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Trump: N.Y. missed chance by banning fracking

President Donald J Trump speaks to soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division before signing the H.R. 5515, the John McCain National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2019 in August 2018 at Wheeler-Sack Army Air Field Fort Drum. (Provided photo — Daytona Niles, Watertown Daily Times)

ALBANY — As President Donald Trump sees it, the administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo has killed a golden goose and ensured high taxes for New Yorkers by blocking the development of shale gas in the state.

Trump, who led a rally in Utica recently for incumbent Congresswoman Claudia Tenney, R-New Hartford, used the occasion to stir the debate over the controversial technique known as horizontal hydrofracking by suggesting the state should be cashing in on its untapped natural gas deposits.

“Dissipating”

Trump, a billionaire businessman before he ran for the White House, asserted that New York’s natural gas reserve is “dissipating” because the Cuomo administration has blocked the issuance of permits for hydraulic fracturing of shale layers under which the fossil fuel is trapped.

“Think of it,” he told Tenney supporters at the Hotel Utica. “If they would’ve allowed a little bit of fracking and taken some of the richness out of the land, which by the way is being sucked away by other states — you know they don’t have state lines underground.”

“Dead wrong”

Trump’s suggestion that New York is losing significant amounts of the underground gas to drillers in Ohio and Pennsylvania because the supply is migrating shows he has no knowledge of the geology of shale formations, said a Cornell University engineering professor and a retired top oil industry executive.

“He’s dead wrong on his science,” said Anthony Ingraffea, who’s studied fracking and has been a vocal supporter of the New York ban.

“He is obviously not a petroleum geologist, and he doesn’t know anything about gas, and he doesn’t know anything about shale.

“My guess is he is just making it up because it sounds like a justification for his statement that New York could have become rich. The reality is there is no substantial amount of shale gas in New York.”

“Trapped in shale”

Lou Allstadt, a Village of Cooperstown trustee who retired as an executive with Mobil Corp. before the company became known as Exxon Mobil, called Trump’s assertions about the properties of natural gas deposits “total bunk.”

“Shale oil or shale gas does not flow like a river,” he said. “It is trapped in the shale.”

Allstadt also said fossil fuel companies seeking to install well pads went south of New York’s border because that is where “productive” shale reserves could be tapped.

“So the idea that New York could have drilled its way to riches is also bunk.”

Fracking ban

The Cuomo administration imposed a ban on hydraulic fracturing in December 2014 after determining the drilling technique poses unacceptable health and environmental risks.

However, the fossil fuel industry has insisted its drilling operations are safe, and some lawmakers from the Southern Tier region have been adamant that the region has suffered economically due to the ban, while many towns in nearby Pennsylvania have prospered as a result of drilling.

“Radical element”

Pro-drilling activist Dick Downey of Otego, the leader of a landowners’ group, acknowledged that the president’s comments in Utica reflect a lack of understanding of geology.

But he argued “the essence” of Trump’s remarks was that New York has hurt its own economy by standing in the way of drilling while other states benefit from it.

“New York has been starving itself,” Downey said. “New York is not taking part in it because Cuomo has decided he has to capture the radical element within the Democratic Party.”

“NY lost out”

Cuomo is now locked in a Democratic primary contest with activist Cynthia Nixon. Another gubernatorial candidate, Republican Marc Molinaro, last month said he would support allowing a “closely watched and monitored” drilling operation to be conducted in the Southern Tier, under which lies the Marcellus shale formation that also spans parts of Pennsylvania.

In Utica, Trump argued that New York missed out on becoming “Boomtown USA” due to the Cuomo administration’s opposition to gas drilling.

“We had the potential to do it better than anybody, and now it’s dissipating, it’s dissipating. Because that stuff flows. Do you understand that? It flows,” Trump said.

He emphasized the economic impacts from the fracking ban.

“You could’ve had the lowest taxes instead of the highest taxes, and it’s very sad to see what’s happened with New York,” he said.

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