NEW YORK — Plumes of black smoke rippling from rooftops are a common sight along the city's skyline — and have long unsettled public health experts.
The city has called for replacing the heavy heating oils used in buildings that are mostly responsible for the toxic dark smoke with substantially cleaner fuels by 2030.
And while there are a handful of alternatives for building owners to choose from, policymakers expect that natural gas will be among the most attractive options because of its low cost and decreased emissions.
The city, in turn, has pushed to expand the capacity of infrastructure to handle natural gas through the construction of the first new pipelines in decades that will carry enough of the cleaner fossil fuel to power millions of buildings and households. But the construction of the pipelines has stoked the passions of residents along the paths where they will be built; environmentalists concerned about the impact of construction on delicate ecosystems; and opponents of hydraulic fracturing.
One of those projects got another boost Saturday when the U.S. Senate passed legislation that would allow the construction of a 3.17-mile natural gas pipeline and facilities going from the Atlantic Ocean off the Rockaways, through Jacob Riis Park and Gateway National Recreation Area.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg praised the passage of the New York City Natural Gas Supply Enhancement Act, saying it was "not just about the construction and operation of a natural gas pipeline and the jobs it will create."
"It is critical to building a stable, clean-energy future for New York City and improving the health of all New Yorkers," he said in a statement over the weekend.
Work on the New Jersey-New York Expansion Project, as the other project is called, began on Manhattan's West Side earlier this summer.
"The administration is supporting those projects because they're being done responsibly, they're being done safely, and with minimal environmental impacts. And they ultimately are going to have a huge public health benefit," said Deputy Mayor for Operations Cas Holloway, in an exclusive interview with Gotham Gazette last week.
Some statistics long cited by the city state that 6 percent of annual deaths in New York City are attributable to poor air quality from pollutants.
Holloway, who testified for the administration in support of the bill that passed in Congress, said the goal of the city's program to convert buildings to cleaner fuels — known as Clean Heat — is to "accelerate" the "public health benefit" of reduced air pollution. By the end of 2013, the city hopes to reach a 50 percent reduction of the nasty emissions attributed to the burning of heavy oils by buildings.
To get a better sense of what the city's energy plan will mean in the years ahead and why the two pipeline projects are expected to play such an important role, we spoke with key policymakers, environmentalists and residents.
Over the next week, we will be publishing stories on both pipeline projects and taking questions and comments on Facebook and Twitter.
The goal of modernizing and expanding the distribution of natural gas is one of hundreds of goals detailed under Bloomberg's PlanNYC, originally released in 2007 and in updated form in 2011. The far-reaching blueprint calls for the transformation of how the city deals with everything from housing and water supply to its waterfront and air quality, with the aim of making the city sustainable as it grows by about one million people and faces changes from climate change.
Under the plan, the goal for energy is to reduce consumption and make energy systems "cleaner and more reliable." Under the plan for energy, one initiative called for increasing "natural gas transmission and distribution capacity to improve reliability."
"City regulations eliminating the use of highly polluting residual heating oil will increase demand for new gas service. With gas prices nearing historic lows and expected to remain below oil prices for some time, building owners have the unique opportunity to upgrade their heating systems while generating a return on their investment," the updated plan states.
In April 2011, the city's Department of Environmental Protection issued regulations effectively requiring that buildings stop using No. 6 and No. 4 heavy heating oils, and replace them with an alternative — natural gas, No. 2 heating oil, biodiesel or steam. Buildings were required to begin the process of converting to a cleaner fuel beginning in July.
At the same time, the city also launched its Clean Heat program, saying that "just one percent of all buildings in the city produce 86 percent of the total soot pollution … more than all the cars and trucks in New York City combined" — by using heavy heating oils.
The city said the pollution from heavy heating oils contributed to the deaths of hundreds of people each year, and was one of the main contributors to high asthma rates among children.
In June 2012, the city announced $100 million in financing to help buildings convert to cleaner fuels.
Holloway said that "from the city's perspective," they were "agnostic" about which fuel is chosen, but "we think that natural gas will, ultimately, from an economic perspective, will be what more people choose."
