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DURHAM – A workshop at Duke University brought researchers, industry officials and others together on Monday to talk about the economic, social and environmental impacts of a natural gas extraction technique known as “fracking.”
The topic is timely, said Robert Jackson, a professor and the director of the Center on Global Change at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, because state officials are studying legalizing the practice of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in North Carolina.
States legislators charged the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources with studying potential impacts of extraction of natural gas from shale rock in North Carolina, and with making recommendations for laws that would be needed to regulate it. The final report is due to the N.C. General Assembly May 1.
According to the department website, it’s thought that there is recoverable natural gas in an area that includes Lee, Chatham and Moore counties.
Jackson said the workshop was held at Duke to identify gaps in the knowledge about the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.
He was one of the authors of a study, “Methane contamination of drinking water accompanying gas-well drilling and hydraulic fracturing.”
The study found the presence of methane in water wells of people living in Pennsylvania near to natural gas wells, he said.
Jackson said that if state legislators to implement regulations to legalize the practice, he said he would like to see a “strong set of safeguards” put in to prevent negative impacts.
Avner Vengosh, also a co-author of that study and a professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, said he believes that what is needed is “hard-core science and funding for science,” to respond to industry experts’ arguments for the role shale gas will in the United States in the future.
Fracking is the process of drilling horizontal wells and injecting fluids into formations in order to the collect natural gas that’s trapped inside, he said.
“The question is: Do we know enough about it, and do we know enough about the environmental consequences?” he said.
Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, was another speaker at the workshop who said his concern is for methane gas emissions from shale-gas development.
Howarth said that methane gas is “an incredible powerful greenhouse gas,” and ranks as the second in human causes of global warming. He was lead author of a paper published in April about the greenhouse gas footprint of shale-gas development.
“All natural gas is a problem, but this releases more gas to the same amount of natural gas,” he said.
Susan Christopherson, a professor at Cornell University, made a presentation of the economic consequences of shale gas drilling.
She said the longterm outcomes for the places where drilling takes place are not “particularly favorable,” and said rural counties can be worse off than where they started.
Local communities can see impacts of drilling such as a need for road maintenance, since she said it’s a truck-intensive industry.
There are also landscape changes that come with shale-gas drilling, she said, such as construction of plants, pile lines, railroad spurs, and other infrastructure that she said can impact existing industries.
“We need to ask again about the kinds of trade-offs that are going to be made over the long-term,” she said.
