From PBS.org’s Need to Know page, Brianna Lee writes:
. . . The students of New York University’s Studio 20, a journalism course that focuses on blending reporting with new media, collaborated with the investigative unit ProPublica to create a new kind of explainer to introduce the public to ProPublica’s three-year investigation on hydraulic fracturing – “fracking” – and the potential dangers it poses to communities’ drinking water supply.
ON JUNE 8, E&E TV HOSTED A DISCUSSION, MODERATED by reporter Monica Trauzzi, as part of a special report on the “shifting economics of coal.”
The participants were Steve Miller of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity; Bill McCollum of the Tennessee Valley Authority; Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo.; Reps. Colleen Hanabusa, D-Hawaii, Bill Johnson, R-Ohio, and Joe Barton, R-Texas; Jeff Holmstead of Bracewell & Giuliani; David Hawkins of the Natural Resources Defense Council; and Christine Tezak of Robert W. Baird & Co.
The remarks offered by Senator Barrasso and David Hawkins were of particular value and interest.
But what if the Wyoming Outdoor Council had been invited to participate?
What would we have said and how would we have tried to encourage people such as Mr. Barrasso to move to a position that better recognizes the need for a cleaner environment?
To answer those questions–and in an attempt to add to the larger conversation–we’ve asked Richard Garrett, the Wyoming Outdoor Council’s energy and legislative advocate to weigh in on the following transcript of the discussion and offer responses as though he had taken part in the discussion.
Here, then, is the transcript, with Richard’s remarks added in.
Click here for the original transcript.
Transcript courtesy E&E TV
As the United States’ most abundant source of energy, what role will coal play as the United States moves toward a clean energy future? Is coal still a stable investment for utilities? Can clean coal and coal-to-liquids save the industry? During E&ETV’s Special Report, “Debating the Future of Coal,” lawmakers and analysts discuss the shifting economics of coal.
Sen. John Barrasso: Coal continues to be the most available, affordable, reliable and secure source of energy we have in the United States and we have a lot of it. It’s going to continue to play a very, very important role in our energy mix.
Steve Miller: I view the future of coal-based electricity as one of limitless possibilities.
Bill McCollum: Coal is challenged today, there are more concerns about the environmental impacts of coal, particularly regulated emissions and the need to put environmental controls on our existing coal plants over the next several years if we’re going to continue to operate those.
Jeff Holmstead: Energy policy in the U.S. is determined almost entirely by EPA and the environmental community and we’ve seen over the last couple of years that there’s a real sense that at least the Obama administration doesn’t want any more coal.
David Hawkins: Coal is very dirty in many respects, starting from when it’s mined to how it’s used and how the ash is disposed of. So it’s a fuel that needs to clean up its act and why does it need to clean up its act as opposed to we should just stop using it? Well, coal is very abundant.
Richard Garrett: There is no question that coal is available and, because of shifted costs, seemingly cheap. A study by the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School has shown, however, that the burden of health care costs that result from the use of coal are substantial–Harvard estimates as much as $500 billion annually—but are largely unrecognized. If those costs were included in the delivery of electricity through the consumer’s electric meter we’d get a much clearer idea about the real cost of coal to our health, economy, and even to the environment.
Monica Trauzzi: With Washington debating the long-term prospects for coal, is it still a stable investment for utilities?
Jeff Holmstead: The uncertainty created, especially by the new permitting process for CO2, makes it very difficult to permit new plants. So a part of what EPA has done, which is the regulation of greenhouse gases under this permitting program, has created just a lot of uncertainty. It’s very hard to get people to invest really in anything, but coal in particular.
Richard Garrett: Some forward-looking executives at large utilities, including Ralph Izzo at PSEG, have recognized that climate change from greenhouse gas emissions has widespread implications for economic development and that there is a need to develop new technologies that are created by leveraging market mechanisms. He has also said that government should play a role in helping this along. In other words he is saying that climate change is real but that there are economic opportunities that can result from a reasonable mix of market forces and government regulation. Closer to home, an executive with the parent company of Rocky Mountain Power, Cathy Woolums of MidAmerican Energy Company, recently called on the state of Wyoming to begin to look at ways to permit greenhouse gas emissions. Underlying all of this is the fact that utilities are asking for predictable markets and regulations. Policy makers must play their part.
Bill McCollum: There are cost challenges in the electric generation business, just as there are in any business these days. But there are also opportunities to look at the energy mix that we have, the energy portfolio that we use in this country to generate electricity, and to make the right sort of economic choices going forward. The potential of having to put controls on all of the existing coal-fired generation or make decisions to retire some of those, certainly creates cost pressure. TVA will spend $3 to $5 billion on clean-air controls for our fleet going forward and for alternative generation. And so that’s an important factor to look at as we go forward and consider how to best manage our energy mix.
