The Huffington Post has a story
about farmers who are jealous and frustrated by New York State’s moratorium on
fracking to discover and exploit petroleum reserves.
There is also a moratorium in
Quebec where there are indications that there is more than enough energy
underground to meet the province’s requirements for oil and natural gas.
“When Dan Fitzsimmons looks across
the Susquehanna River and sees the flares of Pennsylvania gas wells, he thinks
bitterly of the riches beneath his own land locked up by the heated debate that
has kept hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, out of New York,” begins the
article in the Huffington Post.
"I go over the border and see
people planting orchards, buying tractors, putting money back in their
land," said Fitzsimmons, a Binghamton landowner who heads the
70,000-member Joint Landowners Coalition of New York. "We'd like to do
that too, but instead we struggle to pay the taxes and to hang onto our
farms."
(My wife and I are going to Binghamton in June to help with disaster relief efforts, mainly in rural areas hit by Hurricane Isadore in September.)
While New York state has had a
moratorium on shale gas development for four years while the Department of
Environmental Conservation completes an environmental impact review, thousands
of wells have gone into production in Pennsylvania. Both states, along with
Ohio and West Virginia, overlie the vast Marcellus Shale deposit, which has
been made productive by the advent of horizontal drilling and fracking.
