New York Puts Brakes on Drilling in NYC Watershed, Clears Way for Upstate Wells by Next Spring
By Abrahm Lustgarten New York State environment officials shoved a cumbersome task off their plates Friday when they announced that their controversial environmental review of natural gas drilling in New York’s Marcellus Shale would not apply to drilling inside New York City’s 1,900-square-mile watershed. The decision appears to protect the unfiltered water supply for nine million residents — as well as another unfiltered watershed near Syracuse, N.Y. — because energy companies will be required to undergo a separate and exhaustive review for each well they propose to drill and hydraulically fracture inside the area, a hurdle that may amount to a de facto ban. But it also removes a significant political and scientific obstacle to completing the two-year statewide review process , paving the way for drilling to proceed across much of the rest of the state as soon as next spring. "Clearly there will be less analysis required to finish the job now that we are going to be focusing on the environmental safety of the process and not getting into the unique components of the FAD watersheds," said New York State Department of Environmental Conservation assistant commissioner Stuart Gruskin, referring to the Filtration Avoidance Determination, the federal permit that allows New York City’s water to be delivered untreated. "We are not giving special treatment to those FAD watersheds or deciding that it is unsafe to drill there — rather we are pulling them out and recognizing that there are a distinct set of issues." The state has received more than 14,000 comments relating to its generic statewide environmental review and has struggled to complete another draft of that review while coping with questions about the New York City watershed, and a shortage of staff to complete the research. By simplifying the scope of the study, state officials hope they can finish the larger review, known as the SGEIS, by the end of the year. Then they’ll begin considering the 58 drilling applications for outside the watersheds that have already been submitted, soon after. Concerns about the environmental impacts of drilling inside the New York City watershed — and about the state’s preparedness to manage the drilling elsewhere — were first raised by ProPublica in a July 2008 article that found state officials were not informed about what chemicals would be pumped underground during hydraulic fracturing and did not have a plan to dispose of the hazardous waste the process would produce. Gruskin said Friday’s decision to separately review drilling in the watershed was not an acknowledgement that fracturing presented any special risk, but rather was based on concerns that construction and traffic associated with drilling could lead to more sediment and turbidity in the city’s reservoirs. New York City officials praised Friday’s announcement as recognition that the state did not have enough information to say whether hydraulic fracturing was safe, and said they welcomed the additional environmental reviews. Last December the city pressed for an all-out ban on drilling in the watershed after a study it commissioned contradicted the state’s assessments and found that it would be impossible to protect the city’s water supply from the chemicals, waste and disturbance from the drilling. The announcement drew immediate consternation from both the energy industry and environmental groups. "Requiring an individual EIS on a well by well basis is too much," said Jim Smith, a spokesman for the Independent Oil & Gas Association of New York. Kate Sinding , a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said: "It indicates the state is still considering allowing drilling with toxic chemicals in watersheds that supply drinking water to more than 9 million New Yorkers," adding, "And it’s an ominous sign for the water supplies of those in the rest of the state — which could be subject to drilling under a rushed and fatally flawed environmental review that environmentalists, politicians and residents have said for months needs to be started anew." Sinding said the state was just avoiding a final decision about how drilling should proceed in the most delicate areas. She said the only way to fully protect New York City’s water would be to ban drilling in the watershed altogether. Gruskin said such a move would be nearly impossible to make. "At the end of the day an outright ban risks very substantial litigation without a sound basis," he said in a conference call with reporters. "Seventy percent of the property in watershed is privately owned, and to wave a wand and say no drilling can take place in the watershed would deprive people of the right to access natural gas that may be under their properties and there would have to be compensation." Reporter Sabrina Shankman contributed to this report. This story was published by ProPublica , an independent, nonprofit newsroom based in New York City, and is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license.
