The Trillion-Gallon Loophole: Lax Rules for Drillers that Inject Pollutants Into the Earth

Friday, September 21, 2012 by ProPublica

by Abrahm Lustgarten, 

 

On a cold, overcast afternoon in January 2003, two tanker trucks backed up to an injection well site in a pasture outside Rosharon, Texas. There, under a steel shed, they began to unload thousands of gallons of wastewater for burial deep beneath the earth.

 The waste – the byproduct of oil and gas drilling – was described in regulatory documents as a benign mixture of salt and water. But as the liquid rushed from the trucks, it released a billowing vapor of far more volatile materials, including benzene and other flammable hydrocarbons.

The truck engines, left to idle by their drivers, sucked the fumes from the air, revving into a high-pitched whine. Before anyone could react, one of the trucks backfired, releasing a spark that ignited the invisible cloud.

Fifteen-foot-high flames enveloped the steel shed and tankers. Two workers died, and four were rushed to the hospital with burns over much of their bodies. A third worker died six weeks later.

What happened that day at Rosharon was the result of a significant breakdown in the nation's efforts to regulate the handling of toxic waste, a ProPublica investigation shows.

The site at Rosharon is what is known as a "Class 2" well. Such wells are subject to looser rules and less scrutiny than others designed for hazardous materials. Had the chemicals the workers were disposing of that day come from a factory or a refinery, it would have been illegal to pour them into that well. But regulatory concessions won by the energy industry over the last three decades made it legal to dump similar substances into the Rosharon site – as long as they came from drilling.

Injection wells have proliferated over the last 60 years, in large part because they are the cheapest, most expedient way to manage hundreds of billions of gallons of industrial waste generated in the U.S. each year. Yet the dangers of injection are well known: In accidents dating back to the 1960s, toxic materials have bubbled up to the surface or escaped, contaminating aquifers that store supplies of drinking water.

There are now more than 150,000 Class 2 wells in 33 states, into which oil and gas drillers have injected at least 10 trillion gallons of fluid.  The numbers have increased rapidly in recent years, driven by expanding use of hydraulic fracturing to reach previously inaccessible resources.

ProPublica analyzed records summarizing more than 220,000 well inspections conducted between late 2007 and late 2010, including more than 194,000 for Class 2 wells. We also reviewed federal audits of state oversight programs, interviewed dozens of experts and explored court documents, case files, and the evolution of underground disposal law over the past 30 years.

Our examination shows that, amid growing use of Class 2 wells, fundamental safeguards are sometimes being ignored or circumvented. State and federal regulators often do little to confirm what pollutants go into wells for drilling waste. They rely heavily on an honor system in which companies are supposed to report what they are pumping into the earth, whether their wells are structurally sound, and whether they have violated any rules.

More than 1,000 times in the three-year period examined, operators pumped waste into Class 2 wells at pressure levels they knew could fracture rock and lead to leaks. In at least 140 cases, companies injected waste illegally or without a permit.

In several instances, records show, operators did not meet requirements to identify old or abandoned wells near injection sites until waste flooded back up to the surface, or found ways to cheat on tests meant to make sure wells aren't leaking.

"The program is basically a paper tiger," said Mario Salazar, a former senior technical advisor to the Environmental Protection Agency who worked with its injection regulation program for 25 years. While wells that handle hazardous waste from other industries have been held to increasingly tough standards, Salazar said, Class 2 wells remain a gaping hole in the system. "There are not enough people to look at how these wells are drilled … to witness whether what they tell you they will do is in fact what they are doing."

Thanks in part to legislative measures and rulemaking dating back to the late 1970s, material from oil and gas drilling is defined as nonhazardous, no matter what it contains. Oversight of Class 2 wells is often relegated to overstretched, understaffed state oil and gas agencies, which have to balance encouraging energy production with protecting the environment. In some areas, funding for enforcement has dropped even as drilling activity has surged, leading to more wells and more waste overseen by fewer inspectors.

"Class 2 wells constitute a serious problem," said John Apps, a leading geoscientist and injection expert who works with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "The risk to water? I think it's high, partially because of the enormous number of these wells and the fact that they are not regulated with the same degree of conscientiousness."

In response to questions about the adequacy of oversight, the EPA, which holds primary regulatory authority over injection wells, reissued a statement it supplied to ProPublica for an earlier article in June.

"Underground injection has been and continues to be a viable technique for subsurface storage and disposal of fluids when properly done," a spokesperson wrote. "EPA recognizes that more can be done to enhance drinking water safeguards and, along with states and tribes, will work to improve the efficiency of the underground injection control program."

Some at the EPA and at the Department of Justice, which prosecutes environmental crimes, say the system's blind spots suggest that many more violations likely go undiscovered – at least until they mushroom into a crisis.

That's what happened at Rosharon.

The accident prompted the EPA to examine what else had been dumped at the site, ultimately exposing a scheme by a company that was not involved in the explosion, Texas Oil and Gathering, to pass off deadly chemicals from a petroleum refining plant as saltwater from drilling.  

The switch saved the company substantial fees by allowing it to dispose of the material in a Class 2 well, instead of a more stringently controlled well for hazardous waste, federal investigators said.

Texas Oil and Gathering's owner and operations manager were convicted of conspiring to dump illegal waste and violating the Safe Drinking Water Act. Both declined to comment for this article.

Texas officials acknowledged that they had not looked beyond the paperwork submitted by the operators using the well. The delivery trucks weren't inspected; the wastewater was not sampled.

"Staff had no reason to believe at the time that such testing was necessary at this facility,'' Ramona Nye, a spokeswoman for the Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates the oil and gas industry activity in the state, wrote in an email. "The likelihood of unpermitted material being disposed of is low.''

William Miller, the EPA's chief investigator on the case, points out that the only reason anyone was held accountable for injection-related violations was because the site blew up.

"If you can get the stuff down the well how is anyone ever going to know what it was?" said Miller, who retired from the EPA in 2011. "There is no way to recover it. It's an easy way to commit a crime and not have any evidence left of it afterwards."


States and Industry Resist Environmental Protections

 One reason that Texas Oil and Gathering was able to dump toxic waste for years without getting caught is that environmental regulations governing how the oil and gas industry disposes of material underground were weakened almost as soon as they were written.

A series of injection accidents beginning in the 1960s – involving pesticide waste in Colorado, dioxins in Beaumont, Texas, and drilling waste that spread for miles through a drinking water aquifer in Arkansas – prompted lawmakers to impose tougher rules on injection wells.

Wells were divided into classes, depending on the source of the waste they handled. Class 1 wells for chemical, pharmaceutical and other industrial wastes, along with Class 2 wells for the oil and gas industry, were subjected to tough controls under the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. From the start, the EPA says, oil and gas waste was treated as less toxic than waste from other industries, but all such material was seen as dangerous to drinking water.

Companies drilling the wells were required to do geological modeling to ensure that surrounding rock layers would not allow waste to escape through fissures or fault lines. They also were required to check for the presence of other wells that could be a conduit for contamination.  The EPA set baseline standards and mandated periodic inspections for defects. In many cases, states oversaw their implementation.

The ink had barely dried on the new regulations when the oil and gas industry – aided by sympathetic state regulators who thought their existing oversight was sufficient – began arguing that its waste should be treated differently.

Industry officials lobbied for state oil and gas agencies, some of which already had rules in place, to oversee Class 2 wells, not federal or local environmental officials. Some argued state energy regulators had greater expertise in well construction and regional geology.

In 1980, California Rep. Henry Waxman sponsored a measure that allowed the EPA to delegate authority to oversee Class 2 injection to state oil and gas regulators, even if the rules they applied varied from the Safe Drinking Water Act and federal guidelines.

