Category Archives: fossil fuels

energy policy, fossil fuels, fracking, natural resource management, tar sands

The Guardian: A Texan tragedy: Plenty of oil, but no water

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A Texan tragedy: Plenty of oil, but no water, Texan drought sets residents against fracking

By Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian

Sunday, August 11, 2013 13:35 EDT

Beverly McGuire saw the warning signs before the town well went dry: sand in the toilet bowl, the sputter of air in the tap, a pump working overtime to no effect. But it still did not prepare her for the night last month when she turned on the tap and discovered the tiny town where she had made her home for 35 years was out of water.

“The day that we ran out of water I turned on my faucet and nothing was there and at that moment I knew the whole of Barnhart was down the tubes,” she said, blinking back tears. “I went: ‘dear God help us. That was the first thought that came to mind.”

Across the south-west, residents of small communities like Barnhart are confronting the reality that something as basic as running water, as unthinking as turning on a tap, can no longer be taken for granted.

Three years of drought, decades of overuse and now the oil industry’s outsize demands on water for fracking are running down reservoirs and underground aquifers. And climate change is making things worse.

In Texas alone, about 30 communities could run out of water by the end of the year, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Nearly 15 million people are living under some form of water rationing, barred from freely sprinkling their lawns or refilling their swimming pools. In Barnhart’s case, the well appears to have run dry because the water was being extracted for shale gas fracking.

The town – a gas station, a community hall and a taco truck – sits in the midst of the great Texan oil rush, on the eastern edge of the Permian basin.

A few years ago, it seemed like a place on the way out. Now McGuire said she can see nine oil wells from her back porch, and there are dozens of RVs parked outside town, full of oil workers.

But soon after the first frack trucks pulled up two years ago, the well on McGuire’s property ran dry.

No-one in Barnhart paid much attention at the time, and McGuire hooked up to the town’s central water supply. “Everyone just said: ‘too bad’. Well now it’s all going dry,” McGuire said.

Ranchers dumped most of their herds. Cotton farmers lost up to half their crops. The extra draw down, coupled with drought, made it impossible for local ranchers to feed and water their herds, said Buck Owens. In a good year, Owens used to run 500 cattle and up to 8,000 goats on his 7,689 leased hectares (19,000 acres). Now he’s down to a few hundred goats.

The drought undoubtedly took its toll but Owens reserved his anger for the contractors who drilled 104 water wells on his leased land, to supply the oil companies.

Water levels were dropping in his wells because of the vast amounts of water being pumped out of the Edwards-Trinity-Plateau Aquifer, a 34,000 sq mile water bearing formation.

“They are sucking all of the water out of the ground, and there are just hundreds and hundreds of water trucks here every day bringing fresh water out of the wells,” Owens said.

Meanwhile, residents in town complained, they were forced to live under water rationing. “I’ve got dead trees in my yard because I haven’t been able to water them,” said Glenda Kuykendall. “The state is mandating our water system to conserve water but why?Š Getting one oil well fracked takes more water than the entire town can drink or use in a day.”

Even as the drought bore down, even as the water levels declined, the oil industry continued to demand water and those with water on their land were willing to sell it. The road west of town was lined with signs advertising “fresh water”, where tankers can take on a box-car-sized load of water laced with industrial chemicals.

“If you’re going to develop the oil, you’ve got to have the water,” said Larry Baxter, a contractor from the nearby town of Mertzon, who installed two frack tanks on his land earlier this year, hoping to make a business out of his well selling water to oil industry.

By his own estimate, his well could produce enough to fill up 20 or 30 water trucks for the oil industry each day. At $60 (£39.58) a truck, that was $36,000 a month, easily. “I could sell 100 truckloads a day if I was open to it,” Baxter said.

He rejected the idea there should be any curbs on selling water during the drought. “People use their water for food and fibre. I choose to use my water to sell to the oil field,” he said. “Who’s taking advantage? I don’t see any difference.”

Barnhart remained dry for five days last month before local work crew revived an abandoned railway well and started pumping again. But residents fear it is just a temporary fix and that next time it happens they won’t have their own wells to fall back on. “My well is very very close to going dry,” said Kuykendall.