David Hawkins: Oh, there are very definitely financial risks, I think that’s why you see essentially no new coal plants being proposed today in the United States. Wall Street understands that’s a terribly bad bet financially and it will continue to be a bad bet as long as there’s policy uncertainty about what happens with global warming policy. Coal use is not going to disappear overnight. What’s going to happen is that the growth in coal use is going to stop and it’s going to start losing market share. That is not going to put the coal industry out of business, but it is going to mean fewer and fewer growth prospects for coal.
Steve Miller: But we’re seeing major utilities like American Electric Power, like Southern Company, rural electric cooperatives around the country who are still making and proceeding with their investments in clean coal technology and in new coal plants.
Monica Trauzzi: Can clean coal, CCS and coal to liquids save the industry?
Christine Tezak: Well, certainly clean coal is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t think to certain environmental organizations there is such a thing and I would say that there is definitely a constituency that believes that we really have missed an opportunity as a country to not more robustly pursue supercritical coal, which has much lower emission rates on conventional pollution like NOX and SO2, plus about 15 to 20 percent less carbon intensity.
Jeff Holmstead: I think people in the energy business would say, you know, when you achieve these very low emission rates because you have an ultra-supercritical boiler, so you minimize your CO2 emissions as much as possible, you have a scrubber, you have an FCR, you have a bag house or some combination of those controls, that that really is as clean as you can make coal today.
Christine Tezak: I think the biggest challenge for the coal sector is this perception that it’s a redeemably dirty.
Colleen Hanabusa: To me, if you call anything a clean coal it’s got to be something that has no negative adverse effects. It isn’t something that if you weigh a cost-benefit analysis on something that you say, well, it seems to me that the benefits may outweigh the costs, whatever that cost may be.
David Hawkins: We try very hard not to use the term clean coal, because it just doesn’t accurately describe any coal use anywhere in the world. There is no such thing as clean coal.
David Hawkins: Well, NRDC has been very active and proud to be active in fighting new coal plant proposals in the United States and we have worked for 40 years to clean up or shut down coal plants that are dirty, polluting coal plants in the United States. So the efforts to do one or the other, clean up or shut down, are far from symbolic. They are critical to delivering public health benefits to American people.
Christine Tezak: Even when we’ve brought substantially cleaner plants to market that are dramatically better than what we have in place, there’s a resistance to bringing a cleaner coal plant to market instead of a recognition that we’d be better off replacing an older plant.
Rep. Bill Johnson: We’ve got lots of coal in this country and one of the problems that we have is the administration’s reluctance to go after our own natural resources. I think we need to explore more coal liquefaction. If we can determine how to turn coal into refinery grade crude, we solve a lot of problems.
Sen. John Barrasso: We all want energy to be as clean as we can, as fast as we can. That’s why I’ve introduced some bipartisan legislation. There are advanced technologies. You know, Wyoming’s coal is low-sulfur coal, clean coal efforts to go with technology to go, you know, coal to gas, coal to liquid.
Richard Garrett: I’d have to challenge the senator on that–recently when he was asked, “What is clean coal?” he answered: “Wyoming coal” is clean coal. The fact is that coal is not clean–there are environmental challenges and disruptions all the way from the mine to the transmission line. While we are encouraged that Senator Barrasso is co-sponsoring legislation that would stimulate development of carbon capture and sequestration, we also see him working to roll back environmental protections that were signed into law by President Bush that were designed to reduce the military’s carbon footprint. So it seems like the Senator is taking one step forward and two steps back.
Steve Miller: We’re very interested in the legislation that’s being pushed by Senators Bingaman, Murkowski, Rockefeller, Barrasso on carbon capture and storage technologies and ways to advance that.
Jeff Holmstead: I don’t know anybody on the industry side who believes that renewables will be able to take up a big chunk of the slack for many, many years. So if we can get to seven, eight — I mean DOE has a very ambitious proposal that says we could get to 20 percent renewables. But that still leaves 80 percent that needs to be produced by something that’s more reliable like coal or gas or nuclear.
Richard Garrett: The president has said that as a nation we should strive to get 80 percent of our energy from clean sources by 2035. Secretary Chu has said those sources should include nuclear, renewables, natural gas, and even coal. While this sounds a lot like the “all-of-the-above” approach that others have advocated, there is one key difference. The president has said these sources must be clean—and so he is articulating a vision that doesn’t include business as usual for industries and resources that are damaging our environment. The president has committed some of our nation’s financial resources to advancing this goal and is trying to work with legislators to make it a reality. But one step forward and two steps back is not progress.
