The Southern Tier region of New York has always been coveted by oil and gas companies, and new fracking initiatives in the region have recently become a topic of statewide debate. Consisting of counties including Tompkins, Broome, Chemung, and Tioga, the Southern Tier is part of the Marcellus Shale basin. The basin covers five states and holds the largest natural gas deposit in the nation, making the region a target for natural gas mining. During the fall of 2023, many residents of the Southern Tier region began to receive letters and advertisements asking them to lease their land to a Texas-based company called Southern Tier CO2 to Clean Energy Solutions (STS) for the purposes of carbon dioxide fracturing.
The term “fracking” typically refers to hydraulic fracking, the process of drilling deep wells into the ground and pumping pressurized mixtures of water, sand, and chemicals into these wells.
This process fractures the surrounding bedrock, allowing the natural gas within the rock to escape and be collected for energy use. After the fracking process is finished, large amounts of wastewater are left in disposal wells. Carbon dioxide fracturing, or CO2 fracking, is a recent version of fracking that uses pressurized carbon dioxide gas instead of liquids to create fractures. Companies would use carbon sequestration technology to capture CO2 and transfer it to the fracking site through underground pumps. The aim of CO2 fracking, according to the nonprofit newspaper The Legislative Gazette, is to reduce greenhouse gasses in the air by capturing it and storing it in the ground while extracting natural gasses in the process.
Fracking leads to a multitude of negative consequences that in recent years have made it a particularly contentious topic. Hundreds of studies have been conducted about the dangers associated with fracking. Organizations including the Science & Environmental Health Network and Physicians for Social Responsibility published a nearly seven-hundred page document, named the “2023 Compendium of Scientific, Medical, and Media Findings Demonstrating Risks and Harms of Fracking and Associated Gas and Oil Infrastructure,” synthesizing the existing literature on the side effects of fracking. According to the Compendium, 110 studies have documented more than two hundred chemical contaminants detected in the air near fracking projects, sixty-one of which carry known health risks. Air pollution due to fracking has been linked to cancer, respiratory disease, heart disease, birth defects, and shortened life spans for older residents. More than 17.6 million US residents live within one mile of at least one active gas well. Considering the ability of air contaminants to travel hundreds of miles away from the fracking operation, the number of people whose health is harmed by fracking is even larger. Fracking disproportionately affects marginalized people throughout the country, including Indigenous people, women, communities of color, and low-income communities.
Fracking also poses irreversible consequences for the climate. Fracking generates huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions in all steps of its process, including when methane inevitably escapes into the air after the fracturing. The aims of fracking—to obtain natural gas—strengthen our reliance on harmful fossil fuels. In addition to having been shown to cause unnatural seismic activity such as earthquakes, fracking can induce uncontrolled fracturing, methane leaks, and water contamination. When wastewater is injected into disposal wells, it depletes valuable water resources and can lead to groundwater contamination, a public health risk. The ecology of local watersheds is also irreparably damaged by spills and the unethical disposal of wastewater into waterways, killing aquatic wildlife. Meanwhile, some water remains in bedrock cracks deep underground, permanently cut off from the water cycle and lost as a natural resource.
Proponents of CO2 fracking argue that using carbon dioxide instead of water will make it cleaner than hydraulic fracking, while opponents claim that CO2 fracking has its own risks. Because carbon dioxide gas is extremely volatile and harmful to humans in large amounts, CO2 fracking poses just as many public health risks as hydraulic fracking. NY State Assemblymember Anna Kelles, who is from Ithaca, argues that “there is no conclusive evidence that injected CO2 will stay in the ground,” citing the CO2 pipeline rupture in May 2023 in Satartia, Mississippi, that forced two hundred people to evacuate and led to the hospitalization of forty-five people. Sandra Steingraber, PhD, co-founder of Concerned Health Professionals of New York, stated in a press release that the air pollution, methane leaks, water contamination, and unnatural seismic activity “don’t go away when CO2 is subbed in for water as the agent of gas extraction. Indeed, new risks are added. Liquefied CO2 is poisonous, corrosive, and behaves as a terrible asphyxiant that acidifies lung tissue on contact.”
Furthermore, CO2 fracking would necessitate the addition of millions of miles of CO2 pipelines across the country, the construction of which would emit more greenhouse gasses than supporters claim that CO2 fracking would capture in the ground. CO2 fracking does not eliminate the health and climate risks of hydraulic fracking, which means that it would pose just as many negative consequences. Indeed, the investigations documented in the 2023 Compendium “uncovered no evidence that fracking can be practiced in a manner that does not threaten human health directly or without imperiling climate stability upon which human health depends.”
In the political debate surrounding fracking, New York State has been a leader in prioritizing social and climate justice. Hydraulic fracking was banned in the state through executive order in 2014, and in 2021, Governor Kathy Hochul passed a law permanently banning the practice. However, CO2 fracking is not explicitly banned in law, allowing STS, which calls itself a “pioneering force in the newly aligned carbon capture utilization and sequestration sector” that is “dedicated to sequestering CO2 and utilizing it as a clean alternative to traditional water-based drilling fluids,” to create a loophole to access the Southern Tier region. Federal policy in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 exacerbates this issue by providing subsidies to oil and gas companies to use carbon capture and storage technology, which is used in CO2 fracking.
In response to residents’ worry about the implications of CO2 fracking in the Southern Tier, a group of ninety organizations and individuals in the Southern Tier, including public health officials, New York State Assemblymembers, and senators, released a letter to members of the New York State government calling for a ban on CO2 fracking. The organizations argued that CO2 fracking in New York would violate the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), the landmark climate action act that laid out a statewide climate action plan with measurable goals. In a press release, they wrote, “Drilling and fracking for fossil fuels, along with pipelines, gas plants, truck trips, and other infrastructure, is contradictory to the CLCPA.” They opposed the proposed plan of transporting CO2 from other states to use for fracking, saying that it would perpetuate reliance on fossil fuels.
Other political representatives cited property values, community health, and environmental degradation as reasons to oppose the implementation of CO2 fracking. NYS Senator Lea Webb called STS an “out-of-state company [that] wants to lease land from my constituents in Broome County to inject carbon dioxide into the shale—using a practice with limited viable research data—putting our water quality in jeopardy, and potentially driving down our property values.” Assemblymember Kelles stated that “We cannot afford to compromise the safety of our communities, contaminate our water resources, or perpetuate the false promise of economic prosperity. We must stand firm against CO2 fracking and safeguard New York for generations to come.”
In February 2024, Senator Webb, Assemblymember Kelles, Senator Liz Krueger, and Assemblymember Donna Lupardo introduced a bill into the NYS Assembly that, if passed, would ban CO2 fracking in the state. The bill was passed in the Assembly on March 13 and will now move to be voted on in the NYS Senate. In the meantime, the fate of the Southern Tier region hangs in the balance.