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Communities Pushing For Legal Rights To Regain Power Over Fracking Companies
Communities Pushing For Legal Rights To Regain Power Over Fracking Companies
A Colorado group with concerns about the environmental impacts of fracking are pushing for a fundamental change to the state’s legal system to give communities greater power over corporations.
Coloradans for Community Rights has set its sights on dismantling the legal system where state laws take precedence over local rules.
This system where local authorities must fall back on state law instead of forming their own makes it nearly impossible to raise minimum wages, set environmental protections, or even strengthen tenant rights and set rent controls.
In August, CCR launched a statewide initiative: The Colorado Community Rights Amendment. The group plans to gather the necessary 99,000 signatures necessary to place the community rights amendment on the 2016 ballot. In 2014, a similar initiative was proposed but not enough signatures were collected to qualify for the ballot.
By bringing together a broad coalition of environmental, economic and social justice fighters, the CCR is optimistic its model will be successful in bringing about political and legal change.
The moves come as the Colorado Supreme Court has agreed to adjudicate in battles between community groups and fracking companies.
In early October, CCR was at the Stop the Frack Attack national summit in Denver to raise awareness about its mission.
The community rights amendment would “allow real democracy to start to happen in the country,” said CCR Member Rick Casey.
Casey explained the amendment was crucial because it puts local policymakers and local communities in control over, as the amendment states, the “competing rights, powers, privileges, immunities, or duties of corporations.”
The Colorado ballot initiative is part of the fledgling national Community Rights Movement, which works off the legal model proposed by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.
Reuters reported that 18 communities in six states have been supported by CELDF in passing community rights law.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Fracking Fraud
Fracking Fraud
Photo by Jacques del Conte.
Hucksters for high volume hydraulic fracturing with horizontal drilling, the intensely industrial process by which x percent of natural gas and oil are mined in the United States today, loudly tout multiple benefits of the practice. Fracking reduces dependence on imports of crude oil. It generates jobs, profits and tax revenues. Fracked gas burns cleaner than coal, reducing smog and carbon pollution. Fracking leads to lower prices for gasoline and other petroleum products. It’s a variant of the last claim I examine here.
I live in Upstate New York, a place spared the direct ravages of hydrofracking by an especially vigorous years long opposition campaign that led Governor Andrew Cuomo to “ban” the process in 2014 (the next governor could reverse Cuomo’s decision). The state still suffers myriad indirect insults from fracking, including mile-long oil trains from the Bakken Shale, and a network of proposed pipelines, storage facilities and giant compressors to move fracked gas from Pennsylvania to New York and New England. Setting aside the grievous environmental damage of pipeline construction and the ‘round-the-clock threat of another Lac Megantic, New Yorkers were supposed to benefit from the lower costs of heating fuels promised by fracking supporters.
Northeasterners use a wide variety of fuels to ward off the winter chill: electricity, wood, corn, pellets, propane, kerosene, oil, natural gas, even coal. Natural gas is most common. Despite the promises, fracking has not prevented spikes in fuel costs. In recent years, several severe winters caused heating oil and electricity prices to skyrocket.
Given the flood of fracked gas from shale formations as close as the Marcellus, the price ought to have followed that of gasoline. Yet, while current wholesale natural gas prices are twenty-four percent lower than last year, Capital Region of New York customers of National Grid (the local utility) can expect a two percent drop in their bills.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
2 More Fracking-Related Earthquakes Hit Oklahoma Despite New Rules Meant to Prevent Them
2 More Fracking-Related Earthquakes Hit Oklahoma Despite New Rules Meant to Prevent Them
Two earthquakes registering at a 4.5 and a 4.4 magnitude shook frack-happy Oklahoma on Saturday, some of the strongest felt in the state this year. The stronger quake occurred just a few miles from the city of Cushing, which holds one of the largest crude oil storage facilities in the world.
The recent quakes struck only a handful of weeks after the Oklahoma Corporation Commission (OCC), the state’s public utilities commission, shut down several disposal wells around Cushing and issued new regulations meant to prevent more earthquakes in the area, according to Al Jazeera.
