The week that was: Fracking special
Posted on | June 28, 2010 | 3 Comments
To read about how advances in hydraulic fracturing technology led geologists and energy companies to believe that a previously uneconomic source of natural gas might be tapped in the Marcellus Shale and Appalachian Basin, click on the map to be taken to an overview from Geology.com
Josh Fox’s documentary “GasLand,” broadcast last Monday on HBO, planted the suggestion that as former Vice President Dick Cheney was waging his “war on terror” in the wake of 9/11, his energy task force set America on a path capable of poisoning the drinking water supply of New York City, along with that of Pennsylvania, Delaware, parts of Ohio and West Virginia.
In May 2001, the report of the National Energy Policy Development Group gathered by former Halliburton CEO and then Vice President Dick Cheney concluded, "Most new gas wells drilled in the United States will require hydraulic fracturing." Click on the blue highlighted recommendation to be taken to the report.
Were the charge directed at almost anyone else, one would have to dismiss it out of hand, but Mr Cheney’s track record begs the question: How bad is it? I decided to check for myself and spent a week on ProQuest, a database available to just about anyone with a library card and access to a computer. The result is this cross-section of articles, announcements and reports on the gas extraction technology known as hydraulic fracturing, “fracing” or “fracking.”
The links after the jump offer but a snapshot of the gas drilling boom that Mr Cheney surely helped to migrate from Texas throughout the Intermountain West, West, Southwest and South into the Northeast. Many of the cited articles come from the Tulsa-based publication Oil & Gas Journal, which captured an angle missed by every other organ — that being how hotly the gas industry was concerned with keeping natural pollutants out of its fracking water just as the public began panicking about fracking chemicals in its drinking water.
Some ProQuest searches turned up only page after page of patent application notices for fracturing chemical recipes, a wildly lucrative area to judge by a $98m lawsuit brought in a Texas case involving Halliburton.
Honing in on the Northeastern boom, Pennsylvania State University is so deeply involved with the gas industry that it’s hard to know where one stops and the other begins. If there is a father of the rush into the Marcellus Shale, it is probably Penn State geologist Terry Engelder. His home page carries a 2008 UPI report valuing his scientific contribution to “U.S. energy resources by a trillion dollars, plus or minus billions.”
Water takes a back seat in this world of decimals and dollar signs. This 2009 PSU extension sheet on water needs of hydrofracking quotes “regulators” estimating that gas operations in the Marcellus Shale will be “roughly 10 billion gallons per year.” This is unconvincing. The state’s Department of Environmental Protection reports 3,917 wells permitted since 2005. Those alone could account for nearly 12bn gallons of water and nearly 60m gallons of fracking chemicals already in the system over the last five years, provided that the gas wells have only been fracked once. Given that the whole point of the process is that regular re-fracking can keep recalcitrant wells productive, and new wells are being permitted all the time, the 10bn gallons a year estimate looks meaningless, trashy even. This much the industry will tell us about what’s in those tens, probably hundreds, of millions of gallons of fracking chemicals: In 2004, it agreed to stop fracking with diesel. (February 16, 2011 update: A January, 2011 congressional investigation reveals that this didn’t happen, and that between 2004 and 2009, frackers used more than 32m gallons of diesel, half in Texas, also roughly three million gallons respectively in Louisiana, Oklahoma, North Dakota and Wyoming and more than a million in Colorado.)
Depressingly, the coverage of fracking and America’s natural gas boom was most remarkable for the absence of discussion about the role that conservation might play as the US searches for energy sources to bridge the transition from fossil fuels to something less punishing for the planet. This made me wonder if in Mr Cheney we might not have had the Vice President we deserved.
The week spent on ProQuest reading about fracking also convinced me that whoever is editing the Wikipedia entry is seriously on the ball.
For more on an Obama administration Environmental Protection Agency review on hydraulic fracturing, click here. To follow progress on the Frac Act now before Congress designed to undo the infamous “Halliburton clause” of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and to require oil and gas companies to disclose the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing operations, click here.
Click here for more on hydraulic fracturing
Tags: chance of rain > Emily Green > fracing > Fracking > hydraulic fracturing
The Dry Garden: Coyote mint
Posted on | June 25, 2010 | No Comments
Paradise is at once so attainable and so far away.
