BP finished cementing its 2 1/2-mile-deep ruptured well Thursday, in an action the federal government says “will virtually assure us there’s no chance of oil leaking into the environment.”

Retired U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen in a Thursday news conference, called cementing the well “a significant milestone and a major step forward,” but reiterated there is still more work to do before the well is considered “killed.”

Until BP explores the bottom of the well, they won’t know whether there’s any more oil leaking, he said.

Allen is leading the federal government’s response to BP’s 4.9 million barrel oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

Cementing the well was the final step in the static kill that began Wednesday. About 2,300 barrels of heavy synthetic drilling fluid or mud was pumped into the well to push the oil and gas back into the reservoir.

“I think we can all breathe a little easier regarding the potential we’ll have oil in the Gulf ever again,” Allen said. “But, we need to assure the people of the Gulf and the people of the United States that this thing is properly finished, and that will be through the bottom.”

The bottom kill will be accomplished through BP’s relief well, which the company began drilling about two weeks after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded April 20. Eleven workers were killed in the accident.

Allen said work on the relief well should begin again about 24 to 36 hours after the cement from the static kill cures.

Once work resumes, it should take about five to seven days for the relief well to intercept the ruptured well and begin the bottom kill.

Since oil is no longer leaking at the well site, Allen said, it is time to move the large skimming vessels back towards the shore.

The vessels have stayed near the well site — which is about 50 miles offshore — in case the oil started leaking again. The oil stopped spewing in the water July 15, when a newly installed cap was closed.

“We’ve started to focus on areas that we already know had impacts,” he said.

Those areas include Barataria Bay, Chandeleur Islands, Breton Sound, Mississippi Sound, the barrier islands of Mississippi, the Mobile, Ala., area, and the Florida Panhandle, he said.

The response effort has turned to more of a recovery effort now that the well is close to being sealed, he said.

“I will say once again to the people of the Gulf that we are committed to finishing this cleanup, hold BP accountable,” he said. “But our focus will become more locally focused.”

He said that includes making sure the shoreline, beaches and marshes “are properly attended to.”

Gov. Bobby Jindal met Thursday with Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus to discuss the Gulf Coast recovery.

Mabus has been tasked by President Barack Obama to develop a long-term recovery plan for the Gulf Coast.

Jindal has already developed what he calls the Agenda to Revitalize Louisiana, which lays out four priorities to recover from BP’s oil leak:

n Implementing a coastal restoration plan.

n Certifying the safety of Louisiana’s seafood and getting fishermen back on the water.

n Lifting the drilling moratorium.

n Holding BP accountable until Louisiana’s wildlife, air and marshes are restored.

Jindal said he discussed with Mabus the need for quickly implementing a coastal restoration plan without years of more studies.

“We know what needs to be done to restore our coast. The reality is that the legwork has been done and we simply cannot afford years of more studies,” Jindal said. “Yet we continue to face red tape.”

Relief well close to the end

Allen said it is possible the static kill permanently sealed the well.

“But we won’t have 100 percent guarantee they have been able to accomplish that unless we go in through the bottom,” he said.

The relief well, which is about 12,860 feet below the Gulf’s floor, is running at a slight angle next to the ruptured well — there’s only about 4‰ feet separating the two horizontally, Allen said.

There is only about 100 feet left to drill before the relief well intercepts the ruptured well, Allen said. Because the two wells are so close together, workers will drill slowly to make sure the relief well does not nick the ruptured well.

Once they cut into the ruptured well, they will try to determine whether oil is still flowing inside the area known as the annulus — the space between the rock strata and the casing pipe.

If oil is found there, they will pump heavy drilling mud into it to push the oil and gas back into the reservoir.

After that, they will pump cement in to seal it.

When that is completed, Allen said, government and BP engineers will make a decision on whether to drill into the casing pipe — which should already be filled with cement from the static kill — to determine if oil is still flowing inside.

Allen said trying to pinpoint where in the well the oil leaked up to the seafloor is like a “mystery you’re trying to unravel.”

He said that for a long time, BP and government engineers thought there were leaks in various parts of the well because of the explosion.

“I think we’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that we don’t have a breach of the casing or the well bore itself,” he said.

Original Article

Maybe BP’s infamous Macondo oil well will yet rise from the grave like Jason in Friday the 13th, but all signs are that BP’s “static kill” has stopped the blowout for good. If not, a relief well will do the job very soon.

