Citizens drill into fracking issue at City Council meeting

About a dozen citizens attended an Athens City Council meeting Monday night united in their opposition to horizontal hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"), and urged the body to adopt an ordinance prohibiting the gas drilling technique within the city.

The comments came during a council committee meeting headed by First Ward council member Kent Butler, who has proposed that Athens formulate regulations preventing gas companies from using the hydraulic fracturing technique to extract natural gas from shale layers underlying the city. Butler has said he would model the Athens ordinance on similar regulations in Pittsburgh.

Fracking has become a hot environmental topic in recent years, as the oil-and-gas industry has started to go after oil and natural gas in two shale beds, the Marcellus and the Utica, that underlie much of the Eastern United States and Canada, including Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia, Ohio, Quebec and Ontario.

A boom in drilling started in the first three mentioned states in 2008, and is beginning to spread into eastern Ohio, with landowners there being offered big money for drilling rights. The Marcellus shale, which up to now has been the primary target for fracking, doesn't apparently come as far west as Athens County, but the deeper Utica does.

The boom is based largely on the horizontal fracturing technique, in which a company drills down vertically till it hits the targeted shale bed, then drills horizontally into the shale. The drillers then inject pressurized liquid (which may contain toxic chemicals) into the shale to force the oil and/or natural gas to the surface.

Concerns about fracking include worries that the toxic liquid may end up contaminating water supplies, and that the process of storing and transporting the millions of gallons of waste fluid associated with each fracking well can also lead to adverse affects on local water supplies.

A total of 11 people spoke on the subject during Monday's meeting, and every one of them expressed support for Butler's proposed regulations.

Christine Hughes, who owns the Village Bakery, Della Zona and Catalyst Caf, expressed concerns over fracking, and said that at least one of the farmers she purchases produce from has told her that he has signed a lease to allow drilling.

"I believe that the health and environmental risks of fracking have been downplayed by the industry and by state government, and that financial benefits have been overstated," she said. "The profits go mostly out of state and into the hands of a few. And success depends on keeping energy prices high."

Michael Rinaldi-Eichenberg said that to say that negative environmental effects are understated is an understatement itself.

"I think the areas where this type of gas extraction has occurred are completely devastated, and I would hate to see that happen here," he said. "Whatever financial gains occur, I think they are very short-lived. The financial devastation caused by the environmental devastation is so much worse."

Alyssa Bernstein said that she was pleased to hear about the proposal to ban fracking. Bernstein presented a relatively novel concern that southern Ohio has been seeing an uptick in tourism that could be hampered by the environmental effects of fracking.

Local environmentalist Lorraine McCosker said that the region has historically had a boom or bust economy and related that back to coal extraction. She said that such a legacy must be avoided with fracking.

"My concern is that we're heading to an even bigger situation with poverty and impacts to our environment, our social systems, our communities and our economy," she said.

Ohio University student Camille Scott expressed concerns on behalf of the student population, who she said cares about the Athens area. "I don't want to see that natural beauty go to waste as well as have my water poisoned," she said.

Warren Taylor, who owns Snowville Creamery in Meigs County, warned of previous threats to what he called the largest business in the state: agriculture.

"If we compromise the ability of our region to produce safe, healthy food, we have nothing," he said. "This is our sustainable industry, and this is our future."

Meanwhile, last week, the Ohio Oil & Gas Education Program distributed a study that countered many of the claims of negative environmental and especially economic impacts of fracking.

According to the study, conducted by a Cleveland areas research firm, Ohio's natural gas and crude oil industry could "help create and support more than 200,000 Ohio-based jobs from the leasing, royalties, exploration, drilling, production and pipeline construction activities for the Utica shale reserve. The state could experience an overall wage and personal-income boost of $12 billion by 2015 from industry spending."

Furthermore, the study projected royalty payments to landowners, schools, businesses and communities as much as $1.6 billion by the same year. The study put tax revenue by 2015 at approximately $479 million.

"Industry expenditures related to Utica shale development could generate approximately $12.3 billion in gross state product and result in a statewide output or sales of more than $23 billion," the release said.

Currently, it said, there are more than 64,000 active wells throughout 49 counties in Ohio, while more than 274,000 wells have been drilled in 76 of the state's 88 counties.

Similar studies have been released in the past year in both New York State and Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, documentation from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources is largely supportive of the alleged safety of fracking. A "facts about fracking" page states that the method has been "used safely in more than 1 million U.S. wells."

Furthermore, it states that since 1990 more than 15,000 Ohio wells have used hydraulic fracturing.

"During that time the Division of Mineral Resources Management has conducted a number of water well investigation complaints. None of the investigations revealed problems due to hydraulic fracturing," the ODNR page states.

Environmentalists, however, have discounted supportive fracking studies, alleging that they've been done at the oil and gas industry's behest. State regulators in Ohio are also held in some suspicion by environmentalists, since the administration of Gov. John Kasich has made it clear that when jobs and regulation come into conflict, jobs should win.

As for the city of Athens itself, Butler has said previously that the fear with fracking is that groundwater and wells could become polluted. Other pertinent issues include that Athens gets all of its drinking water from wellheads. However, since this sort of drilling is unlikely to happen within the city itself, the question becomes how the city might regulate the potential run-off contamination from drilling that occurs outside city limits.

Butler said he'll have to look at the Pittsburgh legislation more closely to find out how that city has dealt with this issue.

And to complicate the issue even further, it's still an open question whether the Utica shale layer in Athens County offers a practical opportunity for large-scale drilling. Some experts contend that it doesn't.