From the Courier-Tribune

RALEIGH — North Carolina’s fracking revolution is unable to schedule a routine office meeting at this time. Please call again later.

This was supposed to be the era of drill derricks tapping into rich veins of natural gas under Lee County, the fulfillment of several combative years of legislative maneuvering and bureaucratic planning. Instead, five years after the legislature voted to legalize fracking, not a single well has been drilled or proposed. And some are convinced fracking remains a legal non-starter, just as the practice has been since 1940s, when the state banned drilling horizontally for oil and gas under a neighbor’s land.

Trapped in a legal black hole, North Carolina’s Oil & Gas Commission has yet to hold a meeting to discuss drilling permits or regulations. Its nine commissioners, most appointed last year by former Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and the Republican legislature, have not been sworn in. They await instructions from the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, which is now overseen by Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat who in the past has voiced concerns about the risks posed by fracking and this month declared his opposition to offshore drilling.

The situation has sown confusion and frustration in a state that just several years ago had promised to become a national model for safe and responsible fracking.

“It’s weird because you don’t know what’s going on,” said Lee County graphics producer Charles Taylor, an oil-and-gas commissioner nominated for a four-year term by McCrory on Dec. 29, two days before McCrory left office. “I haven’t heard anything from anybody. I do think somebody should tell us something at the end of the day.”

Cooper takes the position that the Oil & Gas Commission does not legally exist. Spokeswoman Noelle Talley said Cooper’s conclusion is based on the N.C. Supreme Court’s decision in January 2016 that the Oil and Gas Commission, along with the Coal Ash Commission, are unconstitutional. In that case, then-Gov. Pat McCrory had sued Republican legislative leaders, claiming only the governor had the legal authority to appoint commissioners.

Senate leader Phil Berger’s spokeswoman, Amy Auth, said Cooper is “wrong.” Auth said six months after the N.C. Supreme Court declared the Oil & Gas Commission unconstitutional, the legislature created a new Oil & Gas Commission giving majority representation to the Governor’s appointees. As constituted in July 2016, the 9-member Oil & Gas Commission has five gubernatorial nominees and four legislative nominees.

Aside from his legal opinion, Cooper philosophically doesn’t see the need for drilling for shale gas.

“North Carolina has abundant sources of energy such as natural gas and renewable energy,” Talley said by email. “Governor Cooper believes fracking within our state is unnecessary even though the law allows it.”

Fracking galvanized Republican lawmakers after they took control of the state legislature in 2011, and enthusiastically pushed for domestic energy production as a means of creating jobs during the painfully sluggish recovery from the 2008 recession. Opponents, who warned of chemical spills and drinking water contamination, had pinned their hopes on creating the strongest possible safeguards to prevent environmental accidents.

The result of the political clash over energy policy was 100-plus safety rules on well casings, property rights, water storage and other requirements that were adopted in 2015. Fracking is a shorthand term for hydraulic fracturing, a means of drilling for gas horizontally underground, and breaking up shale rock formations to release natural gas trapped inside.

Beyond the handful of energy wildcatters who sniffed around here and moved on, there has been little interest in drilling permit applications in the state, and energy developers say it will likely be many years before the first drill is sunk in North Carolina’s Piedmont loam. Depressed global energy prices make it highly unlikely that energy speculators will try their luck in North Carolina’s virgin territory, which is believed to include at at least four counties, when drilling operators have a sure thing going in proven shale gas regions in Pennylvania, Texas, Louisiana and elsewhere.

As a policy issue and scientific matter, however, shale gas exploration is still percolating. Two years ago, the N.C. Geological Survey took soil samples down to 1,477 feet deep in Stokes County, and confirmed the existence of another shale gas deposit in the state, this one in the Dan River Basin, about 110 miles west of Raleigh. The Geological Survey’s October 2015 report says the underground soil sample “confirmed a total petroleum system.”


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