As the crisis ebbs and emotions calm, it’s time to begin looking back to ask what lessons have been learned, what should have been done differently, what there still is to worry about — and how things might go differently next time. Some fresh insights are beginning to emerge:

•Just how bad was the spill? In the days after the well blew out, damage forecasts started out bad and got dramatically worse. It was the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. It would kill the Gulf of Mexico. Oil would be captured by the “loop current,” cover Florida’s beaches and travel up the East Coast. One oil expert went on MSNBC to suggest that the only way to cap the well was with a nuclear bomb.

The alarmists were right about at least one thing: This was a huge spill. The latest official estimate of nearly 206 million gallons easily makes it the worst ever in U.S. waters, far bigger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker accident (11 million-35 million gallons) or the 1979 Mexican Ixtoc I well blowout (almost 150 million gallons).

But the Gulf is an enormous and surprisingly resilient place. The spilled oil from the Macondo well would fill the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans about one-sixth full. If that sounds like a lot — and perhaps to some it doesn’t — consider that it would take about 554 million Superdomes to fill the Gulf of Mexico. That’s not exactly a drop in the proverbial bucket — particularly considering massive economic damage along the Gulf Coast — but it’s a strikingly different image from one emblazoned in people’s mind by the early reaction.

It’s too early to be completely sure, but federal scientists said quite confidently Wednesday that the vast bulk of the oil is already gone (captured, evaporated, skimmed, dissipated, eaten by microbes), and survey teams have been surprised by how little of the coastline has been damaged. Even in oil-smeared areas in Louisiana’s vulnerable coastal marshes, researchers have been gratified to see green shoots in oily grasses. Some areas are reopening to fishing, and so far, seafood from the Gulf shows no contamination.

As of Thursday, teams had collected 3,606 dead birds, less than 1% of the number killed by the Valdez spill. The Valdez dumped heavier oil into frigid waters, some of it into rocky bays where it persists 21 years later. The Gulf is much warmer, and heavy use of dispersants, the churning of the open Gulf and the force of the sun might have helped make most of the oil go away.

Is there seabed damage we don’t yet know about? Are there still plumes of oil lurking underwater? Will the dispersants used to break up the oil cause long-term damage to marine life? Unclear. But so far, it seems the wildest predictions were just that — wild.

What to make of all this? Perhaps that it’s human nature to assume the worst, which isn’t all bad. It focuses attention on fixing the problem. Perhaps that the news media did not do a very good job in the early days of putting the scale of the spill in the context of the Gulf’s size and biology. BP tried to, but it had blown its credibility so no one listened. More provocatively, it might suggest that deep-water drilling, while being riskier and harder to control, is less threatening than drilling near shore. A much smaller spill just off the coast of Santa Barbara in 1969 did enough damage to affect policy for decades — including drilling bans that endure today.

•So is it safe to drill again? If anything was clear in the days after BP’s well failed on April 20, it was that neither BP nor the industry had any real plan for fixing a blowout a mile underwater or ensuring that no oil washed ashore.

All the industry’s claims of technological mastery evaporated as the days ticked by without a fix, and BP cluelessly added to questions about the wisdom of drilling in ultradeep water by whining that trying to fix the broken blowout preventer a mile under the sea was like conducting “open heart surgery at 5,000 feet in the dark with robot-controlled submarines.” OK, then what was it doing drilling there in the first place? It took trial and error and 87 days before BP finally put a temporary cap on the well.

The good news is that BP’s fumbling attempts were a painstaking, real-world test of how to fix an out-of-control well in mile-deep water. Now the industry knows how to do it.

Better yet, there’s a promising plan for doing so quickly in the future. Exxon and three other major oil companies have pledged to spend at least $1 billion designing, building and deploying a system in the Gulf region to contain a deep-sea blowout that would be ready to “begin mobilization” within 24 hours of an accident. The industry has also promised to ready a more robust system for cleaning up any oil that does escape.

The companies have major incentives for doing this. The Interior Department is signaling that it might lift or modify its drilling ban — scheduled to last at least until Nov. 30 while equipment and safety practices are reviewed — if companies can show that they can operate more safely. Further, no company wants to repeat BP’s experience.

