by... Scott Roberts
When I was in seventh grade, I read Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. More precisely, my seventh grade English teacher made me read it. Poems from the late 1700’s are rarely the reading of choice for 12 year old boys. But, since I still remember it 45 years later, I’ll give that teacher kudos for making me read it. If you haven’t read it, you still may know of it. Two of Taylor’s creations are familiar to this day --and both come to mind as I read news stories about Pennsylvania and the development of the Marcellus Shale. They are the verse ‘Water, water everywhere nor any drop to drink’ (I learned the hard way that the correct word is ‘nor’ vs. ‘not’) and the cliché of having an albatross hung around ones neck.
Coleridge’s Mariner kills an albatross and his shipmates -- believing he killed their good luck charm-- hang the bird’s corpse around the mariner’s neck. Rhetorically, the opponents of Marcellus development hang the orange water of Pennsylvania’s historic mine drainage problem around the neck of the modern gas industry. Recently the media has been reporting concerns from stakeholders such as this one: "Everybody testifies there's never been an incident [of drinking water contaminated by fracking] but we haven't done it in this geology, and it's not 25 years from now. Nobody had ever found acid mine drainage in the first 25 years of coal-mining, either. Some of this stuff takes time." This argument is, like the albatross -- just superstition.
Mine drainage is the result of a naturally occurring chemical weathering process, the oxidation of pyrite. Early settlers in Western Pennsylvania named plenty of places ‘Yellow Creek’, ‘Redstone’ and ‘Sulfur Run’. When rock is broken, as it by mining but also by any kind of earth moving including road construction (remember I-99) or landslides, exponentially more surface area is exposed to weathering. When the rock contains pyrite, then it is the pyrite that is attacked; and to compound matters, a bug called Thiobaccillius Ferroxidans, will make the rubble its home and catalyze the reaction. The oxidation of pyrite releases energy versus consuming it (known as an exothermic reaction), so once it starts, it keeps going on all by itself.
In contrast is Pennsylvania’s historic oil and gas industry. Go ahead and Google old photos from Titusville and Oil City. And look closely at them. You’ll see oil and brines flowing away from the wells into the region’s rivers. Then, Google photographs of Drake Well State Park or other places in the region today. They’re green, lush, and full of wildlife and home to many Pennsylvanians. The old time pollution was not cleaned by industry, nor by the local citizens, nor by some government agency. Instead, it was, (completely the opposite to the formation of mine drainage) naturally remediated by chemical weathering processes. Since the exploration and production of oil and gas doesn’t unleash a self-perpetuating chemical reaction, any pollution created is finite.
While I remember ‘Rime’ it is far from my favorite poem—which is Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’. The albatross reminds me of the verse in ‘If’ about truth being ‘…twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools…’ It’s time we lift the rhetoric off from the neck of this debate, and start talking facts.
