Nothing better than a nice cool glass of natural gas on a hot da
Exactly what does greed taste like?
The Must-Drill Mentality Is Threatening NYC’s Water
More than half the residents of New York State – those who live in the Big Apple – rely on a fabled watershed for their supply of pure, fresh water. Dotted with reservoirs, the watershed is so well protected that none of the water needs to be filtered – it just cascades through aqueducts, gigantic underground tunnels, a network of mains and pipes and out of the faucets of the nine million residents in the city. That water supply is now in danger of contamination.
It turns out that a big chunk of something called the Marcellus Shale formation sits underneath the 2000 square mile watershed, and trapped inside the formation is a trillion dollars worth of natural gas. Farmers who used to lease the mineral rights to their land for a dollar an acre saw the price rise to $200 an acre, and then over the last year to $2500 an acre. With permits in hand from the state, energy companies are drilling the first wells in New York.
That’s why landowners from Wyoming and Colorado are touring the Catskills, warning landowners there what will come quickly on the heels of fat royalty checks. Here’s how Applebome described what they had to say to New Yorkers:
They said those royalty checks came at a huge cost: polluted air and water, industrial noise, well blowouts, toxic chemicals leaching into groundwater and wells and a fracturing of communities. Of paramount importance, many said, would be protecting the New York City watershed, an issue that could touch off regulatory and environmental disputes.</em>