A few years later, Dick Stamets, New Mexico's chief oil and gas regulator at the time, told a crowd of state regulators and industry representatives that the Waxman amendment was a biblical deliverance from oppressive federal oversight for the drilling industry.

"The Pharaoh EPA did propose regulations and there was chaos upon the earth," Stamets said. "The people groaned and labored, and great was their suffering until Moses Section 1425 (the Waxman amendment) did lead them to the Promised Land."

In the late 1980s, the EPA moved to impose more stringent measures on injection wells after Congress banned injection of "hazardous" waste. The new rules barred underground dumping unless companies could prove the chemicals weren't a health threat. To earn permission to inject the waste,  companies would have to conduct exhaustive scientific reviews to dispose of hazardous materials, proving their waste wouldn't migrate underground for at least 10,000 years.

The energy industry moved preemptively to shield itself from these changes, too. The Safe Drinking Water Act prohibited the EPA from interfering with the economics of the oil and gas industry unless there was an imminent threat to health or the environment. The industry argued that its waste was mostly harmless brine and that testing and inspecting hundreds of thousands of wells for waste that would qualify as "hazardous" would delay drillers or cost them a fortune.
  
"It would have been crippling to U.S. oil and gas production," said Lee Fuller, vice president of government relations for the Independent Petroleum Association of America. Fuller was a former staff member for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, whose ranking member at the time, the late Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, led the fight against the hazardous waste rule. "So yes, the industry was very aggressively seeking some mechanism to address those consequences."

Bentsen had won the industry a temporary reprieve in 1980 by persuading Congress to redefine any substance that resulted from drilling – or "producing" – an oil or gas well as "non-hazardous," regardless of its chemical makeup, pending EPA study.  In 1988, the EPA made it permanent, handing oil and gas companies a landmark exemption.  From then on, benzene from the fertilizer industry was considered hazardous, threatening health and underground water supplies; benzene derived from wells for the oil and gas industry was not.

The effect was that the largest waste stream headed for underground injection, that from the oil and gas industry, was exempted from one of the most effective parts of environmental rules governing hazardous waste disposal.

"A blanket exemption without any sense of what the actual chemistry of these wastewaters is, is very concerning," said Briana Mordick, a geologist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Other protections also began to unravel, widening the gap between Class 1 and Class 2 well regulations. Both regulators and the industry regularly refer to drilling waste as "salt water" even though, according to a 2002 EPA internal training document obtained by ProPublica, "on any given day, the injectate of a Class II-D well has the potential to contain hazardous concentrations of solvents, acids, and other… hazardous wastes."

Once the wastes were defined as nonhazardous, there was little justification for holding Class 2 wells to the same rules as other waste being injected deep underground.

Today, for example, Class 1 wells for hazardous waste are tested for pressure continuously and are supposed to be inspected for cracks and leaks every 12 months. Oil and gas wells – though the goal is to inspect their sites annually – have to be tested only once every five years.
Injection wells are known to cause earthquakes, so Class 1 wells usually have rigorous seismic and geologic siting requirements. Often, Class 2 wells do not. An EPA staff member might spend an entire year reviewing an application for a new hazardous waste well. Class 2 wells are often permitted in bulk, meaning hundreds can be green-lighted in a matter of days.

Where Class 1 hazardous waste is injected, companies have to inspect a two-mile radius for old wells, making sure contaminants will have no avenue to shoot back up into drinking water aquifers or to the surface. The minimum standard for oil and gas companies is to inspect within 400 yards, even though it is widely believed, according to internal EPA memorandums obtained by ProPublica, that such a rule is arbitrarily defined, runs against "much existing evidence" and "may not afford adequate protection" of drinking water.

EPA officials acknowledge that their Class 1 regulations represent the best practices to keep water safe and that the risk of a Class 2 well leaking is no different than the risk of a Class 1 well leaking. The contrast in regulations reflects "varying legal authorities, not varying levels of confidence," an agency spokeswoman wrote in an email, referring to the mandate not to let environmental rules interfere with the nation's drilling progress.

State injection regulators counter that much drilling-related waste is put in the same geologic formations that produce oil and gas, in which contaminants like benzene naturally occur. The water close to these wells is often already undrinkable, they say, so lesser protections make sense.

According to the EPA's most recent inventory, the number of Class 2 wells is near an all-time high.

Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and California use tens of thousands of Class 2 wells to push out oil and gas or dispose of fracking fluids and "produced" water, as the waste derived from drilling is called. In North Dakota, injection permits have increased tenfold, with more wells being permitted in one month – September 2011 –than is typical in an entire year. New Mexico issued twice as many permits last year as it did in 2007. Ohio injected twice as much waste in 2011 as it did in 2006 and is evaluating applications for dozens of new injection sites. largely for waste exported by Pennsylvania and New York, where such wells are deemed unsafe.

As much as 70 percent of the waste destined for Class 2 facilities would be considered toxic if it were not for the loopholes in the law, according to Wilma Subra, a chemist and activist who sits on the board of STRONGER, a partnership of oil and gas industry representatives and state regulators aimed at bolstering state standards.

Recently, Stark Concerned Citizens, an anti-drilling group, asked Ohio regulators why radioactive materials such as radium weren't identified or disclosed when injected into Class 2 wells.

"The law allows it," Tom Tomastik, a geologist with Ohio's Department of Natural Resources and a national expert on injection well regulation, replied in a Sept. 17 email. "It does not matter what is in it. As long as it comes from the oil and gas field it can be injected."


Well Operators Game Safety Tests

 When Carl Weller showed up, shovel in hand, at a Kentucky farm field dotted with injection wells in June 2007, he was acting on a tip.  Weller, a contracted EPA injection inspector, was an expert in testing for what regulators call "mechanical integrity," using air pressure to check if wells have leaks or cracks.

Such tests are among the only ways to know whether cement and steel well structures are intact, preventing brine and other chemicals from reaching drinking water.

Using his shovel, Weller dug around the top of a well, unearthing the steel tubing near the surface. A few inches down, he came across an apparatus he had never seen before: A section of high-pressure tubing ran out of the well bore and connected to a three-foot-long section of steel pipe, sealed at both ends. The apparatus appeared designed to divert air pumped into the well into the pipe instead, making the well test as if it were airtight.

"The only reason that I know of that that device would be installed would be to perform a false mechanical integrity test, more than likely because the well itself would not pass," Weller testified in 2009 as part of a case against the well's operator. The EPA did not make Weller available to comment for this article.

When EPA inspectors kept digging, they found the buried devices on 10 more wells.
The case stunned regulators. Weller had been inspecting the site's injection wells, which were used to enhance the recovery of oil, for the better part of a decade, certifying them as safe.  After the EPA's discoveries, workers at the company that operated the wells, Roseclare Oil, accused its manager, Daniel Lewis, of having conspired to cheat the tests for much of that time.

In 2009, Lewis was convicted of a felony charge for gaming the safety tests on Roseclare's wells and was sentenced to 3 years probation and a $5,000 fine. He maintains his innocence, saying the wells were rigged by his father, who ran the company's local operations until his death, but said such practices were typical in Kentucky's oil and gas industry. "I'd say it's pretty common," said Lewis, whose probation was commuted in 2011.  "But it's not something people go around talking about either."

From Lewis' perspective, injection well operators sometimes have little choice but to try to fool inspectors. Many wells are decades old and were drilled before the current regulations were written. Some are decrepit, their cement aging and cracked. They also can't be easily – or cheaply – repaired.

