The End of Country (26 page)

In her writing, in her speeches, and in a seemingly endless series of interviews with newspapers in the region, Arrindell had made it clear that she believed there should be no new drilling, not for gas, not for oil, not anywhere in the United States, and certainly not in these hills that she had adopted as her home. And that had made her one of the most polarizing figures in the debate over the future of the Marcellus Shale.

To her army of supporters on the Internet—she estimated that she had as many as four thousand from the Delaware Valley to the banks of the Indus River in India—Barbara Arrindell and her movement were icons of a global movement, representing the last best chance the region had to escape the clutches of creeping industrialization.

To her critics, Arrindell was a Luddite who would choke off any hope of a better economic future for the troubled region, an environmental fundamentalist who would make the perfect the enemy of the good by thwarting efforts to use natural gas to wean ourselves from our addiction to oil.

To be sure, Victoria could see that Arrindell had taken some extreme positions, not least her assertion that there was no need for a “bridge fuel” as conservation alone could sufficiently reduce the nation’s energy consumption to the point where America could limp along until other fuels were developed. Or at least we could, she had said, if the big oil and gas companies, the federal and state and maybe even local governments, as well as the military and the U.S. Patent Office weren’t all in cahoots to prevent such technology from ever reaching the public. “If you patent an energy device, it can be taken by the military,” she had told one questioner, adding, “I am in communication with a number of inventors who have marvelous things, essentially ready to go, who will not put their babies out there to be either used by the military or bought up and put on a shelf.”

Arrindell also took what to some seemed the extreme position that even if the abandonment of fossil fuels ultimately causes financial hardship or social upheaval, that’s a price worth paying to usher in an era of enlightenment. In fact, Arrindell made it clear that she believed those hardships could be a blessing. She saw them in an almost biblical light—she would occasionally cite Thomas Malthus, the eighteenth-century scholar whose economic theories led to the “survival of the fittest” meme—as a chance for our culture to purge itself of the sins it has committed in the name of easy energy. “Our economy is fractured,” she once said, and because of that, there is a mounting appetite for change. “The possibilities for positive change actually get bigger with more desire for it. And the desire is tremendous.”

Such positions had made it easy for some in the pro-development camp to dismiss Arrindell and her ilk as dilettantes, “green crusaders” who could afford the luxury of self-righteousness that few of their neighbors could. Indeed, even some of the state’s mainstream environmental organizations had dismissed her as a fringe character.

But even then, Victoria understood that it would be a mistake for the gas drillers or the government to underestimate somebody like
Barbara Arrindell. Ironically, Victoria realized, the Damascus Citizens for Sustainability might actually have been one of the reasons that the development of the Marcellus in Pennsylvania, and in Dimock in particular, was poised to become as prolific as it was. That was because, together with a coalition of environmental groups in New York state, among them the Delaware River Keepers, and with some support from New York City politicians, Arrindell and her cohort had managed to effectively shut down Marcellus operations in the state of New York.

Thanks in large part to their efforts, an informal moratorium was put in place, and by the summer of 2010 the New York state legislature had made it official. In response, most drillers had for the time being abandoned any notion of developing anything in the Empire State, at least in the area around the Catskills. To be honest, it wasn’t much of a sacrifice. The geology of the Catskills was such that the drillers didn’t think there was enough gas there to make it worth their while, but the way they saw it, there was a couple of million dollars’ worth of good public relations that could be bought by magnanimously ceding that ground to the preservationists.

While that particular victory might have been pyrrhic, it did get people’s attention, and Victoria had to give Arrindell credit for her tenacity and for her research. Even Arrindell’s most ardent critics had to admit that—unlike Victoria in those first days after Cabot had arrived—Arrindell had done her homework. She had made it her life’s work to collect and disseminate a vast collection of horrifying anecdotes, nightmare accidents, and stunning examples of the environmental damage that natural gas drilling can cause, and much of that research was now piled up on Victoria’s kitchen counter. Taken together, these accounts painted a picture of an industry run amok, supported with a wink and a nod by conspiratorial politicos in Washington and in state capitals across the country, aided and abetted by federal and state regulatory agencies that, she believed, were all part of a vast conspiracy of greed to rape the land and keep secret their nefarious machinations.

There was, for example, the case of a nurse in Wyoming who was poisoned when she touched the clothing of a gas field worker who was being treated after accidentally dousing himself with a significant amount of ZetaFlow, a substance used in fracking fluid. The contact
had little impact on the worker himself, but for days, the nurse was near death. And when the doctors treating her demanded to know precisely what ZetaFlow contained, the company that produced it, Weatherford, refused to disclose specific information, citing trade secrets. Ultimately, Weatherford relented, providing key state agencies with a list of the chemicals used in their version of the compound, and the state commission that oversees oil and gas drilling has since established tighter regulations over the handling of the materials.

Arrindell had patched together reports from a host of sources that detailed examples from existing gas fields of how the noise and chaos of drilling operations had disrupted once bucolic farming communities in Texas, and Oklahoma, and Wyoming, and she had posted them on the group’s website. She had collected testimony detailing how the massive diesels that power the rigs and the massive pump trucks that channel the fracking water into the bore holes had polluted the air and how they have tainted the ground with periodic spills. And she wrote and spoke passionately about how the operation, even once the wells were completed, would scar the land, how the drill pads and pipelines and flowback basins—large plastic-lined ponds gouged into the land to catch the water that flows back from the fracking process—remained, sometimes for years, after the initial drilling is completed, so that the drillers can return to frack the well again when production starts to taper off.

