Having missed the entire shale boom, and with heavily-indebted shale companies now scrambling to boost liquidity or else face bankruptcy if crude prices remain at current levels, moments ago - in the latest example of blatant populist pandering - New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday his administration would prohibit hydraulic fracturing statewide, citing health concerns and calling the economic benefits to drilling there limited. “I cannot support high-volume hydraulic fracturing in the great state of New York,” acting health commissioner Howard Zucker said, adding that he wouldn’t allow his own children to live near a fracking site. He said the “cumulative concerns” about fracking “give me reason to pause.”
It only took him 6 years to get to the bottom of said "concerns"? Or perhaps a phone call and an envelope from one or more Saudi princes helped accelerate the decision.
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While fracking wasn't explicitly illegal before, it is now: the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation will issue a legally-binding recommendation prohibiting fracking as a result of Mr. Zucker’s recommendation.
As reported by the WSJ [7], New York’s environment commissioner, Joe Martens, said that his agency’s concerns about the impact of fracking would so limit the area that could be drilled in the 12 million acre Marcellus Shale that the economic benefits of drilling there would be limited.
“The economic benefits [of fracking] are clearly far lower than originally forecast,” Mr. Martens said.
Mr. Cuomo himself said the decision was made by his commissioners, not him. “I don’t think I even have a role here,” he said at a news conference.
The biggest winner: Saudi Arabia of course, which would want nothing more than for North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Texas to follow in New York's footsteps. And one way or another, whether with bribes or by forcing the price of oil to unviable lows, it will get it.