Lewis, who is now a part-owner of Roseclare and continues to run its operations, said that before wells were due for EPA inspections he would pretest them himself. If one failed, he'd enter problem-solving mode, prepping the site for the EPA's arrival. Two of his employees testified that he ordered them to fabricate and install the diverters.

"You go and work in it and try to get it to hold and it won't hold," Lewis said of the wells. "What are you going to do? It's kind of a ‘Don't ask, don't tell.'"

Randy Ream, the Assistant U.S. Attorney for Kentucky's Western District who prosecuted the case against Lewis, called his scheme unusually elaborate but agreed that efforts to get around the rules for injection wells are common. Sometimes, he said, they result in the contamination of private drinking water wells.

"We have people who have constructed wells that are not certified injection wells, or we have people who will put their brine in a tank and carry it over and put it in somebody else's well," Ream said.  "One guy, he's got oil coming out of his shower head."

"There is just so much brine," Ream added, "and you have to get rid of it."


So Many Wells, So Few Inspectors
One obstacle to more effective enforcement in Kentucky and elsewhere, Ream said, is that regulators cannot always keep up with well tests and inspections.

According to EPA records, Kentucky has 3,403 Class 2 wells, which are supposed to be tested for mechanical integrity once every five years. But since 2007, an average of just 253 wells a year have been tested, less than half as many as there should have been to remain on schedule.

A spokeswoman for the EPA's regional office in Atlanta said in an email that only half of Kentucky's injection wells are actively used and only active wells can be tested. She said mechanical integrity tests are performed on each well every 36 months, but did not address the discrepancy between this schedule and the number of tests reflected in EPA data.

The EPA employs just six people to check its wells across the southeast, not just in Kentucky, but in Tennessee and Florida, too. Those same people are also responsible for working with state inspection programs in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, which have their own inspection staffs.

Most states aim to visit injection sites at least once a year, and some meet or exceed that schedule, EPA records show. Ohio, for example, recently added staff dedicated exclusively to injection oversight and visits its active injection sites every 12 weeks. (Ohio also insists that Class 2 wells meet many of the more stringent testing and permitting regulations it uses for Class 1 hazardous waste wells.)

"Ohio's [rules] are based on what we felt we needed to develop to continue to alleviate any concerns," said Tomastik, of Ohio's Department of Natural Resources. "Obviously without regulatory presence in the field, the operator is not concerned about operating within the requirements."

But understaffing seems to be endemic across drilling states, especially where state regulatory agencies are responsible for checking both producing oil and gas wells and injection wells for waste or to enhance production.

In Montana, EPA auditors noted that inspectors are choosing which wells to inspect and have a "significant" workload.  In North Dakota, EPA auditors also noted the pressures of "exponential" growth and an "increasing workload."

To meet the goal of inspecting each well annually, Texas inspectors would have to visit eight wells a day, every day, including Sundays and Christmas. That's after Texas' Railroad Commission hired 65 staffers last year to help inspect the state's 428,000 wells.

Nye, the commission's spokeswoman, said the state had sufficient funding and inspected each of its commercial disposal wells twice last year.

"The Commission has a stringent and comprehensive review process for these wells," Nye wrote in an email.  "Railroad Commission staff work diligently to ensure saltwater disposal wells are not and will not be a problem."

But inspectors don't check on private disposal wells, which are far more numerous, with the same regularity. Nor do they keep a schedule for when officials should conduct such visits.
Other states are struggling under similar burdens. In Wyoming, inspectors would also have to check eight wells a day for each well to be checked once a year – a pace possible if wells are clustered together, experts said, but otherwise difficult to achieve. In West Virginia and Kansas, inspectors would have to check seven wells per day.

Visiting injection wells often ranks low among inspectors' priorities unless there is an accident or spill, according to a 2007 Texas auditor's report. The most urgent responsibility for regulators, beyond responding to emergencies, is typically overseeing the development of new oil and gas wells.

The result is that several years can pass between inspections of many injection well sites. In 2010, state regulators visited less than half of the Class 2 sites that a federal well inventory shows they were responsible for monitoring, ProPublica's analysis showed.  EPA inspectors checked on such wells even less frequently, visiting less than one-quarter of the sites under their jurisdiction in 2010.

"I don't give a darn whether you have federal regulations, or a squeaky clean permitting system," said Bill Bryson, a member of the Kansas Geological Survey and the former head of Kansas' oil and gas commission. "If you don't have somebody going out and looking at the wells it doesn't do any good, and if you don't have the right people looking … it doesn't do any good either."

Much of the problem with oversight comes down to money, critics say. In some states, budgets and staff for oil and gas agencies have dropped relative to the number of new wells being drilled over the last nine years.

Kansas employs about the same number of inspectors as it did in 2003, even though it drills four times as many new wells. New drilling has nearly doubled in Louisiana over the same period, but the state's enforcement staff has remained static and its oil and gas budget has increased modestly. In Illinois, drilling has nearly doubled, while the number of enforcement staff has been reduced.

Since the Underground Injection Control program is run under a federal mandate, states rely partly on money from the EPA to fund oversight and enforcement. Federal dollars make up 20 percent of Texas' budget, for example. But in the last 22 years, the EPA's annual operating budget for injection has remained about the same: $10 million. Taking inflation into account, funding has dropped at least 40 percent from 1990 to 2012, though the regulations for all well classes have only grown more complex.

"The UIC program has been flat funded for years," said Dan Jarvis, the field operations manager for Utah's Division of Oil, Gas and Mining.  "With more manpower, obviously you put them on the ground and you're going to have better compliance. Our field people are some of the greatest guys going, but they are overworked."

The EPA declined to disclose the operating budget for regional offices that monitor waste wells under federal jurisdiction or oversee state injection programs. Documents show, however, that in 2011 the agency suspended its travel budget for visits to some of the states that have the largest injection programs, including Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma.

"Do you think we are doing more now than we were doing 30 years ago? No, there is no money," said Salazar, the former EPA injection expert. "There are not enough people to know what is going on. It is the ideal storm for industry. Less and less people, more and more things that the EPA has to do."

Ultimately, much of the responsibility for meeting EPA standards falls to companies themselves. Some operators routinely exceed the minimum requirements of injection regulations, says Hughbert Collier, who runs a Texas environmental engineering firm that consults with injection well operators. They conduct their own integrity tests every year and make sure employees visit well sites once a month.

But operators inclined to cut corners have little to hold them back.

"What most people would be surprised about is that regulators don't have real good control over everything that goes on in the regulated community," said Miller, the former EPA criminal investigator in Texas. "Most of our environmental law requires self-reporting and that requires honest people."

When violations are identified – such as the 140 times waste was illegally injected and noted in the regulatory reports – the consequences can be minimal, and only in rare cases do transgressions rise to the level of criminal prosecution. In the three years of national data reviewed by ProPublica, which included more than 24,000 formal notices of violations, only one case was referred to criminal investigators.

Usually, violations result in citations or informal warnings. If operators do not address violations, then modest fines may be levied; in some cases, wells are temporarily shut down. There is no central source of information on the size of fines, but an audit of Louisiana's injection program provides a glimpse: In 2011, the state collected an average of $158 for each violation.

After three deaths, two federal worker safety investigations and a criminal prosecution, few injection sites nationwide received as much regulatory scrutiny as those in Rosharon, Texas.  Yet, despite all the attention, the wells there later failed on the most basic level.

On Feb. 17, 2010, thousands of gallons of waste that had been deposited into these wells gurgled to the surface in what the Railroad Commission described as a "breakout." Materials injected far below the earth had managed to migrate back up to the surface, perhaps through an old well missed by regulators.

As of this June, investigators were still analyzing whether the chemicals injected underneath the site had reached water supplies.

