The intensity of feelings that the prospect of natural gas drilling has raised is illustrated by the formation of a new branch of Earth First in our area. “No drilling! No compromise!” is the motto of Finger Lakes Earth First, which refers to its activities as a kind of “defense” of our local ecosystems.

From the logo used by Finger Lakes Earth First, it seems pretty clear that at least some of the group’s “defense” could include monkeywrenching – protest through sabotage.

With something as literally explosive as natural gas, monkeywrenching against natural gas drilling could become dangerous. What are the ethical considerations Earth Firsters ought to take into account in their anti-drilling activities in our area?

As the campaign approaches its zenith, there are political lawn signs up and down our streets, and even a big billboard far outside of village limits on route 96. What’s more important, however, is the talk going on around town about the candidates. In a small community like ours, what people already know about a candidate is not easily overpowered by a quick investment in campaign gear.

This weekend, much of the talk has to do with Republican mayoral candidate John White, who is seeking to replace incumbent Democrat Marty Petrovic. The concern being expressed has to do with one of the hottest political topics in our region: Natural gas drilling, and the impact of its fracking technology on our local water supplies.

It seems that John White owns a good deal of land outside of Trumansburg – land that’s leased out to natural gas drilling companies. In order for those leases to bring a profit to White, however, there would have to be an arrangement for local water to be used, so that dangerous substances could be added to it for hydrofracking, in which natural gas is released through the pumping of the resulting mixture into the ground.

As Mayor of Trumansburg, John White would be in a position to lead the village into providing some of our water to natural gas drilling companies such as the one that holds a lease on his own property. It smells like a serious conflict of interest.

If you see anything, you can call 877-919-4372 or email eyesondrilling@epa.gov .

No, if you want a clue about the political goings-on with the Ulysses Town Board, you’ll have to go to a report recently assembled by Allen Carstensen. He provides the kind of information about what happens at board meetings that never makes it into the official minutes.

I’ll be discussing many of the items Carstensen has documented in the coming days, but for this evening, I want to focus on one of the most timely issues for our town: The arrival of natural gas drilling in Ulysses.

I’ll risk offending some here in Ulysses by stating that whether a person decides to allow natural gas drilling on their land indicates a great deal about how they feel about their neighbors and their community. The reason is hydraulic fracturing (fracking), the drilling technique that has to be used in the Marcellus Shale, the geological formation underneath our town from which natural gas companies hope to extract their product. Fracking requires the use of large amounts of ground water, taking that water, and mixing it with a secret group of chemicals. That mixture is then pumped into the ground. When the process is over, the drilling company removes as much of the fracking fluid as it can, and then has to dispose of the fluid as toxic waste.

Here’s what we learn from Allen Carstensen’s report: At the last Town Board meeting, Ulysses Supervisor Doug Austic admitted that he has signed a lease with a natural gas drilling company, allowing them to perform fracking on his property.

Connect the dots to an old story: Doug Austic spent much of this decade trying to push through approval for Water District 5, a plan to construct water pipes snaking across the countryside throughout Ulysses – and to Doug Austic’s own property.

At the time, Supervisor Austic said that he was promoting Water District 5, because he hated the idea that some landowners in Ulysses might have poor drinking water. However, Austic has personally agreed to take part in a drilling project that involves taking huge amounts of our Ulysses water, mixing it with a bunch of secret chemicals that make it into toxic waste, and pumping it back into the ground.

It’s hoped that this fracking fluid isn’t spilled, doesn’t leak into groundwater, and doesn’t cause problems in some other way. It’s hoped that the fracking process doesn’t cause earthquakes or lead a neighbor’s house to explode. But, hey, no one can say for sure what will happen. We’ll just cross our fingers. Maybe it will all turn out fine.

Property owners like Doug Austic may see some profit – or they may just see drilling company trucks running roughshod over their land without a penny of income. However, these property owners have neighbors who aren’t choosing to go along with the natural gas drilling plans. Those neighbors most certainly won’t be seeing any profit, but their homes and land will be put at risk.

So, it’s not very gentle of me to say this, but I don’t think it’s a very neighborly thing for someone to sign a for-profit lease to allow drilling companies to go prospecting for natural gas on one’s land, when the likely impacts on one’s neighbors are still unknown. For the Supervisor of our Town to engage in such behavior seems particularly disappointing, especially when that Supervisor has been pushing a gigantic water program his neighbors would pay for, which just so happens to lead straight to his own personal profit.

