Deputy Mayor for Operations Ed Skyler speaks at a public hearing at Stuyvesant High School

The Bloomberg administration indicated that it may back an all-out ban on natural gas drilling within the city’s massive upstate watershed, which supplies 9 million New York residents with drinking water.

Ed Skyler, Deputy Mayor for Operations, said at a public hearing earlier this week that drilling could force the city to build expensive water treatment plants to filter out poisonous chemicals it leaves behind.

The mayor will wait for the outcome of a consultants’ study that is due in December before making a final decision, Skyler added. But unless the study shows that drilling can be done safely, the state should “ban altogether” any drilling in the watershed, he said.

Skyler delivered the remarks before a boisterous audience in the auditorium at Stuyvesant High School in downtown Manhattan, where 160 people lined up to voice their concerns about the controversial drilling proposal, which has pitted New Yorkers’ economic realities against health and environmental concerns over the city’s water supply.

The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation has published a decision arguing that to allow drilling could lead to billions of dollars of economic benefits and tax receipts for the state–as long as it is done safely. The energy industry, in turn, has argued that not only can the drilling be done safely, but it can also spur “green” job creation, since natural gas is a cleaner-burning fuel than coal.

Last month, Chesapeake Energy Corporation, a gas company that owns rights to 5,000 acres within the watershed, said in a press release that it would not pursue drilling on those acres. It said that it may still pursue drilling elsewhere.

However, people at the hearing said they did not trust the company to keep its promise and insisted that a ban on drilling in the watershed was the only way to make sure Chesapeake would keep its promise.

Opponents argue that the drilling would inevitably result in poisonous chemicals seeping into the city’s water supply, requiring New York to invest billions in water filtration plants to treat the 1.5 billion gallons of water that currently supply the city with drinking water that does not need to be filtered.

Drilling would rely on a technique called “hydraulic fracturing,” in which water laced with various chemicals is used to break through rocks and allow natural gas to come up from the ground more easily.

The Department of Environmental Conservation has decided to require all drillers using hydraulic fracturing to register with the state and reveal the chemicals used in the process. But opponents say that wouldn’t do much to safeguard the safety of the drinking water.

“Sure, there’s a couple of things in here that you wouldn’t mind drinking,” Eric Goldstein, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told people gathered outside the hearing as he pointed to a giant print-out of the list of ingredients commonly used in hydraulic fracturing.

“But ethyl benzene – that’s a known carcinogen,” he added, as students leaving school raced past him on the way home.

Goldstein said job creation is a laudable goal but it shouldn’t trump public concerns over safety–a sentiment echoed by other public officials gathered at the hearing.

“There are many ways to create green jobs and economic development that do not involve sacrificing water supplies across the state,” New York City Council Member James Gennaro (D-Fresh Meadows) said in an interview.

Gennaro, who chairs the council’s environmental protection committee, has been a strident opponent of the drilling proposal.

He has introduced a council resolution urging Congress to ban an exemption in federal law that allows energy companies to drill near water supplies.

“Two important things happened tonight,” Gennaro said. “The deputy mayor came to the meeting and the word ‘ban’ passed his lips.”

Tags | Chesapeake Energy Corporation, contamination, Ed Skyler, Energy, Eric Goldstein, James Gennaro, Mike Bloomberg, natural gas drilling, recession, watershed