The biggest barrier might be BP itself. It has massive plans for Gulf drilling and a long record that says it won’t reform. Investigators blamed the company’s lax attitude toward safety and maintenance for a terrible refinery explosion in Texas in 2005 and a major pipeline leak in Alaska in 2006. There’s not much indication the company’s safety culture changed. Then there are the drillers. TransOcean, which operated the rig that exploded, also might also be a habitual safety violator.

Further complicating matters is that Exxon and its partners don’t plan to have the new blowout response system ready for at least a year-and-a-half.

Caught in the middle are people and companies that depend on Gulf drilling.

The shrinking estimates of the catastrophe, the human suffering and the improving preparation all argue for shortening the drilling ban. But there’s no question where the burden of proof lies. The industry — particularly BP — needs to make a convincing case that it has created the conditions that will allow drilling to proceed safely.

•What about the politics? It would be naive these days to expect politicians to join together in the face of a national disaster, but it was depressing nonetheless that so much energy was wasted on political finger-pointing. Republicans accused President Obama and the Democrats of responding ineptly, Democrats blamed President Bush and the Republicans for coddling the oil industry instead of cracking down, and politicians of various stripes in hard-hit Louisiana, led by Gov. Bobby Jindal, howled at every stumble, demanding more help. With all that the state has been through, now and in Hurricane Katrina, you could hardly blame them.

Even so, the record will show that a White House with vivid memories of how Bush was burned by the slow-footed response to Katrina got on the case quickly, deploying the Coast Guard and marshalling what resources it could. Some 1,200 ships were on site within a month under Coast Guard command. There were — inevitably — myriad small mistakes, but only a miracle could have kept the oil from reaching shore. It’s a barometer of this polarized era that nothing Obama did short of swimming to the bottom of the Gulf and plugging the well himself would have made his critics happy.

As for the Democrats’ complaints, Bush’s affection for the oil industry is a matter of record, as is his push to call off regulatory watchdogs in a number of areas. But the Obama administration had been in office for more than a year when the spill happened, Democrats had controlled Congress for three, and Obama was confident enough about safety just before the spill to propose increasing offshore drilling. The regulators who had been captured by the industry were still doing the same sloppy job. That is where the fingers should have been pointing and where attention should focus now.

Also lost in the squabbling was a chance to raise awareness of the costs to national energy security as exploration stopped in an area that produces 30% of the nation’s domestic oil. Plans for expanded offshore drilling elsewhere were shelved. The cost of banning drilling in some of the last places that could provide significant domestic oil supplies is that imports rise. The USA already imports about 68% of its oil and is dangerously vulnerable to the vagaries of the world petroleum market. It would be nice to think the nation will simply use more solar energy, more wind power or some other alternative source of energy. But there’s no national plan to make that happen, and Congress is currently paralyzed over legislation that would barely begin the effort.

Future generations will probably look back years from now and wonder why this didn’t galvanize the nation into changing course. The saddest lesson of all from this disaster so far is the one we didn’t learn.

Original Article

Moratorium has not sparked stampede

WASHINGTON — Despite uncertainty about when the federal moratorium on deepwater oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico may be lifted, drilling companies say they are readying to return to work, maintaining their full complement of rig workers at full pay and making improvements in their rigs to meet new federal safety standards required by the Interior Department.

“Most of the discussions we’ve had about the readiness to resume work during this period of suspension has been around … maintaining crews and the capability of equipment to go back to work as quickly as possible,” Steven Newman, president and CEO of Transocean, the largest offshore drilling contractor in the world and in the Gulf, said Thursday. “So setting aside the process we are going through to comply with NTL-05 (Notice to Lessee), the rigs are ready to go back to work and the customers are similarly in a position where they have kept all their capability intact as well. So I would think it would be a relatively timely resumption of activity.”

Newman spoke Thursday in a conference call the day after Transocean, which has 14 rigs in the Gulf, released its second quarter earnings. His status report was consistent with that made in a July 20 conference call by David Williams, chairman, president and CEO of Noble Corp., the second biggest drilling contractor in the deepwater Gulf, with seven rigs, including one recently purchased from Frontier Drilling.

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The remarks by Newman and Williams and the assessment of industry representatives indicate that, despite concerns that the six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling imposed by the Obama administration would cost rig workers their jobs and send rigs en masse to distant shores in search of work, so far that is not the case.