A local report said that the stronger 4.5 magnitude quake occurred around 5 p.m. Saturday evening and could be felt in the nearby cities of Stillwater, Guthrie, Sapulpa, Oklahoma City and other parts of the metro. There were multiple aftershocks in Cushing, recorded at 3.0, 3.2, 3.1, 2.8, 2.7 and 2.5.
Bob Noltensmeyer, Cushing Emergency Manager, told the Associated Press he had not received reports of significant damage in the area although there were “shattered nerves.”
“This one was pretty strong,” he added. “The whole house shook.”
A 4.4 was also recorded on Saturday at 4:20 a.m. about 18 miles southwest of Medford and about 100 miles northwest of Cushing.
America’s heartland used to register earthquakes from two a year to almost two a day. This year, roughly 700 earthquakes of magnitude 3 or higher has shook the state, compared to 20 throughout 2009, as the Associated Press pointed out.
The Sooner State’s seemingly never-ending earthquakes appear to be a man-made side effect of the country’s drilling boom. Scientists say that the injection of wastewater byproducts into deep underground disposal wells from fracking operations are very likely triggering the major increase of seismic activity in Oklahoma, which is not near any major fault lines.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A New Kind of Frackademia? New Environmental Inspectors Offered Free Industry-Funded Classes on Fracking
At an industry conference in Philadelphia last month, oil and gas executives gathered to hear about a little-known public relations effort with a very precise target: newly hired state and federal environmental inspectors.
At a seminar titled “Staying Ahead of Federal and State Regulations: A Partnership with Academia and Government,” officials from Pennsylvania State University and the University of Texas described how gifts from companies like ExxonMobil allowed their universities, along with the Colorado School of Mines, to offer state regulators free classes on oil industry best practices, travel and accommodations included.
“We’re targeting inspectors – oil and gas inspectors – who have three years or less of experience, although we do have lots of inspectors with different experiences on the course,” Dr. Hilary Olson, director of Education, Training and Outreach at the College of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas told attendees at Shale Insight 2015.
The program showcases the industry’s technical prowess as it conveys detailed information about the science involved in oil and gas drilling and fracking. “We don’t teach them about regulations specific to their state or talk to them about policy; what we’re interested in teaching them is the engineering, the science, the technology and how to communicate about that technology,” Dr. Olson explained.
The five-day TopCorp course includes both time in the classroom and visits to working oil and gas sites, taught by professors from many disciplines. Sample lesson footage reveals an online course featuring slick CGI graphics as professors lecture on topic ranging from basic principles of geology to complex technological advances that the industry has made in recent years.
All three universities involved have made national headlines in the past for their “frackademia” scandals.
In 2009, a Pennsylvania State University study, which claimed Pennsylvania alone could create 175,000 jobs by promoting fracking in the state, made headlines because the study’s lead author, Timothy Considine, had concealed the fact that the research was funded by the shale industry.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Tight Oil Reality Check
Tight Oil Reality Check
Much of the cost-benefit debate over fracking has come down to the perception of just how much domestic oil and gas it can produce and at what cost. To answer this question, policymakers, the media, and the general public have typically turned to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA), which every year publishes its Annual Energy Outlook (AEO).
In Drilling Deeper, PCI Fellow David Hughes took a hard look at the EIA’s AEO2014 and found that its projections for future production and prices suffered from a worrisome level of optimism.
Recently, the EIA released its Annual Energy Outlook 2015 and so we asked David Hughes to see how the EIA’s projections and assumptions have changed over the last year, and to assess the AEO2015 against both Drilling Deeperand up-to-date production data from key shale gas and tight oil plays.
In July 2015, Post Carbon Institute published Shale Gas Reality Check, which found that in 2015 the EIA is more optimistic than ever about the prospects for shale gas, despite substantive reasons for caution.
This month we turn our eyes to the EIA’s latest projections for tight oil.
Key Conclusions
- The EIA’s 2015 Annual Energy Outlook is even more optimistic about tight oil than the AEO2014, which we showed in Drilling Deeper suffered from a great deal of questionable optimism. The AEO2015 reference case projection of total tight oil production through 2040 has increased by 6.5 billion barrels, or 15%, compared to AEO2014.