This column was going to be about how the most immediate and affordable thing that Southern California homeowners could do to reduce our collective dependency on fossil fuel would be to rip out lawn. But events in the Gulf of Mexico are too crazy-making to be sure that it wouldn’t be the garden-writing equivalent of picking a fight at the dinner table. So this column is about coyote mint. Click here to keep reading The Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times.
From press release to pocketbook
Posted on | June 24, 2010 | No Comments
Click on the image to be taken to NASDAQ.com
Cadiz, Inc today announced that the Santa Margarita Water District and Three Valleys Municipal Water District have agreed to stand as lead agencies in a review under the California Environmental Quality Act to evaluate the risks of reviving a previously discredited plan to mine Mojave Desert groundwater to serve the Southern Californian urban conurbation.
The share price responded with a jump of more than 14 per cent before declining.
No water has been produced by this 12-year-old scheme, however for the last year skillfully deployed press releases have made Cadiz a volatile and occasionally lucrative stock. It would take a SEC investigation to see if a run on the shares last year involving a privately secured endorsement from the Governor of California amounted to insider trading by directors at the expense of stockholders.
Today’s news about two Southern California water companies taking the lead in a state environmental review for the project comes on the tail of assurance by Cadiz to its shareholders in April 2009 that the review was already underway. By June 2009, Cadiz had backtracked, telling its shareholders, “the environmental review process is expected to begin shortly following the submittal of the Project description.”
If Cadiz has been stalling real review, it might be because of the abysmal grading its scheme to extract water from the desert received when the US Department of Interior performed an environmental review of the old (almost identical*) project a decade ago. After it was published, risks were seen as so high and rewards so marginal that the then sponsor, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, withdrew from the project.
This latest move involving two small water agencies is part of an ongoing attempt by Cadiz to get around Metropolitan’s veto by individually courting smaller agencies in Met’s service area. However, it would be naive to assume that any water will ultimately flow to the region because of the project. From the standpoint of Cadiz directors, it scarcely matters. As today’s share price jump indicates, with little more than some influential friends, well-timed press releases and even a discredited plan, it’s perfectly possible to bilk the market without actually producing a drop. Meanwhile, the rate-payers of Santa Margarita and Three Valleys are now where MWD was a decade ago: in line to foot high bills for an environmental review against compelling evidence that the project will still flunk.
UPDATE: Eric Spillman at KTLA blogs that Cadiz CEO Keith Brackpool was a likely companion on the trip of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to last year’s climate conference in Copenhagen. Via LA Observed. Villaraigosa worked for Cadiz and Brackpool before becoming Mayor of Los Angeles and the two have a long history traveling together, including jaunts to China and Iceland. Recently, Cadiz has used company attorney Scott Slater as spokesman, keeping the jet setting political fixer Brackpool behind the scenes.
June 28: The Los Angeles Business Journal reports that Golden State Water will be among the local water agencies involved in the CEQA process. Golden State has been involved with Cadiz for a year, but a press release maybe worth a bump on the market.
*To judge from publicity materials released by Cadiz, a key difference between the two plans is that the new iteration calls for pumping of the deep set waters of the carbonate aquifer rather than the alluvial fan of the target basin. Drawing water from the carbonate aquifer would make the pumping impacts almost impossible to monitor and therefore potentially far more destructive.
This post has been updated.
‘Erin Brockovich’ writ large
Posted on | June 21, 2010 | 2 Comments
Josh Fox standing in a stream that passes by his home in Pennsylvania. Source: HBO. After fracking began in Dimock, Pa., local livestock that drank water near gas mines began losing their hair. Fox took up the subject in the documentary 'Gasland' after his family was offered nearly $100,000 by a company for drilling rights on their land. From the Philadelphia Inquirer. Click here to read its review of 'Gasland.'
For Westerners, the connection between gas and water usually centers on Chromium VI, the chemical once used as a coolant by PG&E gas compressor plants and subsequently the Mojave Desert groundwater pollutant made famous by “Erin Brockovich.”
