by Larry Beahan
 Sierran Ginger Ursitti, left, enjoys an outing in Allegany State Park with her niece and nephew, Ben and Libby Schwartz. |
National Fuel Gas owns a lease on 9,000 acres of Allegany State Park. It can drill storage wells as it sees fit anywhere in that area. The lease ends in June. Let’s not renew it.
National Fuel has been in Allegany State Park too long. For 50 years, its 12 gas storage wells and the tangle of roads that service them have kept 9,000 acres in the heart of the park from returning to natural forest. Now its website advertises the possibility that it will increase the number of these wells.
Few park visitors know where the wells are. The park neither prevents nor encourages visitors hiking in this huge area. The National Fuel right-of-way is an ample gravel road that cuts across a 350-year-old grove of old-growth hemlocks in the Big Basin.
The road leads to acre-sized clear-cuts around 12 storage wells and more roads slicing up the forest. From the vantage point offered via Google Earth, National Fuel’s road system looks like a human victim laid out in a crime-scene sketch.
It is an ecological crime. What could be a 100-year-old intact forest has fallen prey to the fossil fuel industry. A century ago, most of the park was cleared of its trees, crisscrossed by hundreds of miles of logging railroads and pocked with 200 gas and oil wells. Eighty-five percent of the park has been allowed to cover these scars with oaks, maples, beech and ash. But National Fuel’s 15 percent of the park remains cluttered and broken.
Perhaps that made sense 100 years ago, but New York has now recognized the global warming consequences of using gas, oil and coal as energy sources. Closing those wells moves us in the right direction—getting more of our energy from renewables.
Two years in a row, National Fuel has been criticized for paying executives too much, including $7.5 million to its chief executive, the highest salary in western New York. Last year, National Fuel Gas made 2 percent more profit than considered to be fair by the state Public Service Commission. The PSC is forcing National Fuel to repay us $7.5 million of this excess profit.
It is time for New York to reclaim its 9,000 acres of Allegany forest as well. Call the governor or write him a letter. Tell him we want our woods back. Tell him: Do not renew that lease. Tell the governor to tell National Fuel: Go take a hike.
Larry Beahan is conservation chair of the Niagara Group.