- The EIA assumes West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil prices will remain low and not exceed $100/barrel until 2031.
- At the same time, the EIA assumes that overall U.S. oil production will experience a very gradual decline following a peak in 2020.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Exclusive: Battle Over Flaming Water and Fracking Reignites As Analysis Prompts Call for Renewed EPA Investigation
At the heart of the international controversy over fracking has been the contention that the oil and gas drilling technique can contaminate people’s drinking water, sometimes even causing it to light on fire. One poster child for this claim has been Steven Lipsky, a Texas homeowner who has appeared in a viral video with a garden hose spewing flames and says his water was fouled by fracking.
For years, Mr. Lipsky has fought legal battles — most often with federal EPAinvestigators finding his claims of contamination credible, while Texas regulators and the drilling company, Range Resources, taking the opposite view.
An analysis released this week, describing research by scientists at the University of Texas at Arlington, may open this case once again. It offers new evidence that the tests taken at Mr. Lipsky’s well water by Range Resources and Texas regulators, who reported little or no contamination, were flawed and potentially inaccurate.
In the videotaped presentation, Zacariah Hildenbrand, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Arlington, lays out a detailed case that the Lipsky family’s water carries high levels of contamination, including methane matching that found in the gas from two nearby Range Resources Barnett shale gas wells, and presents evidence that past test results reported by the Texas Railroad Commission and Range were not reliable.
Much of the research he describes in the video was conducted by a team from the University of Texas at Arlington, and Dr. Hildenbrand was later hired by Mr. Lipsky’s legal team to explain those findings on tape.
Dr. Hildenbrand’s research has broad implications not just because Mr. Lipsky has become something of an icon for the anti-fracking movement. The Lipsky case was also at the center of a jurisdictional showdown between Texas and the federal government, after the EPA stepped in and issued an emergency order over the water contamination, and then Texas pushed back and the EPA dropped its investigation.
Australian Aboriginals Fear Gas Fracker Aubrey McClendon’s Down Under Drilling Plans
Energy companies the world over would love to think they could be first in the queue at the next big global frontier for fossil fuel energy.
Aubrey McClendon was a key figure in creating the last big energy boom in his own backyard, using the controversial hydraulic fracturing technology to release gas from shale in the United States.
Now McClendon’s company American Energy Partners (AEP) thinks it has found that new global frontier in a vast and remote corner of Australia’s Northern Territory (NT).
AEP has made two major investments in the NT in recent weeks where drillers hope McClendon will kick-start another fracking boom. McClendon built his former company Chesapeake Energy from the ground up to become a major player in the United States shale gas fracking boom.
At one point, only ExxonMobil was producing more gas than Chesapeake.
But already McClendon’s hopes of recreating a US-style gas “fracking” boom in Australia are coming up against resistance from Aboriginal Australians — one of the oldest continuous cultural groups on the planet.
Land grab
Exploration licences cover many millions of acres of land in the NT and many of those are with a view to drilling for gas using hydraulic fracturing — a process where large amounts of water, sand and chemicals are pumped at pressure to create small cracks in the rocks to release the gas.
A key to McClendon’s success in the U.S. was in acquiring rights over huge land areas of prospective shale gas, a tactic he appears to be trying to mirror in Australia. Chesapeake Energy called this a “land grab” business strategy.
McClendon is also known for his financial risk taking, a trait that caused one analyst at business magazine Forbes to dub him “America’s most reckless billionaire
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How Fracking Changed the Economics of Oil Production Around the World
James Meadway, chief economist at the New Economics Foundation, explains the interrelated economics behind China’s ‘Black Monday’ stock market crash, Middle Eastern oil and US fracking.
The ‘fracking revolution’ has transformed the economics of oil production globally, with the US becoming a bigger producer than Saudi Arabia and – after decades of dependency on oil imports – even being able to export some of its surplus production.
US shale oil is unusual, too, in being privately owned: most of the world’s oil reserves (over 70 percent) are in state hands. Like the North Sea 30 years ago, in a world dominated by state-owned companies and publicly owned reserves, US shale could look like a new frontier for private operators on the search for fat profits.