David Hawkins: Renewable energy is a tremendous opportunity and we can have renewable energy that is also firmed up with cleaner fuels like natural gas. And I think anyone who follows this issue realizes that a lot of existing coal plants are going to get replaced with natural gas plants and that will be a cleaner use of that electricity resource.
Steve Miller: We’re concerned as a coal centric organization about significant efforts to force or induce fuel switching to natural gas. Natural gas historically has been an extremely volatile fuel in terms of price and no one is certain right now whether the promise of shale gas will really prove to be one that can be relied on for any kind of significant fuel switching going forward.
Richard Garrett: Natural gas by many estimates is really not a lot cleaner than coal when the full life cycle of its extraction and use is calculated. In Wyoming, exploration for natural gas has created health risks that we never faced before, including potential contamination of groundwater from hydraulic fracturing. We’ve also seen hazardous levels of ozone as a result of gas field development. So while we recognize that natural gas has a role to play in our nation’s energy portfolio, we don’t see it as a magic bullet. In fact, if there is one (a magic bullet), it’s energy efficiency–research by McKinsey and Associates has suggested that the U.S. economy has the potential to reduce annual non-transportation energy consumption by 23 percent by 2020 which in turn eliminates over $1 trillion in waste. Not only that, but the reduction in energy use would also result in the abatement of 1.1 gigatons of greenhouse-gas emissions annually—the equivalent of taking the entire current U.S. fleet of passenger vehicles and light trucks off the roads.
Bill McCollum: Overall I think you’ll begin to see our electric generating mix shift a bit toward a lower percentage of coal, while it will still be significant, and a higher percentage of gas-fired generation, nuclear and some of these other sources.
Monica Trauzzi: The Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned power company, recently reached a settlement with U.S. EPA to shutter 18 of its poorest performing coal-fired power plants.
Rep. Bill Johnson: You know, 18 plants, those are a lot of plants. I can’t speak for TVA, but I can tell you that that’s not something that the coal industry is excited about.
Richard Garrett: Taking 18 of the dirtiest coal-fired power plants off-line is simply a recognition by the TVA that the economics of operating an out-of-date fleet built in the 1950s are no longer viable. These are many of the same plants that were exampled in the Harvard study that I mentioned earlier that pose real health risks to people living nearby to the tune of $27 billion annually. Not only that, but the plants were degrading air quality in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In Wyoming, we’ve seen similar air quality challenges from energy development that have damaged visual resources in the Wyoming Range, the Bridger-Teton National Forest, and Grand Teton National Park. The TVA has committed to a new integrated resource plan that offers a strategic direction focusing on a diverse mix of electricity generation sources, including nuclear power, renewable energy, natural gas, and energy efficiency, as well as traditional coal and hydroelectric power.
Bill McCollum: We set out a vision for the next 10 years which includes keeping our rights affordable, our reliability high and being very responsible in the way that we generate and deliver our electricity and that we also are shifting our portfolio to a different mix of sources which will be cleaner and more appropriate for the future.
Rep. Joe Barton: TVA is just kind of accepting the reality that some of the older coal plants, they’re not very efficient, need to be shut down.
Monica Trauzzi: As coal plants shut down, what impact do the closures have on the U.S. economy?
Richard Garrett: The U.S. economy has always been the most robust, innovative, and resilient in the world. With the right mix of market forces and policy we will see new job creation, reductions in health costs, and improved energy security that will prepare us for an even better future. While coal has been reliable–and can prove to be so again with the right kinds of technologies–it shouldn’t be our only answer. We will thrive through energy diversification just as we do as a result of environmental diversity. The fact is that while the TVA is shuttering plants, they are also committing to a mix of new technologies and energy sources that will surely contribute to this kind of diversity. Why should we, as a nation, put all of our eggs in one basket?
Sen. John Barrasso: With coal being the most available, affordable, reliable and secure source of energy we have in our country, anything we can do to continue to use coal in a responsible way I think is going to be better for our economy long-term.
Rep. Joe Barton: I think that America has got the world’s greatest economy because we’ve had a free-market energy policy and a cornerstone of that policy has been the use of coal and it’s a strategic asset and an economic asset and I think one that can continue to be used in a way that benefits the economic prosperity for every American.
Bill McCollum: Coal prices have spiked. They’ve come back down and moderated a bit now, but foreign demand for coal is much higher than it used to be and that has put pressure on market prices. So we’ve seen roughly a doubling in some of the coal prices and there doesn’t appear to be a let up in the foreign demand for coal. So I think the economics of coal have shifted somewhat from the way they were traditionally viewed decades ago.
