The battle for Seneca Lake

View of Seneca Lake from the south

Crestwood Midstream Partners, a Texas company, wants to store methane, propane and butane in salt caverns underneath upstate New York’s beautiful Seneca Lake.

The company wants to make Seneca Lake a hub for transportation and storage of natural gas products for the whole northeast United States.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has already approved the methane part of the plan.   The New York Department of Environmental Conservation is considering whether to approve storage of propane and butane—aka liquified petroleum gas (LPG).

Ellen Cantarow, writing for TomDispatch, explains what’s wrong with this idea.

Crestwood’s plan would mean the full-scale industrialization of the lake’s shores near Watkins Glen, including a 14-acre open pit for holding brine (water supersaturated with salt) removed from the caverns upon the injection of the gas; a 60-foot flare stack (a gas combustion device); a six-track rail site capable of loading and unloading 24 rail cars every 12 hours, each bearing 30,000 gallons of LPG; and a truck depot where four to five semi-trailers would be unloaded every hour.

As many as 32 rail cars at a time would cross a 75-year-old trestle that spans one of the country’s natural wonders, the Watkins Glen gorge, its shale sides forming steep columns down which waterfalls cascade.

The plan is riddled with accidents waiting to happen. Brine seepage, for example, could at some point make the lake water non-potable. (From 1964 to 1984, when propane was stored in two of the caverns, the lake’s salinity shot up.)

That’s only the first of many potential problems including tanker truck and train accidents, explosions, the emission of toxic and carcinogenic organic compounds from compressor stations and other parts of the industrial complex, air pollution, and impacts on local bird species and animal life due to deforestation and pollution.

Salt caverns 1,000 feet or more underground have been used for gas storage since the middle of the last century and have a checkered history.

A January 2015 analysis of Crestwood’s plan, based on documents by both independent scientists and an industry geologist, found 20 serious or extremely serious incidents in American salt cavern storage facilities between 1972 and 2012.

Ten of these involved large fires and explosions; six, loss of life or serious injury; eight, the evacuation of from 30 to 2,000 residents; and 13, extremely serious or catastrophic property loss.

via Dirty Energy vs. Clean Power: The Past Battles the Future at Seneca Lake by Ellen Cantarow for TomDispatch (via Unz Review).  An excellent article, well worth reading in its entirety.

Upstate New York and the Spiritualists

I just finished reading The Heyday of Spiritualism by Slater Brown, a used paperback I bought the other day at Bookends, a used-book store on Jefferson Road in suburban Rochester.  It told me a couple of things I hadn’t known about the Spiritualist movement.

I always thought Spiritualism originated with the Fox sisters in Hydesville, near Newark, N.Y.  That would make Spiritualism one of two major religious movements to originate in Wayne County (the other being Mormonism, originating in nearby Palmyra). But according to Slater Brown, it has a long history, going back to the origins of hypnotism and Mesmerism in 18th century France and including the visions of Immanual Swedenborg in 18th century Sweden.  I always thought that the Fox sisters when old admitted their mysterious spirit rappings were a hoax. But according to Brown, that also is wrong. The source of information of the alleged confession is a hostile and unreliable source that the Fox women would hardly have confided in.

Reading the book made me recall what a great intellectual ferment took place in upstate New York during the 19th century. The women’s suffrage movement originated in Seneca Falls, N.Y.  The Shakers and the Oneida Communithy were based in upstate New York.  Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass not only both lived in Rochester, but they knew each other and were good friends. Upstate New York was a stronghold of abolitionism and Universalism (and many Universalists were strongly interested in Spiritualism).

Later on upstate New York became a center of manufacturing industry – Bausch & Lomb Inc., Carrier Corp., Eastman Kodak Co., General Electric Co., IBM Corp. and Xerox Corp. For the most part they were located in this region of the country not because of any geographic advantages or natural resources, but because certain creative individuals happened to live here.

All this seems a contrast to upstate New York today. (If I’m missing something, please add a comment). What is it that makes a region or a nation a hotbed of creativity in a particular era? Is it a matter of chance? Is it a result of certain talented and enterprising individuals happening to be born in one place rather than another? Or are there historical and social factors that can be understood and – maybe – duplicated?