"Natural gas drilling issue heating up for new year"

By Amanda Cregan, Intelligencer, December 22, 2010:

At the beginning of 2010, we knew gas drilling was an issue in Nockamixon. Today, we know it's an issue for all of us.

Early in the year, natural gas drilling was widely considered a pocket problem for local environmentalists and a potential payday for land-rich homeowners in rural Nockamixon.

As 2010 comes to a close, the drilling boom is at the doorsteps of all Bucks County homeowners and business owners.

An estimated 10,000 natural gas wells will soon line the Delaware River watershed, crossing through New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware; affecting the 15 million people that rely daily on the river and its tributaries for unfiltered drinking water.

Five years after hundreds of Nockamixon homeowners had signed a contract with a gas drilling company and sold their mineral rights for a comparatively minimal profit, the drilling company began 2010 by automatically renewing those gas leases.

Drilling had not begun in Upper Bucks, and many weary homeowners wanted out of the binding contract. Some felt they had gotten a bad deal.

Looking from their own $100 lease checks to the reports of small farmers in Bradford and Susquehanna Counties racking in more than $100,000 in lease payments and royalties, some Nockamixon homeowners were feeling stiffed.

Some had second thoughts after learning more about the hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," process, which uses millions of gallons of water and a drilling company's secret recipe of chemicals to flush gas trapped in the rock thousands of feet below the surface.

Environmentalists pointed north to towns like Dimmock, Susquehanna County, where a frack fluid spill by drillers leached 8,000 gallons of toxins into a nearby creek, killing fish and poisoning neighboring water wells.

Nationwide, accidents are happening, and people are beginning to pay attention to its potential health threats.

In his HBO documentary "Gasland," released this year, filmmaker Josh Fox highlights incidents where residents' properties have been contaminated because of gas drilling mishaps. In the film, a Pennsylvania homeowner can ignite the water pouring from his kitchen faucet.

But gas drilling is solving real financial problems for people, proponents argue.

It's bringing jobs and business to small towns hard-hit by a recession, and offering easy wealth to small farmers and low-income property owners.

At the same time, Pennsylvania lawmakers have spent the year debating a tax on gas drilling; adding millions to a slumping state budget.

Gov.-elect Tom Corbett opposes a severance tax on gas drilling, citing that a tax on the industry at this stage would reduce capital investment in the commonwealth and reduce the potential for new jobs, tax revenues and other economic benefits.

In Nockamixon, township supervisors and the Delaware Riverkeeper Network have been working feverishly to block Michigan-based Arbor Resources' attempt to begin exploratory drilling in our area.

Though Nockamixon does not sit atop the Marcellus Shale region, like much of Pennsylvania, it's believed that there is an untapped hot spot of natural gas below rural Upper Bucks.

Arbor argued that the state Oil and Gas Act trumps all local laws concerning gas drilling.

Nockamixon maintained that it had the authority to enforce its zoning, which restricted drilling to the township's industrial and quarry zones - not within residential and agricultural areas, which include most of those approximate 300 homeowners who had already signed gas leases.

Nockamixon won this round.

This fall, Arbor quietly withdrew its permit from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to drill.

But the opportunity to drill is not dead in Nockamixon.

No judge has blocked a drilling company from moving in, and reportedly, at least half of those signed gas leases have already been sold by Arbor to two other gas drilling companies, Hook 'Em Energy Partners and Pearl Energy Partners.

Those two companies originally had partnered with Arbor to battle Nockamixon Township in court.

Surely, 2011 promises to bring more heated debate over natural gas drilling - its potential boost to cash-strapped state and local economies and its potential devastation to the Delaware River, its wildlife and the clean drinking water we all rely on.

This year, grassroots groups like the Delaware Riverkeeper network and Damascus Citizens for Sustainability will continue to unite under a banner call to kill the drill before it begins in our region.

Currently, the Delaware River Basin Commission is working on new gas drilling regulations.

The commission oversees the river's water quality and quantity, and its representatives vote on behalf of President Barack Obama and the Army Corps of Engineers, and the governors of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.

Gas drilling operations are on hold until the new regulations are finalized.

Though environmental groups and some lawmakers, including New York Gov. David Paterson, are demanding a federally funded, cumulative impact study before the region is opened up to natural gas drillers, the DRBC is moving forward.

In early 2011, the DRBC will hold public hearings in New York, Trenton and the Lehigh Valley. Though no specific dates or locations have been announced yet, thousands are expected to storm the events.