Jeff Holmstead: If all we do is succeed in increasing the energy costs here, we’re not going to do anything to deal with climate change because the Chinese and the Indians and the Indonesians and around the world, they have not only I think a political imperative, but a moral imperative to provide power for billions of people. And until we can-until someone can help them provide that power in a way that doesn’t involve the combustion of coal, people will continue to use coal all over the world, regardless of how many coal-fired power plants Sierra Clubs manages to shut down in the United States.
Sen. John Barrasso: For me coal is freedom.
Richard Garrett: Coal is not freedom. If we continue to rely on coal, in the ways that we have for the last 100 years or more, we will continue to create more health, environmental, and economic problems. That is not freedom. We need to make coal a resource that no longer forces us to conform or adapt to its problems and instead commit ourselves, as President Obama has envisioned, to making it one part (an important one) of a diverse, safe, and clean energy portfolio.
Rick Dunn describes the historical geology and native habitat of the 15 Mile Basin during a group hike through the badlands earlier this month. The Wyoming Outdoor Council helped organize and lead the outing. Photo by Jamie Wolf.
By MARTIN KIDSTON Gazette Wyoming Bureau?
Story excerpt:
15 MILE BASIN, Wyo. — Rick Dunne placed his hand against the mudstone cap and explained the massive forces that shaped the landscape.
The thrust of tectonic plates, volcanic super eruptions and eons of deposition and erosion worked to bury, smooth and carve this wild place over millions of years.
[. . .]
Dunne, a Worland farmer with interests in geology and botany and a member of the Wyoming Crop Improvement Association, names the Wyoming big sage and the Gardner saltbrush. The bunch grass and Sandberg bluegrass help contribute to one of the healthiest native ranges he has seen in years.
“This is the best of the best,” Dunne says, sweeping a hand across the horizon. “It’s been a good year, and this is a good community. But I’m afraid we’re in the twilight of this native habitat.”
[. . .]
“It’s one of the last large, unleased areas of the basin, where we can go out and enjoy open spaces and wildlife,” said Jamie Wolf of the Wyoming Outdoor Council while addressing a group of 20 hikers early Saturday on National Trails Day.
“We should try and keep it the way it is. We want to maintain its value as an open landscape for recreation, for its historical and cultural resources, and its wildlife habitat.”
Read the full story here.
Sinclair Refinery in Sinclair, Wyoming. Photo by Scott Kane.
By JEREMY FUGLEBERG Star-Tribune energy reporter
The owner of an oil refinery near Rawlins with a raft of pollution problems in recent years has agreed to a multimillion-dollar settlement with state regulators regarding a 2010 incident that killed dozens of birds.
Sinclair Wyoming Refinery Co. will pay $850,000 for releasing oil into a wastewater evaporation pond at its refinery, the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality announced Monday.
Sinclair also agreed to spend $4.5 million on equipment upgrades and training.
Read the full story here.
Image courtesy of Gasland the movie. Click here to see the Gasland website.
By Steve Jones
ON MAY 9, A STUDY CONDUCTED BY FOUR SCIENTISTS FROM DUKE UNIVERSITY determined that natural gas, found in residents’ drinking water wells in New York and Pennsylvania, was probably coming from shale gas drilling operations located close to the contaminated wells.
This finding will come as no surprise to some residents in the Pavillion area of Wyoming, who have been suffering from methane gas and other toxic oddities showing up in their wells for the last 8 to 10 years.
Some of these residents, such as Louis Meeks, had clean, fresh water for decades until developers began fracking near the domestic wells. The correlation seems rather obvious.
But following the release of the Duke University study, industry representatives mounted a campaign to discredit its findings.
This campaign, it turns out, had a central and disquieting irony, as described in this excerpted report from ProPublica:
For years the natural gas drilling industry has decried the lack of data that could prove—or disprove—that drilling can cause drinking water contamination. Only baseline data, they said, could show without a doubt that water was clean before drilling began.
The absence of baseline data was one of the most serious criticisms leveled at a group of Duke researchers last week when they published the first peer-reviewed study linking drilling to methane contamination in water supplies.
That study—which found that methane concentrations in drinking water increased dramatically with proximity to gas wells—contained “no baseline information whatsoever,” wrote Chris Tucker, a spokesman for the industry group Energy in Depth, in a statement debunking the study.
Now it turns out that some of that data does exist. It just wasn’t available to the Duke researchers, or to the public.
Ever since high-profile water contamination cases were linked to drilling in Dimock, Pa. in late 2008, drilling companies themselves have been diligently collecting water samples from private wells before they drill, according to several industry consultants who have been working with the data.