So what is a town like Barnhart to do? Fracking is a powerful drain on water supplies. In adjacent Crockett county, fracking accounts for up to 25% of water use, according to the groundwater conservation district. But Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, argues fracking is not the only reason Texas is going dry – and nor is the drought. The latest shocks to the water system come after decades of overuse by ranchers, cotton farmers, and fast-growing thirsty cities.

“We have large urban centres sucking water out of west Texas to put on their lands. We have a huge agricultural community, and now we have fracking which is also using water,” she said. And then there is climate change.

West Texas has a long history of recurring drought, but under climate change, the south-west has been experiencing record-breaking heatwaves, further drying out the soil and speeding the evaporation of water in lakes and reservoirs. Underground aquifers failed to regenerate. “What happens is that climate change comes on top and in many cases it can be the final straw that breaks the camel’s back, but the camel is already overloaded,” said Hayhoe.

Other communities across a bone-dry south-west are resorting to extraordinary measures to keep the water flowing. Robert Lee, also in the oil patch, has been hauling in water by tanker. So has Spicewood Beach, a resort town 40 miles from Austin, which has been trucking in water since early 2012.

San Angelo, a city of 100,000, dug a pipeline to an underground water source more than 60 miles away, and sunk half a dozen new wells.

Las Cruces, just across the border from the Texas panhandle in New Mexico, is drilling down 1,000ft in search of water.

But those fixes are way out of reach for small, rural communities. Outside the RV parks for the oil field workers who are just passing through, Barnhart has a population of about 200.

“We barely make enough money to pay our light bill and we’re supposed to find $300,000 to drill a water well?” said John Nanny, an official with the town’s water supply company.

Last week brought some relief, with rain across the entire state of Texas. Rain gauges in some parts of west Texas registered two inches or more. Some ranchers dared to hope it was the beginning of the end of the drought.

But not Owens, not yet anyway. The underground aquifers needed far more rain to recharge, he said, and it just wasn’t raining as hard as it did when he was growing up.

“We’ve got to get floods. We’ve got to get a hurricane to move up in our country and just saturate everything to replenish the aquifer,” he said. “Because when the water is gone. That’s it. We’re gone.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/11/a-texan-tragedy-plenty-of-oil-but-no-water/?utm_source=Raw+Story+Daily+Update&utm_campaign=2cd20bb36a-8_11_138_11_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1b6404e40c-2cd20bb36a-180476769

energy policy, fossil fuels, fracking, natural resource management, tar sands

CommonDreams: Fracking-Harmed Residents Demand Reopening of EPA Poisoned Water Investigations

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http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2013/08/13-2

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 13, 2013
3:01 PM

CONTACT: Food & Water Watch

Seth Gladstone – sgladstone[at]fwwatch[dot]org, 718.943.8063

Action Comes on Heels of Report Showing EPA Officials Ignored Evidence from Philadelphia Office Finding Pollution in Dimock Drinking Water

WASHINGTON – August 13 – Pennsylvania residents and activists personally harmed by the hazards of fracking gathered today at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C. to call for the reopening of the investigation into drinking water contamination in Dimock, PA. A recent report in the Los Angeles Times revealed that EPA officials in Washington chose to close an investigation of Dimock drinking water despite evidence gathered from agency investigators based in Philadelphia that found “significant damage to the water quality,” from poisonous contamination likely caused by fracking. The EPA PowerPoint Presentation was released last Monday on DeSmog blog by investigative journalist Steve Horn. Evidence of drinking water contamination due to fracking was similarly ignored by the EPA in Pavillion, Wyoming and Weatherford, Texas. The resident-activists delivered more than 50,000 petitions to new EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy calling on her to reopen investigations in Dimock, PA as well as in Pavillion, WY and Weatherford, TX. They are also calling on EPA to provide safe drinking water to residents while these investigations recommence.

“For years now, I have had to live with toxic, poisoned fracked water in my home,” said Ray Kemble, a former gas industry employee turned whistleblower and an affected Dimock area resident. “When EPA finally stepped in and tested my water, I thought ‘Thank God. Someone is finally here to help us.’ But then it became apparent to those of us on the ground that they were playing politics. EPA officials literally told us officially that our water was safe to drink but then told us off-the-record not to drink it. Now the truth is out and we want justice.”