The drilling companies seem determined to hold onto their workers, in whom they have a deep investment in training and experience, even as they are generally receiving lower standby rates from the oil companies for whom they work. They also are using the time to upgrade their fleet and meet the new federal requirements. So far, two Diamond Offshore rigs that were in the Gulf have found work in the Congo and in Egypt, and Transocean said it is in conversations about potential jobs elsewhere for two of their rigs now in the Gulf.

Likewise, Noble’s Williams said that in the case of “an idle rig, like the Noble Paul Romano, we, like most of our competitors, are actively seeking opportunities outside the Gulf.”

Upgrading Gulf rigs

But most of their attention is on getting their existing rigs in the Gulf to meet the new standards, which are focused on the blowout preventers, the so-called fail-safe device that did not stop the blowout of the well being drilled for BP by Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon on April 20, leading to the largest oil spill in history.

“Some of our rigs really are almost compliant or really compliant now,” Williams said. “Some are very close, and some will need a little time and some manufacturing. So it kind of depends.”

But, he said, “the costs on a per-rig basis are not out of line. I mean they are not crazy. We’re talking millions of dollars, not tens of millions of dollars.” Newman on Thursday put the capital costs of making the needed changes to his company’s fleet in the Gulf at $25 million.

Original Article

Natural gas prices fell Thursday after the government downgraded its hurricane forecast just ahead of the most active period for storms.

Natural gas fell 3 percent. Fewer major storms would lessen the chances of disruptions to oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico. That, plus a report showing a decline in electricity use last week, turned the tide against gas.

Natural gas for September delivery fell 13.9 cents to settle at $4.598 per 1,000 cubic feet in trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

At the pump, motorists found higher prices in the wake of a recent rally in oil prices. The national average for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline rose 1.8 cents to $2.765, according to AAA, Wright Express and Oil Price Information Service. It’s up 2.1 cents from a week ago and 18 cents from a year ago.

In its revised forecast, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it expected as many as 20 named storms in the Atlantic this season with up to 12 hurricanes. As many as six could become major hurricanes with sustained winds of at least 111 mph.

That compared with a forecast issued May 27 calling for 14 to 23 named storms, eight to 14 hurricanes and as many as seven major hurricanes.

Hurricane season peaks between Aug. 15 and Sept. 15.

More discouraging economic news also weighed on energy prices. Oil dropped after the Labor Department said initial claims for unemployment benefits jumped to 479,000 last week from a 460,000 a week earlier. Economists polled by Thomson Reuters had expected a slight decline.

The department will release its monthly jobs report Friday, which can be a key indicator of economic growth. Analysts say that energy demand will remain constrained until people get back to work in significant numbers. The unemployment rate stands at 9.5 percent.

Benchmark crude for September delivery fell 46 cents to settle at $82.01 a barrel.

In other Nymex trading in September contracts, heating oil lost 1.54 cents to settle at $2.1868 a gallon and gasoline retreated 1.06 cents to $2.1644 a gallon.

In London, Brent crude fell 59 cents to $81.61 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.

Original Article

In less than a week, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to be in the area to host the largest public meeting on its $1.9 million study of hydraulic fracturing.

Just where will that meeting take place? That’s up in the air.

More than 1,200 people are already registered to attend the Aug. 12 event, but the venue has yet to be determined, according to Binghamton University and the EPA. It was expected to take place in BU’s Anderson Center for the Performing Arts — as it was advertised on the EPA’s website — but the school and agency are apparently at odds.

“Unfortunately, the university recently informed the agency that it decided to change the meeting location from an air-conditioned hall to a campus gymnasium with no air conditioning,” EPA spokeswoman Betsaida Alcantara said in a statement late Thursday.

Related

o Why is the meeting being held?

“EPA is concerned that this change could present serious public safety concerns due to the expected temperatures and the number of citizens expected to take part in the public hearing,” she said.

Alcantara and BU spokeswoman Gail Glover both said negotiations continue. Alcantara would not say if the agency is considering venues other than BU.

“At this point, a contract for this event has not been signed nor has a venue been determined,” Glover said. “As we do for any function on campus, we are making sure that the needs of that campus and the event will be met.”

Alcantara said, however, that the EPA “entered into a payment agreement to enable this important public discussion to take place.”

The EPA has advertised the meeting’s location as the 1,186-capacity Osterhout Concert Theater in the Anderson Center since it was announced in June. The West Gym, a larger venue on campus, does not have air conditioning — a tough sell in mid-August, especially for an event that is expected to last more than 12 hours.