The city is already a major consumer of natural gas, both to generate electricity and to heat homes and businesses. According to an ICF International study commissioned by the mayor's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, “Approximately 57 percent of NYC’s energy use is fueled by natural gas, either directly through on-site combustion to heat and cool buildings, or indirectly through the use of gas at power plants to generate electricity.”
Mark Brownstein, the chief counsel of the energy program at Environmental Defense Fund, said that "as a practical matter" natural gas "looks to be an attractive option."
But he said “the issue is not expanding the supply of natural gas. The issue is getting off #4 and #6 fuel oil."
(The EDF received a $6 million grant from Mayor Bloomberg's private foundation to examine how to strengthen the regulatory framework for hydraulic fracturing throughout the country and address public health concerns.)
Jackson Morris, senior policy analyst at the Pace Energy and Climate Center, said, "Every piece of the puzzle contributes to air quality."
“The fact that there are a ton of old buildings that are still burning #6 oil is medieval," he continued. "It’s inexcusable from a public health perspective … A lot of these boilers are at elementary schools. It’s the dirtiest oil money can buy."
Natural gas is not without its emissions. There is a debate in the scientific community regarding the full greenhouse gas impact of natural gas, relative to other fossil fuels like oil and coal.
The ICF study reports that all major studies except for one (by Cornell University) found that natural gas has significantly lower (36-47 percent) life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions than coal. The Cornell study attracted a lot of attention and, according to ICF, used newer data than what is currently used by the International Panel on Climate Change.
ICF projects that 88.5 percent of natural gas entering New York City by 2030 will come from sources in the Northeast, including from the Marcellus and Utica shales. The extraction process for shale gas, hydraulic fracturing, has attracted considerable attention because of concerns regarding air pollution, industrialization of rural communities and possible contamination of water supplies.
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is weighing whether to allow fracking. The agency announced Thursday that the State's Health Commissioner, Nirav Shah, will assess the DEC's analysis of public health impacts associated with hydraulic fracturing. The agency has already agreed to ban the process within the boundaries of New York City's upstate watershed, which supplies the city's drinking water.
Asked about whether there were any concerns about gas extracted through hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania being piped to New York City, Holloway said, "Any industrial process without the right safeguards is something to be concerned about. "
Ross Gould, the air and energy project director at Environmental Advocates of New York, said the focus should be on energy efficiency, not changing the city's reliance from "one fossil fuel to another" — natural gas.
“The question you should be asking is, what have been the barriers and obstacles to energy efficiency and renewables," he said. "What has held us back?”
Holloway said the city is working on projects to increase the production of renewable energy through solar, wind, hydroelectric and other technologies. But he said the process of getting that to market was time consuming, and there was still a lot to be worked out in terms of connecting those sources to the grid.
"We need to get there. What do you do in the mean time? Do you keep burning dirty fuels? No," Holloway said.
In the meantime, with the city breaking records each year for peak demand, he said natural gas was the likely energy bridge for the next few decades. "I think that that is just the reality of it," he said.
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Photo of gas burner by Flickr user stevendepolo, used under Creative Commons license.
NEW YORK — For Sabrina Terry, the Sunset Park neighborhood where she works is at the front line of climate change.
The community along the Brooklyn waterfront is home to waste transfer stations, power plants, industrial facilities and tens of thousands of mostly low-wage immigrants. Devastating storm surges expected to be brought on by radically altered weather could flood the area and create a toxic brew.
“If you have a storm, who knows what is being washed up into the community? It’s not just the water — it’s what is being carried,” said Terry, an environmental justice planner who works for Uprose, a community-based organization.
Terry and her group have been vocal about their belief that the city wasn’t preparing sufficiently for the impact that climate change would have on coastal communities already struggling with environmental problems.
The City Council took steps to address those concerns yesterday, voting in favor of a bill that would enlarge the scope of a climate change panel and task force to focus on populations that are especially vulnerable to extreme weather events — such as the elderly, children and the poor. The legislation also makes the panel and task force permanent.
Council Speaker Christine Quinn said the point was to make sure that the city was thinking as broadly as possible.