In 2010, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection concluded that a fracking well drilled by Cabot Oil and Gas Corporation was responsible for methane contamination of a large aquifer in Dimock, PA resulting in the contamination of the drinking water of 19 families. The PA DEP enacted a fracking moratorium in the area and promised to build a water line from a nearby town to the residents. Then they rescinded that promise leaving Dimock residents to fend for themselves.

During the next few years, Cabot Oil and Gas paid for water deliveries to the residents and then abruptly stopped December 2011. Residents and advocates demanded the EPA and the federal government step in and in January 2012, the EPA commenced water deliveries while conducting its own investigation into groundwater contamination caused by drilling and fracking operations. In the summer of 2012, the EPA concluded its investigation and stated that Dimock’s water wasn’t contaminated from drilling and fracking operations, however the Los Angeles Times now reports that internal documents show regional EPA staff members said the exact opposite. Staff members warned their superiors that several wells had been contaminated with methane and substances such as manganese and arsenic, most likely from local gas drilling and fracking.

“I helped sound the alarm and called EPA when Cabot Oil and Gas stopped water deliveries to outspoken residents in Dimock, PA,” said Craig Stevens, a resident from the neighboring town of Silver Lake Township, who has also been adversely been affected by fracking operations in the region. “The people in this country deserve better then this. These fracking corporations should not be allowed to cause citizens harm and then have the federal government cover up the water contamination. Enough is enough. We aren’t going away until we have law, order and safe drinking water.”

Residents argue this isn’t the first time the EPA has stepped back from connecting the evidence from its own studies of water contamination to unconventional gas drilling and fracking operations. Dimock’s story is emblematic of a troubling pattern in EPA groundwater investigations related to fracking.

In late-2010 in Weatherford, Texas, after evaluating samples from a water well near drilling and fracking operations, the Environmental Protection Agency believed the situation was so serious that it issued a rare emergency order that said at least two homeowners were in immediate danger from a well saturated with flammable methane. More than a year later, the agency rescinded its mandate and refused to explain why. However, in an Associated Press story that later emerged, the EPA had scientific evidence against the driller, Range Resources, but changed course after the company threatened not to cooperate with a national study about hydraulic fracturing. In response to this threat and industry pressure, regulators set aside an analysis that concluded the drilling could have been to blame for the contamination.

More recently, the EPA abandoned the fracking study in Pavillion, WY, which found benzene, a known carcinogen, at 50 times the level that is considered safe. However, even with this evidence, the EPA stepped away from this study and instead handed it over to the state of Wyoming, whose lead politicians have repeatedly vocally supported fracking. Worse, the research will be funded by EnCana, the very company whose drilling and fracking operations may have caused the groundwater contamination.

“The purpose of the EPA is to protect all Americans from the types of health and safety hazards fracking so obviously caused in Dimock and elsewhere,” said Emily Wurth, director of water programs at Food & Water Watch, the organization that led the petition collection effort. “It’s time for Gina McCarthy and the EPA to do its job and stand up for public health, not continue wilting under pressure from the oil and gas industry to simply maintain the dangerous status quo.”
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Food & Water Watch is a nonprofit consumer organization that works to ensure clean water and safe food. We challenge the corporate control and abuse of our food and water resources by empowering people to take action and by transforming the public consciousness about what we eat and drink.

fossil fuels, fracking, natural resource management, oil pollution

NewYork Times: Amid Pipeline Debate, Two Costly Cleanups Forever Change Towns

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August 10, 2013

By DAN FROSCH
MARSHALL, Mich. – As the Obama administration inches closer to a decision on whether to approve construction of the much-debated Keystone XL pipeline, costly cleanup efforts in two communities stricken by oil spills portend the potential hazards of transporting heavy Canadian crude.

PIPELINE-1-articleLarge
Sean Proctor for The New York Times

The Environmental Protection Agency estimated in May that 180,000 gallons of oil sands crude remained in the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, three years after a pipeline ruptured.

