Can wind, water, sun satisfy NY’s huge energy appetite? Anti-fracking movement offers plan with hard numbers

Powerimg NY with renewable energy means more hydro power
like the  2,353-megawatt Robert Moses plant in Niagara Falls

New York state has become a battle ground for the country’s energy future. Do we – through shale gas development -- lay the foundation for another generation of fossil fuel production and consumption, or not?  The heat and intensity of the debate – fracking is bad, fracking is good – often overshadows an underlying reality that makes the discussion so critical to begin with. That reality is expressed in these simple numbers tabulated by the federal Energy Information Administration:

In 2010, New York state consumed more than four times as much energy as it produced (3,728 trillion BTUs vs. 867 trillion BTUs).

Although these numbers seldom if ever find their way into rallies and rhetoric, the protracted debate over shale gas in the Empire State is hopefully compelling residents to pay closer attention to where energy comes from and how they use it.  The consequences of flipping a switch should become less of an abstraction now that the on-shore drilling boom has brought the extraction energy to our collective back yards.

New York state (and the rest of the country) could make up its energy shortfall by using fracking to exploit previously inaccessible carbon reserves, such as the Marcellus and Utica shales lying under largely unexplored regions of New York between the Finger Lakes and the Catskills regions. There is now expectation that the United States will become an energy exporter after the Obama administration recently approved policy to permit liquefied natural gas exporting plants in the wake of a market glut from shale gas production. (It’s a policy that will help shareholders, but hurt wage-earners, according to a federal report, which I have written about here.)

Despite consensus that fossil fuels are not sustainable – even the fracking proponents pitch natural gas as a “bridge” to a world someday powered by cleaner alternatives – acceptance of renewable energy has, for various reasons, yet to reach critical mass.

Whether or not fracking takes us across the bridge to the next generation of energy, there are paralyzing chasms that must be crossed, one way or another, in policy and politics.  In New York state and other places, there is the gulf between the energy consumed and the amount produced – a disparity that is more unsettling as competition for cheap carbon continues to increase globally at unprecedented rates. There is also a chasm between opposing visions of our country’s future by patriots for and against shale gas development. And there is a certain disconnect between the past and future that we are unable to bridge in the present. The moratorium on shale gas permits in New York is approaching its fifth year anniversary (July 23) with little signs of advancing state policy on the broader issue of energy.

New Yorkers Against Fracking poster for rally in Albany

Anti-frackers are seizing the moment to showcase their way forward with a plan that demonstrates how New York can make up its energy shortfall with other natural resources – sun, wind, and water. New Yorkers Against Fracking, a grass roots political action group, is organizing a rally in Albany on June 17  “calling on Governor Cuomo to reject fracking and lead the nation in constructing a renewable energy economy here and now in New York.” Until now, the anti-fracking movement has put more energy into shutting down fracking than proposing concrete alternatives. It’s encouraging to see the movement harnessing its considerable grass roots punch to advance the discussion rather than simply to fortify an impasse.

While banners, placards, slogans, marches, and chants will be the natural and time-honored means for delivering political pressure at the Albany rally – called New York Crossroads -- the concept behind the rally is based on research by a group of scientists, economists, and academics. The result is a paper published in March in Energy Policy, an international academic journal dealing with political, economic, environmental and social aspects of energy. It spells out empirically how New York state can wean itself from fossil fuels and convert completely to renewable energy sources by 2050.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s hesitancy over fracking provides a stark contrast to the approach of the Obama administration, which has characterized shale gas development as “a priority” in the country’s energy future. Now the anti-frackers hope to present the ambivalent New York governor (and potential presidential candidate) with a blue print to overcome the political inertia and practical barriers to advance beyond fossil fuels.

“You have to be realistic and pragmatic,” said Anthony Ingraffea, a Cornell University engineer, former fracking industry consultant, and one of the 13 co-authors of the plan. “If you say no to shale gas, you better say yes to something else.”

The report considers the cost and feasibility of powering New York’s residential, manufacturing and transportation sectors with solar, wind, and water energy technologies -- combined with reduction through inherent efficiencies. It also accounts for known health risks associated with carbon fuels. Not surprisingly, it is drawing challenges and criticism on many fronts, including questions about the reliability of a post-carbon grid adjusting to power flows and natural cycles, and behavioral changes, capital sources, enterprise, and political shifts that will be necessary for a renewable energy plan to flourish.