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New York Puts Brakes on Drilling in NYC Watershed, Clears Way for Upstate Wells by Next Spring
Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells — Our Ride to a Renewable Future
Recently I walked down to 255 Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, a couple miles south of where I live. I turned onto Wall Street, passed the New York Stock Exchange, and then proceeded to circle the same short block until a parking attendant confirmed that the address I was looking for no longer exists. A clothing store now stands roughly where the world’s first power plant once did. In 1882, at a time when Thomas Edison was being chastised by impatient investors and scoffed at by the press, he finally threw the switch here, illuminating hundreds of light bulbs along Wall Street. Within a decade, the early foundations of our modern-day power grid had been laid, and more than a million bulbs shone across the country. My walk was inspired by Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells — Our Ride to the Renewable Future by journalist Amanda Little . It’s the kind of book that makes sense of events and inventions you didn’t even realize belonged in the same story. From shipping crates to electric cars to silicone breast implants, Little elucidates a topic as complex and tangled as the wires now running beneath New York City. I’d be tempted to insert a pun here about how Little has pulled off something big, if I were into the kind of quippy subheadings found throughout the book ("It’s a Sprawl World," "Big Butz," "The Writing is on the Wal-Mart"). But I think Power Trip sells itself short with this cutesy packaging. It’s a friendly, but not a faddish, book — an expansive, impressively well-researched history that explains how we came to live in the world that we do and where we might go from here. Beginning with a long look at fossil fuels and the infrastructure they’ve generated, Little takes us to an "ultradeep" offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, an enterprise she finds "doggedly ambitious, but also seemingly desperate — like an addict forcing a syringe into the earth’s innermost veins." She recalls a time when the United States was "the Saudi Arabia of the world" in terms of supplying petroleum, then traces how oil "evolved from a fuel for war machines to a catalyst for war to a lethal weapon" on September 11th. One of the best scenes in the book is her fond rendering of the 1945 maritime meeting between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the king of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, during which the two men forged an alliance that would shape the modern world. (Ibn Saud brought along a herd of sheep, slept under the stars, and, having a lame leg, bonded with FDR over his newfangled wheelchair.) Much of the narrative is cast as a personal quest for understanding. This works well at times, such as when we descend with Little to inspect the electrical grid beneath New York City, where "hot flashes" have been known to fuse contacts to eyeballs. But it seems contrived in other spots — at Talladega in Alabama, for example, where Little has an epiphany that NASCAR is "more universally American — more me — than I’d ever realized." Even though Little catalogs the contents of her office, her home, and her salad in greater detail than necessary, her message about the astonishing ubiquity of petroleum is a powerful one. Our dependence on oil goes far beyond fuel. We touch more plastic than we do skin. And thanks to fossil-fuel-based fertilizers — arguably the most significant invention of the last century — we even eat oil. In the end, Little argues that the same ingenuity that got us into this mess can get us out of it. The last part of the book canvasses alternative energy technologies, including Scotch Tape-thin batteries made of viruses and "nanoink" that can be printed on any surface to convert sunlight into electricity (think pants that charge your cell phone while you wear them). To glimpse what the future might look like, she visits the new Bank of America skyscraper in Manhattan (where the rooms can tell if they’re occupied by measuring CO2 levels) and a zero-energy housing development in Tennessee — "an experiment that could have implications for American daily life almost equal to those of Edison’s Pearl Street dynamo." It’s heartening that the great inventor himself anticipated the end of fossil fuels. "This scheme of combustion to get power makes me sick to think of it — it is so wasteful," Edison told a visitor to his laboratory around 1910 (not 1931, a minor error in the book*). "You see, we should utilize natural forces and thus get all our power. Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy. "Do we use them? Oh no! We burn wood and coal, as renters burn up the front fence for fuel. We live like squatters, not as if we owned the property." * On page 252, Little quotes Edison as saying this in 1931. The source in her notes, however, is Little Journeys by Elbert Hubbard, a book published in 1913. If you have a look at the chapter on Edison, you’ll see that the quote is actually from an interview that took place when Edison was 63. Since he was born in February 1847, that would make the interview in 1910, unless it’s very early 1911.
Continue here: Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells — Our Ride to a Renewable Future