In Mr. Austic’s favor is the fact that he signed the drilling lease on his land 15 years ago, not as a part of the recent push for drilling here. Some will say that 15 years ago, the environmental impacts of natural gas drilling weren’t known. Isn’t that still a problem, though? Should we enter into any kind of radical exploitation of our properties before we understand what the impacts will be?

“Dear Friends and Neighbors:

You may have heard about the prospect of drilling for natural gas in Tompkins County. In fact, you have a very good chance of living on or near land that has already been leased to gas companies since close to half of the County has already signed up.

Many of us heat our homes with natural gas because it is generally considered to be the “cleanest” fossil fuel available and will doubtlessly be a mainstay of the American energy generation system for the next several decades as we make the slow shift to more renewable and sensible sources. Is it ethically and morally defensible to heat your house with natural gas and fight to prevent companies from drilling in your neighbor’s adjacent fields?

You bet it is. It’s okay to be a NIMBY on this issue. There are trillions of cubic feet of natural gas beneath American soil. Currently natural gas prices are at multi-year lows because supply is so plentiful. We are NOT in a natural gas crisis in this country. There is no earthly reason to drill for natural gas in Tompkins County except greed. But we are inviting a health crisis in Tompkins county and other residential and agricultural areas where natural gas companies are gobbling up land leases if we don’t attempt to regulate natural gas drilling now!

WHY IS THIS A PROBLEM?
Halliburton and other energy companies have developed a means of siphoning natural gas from the Marcellus shale which lies under much of New York State and northeastern Pennsylvania with a technique called hydraulic fracturing (hydrofracking). This involves drilling wells into the shale (six to eight thousand feet below the surface of the earth) and forcing a poisonous mixture of water and unknown chemicals under pressure into the holes to force out the gas. The wells are drilled vertically but can run horizontally for miles beneath our homes, our wells, our water supplies, our children…well you get the picture. What is so bad about fracking fluid? Nobody knows except Halliburton and other gas drillers because they claim the fluid they use is proprietary and patent protected. More than a 1000 documented incidents of water contamination have occurred in New Mexico, Ohio, Alabama and other places where fracking fluid has been inserted into the water supplies of local communities. Recent information from Texas which is riddled with hydrofracked wells suggests that the technique may precipitate earthquakes. People and animals have died as a result of exposure to hydrofracking fluid but the extent of the danger is unknown at the moment. And even when a drilling process is proceeding as it should, the activity involved in working each well involves delivery of millions of gallons of water weekly and constant and deafening drilling and pumping of fracking fluid as long as the well is active. Would you want one in your backyard or across the street? And where would natural gas companies get these untold millions of gallons of water? From OUR water supplies and Lake Cayuga itself.

AREN’T THERE FEDERAL AND LOCAL LAWS PROTECTING OUR WATER SUPPLIES?
Yes, the Safe Drinking Water Act is a Federal mandate designed to do just what its name implies, namely insure safe drinking water for Americans. But in 2005 working with a Bush administration friendly to their goals the natural gas industry succeeded in exempting hydrofracking operations from governance by the Safe Drinking Water Act. But wait! Just because the Federal government has abdicated its responsibility to protect our water supplies, what about our State and Local governments and agencies? Unfortunately after defanging the Federal mandate incredibly the gas industry was also successful in pushing through NY State Environmental Conservation Law Article 23 which in effect prevents local town and county governments from regulating gas drilling activity within their jurisdictions. And as for the DEC that presumably protects New York State citizens from activities hazardous to health and/or the environment…well, the DEC is the agency that hands out gas drilling permits to gas companies and in fact has opened up some State forests to this activity…so far.

SO WHAT CAN YOU DO?
Look into the mirror! It is up to each of us to get concerned, involved and active NOW if there is any hope at all of stemming this developing environmental tragedy. At this writing, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce is considering a bill that would repeal the exemption that gas drilling currently enjoys from the Safe Drinking Water Act. If you care about this problem, please write to the officials on this Committee and urge them to recommend the legislation for Congressional deliberation. And towards that end, please write to your New York State Congressional representations and our Senators and to the State DEC. Some sample letters and relevant addresses follow. Please help us win this battle for our families and the lifestyle we enjoy in what is currently a fairly placid rural environment. If hydrofracking is allowed in Tompkins County that will certainly change!