No issue was as critical, she argued, as the question of water. She cited peer-reviewed scientific reports detailing examples of cases where those flowback ponds had leaked, sending their chemicals leaching into groundwater aquifers. Ominously, Arrindell pointed to the fact that in 2005, Halliburton and some of the other gas industry leaders succeeded in persuading Congress to exempt them from the provisions of the Safe Water Act and the Clean Water Act, in effect, she said, proving government collusion in the gas companies’ bid to extract riches whatever the environmental cost.

Even Barbara Arrindell’s critics acknowledged that her fears were not without substance.

On average, it was estimated, a typical horizontal well in the Marcellus would use about half a million gallons of fresh water, in some cases up to a million gallons, which would then be treated with the list of chemicals and the “sand,” a substance that contains millions of tiny
spherical grains, most often bauxite, pumped at thousands of pounds per foot of pressure into the well bore. Between 30 percent and half of the fluid, typically, would flow back immediately into the well bore, and it would then be channeled into a holding pit, where it could later be siphoned off and disposed of.

As Arrindell and other critics described it, the process created two insurmountable challenges. First, they believed that the delicate watersheds of the region, principally the Delaware River watershed, which provides drinking water for New York City and its suburbs, and the Susquehanna River Basin, which feeds the Chesapeake Bay and is governed by a water authority representing four states, could never keep up with the demands that the industry would place on it. Their second and more pressing fear was that the drillers, either intentionally or inadvertently, would allow the flowback water from these wells, with its mix of potentially harmful contaminants, to mix with surface and groundwater and poison drinking water supplies.

Victoria’s own research by that point had indicated that Arrindell, while she might have been extreme in her position, did raise some valid concerns. Victoria had come to regret that she hadn’t shown more of her environmentalist father’s innate skepticism when the landman first showed up, and now she was making up for it, plowing into research, studying maps from all across the country, and identifying places where streams and underground aquifers had been depleted by the demands of drillers. She found more than a thousand instances in which surface and underground water supplies had been contaminated by natural gas, by diesel fuel spilled during drilling, or by chemicals used in the fracking process at the nation’s 450,000-plus drill sites, and though many of those accidents occurred in coal bed methane fields, places where the gas deposits were far closer to the surface than they were in Pennsylvania, or in places where the rocks were younger and more brittle and thus more prone to seepage, such incidents were cause for concern.

V
ICTORIA’S ANXIETY WAS AMPLIFIED
by what she and her neighbors were coming to perceive as the lax oversight by state and federal agencies. Of course, the drillers and state officials in Pennsylvania were insisting that the commonwealth, though its DEP admitted it was understaffed and underfunded, was in a better position than other
states to monitor and enforce regulations designed to protect water supplies. But Victoria had her doubts.

Nor did she take much solace in the insistence by both the drillers and the state that Pennsylvanians needn’t worry about sharing their water supply with the drillers. The drillers and their allies had calmly insisted that unlike the largely arid gas-producing states of Texas and Oklahoma and Wyoming, Pennsylvania was and still is literally awash in water, and there is some truth to that. The state does boast more surface water than any other state in the Union except Alaska, and both the industry and its regulators have noted that most of the water that would be used to develop the Marcellus would be drawn from the state’s rivers and their tributaries.

They insisted that the state has a long history of exerting more control over its water than virtually any other state in the nation, and has since the 1930s, when Governor Gifford Pinchot—a noted conservationist who was the nation’s first forester, appointed with the help of his close friend, then vice president Theodore Roosevelt—mounted a campaign to have the state assume control of all its water resources. The law was finally adopted after his term as governor ended. As a result of his efforts, the state of Pennsylvania is the owner of every drop of water that falls from the sky above it or percolates up from the ground beneath it.

The responsibility for monitoring that water fell to the state’s environmental agencies, principally the state Department of Environmental Protection. But in large portions of the state, that responsibility did not belong to the state alone. Three decades ago, after scientists determined that noxious runoff from farms and industries all along the Susquehanna River and its tributaries was killing off shellfish in the Chesapeake Bay, a multistate commission was established to regulate water usage from the Susquehanna. The Susquehanna River Basin Commission was now responsible for issuing permits for every drop of water taken out of the river, while the DEP was charged with making sure that no new toxins were dumped into it. A similar agreement existed in the Delaware River Basin.

The gas drillers, along with the DEP and members of the SRBC, all argued that appropriate safeguards were already in place to prevent the watershed from being sucked dry. They noted that even if the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania were to be fully developed—if thousands
of wells were to be drilled simultaneously in the state—they would still require only about 1 percent of the amount of water consumed annually in the state.

And it was also argued that the development of the Marcellus would use only a fraction of the water used to create other fuels such as ethanol, which can require anywhere between 263 and 2,100 gallons of water to create a single gallon of the biofuel, depending on how the source crop is irrigated. Gas from the Marcellus was likely to produce anywhere from 2,000 to 17,000 more BTUs per gallon of water than did ethanol.

Certainly, there were mainstream environmental groups such as Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future, part of a coalition of environmental organizations willing to support the development of the Marcellus—admittedly, with reservations—provided that there were sufficient safeguards in place to protect against overburdening the state’s water supplies, and that they were appropriately enforced. To that end, the SRBC, the agency overseeing water usage from the Susquehanna and its watershed, had established protocols for the drillers to collect water from municipal water suppliers, who in turn drew it from the river. Water was to be taken during what are usually high flow periods for the river, such as springtime, when the rivers are flush with snowmelt. But even those environmental groups that supported the idea of drilling in the Marcellus also admitted that there were no guarantees that the current safeguards would be adequate down the road, and there were serious questions, not the least of which were “What will we do during periods of drought?” and “What will happen when the water is low and the price of gas is high?”