Visiting Dimock, Seeing Gas Drilling’s Ugly Side Firsthand:
Like so many who have been following controversial gas drilling issues in the Northeast’s Marcellus Shale region (the geological formation that stretches from West Virginia to upstate New York), I have been hearing and reading about, and seeing images of, Dimock, PA for the past roughly year-and-a-half. For those not in the know, Dimock has become the unfortunate poster child for all that can go wrong when industrial gas drilling in the Marcellus isn’t adequately regulated and companies make mistakes. Residents have experienced the wide array of adverse effects associated with shale gas production – many of them, it should be noted, inherent in the activity even under the best of circumstances.
These impacts include: exploding water wells, contaminated water supplies necessitating daily fresh water deliveries (complete with home invasion in order to accept the regular deliveries), rural landscapes utterly transformed into industrial zones, constant diesel fumes, 24-hour-a-day traffic and noise that literally shakes the walls of homes.
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Only when you’re standing in the front yard of someone’s dream home – which was once surrounded only by their residential neighbors and farms – and see, hear, smell and feel the vibrations of the incessant truck traffic that passes at all hours of the day and night can you truly understand how transformative it is when gas production arrives in a community. Only when you hear the constant industrial noise from every direction as new well pads are cleared, well bores drilled and then fracked – noise that likewise exists around the clock – can you comprehend how those whose lives have already been turned upside down by drilling gone wrong can never escape the constant auditory reminders. And only when you stand in the backyard of a family who moved to the beautiful Dimock countryside after their last home burned to the ground and see the well pads to both their immediate left and right does it become clear that – even if everything had gone “right” – this family now lives in an industrial zone.
My next post will focus on some of the myriad things that have, in fact, gone wrong in Dimock – things that have made it the unwilling cautionary tale for why Marcellus drilling should not be permitted in New York (or anywhere) unless and until we are shown if and how it can be done safely.
The image a lot of people have of natural gas extraction, that it’s a clean, quiet process vastly “nicer” than messy old coal or oil, is just as wrong as the bizarre idea that converting gasoline or diesel vehicles to run on compressed natural gas yields a huge reduction in CO2 emissions.[1]
With any luck at all, continued reporting, like the blog entry quoted above from Kate Sinding, will help get the word out.
[1] I’ve seen several reports of field tests of CNG-fueled vehicles that claim a CO2 emissions reduction of about 20% compared to an equivalent gasoline or diesel vehicle. One report I found just now, White Paper on Natural Gas Vehicles: Status, Barriers, and Opportunities [PDF] by the Argonne National Laboratory, says (page 4):
The Civic GX has been the only CNG light duty vehicle offered since 2007. The American manufactured vehicles, however, did not always have lower criteria pollutant emissions operating on natural gas than did comparable models with the same engine size. When running on gasoline, the Cavalier bi-fuel CNG/gasoline vehicle had slightly worse fuel economy than the comparable dedicated gasoline vehicle, probably as a result of added storage system weight. Based on today‘s EPA ratings of past CNG vehicles, for criteria pollutants, on average they were comparably clean to gasoline vehicles. ―Energy equivalent‖ fuel economy was consistently less, but due to favorable properties of natural gas, net estimates of tons of GHGs emitted are generally less. According to the DOE/EPA fueleconomy.gov website, the 2009 Civic GX emits an estimated 5.4 tons of CO2 per year, compared to 6.3 tons for the standard Civic, an improvement of 14%.
So we’re going to build out an entire refueling infrastructure and start mass producing new CNG vehicles for that piddling level of CO2 reduction? Really?
I would think that we would see more reduction as vehicles are developed specifically for CNG – remember that the Civic is adapted for CNG, although it is really well adapted and engineered. My experience has been a reduction in mileage on CNG GGE’s (gas gallon equivalents, or how CNG is presently sold) but still remarkable in my dual fuel gas/cng truck. And, in many areas, the refueling infrastructure only needs to expand, sinc it is already there. The biggest part of the expansion is running new gas lines to areas without natural gas service, and those lines will allow gas for home and industrial use which those areas would therefor not already have available. So, to allocate all of that cost to CNG refuelling stations is misleading. I would imagine those numbers were allocated that way by opponents of the efforts, but maybe I am just paranoid (Big retailers of gasoline and diesel wouldn’t do anything to mislead us, would they ??).
No, we won’t get better reductions, unless there’s a significant downsizing of the engines and the amount of power they produce and fuel they consume. (Which means we’re no longer using an engine equivalent to the gasoline engines.) As far as I know, it’s basic physics and chemistry–you get a certain amount of CO2 per unit of energy from natural gas and gasoline, and the ratio for NG simply isn’t that much better than it is for gasoline. (To be clear, I realize that natural gas is much cleaner than gasoline for other forms of pollution, like particulate matter, which would be a welcome improvement.)
Even if you make a magic wand assumption–we can do the entire fueling infrastructure build out instantly and at zero cost–we’re still making a huge commitment in terms of the rolling stock of vehicles on the road and (to a lesser extent) the manufacturing plant changes needed to build those engines. But ignore those costs as well. Is it worth moving a significant portion of our motor vehicles, through the normal replacement process, to a fuel that delivers at best a 20% reduction in CO2? I think the answer is clearly no. We need very dramatic reductions in the CO2 emissions from the transportation sector, very close to the 80%-by-2050 reductions we always talk about. Changing a sizable portion of motor vehicles to NG over a one or two decade period makes no sense, because it leaves us much closer to to 2050 and still emitting far too much CO2. It guarantees that we’ll have to make much more drastic cuts in the 2030-2050 time frame than are needed now.
Standing alone, no, CNG is not a solution.
I think a part of the change must come from efficiency-type of changes, but that most will have to come from behavioral or community based changes. Carpooling is the easiest example, for those who are not willing to make permanent changes, such as relocation to reduce commuting mileage. Much of the change will need to come from building efficiency increases, both for residential and commercial structures, and I would imagine that a lot will come from living arrangement-type changes – increasing the density of the population.
Still no silver bullet, however.