It has been three years since an Enbridge Energy pipeline ruptured beneath this small western Michigan town, spewing more than 840,000 gallons of thick oil sands crude into the Kalamazoo River and Talmadge Creek, the largest oil pipeline failure in the country’s history. Last March, an Exxon Mobil pipeline burst in Mayflower, Ark., releasing thousands of gallons of oil and forcing the evacuation of 22 homes.

Both pipeline companies have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to recover the heavy crude, similar to the product Keystone XL would carry. River and floodplain ecosystems have had to be restored, and neighborhoods are still being refurbished. Legal battles are being waged, and residents’ lives have been forever changed.

“All oil spills are pretty ugly and not easy to clean up,” said Stephen K. Hamilton, a professor of aquatic ecology at Michigan State University who is advising the Environmental Protection Agency and the state on the cleanup in Marshall. “But this kind of an oil is even harder to clean up because of its tendency to stick to surfaces and its tendency to become submerged.” Before July 26, 2010, hardly anyone in Marshall had heard of Enbridge Energy Partners, a Houston firm whose parent company is based in Calgary, Alberta.

On a recent midsummer morning, the Kalamazoo looked almost the way it once did. Towering oak trees draped over the water in the heat. Hawks patrolled the deep green riverbanks. An elderly couple lugged fishing tackle toward a shady area. If not for two motorboats whirring downstream and three men probing the water with poles, there would have been no sign that anything had gone wrong.

Much of Kalamazoo’s plant and animal life has returned. But ridding the water of all the oil – some of which sank to the river floor and continues to generate a kaleidoscopic sheen – has proved elusive. Though a 40-mile stretch of the river has reopened after being closed for two years and most of the oil has been recovered or has evaporated, vestiges of the spill are everywhere. “For Sale” signs dot the rolling cornfields and soy farms. Once-coveted riverfront homes sit vacant.

Matt Davis, a real estate agent here, said he had struggled to sell homes since the spill. “Enbridge hopes people forget,” Mr. Davis said. “But this is my town. This is where I grew up. Enbridge isn’t from around here. “We didn’t ask for them to have their pipeline burst in our backyard. Make it right. Take care of the mess you made.”

In May, the E.P.A. found that Enbridge had drastically underestimated the amount of oil still in the river. The agency estimated that 180,000 gallons had most likely drifted to the bottom, more than 100 times Enbridge’s projection. It has ordered Enbridge to dredge sections of the river where stubborn beads of oil remain submerged. The dredging started on July 30, and stretches of the river are being closed again. Construction crews have rumbled onto the riverfront in nearby Comstock Township, angering residents and business owners who remain fearful of another accident.

Jason Manshum, an Enbridge spokesman, said the company was working to address the township’s concerns as it followed the orders of the E.P.A. “This is the single-largest incident in the history of our organization,” he said. “From the beginning, in July 2010, we said that we would be committed to this community and the natural environment, for as long as it would take to right the rupture that happened. About three years later to the day, we’re still here.”

Larry Bell, who owns Bell’s Brewery, one of the country’s largest craft beer makers, was shocked earlier this summer to see workers clear a staging area next to his brewery near Marshall. “We’re going to be downwind of this thing,” said Mr. Bell, who filed a lawsuit last month asserting that Enbridge did not get permission from the local condominium association to build its dredge pad.

“If those airborne contaminants come in, it’s going to get into our ingredients,” Mr. Bell said. “We see that as irreparable. They can’t compensate me for taking away my business.”

Since the spill, Enbridge has become one of the largest landowners in the area – buying out 154 residential properties within a 200-foot swath that the company determined was most affected. By many accounts, Enbridge paid a fair price and has begun to put some properties up for sale. The company has also donated millions of dollars to build roads and parks along the river. Still, the emotional scars of losing property run deep.

For nearly 30 years, Deb Miller and her husband owned a carpet store along the Kalamazoo. After the spill, Enbridge offered to buy the property but not the store, Ms. Miller said. Nearing retirement and worried that the land’s value would plummet, the Millers liquidated their business and sold the land. “We could have worked that store for another 10 years,” said Ms. Miller, 59, who now has two part-time jobs. “For us to physically move our business at our age was more than we could fathom. It was an agonizing decision.”