“When you have severe weather circumstances and, say you need to evacuate people, it’s obviously more challenging at times to evacuate seniors, disabled New Yorkers,” she said in remarks to the press before their only full-council meeting in August. “If you don’t have a plan for that, it is going to be doubly hard.”
Councilman James Gennaro, who drafted the bill, said that when the city’s panel on climate change was created by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office in 2008, it was directed to focus its work on protecting critical infrastructure. “We feel it’s important to protect people, too,” he said.
The city launched PlaNYC in 2007, an ongoing sustainability planning effort involving 25 city agencies to prepare for population increase, strengthen the local economy and combat climate change. The city has also moved to reduce carbon emissions generated by government and by commercial and residential activity.
The mayor’s office was supportive of the council's measure. “It is building into law what we are doing,” said Bloomberg spokeswoman Lauren Passalacqua. “This is now a fixture of how the city thinks and operates.”
Terry praised the council for acknowledging the feedback from the environmental justice community. “In this new draft of the bill, they do acknowledge local leadership to ensure that this message gets out to the people who really need it,” she said.
Paul Gallay, president of Hudson Riverkeeper, called the legislation “groundbreaking.”
“This is an effort to get on top of the biggest challenge the city may face in coming years, and to be inclusive about it,” he said.
In remarks made at an environmental protection committee meeting Tuesday, Gennaro said that, if passed, it would be the first time a municipality in the U.S. had decided to codify climate change preparation measures within city law. That claim could not be verified by press time.
Maintaining and overseeing public health, natural systems such as wetlands and waterways, the city’s critical infrastructure and overall building stock, and the health of the local economy will be the focus of climate-change planning and adaptation efforts, according to the legislation.
The two bodies that the bill will make permanent, the New York City Panel on Climate Change and the Climate Change Adaptation Task Force, work together to forecast and plan for climate change within the five boroughs.
Gennaro explained that the adaptation task force functions as “the boots on the ground,” employing the analysis developed by the panel’s scientific experts. The task force will be responsible for planning and implementing “hard strategies,” such as a network of storm surge barriers; “green strategies,” including marsh restoration; and “soft strategies” — zoning, for example.
The task force is comprised mainly of relevant city agencies, but will also include public members "not limited to representatives from organizations in the health care, communications, energy and transportation fields,” according to the legislation.
In 2010, the panel — made up of climate scientists and academics, along with legal, insurance and risk management experts from the private sector appointed by the mayor — released what was described as the first official climate change projections for the city.
According to the report, the city’s vulnerability to progressive sea level rise and the flooding of low-lying neighborhoods and infrastructure is a key challenge. Intensified storms could also cause more inland flooding. At the same time, heat waves are likely to occur more frequently and for longer periods; severe droughts are also projected.
The bill codifies one part of a two-pillar strategy to tackle climate change. Earlier legislation dealt with how the city can reduce its carbon emissions.
If the legislation becomes law, both the panel and the task force will be required to meet at least twice a year. The panel is required to release new climate change projections within one year of the release of climate data by the U.N.’s intergovernmental panel on climate change, and once every three years at minimum. The task force is required to create an inventory of potential risks and identify issues for further study within one year of new projections.
All reports are to be made available to the public and both bodies are to coordinate with the mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability on developing borough and community-level communications strategies.
“It’s important to think reasonably about the impacts which are coming,” Gennaro said in an interview. “We are a coastal city.”
State. Sen. Tony Avella at an anti-fracking rally in June 2011. Photo by Adrian Kinloch, used under a Creative Commons license.
NEW YORK – State Sen. Tony Avella has called on Gov. Andrew Cuomo to meet with legislators, public health researchers and the director of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Gasland” to discuss the negative impacts of hydraulic fracturing.
"The gas and oil industry has already been readily engaged in the process of review and information sharing," he said in a letter sent to the governor yesterday. "It is now time to expand that review … to include numerous medical professionals, scientists and environmentalist[s] who have repeatedly stated their willingness to engage."