Those on both sides of the fraking debate – now being recast in New York as the fracking versus renewable debate -- see Cuomo’s leadership as pivotal. He could allow fracking in New York as it has proceeded in Pennsylvania, free of a severance tax and exempt from water conservation and hazardous waste handling laws. This would channel more capital into drilling and related infrastructure and contribute to a glut of cheap fossil energy that hurts the competitive position of renewables. Or he could tilt the scales in the other direction, allowing greater incentives for renewables while discouraging shale gas development.

Authors of the report – titled  “Examining the Feasibility of Converting New York State’s all-purpose Energy Infrastructure to one using Wind, Water, and Sunlight” --have been promised an audience with Cuomo, Ingraffea said, which has yet to happen, but they are encouraged by the governor’s hesitancy to approve fracking and the mounting political pressure to provide answers.

New York is hardly starting from scratch in harnessing renewable sources. According to the same EIA report that outlined the state’s energy deficit:

The State possesses considerable renewable energy potential. Several powerful rivers, including the Niagara and the Hudson, provide New York with some of the greatest hydropower resources in the Nation, and New York’s Catskill and Adirondack mountains offer substantial wind power potential.

The EIA report notes that New York produced more hydroelectric power than any other state east of the Rocky Mountains in 2011 and that the 2,353-megawatt Robert Moses Niagara hydroelectric power plant in Niagara Falls was the fourth largest in the United States in 2010. Looking ahead, New York's Renewable Portfolio Standard requires that 30 percent of electricity come from renewable energy resources by 2015; in 2011, 24 percent of electricity came from renewable energy resources. The report also notes that residents in New York, in metropolitan areas at least, are already inclined to conserve energy. Although the state was the eighth largest energy consumer in the country in 2010, it had the second lowest energy consumption per capita after Rhode Island due in part to its widely used mass transportation systems.

Ingraffea dismisses the idea that a fossil-fuel free New York is a pipedream. “The technology is already here,” he said. “The bridge is behind us. Renewables are every bit as real as coal, oil, or gas.  The hard part is not the science. It’s the policy.”

It’s not surprising that the feasibility paper has been criticized and debated over its assumptions and practicality. Andrew Revkin, the New York Times analyst and blogger who covers energy, climate, and environmental issues for Dot Earth, summed it up this way: “To me, the analysis works best as a thought experiment, given the monumental hurdles — economic, political, regulatory and technical — that would hinder such a shift.” (You can read his full assement here.)

Two of the papers’ authors, Ingraffea and Robert Howarth, are also principal aubthors of another paper that has riled the industry with science suggesting  shale gas development is as bad or worse than coal in contributing to greenhouse gasses and global warming. The work, titled Climate Impacts of Shale Gas Development,  has been met with rebuttals and challenges (including this one by Francis O’Sullivan and Sergey Paltsev at MIT) as well as praise. That’s the fitting and proper nature of academic scholarship, the scientific method, and the hard work of blending science with policy. At the very least, it provides a starting point for much-needed discussions – one challenging the conventional wisdom that gas is cleaner than coal, and the other providing an empirical framework for life after carbon. With or without fracking, carbon reserves are finite, and New York’s share of them will last for maybe a generation or two, perhaps less. The legacy of abandoned wells may well outlast that.  What then, if not renewables? And if renewables, why not sooner rather than later?

Federal report gives thumbs up to shale gas exports Scenarios would help investors, hurt wage earners

LNG exports: shareholders win, wage earners lose
PHOTO PROVIDED

Exporting the country’s shale gas reserves would drive up prices and drive down wages, according to a report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy. Yet drawbacks would be more than offset from gains to economic stakeholders in the natural gas extraction and exporting industries, the report concludes.

The report by NERA Economic Consulting was forwarded last week to Christopher Smith, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Department of Energy. It shows that policy to encourage exportation of domestic energy reserves, thought by some to be a political non-starter, is being weighed by an administration that has identified on-shore drilling as a priority to stimulate energy independence.

With 20 different plays, the collection of shale gas reserves in the lower-48 United States is thought to be among the largest in the world. President Obama’s support of shale gas development comes despite opposition from some environmental organizations and grass roots campaigns that argue drilling poses risks to public health and the environment while channeling resources away from sustainable energy development.

