Shale-gas fracking is sure to bring all kinds of changes to Ohio. But what administrators and trustees at Ohio University are concerned about at the moment is who will control whether their land gets fracked.
In years past, individual boards of trustees, for the most part, controlled the land at the state’s colleges and universities. But a new law directs Ohio’s state institutions to inventory their parcels and determine whether gas companies can drill on them—with the state pushing the colleges to offer up their land.
So Ohio University finds itself caught between shale and a hard place. On one side are state politics and the lure of petrodollars. On the other are the university’s commitment to sustainability and the community’s opposition to “fracking,” the term that describes the way drillers break the rock to get at the gas.
In the shale-gas zone, which extends from New York to Ohio and West Virginia, Ohio University is not alone. Money is driving politics and policy, sometimes in ways that run against academe’s tendencies to move slowly and deliberately while adhering to academic ideals. But colleges in the region—which are closely joined to the communities, economies, and land around them—are also vital players in the gas boom. Some institutions hope to reap money from drilling on their lands or from new programs tailored for the burgeoning gas industry. Others are exploring new research opportunities.
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Brian McAdoo, Vassar College
Miles of pipe are used to drill a typical natural-gas exploration well, like this one, near Towanda, Pa. In the shale-gas region, which extends from New York to West Virginia, colleges are major players, tied as they are to their local economies.
Pete Marovich for The Chronicle
Professors Anthony Ingraffea and Susan Christopherson, of Cornell U.: “You don’t want to have, in addition to the real pollution that could come with shale-gas drilling, a pollution of the science,” says Mr. Ingraffea, an expert on fracture mechanics.
Critics of the gas industry say some colleges are too cozy with it, while backers complain that other colleges harbor academics who try to stand in its way. It’s a sign of the activity and controversy surrounding the shale-gas boom that everyday Americans in several states refer offhandedly to once-obscure geological formations, like the gas-rich Marcellus Shale. (The deeper Utica Shale—also thought to be gas rich, in roughly the same area as the Marcellus—may someday be a household name, too.) For the past several years, landowners have entertained offers from gas companies wanting to drill.
Pennsylvania’s state colleges have for the most part refused such offers, at least so far, because the law wasn’t clear on whether the colleges could keep the money. Mansfield, California, Clarion, Indiana, and Slippery Rock Universities are all either atop the Marcellus Shale or on the edge of it. (The student association at California University of Pennsylvania, a private entity separate from the college, leased drilling rights on 67 acres that include sports facilities and student residences, but no drilling has started on the land.)
State Rep. Matt Baker, a Republican representing the gas-rich Mansfield area, has now sponsored a bill that would allow Pennsylvania’s public colleges to keep the money that comes from drilling for gas on their land. Sixty percent would be kept by the college that leases its land to drillers, while 40 percent would be divided among other colleges in the state system.
Any money from drilling would have to be spent on energy-efficiency projects or a backlog of deferred maintenance, which stands at $2-billion systemwide, said Mr. Baker, who sits on the state system’s Board of Governors.
“If the money were just to go into the revenue stream, some thought that might be more vulnerable” to cuts by the legislature, Mr. Baker said. “It just makes sense that now that Pennsylvania has one of the largest formations of natural gas that those revenues come back to benefit the universities in some way.”
However, drilling activity has recently shifted away from Mr. Baker’s Mansfield area to western Pennsylvania and Ohio because the market favors the “wet gas” found there. In Ohio, too, colleges are learning about the sometimes fickle and fleeting interest of gas companies.
Several months ago, administrators at Hocking College were contemplating a deal from West Virginia-based Cunningham Energy that might have paid $3-million upfront and 16 percent on gas revenues that came out of the technical college’s 2,000 acres. But that deal is off the table now. The state redrew its gas maps, removing Athens County, where Hocking sits, from the gas “play,” or area where gas is abundant. (The state geologist was fired shortly after the map came out, which led to speculation about whether the firing was linked to the map.)
