Industry, Protesters Clash Over Marcellus Shale Conference

Chesapeake CEO attacks anti-drilling demonstrators as "extremists”

A top natural gas producer doesn’t take kindly to critics and let them know in a blistering attack, calling them “extremists” engaged in “unfettered fear-mongering.”

Speaking at an industry conference in Philadelphia on Wednesday, Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon says gas drilling has been done safely for decades using a process called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”

McClendon said anti-drilling protesters want Americans to live in a world where “it's cold, it's dark and we're all hungry.”

Environmental activists say that fracking and the drilling boom it's created has led to polluted air and tainted groundwater and has made people sick. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is studying the issue.

McClendon accused critics of distorting the facts. He asserted there have been only a few dozen cases of methane migration into well-water supplies in northeastern Pennsylvania, all of them unrelated to fracking, and that residents were merely inconvenienced.

“Looking back, was anybody hurt? Was there any permanent or even temporary environmental damage? No, no and no. Some folks were inconvenienced, for sure, and for that we're deeply sorry,” McClendon said. But he said the industry's benefits -- including lower home-heating bills, tens of thousands of new jobs, and millions of dollars of landowner wealth -- more than outweigh the isolated cases of contamination.

Several hundred activists and homeowners packed the sidewalks outside the industry conference Wednesday and called for a moratorium on drilling.

Protester Stephen Cleghorn, who runs an organic farm in Reynoldsville, in western Pennsylvania, said outside the conference that he doesn't believe industry assurances.

“Don't let anybody tell you it's responsible drilling,” he said.

In fact, some residents with contaminated water wells have been forced to get their water delivered for months or years, and say their home values have been destroyed. Last month, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection announced that it was investigating a fresh case of methane contamination.

Energy executives opened the conference earlier Wednesday by advocating a national energy policy in which natural gas plays a leading role, citing its domestic abundance and cleaner-burning characteristics.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, who has been an industry consultant, said that gas extracted from the nation's vast shale deposits can help release the U.S. “from the vice grip of our dependence on foreign oil.” Ridge asserted that shale gas taken from the ground by fracking leaves the lightest environmental footprint of any fossil fuel.

``We need to make sure that natural gas doesn't get squeezed on the margins ... by some phony hysteria about its environmental sustainability,'' he said.

The Marcellus is a vast rock formation beneath Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, New York and portions of other states that's believed to contain one of the biggest deposits of natural gas in the world. Nearly 4,000 wells have been drilled in Pennsylvania over the past few years, with tens of thousands more planned.

Copyright AP - Associated Press
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