Did you hear about Vermont’s plans for natural gas? They’re very excited about it. They’re going to use much more of it. It could lower their costs by a lot. Wow!
They had a groundbreaking for a new natural gas compressor station the other day in Vermont. You can read all about it here. Governor Peter Shumlin was so excited about this new facility, he showed up at its groundbreaking. A real-live governor at a groundbreaking for a natural gas compressor; who woulda thunk it?
And as long as you have your browser open, you can read about how the state also banned fracking awhile back. The governor himself–same guy who was at the natural gas compressor groundbreaking–signed the bill banning fracking. That story is here.
Shale deposits aren’t believed to exist under Vermont’s borders, but if they are, the Green Mountain State won’t allow anybody to try to produce them. But if you’re in Vermont and want to use shale gas produced in other states, well, that’s just fine.
Given the real possibility that the TransCanada Pipeline may eventually throw in the towel trying to bring western Canadian natural gas into the northeast US and Ontario, with its market share increasingly snared by shale gas from the Marcellus, it’s a pretty good assumption that someday, the gas going through that compressor is going to be from a fracked well, the kind that is banned in Vermont. It won’t be from a conventional Alberta or Saskatchewan well. (The fate of TransCanada and its possible oil future was the subject of a recent Platts Commodity Pulse video. )
It’s great to have the comments section on The Barrel open again, since it allows somebody to try to bridge the apparent inconsistency here.
We are citizen Fracking fighters. I live less than a mile from the idyllic garden where the pipeline people want to stick it. Our town gets no gas. NONE. We would be a mountainous beautiful transmission field. I have been censored and thereby dissed by the press that takes ad money from the parent company, or is GMP a cousin? The Gaz company wants to build a pipeline by imminent domain and general town to town selectoboard delirium. They divide towns and conquer. All the citizens and students of colleges understand, protest, speak up. This is going from Canada to New York via under Lake Champlain. New York banned it. Why?
Fracking has been ban from VT- Fracking is a human holocaust waiting to happen- watch GASLAND on HBO and cry- Deadly Cancer casuing chemicals are polluting our air and water and food supply from TX – NY –
huh? My comment was that the VT legislature’s ban on fracking was an overreaction, and that VT should consider using a local source rather than importing natural gas. How did this translate into “homegrown is better”? The replacement of heating oil with natural gas to heat homes would be welcome in VT, but there ain’t no big giant grid in VT.
Natural gas molecules are all the same, and it’s a great big giant grid out there that moves them. Any attempt to just use homegrown natural gas molecules because they’re “better” is like trying to only buy gasoline that doesn’t come from a particular country. If Vermont really wants a transformation in its energy use–and being so dependent upon heating oil, it would seem that would be a smart goal–it’s going to be using shale gas down the line. It can’t just use “good” gas.
John, there are quite possibly some shale deposits in northwestern VT that could yield natural gas. What if the counties of Grand Isle, Chittenden, and Franklin could source natural gas locally? What if the gas development & fracking was done properly under strict environmental regulation? Granted we talking about a fossil source that will be depleted at some point in the future, but a local source seems to be better fit for VT than importing from elsewhere. No one seems really upset about the lax environmental regulations in some of the major oil producing nations where big multi-national corporations pretty much run the show.
We can thank Josh Fox and his documentary for the VT legislature’s overreaction to fracking. If the VT legislature was really concerned about preventing groundwater contamination, they would ban the underground storage of petroleum products (the major source of contamination at the over 3,500 hazardous waste sites in VT). And they would stop stealing funds from the VT Petroleum Cleanup Fund as they have done in the past…
http://www.anr.state.vt.us/dec/wastediv/sms/ecfpcf/PCFrpt.pdf
Yes, natural gas can come from processes other than fracking. But as the story notes, natural gas from the TransCanada pipeline in Ontario and the Northeast US is being pushed out by natural gas from the Marcellus, a trend that is likely to result in Marcellus gas — almost all of it fracked — being the overwhelming source of supply in the US Northeast. Give it a few years, and that gas compressor is almost certainly going to be running on gas from fracking. There is not likely to be any other significant sources that Vermont is going to be able to buy. If Vermont is going to be switching more to natural gas while saying it “cares enough not to destroy drinking water and environment,” then the obvious corollary is that the state is OK with other areas doing that, if this in fact is what you believe fracking does. It’s difficult to bridge those two tracks with any other conclusion. The only way I can see the governor not being hypocritical would be for him to say that he realizes that the natural gas that comes in the state will shift toward being fracked gas, he doesn’t like it, and he’d prefer it didn’t happen but there’s not that much he can do about it. Showing up at the ribbon cutting of a natural gas compressor is a far cry from that stance.
Not all natural gas comes from fracking.
And what if there is no natural gas to be fracked below Vermont? Does that means that Vermont cannot buy natural gas from what is produced from other sources?
Yes, it may seem to be a bit contradictory, but the anti-fracking law just states that Vermont cares enough not to destroy our drinking water and environment.