Mike Brooks, chairman of Hocking’s Board of Trustees, is ready to talk if the gas companies come back to the area. “If a lucrative deal presents itself, I would have no problem supporting one operation on our property,” he said. With state and federal money getting tighter, “this could be one way for us to secure our future without dramatically raising tuition.” The college has had gas wells on its land for 30 years, and has offered programs in exploration and drilling along with them. Today the college takes 20 percent of the gas it uses for heating from the rocks underneath.
“We should explore this and understand fracking,” Mr. Brooks said, even though it’s a “dirty word” for some people.
Putting Land Off Limits
To get a lesson on the risks, Mr. Brooks visited a gas-drilling site in Wetzel County, W.Va., where regulations were lax, he said, and land and waterways were polluted with fracking fluids. After seeing that, he said, “I would want to deal with a large company that has had a good track record of safety.”
Ohio University, in the same region, might be more reluctant to join the gas boom. In April a university committee issued a report to the Board of Trustees that discussed the financial, environmental, socioeconomic, and public-image implications of pursuing fracking on university land, with a poll showing that a vast majority of people in the university community were opposed to drilling and believed it would adversely affect their lives.
But administrators wonder whether they will be pushed into gas leases, whether they want them or not. Last year the state passed Ohio House Bill 133, a law that opened the state’s agencies and lands—including colleges, parks, and forests—to gas drilling. The law said that colleges need to review and categorize their land parcels, and determine whether deed restrictions, research uses, or insufficient size might put the land in a category that makes it not drillable.
But under the law “we have to actively try to classify them as drillable sites, if it is possible,” said Nicolette Dioguardi, deputy general counsel at Ohio University. The university has hired two law firms to help examine its properties, determine the deed restrictions and uses of the land, and navigate the related environmental issues.
A commission, yet to be appointed by Gov. John Kasich, a Republican, will review the classifications—and that could pose problems for the university, Ms. Dioguardi said. What if the commission deems a parcel drillable, even after the university’s Board of Trustees has said it is off limits? “There is nothing in the statute that said we win or they win. It isn’t laid out yet,” Ms. Dioguardi said. “We are going to take the position that once our board acts, that’s it. We have staked out our position, and that should hold because the law gives us that authority. But I can’t sit here ... and say that that will absolutely win the day.”
In its report, Ohio University’s committee tried to anticipate the pressures that the university might have to work under. It recommended pursuing leases at Ohio University’s Eastern Campus—near Wheeling, W.Va., in a region where drilling activity has been intense—in part to ensure the university’s control in picking a reputable driller.
Conflicting Research
Energy issues frequently inspire debate, but the discussion around fracking and gas-drilling policies has been intense. The drilling lines go through groundwater before reaching the shale, thousands of feet below, into which drillers inject fracking fluids loaded with chemicals that help release the gas. Crews line the drilling shafts with casings intended to protect the groundwater from the gas and chemicals, but critics say the casings are not fail-safe and may not last as long as necessary. And accidents have already happened: Blowouts, contaminated wells, and spillage of fracking fluids have made headlines in the region in recent years.
Because natural gas has been perceived as a cleaner fuel than coal, the fracking issue can divide people who might be allies in other environmental debates. Josh Fox, a documentary filmmaker who made the anti-fracking film Gasland, recently got into an online argument with Andrew Revkin, an environmental blogger for The New York Times, who signaled that he sees gas as a more environmentally friendly fuel.
Colleges near the region are able to provide their students with an up-close perspective on the debate. Brian G. McAdoo, an associate professor of earth sciences at Vassar College, takes his students on trips that include tours of rigs run by Chesapeake Energy, and a meal of pizza and soda at the homes of anti-fracking activists. “It’s a little tilted because Chesapeake has a lot to offer—they give us a full dog-and-pony show,” he says. “This group of activists tends to throw the kitchen sink at you.”
The whole debate is muddied by conflicting university research. In May the new Shale Resources and Society Institute at the University at Buffalo released a report saying that pollution from fracking had decreased from 2008 to 2011. A watchdog group analyzed the report and pointed out that incidents of pollution had actually gone up, that the authors had longstanding ties to the gas industry, and that the report was not peer reviewed, although the university initially said that it was.
