Global Marketplace
N
ovember
2014
79
industry. President Chris John of the Louisiana Mid-Continent
Oil and Gas Association (LMOGA), a former congressman,
presented statistics demonstrating the benefits the industry
provides to the state – to the tune of $73.8bn annually,
including $20.5bn in household earnings. The sector supports
more than 287,000 jobs, with oil and gas jobs and earnings
found in all of the state’s 64 parishes.
Wrote Mr John, “These jobs help Louisiana’s ranking as the
No 2 producer of crude oil and natural gas in the country, while
also having the second-highest petroleum refining capacity in
the US.” (
Daily Advertiser
, 8 August)
The LMOGA report cited by Mr John also found that the oil
and gas industry of Louisiana is one of the most significant
funding sources for state and local government projects. The
industry paid $1.497bn in state taxes, licenses, and fees in
2012-2013, accounting for nearly 15 per cent of all those
collected.
The LMOGA president also noted that an oil and gas industry
worker earns nearly twice as much as the average Louisiana
worker.
A facts-based protest in
Pennsylvania signals growing
scepticism about official
regulation of natural gas
development
“This report focuses on Pennsylvania, but it easily could
have been written about Ohio or the federal Bureau of Land
Management or Denton, Texas. [It] illustrates why many
residents across the US have given up on the idea that
regulators can manage the oil and gas boom and are working
so hard to stop fracking.”
The report cited by Bruce Baizel, director of an oil and
gas accountability project of the Washington, DC-based
environmental organisation Earthworks, is entitled “Blackout
in the Gas Patch: How Pennsylvania residents are left in the
dark on health and enforcement.” It is the second report from
Earthworks that asserts faulty oversight and enforcement by
the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection
(DEP) of gas development in the Marcellus Shale that extends
along the US East Coast and into Canada.
As reviewed by Don Hopey of the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
the Earthworks Pennsylvania initiative is rather more than a
beforehand protest against potential threats to health from
hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” The group reviewed and
analysed DEP Marcellus Shale gas well drilling files and
conducted its own air and water testing. With those inputs,
its 70-page report alleges, among 25 negative findings, that
the DEP:
• has failed to consider cumulative health impacts from
shale gas development
• keeps incomplete permitting and enforcement records that
make it impossible for residents to assess their exposure
to air and water emissions
• has stepped up inspections, but is still not meeting its own
stated goals
• poorly tracks, records, and responds to citizen complaints
• puts a higher premium on speedy permitting than on
enforcement. (“DEP Gets Second Dour Report on Gas
Well Oversight,” 11 August)
Earthworks is not a lone complainant. Three weeks earlier,
Pennsylvania’s auditor general, Eugene DePasquale, sharply
criticised the DEP for its shale gas industry oversight, citing
failure to consistently pursue citizen complaints about drinking
water degradation or issue enforcement orders for regulatory
violations as required by state oil and gas law.
›
A DEP spokesman, Eric Shirk, discounted the Earthworks
charge of ineffectiveness. “I don’t think it’s valid,” the
interestingly named Mr Shirk told the
Post-Gazette
. “It seems
like it has more of a political agenda.”
Steel
New guard valves from an Italian
company will restore to service
a disused venerable system of
water pipes in New York
“The changing of the valves offers a chance to appreciate
the foresight with which the water system was developed
and the magnitude of its scale. One rarely has the chance
to walk around a bronze fixture the size of a subcompact
car.”
The “fixture” which so impressed David W Dunlap of the
New York Times
is a 100-year-old, 13-foot-tall, 20,000-pound
manganese bronze guard valve – one of a matched pair
which helped ensure the water supply of generations of New
Yorkers.
Now, a project to re-connect the vast system of underground
pipes to the Croton Watershed north of the city requires
that the City Water Tunnel No 1 guard valves be replaced.
(“Building Blocks,” 23 July)
As noted by Mr Dunlap, New York City long had the largest
unfiltered water system in the US, drawing on the Croton
and also on the more distant, rural Catskill and Delaware
Watersheds upstate.
In 1993, Washington directed New York to filter Croton water,
coming as it did from an area of new, intensive development.
Five years later, Croton, which accounted for about ten per
cent of the 1.1 billion gallons of water consumed daily in the
city, was shut out, its contribution assumed by the Catskill and
Delaware systems. No city resident has since drunk a drop of
Croton water.
The filtration plant under construction by the city Department of
Environmental Protection in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx,
the city’s northernmost borough, has met with problems not
unusual in such undertakings. “The budget has ballooned,”
