Op-ed: Expanding oil and gas use not the answer

Aug 22, 2024

Eric Engle

• editorial@newsandsentinel.com

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the presidents of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, the West Virginia Oil & Gas Association and the Ohio Oil & Gas Association would claim that the industry they’re paid to promote and lobby on behalf of is the key to U.S. energy security and national security, and even that it reduces carbon emissions because its use emits less CO2 than coal. We can’t fault them for doing their jobs, but we can fault them for ignoring facts, painting over other facts and disparaging the name of environmental activists and others while they’re at it.

In a piece in last weekend’s edition of the Parkersburg News and Sentinel titled “To build or not to build… Are we even permitted?,” these industry representatives claimed that “The Marcellus and Utica Shale formations that lie below [the Appalachian region] are the most prolific in the nation and the resources are produced under the strictest environmental standards.” While “strictest environmental standards” is a questionable assertion at best, it also ignores the realities spelled out annually in the Compendium of Scientific, Medical, and Media Findings Demonstrating Risks and Harms of Fracking and Associated Gas and Oil Infrastructure (see: concernedhealthny.org).

This report by the Concerned Health Professionals of New York, a program of the Science & Environmental Health Network and Physicians for Social Responsibility, currently in its ninth edition, is a fully referenced, 637-page report clearly and unequivocally demonstrating the immense and ongoing environmental, climate and public health harms related to fracking and the oil and gas industry more broadly. While these industry PR personnel and lobbyists claim that attempts to ban fracking are “red herrings,” communities faced with the devastation laid out in the aforementioned compendium do not consider preventing or stopping it to be a misleading or distracting ruse.

What the authors describe as an “onslaught” caused by “a web of red tape and environmental activism in the courts” putting a stop to dangerous pipeline projects like the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and delaying the in-service date for the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) was especially insulting to citizens of West Virginia and Virginia looking to protect their homes and health. Had the authors described these folks by name instead of simply as part of the “environmental movement,” their piece could have arguably been libelous.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline is a 303.5-mile, 42-inch in diameter pipeline built to transport approximately 2 billion cubic feet of methane (aka “natural”) gas per day at up to 1,480 pounds per square inch of pressure. Part of the pipeline already ruptured during a water pressure test in Virginia earlier this year. A rupture while in full operation could be utterly catastrophic. Methane is 86 times more efficient a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 20-year period (though it stays in the atmosphere a far shorter time) and explosions are frighteningly possible.

MVP crosses over 75 miles of slopes greater than 30% in gradation, which is unusually high for any pipeline, as it crosses our mountainous region. The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection fined MVP a combined $569,000 in 2019 and 2021 for erosion and sedimentation issues along its path and those issues are still arising in weekly summary reports filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) as recently as late July and early August.

U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin III, I-W.Va., working with the Biden administration to circumvent judicial review by appropriate courts of jurisdiction and ignoring half-century old environmental law to bring MVP to fruition was the problem, not the citizens, courts and regulators with respect for the rule of law who worked to hold the entities behind MVP accountable. Beyond that, the suggestion that all of this pipelined shale gas would lower natural gas prices for U.S. consumers up and down the Eastern Seaboard is nonsense.

The reason the U.S. natural gas export ban was lifted by the Obama administration was the glut of fracked gas we were already producing over eight years ago. That’s the same reason we’re seeing industry trying to build out all these polluting liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals, many in environmental justice communities consisting of mostly low-income folks and people of color. Let’s not pretend that exploiting the Marcellus and Utica shale plays is about domestic energy prices. Anecdotally speaking, my family and I still have a gas utility (working to change that) and certainly haven’t seen our bills reduced to date; have you?

The authors call for supporting legislation by Manchin and Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., on permitting reform to make energy infrastructure updates that would also help bring a large amount of renewable energy to grids sooner. The bill in question, though, is not the bill we need. We need permitting reform legislation focused only on renewable energy, energy storage and energy efficiency, not dangerous and polluting fossil fuels.

I’m not arguing that oil and gas magically disappear tomorrow, but calling for their expansion with climate change raging and the numerous threats they pose, while falsely claiming that they’re good for energy consumers, is disingenuous at best if not just propaganda. We deserve better.

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Eric Engle is a local environmental activist.