DC Bureau - Investigative Journalism, Environmental News, and National Security Stories That Matter

Photo: Jean-Etienne Poirrier

Its official - New York is so broke the state has now turned itself into a science experiment with the people becoming one big collective lab rat. The bad news is the researchers running the experiment come from Wall Street and Texas.

Forever the slave to Wall Street, New Yorkers are hoping that if enough chemicals are poured into wells dug in the most pristine parts of the state a fortune in natural gas will help turn around their financial bad fortune. Down on the Street the big stock pump is on as drilling stocks for the “Shale play” are being pushed as the next big thing.

Thanks to the pre-Jurassic era creation, New York is sitting on the largest gas find in America. Unfortunately, the gas lies under the most scenic areas of the Empire State. Environmentalists have struggled to keep the State from being abused for generations. Now, thanks to Wall Street and bankers who plundered the country with subprime loans and bets on these loans - from the Sandlers’ Golden West in California to Manhattan’s Goldman Sachs, New York is so busted that the temptation to dump chemicals into the ground to get cash for gas has spread across the state like the H1NI virus.

Even environmentally friendly universities want to sell gas leases under their land.

New York is the statewide equivalent of selling a kidney to survive.

The gas rush to the Marcellus Shale is beginning to display some of the symptoms of the sub-prime bank disaster. Wall Street analysts are hyping companies who have secured drilling leases in the gas rich shale area. While there may be real gas under the shale, the real mining is being done on Wall Street driving up share prices of drilling companies who operate or own leases in Marcellus Shale.

There is only one problem: the demand for natural gas and other petroleum products is weak. So if prices for natural gas are low, Wall Street tries to create a way to make money. A few years ago that is how speculators drove oil prices to $140 a barrel. Now it is gas and making commissions on gas plays.

New York State legislators, faced with a government horribly in the red, see the Marcellus Shale as political and economic salvation. But the pot of gold being chased by local landowners from mom and pop farms to giant institutions like Cornell University may be of the fool’s variety.

When you go into business with the natural gas industry, the only clean part of the process is the blue flame burning at the end. Everything leading up to that is dirty. To get the gas out of the shale a horrendous brew of chemicals is injected into the ground using between three and seven millions of gallons of fresh water for each well. The chemicals are largely poisonous and to avoid liability the gas lobby convinced Congress and the Bush Administration in 2005 to exempt these concoctions from the Safe Drinking Water Act. The companies can keep their witches brews secret, thus reducing the chance that a poisoned water table will be pinned on them.

So while the good intentioned Department of Environmental Conservation in New York can demand to know all the chemicals to be poured into the watershed of New York State, it cannot know the formulas of the compounds that work to extract the gas by chemically cracking the shale. That is why residents may never know how nanotechnology being used under their homes to keep the pores of the shale open could affect them. The potential for environmental disaster is real. Once the well gets going, the gray wastewater must be removed and cleansed. Little is understood about nanotechnology. The gas drillers tell us it is okay because, after all, it is used in women’s cosmetics. But fear not New Yorkers, each of those 17 inspectors at the DEC would only have to examine about 800 wells every year.

So there you have it – horizontal drilling using chemicals to get vast amounts of natural gas and huge amounts of cash. Doesn’t sound like anything could go wrong with any of this does it? I mean what are the chances a collapse in gas prices would cause these companies to abandon the leases and leave New York an environmental wasteland?

Visit Texas sometime. Oh, never mind. Texas was a wasteland before the gas drillers came from there.

But New York is New York. We love New York. The reason people travel to places like the Hudson River Valley, visit the Catskills or enjoy New York Wine Country is to see those beautiful gas wellheads popping out of the countryside. Why that’s better than picking apples, drinking wine or watching the leaves change. Right?

But there is some good news. The buzzards on Wall Street pushing this science experiment don’t have to worry.

They are not doing any gas drilling in East Hampton. The only liquid they have to worry about is a little Piper or Dom.