The same sentiment echoes in Mayflower, Ark., a quiet, working-class town of about 2,200 tucked among the wetlands and dogwood thickets near Little Rock. On March 29, an Exxon Mobil pipeline burst near the Northwoods subdivision, spilling an estimated 210,000 gallons of heavy Canadian crude, coating a residential street with oil. Twenty-two homes were evacuated.
Now, four months later, the neighborhood of low-slung brick homes is largely deserted, a ghostly column of empty driveways and darkened windows, the silence broken only by the groan of heavy machinery pawing at the ground as remediation continues.
After E.P.A. monitoring found air quality to be safe, residents of 17 of the homes were allowed back. But only a few have returned.

“People here are still unsure about whether it’s safe for their families,” said April Lane of the Faulkner County Citizens Advisory Group, a community organization working with residents. Exxon has offered to buy the 22 evacuated homes, or to compensate owners for diminished property value. The company also said it would buy 40 additional properties if the owners could not sell them within four months. So far, Exxon has spent $2 million on temporary housing for residents and more than $44 million on the cleanup, said Aaron Stryk, an Exxon spokesman.

“We can’t say it enough: We are so, so sorry this incident took place and for the disruption and for the inconvenience that has taken place,” Mr. Stryk said. “We are staying in Mayflower until the job is done.” For some, the money cannot replace the lives they once led. Jimmy Arguello and his wife, Tiffany, lived in Northwoods for six years, in the first home they owned, built by Mr. Arguello, a plumber, and his friends.

The day the pipeline broke, the Arguellos were told by the police to pack for a few days. But for three months, the couple and their two young sons stayed at hotels – six in all – before settling into an apartment in nearby Conway. Exxon has paid their living expenses, but the impact on the family has been “heartbreaking,” Mr. Arguello said. Worried about raising his children near an oil spill, he has decided to sell his home to Exxon. “It’s hard not to know where your family is going to go and where we’re going to end up,” he said. “I built that house six years ago. And now I’m not going back.” Ryan Senia, a 29-year-old engineer, is also selling to Exxon. Mr. Senia, who has stayed at a friend’s house since being evacuated, said he worried he would never be able to put his home on the market otherwise. “Everyone you know is gone,” he said.

During the last few months, several lawsuits have been filed on behalf of dozens of residents who live both in and near the subdivision. The State of Arkansas and the Justice Department have also filed a claim, saying that the spill polluted waterways and that Exxon did not immediately repair the pipeline.

Exxon would not comment on pending litigation, Mr. Stryk said, adding that it had been transparent in its clean up efforts.
There is no sense of how long those efforts will continue. A protective boom has been strung across Lake Conway; so far, no oil has reached it. Workers were still searching for residual oil in a nearby marsh. And crews in Northwoods continue to monitor for oil that seeped into the foundations of several homes. “We’re tired of it,” Mr. Arguello said. “We’re ready for it to be over.”
Here in Marshall, Enbridge projects that its total cleanup cost will run to nearly $1 billion.

An E.P.A. spokeswoman, Anne Rowan, said that even after the company dredges the Kalamazoo, about 162,000 gallons of oil will remain. It cannot be recovered immediately without causing a significant adverse impact to the river, Ms. Rowan said.
Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality, meanwhile, has undertaken a huge study to examine soil and sediment. Since the spills, the pipeline industry has emphasized that oil lines remain safe and reliable, and that major spills are rare. “Are we satisfied? No,” said Peter T. Lidiak, the American Petroleum Institute’s pipeline director. “We are trying to not have any releases and not have properties damaged and people impacted. Because that’s not the business we’re in.”
For Deb Miller, the spill will forever haunt Marshall. “They can try and beautify along the river, but they can never give us back all of our neighbors who have moved out,” Ms. Miller said. “There are not enough zeros to pay us for what we’ve been through.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

BP Spill, fossil fuels, gulf of mexico clean-up, Gulf restoration, marine pollution, natural resource management, oil pollution

Nola.com: Making industry pay its share

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http://www.houmatoday.com/article/20130809/LETTERS/130809591/-1/living?Title=Making-industry-pay-its-share

Published: Friday, August 9, 2013 at 10:00 p.m.
Last Modified: Friday, August 9, 2013 at 10:31 p.m.