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Friday, September 21, 2012 by PRWatch.org
Coordinated Actions Worldwide this Weekend Call for Banning Fracking
by Sara Jerving

 

 

Concerned people from the U.S. and numerous other countries will join in a global campaign event Saturday to call for a ban of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking." More than 150 events, on five continents, are planned for this weekend’s “Global Frackdown” -- a day of action against fracking -- coupled with the promotion of the expansion of clean, sustainable energy options. 

Concerns about fracking, a process of extracting oil and gas from shale formations, have increased over the past few years as a growing number of communities encounter pressure from the well-funded industry to open up their land and water to industrial drilling. New technologies have made obtaining these deposits cheaper than had been possible in the past, leading to a rapid expansion of fracking across the globe.

During the process of fracking, large quantities of fresh water, coupled with chemicals and sand, are pumped into shale formations in order to crack the rock and extract the fossil fuels.

The blend of "proprietary" chemicals used in this process is largely kept confidential, but studies have revealed that fracking fluids contain a host of toxic substances, including known carcinogens and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Fracking has the documented potential to contaminate drinking water sources.  Fracking has also been shown to foul both air and land -- in addition to spoiling millions of gallons of fresh water as part of the drilling process.

Fracking has been a contentious issue in many countries that have large shale deposits, which may be located where people live or set aside as natural wildlife areas or parks.

While communities across the globe continue to fight political or legal battles over the use of land and water for the controversial extraction process, Saturday’s day of action will be the first time such efforts are coordinated internationally.

Citizens on Five Continents Call for a BanThe day of action, spearheaded by Food & Water Watch, has garnered participation of over 150 organizations worldwide. Citizens in Argentina, the Czech Republic, China, Zimbabwe, and the Ukraine, among other nations, will be speaking out on the same day that resisting unlimited fracking is a universal fight.

“Since our water system is deeply interconnected, even if you don’t have a fracking rig next to your house, your health, safety and environment are at risk,” Anna Ghosh of Food & Water Watch said.

Citizens will converge in front of parliament buildings in Bulgaria, South Africa, and the Czech Republic, at the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, and at Noosa Beach in Australia. A brigade of bicycles will protest at the site of an injection well in northern Spain. Street theatre performances portraying the dangers of fracking will be held in downtown Chicago and citizens will hand out information on fracking at Madison's weekly farmers' market on the Capitol building square, among other actions.

Day of Action Follows Protests in Brussels, Philadelphia, and Ottawa Some of the actions already started this week. On Tuesday, members of Green Parties from across Europe gathered in front of the European Parliament building in Brussels, Belgium, holding murky cups of water along with their protest signs, to represent the threat of water contamination that comes with fracking. The European Union is currently in the process of deciding the future of how the continent will move forward on regulating fracking.

This protest came in part in response to the European Parliament’s Industry Committee passing a decision Tuesday that said no environmental regulation amendments are needed to protect citizens from fracking. The European Parliament Environment Committee voted the following day for a more stringent approach to regulation. A European Commission released a report earlier this month calling for strict regulations because of the threat that fracking poses to the health of Europe’s residents and its environment.

On Thursday in Ottawa, the Council of Canadians, dressed in hazmat suits, delivered petitions signed by nearly 10,000 people asking for a moratorium on fracking in that country until federal reviews have been completed. The staff carried fake buckets of toxic fracking fluid to deliver along with the petitions. The protesters had hoped to deliver the petitions to Peter Kent, the Minister of the Environment, but the minister never made an appearance.

About one thousand people gathered in Philadelphia Thursday for “Shale Gas Outrage,” organized by Protecting Our Waters, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit group. The protestors stood outside the Pennsylvania Convention Center where inside Governor Tom Corbett spoke to attendants of a Marcellus Shale industry conference. At the convention, Corbett called those concerned about fracking the "unreasoning opposition" and touted the industry as the "tip of the spear" of a new industrial revolution. Corbett reportedly received nearly $1 million from those in the oil and gas industry during his gubernatorial campaign.

Citizens Standing up to Powerful Industry, Gains Have Been MadeThese citizens are up against a powerful, well-funded oil and gas industry with an aggressive public relations campaign to convince the world that fracking is benign. But despite their efforts, victories have been won by citizens hoping to protect their health and the environment from the dangers fracking poses. Fracking has been banned in France, Bulgaria, and the state of Vermont. There are also moratoriums on new fracking wells in New Jersey and New York, as well as in Romania, the Czech Republic, and the German region of North Rhine Westphalia. New York is currently deciding whether to end the state's moratorium on new wells in the state. Around two thousand individuals marched in Albany in August to persuade Governor Andrew Cuomo not to lift the moratorium.

Within the first 24 hours of which she was named to cabinet, Quebec’s new Natural Resources Minister Martine Ouellet said Thursday that she does not think there is any safe way to extract shale gas. “Our position is very clear: we want a complete moratorium, not only on exploitation but also on exploration of shale gas. We haven’t changed our minds,” she said.
A full list of events planned for the "Global Frackdown" is available here.

Looming Curses of Privatization

Monday, September 17, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Paul Buchheit

With the breakdown of the private financial industry, and with the decision by corporations to stop meeting their tax responsibilities, and with the dramatic surge in tax haven abuse, less tax revenue is available to state and local governments. Deprived of funding, governments are forced to consider privatization schemes to balance their budgets. But any such scheme comes with adversity and pain.

The futility of diverting public funds into the hands of profitseekers has been well-documented. Here are a few of the gathering curses of privatization.

1. Public treasures sold off for short-term budget needs

In his 2006 budget President Bush proposed auctioning off 300,000 acres of national forest in 41 states. This followed attempts by both the Reagan Administration and Clinton-era Republicans to privatize public land.

Now, with continuing budget shortfalls, the Cato Institute and other libertarian groups are pressing for property deals, with the justification that land should be "allocated to the highest-value use," presumably making it available to the highest bidder for consumption purposes.

That brings us to Paul Ryan's dubiously-named Path to Prosperity, which proposes to sell millions of acres of "unneeded federal land" and billions of dollars worth of federal assets. He's starting in his own backyard: the state of Wisconsin is considering the sale of DNR land for some ready cash. The Path to Prosperity is based in part on Republican Jason Chaffetz' "Disposal of Excess Federal Lands Act of 2011," which would unload millions of acres of land in America's west. Worse yet is Rep. Cliff Stearns' perplexing recommendation to "sell off some of our national parks." Mitt Romney also chimed in, admitting that he didn't know "what the purpose is" of public lands.


2. Infrastructure decaying in the hands of profit-seekers

David Cay Johnston describes the deteriorating state of America's infrastructure, with grids and pipelines neglected by monopolistic industries that cut costs rather than provide maintenance. Meanwhile, they achieve profit margins of over 50%, eight times the corporate average.

The government agencies that are usually blamed for the crumbling infrastructure are often staffed with regulators from the industries they're expected to monitor. If and when accidents happen, the companies responsible can plead hardship and demand rate increases from the public.

It's getting worse as corporations become fewer and more powerful. Almost every American adult can relate to the monopolistic phone and Internet industry that controls our public airwaves. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, South Korea has Internet speeds up to 200 times faster than the average speed in the U.S., at about half the cost. Free-market enterprise is simply not working in the U.S. telecommunications industry.

3. Water no longer available for the common good

According to Food and Water Watch, "The finance industry is promoting water privatization as a way to help local governments pay for budget shortfalls and improvement projects." The chief economist of Citigroup concurred: "I expect to see a globally integrated market for fresh water within 25 to 30 years."

