Texas Mayor Warns of Natural Gas Drilling
From the Walton Reporter (no website), February 12, 2010.
By Glenn Graves
DISH, Texas Mayor Calvin Tillman was at Downsville Central School last Wednesday evening to discuss the pitfalls that can be associated with natural gas development. His presentation was sponsored by a coalition of local groups concerned about the impacts of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale region of New York State and Pennsylvania, in response to a recent meeting, held in Downsville and sponsored by the towns of Colchester and Hancock, which announced the formation of a landowners association to negotiate lease deals with the gas industry.
Tillman said his town, which was renamed DISH, from Clark, after the DISH Network agreed to award all 200 townspeople free satellite television several years ago, sits over the Barnett Shale formation of Texas, a valuable natural gas reserve. DISH is the host to 11 natural gas compressors, four metering stations, 11 high-pressure gas lines and numerous gas wells and gathering lines, he said.
It is also the host to a noxious odor arising from all the activity, which, he said, tests have revealed contains high levels of carcinogens and neurotoxins. Tillman said the town hired a firm to conduct an air-quality study after horses and people in the town became sick.
When the town addressed people in the gas industry and landowners in the town who were leasing property to the gas developers, it fell on deaf ears, he said. “The natural gas profits are just like heroin and we had people addicted to it,” he said.
Tillman said 60 percent of DISH’s revenues were derived from property taxes on minerals, primarily natural gas and that as the wells lost production over the past 20 years, the town’s revenues similarly decreased. “Wells lose 50 percent production after the first year,” he said.
Tillman had several recommendations for communities, such as those in the Marcellus Shale region that will be host to burgeoning gas development. He said people should be wary of neighbors too eager to get them to sign on with a certain gas developer, because companies are paying some people to enlist others, sometimes as much as two percent of the royalties.
He also suggested setbacks from neighboring properties.
Tillman said communities should insist upon the gas companies using gathering tanks for used drilling fluids, rather than pools, as are used elsewhere. He said the companies could install vapor recovery condensation tanks to eliminate much of the chemicals that had sickened his community. He said the cost would be about $60,000 per unit.
He said the companies could also install zero-emission dehydrators to treat the fluids and that pneumatic valves should be installed in the hydrators, to keep the gas impurities from being released into the air.
Tillman said that the chemicals used in the hydrofracking fluids didn’t need to be revealed in Texas, but said New York State should insist on knowing the contents of all fluids being pumped into the ground to fracture the shale and release the gases. He said there is legitimate concern about what damage hydrofracking can do to groundwater. “Within the next six months, you’re going to hear that the EPA (United States Environmental Protection Agency) is going to commence a study of the impact of hydrofracking on drinking water,” he said.
He also strongly recommended the state impose a severance tax, based on the volume of gas extracted from the shale. “This industry has to be tightly regulated,” he said. “A severance tax would pay for more regulators.”
He suggested that the agency that is permitting the activity, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), not be the regulatory agency, in order to eliminate the chance of biases or alliances.
“Local ordinances should require road use agreements,” Tillman told the audience of over 100, “and local ordinances should also require green completions. There should also be places that are off limits for drilling and equipment, such as wells in school playgrounds and pipelines in front yards. Get control of where wells can be sited.”
Tillman also said communities should band together when signing leases. “There’s strength in numbers,” he said.
Tillman closed his presentation with a warning about the use of eminent domain by gas companies, which most states allow for the distribution of energy. “All 11 pipeline sites in our town were taken by eminent domain or under threat of eminent domain,” he said