When I first began writing about the anti-fracking movement in
New York, I was told I must interview James “Chip” Northrup, a Texas
oil-investor-turned-anti-fracker with a home in Cooperstown, New York,
and another in Dallas, Texas. “Chip,” I was told, had an insider’s
knowledge of the industry and was a frequent speaker on the subject in
local forums as well as in national and international media.
I
found out that he was about to lecture in an Upper New York State
village on a mind-deadening topic—decoding the New York Department of
Environmental Conservation’s (DEC) 1,500 plus pages of guidelines for
the industry. This was in October 2011, when the DEC’s public hearings
on the “Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement” (SGEIS)
were about to begin and community members and activists needed briefing
on how to comment. Few in New York could do better than Northrup.
He
walked in early at the little café where I was to interview him over
dinner before the talk—tall, lean, a boyish face under a thatch of pale
blond hair. As another reporter wrote recently, he looked “like the kind
of guy you’d get from central casting if you were trying to make a
Western movie.” The Texas drawl fit the package and under level blue
eyes he had a smile that kept appearing as he spoke. Behind that charm
was a caustic, take-no prisoners attitude about the industry and its
proponents, and detailed knowledge about things I’d had no inkling
about—set-backs of gas wells from houses, well casings, “frackonomics” and details about corruption within New York’s DEC.
The following interview is drawn from conversations I’ve had with Northrup between October 2011 and January 2013.
Q. You’ve compared fracking with a bomb. Can you comment?
A. When you take the amount of energy involved in a shale frack, it’s the equivalent of a thermobaric bomb. In 1969, theAtomic Energy Commission actually exploded a nuclear bomb in the Mancos Shale
in Rulison, Colorado. It made a big hole in the shale but the gas was
too radioactive to sell and they closed the hole up. Ironically, the
shale is radioactive itself. That’s how you find shale on a well log,
you’re looking for radioactivity. And what comes back up in the fracking
flowback is radioactive because it’s coming back from the shale.
Q. How would fracking disrupt daily life if it happened in New York State?
A. The
first things that arrive are the land men. They come in and they sign
mineral leases with landowners. And they try to sign them as cheaply as
they can and with terms as onerously favorable to the gas industry as
possible. So the land grab is the first disruptor. That’s where the scamming starts. It’s very disruptive to the town, the people’s lives, thousands of bad leases have been in litigation in New York State. The brilliance of [Matt Damon’s film] Promised Land is it focuses on the land men, the first aspect of the activity.
The second thing is the seismic crews.
They go in and “shoot seismic.” That means they set off dynamite in the
ground to record the sound waves from the strata when they’re looking
for the shale. There are no regulations in NY State for seismic testing.
You can shoot seismic blasts anywhere. Let me back up and say there are
no regulations for land men, either, in New York. There are no
standards at all, no licensing. They don’t even have to record the
leases they sign. They’ll sign up the mineral lease and it’ll be kept a
secret.
The
third thing you see are the trucks. They build the roads out to the
well pad. They travel in convoys. There are thousands of them. They just
tear the roads and the whole place up. There are no state standards in New York for
that kind of activity. The state has no way to cover the damages
they’ll do to state roads, because New York is one of the few places on
the planet that does not tax gas at the wellhead.
A
town or a county can recover damages that the convoys do to roads. They
can’t recover the damages done to cars, to windshields and axles. But
they have to enact road use agreements. If they don’t do this they won’t
recover the damage to the roads.
The
next activity is the drilling and the fracking of the well itself. If
you live near one of these well pads it’s gonna basically ruin the value
of your farm or house. It doesn’t go on forever but it goes on long
enough to ruin the value.
If you’re in the process of refinancing or just living there, it’ll
ruin the property. If you’re unfortunate, it’ll crater your mortgage, or
if you’d need to sell the house, you can’t sell it.
Setback is the distance of the drilling rig from the house, 500 feet. There is no setback in New York from
a warehouse or a school or daycare center or hospital or a filling
station. If the house is uninhabited or under construction there is no
set back of a shale gas well in New York State. Zero. It could be ten
feet.
Q. Even at 500 feet, could you compare that with Texas?
A. In Texas the setbacks are done by towns. They are municipal setbacks.
The
standard setback is about a thousand feet. But let me get to the real
punch-line here. The setback is from the drilling rig. But on each of
these sites there are open pits, compressors, generators, gas processing
plants, trucks and there are no setbacks from any of that from a house.
The rig has to be 500 feet away, but an open pit or a generator could
be right next to your house or a church or a daycare center. There’s no
setback of any of the industrial infrastructure, which remains after the drilling has ended.
The other thing is getting rid of the toxic radioactive flowback. But by now, how much else do you really want to know to say, “Umm, I don’t think I like that.”
Q. What would fracking do to Cooperstown?
A. It
would completely ruin Cooperstown’s economy, which is based on tourism
and health care. It would be the end of Cooperstown. Which is why the
village of Cooperstown, which is in the Town of Otsego, was the first
township to have banned shale-gas drilling. [The organizers] looked at
this—Julie Huntsman was the leader—and they said, ‘This would ruin this place.” Then other towns followed.
