
{"id":26943,"date":"2012-07-12T10:11:24","date_gmt":"2012-07-12T14:11:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=26943"},"modified":"2012-07-12T14:07:19","modified_gmt":"2012-07-12T18:07:19","slug":"big-city-notes-from-a-day-off-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2012\/07\/12\/big-city-notes-from-a-day-off-2\/","title":{"rendered":"BIG CITY: Fracking not a done deal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Kirk Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get your hopes up and for goodness sake don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t let your guard down, but the odds of wide-scale fracking in this state are not as good as you think.<\/p>\n<p>There was little doubt at the end of last year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s session that despite a veto of the original fracking bill, this state would legalize horizontal drilling, an essential element of fracking, which has been banned since the middle of the last century. Last week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s accidental vote that capped the two-year rush to frack by the leadership in the General Assembly was just the icing on the cake.<\/p>\n<p>The new legislation, which became law when the legislature overrode the governor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s veto, is a much better piece of legislation, especially in the form of land protection and landowner\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rights. But as finely worked out as any piece of legislation is, the simple fact is that fracking is kind of an all-or-nothing deal. Either the industry goes big, or it stays home.<\/p>\n<p>In North Carolina there are immense hurdles to going big. One of the things to consider is the amount of new infrastructure it would take to move gas from a large number of rigs spread out over a wide area. Infrastructure, or in this case the lack of it, is one of the biggest arguments against wide-scale fracking here. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also why the industry, if it does crank up a North Carolina operation, will have such a big impact on the land.<\/p>\n<p>Keep in mind that the well companies via their legislative supporters are going to get unprecedented rights of access to drilling sites. That means roads and pipes in places hitherto unimagined. The network required for a large-scale effort has not been a focus, but its construction, which would happen in tandem with the drilling, could provide far more flashpoints for disputes than the wells themselves.<\/p>\n<p>While the lack of infrastructure creates a barrier to getting started, the drop in the price of natural gas has made a new venture in North Carolina less feasible. So too have wildly shifting estimates of how much could be extracted.  <\/p>\n<p>There are other large economic forces at work as well. The hurry to legalize fracking probably speaks more to the uncertainty in the industry in fracking areas elsewhere than the riches of our state\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s shale deposits. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s entirely plausible that North Carolina is a ready backup in case there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s trouble in Pennsylvania, New York or Michigan. The federal government is also getting involved, opening up more of its lands to fracking and contemplating greater fracking regulation, which to date has been mostly a state-by-state free-for-all.<\/p>\n<p>Once the feds take a role in regulating fracking, all bets are off, thanks to the supremacy clause, which gives federal officials final say.<\/p>\n<p>This could provide an important check should the legislature decide to circumvent science, which as many of you know is all the rage under the dome these days.<\/p>\n<p>While for the above reasons cited there are significant hurdles to fracking becoming a reality, the overriding reason fracking will be difficult has to do with the land itself.<\/p>\n<p>The Triassic basin, where lay the frackable lands, has a complicated geology. Throughout are diabase dikes, igneous rock formations jutting upward through the layers. These structures make it incredibly difficult to predict the flow of water beneath the surface.<\/p>\n<p>If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been around the area long enough to remember when a site on the border of Chatham and Wake counties was being considered for the country\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s largest low-level radioactive-waste landfill, you might recall that the fact that groundwater flow could not be predicted \u00e2\u20ac\u201d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153modeled\u00e2\u20ac\u009d was the key word \u00e2\u20ac\u201d was the key scientific objection.<\/p>\n<p>As near as anyone can tell, in the past few decades the geology of the Triassic basin, formed somewhere between 200 and 250 million years ago, hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t changed much. Pumping it full of hazardous fluids is still a gamble.<\/p>\n<p>Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hope that in the end what also hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t changed is the understanding that no matter how good the sales pitch, there are some things we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t put on the line. When it comes to fracking, the old expression doubly applies.<\/p>\n<p>Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t bet the farm on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The odds of wide-scale fracking in this state are not as good as you think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26943"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26993,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26943\/revisions\/26993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}