New technology, high oil prices, and plentiful cheap credit have encouraged the boom. Some $200bn has been borrowed to invest in fracking in the last few years, accounting for 15 percent of the entire $1.3tr US junk bond market. Investors were, in effect, betting on continuing high oil prices making their investments profitable for years to come.
Price Slump
Last year’s slump in prices trashed that calculation. From a mid-year high of $115 per barrel, by the end of 2014 the price per barrel had fallen by more than 40 percent. More than half of US shale rigs have been laid up since October.
The driver, last year, was the behaviour of OPEC – the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. OPEC is a cartel agreement among major oil producers that seeks to manage the international market for oil. With oil prices already plunging over the summer, OPEC could be expected to ease off on production. Restricting supplies should, thanks to the magic of the market, produce a decent increase in the sale price of oil. Instead, with Saudi Arabia taking the lead, OPECdecided to continue production levels. No agreement on restricting output could be reached. Prices slumped.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
EU Ombudsman Investigating Industry-Dominated Fracking Expert Group
The European Ombudsman has opened a case into the European Commission’s industry-dominated Expert Group on the risky and dangerous practice of fracking for natural gas.
The Ombudsman, responsible for investigating complaints about maladministration in EU institutions and bodies, is looking into allegations that the Commission “wrongly allowed members associated with the shale gas industry to act as chairmen of the European Science and Technology Network on Unconventional Hydrocarbon Extraction.”
Despite massive public opposition to fracking, the Commission established the European Science and Technology Network on Unconventional Hydrocarbon Extraction last July with a mandate to recommend the most appropriate fracking techniques and technologies for Europe.
However, research by campaign groups Corporate Europe Observatory and Friends of the Earth Europe shows that of the network’s members who do not work for the Commission, more than 70% either represent or have direct financial links to the fracking industry, while all four chairs and co-chairs of working groups are fracking proponents and have even lobbied against tougher regulations.
Vested Interests
Putting such vested interests in charge of deeming which fracking techniques are most ‘appropriate’ for the EU is only going to serve the interests of a floundering industry, not the 500 million Europeans who will have to suffer the consequences.
The Ombudsman’s investigation, opened in August, follows a complaint by Corporate Europe Observatory and Friends of the Earth Europe, which calls on the Expert Group to follow the Commission rules for balance and conflict of interest.
However, the Commission denies the network is an Expert Group, despite its clear advisory role, and dismisses any worry with regards to balance. If the groups is not formally recognised as an Expert Group and made to conform to the existing rules, then both organisations have called for it to be scrapped.
Climate Talks
The Ombudsman has given the Commission until the 30th November to respond, the same day that this year’s UN climate talks are set to begin in Paris.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Fracking triggered 2014 earthquake in northeastern B.C.
Quake one of world’s largest ever triggered by hydraulic fracturing
Fracking triggered a 4.4-magnitude earthquake in northeastern B.C. last year, CBC News has learned, making it one of world’s largest earthquakes ever triggered by the controversial process.
B.C.’s Oil and Gas Commission confirmed the cause of the earthquake in an email statement to CBC this week, saying it was “triggered by fluid injection during hydraulic fracturing.”
The 4.4-magnitude quake was felt in Fort St. John and Fort Nelson in August 2014. It was preceded by a 3.8-magnitude earthquake in late July, also caused by fracking.
B.C.’s Oil and Gas Commission told CBC that several companies were doing hydraulic fracturing in the area at the time, and several more were disposing of fracking waste.
But the commission says it was Progress Energy’s operations that were “associated with triggering this event.”
Hydraulic fracturing, often called fracking, is the process of injecting water, sand and chemicals at high pressure deep underground to break rock and free gas.
Since the 2014 earthquake, Progress Energy has been ordered to reduce the volume of fracking fluid being used, and the company has complied, according to the commission.
As well, new seismic equipment has been set up in the area. No new earthquakes have been detected in the immediate area.
Sign of things to come?
Progress Energy is owned by Petronas of Malaysia, which also owns Pacific NorthWest LNG, the firm planning to build a giant liquefied natural gas export facility near Prince Rupert, B.C. supplied by gas fracked in northeastern B.C.