Wrapped up in the exporting question is a debate over the merits of high volume hydraulic fracturing, a controversial practice to fracture bedrock and release gas by injecting well bores with pressurized chemical solutions. In 2005, the Bush/Cheney administration encouraged shale gas development by making fracking exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act. That exemption -- known to critics as the Haliburton Loophole -- came in addition to exemptions from hazardous waste laws enacted by Congress in both the Carter and Reagan years. The report issued last week is a sign that, despite a growing anti-fracking movement lead by progressives, the Obama administration could be thinking less about repealing exemptions and more about stimulating demand for the country’s shale gas.

The risks and merits of shale gas development are the subject of a polarizing national debate, including unresolved prospects of the Marcellus and Utica shale’s underlying parts of New York state. While fracking has lead to an onshore drilling boom in Texas, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Ohio, Colorado, Arkansas, West Virginia and other places, New York, has held off on permitting shale wells as it reexamines policy in light of concerns about impacts on environment and public health. While governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration is shooting for a deadline in late February to finalize regulations, it is awaiting analysis from an independent panel of health experts, and Cuomo has left the door open to shelving the process.


To make it suitable for exporting in tankers, gas is converted into liquid (Liquid Natural Gas or LNG). The idea of exporting domestic supplies to lucrative overseas markets in Europe and Asia is sure to spur more controversy. As prices drop domestically with increased supply, companies have proposed more than a dozen projects to build coastal exporting facilities. These include a $6 billion liquefied natural gas export terminal, already approved, at Sempra Energy’s existing import terminal at Hackberry in southwestern Louisiana, with permits for other projects pending. Gas exports would stimulate more shale gas development by easing a market glut and raising prices. Higher prices, in turn, provide incentive for more exploration, development and infrastructure build out. Critics warn that unconventional extraction methods have outpaced science and regulations to understand and mitigate the costs, even without the catalytic affect of exports.

“Exporting means more fracking, and there are a lot of regulations that need to be developed before this is even close to safe,” said Craig Segall, an attorney for the Sierra Club. “You haven’t done an analysis of the cost to the public and the environment. This is a huge one and you have to think about it.”

Jim Smith, a spokesman for Independent Oil & Gas Association of New York, said the agency would not be inclined to support policy that raises costs to manufacturers, which are a mainstay of the agency’s membership. “We have to look carefully at both sides of the equation,” he said.

Nationally, any gas exporting policy is sure to meet resistance from the manufacturing sector. Gas and its derivatives are used as both fuel and feedstock for domestically produced goods ranging from textiles to fertilizer to packaging. Domestic petro-chemical manufacturers, including DOW Jones and the Koch Industries, have already successfully lobbied against proposed federal subsidies to use natural gas to fuel vehicles because, the argument goes, increased demand would raise prices and hurt manufacturing.

Yet operators and investors can fetch much higher prices in overseas markets due to global demand. The winners and losers under exporting scenarios break down accordingly, with the winners being the natural gas industry and those who invest in it, and the losers being manufacturing, transportation, service, and agriculture sectors.

Under exporting scenarios, according to the NERA report:

“Wage income decreases in all industrial sectors except for the natural gas sector. Services and manufacturing sectors see the largest change in wage income in 2015 as these are sectors that are highly labor intensive.” The report explains that “the overall effect on the economy depends on the degree to which the economy adjusts by fuel switching, introducing new technologies, or mitigating costs by compensating parties disproportionately impacted.”

The most viable “fuel-switching” scenario is this: Plants that might otherwise burn gas would likely be more inclined to burn coal as gas prices rise. Critics argue that could leave the U.S. with both the environmental consequences of air and water pollution (including methane emissions) from unconventional shale gas development, plus CO2 and mercury pollution associated with burning coal.

Updated Dec. 12 Jannette Barth, an economist, consultant and shale gas industry critic, issued a critique today charging that the DOE study did not account for hidden costs -- ranging from increased demands on municipal resources to environmental degradation -- on local communities to produce gas. Barth argues that gas exports will benefit shareholders in gas extraction companies who tend to be affluent. “Only 54% of Americans own stock of any kind, retirement savings or otherwise. Clearly, not all of the 54% own natural gas stock.” Most who do “likely hold tiny numbers of shares in mutual funds.” Additionally, according to Barth’s assessment, many shareholders in the U.S. domestic shale gas play are from outsides the U.S.

What other reports and considerations are relevant to the discussion? What do you think?