By Kirk Ross
Don’t get your hopes up and for goodness sake don’t let your guard down, but the odds of wide-scale fracking in this state are not as good as you think.
There was little doubt at the end of last year’s session that despite a veto of the original fracking bill, this state would legalize horizontal drilling, an essential element of fracking, which has been banned since the middle of the last century. Last week’s accidental vote that capped the two-year rush to frack by the leadership in the General Assembly was just the icing on the cake.
The new legislation, which became law when the legislature overrode the governor’s veto, is a much better piece of legislation, especially in the form of land protection and landowner’s rights. But as finely worked out as any piece of legislation is, the simple fact is that fracking is kind of an all-or-nothing deal. Either the industry goes big, or it stays home.
In North Carolina there are immense hurdles to going big. One of the things to consider is the amount of new infrastructure it would take to move gas from a large number of rigs spread out over a wide area. Infrastructure, or in this case the lack of it, is one of the biggest arguments against wide-scale fracking here. It’s also why the industry, if it does crank up a North Carolina operation, will have such a big impact on the land.
Keep in mind that the well companies via their legislative supporters are going to get unprecedented rights of access to drilling sites. That means roads and pipes in places hitherto unimagined. The network required for a large-scale effort has not been a focus, but its construction, which would happen in tandem with the drilling, could provide far more flashpoints for disputes than the wells themselves.
While the lack of infrastructure creates a barrier to getting started, the drop in the price of natural gas has made a new venture in North Carolina less feasible. So too have wildly shifting estimates of how much could be extracted.
There are other large economic forces at work as well. The hurry to legalize fracking probably speaks more to the uncertainty in the industry in fracking areas elsewhere than the riches of our state’s shale deposits. It’s entirely plausible that North Carolina is a ready backup in case there’s trouble in Pennsylvania, New York or Michigan. The federal government is also getting involved, opening up more of its lands to fracking and contemplating greater fracking regulation, which to date has been mostly a state-by-state free-for-all.
Once the feds take a role in regulating fracking, all bets are off, thanks to the supremacy clause, which gives federal officials final say.
This could provide an important check should the legislature decide to circumvent science, which as many of you know is all the rage under the dome these days.
While for the above reasons cited there are significant hurdles to fracking becoming a reality, the overriding reason fracking will be difficult has to do with the land itself.
The Triassic basin, where lay the frackable lands, has a complicated geology. Throughout are diabase dikes, igneous rock formations jutting upward through the layers. These structures make it incredibly difficult to predict the flow of water beneath the surface.
If you’ve been around the area long enough to remember when a site on the border of Chatham and Wake counties was being considered for the country’s largest low-level radioactive-waste landfill, you might recall that the fact that groundwater flow could not be predicted — “modeled†was the key word — was the key scientific objection.
As near as anyone can tell, in the past few decades the geology of the Triassic basin, formed somewhere between 200 and 250 million years ago, hasn’t changed much. Pumping it full of hazardous fluids is still a gamble.
Let’s hope that in the end what also hasn’t changed is the understanding that no matter how good the sales pitch, there are some things we don’t put on the line. When it comes to fracking, the old expression doubly applies.
Don’t bet the farm on it.