At a forum on Wednesday, Avella said he thought the governor and the state’s environmental regulatory agency are "moving rather quickly” on a decision to allow the controversial form of natural gas drilling - also known as fracking – in New York.
Avella’s challenge to Cuomo came during Wednesday’s hearing held by Democrats on the state’s environmental conservation committee in Manhattan, where dozens of opponents of fracking gathered to voice their concerns. They heard testimony from public health researchers, economists and natural gas experts.
The plan proposed by Cuomo and detailed in a Department of Environmental Conservation environmental impact statement would allow natural gas companies to drill within five southwest counties in upstate New York at the deepest core of the Marcellus shale rock formations.
In hydraulic fracturing sand, chemicals and water are injected to extract natural gas. The process has raised concerns over contamination of groundwater and the city’s watershed.
At the forum yesterday, Elaine Hill, a doctoral student from Cornell University studying the effects of unconventional natural gas development in Pennsylvania, Colorado and Texas claimed newborn babies within a close proximity to fracking wells could be subject to a significant decrease in birthweight.
Many anti-fracking environmental advocates and public health researchers present at the forum called for the DEC to accept an independent health and seismological assessment of the drilling process, saying the studies should be both peer-reviewed and separate from the natural gas company-funded studies.
Pepacton Institute economist Jannette M. Barth noted the ad-valorem tax, which measures gas value over time, may not start until 5 years of drilling – while surrounding communities incur immediate costs of production without any source of revenue.
Barth disputed a gas industry-funded study claiming 70,000 new jobs would be created through fracking in New York.
She said this will be “a boom and bust cycle” of short-term, out of state workers.
“They may work for two weeks at a time, while sending wages to home states helping those economies, but jobs are gone once the rig moves to another state,” Barth said
Attorney Elisabeth Radow noted that Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., will not renew insurance on homes leased to fracking. She said with contamination of water and air quality “mortgages and home values would plummet.”
Chris Northrop, an oil and gas investor in Texas and New Mexico for 30 years, testified against the DEC being able to issue permits to natural gas companies and manage environmental requirements.
“There should be an autonomous environmental oversight,” he said.
In the forum Avella said this is a “conflict of interest” after Senate Democrats accused the DEC of sharing information with drilling companies months before the public got to see the process.
In a NY1 report, the governor was asked to comment on the issue at a public event in upstate Utica.
"They should be talking to the industry," he said. "They should be talking to supporters. They should be talking to opponents. They should be talking to people in Pennsylvania. They should be talking to everyone. This decision should not be made in secret," he said.
In January, Avella along with two other state senators, introduced legislation to regulate fracking. One measure called for banning fracking in New York, while another called for treating contaminated water under hazardous waste regulations if fracking were to be permitted.
“Since there’s a Republican majority, the bills didn’t go anywhere,” said Avella spokesman Xavier San Miguel.
Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York spokeswoman Cherie Messore noted that this new plan to start fracking has “huge economic benefits”
She said wells had already been successfully fractured. The governor’s plan would allow workers to “drill laterally into tight porous shale formations” that were previously “not accessible for the past ten or twelve years,” she said.
She defended the natural gas industry as being “established for 60 years” in the U.S. and having an “absolute stellar record” with “no dangerous groundwater contamination.”
Messore also said the technology practiced is proven and safe. Commenting on lateral hydraulic drilling, she said: “In other parts of the U.S., this is a standard practice.”
James Smith, another spokesman for the IOGANY, said Wednesday’s forum was “more of a rally than an educational session.” He did not attend.
Josh Fox, the director of “Gasland,” presented an emergency short film “The Sky is Pink” during the forum. He said that “over a thirty-year period half of all gas wells will fail” due to cement well case leakages, according to a study titled “Why Gas Wells Leak?” done by Schlumberger, the world’s largest oil services company.
But Smith said cement case leaks “happens naturally” and are not caused by drilling. He said that, in New York, seven layers of cement and steel well casings are made to protect fluid in the well pipes.
But he acknowledged that “the process isn’t foolproof” but added that there was a payoff for landowners who agree to drilling. He said they “will have wealth they never had before to keep their farms going.”