Shepstone Management Company, Inc.
An EPA report on biofuels reveals the falsity of fracking bans based on such factors as forest protection, which is enhanced by natural gas development.
Several years ago I attended a meeting at which National Park Service representatives were present and made what I thought was an obvious point. It was that if one was serious about forest protection or saving open space in general, then there was no better approach than to encourage natural gas development. The reason? Nothing else disturbs so little with so much economic impact.
Natural gas development, which typically disturbs but a tiny portion of the land, gives farmers and forest landowners an economic return—the ability to earn a living from and pay the taxes on—the land so that they could maintain it as farmland, woodland and open space. I carefully explained these fundamental facts and the NPS folks gave me that deer in the headlights stare that showed how little they grasped of land economics. I might as well have lectured the infants in the maternity ward of our hospital. Sadly, it’s not uncommon, but a recent EPA study on biofuels may help.
The study, entitled “Biofuels and the Environment: Second Triennial Report to Congress,” has been long overdue and was apparently avoided for the longest time because nobody in Washington wanted to face the truth about the biofuels/ethanal boondoggle so loved by both political parties and so hated but most of the rest of us. The Washington Times notes the following, in fact:
In their new, 145-page report, “Biofuels and the Environment: The Second Triennial Report to Congress,” the EPA repeatedly acknowledges that the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) — the federal law that requires the blending of ethanol with gasoline supplies each year — has done harm to water, soil and air quality.
The National Wildlife Federation (NWF) indicates the June report documents millions of acres of wildlife habitat lost to ethanol crop production and increased nutrient pollution in waterways and air emissions. They also say the report supports their belief that the unintended consequences of replacing gas with ethanol are making things much worse.
The RFS is having negative consequences to a wide variety of environmental indicators, according to David DeGennaro, a policy expert at NWF. “The report is a red flag warning that we need to reconsider the mandate’s scope and its focus on first-generation fuels made from food crops,” he said.
The report includes several findings, including the following tidbit:
Although the use of agricultural land has intensified, cropland extensification and deforestation has continued. Cropland expansion that results in forest loss is a particularly acute driver of environmental impacts.
So, biofuels, one of the renewables alternatives suggested by fractivists, are causing deforestation with acute environmental impacts. Natural gas development is not; for two reasons.
First, it’s occurring in regions like my own Wayne County, Pennsylvania where forest cover has dramatically increased (by roughly 15%) over the last half-century—a point the NPS reps and the politically craven DRBC folks simply refuse to address. The following chart compares forest land in 1959 with 2008:
Wayne County forest land grew by over 44,000 acres or 15% from 1959 to 2008, from 56% of total land use to 65%.
Secondly, natural gas development and the pipeline network designed to gather and deliver it requires only a very small acreage, as little as 10-15 acres to grab the gas from underneath more than 2,200 acres with existing technology that allows laterals as long as two miles, and its getting better all the time. Again, nothing else delivers so much for so little disturbance and most of it occurs on already disturbed land. Biofuels development, by contrast, uses every bit of the acreage involved and, as we know from EPA, often occurs on land deforested for the purpose of growing the crops.
Yet, here’s what we read from the DRBC with respect to fracking in the Delaware River Basin:
Approximately 70 percent of the basin area underlain by the Marcellus and Utica shales (largely in the drainage area of Special Protection Waters) is forested. The average total disturbance associated with a single well pad, including associated access roads and utility corridors, is estimated at 7.7 acres. Off-site facilities such as gathering lines involve additional disturbances. These landscape changes will reduce forested areas and potentially vegetated buffers, increase non-point source pollution, diminish groundwater infiltration, and risk adversely affecting water quality and quantity in surface and groundwater. Because high volume hydraulic fracturing would most likely occur in headwater areas in the drainage area to Special Protection Waters, the risks of degrading water resources and impairing the effectuation of the comprehensive plan are of particular concern.
Not only does the DRBC ignore the vast increase in forest cover over the last several decades as farmland has reverted to forest, but it also pretends natural gas development uses an unusually large amount of forest land for energy production when the truth is exactly the opposite. Natural gas development disturbs far less forest than biofuels, solar or wind per unit of energy produced and it economically permits landowners the luxury of keeping land in open space and doing forest protection everyone says they favor.
The DRBC and other fractivist-oriented groups using forest protection as a rationale for their positions, in other words, aren’t the least bit serious about forest protection. It’s nothing more than an excuse to frustrate natural gas development. In the DRBC’s case that’s because such development will make it more difficult to make a wilderness out of the Upper Delaware for the gentry class it is so determined to appease.
The post Don’t Talk to Me About Forest Protection Unless You’re Serious About It appeared first on Natural Gas Now.
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