As the debate over horizontal drilling into the Marcellus Shale formation wages on, last night the Faculty Senate tabled a resolution that called for the University to create a committee that would have the ability to make decisions on whether to lease any Cornell-owned land to natural gas drilling companies, among other measures.

The Faculty Senate decided to postpone the vote on the resolution after some members said they believed that the Senate did not have enough information about drilling into the Marcellus Shale to vote on the proposals in the resolution.

However, Prof. Charles Geisler, development sociology, indicated that this reason is merely an excuse to not act. He said the faculty has been exposed to this issue over the past several months. Emeritus Prof. Howard Howland, neurobiology and behavior, who opposed the resolution before it was tabled, said: “The faculty is all aware [of this]. It’s been in The Ithaca Journal, on the radio.”

The shale formation, which runs from Ohio and West Virginia to the northeast into Pennsylvania and southern New York, may contain between 168 to 516 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, according to estimates from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Cornell owns 11,000 acres, or 4 percent, of the land in Tompkins County alone. It also possesses the mineral rights on 420,000 additional acres of land in other parts of the U.S., according to the website for The Marcellus Accountability Project for Tompkins County.

Before the resolution was tabled, faculty members debated over the merits of the resolution and what the University should be doing in regards to leasing its land to natural gas companies, if it chose to in the future.All that gas: Prof. Linda Nicholson, molecular biology and genetics, delivers a presentation on horizontal drilling into the Marcellus Shale during yesterday's Faculty Senate meeting.

Speaking against the resolution, Howland said that though he sympathized with the concerns about the environmental and health issues that could spring up from horizontal drilling in the area, he believed that the resolution overstepped its bounds. Specifically, he was referring to clause one in the resolution, which urged the University to create a committee of faculty, students, staff and alumni “empowered with the decision of whether to lease any university-owned lands to natural gas drilling companies.”

“I think we all agree University shouldn’t [undertake these actions] unless it’s absolutely safe and supervised,” Howland said. “But why are we taking this decision out of the hands of the administration where it belongs and putting it in the hands of a committee with unspecific parameters? I think it’s a nonstarter and ill-considered.”

Howland also believes by asking the University to lobby the state for political action on this issue — as suggested in clauses two through four of the resolution — the University will be distracted from the many problems it is facing now and will encounter in its future.

“Like it or not, what we’re suggesting here is that the President act as a political lobbyist,” Howland said. “It’s the duty of the Senate to advise the administration and perfectly correct the administration on how we thought we should handle our land, but it’s another thing when we send our president out as a lobbyist. It’s not our duty.”

Others thought the resolution proposed did not go far enough; they thought the University should be taking a more proactive stance in this issue because it is a local matter and could potentially affect the future of the University for years to come if it began leasing land in the area to gas companies. “I would suggest that this resolution is excessively weak and we should be doing more than this [resolution],” said Prof. Peter Davies, plant biology. “In other drilling places, numerous spills have occurred and the one thing we have in this area is water and the contamination of our water supply would be disastrous not just for households, but for whole communities. Methane has leaked up into people’s houses and caused sickness. These drilling companies appear to be exempt from all environmental regulations ... We as an academic body need to really stand up on this.” Davies’ statements garnered some applause from faculty in the room.

Davies further said he believed that resolution should include a communication mechanism with the state to ensure that gas companies are not exempt from environmental regulations.

Other provisions of the resolution called for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to stave off issuing any more permits for gas drilling until NYS “has completed all necessary and appropriate studies and has in place an adequately funded as well as staffed inspection and enforcement program.” The resolution also urged the NYS to implement a severance tax and permit fees on gas drilling companies to offset the cost of inspections and environmental impacts due to drilling. In addition, it also asks that the state to mandate identification of all chemicals introduced into the wells and make these information available to the public.

Prof. Linda Nicholson, molecular biology and genetics, delivered the presentation on the resolution. She stated that each well requires three to five million gallons of water and that at least 30,000 to 50,000 gallons of that water is potentially laced with toxic substances such as carcinogens, endocrine disrupters, arsenic, hydrogen sulfide and mercury. The chemicals enter the well at a very high pressure in order to fracture the shale and release the gas.

Horizontal drilling, the type of extraction method that is already being used to extract natural gas, involves drilling a vertical well into the ground and then drilling horizontally. The gas is extracted from the well as sand causes the fissures already present in the shale to expand. The gas then flows back up into a storage tank.

Deputy University Spokesman Simeon Moss ’73 stated in yesterday’s Sun that the University has not and is currently not considering leasing any of its lands to gas companies at this time. He added that any consideration to lease land in the future would depend on the proposed process, as well as whether regulations exceeded EPA guidelines or similar new state DEC guidelines.

Elsewhere on campus, student group KyotoNow! delivered a letter yesterday to President David Skorton and requested to meet with him to discuss their concerns about hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. Similar to the the Faculty Senate resolution, KyotoNow! discussed the possibility of creating an ad hoc committee designed to investigate the environmental impacts of this issue or possibly working with the University Assembly Sustainability Committee, which has representatives from all segments of the Cornell community, according to the letter.

Currently, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has placed a moratorium on horizontal drilling in New York, but vertical drilling is allowed.