Matt Horn, with clean energy advocate the Pembina Institute, calls the significant earthquake “another warning sign for what could be down the road.
“If B.C. goes down the LNG road in a big way, it’s really important when we’re debating LNG proposals, we’re eyes wide open…. to both the benefits and impacts. Increased earthquakes is one of those impacts.”
B.C.’s Oil and Gas Commission declined a taped interview, providing only background information by email.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Real Long Term Threat To The Oil & Gas Industry
The Real Long Term Threat To The Oil & Gas Industry
As oil prices continue their downward slide, most investors and firms are understandably eyeing prices, revenues, and exploration costs nervously. All that makes sense, as there is a good chance some oil firms will face liquidity crunches and restructuring over the next year. In the longer term though, there is another specter that could be equally damaging to O&G firms – a shortage of skilled labor.
During the 2008 Recession, many manufacturing firms cut way back on labor and costs everywhere they could, as demand plummeted and customers started asking for lower prices. Fast forward a few years though, and demand has returned. What has not returned are many of the skilled laborers that were instrumental to the manufacturing industry’s success. Many of the industry’s best workers moved on to other fields or retired in the intervening years since the Recession. As a result, manufactures complain frequently about a lack of available skilled labor. The same thing could happen in the O&G industry.
Related: UK Determined To Realize Its Fracking Dreams
Oil and gas executives already lament the lack of proper training being done by colleges and universities for entry level employees. The exodus from the industry is only going to exacerbate that problem. Every field in the O&G space from geologists on down, is seeing layoffs and cut-backs. In the short term, these actions might be unavoidable. But if the downturn continues for more than a year or so, many of these workers may move on to new fields. If that happens, the industry could find that those workers are lost for good.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Another Industry Reported Quake in BC’s Fracking Grounds
Another Industry Reported Quake in BC’s Fracking Grounds
Regulator says tremor likely industry-caused, but company says it’s too soon to say.
Progress Energy, an arm of the Malaysian oil company Petronas, temporarily shut down operations at a wellsite after a 4.5 magnitude earthquake hit an area 114 kilometres northwest of Fort St. John on Aug. 17.
B.C.’s oil and gas regulator said the earthquake was likely caused by hydraulic fracturing but “has yet to determine the cause of the event.” Progress Energy reported the tremor on Monday. No damages were reported to the regulator.
“The Commission is working to obtain a reasonable event depth from local seismic-monitoring data and is collecting more information about the event as part of its investigation,” B.C. Oil and Gas Commission spokesman Allan Clay told The Tyee.
David Sterna, Progress Energy’s director of external affairs, said the company has since resumed operations with approval from the regulator, and that “despite certain media speculation, it is too early to determine whether Monday’s seismic activity was a natural occurrence or related to hydraulic fracturing activities.”
The epicentre of the earthquake occurred three kilometers from a site where Progress Energy was conducting a multi-stage frack into the Montney Shale, a large swath of land stretching across northeast B.C. into northwest Alberta.
In B.C., any fracking operation that measures a magnitude 4.0 tremor or greater within a three kilometre radius of the drilling pad must report the event to the regulator and suspend operations. Alberta operates a similar “traffic light” system for earthquakes in the Duvernay Shale around Fox Creek, Alberta.
That region, which has experienced industry-made quakes for two years, saw a 2.6 tremor in early August.
The shale gas industry injects fluids and sand at high pressure into deep and shallow wells to crack open difficult oil and gas deposits. The injections create a network of cracks that can also connect to water zones, other industry wellsites and faults.
The reactivation of these faults can then trigger an earthquake, sometimes days after the fracture treatment, scientists say.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Radioactivity Found in Pennsylvania Creek, Illegal Fracking Waste Dumping Suspected
Recently released testing results in western Pennsylvania, upstream from Pittsburgh, reveal evidence of radioactive contamination in water flowing from an abandoned mine. Experts say that the radioactive materials may have come from illegal dumping of shale fracking wastewater.
Regulators had previously found radioactivity levels that exceeded EPA‘s drinking water standards over 60-fold in waters in the same area, which is roughly 3 miles upstream from a drinking water intake, but those test results were only made public after a local environmental group obtained them through open records requests.
