To the Editor:
Arthur Herman’s article on fracking is misleading and biased [“The Liberal War on American Energy Independence,” February]. In order to get to deep shale, drillers must drill through the aquifer. Is so doing, they frequently allow natural gas to contaminate drinking water. And there are other dangers. In 2007, a defectively drilled well in Bainbridge, Ohio, led to an explosion that blew a home off its foundation—and contaminated the water supply of dozens of other homes.
If fracking chemicals are so safe, why are does federal law allow frackers to keep secret the chemicals they use? The Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) mandates regulation of underground-injection activities to protect groundwater resources. But in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which arose out of Vice President Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force, Congress amended the definition of “underground injection” under the SDWA to specifically exclude “the underground injection of fluids or propping agents (other than diesel fuels) pursuant to hydraulic fracturing operations related to oil, gas, or geothermal production activities.” Under this exemption, oil and gas companies can now inject anything other than diesel in association with fracking operations without having to comply with SDWA provisions intended to protect our nation’s water supplies.
Doug Bletcher
Chesterland, Ohio
To the Editor:
Arthur Herman’s article is interesting and informative about the fracking revolution and the energy supply of the United States. But in the last paragraphs, Mr. Herman makes predictions and assertions that do not add up and that, if true, would be bad for the energy future of the United States.
The first problem is the author’s assertion that the supply of natural-gas resources in the United States is “not limited.” But a supply that could last decades is not the same thing as an unlimited supply.
In the next paragraph, Mr. Herman happily predicts that the U.S. economy will “shift to rely more on natural gas than coal and petroleum [for generating electricity].” This is nothing to be happy about. Americans should be concerned that a limited resource needed for heating, water, cooking, and numerous industrial tasks is being used to replace coal and oil in power generation.
Finally, Mr. Herman asserts, without evidence, that methane hydrates will become economically recoverable as the current sources of natural gas and oil are used up.
Steven Zoraster
Address withheld
To the Editor:
After reading Arthur Herman’s article, it occurred to me that energy independence will be a hugely liberating step for the United States. It will give the U.S. more freedom in foreign policy and boost economic growth and stability independent of foreign potentates. (Consider, as an alternative, the tragic energy dependence of Europe on Russian oil and gas.) No wonder foreign energy powers, including Arab sheikhdoms and Russia, are eager to torpedo U.S. fracking; financing green and liberal groups is just about the best way to do it.
Sam Theodore
London, England
To the Editor:
I strongly agree with Arthur Herman’s article. It does, however, skip over the “hair shirt” nature of modern liberalism, especially when it comes to energy and environmental matters. During the 1970s, the same forces that now oppose fracking fought against decontrol of natural-gas and oil prices.
They first asserted that the U.S. didn’t have much in the way of additional resources to be discovered, which meant that the ones we had might as well be sold at below-market prices. This line of attack proved ineffective after the drop in gasoline, heating oil, and crude prices spurred by Reagan-era decontrol. The left then objected on environmentalist grounds.
This interest in self-destructive policies is born of guilt about America’s and the West’s affluence. It is part of the dubious “limits of growth” agenda that the Club of Rome popularized starting in 1972. The global-warming confabs of Kyoto, Copenhagen, and Lima are inspired by the same passions.
James Glucksman
Rye Brook, New York
Arthur Herman writes:
To paraphrase Mary McCarthy’s verdict of Lillian Hellman’s memoirs, virtually every word in Doug Bletcher’s letter is misleading and untrue, except “a” and “the.”
To start with, federal law does not “allow frackers to keep secret the chemicals they use.” Nor is it true that fracking activity is subject to the Safe Drinking Water Act (SWDA). It never has been, the reason being that fracture stimulation occurs thousands of feet below geological formations that contain or carry drinking water—in some cases, some two miles below the aquifer. Therefore, there could be no “exemption” from SWDA rules in the 2005 Energy Policy Act because, in the 60-year history of fracking, they never applied. Fracking is instead regulated by the states, sometimes with over-aggressive care (as in Pennsylvania) but always in contact with local communities, including local environmentalists.
Information about the chemicals used in fracking is publicly available through state regulator websites such as those in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and from websites run by the Ground Water Protection Council and the U.S. Department of Energy.
Nor is it true that the 2005 Energy Policy Act was the result of any Dick Cheney–inspired task force. Support of the measure was broad and bipartisan and included three-quarters of the Democrats then in the Senate—including a certain junior senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.
As for the 2007 Bainbridge, Ohio, explosion (in which no one was injured), Mr. Bletcher’s assertion that it was the result of “a defectively drilled well,” i.e., fracking, is contradicted by the facts. One only has to turn to the September 2008 report by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which concluded, after exhaustive investigation, that it was not drilling but “inadequate cementing of the production casing” that allowed over-pressurized gas from the well to leak into the aquifer and trigger the explosion. The report also noted that since 1984, this was “the first documented incident where natural gas invaded ground water aquifers as a result of a deficient primary cement job” at a gas well, even though during that same period of time, more than 22,000 oil and gas wells had been completed along the same geological formation—and 30,000 had been constructed across the state of Ohio.
Steven Zoraster’s letter, by contrast, is not dishonest but seems inspired by the same “hair shirt” mind-set mentioned by James Glucksman. The key word in Zoraster’s message is “limited”: limited natural gas, limited permissible uses for its consumption (heating, cooking, industrial feedstock, etc.), and limited technical knowledge to unlock future energy sources such as methane hydrates.
Japanese scientists (Japan sits on vast untapped sources of methane hydrate) are certainly more sanguine than Mr. Zoraster about the possibilities of converting that resource into usable energy—so are scientists at our Department of Energy. Of course no one can precisely predict the energy future. However, it is true that over time estimates of available, i.e., recoverable, supplies of shale natural gas have tended to go upward, rather than downward. Indeed, the current estimate of available natural gas in the United States is 8.5 trillion cubic meters, and technically recoverable resources in the U.S. are probably eight times that number.
This upward curve is the result of rapidly improving technological innovation, including fracking and horizontal drilling as well as more precise seismic investigation and imaging. Eventually it will include methane hydrates—while leaving dire predictions like Mr. Zoraster’s in the rearview mirror.
By contrast, I largely agree with Sam Theodore and James Glucksman about the forces that are arrayed against American energy independence, including liberalism’s self-destructive guilt. However, I would point out that a new factor now weighs heavily on the average environmentalist’s mind, and on the policy scales: fear of climate change. Its apocalyptic vision of the future has turned every effort at economic improvement, from fracking to farming, into a scenario triggering mass destruction and extinction of the planet—excusing any lie to further the cause. It’s up to the rest of us to keep our heads and separate truth from fictions like Mr. Bletcher’s.
