Who's going to Powershift NY?
? Contact me if you are, I plan on being there!
? Contact me if you are, I plan on being there!
New York: a hydraulic fracturing battleground state.
A state judge’s decision this week supporting the rights of individual towns to determine whether to allow hydraulic fracturing has added a new wrinkle to the fight over the natural gas drilling process in New York.
Parties on all sides are trying to figure out what the ruling will mean, but a consensus emerged on Wednesday that there will be further court challenges and delays over when, how and where the process, known as hydrofracking, will be allowed in the state, and by whom.
Officials of natural gas companies voiced concern that such local restrictions could render more areas of the Marcellus Shale off-limits to drillers in a state that is already proposing strict regulation of where the industry will be allowed to operate.
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The ever-changing fuel situation continues to develop in curious ways….
Also, note how Albany is specifically mentioned -I’m going to assume, since the link doesn’t specify otherwise, they mean Albany, NY…. specifically New York’s current deliberation about how to best allow Hydrofracking in New York.
‘Hurt Themselves’
Chevron Corp. (CVX) and ConocoPhillips, the second- and third- largest U.S. energy companies by market value, also are expected to post their largest full-year profit declines in 2012 since 2009, when worldwide fuel markets were reeling from the collapse of demand in the wake of the financial crisis.
“In a sense, they’ve hurt themselves,” Leonard Coburn, president of Washington-based Coburn International Energy Consultants LLC and a former director of Russian and Eurasian affairs at the Energy Department. “But that’s why we’re seeing them shifting away from gas toward more oil.”
Shale formations will account for 49 percent of total U.S. gas production by 2035, up from 23 percent in 2010, the Energy Department said in a Feb. 14 report. When other geologic formations such as tight sands that require the same intensive drilling techniques are added in, unconventional fields will pump 77 percent of domestic supply by 2035, the department said.
The supply bonanza of gas and oil made possible with fracking means the U.S. will become increasingly independent of foreign energy producers at the same time as burgeoning economic powers such as China grow more reliant on overseas supplies, said Jonathan Chanis, managing member of New Tide Asset Management LLC in Torrington, Connecticut. That outlook assumes lawmakers and regulators at the federal and state levels won’t place expensive restrictions on drillers, he said.
“With the right policy decisions in Washington and places like Harrisburg and Albany, the United States will be in an extremely positive position,” Chanis said.
More in the battle for hearts and minds of the people.
John Hanger is described in the article as:
There are real environmental concerns about gas drilling, says John Hanger, an environmental activist, former Pennsylvania environmental secretary and sometimes sharp critic of the gas industry — but the concerns have little to do with fracking.
Who is John Hanger? Depends on who you ask, it seems. A quick search for John Hanger reveals a variety of those who think highly, and not so highly of him. The above quote is from the NY Post.
Yet elsewhere on the internet...
In a documentary about natural gas development that premiered this week on HBO, Pennsylvania’s secretary of the environment receives a decidedly unflattering portrayal at the hands of Josh Fox, who made the movie Gasland.
Fox portrays Hanger - a liberal who spent years in the mainstream environmental movement - as an equivocating tool of the natural gas industry. In one of the film’s signature moments, Fox pulls out a bottle of water he says was polluted by a Marcellus Shale gas well and challenges the state’s top environmental regulator to drink it.
As usual, it seems to depend on who you ask. A search for Hanger reveals this line of tags from Energy In Depth http://www.energyindepth.org/tag/john-hanger/ They seem to think fairly well of Mr Hanger.
For what it’s worth, Energy In Depth describes itself as…
Launched by the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) in 2009, Energy In Depth (EID) is a research, education and public outreach campaign focused on getting the facts out about the promise and potential of responsibly developing America’s onshore energy resource base – especially abundant sources of oil and natural gas from shale and other “tight” reservoirs across the country. It’s an effort that benefits directly from the support, guidance and technical insight of a broad segment of America’s oil and natural gas industry, led in Washington by IPAA, but directed on the ground by our many affiliates — and IPAA’s more than 6,000 members — in the states.
Can think tanks sponsored by organizations devoted to the usage of one type of fuel be counted on to provide sincere and insightful criticism to that fuel? Is that a conflict of interest?
Nothing new in the realm of energy debates for NY’s hydrofracking decision.
Close to home, definitely an important issue…
Beyond Hype, a Closer Look at New York’s Choice on Shale Gas
By ANDREW C. REVKINMore than 40,000 comments have been submitted to New York State aimed at shaping how Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo deals with the huge natural gas resource locked in the state’s portion of sprawling geological formations known as the Marcellus Shale and Utica Shale.
The comments are not publicly viewable at this point. (You can submit a Freedom of Information Law request for an eventual CD, I was told.) But any quick sift of the Web provides a pretty solid sense of the range of views — from environmentalists pursuing an outright ban on hydraulic fracturing and related processes, widely called fracking, to landowners seeking the freedom to benefit from their mineral rights. There was a fresh anti-gas rally in Albany this morning, focused on passing bills (sponsored by lawmakers representing New York City constituents far from the resource) that would limit the governor’s ability to move ahead.
Here’s some background behind the shouting:
The comments submitted to the state by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (online here) are particularly useful to explore. The E.P.A. stance could be characterized as concerned but supportive, which is a strong contrast from the agency’s tougher stance in 2009, as described in a recent post on the Politics on the Hudson blog. I also encourage you to read coverage from Brian Nearing of the Albany Times Union. One concern from the agency is over how the state and industry will work out how to pay for the cost of overseeing the gas extraction.
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