Repercussion Section: Banning Fracking in New York...All Over Again
By Sandra Steingraber, Senior Scientist
In the pages of The Networker, we often point to the December 2014 New York State fracking ban. We do so with pride because the rationale for the ban echoed the messaging and data of our own health professional-led campaign that documented the many pathways by which fracking imperils human health. The science we compiled helped our governor make the right decision.
Five years later, in the face of Trump-era environmental rollbacks, the New York State legislature further strengthened our state’s ban on high-volume hydraulic fracturing by codifying Governor Cuomo’s executive action into permanent law, making it impervious to any attempts by future governors to toss it out.
That law also squashed a cynical attempt to circumvent the fracking ban when Tioga Energy Partners, LLC tried to advance a proposal to extract natural gas by using propane gel instead of water as the agent of fracking. The 2021 law places an explicit moratorium—although not an outright ban—on propane fracking. Phew.
With this, we all breathed a sigh of relief—with one environmental organization going so far as to claim that “now that the ban is codified, we can rest assured that this ban will last for generations to come.”
Except… see our lead story in this edition.
Sandra Steingraber at the January 11, 2024 protest outside of Governor Kathy Hochul’s Manhattan office.
Enter Southern Tier Solutions, a Texas-based company with a New York-sounding name that hopes to evade our fracking ban by using liquefied CO2 instead of water to force molecules of methane out of the shale. Strictly speaking, liquid CO2 skips around the word hydraulic in our prohibition on high-volume hydraulic fracturing, which is water-based.
Hence, on January 11, 2024 anti-fracking activists from around the state, organized by Food and Water Watch, assembled outside of Governor Kathy Hochul’s Manhattan offices for a rally. We came to protest this misbegotten plan to drill thousands of wells and burn the methane fracked out of them in a dozen or more gas-fired power plants from which CO2 will be captured, liquefied, and used to frack more methane of out the wells—in a kind of gas-extracting, perpetual motion machine.
If CO2 fracking sounds like a fanciful, highly speculative idea, it is.
If CO2 fracking sounds like a something that has not been field-scale tested anywhere else in the United States, you would also be right.
If CO2 fracking sounds like a delusional excuse to continue our dependency on fossil fuels and abandon our climate goals in the face of a deepening climate crisis, your fears are real.
If CO2 fracking sounds like prospecting for dollars by scoundrels keen to get their hands on federal IRA funds that subsidize carbon capture schemes, right again.
Indeed, all of these talking points and more were made by the various speakers at the January 11 rally, of which I was one. Backed by a letter released on December 19, 2023, signed by more than 90 different environmental and public health organizations, this event marks the beginning of a new campaign to stop fracking in New York. We intend to win.
I brought the science to the sidewalk. Here are a few excerpts from my own remarks:
Using CO2 as the agent of fracking instead of water adds to, not subtracts from, the harms and risks of fracking.
First concentrated CO2 is terribly toxic. It’s a poison. That might seem counterintuitive. After all, we exhale CO2 with every breath we take. But the toxicity of CO2 is exactly why we pant while exercising. Our body is full of CO2 detectors—which line our arteries—which, when levels go up even slightly, prompt us to get this gas out of us as fast as possible.
And that’s because CO2 turns into carbonic acid when it contacts water, and we are all 65 percent water by weight. If CO2 builds up in your body, you dissolve into a pit of acid. Your lungs begin to liquefy. And you begin to asphyxiate. That’s exactly what happened to the people of Sartaria, Mississippi in February 2020 when a CO2 pipeline ruptured in their community.
And that’s exactly what will happen to us if a pipeline carrying liquid CO2 ruptures here. Or a railcar crashes. Or a truck overturns.
And these kinds of accidents are possible precisely because CO2 turns into acid in the presence of moisture. In a pipeline, CO2 plus moisture creates corrosion. And down in the shale, CO2 plus moisture can drop pH in ways that can mobilize heavy metals and risk drinking water contamination.
Fracking our bedrock with a poison that turns to acid is a bad idea. Using taxpayer dollars to capture carbon for this purpose is a worse idea. CO2 fracking is a false climate solution, a danger to public health, and we’re here to say NO.