HURLEYVILLE – A startup company is looking into a new method of fracking for methane gas and Catskill Mountainkeeper has put up a red warning flag.
The new proposal would frack with carbon dioxide instead of water to get more methane gas out of the ground.
Dr. Kathy Nolan, Mountainkeeper’s senior research director, said her organization is skeptical of the proposal.
“Whether it is injecting CO2 in order to fracking itself or whether you are trying to sequester the CO2 under the ground, the problem is that those high pressure, large volume activities have been shown around the world to cause earthquakes,” she said. “That’s something that we don’t want happening near the New York City water supply or any water supply.”
Nolan said the company also plans to construct natural gas-fueled power plants and direct air capture facilities that pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Several years ago, New York banned high-pressure water fracking to harvest natural gas although it allows methane gas to be piped in from out-of-state to power electric generating plants including the CPV facility in Wawayanda and Cricket Valley in Dover.