While Pennsylvania regulations now suggest pre-testing water wells within 1,000 feet of a planned gas well, companies including Chesapeake Energy, Shell and Atlas have been compiling samples from a much larger radius—up to 4,000 feet from every well. The result is one of the largest collections of pre-drilling water samples in the country.
“The industry is sitting on hundreds of thousands of pre and post drilling data sets,” said Robert Jackson, one of the Duke scientists who authored the study, published May 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Jackson relied on 68 samples for his study. “I asked them for the data and they wouldn’t share it.”
Why would industry representatives criticize a study for not analyzing baseline information, when it is the industry that has that information but refuses to divulge it? Either the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, or they just simply hoped no one would notice the hypocritical inconsistency.
The Wyoming Outdoor Council has co-sponsored showings of the documentary Gasland in Laramie and Cheyenne (with more to come soon in Jackson, Bondurant, Cody, and Powell). The movie illustrates this problem in dramatic fashion, showing, for example, rural residents who can light their faucets on fire as a result of the methane gas in their home water supply systems.
One criticism of the movie—some industry promoters argued—was that there was no proof that the methane found in the water supplies was coming from the natural gas drilling that was going on nearby.
Another possible source, it was argued, could have been from the biogenic production of gas, such as that generated by manure or compost piles.
But this groundbreaking Duke study tested for such a possibility. It found that residents’ water wells with high concentrations of methane close to drilling activities had thermogenic gas—the type of gas recovered in natural gas drilling.
The proximity of the water wells to gas drilling operations, with these high levels of methane, was also, in the view of the researchers, a clear indication that the methane in the water wells was a consequence of the natural gas drilling operations.
The study noted three likely avenues for the contamination to reach the wells: (1) “. . . the substances could be displaced by the pressures underground,” (2) they “could travel through new fractures or connections to faults created by the hydraulic fracturing process,” or (3) they “could leak from the well casing itself somewhere closer to the surface.”
In a very basic sense, the act of hydraulic fracturing changes the situation underground. It creates new cracks and fissures so the gas can escape–which is, of course, the whole point.
But this study, and the experience of several families in Pavillion, seems to strongly suggest that the results are not as predictable or as controlled as industry spokespeople would like us to believe.
Another possible route for contamination that perhaps should have been mentioned in the study are abandoned drill holes and bore holes that can serve as conduits for contamination from deep in the ground, if such holes are not properly cemented and plugged.
Notably, the study did not test for the presence of hydraulic fracturing fluids used in the fracking process. Considering what the U.S. Department of Health’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry has documented in Pavillion—where the wells of 11 homes have been found to have chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing—this should be considered an oversight of the Duke study.
The researchers expressed some doubt about whether hydraulic fracturing chemicals were likely to be found in the water wells—even if they had been tested—since radium and other suspected indicators of hydraulic fracturing fluids were not found. But this, in my mind, is a rather poor assumption, since one of the obvious sources of hydraulic fracturing fluids in domestic water wells must be cracked or leaking well casings at or near the surface, which also would not carry radium or other “deep fluid” indicators.
In fact, one of the most likely scenarios for water contamination by fracking chemicals would be a spill or spills at or near the surface that would work their way into the groundwater.
It must be hoped that another ongoing fracking study, this one being conducted by the EPA, will fill this gap in knowledge. This study, which the agency initiated in 2010, will include the Laramie County area of Wyoming, where oil and gas production is just taking off on the Niobrara Shale play.
But considering the politics of this issue, it may not play out well. Just recently, Rep. Ralph Hall of Texas, who was holding hearings in his Science and Technology Committee, attacked the EPA and its fracking study, claiming, “objectivity is not EPA’s strong suit.” He also noted he was hearing complaints that the EPA’s fracking study was “far too broad.”
Let’s hope, for the sake of people’s health, that partisan politics doesn’t derail this important project.
Steve Jones, the Wyoming Outdoor Council’s watershed protection program attorney, can be contacted at steve@wyomingoutdoorcouncil.org or 307-332-7031 x12.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 1, 2011
Contact:
Bruce Pendery, Wyoming Outdoor Council, 435-752-2111; 435-760-6217
bruce@wyomingoutdoorcouncil.org
Administration is backing away from ‘wild lands’ policy
Photo by Jeff Vanuga
LANDER, Wyo. — The Obama administration is backing away from a plan to make a small percentage of undeveloped lands in the West eligible for protection of their wilderness qualities.
The Wyoming Outdoor Council is calling for the Obama administration to stand up to the energy lobby and instead go to bat for western hunters by protecting these lands.
