Two approaches to drilling
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When Dan Fitzsimmons drives just across the border into Pennsylvania, he looks longingly at the Marcellus Shale natural gas wells drilled there.
"You know how frustrating it is?" said Mr. Fitzsimmons, 55, a disabled former roofer who lives on his family's 185-acre farm in Conklin, a southern New York community. "My son lives in Dimock [Pa.] where you see people redoing their homes, farmers buying new tractors, all because of money they're making from gas leases. And here, where it's such a destitute area, we're being penalized for the state's inaction."
While New York has had an effective moratorium on Marcellus Shale drilling for the past two years while it studied the industry and developed new permitting procedures, Pennsylvania has allowed it to continue while it tried to update its regulations as it went.
"Pennsylvania has done it piecemeal, and New York is trying to do it with one big rifle shot," said Chris Tucker, a spokesman for the industry group Energy In Depth, based in Washington, D.C.
But as different as the methods have been as both states attempt to figure out how to regulate this new gold rush a mile below the surface, the states have shared more than just a 300-mile-long border.
New York decided how to proceed, in part, by its view of what has happened just over the border in Pennsylvania, said Peter Grannis, New York's Department of Environmental Conservation commissioner until October, when he was fired after complaining about deep cuts to his department.
"Theirs was a work in progress," Mr. Grannis said of Pennsylvania's decision to allow Marcellus Shale drilling while the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection drew up new regulations, "while ours was intended to be a final product."
Pennsylvania DEP instituted new drilling regulations earlier this year that it insisted were among the best in the country, and is still working on one more major set of changes concerning the construction of well sites.
But in the two years that New York has been reviewing its permitting procedures, Mr. Grannis said the various drilling accidents and problems that occurred in Pennsylvania -- most significantly the methane gas migration troubles in Dimock -- made his department's job that much harder.
First Published December 26, 2010 12:00 am