The BU Events Center is not available because the floor is being resurfaced, according to the EPA.

Without a venue for the meeting, several rallies also remain homeless. A number of environmental groups are staging an all-day rally complete with bands and a long list of speakers — including “Gasland” filmmaker Josh Fox, actor Mark Ruffalo, Congressmen Maurice Hinchey and Michael Arcuri, and Love Canal activist Lois Gibbs — but Glover said placement of the rally will not be determined until a venue for the meeting has been selected.

The natural gas industry is also expected to host a large rally.

“A number of individuals who have high interest in this event have reached out to us,” Glover said. “As to where to place various rallies that are supposed to take place; those decisions will be made when the venue has been determined.”

The meeting is the last of four scheduled by the EPA. Other meetings took place in Denver, Fort Worth, and Canonsburg, Pa.

Original Article

While it is becoming obvious to many economists that the massive bailouts and stimulus programs of 2008 and 2009 helped us avoid another Great Depression, economic growth is slipping and our unemployment crisis remains. One of the root causes of America’s economic slump is our inability to compete in the global economy. America has many competitive advantages, immigrants, financial resources, freedom, creativity and our university-based research institutions, to name only a few. In the long run, we must translate our brainpower into the most sustainable economy on the planet: one that uses labor, energy, materials, capital and natural resources as efficiently as humanly possible. The Obama Administration seemed to get this idea and integrated it into their economic stimulus package. Now, here in New York, gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo has demonstrated the same deep understanding of the centrality of energy to New York State’s economic revival.

In the past several weeks, I have been asked to review the Cuomo campaign’s energy analysis. The very clear and concise “Power New York” was recently released by Attorney General Cuomo. I suppose I am as easily flattered as the next guy, and so I was delighted when they accepted some of my suggestions. I think it’s to the credit of the Cuomo team that they consulted with a number of people outside their campaign and crafted a thorough and persuasive analysis.

The report begins by observing that:

“New York’s energy policy must meet the interrelated goals of providing affordable and reliable energy, improving our environment and creating jobs and economic growth through energy policy as we transition to a more efficient, lower carbon and cleaner greener energy economy”

“Power New York” details a careful and balanced agenda for energy that focuses on the scope of the state government’s authority to improve energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy. While a great deal of energy policy is controlled by national governments and global corporations, there is still an important role to play for state and city governments, local communities and individual citizens.

Andrew Cuomo’s energy policy reads like a user’s manual on how to accomplish a state-level energy transformation. It focuses on energy efficiency, more efficient transmission of energy through smart grid infrastructure and renewable energy. In addition, he takes on the confused and wasteful New York state energy bureaucracy. The inefficient regulatory and administrative processes at work in New York’s energy supply are part of the massive, systemic dysfunction within New York’s authority laden bureaucracy. Cuomo seems determined to fix this problem.

Energy efficiency is the low hanging fruit of the state’s energy problem. The Cuomo plan identifies several areas that are well within the state’s authority to change:

* Easing the availability of capital for homeowners and small business to invest in energy efficiency measures with a reasonable period of financial payback.

* Improving the energy efficiency of state owned facilities.

* Encouraging energy standards in building codes throughout the state.

This report does a superb job of detailing and explaining how New York gets its energy and how our energy system could be improved. Of course, nothing is perfect, and even this policy statement has some flaws. The most significant problem is that it continues the discussion of drilling for natural gas near New York City’s water supply. To be sure, the policy is that “any drilling in the Marcellus Shale must be environmentally sensitive and safe.” The problem is that under current technology no drilling can guarantee that our water supply would not be threatened. This entire discussion should be taken off the table. New York’s water system is a rare and essential natural and engineering wonder. If the Gulf oil disaster has taught us anything it should be that no technology is fool proof and the potential for catastrophe should be a primary consideration in drilling for energy, not a secondary one.

Politics, of course, is the art of the possible, and this small flaw should not be allowed to distract attention from this exemplary piece of policy and management analysis. While well-research and carefully considered policy analysis is no guarantee of real-time, on the ground public programs, it is a necessary and important first step.