“Frankly, we’d like to see president Obama show a little more determination here,” said Bruce Pendery of the Wyoming Outdoor Council. “The fact is Wyoming hunters would benefit from a new wild lands inventory on BLM lands in this state.”
Many Wyoming Outdoor Council members are hunters, Pendery said, and they — like nearly all Wyoming residents — would like to see a few places in Wyoming stay undeveloped.
The “wild lands” policy proposed by the Obama Administration, but now stymied by Congress, is one practical way this could have been accomplished.
“What happened was a few industry reps who believe companies should be able to drill every square inch of Wyoming got all worked up and they lobbied nonstop — and it appears some in Congress were more than ready to hear this pitch,” Pendery said.
But this energy industry position is not a mainstream one; and it’s not what Wyoming residents want, he said.
“We want a strong economy like we have — 2010 was our second biggest year in history in terms of mineral production,” he said. “And we also want to be able to hunt and fish. To take our kids camping on the weekend. And we hope some places in Wyoming can stay the way they are.”
There’s a small but vocal minority of lobbyists and politicians who always criticize land protection of any form, Pendery said. So it’s a shame that the Obama administration is backing away from the “wild lands” policy in response to these very predictable criticisms, he said.
“We’d rather hoped that president Obama would have recognized the benefits for hunters and for everybody who chooses to live in the West — and instead would have stuck to his guns and stood up to the energy lobby.”
###
Nighttime flaring on a gas field near Pinedale, Wyoming in 2009. Photo by Linda Baker.
By CAT URBIGKIT Star-Tribune correspondent
PINEDALE — Sublette County residents who say they suffered health problems from ground-level ozone pollution this winter are demanding more action be taken to combat the problem.
Isabel Rucker, a Pinedale businesswoman, facilitated a brainstorming session for about two dozen area residents earlier this week. The goal was to “get together and demand better from industry and our government.”
“We want clean air,” Rucker said, adding that such a position is not meant to be anti-energy development. Rucker said the group believes there should be a better balance between development and protecting human health.
Parts of Sublette County experienced elevated ozone levels on 13 days this winter, with the highest readings measured at monitoring stations in the Boulder area in the Pinedale Anticline natural gas field.
Read the full story here.
Image courtesy of Gasland the movie. Click here to see the Gasland website.
by Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica, May 17, 2011, 1:14 p.m.
For years the natural gas drilling industry has decried the lack of data that could prove—or disprove—that drilling can cause drinking water contamination. Only baseline data, they said, could show without a doubt that water was clean before drilling began.
The absence of baseline data was one of the most serious criticisms leveled at a group of Duke researchers last week when they published the first peer-reviewed study linking drilling to methane contamination in water supplies.
That study—which found that methane concentrations in drinking water increased dramatically with proximity to gas wells—contained “no baseline information whatsoever,” wrote Chris Tucker, a spokesman for the industry group Energy in Depth, in a statement debunking the study.
Now it turns out that some of that data does exist. It just wasn’t available to the Duke researchers, or to the public.
Ever since high-profile water contamination cases were linked to drilling in Dimock, Pa. in late 2008, drilling companies themselves have been diligently collecting water samples from private wells before they drill, according to several industry consultants who have been working with the data.
While Pennsylvania regulations now suggest pre-testing water wells within 1,000 feet of a planned gas well, companies including Chesapeake Energy, Shell and Atlas have been compiling samples from a much larger radius—up to 4,000 feet from every well. The result is one of the largest collections of pre-drilling water samples in the country.
“The industry is sitting on hundreds of thousands of pre and post drilling data sets,” said Robert Jackson, one of the Duke scientists who authored the study, published May 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Jackson relied on 68 samples for his study. “I asked them for the data and they wouldn’t share it.”
The water tests could help settle the contentious debate over the environmental risks of drilling, particularly the invasive part of the process called hydraulic fracturing [1], where millions of gallons of toxic chemicals and water are pumped underground to fracture rock.
Residents from Wyoming to Pennsylvania fear that the chemicals will seep into aquifers and pollute water supplies, and in some cases they complain it already has. But the lack of scientific research on the issue—including a dearth of baseline water samples—has hindered efforts by government and regulators to understand the risks.
The industry has two reasons to collect the data: To get to the bottom of water contamination problems, and to protect itself when people complain that drilling harmed their drinking water.
“Unless you have the baseline before the analysis you can argue until the sky turns green,” said Anthony Gorody, a geochemist who often works for the energy industry. “The only real way to address this without anybody bitching and moaning is by doing this before and after.”
Chesapeake Energy alone has tested thousands of private water supplies in the Marcellus Shale, and the company says its findings demonstrate that much of the water was contaminated before drilling began.