But while profits average 12 to 15 percent per year, water and sewer utility rates typically rise 33 to 63 percent, and short-term business ventures are subject to abandonment after just a few years. Desperate local governments often regret their hasty decisions. A Century Foundation report concluded that with privatization "Competition is hard to create and maintain, cost savings (if any) from privatization erode over time, and service quality often suffers."

Numerous examples of water privatization abuse have been documented. In Pennsylvania and California, the American Water Company took over towns and raised rates by 70% or more. In Atlanta, United Water Services demanded more money from the city while prompting federal complaints about water quality. Felton, California privatized its water and received a 74 percent proposed rate increase over three years. Coatesville, Pennsylvania saw an 85 percent increase. Shell owns groundwater rights in Colorado, oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens is buying up the water in drought-stricken Texas, and water in Alaska is being pumped into tankers and sold in the Middle East.

In another ominous note for the future, the House passed the Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act of 2011, which would deny the Environmental Protection Agency the right to enforce the Clean Water Act. Our water is getting dirtier and scarcer. But a hedge fund advisor put a capitalist spin on it, noting the "serious profit opportunities" in water. "If you play it right," he added, "the results of this impending water crisis can be very good."

4. Our children put at risk with unproven educational methods

The few charter schools with good reviews have functioned with limited enrollments, retention policies favoring likely-to-succeed individuals, and an absence of special needs students. This violates a precept underscored by Chief Justice Warren in Brown vs. the Board of Education: "Education...is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms." Charters aren't even close to that. The Louisiana Believes project, for example, which will eventually be the country's most extensive voucher system, has only 5,000 slots available for about 380,000 eligible students.

But corporations are rushing headlong into this lucrative new market anyway, while paying little heed to the body of research confirming their relative ineffectiveness. This includes studies from Stanford University, the Department of Education, Johns Hopkins University, and the RAND Corporation.

In addition to their poor performance, charters are more segregated, less likely to accept students with disabilities, and conducive to a widening of the racial and rich-poor education gaps.

Still, despite all the damning evidence, the charter myth persists in the American mind. And it's getting worse. The newest blind rush into privatization heralds 'virtual' schools, which offer lessons to homebound kids on their computers, even at the K-12 level. In what seems obvious to most of us, virtual schools don't work for children. A 2009 Department of Education study on blended online and face-to-face instruction reported results that were "significantly positive for undergraduate and other older learners but not for K-12 students."

A lengthy New York Times investigation of one of K12 Inc's online schools concluded that "By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing. Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll."

5. Colleges gradually being replaced with prisons

America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and despite a falling violent crime rate, more people are going to jail. As explained by Michelle Alexander, "federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses."

So as education funding drops again this year in most of the states, spending on prisons increases. The U.S. spends over two times as much per prisoner as per public school student. California spends more on prisons than it does on higher education.

The profit motive is hastening prison privatization. Quickly. From 1990 to 2009, the number of prisoners in private facilities increased by more than 1600%, from about 7,000 to over 125,000 inmates. Corrections Corporation of America recently offered to run the prison system in any state willing to guarantee that jails stay 90% full.

Yet studies show that private prisons perform poorly in numerous ways: prevention of intra-prison violence, jail conditions, rehabilitation efforts. A 10-month investigation by the New York Times concluded that "the state's halfway houses have mutated into a shadow corrections network, where drugs, gang activity and violence, including sexual assaults, often go unchecked." Even so, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie insisted that "Places like this are to be celebrated."

The U.S. Department of Justice offered this appraisal: "There is no evidence showing that private prisons will have a dramatic impact on how prisons operate. The promises of 20-percent savings in operational costs have simply not materialized."

Prisons, like public land and utilities and schools, are up for sale in America. Essential public needs are fast becoming the newest products on the market.

Fracking Your Water

Drilling Through the Halliburton Loophole

by SHERWOOD ROSS

 

ExxonMobil Chairman/CEO Rex Tillerson sounded very confident when he told a congressional hearing last year that extracting natural gas by the “hydraulically fractured” process has not led to even one “reported case of a freshwater aquifer having ever been contaminated.”

But drinking water supplies in Pavillion, Wyo., and Dimock, Pa., are suspected of contamination from such drilling and a study by Duke University researchers showed that methane can leak into drinking water near active fracking sites.

The oil companies are backing up their story with an effective ad campaign. Example: ExxonMobil’s ad in the Sept. 19th New Yorker claims existing gas buried deep beneath our water supplies could “meet our needs for over 100 years.”

Besides having “thousands of feet of protective rock between the natural gas deposit and any groundwater” drillers’ install “multiple layers of steel and cement” in shale gas wells to keep the gas “safely within the well,” the ad said. The slurry is made up of sand, water, and chemicals—but drillers don’t have to identify the chemicals.

That’s because in the 2005 energy bill, crafted in part by goodfella Vice-President Dick Cheney, “fracking was explicitly exempted from federal review under the Safe Drinking Water Act,” writes Elizabeth Kolbert in an incisive article in the December 5th New Yorker.

This exemption, dubbed the “Halliburton Loophole,” does not require drillers to reveal which chemicals they use, which are carcinogens such as “benzene and formaldehyde.” 

Might this be why some irate homeowners say their tap water can be set on fire?

This hasn’t stopped more than 1,000 Pennsylvania and New York property owners from accepting up-front payments (with a pledge of future royalties) to allow drilling, even though “as much as forty per cent of (the water used in extraction) can come back up out of the gas wells, bringing with it corrosive salts, volatile organic compounds and radioactive elements, such as radium, ” Kolbert writes.

Pennsylvania has asked drillers to stop taking this flowback water to municipal treatment plants and New York State has ordered a moratorium on fracking permits. And it is seeking to ban fracking in New York City’s upstate watershed.

Says Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, “Once hydrofracturing begins in the (Delaware River) basin, the proverbial ‘faucet’ cannot be turned off, with any damage to our freshwater supplies likely requiring generations of effort to clean up.”

In a letter earlier this year, Tom Curtis, deputy executive director of the American Water Works Assn., called upon the EPA to evaluate every pathway for drinking water contamination and asserted a new study is needed that will cover fracking’s impact on water supply.

“Impacts on existing water resources can only be ascertained by properly designed monitoring programs,” Curtis wrote. “Protecting drinking water should trump everything.”

Indeed. It’s past time for state governments to ban all fracking until additional research finds conclusively it is safe to continue the practice—if it does.

The oil firms are claiming natural gas can satisfy the nation’s energy wants for anywhere from a century to 250 years. No doubt. But wind power, by contrast, is a resource that lasts forever. What’s more, if harnessed,  there’s enough of it blowing in just a couple of Dakota counties to light up the entire USA year-round, and without polluting the water we drink and upon which all life depends.

The Fracking Industry Has Bought Off Congress: Here Are the Worst Offenders

Thanks to our morally bankrupt political system and the Supreme Court's ruling on Citizens United, the fracking lobby's power of the purse is huge. 

By Scott Thill, AlterNet
Posted on December 16, 2011

Environmentalists and other well-adjusted citizens of Earth, I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that, thanks to illuminating documentaries like Josh Fox's Gasland and determined pressure from activists in and out of the mainstream, the toxic ravages of hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, are no longer the shale gas sector's dirty secret. The bad news is that, thanks to the United States' morally bankrupt political system and its Supreme Court's reality-defying ruling on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the fracking lobby's power of the purse is greater than it has ever been.