Here’s
the catch, the big trade-off. If the surface value is worth more than
the mineral rights—that is, the built environment, businesses, the
organic farms, the vineyards, the houses—then there’s absolutely no
reason to be shooting up the place with shale gas wells. It’s just a
given you’re going to ruin the surface rights, the built environment, the water supply.
If on the other hand the value of the surface rights and the water is basically useless, then
you have an economic argument in favor of gas well drilling. It’s why
you see gas wells and oil wells out in West Texas where there are no
farms, houses, nothing. But these shale gas wells are not compatible
with most land uses in a place like New York State, and that’s the
biggest understatement of this interview.
Q. I was particularly struck by your remarks to an interviewer a year ago about well casings. Can you comment?
A. When
you understand how a well is constructed, it’s very simple. The casing
is the steel tubing in the well that transports the gas up to the
surface. But that is not the problem. The odds of the steel casing
bursting or leaking is pretty low initially. Over time, since it’s a
ferrous metal, it’ll all rust out and leak. But initially that’s not a
big problem. What is the problem, then? The problem is, is that the
steel tubing is surrounded by cement, not concrete, not reinforced
concrete. Raw cement without aggregate, the closest approximation would
be plaster. So what does the plaster do? It’s not gonna support the
steel any more than the steel can support itself. All it does is, it
plugs the hole up. You pour plaster down and it has the effect of
holding the steel tubing upright and also plugs the hole. But the cement
as it cures, it shrinks and it does not stick to the side of the well bore. And it allows gas to vent up inside the well bore. Not in the steel casing but between the cement and the well bore. Gas is coming up those well bores into groundwater. I’ll repeat that: gas is coming up into the groundwater and
that’s why you get it coming up. The DEC says, we’ll make you have two
casings or three casings. That’s not the problem. This leaking or
venting is going on outside the casings. You could put in seven casings but the leak would still be happening outside the casings.
Q. Could you also comment on well failure?
A. About 5 percent fail almost immediately. But the real problem is not that they fail catastrophically like the BP Gulf disaster,
but they deteriorate rapidly and start venting gas up into the
groundwater. They can build them really well but they don’t age well.
They never were designed to last long and the reason why is, these shale
wells only have an economic life of four or five years. Why would you build something to last 50 or 100 years if it’s only going to be productive four or five years?
Q. Is the four to five year life invariable for all fracking?
A. They
can re-frack them [the wells] and extend their productive life, but it
doesn’t always work. They can run it out for ten years but under few
circumstances much more than that. If they had to last 100 years they’d
have to use stainless steel. But now, whatever’s on sale in China, they
stick in the ground.
Q.
I attended a conference recently where a woman from Cabot Oil & Gas
said, “Oh, we’ve taken care of that. We’re making better cement.”
A. Whenever
you raise an issue they’ll say ‘We’re working on this.’ But let’s
address this. They do have better cement. They put plasticizers in to
keep it from having this problem. But they cannot keep the cement from
pulling away from the well bore. Think about what the well bore is like.
It’s drilled with grease, with drilling mud. When you’re finished
drilling the well, you basically have just a big greasy hole in the
ground. There’s no disclosure of what they put in drilling mud, which is
used to cool the drill bits, and bring cuttings back up. So now you
have this big greasy hole in the rock that can go on for miles. So now
the cement has to stick to every square inch of the surface of that
greasy rock, and they have to do that down to the angstrom level. A
methane molecule is only 3.8 angstroms wide. (An angstrom is
one ten-millionth of a millimeter). If you have a crack of five
angstroms [in the cement] and it’s gonna vent gas. Remember, gas is
lighter than air. It’s like helium. It’s not whether or not it will
leak, it’s how much, how soon.
Q. You’ve talked about “frackonomics” in your writing and in your previous interviews. Could you talk about it briefly here?
A. The expert on this is really Deborah Rogers. Art Berman has
also commented on this extensively. But frackonomics is very simple. It
is very very easy to mislead the public, politicians and investors.
It’s because the initial production, the gas produced immediately, can
be extraordinarily high, it’s called the “IP” or initial production, it
can be eye-popping. But the production declines very very quickly. What
happens is, it gives unscrupulous operators like Chesapeake the
opportunity to mislead people about how productive an area is going to
be. It happens every time a new field is opened up. It’s alwaysoverstated initially.
There’ll be a rush, and then most of the area that’s defined—like the
Marcellus—is not going to be economically productive. It’s almost a
guarantee that it’s going to be hyped. And everybody knows this and they forget it about every time there’s a new field.
Q. If the Marcellus is slated to be unprofitable, why would companies start drilling in New York State?
A. Well, they will not. This is a kind of real irony.
The Marcellus in New York State is dry gas, it’s methane. It doesn’t
have much ethane, propane or butane. Those “liquids” command higher
prices. The price of methane is depressed, there isn’t much incentive to
go for more dry gas in New York State. Drilling has been cut back by
more than 50 percent in New York State because those are dry Marcellus
Shale wells. They’re pulling rigs out of that area by the border.
