven transformation of our materials economy.
Fully 30% of natural gas is used not as a source of domestic energy but in
manufacturing, a big chunk of which is diverted for use in petrochemical
manufacturing. Fully 5% of the world’s natural gas supply is consumed to make
the petrochemical fertilizer anhydrous ammonia. Natural gas is also the
starting point for the manufacture of polyvinyl chloride (PVC plastic). The
“wet gases,” such as ethane, that are blasted out of the ground with methane
are used in the manufacture of other petrochemical plastics. And these are
just a few examples. As you know, the U.S.
chemical industry is experienced a parallel boom in activity as a direct
result of cheap, abundant shale gas.
Accelerated petrochemical manufacture brought on by fracking has profound
environmental and public health consequences. Cheap, abundant agricultural
chemicals undermine the local, organic food movement and keep our nation’s
farm system running on the pesticide treadmill. Anhydrous ammonia fertilizer
is responsible for the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico,
the destruction of aquatic ecosystems throughout the Chesapeake
Bay watershed, and contamination of groundwater aquifers
throughout rural America.
Last Thursday’s deadly explosion at the West Fertilizer Company in Texas
– which destroyed lives and homes across a vast swath of land – reveals the
inherent dangers of relying on volatile petrochemicals as a source of
agricultural nitrogen. Once again: natural gas is the starting point for
anhydrous ammonia manufacture (say what you will about downsides of
sustainable agriculture, but green manure, compost tea, and crop rotation
never blew up a nursing home). In sum, the fracking boom – whether regulated
or unregulated, guided by best practices or worst – further deepens the
dependency of our nation’s food system on non-renewable fossil fuels at
precisely the moment when we desperately need to be calling for its
emancipation. In this, natural gas is not a bridge but a perilous detour.
Likewise in chemical manufacturing, fracking, by making petrochemicals
cheaper and more abundant, undoes gains in toxic chemical reform, green
chemistry, and green engineering. The plastics that will be created by a
proposed new cracker facility in Pittsburgh
from the wet gases of fracking solve a waste disposal problem of the energy
industry – and make fracking more profitable – but, at the same time, add to
the burden of unbiodegradable materials that we are, as individual citizens,
encouraged to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Inevitably, much of this fracked
plastic will end up in the oceans, adding to garbage patches and contaminating
aquatic food chains. Meanwhile the cracking facility itself will add
ground-level ozone (smog) to a Pennsylvania
community already in non-attainment for ozone, and thus add to the
community’s burden of asthma, heart attack, stroke, and preterm birth. How is
this sustainable?
In my home state of Illinois
– where no fracking is currently occurring – the Sierra Club and Natural
Resources Defense Council has joined hands with industry to draft model
regulations for fracking (which are not as strict as those that we rejected
in New York). The Sierra Club’s
subsequent endorsement of the fracking regulatory bill now under
consideration by the State legislature has allowed pro-fracking forces in
both government and industry to claim that Sierra Club has endorsed regulated
fracking. In separate conversations this year with both Frances Beineke of
NRDC and Michael Brune of Sierra Club, I was told that a nation-wide ban on
fracking – or even moratoria in all states – would be “unrealistic” for
political reasons. What seems to me less realistic – politically – is to
imagine that the oil and gas industry, which has already exempted itself from
federal laws and surrounds itself with secrecy, would willfully follow any
regulations or voluntary standards of any kind. Ironically, the very states
that are most vulnerable to fracking for reasons of economic desperation are
those least able, because of massive budget cuts, to enforce regulations and
provide oversight for an industry whose wells and infrastructure will be distributed
across the landscape.
Meanwhile, land in Missouri
and up and down the Illinois River is being readied
for sand stripmining in anticipation of fracking’s debut in Illinois,
and the Shaunee National
Forest, a haven of biodiversity, in southern Illinois,
is being opened for drilling activity. The results will neither be
sustainable nor regulatable.
With fracking, the mainstream environmental community has lost its way,
aligning itself with those who believe that now is not the time to embrace
renewable energy and declare the fossil fuel party over.
The voices that cry “wait” and capitulate to powerful industry forces
through their willingness to trade one fossil fuel for another are taking us
down a perilous path. It is time to say now – grassroots groups and big green
groups together – that the unholy trinity of coal, oil and gas is part of a
ruinous past and; that further investments in new techniques to blast these
deadly fossils from the bedrock are a waste of time, money, water, air,
trees, health and farmland; and that well-intentioned attempts to regulate
and police the resulting mess is a waste of human ingenuity that could be
better spent re-imagining and retooling our economy and our culture for the
post-carbon age. We don’t need to design filters for cigarettes – they
provide only false assurances of safety and only delay the initiation of
entirely new habits and attitudes. Because I have now run out of paper –
With respect and toward the unfracked future,
Sandra Steingraber
Yvonne Taylor
Co-Founder, Gas Free Seneca
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