That power was depressingly dissected in Common Cause's recent report, Deep Drilling, Deep Pockets, which explained that earnings junkies like Exxon, Koch and more have paid House and Senate politicians on select energy and commerce committees nearly $750 million over the last decade to smother regulatory oversight of the expanding fracking practice, whose complete chemical components still remain a relative mystery. It was evidently money well spent. During that lobbying stretch, the Environmental Protection Agency scientifically linked fracking with water poisoning in Wyoming, and probably isn't far from siding with the increasing ranks of those who blame fracking for earthquakes from Oklahoma to Ohio to England. And yet beyond manageable fines and stock devaluations, no one from the industry has yet to seriously face the music for groundwater contamination and worse.

For that, you can thank the industry's "Halliburton loophole," so named for former Vice-President Dick Cheney's insistence that his former company's fracking be stripped of EPA regulation. Years and billions later, money still talks and safety still walks in our peak oil century tapping, like veins, what fossil fuel deposits we have left, from natural gas to tar sands. And they do so in a decidedly nonpartisan fashion.

"The natural gas industry has spent billions on lobbying and advertising to convince Americans that natural gas is a cleaner, cheaper alternative to oil," Common Cause regional director James Browning, co-author with Alex Kaplan of Deep Drilling, Deep Pockets, told AlterNet. "They've also tried to rebut environmental concerns by pitching natural gas as a 'transition fuel' that will help America move from fossil fuels to primarily clean forms of energy by the next century.

"But while fracking's exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act is rightly called the 'Halliburton loophole' and the vast majority of our top 100 recipients of fracking money are Republicans, it's important to note the extent of the industry's influence among Democrats," he added. "In Pennsylvania, the only state without a severance tax on natural gas extraction, previous Democratic governor Ed Rendell only made an issue of imposing a tax during his last year in office, too late to make it a reality. President Obama is very pro-fracking and it's important to note that the FRAC Act languished in the Democratic 111th Congress."

Currently, the FRAC Act, which would repeal fracking's exemption from the Safe Water Drinking Act, also languishes in the 112th Congress, where it is still taking its first legislative steps while sponsored by Colorado's Democratic congresswoman Diana DeGette. DeGette and Delaware Republican Michael N. Castle coauthored the 2005 Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act, an opportunity that provided former president George W. Bush with his first veto. Yet it is respective Bush Republicans like Joe Barton ($514,945) and John Cornyn ($417,556) who crown Common Cause's top 100 congressional hoarders of campaign cash from the fracking industry. As Browning explained, they're followed in fourth by Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu ($328,300), who's accompanied by House Democrats Dan Boren ($328,300), Jim Matheson ($223,79), and even Gene Green ($186,300).

More importantly, and across party lines, the fracking industry has lavished millions on crucial members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Yet it was only DeGette who continued to beat the lonely regulation drum after the EPA's report on Wyoming.

"The fact that we have a proven case of a connection between hydraulic fracturing and the contamination of an aquifer underscores just how important it is that we take cautionary steps to protect our communities' water supply," said DeGette in December, after Colorado implemented a new fracking disclosure rule. "That is why I continue to encourage members of Congress to pass my FRAC Act, so communities across the country will have transparency in the drilling process as well."

Transparency is the enemy of industry, which is why steps to stem its ubiquity in fracking have continued support from well-paid politicians at the state and federal levels, despite the disturbing facts. As Browning and Kaplan explained in Deep Drilling, Deep Pockets, different states host different loopholes for perpetuating the industry's extraordinary influence. Pennsylvania currently has no limit on campaign contributions, while Ohio's lobbying law fails to require disclosure of lobbyists' salaries, complicating the effort to get hard numbers on their political spending.

"There is a direct and frightening parallel between the failure to get better disclosure of the chemicals used in fracking, and the failure to get better disclosure of the industry's political expenditures," Browning told AlterNet. "As noted in our report, the industry has been ramping up its independent political expenditures since Citizens United. Three ways to give the public more of a fighting chance are requiring disclosure of all independent political expenditures, requiring disclosure of political expenditures to corporate shareholders, and giving corporate shareholders the power to approve or disapprove such expenditures in advance."

According to Browning, some strange developments have arisen on the latter front, from parties to our current economic and environmental misery. Fracking's indignant bedfellows have been getting stranger.

"As the potential dangers of fracking become harder to ignore, two of the most interesting developments are the hard questions being asked by banks and mortgage brokers, who don't want to be left with a lot of potentially permanently polluted property, and by the shareholders at oil and gas companies," Browning explained. "Last May, shareholders at ExxonMobil and Chevron both introduced resolutions to force better disclosure of the potential risks and costs of fracking. The Chevron resolution got more than 40 percent, a very high figure for a controversial, first-year resolution."

It's hard to look at budding shareholder revolts in both repeat offenders without noticing that, like most polluters and parasites, they've soiled their own nests. ("You never miss your water, until your well runs dry," is how Peter Tosh put it in the song "Till Your Well Runs Dry.") From the Deepwater Horizon spill in Landrieu's Louisiana to fracking messes in predominately Republican territories, citizens and shareholders alike are starting to realize that fossil fuel's base is, pun intended, fracturing.

"Fracking is an unusual example of an environmental issue that, for now, is playing out in areas that routinely support Republicans," said Browning. "In Pennsylvania, the threat not only of water and air pollution but also of stripping local governments' abilities to regulate fracking in their communities is creating common cause between rural Republicans and urban and suburban environmentalists."

"We need to take this momentary victory in the Delaware River and move across Pennsylvania and the United States to stop fracking," Gasland director Fox tweeted in November, after the Northeast's Delaware River Basin Commission -- which includes the governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Delaware and an official from the Army Corp of Engineers -- postponed further meetings about regulating fracking in the region.

"We have the momentum."

But do we have the money? Until we bring Citizens United to heel, we will be hard-pressed to compete with the current billions, and future trillions, that last century's climate-killing energy sector throws at politicians like party favors. If the past is prologue, then we're likely to change, like Rendell, too late. In slow-motion, we could annihilate what aquifers and other sensitive resources we have left to us, as climate change ramps up to freakout levels later this century. Plus, we've already reached the realm of the ludicrous: When a nation of drill junkies forces its planet to return fire with earthquakes, in hopes of changing our distracted minds and dirty habits, then it's time to move onto the green economy, no matter the capital costs. But until anything substantive changes, we'll likely need to marry Fox's momentum to Citizens United's money to make the drop-deadline.

Bad News About Water Quality — and Quantity

(Sometimes I feel guilty watering my yard. Real life water rationing is right around the corner, and we won't have a choice. People will bitch--mainly business folks--but we won't have a choice. Soon "lost to history" will be water parks; and the backyard family pool will soon be a thing of the past. But someday soon, we will literally wake up and wonder where all the water went.--jef)

Friday, August 5, 2011 by The Toronto Star
by Antonia Zerbisias

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart practically cowered under his desk last month when journalist Alex Prud’homme appeared.



That’s because Prud’homme’s just-published The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century is 435 pages of bad news about how North Americans waste, contaminate and violate our water supplies.

“Water is a deceptively plain substance,” he notes in his introduction. “Yet it is the basis for life, and is considered an ‘axis resource,’ meaning one that underlies all others.”

Without water, there is no life. As we have seen this summer, droughts have ravaged the U.S. mid- and southwest, China and even France. In Somalia and Kenya, it’s a humanitarian disaster.

In North America, we’re spoiled.

On the phone from his home in New York City, Prud’homme says, “We really need to start thinking about water.

“Because we’ve become so good at collecting, transporting and treating water, people feel they can turn the tap on anytime they want and get as much water as they want, at any temperature they want, for as long as they want. So we’ve forgotten how important it is. But what we haven’t done is manage it very sustainably or wisely.

“But now conditions have changed. There are more people on Earth, we are using water more and more, the climate is shifting, our diets are changing, the ways we pollute water are shifting. Our indifference is a luxury we no longer can afford.”

