PRESTON – An unhappy, alien-eyed face and the word “Yuck” written underneath in capital letters – all painted in green – appeared sometime last week on county Road 19 before the gated entrance to a landowner’s gas well in Preston.
Preston Highway Superintendent Charles Stein said he first spotted the picture on the blacktop last Thursday night, but wasn’t sure what the letters were. When told, he said he had “no clue what that’s all about.”
The well’s owner, who wished to remain anonymous, had no comment.
Green Party member Mike Bernhard of Coventry said he was unaware of the image and didn’t know who painted it. Bernhard is president of CDOGs (Chenango, Delaware, Otsego Group), an organization that is calling for a ban on stone-gas drilling in New York State.
CDOGs are part of a growing consortium of environmental protection groups as well as politicians in Pennsylvania and New York who believe that, unlike traditional gas drilling in porous rocks, the gas sought in the abundant Marcellus Shale formation is trapped too tightly within various types of stone layers to be extracted safely. The Marcellus spans the Appalachian River Basin from the town in upstate New York down through Pennsylvania and west to West Virginia and Ohio.
According to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s website, the protested well in Preston was drilled vertically into the Oneida strata.
Last week, neighboring Broome County learned via a researchers’ report that the natural gas reserves lying beneath the ground could create 16,000 good-paying jobs, $793 million in wages, and $15.3 billion in total economic output. The report, compiled by researchers from the University of North Texas, who had previously studied the Barnett Shale, came on the heels of a Penn State study also released last week that found for every Marcellus Shale well developed in the Pennsylvania, $6.2 million in economic impact could be realized.
Unlike New York, hydraulic fracturing is permitted in Pennsylvania. In 2008, natural gas generated more than $240 million in state and local taxes, 29,000 jobs, and $2.3 billion in total economic development.
When looking at the two reports, Bernhard said he preferred “facts to projections,” and pointed to a comparison study released in June that found county economies built on mining, pumping and drilling for oil and gas are not any better off than counties without fossil fuels.
Researchers at Headwaters Economics in Bozeman, Montana, an independent, nonprofit research group, reports that energy-intensive counties have slower growth, lose people to migration and have lower rates of growth in household income.
The comparison study grouped the 26 rural counties in the West that have at least 7 percent of their workers engaged in the extraction of fossil fuels. The firm compared those counties to the 254 rural western counties of a similar size (fewer than 57,000 people) that didn’t have large numbers of workers in the energy industry. From 1990 to 2005, the average real personal income growth in non-energy rural counties was 2.9 percent a year. For energy-intensive counties, the growth in personal income during that time was only 2.3 percent. The energy counties also added fewer jobs, had a slightly less educated workforce, a greater gap between high and low income households, less ability to attract investment and retirement dollars and created less economic diversity, the study said.
“The current surge in energy development takes place in this changed economic context,” the report concludes. “In counties that have pursued energy extraction as an economic development strategy... the long-term indicators suggest that relying on fossil fuel extraction is not an effective economic development strategy for competing in today’s growing and more diverse western economy.”