To the Editor:

The introduction of an ordinance to ban hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in Princeton (“New Ordinance Would Ban Fracking,” Town Topics, August 6) is timely given the concern about the new technology’s possible negative effects, which include groundwater contamination, drilling waste and fracking fluid disposal, drastically increased greenhouse gas emissions, and significant disturbance to what were once rural areas.

I would hope that the public hearing scheduled for September 22 would also be the occasion for Princeton to begin to examine its own natural gas consumption and ways that this might be strongly reduced. The average Public Service Electricity and Gas (PSE&G) natural gas residential heating customer burns the energy equivalent of about 18 barrels of oil (756 gallons). In addition about 20 percent of our electricity (PSE&G data, 2012-2013) comes from burning natural gas.

It should be understood that nationally about 40 percent of the natural gas we burn comes from fracking, and that the most prolific gas field in the U.S. is the Marcellus in Pennsylvania. Unless we reduce our demand for natural gas, fracking will only grow and we will merely have transferred the problem to someone else’s back yard.

For example, Princeton might request cost estimates to convert from natural gas to geo-coupled heat pumps for cooling and heating for its municipal buildings and schools. Princeton homeowners could also explore replacing their own oil or gas furnaces with heat pumps. This technology is well understood and benefits from a 30 percent federal residential rebate program. (It should be noted that Princeton University is already a leader in this area, with several older buildings and its new arts campus buildings and the Lakeside Apartments to be heated and cooled using this equipment.) The new equipment could be partly funded using savings from current low natural gas prices.

Princeton could also consider purchasing renewable electricity from a third party electricity supplier. This would eliminate not only the negative environmental impacts of the natural gas portion of electrical generation but also such noxious side effects as greenhouse gas emissions, black lung disease, mountaintop removal mining, coal ash waste piles, and nuclear waste generation.

Currently renewable electricity costs about 19 percent more than electricity from PSE&G (see www.ethicalelectric.com); this would add about $13 per month to an average PSE&G residential customer electricity bill, an affordable difference. (Clean energy is more expensive than dirty energy: it costs a bit more to do things right.)

Looking to the future, at this moment 26 plants to export liquefied natural gas (LNG) have been proposed. If they are all built it would require about a 50 percent increase in the U.S. natural gas extraction rate, all of which would come from hydraulic fracturing; this would mean doubling the fracking well drilling rate and would make the U.S. one of the world’s largest sources of LNG.

So who knows, if the price is right we may one day have drilling rigs in the Institute Woods and the Mountain Lakes Preserve, with flared fracking gas turning New Jersey’s nights into days.

Alfred Cavallo

Western Way