On a per-capita basis, Canadians are just behind the world’s most wasteful water users, the Americans, reports the Conference Board of Canada. That’s a lot of water down the drain.

What’s more, says Prud’homme, we excrete Viagra, synthetic estrogen and other prescription drugs — as well as illicit substances — when we use the toilet. Some of us are even flushing chemicals and leftover pills away. We poison fish every time we wash with antibacterial soap. Our factory farms send rivers of runoff — including potentially E. coli-carrying manure — into lakes and streams. Turn on an appliance, including the computer on which you may be reading this, water is used to power hydroelectric dams, or cool nuclear plants, or run coal generators.

And personal water usage is just a few drops in the bucket compared to what industry uses and pollutes on a daily basis.

Then there are the catastrophes. Last year’s BP Deepwater Horizon explosion spewed at least 2.5 million gallons of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico, ranking it as the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history.

But that’s nothing, according to Prud’homme, who notes that every day “millions of tiny leaks from the cars, trucks, motorcycles, lawn mowers, boats, planes, snowmobiles and other machines we use” get washed into sewers and flow into the rivers, lakes and the ocean.

Citing a National Research Council report, he writes that “humans spill more than 300 million gallons of oil into North American waters every decade, which is double the highest estimate of the BP spill.”

“This is not as photogenic as Deepwater Horizon or Hurricane Katrina, something where images can really sway people emotions,” he tells the Toronto Star. “The fact is, ultimately it’s far more destructive.”

But The Ripple Effect is about a lot more than water quality. It’s also about water quantity, which we take for granted.

In the U.S., water is literally poured into the desert.

That’s why Prud’homme zeroes in on the driest city in the driest state, Las Vegas, Nev., where the famous strip’s hotels boast extravagant water features, water slides, water shows and even shark tanks.

While Sin City has started to recycle and manage its water — that could be your used bathwater spurting out of the Bellagio’s famous fountain — it has also been snatching up ranch land to claim the groundwater beneath.

“Las Vegas is the city that wasn’t supposed to be,” says Prud’homme. “Despite the fact that they have implemented a lot of efficiencies, it’s still a city in the desert, which is kind of crazy. So they’re considering this project which would essentially build this pipeline up to central eastern Nevada where the basins are seemingly dry on the surface but there’s actually water beneath. The ranchers and the environmentalists and Native Americans are not happy about it and, most important, the state of Utah is not happy about it because that aquifer is shared between Nevada and Utah.”

Which brings us to water ownership.

Prud’homme devotes many pages to tycoons such as Canada’s Maurice Strong and American corporate raider T. Boone Pickens, who both own thousands and thousands of acres of land atop two of the U.S.’s largest aquifers. It’s a 21st-century bonanza.

“The hydrocarbon era is over. Water is the new oil!” says Pickens in The Ripple Effect.

Then there are the multinationals that are eager to buy water, bottle it and sell it for profit.

They’ll also tempt cash-strapped municipalities with offers of replacing aging infrastructure, such as century-old sewer pipes, in return for collecting fees for water.

“This gets to this really interesting moral question,” says Prud’homme. “Is water a common (good) like the air we breathe and therefore should be free to everyone, or is it a commodity like oil and natural gas that is extracted and processed and then sold in the market place?

“Sometimes private water can be good. They’ll come in and fix up your utility and they will run it more efficiently and you’ll get better water. Yes, there’s a price for that but it’s an affordable price.

“But there are other times where the dark side of human nature has gotten the better of water companies and they have seized on this essential resource. Private water companies have occasionally gouged their customers and started charging high water rates when people are desperate for a drink. This has happened in places like Central and South America, and it’s led to protests and riots.”

Like many, Prud’homme worries the coming water scarcity could lead to hostilities.

“That’s the great fear,” he says. “If you look at places like Pakistan-India, the two Koreas, China and its neighbours or the Tigris-Euphrates nations, there are certainly going to be tensions in the coming years, maybe even violence. There’s only so much water in the world, the population is growing, the climate is changing and people are using water in new ways.”

Canadians, who may feel smug about having one of the world’s largest supplies of fresh water, may need to, well, pour some of that water into their wine.

“Canada is water rich but it’s not so easy to pipe water from Quebec to Alberta, for example, and there are consequences,” cautions Prud’homme. “There is a way of managing water more holistically instead of having a hodgepodge of laws and initiatives.”

Pointing to the tiny island nation of Singapore, he says, “It’s an island nation and it’s ruled by an autocrat but they use water extremely efficiently. Their system is overseen by a body of highly skilled and educated managers who are well-funded and independent. It can make decisions based on what’s right rather than what’s politically expedient.

“Every drop counts there. They are always reminding citizens how important it is to be efficient and to conserve. There’s a great depth of education about water there that neither Canada nor the U.S. has.

“So these are lessons and strategies that can be adopted on a larger scale for nations like Canada and the U.S. We are going to have no choice over the coming decade.”

EPA Proposes New Rules on Emissions Released by Fracking

Friday, July 29, 2011 by ProPublica

by Nicholas Kusnetz, ProPublica 

Prohibited from regulating hydraulic fracturing under the Safe Drinking Water Act, yesterday the EPA took to the air, proposing federal regulations to reduce smog-forming pollutants released by the fast-spreading approach to gas drilling.

If approved as currently written, the rules would amount to the first national standards for fracking of any kind, the EPA said. The agency sets guidelines when companies inject fluids underground for various purposes, but in 2005 Congress prohibited the EPA from doing so for fracking. Regulation has been left to the states, some of which compel companies to report what chemicals they use and have imposed tougher well-design standards.


The new EPA proposal would limit emissions released during many stages of natural gas production and development, but explicitly targets the volatile organic compounds released in large quantities when wells are fracked. Drillers would have to use equipment that captures these gases, reducing emissions by nearly 95 percent, the EPA said.

Environmentalists said the proposed rules represent an important step by federal regulators amid a growing controversy over fracking's safety.

"The EPA has a terrific opportunity here to provide the public with some assurance that the industry has to meet certain performance standards that are protective of public health," said Ramon Alvarez, a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund in Texas.

The American Petroleum Institute, the country's main oil and gas lobbying group, has requested that the EPA delay finalizing the rules for at least six months beyond the current Feb. 2012 deadline. Asked to comment on the proposal's likely effects, API spokesman Reid Porter said only that the organization was reviewing it.

The Marcellus Shale Coalition, a group representing gas drillers in the Northeast, issued a statement criticizing the proposed regulations, saying they would "undercut" gas production.

The EPA contends that the measure would actually be a moneymaker for drilling companies. Though it might compel them to invest in new equipment, this equipment would allow them to capture methane gas currently lost in the drilling process, which they could then sell.

The EPA proposal is the result of a successful 2009 lawsuit brought against the agency by WildEarth Guardians and another advocacy group alleging that the agency had not updated air-quality rules as required. The EPA is supposed to review such rules at least every eight years, but in some cases had not done so for 10 years or more.

While the rules affect the oil and gas industry as a whole, growing awareness about environmental and health risks associated with fracking seems to have played a role in their formulation.

During an interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson called natural gas a critical bridge fuel to a lower carbon future, but acknowledged that drilling had led to poor air quality in some areas. Smog was worsening in rural communities where drilling had increased sharply, she said, and the agency was concerned that without better regulation those problems would grow.

"People's health will be affected," Jackson said, adding that the EPA was developing rules -- the ones announced yesterday -- to address this issue.

Hydraulic fracturing is a major source of emissions because when fluids used to frack a well return to the surface, they carry gases that can be vented into the air, said Jeremy Nichols, the climate and energy program director for WildEarth Guardians.

