Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Natural gas drilling upstate may hurt NYC

...if Councilman James F. Gennaro’s press conference Friday with two environmental leaders barely moved the needle on the summer news meter, it almost certainly was a window onto the biggest environmental issue almost no one in New York City is paying attention to.

Putting Water Ahead of Natural Gas

It has slowly dawned on people, among them Mr. Gennaro, chairman of the Council’s Environmental Protection Committee, that there’s one very big local angle to the distant and still exotic notion of major energy companies descending on upstate New York to drill for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale formation.

A large chunk of that area is the 2,000-square-mile watershed where New York City gets its water, which comes unfiltered through the city’s reservoirs and aqueducts to nine million people, or roughly half the state’s residents. That raises the obvious questions: Should there be gas drilling in the watershed and, if so, can it be done without imperiling the federal waiver that has allowed New York to avoid building a filtration plant that would cost $10 billion to $12 billion?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Most likely the City is going to have to filter Catskill and Delaware water at some point in the future. The designs for the facility are complete. The $10 Billion it will cost today will be $50 Billion 10 years from now... This is the type of analysis that the DEP is weighing right now.

faster340 said...

What about the "Natural Gas" that comes out of Albany? That should be enough to power the state of New York indefinitely.

Anonymous said...

Wait a minute!

How come people in New York City are always bitching about how they wish to secede from the rest of New York State, since "all their tax money" is sent upstate?

Yet when your water supply is threatened, all of a sudden you start....bitching!!!

Anonymous said...

IF GENNARO WOULD SHARE HIS PRESS RELEASES WITH ALL INSTEAD OF A PRIVATE PHOTO OP
MORE PEOPLE WOULD
KNOW AND SHOW... RATHAN THAN
A NO-SHOW!

Anonymous said...

For years now people have been saying, "They've been putting something in our drinking water"!

Looks like it's true!

H-m-m-m.....natural gas carbonation.

Not exactly like "Evian's" natural effervescence from the French Alps,
is it?

Cancer cluster coming up!