Jim Holstun, a professor of English at Buffalo, found out about the institute when it was described in a local newsweekly in April. “There are procedures for the establishment of institutes and centers, and those procedures weren’t followed,” he said. “It looks to me like they were trying to introduce it in the summer when there were fewer people to notice.”
He is part of a group of professors and students that has called on the university to cut off money to the institute, release documents concerning its formation, and establish an independent committee to investigate its ties to industry.
Citing the need to support academic freedom, the university rebuffed the group in a news release: “The university’s role is to create a forum for objective research and informed debate—not to dictate the positions taken by its faculty members,” it said. “Thus the university views the work of the Shale Resources and Society Institute as fully consistent with UB’s mission as a public research university. UB has no plans to alter or suspend the operations of the institute.”
The university would not comment further on the case.
Anthony R. Ingraffea, a Cornell University professor of civil and environmental engineering and an expert on fracture mechanics, has concerns about how the industry might influence research. “You don’t want to have, in addition to the real pollution that could come with shale-gas drilling, a pollution of the science,” he said.
He has done sponsored research for the natural-gas industry, but he and Cornell have always demanded independence and freedom to publish, no matter the results. But the industry pushes hard: In once instance, he said, the Gas Research Institute negotiated research terms for more than a year, culminating in a day when the top officials from the institute flew to Ithaca and went through the researchers’ contract line by line with Mr. Ingraffea and Cornell administrators.
Mr. Ingraffea’s research has led him to be an outspoken opponent of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale region. One problem, he said, is that people don’t realize that the drilling will be much more industrially intense than what they see in Pennsylvania now.
“To make economic sense, because of the geology and the geochemistry of shale gas, drilling a single well makes no sense,” he said. When gas extraction reaches its peak in Pennsylvania, gas companies will have to drill 100,000 wells on 20,000 pads. “Right now they are two miles apart, but pretty soon they are going to be half a mile apart,” he said. “The whole idea of ‘out of sight and out of mind’ doesn’t exist here.”
‘Not Passing Judgment’
Colleges that are considering drilling on their land have found that gas companies are good at controlling their message.
Mr. Ingraffea was part of a group of Cornell professors and administrators who examined the potential for shale-gas drilling on Cornell’s land and ultimately decided not to pursue it.
The investigation process involved visiting Chesapeake Energy’s office in Towanda, Pa., and a couple of well sites, along with visiting families in Dimock, Pa., who claimed that their groundwater had been ruined by fracking operations taking place just outside their front doors.
Chesapeake was polished—at the well site, “you probably could have eaten a fried egg off the ground, it was that clean,” Mr. Ingraffea said—while the activist families were less organized and less eloquent.
“The administrators thought they wanted to immediately lease with Chesapeake, but most of the people on the committee came away aghast,” he said.
For a public institution like Pennsylvania’s Mansfield University, already in the midst of Marcellus Shale activity, finding ways to respond to the gas boom has been a challenge. Operating in a boomtown hasn’t been easy: Hotel prices and rents went way up as gas workers moved in, making it harder for the university to house students or new faculty members. The university also saw a 7-percent decline in fall enrollment from 2009 to 2011—administrators say they have heard that prospective students are going to work in the gas industry instead of attending college.
Now, though, Mansfield is trying to capitalize on its location. Last month the Board of Governors approved two new academic programs: an associate degree in natural-gas production and services and a bachelor’s degree in safety management. And after consulting with petroleum companies and related industries late last year, the university founded the Marcellus Institute, which will help develop academic programs in fields related to the gas industry, get students connected to companies for internships, and offer programs in community education. This month, for example, the institute is offering a three-day, overnight summer camp for high-school students, which includes tours of Chesapeake Energy well sites.
Given the controversies surrounding drilling, administrators have been careful to maintain a distance from the gas industry—although Allan J. Golden, interim president at Mansfield, said he is asked all the time about whether the university has industry connections.
“There is no financial contribution coming directly to the university from the gas companies,” he said. “The position that I have taken is, We are not passing judgment on the industry. ... We don’t advocate, we educate.”