The goal for New York and for the United States is to reduce the proportion of our GDP devoted to the cost of energy. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, energy expenditures as a percentage of GDP stood at 8% in 1970 and peaked at nearly 14% in 1980. As the economy expanded under Bill Clinton it declined to about 6% at the turn of the 21st century but has grown steadily since then to around 9% today. Reducing this number is a key element our nation’s and our state’s ability to compete in the global economy. Both President Barack Obama and Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo understand and are prepared to act on this fundamental fact. How about the rest of the political establishment?

Original Article

Regency Energy Partners LP announced Wednesday it has completed the first two phases of its Logansport gathering system in the Haynesville Shale in north Louisiana.

The Logansport Expansions, which add an incremental 485 million cubic feet per day of natural gas gathering capacity to Regency’s existing system, went into service Tuesday.

The project cost about $40 million.

“The Logansport Expansions provide producers in DeSoto Parish and Shelby County, Texas, with additional takeaway options for the rapidly-growing production around the Haynesville Shale,” Byron Kelley, president and chief executive officer of Regency, said in a news release. “The Logansport Expansions, which were completed under budget, are expected to contribute fee-based cash flows to our business and further strengthen Regency’s position in the Haynesville Shale.”

The expansions increase the total gathering capacity of the Logansport system to approximately 710 mmcfd by adding approximately 28 miles of gathering pipeline, ranging from 10 inches to 24 inches in diameter. The system also included construction of a 300 mmcfd amine treating plant, as well as compression and dehydration facilities.

In addition, the Logansport Expansions will add approximately 435 mmcfd of incremental interconnect delivery capacity to Regency’s existing system and will deliver gas gathered by the Logansport Gathering System to a 300 mmcfd interconnect with CenterPoint Energy Gas Transmission’s Line CP.

Original Article

The New York State Senate has voted to temporarily ban drilling in a natural gas-rich region of Western-Central New York known as the Marcellus Shale.

Although companies are almost in place to begin exploring the area, the Senate says the moratorium is necessary in order to thoroughly review the environmental and safety-related repercussions of drilling. However, the moratorium bill, passed Tuesday night, still needs the Assembly and Governor Paterson’s approval to become law.

The Marcellus Shale is a layer of sedimentary rock in the earth’s crust that runs from Upstate New York to North Carolina. Millions of years ago it was a coastal area, so the Marcellus Shale is rich in air pockets and organic matter which over time decomposed and reformed into the combustible hydrocarbons known as natural gas.

But the Marcellus Shale is also partially responsible for New York City’s pure tap water. Shale is a flaky, porous rock, so the Marcellus Shale acts as a filtration system for water running underground into the city’s reservoirs.  Critics of drilling say that the process used to retrieve the gas, called fracking,’ could soil the water.

In fracking — short for “hydraulic fracturing” — miners drill a narrow tunnel into the layer of the crust containing the natural gas, then pump into it millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals.  Shale, as stated above, is a flaky, fissured rock, and therefore crumbles easily under pressure.  The natural gas then escapes the shale through the fractures created by the water (hence the name “hydraulic fracturing”).

Then, because water is heavier than gas, and because of the enormous water pressure on the shale, the natural gas shoots up the well through which the water went down.  Drillers on-site capture the natural gas as it escapes the well and ship it off to be used as fuel. (Check out this diagram about fracking from propublica.org.)

The Senate’s moratorium would last until May 15, 2010. Meanwhile, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is investigating hydrofracking and its potential effects on the state’s natural resources.

“More time is needed to digest those comments [about fracking in the Marcellus Shale] and make an informed judgment if adequate safeguards can be put in place,” said Senator Antoine Thompson in a senate statement. “In light of the Gulf of Mexico drilling disaster, my colleagues and I believe that a 10 month delay to get it right is prudent and necessary.”

Others disagree, saying the delay will only hurt New York in terms of jobs, resources, and other economic benefits.  “We have companies that want to come to New York, but in this regulatory and legislative climate and instability they’re going to Pennsylvania,” Brad Grill, executive director of the Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York told the New York Times.

“We’re just losing out on this economic opportunity,” Gill told the Times.

Most New York City officials counter that our water supply is too precious to gamble with.

“It is beyond unacceptable to imperil the New York City Water Supply Watershed, the crown jewel of big-city water supplies in the country, for the sake of some short-term economic benefit from natural gas revenues,” said City Councilman James F. Gennaro in a statement.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has voiced support for a moratorium, saying in a statement, “There is nothing more important than the safety of our water supply and protecting the health and welfare of our citizens.”

Original Article