Yet a far greater, clear and present threat exists to a shared watershed extending from New York to West Virginia and throughout gas fields of the midwest and Texas. That is “hydrofracking,” the process in which chemically laced water is used to fracture rock for gas extraction.
Gas companies decline to state what chemicals they use, citing commercial sensitivity. “The casing design and cementing of wells are orders of magnitude more important than knowing what’s in the secret sauce at fracturing companies,” Charles Stanley, chief operating officer of the natural gas mining exploration group Questar Corp told the Houston Chronicle last December.
For the industry's view of events from the Global Petroleum Forum, and how "fracking" was imported from Texas to deal with Northeastern rock, click here.
Moves to force them to treat fracking water before returning it to streams and groundwater have been unevenly applied. To see the havoc that fracking waste water is wreaking throughout the Marcellus Shale (left), watch Josh Fox’s 2010 Sundance Film Festival award-winning documentary “Gasland” on HBO tonight at 9pm. Also look for him to be interviewed by Jon Stewart. Via WaterWired.
Note: Fracking is a frequent subject of weekly news round-ups on this site. For a range of links on reports on hydrofracking in Texas, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York, go to the search box of this website and enter ‘fracking’ and ‘frack.’
The week that was, 6/13-19/2010
Posted on | June 19, 2010 | 1 Comment
'Tanker Traffic' by Kathryn Altus, 2010. Water based oil on canvas, 36" x 24" and part of the "Some seas" exhibit at the Lisa Harris Gallery in Seattle. Click on the image to be taken to the gallery.
'Tanker Traffic 2' by Kathryn Altus, 2005. Oil on canvas, 24 x 20" oil on canvas. Click on the image to be taken to the artist's website.
Approximately 40 percent of the coastal wetlands of the lower 48 states is located in Louisiana. — “Watermarks,” LaCoast / USGS*
Oil has been observed on approximately 503 total miles of U.S. coastline. –– Florida update, Gov Monitor, June 19, 2010
“… simply protecting the shore and the nesting habitat is not protecting the birds that forage out over the water.” — Melanie Driscoll, director of bird conservation for the National Audubon Society’s Louisiana Coastal Initiative, Yale Environment 360, June 15, 2010
Sea turtle specialist Peter Lutz. Click here for his obituary in The Journal of Experimental Biology.
Three of [the top five oil companies BP, Exxon, Conoco Phillips, Chevron and Shell] listed the phone number for the same University of Miami marine science expert, Peter Lutz, who died in 2005. — “Lawmakers attack plans oil companies had in place to deal with a spill,” The Washington Post, June 16, 2010
Thinking about your Florida beach vacation and about what’s happening in the Gulf? Here’s what you need to know. Florida has 825 miles of beaches, 1,260 miles of coast line. There are plenty places in Florida where you can enjoy crystal clear waters and a great beach vacation. See for yourself in real time at FloridaLife – webcams, daily video, beach updates and real photos to help you find your own Florida beach! Get the Facts. Go to FloridaLife and visit Florida.com. — “Visit Florida launches new ad in oil spill marketing response campaign,” VisitFlorida — pitchengine.com, June 16, 2010
If oil seeps deeply enough into the marsh, it will not only kill the grass above ground but also the roots. Those roots are what hold the marsh together, keeping bright green land from collapsing into the Mississippi River delta and the Gulf of Mexico. — Naomi Klein, “Gulf Oil Spill: A hole in the world,” London Guardian, June 19, 2010
Slick as of June 19, 2010. Source: NASA. Click on the image to be taken to the Earth Observatory.
Sperm whales live in deep water where there are layers of subsurface dispersants and oil, and they feed on squid, which also could be contaminated by the oil and chemical dispersants. — “NOAA finds dead whale south of spill,” McClatchy, June 18, 2010
“Bob” finished fourth in its group. — “BP CEO’s yacht outing infuriates Gulf residents,” Associated Press, June 19, 2010
“I don’t think BP’s accident will be driving anyone away from China deep water.” — Consultant Changlin Wu, “China to step up exploring in deep water,” Financial Times, June 18, 2010
It’s as if the Earth has been smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.” — Australian marine scientist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, “Ocean choking on CO2,” Scientific American / Reuters, June 12, 2010, via Aquafornia
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