T Boone Pickens stated on Jon Stewart’s show that hydrofracking has been practiced for decades

Dear Governor Cuomo,

T Boone Pickens stated on Jon Stewart’s show that hydrofracking has been practiced for decades. Taken at face value, that is a true statement. But in fact it is a lie of terrible proportion, and the article that you hopefully will read today on the front page of the New York Times makes significant progress in exposing that lie for what it is.

High volume slickwater hydrofracturing of horizontal wells as it is being practiced, for example in Pennsylvania, and as it will soon be practiced in New York unless the trajectory we are on changes dramatically, is not even a decade old.

Unfortunately, starting with the 2005 Energy Act, what has been allowed to happen in about a dozen states is that a practice with unstudied consequences has been in use.

The Times article, the first of a series of three, focuses on the subject of the toxic and radioactive industrial waste materials produced by this process. That is one of many dire consequences, each of which includes its hidden costs. The article does mention the dramatic effects of air pollution in Wyoming; rising asthma rates in Texas. I won’t count the millions of gallons of water and the millions of truck trips and the weight of the toxins that the diesel engines pour into the air in a quick note. I will mention that the rate at which methane is allowed to leak nation wide is 5%. That is completely unnecessary, there is a fix that pays for itself within five years, but federal law doesn’t require it, nor does the dSGEIS. I hope that you are familiar with the Cornell study that taking this leak rate into account, and the fact that methane is a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, found that natural gas is a more toxic form of energy overall than coal, ranking it second in the three most toxic forms of energy.

After the air pollution required to get the well drilled and fracked, we come to the contamination of aquifers, to the migration of the toxic fluid and the naturally occurring toxins underground into our drinking water. Again, Mr Pickens will state that he knows of no example of such a migration. The falsity of that claim rests on a thin layer of circumstance- on the one hand, precious little scientific study has been done, and on the other hand, you must ignore the proof, as well as the abundant evidence that can be found everywhere this practice has been allowed. For proof, one example is the USGS study that established the vertical migration of gas from a storage well thousands of feet deeper than the Marcellus itself, up through the Marcellus and into an aquifer in PA, ruining permanently a drinking water supply for dozens of homes. The gas in the storage well was nonnative, and identified in the water, along with it gas that had been picked up on its way through the Marcellus.

The geology in our southern tier is known to be brittle and riddled with faults. Only 40% of that wastewater makes its way out (and then often right back into the watershed with its many toxins.) The pressure under which wells are fracked is tremendous.

That gas will be down there until we have not only studied this process thoroughly, but designed methods that are first proven to provide a failure rate far below the unacceptable current rate. There is no reason for the asthmas, the cancers, the endochrine system problems, and the irredeemable degradation to aquifers. Also we need to take into account the decimation of property values, and the damage to existing local businesses.

The dSGEIS is not capable of the protection that the people of New York need, this very new and extremely dangerous practice needs attentive study and its own specific set of regulations, however long that takes, the gas will be there. The Barth economic report makes it very clear that the hidden costs associated with this practice under the current climate of under-regulation and lack of oversight make this a long term terrible deal for the people and the state.

I hope that the Times article will start to establish the need to put the brakes on and scrap the dSGEIS, study this process and this situation, and start from the ground up with regulations that address the new hazards this new method poses.

Thank you for your attention to and help with this matter which is so critical to New Yorkers.

Paul B