"Just imagine opening a bottle of soda," he said.

Instead of carbon dioxide, in fracking's case the soda can contain methane, volatile organic compounds and toxic chemicals such as benzene, which generally spray into the environment. Some areas in the West, where emissions from drilling are particularly high, no longer meet federal air quality standards.

The EPA proposal also calls for reducing emissions of toxic chemicals, such as cancer-causing benzene, produced by processing, transmitting and storing natural gas. An exemption in the Clean Air Act prohibits the EPA from requiring similar reductions for fracking. Nevertheless, the agency said that a byproduct of new limits on volatile organic compounds produced by fracking would be reductions in other emissions.

Some environmentalists said they were disappointed that the proposed rules do not target methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is also the primary ingredient of natural gas. The oil and gas sector accounts for nearly 40 percent of all methane emissions nationwide, according to the EPA.

While the EPA said such emissions would be reduced by one-quarter as a result of new limits on the release of other gases, Alvarez said greater cuts would have been possible if methane reductions had been mandated.

The EPA issued its emissions reduction proposal soon after saying it would not meet a July 29 deadline for tougher national ozone standards.

Doing one without the other may not be enough to improve air quality in busy drilling areas such as Wyoming's Upper Green River Basin, Nichols said.

"That's a hard realization that's going to sink in," he said. "We're definitely going to be able to take a bite out of it through some of the standards that are coming on line, but we're going to reach a point where something else needs to be done."

Why is the Fracking Fluid Disclosure Law Important?

How did the law happen, and what does it mean for the rest of the country?
Deb Nardone, Director of the Sierra Club Natural Gas Reform Campaign

Significant environmental damage from natural gas extraction is evident across the country, from air pollution in rural counties of Wyoming to wells contaminated in Texas, Colorado, and Pennsylvania.

Sierra Club is moving to enact policies that break our addiction to oil, move us toward a clean energy future, and hold oil and gas companies accountable. This past weekend, Texas certified a law to require natural gas drilling companies to disclose the chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing process.  Hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" is a process used by the natural gas industry to remove gas from large shale rock deposits deep below the earth's surface. Natural gas drilling and the fracking process currently go unregulated by state and federal officials, despite the potential dangerous effect to our air, water, communities and landscapes with important wildlife and recreational value.

This new law comes during intense debate over the safety and health implications of this drilling process and in a state that positioned itself as a leader in oil and gas drilling. How did this happen?

The bill originated in the state House by State Representative Jim Keffer of Eastland, TX. Upon passage, the bill moved to the state Senate with State Senator Troy Fraser as the sponsor. The bill passed both chambers and was signed into law on June 17.  

It is important to note that this first step forward could not have been accomplished if it weren’t for the hard work and determination of the Sierra Club's Lone Star Chapter. Cyrus Reed, the Lone Star Chapter's Conservation Director, devoted tremendous time and energy lobbying for the inclusion of several amendments proposed by the Sierra Club. The chapter's hard work on this issue led the way for chapters across the country that are pushing for fracking fluid disclosure in their own states.

Although Texas is the first state to make fracking fluid disclosure a law, many states already have rules in place to require well and fracturing fluid chemical reporting. Currently, Colorado requires operators to maintain an inventory of chemicals exceeding 500 pounds in a quarterly reporting period. Maryland requires operators to include drilling additives used and a description of their toxicity in drilling applications. Pennsylvania requires operators to prepare a Preparedness, Prevention, and Contingency Plan that includes a list of the chemicals used.

While this is a step in the right direction, there is still much more that should be required in each gas producing state. All chemicals used in fracking and well production, including volume and concentration,  should be reported to state regulatory agencies prior to their use, including proprietary "trade secrets."  This information should be posted online and available to the general public. Of course the most important part of the puzzle is how the states monitor and enforce the accuracy of reported data. More and more states are beginning to take action into their own hands as the U.S. Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency continue to drag their feet in closing the Halliburton Loophole and forcing disclosure of these dangerous chemicals.

Full public disclosure is essential for landowners, state regulators, emergency personnel and the general public to understand what is being pumped underground. We are tired of being kept in the dark about fracking, and we can't allow the gas industry to continue pushing our concerns aside. Congratulations to the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter for keeping vigilant and fighting for key amendments to this bill.

No Fracking Way

Monday, June 13, 2011 by OtherWords
In addition to poisoning our water, homes, and bodies, fracking is eroding the quality of life in rural America.
by Wenonah Hauter

 

Flames exploding from kitchen taps. Livestock dropping dead from tainted water. People in small towns noticing an unusual stench, experiencing acute headaches, and blacking out.

These aren't scenes from a horror movie. They're the increasingly common results of natural gas drilling throughout the United States.

Many state and federal lawmakers see natural gas as the answer to our nation's need for new energy sources. Yet extracting gas through a process called hydraulic fracturing — more commonly referred to as "fracking" — poses unacceptable risks to the American public.

Fracking requires large quantities of water and a cocktail of toxic chemicals that have been shown to poison water resources in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

To date, at least 1,000 cases of water contamination have been documented near drilling sites around the country. In some cases, residents can no longer drink from their taps, and in at least one instance, a home near a fracking site exploded after a gas well leaked methane into its tap water.

Fracking can also compromise air quality. People in Dish, Texas, located near 11 natural gas compression stations, know this from firsthand experience. Residents there complained of headaches and blackouts, a strange odor in the air, and a sudden rash of blindness among their livestock. A private environmental consultant sampled air from Dish and found that it contained high levels of neurotoxins and carcinogens, including benzene.

The correlation between fracking and serious public health problems is further reinforced by studies conducted by the Endocrine Disruption Network, which found that 25 percent of fracking chemicals could cause cancer, and 40 to 50 percent could affect the nervous, immune, and cardiovascular systems.

In addition to poisoning our water, homes, and bodies, fracking is eroding the quality of life in rural America. New wells bring fleets of noisy, polluting trucks to small towns. Scenic vistas are replaced by fracking wells, harming tourism and recreation industries. In Wise County, Texas, properties with gas wells have lost 75 percent of their value. While companies promise minimal impacts, the process often devastates farming operations when fracking fluids poison water supplies, sometimes even killing livestock.

Yet despite these problems, the United States is currently experiencing a boom in natural gas production, drilling into rock that is only now accessible thanks to so-called innovations within the industry. Between 2000 and 2010, fracked shale gas increased from 1 percent to 20 percent of the domestically drilled natural gas supply.

The natural gas industry's influence has fueled much of this growth. Between 2005 and 2010, the largest natural gas producers and two trade associations spent more than $370 million lobbying on behalf of industry interests.

Such unchecked influence has allowed the natural gas industry to expand while doing little to protect consumers from its effects. Fracking is exempt from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act, and companies are not legally required to disclose the chemicals used in fracking operations, claiming them as proprietary "trade secrets."

In the absence of strong federal leadership, it's up to state and local governments to protect their residents. Last year, New York State passed a six-month moratorium on fracking. In late May, Eric Schneiderman, the state's Attorney General, launched a lawsuit against the federal government for not fully assessing the environmental impacts of proposed fracking operations along the Delaware River, which supplies drinking water for 15 million Americans. To date, at least 44 municipalities across the country have passed measures to ban fracking.

Such developments point to a public backlash against this dirty, polluting process, but federal government involvement is essential too. President Barack Obama should institute a national ban on natural gas fracking. Doing so would protect public health and our essential resources, sending the message that our communities are more important than the interests of the big oil and gas companies.

The report, The Case for a Ban on Gas Fracking, is available at http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org