“Water quality testing. . . has shown numerous issues with local groundwater,” wrote the company’s spokesman, Jim Gipson, in an email to ProPublica. “One out of four water sources have detectable levels of methane present. . . and about one in four fail one or more EPA drinking water standards.”
Gipson declined to elaborate on the findings or share Chesapeake’s test results, making it difficult to verify whether the companies had, indeed, found the water was contaminated before drilling began. But he did note that Pennsylvania does not regulate water quality in private wells and that water sampling is typically not done by homeowners.
“This fact substantially explains why many of these pre-existing issues have not been previously identified or resolved by landowners,” he wrote.
It is also unclear whether Pennsylvania state environment officials—who declined to answer questions for this story—have been allowed to review the industry data or are using it when they investigate drilling accidents in the state.
That leaves open questions about who will see the water data, whether it has been verified by independent labs, and how it might be useful in the public debate. The Environmental Protection Agency’s study of hydraulic fracturing is due to be completed next year, and the Department of Energy recently appointed a review panel to assess the risks of drilling.
Energy in Depth’s Tucker and others expect the industry will eventually make its data public.
“There has been talk about releasing it and putting it in the public domain,” said Fred Baldassare, a former Pennsylvania environment official and expert on underground gas migration who now consults for the industry.
Baldassare said the drilling companies were concerned that releasing water test results could affect property values for residents and amounted to a violation of their privacy. “How do you identify these points while maintaining some confidentiality?”
Jackson said the data should be made available now to independent researchers and to agencies investigating the hydraulic fracturing process. But even without the data, he stands behind his study.
The Duke report said that the link between drilling activity and water degradation was clear, and said the contaminants could be migrating through manmade underground fractures, or, more likely, were coming from cracks in the well structure itself.
The researchers said the wells they analyzed had been hydraulically fractured, but that more study of that process was needed to understand whether fracturing might be causing the contamination. No indicators of fracturing fluids were found in the samples.
Jackson likened the questions about drilling risk to those about the link between smoking and lung cancer.
“In an ideal study you follow people through their lives. You take measurements on them in their lungs as they start smoking and as you grow old. That’s what you need to prove cause and effect,” he said. “But instead they asked: ‘If you smoke, did you get lung cancer?’ That doesn’t prove that smoking is the cause, but it’s a pretty good step.
“That’s all we did here. If you live near a gas well are you more likely to have methane contamination? That answer is yes. It’s not proof, but it’s a good first step.”
Read the original ProPublica story here.
Pristine to Polluted | More Wells, Fewer Emissions | Next Wave of Natural Gas
PINEDALE — State, federal and company officials admit they don’t fully understand how to restore air quality and avoid further exceedences of federal Clean Air Act standards in the once-pristine airshed of the Upper Green River Basin.
Yet the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has already begun analyzing proposals for major natural gas field expansions that will add up to 4,338 new wells in the area.
Despite significant reductions in the volume of emissions from the Pinedale Anticline and Jonah natural gas fields in recent years, the area remains prone to ozone spikes — a human health risk. Ozone spiked beyond federal thresholds 13 times this past winter, and triggered 10 state-issued alerts, warning people to remain indoors.
Ozone is best known as the main ingredient in urban smog, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Naturally-occurring ozone in the stratosphere helps protect the earth from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. But at ground level, and in high concentrations, ozone is harmful to human health, plants and wildlife.
The federal ozone standard that is not being met today in the Upper Green River Basin is set to become even more stringent this summer. The continuing ozone problem has triggered a process under the Clean Air Act to declare Sublette County a “non-attainment” area, a designation that strictly prohibits any further deterioration of air quality.
Yet industry asserts that the BLM has committed itself to issuing a Record of Decision on EnCana Oil & Gas USA’s 3,500-well “Normally Pressured Lance” project (known as NPL) by April 2014. If federal officials attempt to meet that timeline, it would mean the industry, the BLM and Wyoming regulators have just three years to figure out how to expand natural gas development while complying with air quality standards that are not being met at today’s higher ozone threshold and slower pace of development.
How can such a feat be accomplished?
“It is a big question, and the answers are equally big,” said EnCana spokesman Randy Teeuwen.
[. . .]
Others doubt Wyoming can adequately resolve multiple air quality issues while expanding natural gas development.
“Where I come from, if you have a problem you fix the problem before you move on down the road,” said Laramie resident Pete Gosar, who is among several Wyoming residents who have advocated a slower pace of development.
Gosar grew up in Pinedale and still has family there. He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for Wyoming governor in 2010, and campaigned on a pro-energy stance that included stringent protection of Wyoming’s other natural resources.
