Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
next door, Pennsylvania, all of which were being transformed by an oil
and gas revolution that seemed to be sweeping the land.
For decades, most analysts on Wall Street and in Washington (not to
mention Houston and Dallas) had been resigned to a long, slow decline
for American-produced oil and gas. Now the gush of fossil fuels, not
just from shale but from the deep waters of the Gulf Coast, and, beyond
the U.S. border, the wilds of northern Canada, was bringing with it ever
more excited predictions: billions of dollars in revenues, millions of
new jobs, and, because natural gas was replacing coal in power plants
across the nation, plummeting emissions of carbon dioxide, which
drives climate change. In Youngstown, forty miles north of Carrollton,
mills were humming as they churned out steel pipe and machined
equipment for wells not only in Ohio but also across the Pennsylvania
border to the east. Carrollton itself, like countless other towns across
new oil patches now spanning the country, was being buoyed by an
inl ux of drillers who had moved to follow the new jobs. Perhaps the
most tantalizing prospect, though, was the one captured in two-foot-tall
let ers on a Chesapeake billboard by the side of the highway. For forty
years, Americans had dreamed of freeing themselves from the shackles
imposed by the need to import oil from volatile regions and distasteful
dictators. Now, with domestic supplies surging, many were convinced
that the goal was within reach. h e billboard described the oil and gas
boom simply: “h e Answer to Foreign Oil.”
Not everyone, though, was convinced. Indeed, many were down-
right hostile to the developments. Two days before I visited the rig
near Carrollton, I'd joined some of the most passionate opponents in
Columbus, the state capital, at what its organizers billed as the biggest
antifracking gathering ever. Andrew Sidesinger, a thirtysomething sot -
ware engineer, brought his three young children; it was how he wanted
to spend Father's Day. Warren Huf , a seventy-four-year-old geology
professor from the University of Cincinnati, spent the drive down tutor-
ing his van mates on the i ner details of energy in general and shale in
particular. h ey were among nearly a thousand people who traveled
from every corner of the state, and well beyond its borders, to send a
clear message: oil and gas were not the answer to the nation's problems.
Indeed, oil and gas only promised to make those problems worse.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search