PITTSBORO -- A packed crowd at Central Carolina Community College's Pittsboro campus spent Saturday afternoon listening to a litany of cautionary tales about fracking, a drilling method that extracts natural gas from shale deposits deep underground.
What they heard was a lot of risk with little reward for landowners and other residents - unless you're savvy enough to outmaneuver the oil and gas industry.
State lawmakers are a veto override vote away from approving a study that could recommend opening North Carolina to fracking. The House could vote on that Senate bill this week, although it is more likely it will wait until next year.
Fracking requires drilling at least a mile down to reach shale deposits and then drilling into them horizontally. Chemical compounds are then force-fed into the shale to pulverize it and free up the natural gas. Two laws, one that prevents horizontal drilling and another that prevents the injection of chemicals into the ground, have kept fracking away. But it has taken off in other states, particularly Pennsylvania and Texas.
The fracking summit was sponsored by Clean Water for North Carolina, a nonprofit environmental group that opposes the practice. Hope Taylor, the nonprofit's executive director, said the Senate bill calls for a study that fails to examine the full environmental ramifications of fracking, and sets up an "energy jobs council" to weigh in on fracking that is too industry-friendly.
"We're moving too fast," Taylor said. "There are still too many unanswered questions and the more we learn the more we are concerned."
Objective study seen
State Sen. Bob Rucho, a Matthews Republican, is one of the sponsors of the Senate bill. He said in an earlier interview the legislation will lead to an objective study.
"We may find out that it isn't economically feasible, and if it costs too much to do it then we won't do it," he said. "But to not look at it would be a real tragedy."
The summit featured three speakers who talked about how fracking has affected Pennsylvania.
Duke University professor Avner Vengosh presented findings from a study that found high levels of methane in private water wells near fracking operations. The methane concentrations, which researchers tracked back to the shale deposits, were so high that they created the potential for explosive conditions in some homes.
Oil and gas industry officials have challenged the findings, saying they aren't definitive since the Duke researchers did not take baseline water samples before the fracking began. Vengosh said water well tests in other neighborhoods in the area, but not near the fracking, showed far less methane contamination. He said the study did not find that the toxic chemical compounds used to break up shale were in drinking wells.
Dairy farmers Carol French and Carolyn Knapp said the fracking boom in their home county in north-central Pennsylvania has brought some reward to landowners who negotiated smart leases and local businesses that cater to visiting workers. But, she said, it has exacted a heavy toll in roads damaged by heavy equipment, farmlands and forests closed off or damaged by fracking operations and landowners left holding the bag because they didn't consider all the consequences of signing their land rights away.
Residents in fracking zones can expect to pay more for water testing and filtration, emergency services for the increased heavy machinery related accidents, and police costs related to responding to poorly behaved and poorly paid out-of-town drilling workers, they said.
'Slow it down'
They said North Carolinians need to know what they are getting into.
"Slow it down," said Knapp. "It doesn't need to be done tomorrow; it doesn't need to be done next year. It can wait."
Some in the industry have already bet on North Carolina opening up to fracking.
Jordan Treakle, a mineral rights specialist with the Rural Advancement Foundation International, which promotes environmentally responsible farming, said three companies alone have leased 9,400 acres in Lee County for potential fracking operations. Much of the leased property is just west of Sanford and sits over the Triassic Basin Shales that stretch from Granville County down to Anson County.
Treakle said a number of landowners have already signed bad deals that give them as little as a dollar an acre in "bonus payments" and tie up their properties for as long as 20 years. They could also find themselves on the hook for environmental and operational costs.
Pamela Schwingl, an epidemiologist who lives in Orange County, attended the summit and was troubled by what she heard. She gets her drinking water from a private well and fears what could happen if fracking operations moved in.
She said the way the laws and regulations are set up, the oil and gas industry has a tremendous advantage to reap profits at public expense.
"It's privatized profits and privatized benefits at a socialized cost," she said. "The big bucks aren't coming here."
