How have you been at work in the world?
1
Working Watersheds
Thales says that it is water.
—Aristotle, Metaphysics
At the same time that my neighbors and I are learning new words—J1s, muds, and fracking, for example—we confront new acronyms such as MCF, MER, PIG.1 And the terms, the terms keep coming. I discover that to drill on air is to sink a bare bit through the water table. A Christmas tree, I hear, is a collection of pipes on a well top. Someone mentions that horizontal drilling has revolutionized oil and gas production, and an expert reminds me that “all energy requires water; water requires energy.”2 Even as I struggle to sort words and terms, big companies—Exxon, Hess, Chesapeake—bandy about big numbers: $6,000/acre and a 20 percent royalty. Two thousand drilled, four thousand permitted, maybe one hundred thousand more: a gas rush.
Searching for some clarity, I signed up for the August 2010 Marywood University forum “Marcellus Shale: Opportunities and Challenges.” Industry terms, numbers, and names dominated presentations about energy extraction, community impacts, and water quality. I heard my then representative in the U.S. House, who was up for reelection, declare that the “gold rush is here,” that “Marcellus Shale is a second chance,” and that “we can have it both ways.” A little more cautious, thankfully, one of my representatives in the U.S. Senate told me that “we need to invent the future in the right way” and that “we can’t repeat the mistakes of the past.” The president of a coalition of gas companies—its logo a water droplet encasing a green leaf—pointed out that Marcellus shale is a “long-term play”; when fully developed, by about 2020, it will have put tens of thousands to work and will have added billions to the state economy. On the other hand, the head of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) reported that the state’s conservation efforts suffered a major setback in October 2009 when the state swiped money from the DCNR budget to shore up its general fund. If Pennsylvania wants a model for what might happen as the rush runs its course, a Penn State professor suggested, it should look to Texas and other shale areas; experience in these places has shown that boomtowns are not better off for the boom.3 He urged communities to ask a question that too many in the Anthracite Region failed to ask 150 years ago: “What happens when it’s over?”
I walked away as bewildered as before. Strolling across campus toward home, I realized that I had no category to absorb the immensity of what might happen. Like a slowly approaching hurricane might, the size of what was coming posed questions I couldn’t begin to answer. How does one person prepare? How do people “invent the future”? When the storm breaks, how do communities “have it both ways”? And the question I couldn’t shake: How do we keep the powers at play from wreaking havoc on us and the land?
Past is prologue, they say, which may be why at least two forum speakers urged me to think about the rush to drill within the context of the region’s history of resource extraction. In her opening remarks, for example, Marywood president Sr. Anne Munley insisted that we “recall our regional history at moments such as this.” What’s at issue, she asserted, is “balancing an economic opportunity with stewardship of the land for future generations. In a region long used to economic hardship, this is a difficult balancing act to resolve.” Citing acid mine drainage, U.S. senator Bob Casey reminded me that the region’s “history is instructive”; we’ve “been there, done that.” Both urged me to read attentively, think deeply, and act carefully. Amen to that, I said. But then again, how well can I read, think, and act when I’m in a rush?4
A lot has happened since land men began knocking on people’s doors. By mid-2010, they had leased one-fourth of Pennsylvania. Facing a 2009 budget crisis, the state allowed drilling on large blocks of state forest and game lands, much of which, we were later told, the state owned no mineral rights to anyway. During the same budget battle, Pennsylvania, unlike most states that have oil and natural gas reserves, refused to impose a “severance tax, a tax on natural resources ‘severed’ from the land.”5 Meanwhile, my brother, facing falling milk prices, signed a lease allowing Houston-based Southwestern Energy to drill on the homestead. A few miles to the south, at the Matousheks’ farm, Louisiana-based Stone Energy dropped the gas rush’s first drill in Wayne County, creating a well that joined seventy thousand others that dot the state, reminders that drilling is not new to Pennsylvania, which is, after all, the birthplace of the oil and gas industry.6
The terms, numbers, and names fade when someone mentions water.
People fear that natural gas drilling will contaminate drinking water. Sinking a gas well requires about three million gallons of water, which must be sucked from rivers, streams, or water wells. Once the water and its toxic additives have shot through shale, they resurface as wastewater that must be either treated or recycled. It doesn’t help to know that water from a fracked well is three to five times saltier than seawater, or that in 2007 scientists discovered that gas wells capped in 1920 have contaminated nearby water wells.7
Accidents happen. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection recorded between 2005 and 2010 “hundreds of examples of spills at natural gas drilling sites.” In March 2009, for example, DEP fined Cabot Oil and Gas for “allowing methane to escape into [Susquehanna County] residents’ drinking water.” Later that year, in September, a “spill of a hydrofracturing lubricant” in the same county may have contaminated Stevens Creek. An environmentalist’s aerial photographs sparked a 2009 state investigation of a Wayne County well; a preliminary report found that a “ ‘weathered petroleum product’ of unknown quantity was discharged... into a forested area.” In June 2010, a Clearfield County well on a private hunting club’s property in the “middle of a state forest” spewed for sixteen hours a “geyser of gas and wastewater.”8
Slapping firms with small fines and short stoppages, Pennsylvania has gone easy on gas companies. I would have expected a state with three major watersheds—the Delaware, Susquehanna, and Ohio, whose waters touch millions of lives—to exert a little more force. The Susquehanna, for example, drains 27,510 square miles, supports a population of over four million people, and makes up 43 percent of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.9 The Ohio watershed, draining the west end of the state, contributes water to the largest river system in the United States, and sends its waters to the Gulf of Mexico. With more miles of streams than any other state but Alaska, water-rich Pennsylvania suddenly must rely on the federal Environmental Protection Agency to initiate a “study of hydraulic fracturing that would consider... the whole life-cycle of a well.”10 Why?
Not everyone agrees with Pennsylvania policy. In August 2010, the New York Senate overwhelmingly approved a moratorium on gas drilling in that state. Aware of the fifteen million people who drink water from the Delaware rivershed, which supplies New York City and Philadelphia, the Delaware River Basin Commission effectively declared in May 2009 a drilling moratorium.11 Fearing that chemicals used in fracking wells would contaminate the city’s drinking water, Philadelphia City Council in March 2010 “unanimously approved a resolution that asks the Delaware River Basin Commission to conduct an environmental impact study of natural gas drilling in the Delaware River watershed prior to approving any permits.” At the time, the Commission was mulling a request from Stone Energy to draw water from the West Branch of the Lackawaxen River in order to frack the Matoushek well, an application