At the end of July, the West Virginia Water Research Institute released the results from its tests of water flowing from an abandoned coal mine.
Most of the sampling results showed no detectable radioactivity, but one test result showed roughly 13 picocuries per liter (pci/l) of gross alpha radioactivity, just below EPA‘s drinking water limits, confirming the presence of radioactive materials in the mine’s discharge.
“There’s something going on there that’s not right,” Paul Ziemkiewicz, director of the West Virginia Water Research Institutetold the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “The radiation, together with higher bromide levels than you would expect to see coming out of a deep mine, point to drilling wastewater.”
In April 2014, under pressure from local environmental groups, the state Department of Environmental Protection had taken samples from same mine, the Clyde Mine in Washington County, PA, as it discharged into 10 Mile Creek, a popular destination for boaters and fishermen.
Those tests showed one sample with radioactive materials (specifically radium 226 and radium 228) totaling 327 pci/l at and a second totaling 301 pci/l — in other words, up to 65 times the radium levels that the EPA considers safe in drinking water.
Some had speculated that the 2014 test results could simply have been flukes or false positives, a claim that seems less likely now that the subsequent round of testing by independent researchers also showed the presence of radioactivity.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Junk-Rated Offshore Drillers Headed into Bankruptcy: Fitch
Junk-Rated Offshore Drillers Headed into Bankruptcy: Fitch
After fracking, offshore drilling.
At the leading edge is rig-contractor Hercules Offshore. In March 2014, before the oil price collapsed, it had the temerity to sell for 100 cents on the dollar $300 million in junk bonds. Since then, its shares have collapsed to near zero. Its bonds have collapsed too. And on Thursday last week, it and a whole gaggle of related companies filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
It won’t be the only junk-rated offshore driller with that fate, according to Fitch Ratings.Investors are going to get their pockets cleaned.
“This is the lowest level of demand we have seen since the early days of the offshore industry,” Hercules CEO John Rynd had told investors in a quarterly conference call on April 29. Hercules had already cut its global workforce – about 1,800 employees at the end of 2014 – by nearly 40%, he said.
Offshore drillers have been buffeted from two directions: the collapse of drilling activity and the collapse in the daily rates they can charge for their offshore drilling rigs. So fewer rigs, and less money for each of the fewer rigs: Hercules’ revenues in the second quarter plunged 67% from a year ago!
And junk-rated companies like Hercules that need new money to stay afloat and service their debts are finding out that their burned investors have shut off the spigot.
“A leading indicator of further bankruptcies among other challenged high yield (HY) offshore drillers,” is what Fitch Ratings calls Hercules.
True Believers
True Believers
There is a special species of idiot at large in the financial media space who believe absolutely in the desperate and tragic public relations bullshit that this society churns out to convince itself that the techno-industrial high life can continue indefinitely, despite the mandates of reality — in particular, the fairy tales about oil: we’re cruising to energy independence… the shale oil “miracle” will keep us driving to WalMart forever… our wells doth overflow as if this were Saudi America… don’t worry, be happy…!
Such a true believer is John Mauldin, the investment hustler and writer of the newsletterThoughts From the Frontline, who called me out for obloquy in his latest edition. After dissing me, he said:
“I have written for years that Peak Oil is nonsense. Longtime readers know that I’m a believer in ever-accelerating technological transformation, but I have to admit I did not see the exponential transformation of the drilling business as it is currently unfolding. The changes are truly breathtaking and have gone largely unnoticed.”
Mauldin is going to be very disappointed when he discovers that the vaunted efficiencies in shale drilling and fracking he’s hyping will only accelerate the depletion of wells which, at best, produce a few hundred barrels of oil a day, and only for the first year, after which they deplete by at least half that rate, and after four years are little better than “stripper” wells. The PR shills at Cambridge Energy Research (Dan Yergin’s propaganda mill for the oil industry) must have pumped a five-gallon jug of Kool-Aid down poor John’s craw. He believes every whopper they spin out — e.g. that “Right now, some US shale operators can break even at $10/barrel.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