So why would you go prospect, what would be the rush, just on the other
side of the state line? The short answer is: there is none. And based
on the geology, the area north of the border is going to be less
lucrative than south, where they’re pulling rigs out.
So what’s the rush of getting the regulations when they’re not gonna come knocking at the door.
The
only thing driving this is politics at this point. Much more so than
any need to prospect for gas. Cuomo is being pushed into permitting
shale gas wells when such wells are uneconomic to drill. The prospects
for the Utica are no better in New York than the Marcellus. And like the
Marcellus, the Utica is likely dry in New York, based on results form test wells. So we are left with pressure from gas lobbyists as the driver.
Q.
Before Governor Cuomo allows fracking, the DEC has to draft
regulations. Then Cuomo approves them. Could you talk about the DEC?
A. In
most states there’s a state agency for minerals management for issuing
gas-well permits and regulating drilling. And there’s a totally distinct
and autonomous environmental agency which has oversight over gas wells.
So if there’s a problem you complain to the environmental agency, which
is autonomous from the minerals management agency. In New York it’s the
same agency. Meaning the DEC acts as both the minerals management
agency and the environmental agency. As a practical matter, the environmental function gets compromised.
When
you go to the DEC to talk about oil and gas or fracking, you know who
you see, or talk to? You call up and say, “I want to talk about the
regs—because I’ve done this!—You don’t meet
with a chemist or an epidemiologist or a toxicologist, a hydrologist or
an environmentalist. If you go high up on the chain, you meet with the
head of well permitting! You go there,
you’re concerned with water pollution and air pollution and you meet
with the guy who issues the permits and with his attorneys. If you’re
lucky you meet with Allison Crocker, y’know, big tall good looking gal.
Allison Crocker is the one who Chesapeake sends their drafts to. When
Chesapeake wants wording changed in the SGEIS, they go to Allison Crocker.
Q. Could you talk about the DEC’s regulations? [These
“final” drafts were just issued after over three years of massive
public protest about the agency’s draft guidelines. See further details here.]
A. The
DEC in New York is required by law to show any scientific studies, any
statistics, any studies at all, that it has used as the basis for its
regulations. That’s a state law. In the SGEIS [preliminary to the final
regulations] and in the proposed regulations they just issued, the DEC
does not cite any studies whatsoever. No papers, no science, nothing. It
has no references, no science at all.
So what’s it based on? They basically just made it up with input from
the gas lobbyists. Some of these regulations are literally copied
verbatim from the lobbyists. They FOILED the meetings with the lobbyists
[requested records under the Freedom of Information Act] and [found out
that] the lobbyists were feeding them with industry wording. [See
further details here.]
Q. Do you think it’s likely that Cuomo will OK fracking? If so, what will happen next?
A. There’s
no doubt about it. I’m sure he will. I don’t think people realize that
the only difference between Cuomo and [Pennsylvania Governor] Corbett
[who immediately allowed fracking in Pennsylvania in 2008] is that
Cuomo’s a better actor. You can be charitable and say they’ve bought
into the shale game, whatever. But they’ve just been co-opted by the gas lobbyists. When you look at what the DEC proposed as regs. and what’s missing, the fingerprints of the gas lobby are all over it. They wrote the regs.
Let
me give you just one example. In the September 2011 draft of the
regulations, an open pit for storing drilling mud or flow-back, the
requirement was for the fluid to be at least two feet from the [top] of
the pit—the distance is called the “freeboard.” And guess what the
freeboard is in the new regs? Nothing. Zero You can fill the pit up to the brim.
You know what would happen if it rained real hard? The gas industry
wanted it to be zero. And the DEC changed it [to] zero for the people
that paid them.
Q. If the DEC is just going to rubber-stamp industry anyway, why ask people to comment on the regulations?
A. The
short answer is, you have to expose this corruption. In commenting,
we’re given the opportunity in the hearings—three committees in the
State Assembly are having hearings on these proposed regulations and
that’s an opportunity to expose the corruption. That is what Tony Ingraffea and Sandra Steingraber are doing, they’re publishing their responses on the proposed fracking regulations. To the press. To journalists. That’s what I’m doing.
There’s still time to comment on the D.E.C. regulations. See the Sourcewatch guide as well as http://fleased.org.
Visit EcoWatch’s FRACKING page for more related news on this topic.
——–
Ellen Cantarow has been a journalist for the
past 35 years, and a published writer since the late 1960s. Her writing
on Israel and Palestine has appeared widely for three decades, and has
been anthologized. Her more recent writing on the environment,
especially on the impact of fracking on grassroots communities, appears
regularly at Tom Dispatch and has been reprinted at EcoWatch, CBS News,
The Nation, Salon, Alternet, European Energy Review, Le Monde
Diplomatique, Al-Jazeera English and many more.
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