Thank you,

Ken Zeserson and Judy Abrams on behalf of
Concerned Citizens of Ulysses (CCU)

Other town news this morning:

- There’s going to be a forum on the impact of natural gas drilling down at the Museum of the Earth. U.S. Representative Maurice Hinchey will have a staff member taking part. Our own representative, Michael Arcuri, will not.

- The dropout rate at Trumansburg High School has risen over the last three years. Note to Trumansburg teenagers: There’s a recession on with crippling unemployment. Now is not the best time to go looking for a job that’s going to bring you anything more than a minimum wage lifestyle. School can feel like a drag. Flipping burgers is worse.

Part of the process of natural gas drilling is something called fracking (hydraulic fracturing). Fracking forces a fluid into bedrock at high pressure, opening up cracks in the rock and allowing natural gas to escape. What that fluid is, however, no one really knows – except for the people at Halliburton who make the fluid. Independent analysis of areas where fracking fluid is believed to have spilled have found some very toxic chemicals, but currently, Halliburton enjoys a special legislative loophole that allows it to ignore environmental laws, and keep the contents of fracking fluid a secret.

In the House and Senate, the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act of 2009 seeks to close this loophole, requiring the disclosure of the toxic chemicals in fracking fluid to people living near proposed natural gas drilling sites.

The good news is that Michael Arcuri, who represents Trumansburg in the U.S. House of Representatives, has cosponsored the legislation, giving it his public support. The bad news is that appointed U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has declined to do so. That’s particularly disappointing, given that one of Kirsten Gillibrand’s political strengths was supposed to have been that she is able to represent the interests of people living in Upstate New York.

If Gillibrand continues to ignore the growing concerns of people living atop the Marcellus Shale, she may find herself surprised in 2010 by some upstate resistance to her effort to gain the Democratic Party nomination for New York’s junior U.S. Senate seat.

Yesterday, U.S. Representative Diana DeGette, from Colorado, introduced legislation that would close the loophole that keeps the toxic contents of fracking fluids a secret. The proposed law would also give the Environmental Protection Agency the power to regulate the fracking process.

A similar bill was introduced in the Senate by Senator Bob Casey, from Pennsylvania, which shares the Marcellus Shale with our area. Congressman Maurice Hinchey, who represents Ithaca and other portions of the Southern Tier, has cosponsored the legislation. “It’s time to fix an unfortunate chapter in the Bush administration’s energy policy and close the ‘Halliburton loophole’ that has enabled energy companies to pump enormous amounts of toxins, such as benzene and toluene, into the ground that then jeopardize the quality of our drinking water,” Hinchey said.

Senator Chuck Schumer has also cosponsored the legislation. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and our own district’s U.S. Representative, Michael Arcuri, are not yet officially supporting the bills.

Natural gas industry lobbyists say that there’s no reason to think that there’s ever any risks associated with fracking. People who live near wells where fracking has occurred complain of damaging changes in water pressure, as well as a nasty oily film in the water they drink. Then there’s the case of a couple in Ohio, living on the Marcellus Shale, whose house exploded because of natural gas leaking out of their drinking well after fracking was done near their home.

Right now, Halliburton (yes, that Halliburton) claims an exemption from laws that would otherwise require the company to report the toxic chemicals found in the fluids used in the fracking process. U.S. Representative Diana DeGette plans to introduce a bill to Congress that would close that loophole.

The natural gas under Ulysses isn’t going anywhere. Will residents be willing to wait to sign leases until a new law provides them with more information about the substances that they, and their neighbors, may have to deal with?

There are concerns about the impact this activity will have upon groundwater quality in the Town of Ulysses. Drilling for natural gas involves hydraulic fracturing, frequently referred to simply as “fracking”, in order to get a well started. Fracking requires the use of large amounts of fresh water, usually taken from local sources. Much of that water, contaminated by toxic chemicals, remains in the ground. The rest has to be recaptured and then disposed of as industrial waste.

Residents of Ulysses naturally have many questions about how these, and other heavy-impact aspects of natural gas drilling on their neighbors’ lands, will affect their lives. Tompkins Weekly has a good introductory article on the issue this week.

Shaleshock offers Drilling 101 for additional information.

Back to Democracy also offers a number of resources on drilling for natural gas.