New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, newfound toast of the gay-marriage movement, did the nation’s consumers a huge favor last week, too, when his administration signaled it will lift a ban on hydraulic fracturing for natural gas.
As both the drilling industry and green radicals seem to understand, the fate of fracking is likely to determine nothing less than the nature of energy development for decades to come, and not only in the United States.
With fracking, we’re likely to enjoy a bonanza of relatively inexpensive natural gas for the rest of our lives. And that bonanza represents a challenge not only to other fossil fuels and nuclear power because of its potential price advantage, but to wind and solar power, too.
That’s why, from the perspective of some green activists, fracking must be stopped in its tracks.
As recently as 2003, ironically, U.S. natural gas production appeared destined for decline and experts touted the need for imports of costly liquefied gas. But that outlook has been upended. The combination of sophisticated horizontal drilling and fracking — a process in which water, sand and small amounts of chemicals are blasted into rock formations deep underground — have brought colossal natural gas fields into play.
The result: The Colorado School of Mines’ respected Potential Gas Committee concluded this spring that reserves of recoverable gas in the U.S. were at their highest “in the committee’s 46-year history.”
New York is hardly a major energy producer, of course, but it could become one as it sits above part of one of the largest gas fields in North America, the Marcellus shale formation. If anti-fracking crusaders had triumphed in New York, they would have bagged a major trophy. Instead, they may have to settle for victory in New Jersey, where the legislature recently approved a fracking ban by an overwhelming margin.
Trouble is, New Jersey isn’t blessed with similar underground geology. So a ban on fracking there is mostly symbolic.
As with every fracking debate, the New Jersey vote was accompanied by lurid but unexamined charges of groundwater contamination from fracking. As recently as May, however, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson was asked at a congressional hearing about similar claims. Her reply: “I’m not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water, although there are investigations ongoing.”
Colorado regulators have echoed the same conclusion many times. They, too, have never confirmed a single instance of fracking fluids seeping into water wells from where they were first injected — a migration that typically would have to penetrate thousands of feet of rock.
Not that this fact deterred Josh Fox, director of the Oscar-nominated film “Gasland.” Fox fed viewers the impression that water faucets in Colorado were actually bursting into flame as a result of fracking.
For years, energy firms fanned suspicions by resisting disclosure of the chemicals used in fracking, citing proprietary concerns. But many companies seem finally to have wised up and now offer the chemical list on their own or support state mandates for disclosure.
If even Texas can pass a law mandating disclosure, as it did last month, then it’s only a matter of time before every other state follows suit.
Matt Ridley, the former Economist science editor, believes fracking may even benefit renewable energy in the long run because “unlike coal and nuclear power, [natural gas] can be powered up and down quickly … . If the costs of solar power do fall rapidly, it is conceivable that one day an electricity system based on solar power by day and gas by night may well prove economically viable.”
We’ll see — but only if we defeat the Luddites out to kill fracking.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