“This is not something to be played with. These are people’s lives,” Gosar continued. “It’s very sad to watch. In my lifetime — and I’m only 43 — we went from celebrating the cleanest air and water to, now, the worst air on occasion in America.”
Environmental groups such as the Wyoming Outdoor Council note that spiking ozone isn’t the only air quality problem in the area. Regional haze requirements are not being met, and deposition of sulfur and nitrogen compounds is increasing the acidity of some high mountain lakes, according to studies by the U.S. Forest Service.
Wyoming Outdoor Council officials insist that federal law prohibits the BLM — or the U.S. Forest Service and other federal agencies — from permitting new activities that would cause violations of Clean Air Act standards, and that agencies are obligated to regulate development of federal leases “as needed” to avoid such violations.
“What’s needed most is for people to have a holistic concept of what’s going on over there,” said Bruce Pendery of the Wyoming Outdoor Council. “It’s more than just air. The mule deer population crashed. There’s haze in the Class One areas, ozone exceedences. … Boy, we need to start doing some things differently.”
Read the full story here.
Pristine to Polluted | More Wells, Fewer Emissions | Next Wave of Natural Gas
PINEDALE — Natural gas operators in the Upper Green River Basin say they’ve been able to drill more wells with fewer emissions in recent years, and they can continue to maintain that trend by consolidating facilities and using advanced, emission-cutting technologies.
“Technology is key. We can make significant reductions with the right technology,” said Shell spokeswoman Darci Sinclair.
The three main operators in the Pinedale Anticline field are Shell, Ultra Petroleum and QEP Energy Co. To date, the companies have drilled 1,775 wells, and they plan to drill hundreds more in years to come.
EnCana Oil & Gas USA is the main operator of the Jonah field on the southern end of the Anticline, where it has drilled some 1,200 wells so far. EnCana spokesman Randy Teeuwen said the company will continue to drill about 150 wells per year for the next three years. Then, if approved, it will move its rigs to the proposed “Normally Pressured Lance” field (known as NPL), where the company wants to drill 3,500 new gas wells at a rate of 350 wells per year.
According to Teeuwen, the ability to achieve emissions in the NPL below even current levels in the Jonah field depends on the ability to make a seamless transition, moving drilling rigs from Jonah to the NPL field three years from now.
“Imagine, if you will, that the drilling in Jonah is complete and we don’t have a Record of Decision for the NPL. All of the workforce goes away, and the continued revenue stream for the state and county will start to decline,” said Teeuwen.
He added that without a seamless transition, the economics become less favorable for efficiencies in production and emission reductions.
Yet environmental groups and some local residents say they will very carefully scrutinize the industry’s claims of lowering emissions in upcoming planning documents.
“I think the BLM is going to have to do some serious air quality modeling to demonstrate this can be done, and provide some objective evidence,” said Bruce Pendery of the Wyoming Outdoor Council.
Pendery noted that even with recent emission reductions, the development is still contributing to spiking ozone, therefore the BLM is required to impose whatever restrictions necessary to meet federal standards under the Clean Air Act. And when it comes to analyzing plans to expand development, Pendery said the BLM must consider the cumulative impact to air quality in the region.
In addition to consolidating processing facilities, another major emission-cutting aspect of the proposed NPL project will be to “electrify” the field. Rather than rely on a combination of natural gas- and diesel-fired engines to operate compressors and other facilities, EnCana has asked Rocky Mountain Power to supply 20 megawatts of power to the NPL field.
Read the full story here.
Story courtesy of WyoFile. Read the original report here.
Pristine to Polluted | More Wells, Fewer Emissions | Next Wave of Natural Gas
It may seem counter-intuitive to propose some 21,000 new wells in Wyoming at time when natural gas prices are still depressed due to large new supplies in the southern and eastern United States. But producers are looking to the future, and Wyoming will remain a prime location for gas development for decades to come.
With the completion of the Wyoming-to-Oregon Ruby Pipeline this summer, Wyoming will — for at least a little while — have more export capacity than production. Ample export capacity makes Wyoming an attractive place to develop natural gas because producers don’t have to take discounted prices to get their gas into a pipeline. And some major producers can potentially play to whichever markets — east or west of Wyoming — are paying the best price.
Below is an overview of some of the major natural gas projects in preliminary stages of analysis at the Bureau of Land Management.
— Compiled by Dustin Bleizeffer
Proposed Wyoming energy development on U.S. Bureau of Land Management land. (click to enlarge)
Normally Pressured Lance Formation
LaBarge Platform Infill
Gun Barrel, Madden Deep, Iron Horse
Beaver Creek
Moxa Arch Infill
Hiawatha Project
Continental Divide-Creston (infill) Project
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