The lawsuit against major oil companies by the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East is long overdue.

For years we have seen how offshore oil exploration and production have damaged our wetlands.

Yet no statewide politician except Gov. Dave Treen has tried to hold the industry accountable.

Our elected officials want to blame the federal government.

Certainly its construction of levees to control the Mississippi River robbed the delta of land-building sediment.

But the people of Kansas, Vermont and the other states did not cut oilfield canals through our marsh, drill oil wells in our wetlands and pump oil out of the ground until it sinks into the Gulf.

Why do Louisiana politicians ignore the oil companies and put the burden of coastal restoration on American taxpayers?

Could it be that they depend on oil-industry contributions?

I served in the Louisiana Senate for 27 years and on the Public Service Commission since 2003.

In that time, Treen has been virtually the only Louisiana politician to ask the oil companies to pay for the damage they caused.

When Treen introduced his Coastal Wetlands Environmental Levy, the oil companies that helped elect him became his enemies in a matter of days.

Bobby Jindal argued against suing the tobacco companies in the 1990s when he was secretary of health and hospitals.

Fortunately the state didn’t listen, and we got $4 billion from Big Tobacco to help treat people in state hospitals with illnesses from smoking.

Jindal represents the special interests. First it was the tobacco companies, now it’s the major oil companies.

As for the claim that this lawsuit will “shut down” the oil industry, consider that Louisiana and Texas have 40 percent of U.S. refining capacity, and these plants are running wide open.

Louisiana has the Mississippi River to transport products, 50,000 miles of pipeline and some of the world’s most-productive oil and gas fields off our coast.

Can anyone seriously say the industry is leaving?

The Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East has drawn a line in the dirt.
Its suit against major oil companies for their role in coastal erosion challenges the politicians of Louisiana to defend our state like they would defend their own property.

If Bobby Jindal, Mary Landrieu, David Vitter or any other politician were to suffer damage to their own property like we have seen in the wetlands, would they look the other way?

Foster Campbell
Public service commissioner
Bossier City

Special thanks to Richard Charter

climate change, energy policy, fossil fuels, national ocean politics

350.org: Joyful, Unyielding by Bill McKibben

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My wife Sue and I criss-crossed America these past few weeks — from the Mackinac Straits of Michigan where they want to run tar sands oil through aging pipes beneath the Great Lakes, to the Chevron refinery in Richmond, California where they’d like to turn tar sands into gasoline. We saw coal plants, fracking wells and stretches of Pacific coast they’d like to turn into carbon ports.

But mostly we saw people — the beautiful face of a movement that’s growing, learning, coming together.

It’s incredibly diverse, as one would expect — people in Maine are from people in Moab, Utah are different from people in Trumbull County, Ohio. But no matter our differences, everywhere we share an adversary: a fossil fuel industry so focused on greed that they’re willing to rip apart the planet and its communities.

We’ve put up a slideshow with photos and reportbacks from Summer Heat events — it’s a small glimpse of the power and beauty shown across the country in the past few weeks. Click here to see it: 350.org/en/about/blogs/what-happens-when-climate-movement-decides-summer-isnt-hot-enough

Everywhere I went, people also shared a spirit: firm, joyful, unyielding. I particularly liked the banner that hung from the I-5 bridge over the Columbia River: “Coal, Oil, Gas: None Shall Pass.” It all has to stay under ground.

For a few weeks we took the hottest stretch of the summer and turned it politically hot as well. A lot of people felt the pinch of handcuffs — myself included — but they felt the embrace of the rest of the movement too. Everywhere people were embracing the power of the local climate justice movement, in all its forms.

If this was a movement of a few big organizations or a few leaders, then the industry wouldn’t need to worry so much. But instead there are thousands of local leaders, and hundreds of local organizations — and they’re linked together in new, exciting ways that spell trouble for the fossil fuel barons, and hope for a troubled earth.

So many thanks to everyone who raised the heat. Let’s keep going,

Bill McKibben

350.org is building a global movement to solve the climate crisis. Connect with us on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for email alerts. You can help power our work by getting involved locally, sharing your story, and donating.