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Study Fills in Missing Data on Homes, Schools, Habitats at Risk from Shell’s Falcon Pipeline

January 30, 2018

Study Fills in Missing Data on Homes, Schools, Habitats at Risk from Shell’s Falcon Pipeline

Aerial view of the future site of the Shell ethane cracker plant in Beaver County, Pennsylvania

At the end of 2017, Shell ran slightly afoul of Pennsylvania state regulators after filing a pipeline permit application to the state and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that failed to show sensitive environmental areas in the path of its proposed Falcon ethane pipeline. Now, a concerned nonprofit has pieced together the details Shell should have included (and more), revealing hundreds of homes, schools, streams, and wetlands in the path of the fracking products pipeline.

The 97-mile Falcon Ethane project will carry more than 107,000 barrels a day of a flammable plastics precursor to a small town in Pennsylvania where Shell is building an ethane “cracker” facility. In a region poised to be transformed by petrochemical development, this huge plastics plant will superheat the ethane and “crack” it as it manufactures over a million tons per year of tiny plastic beads of ethylene or polyethylene.

Shell’s pipeline plan lacked maps that would show area creeks, rivers, waterways, and other sensitive areas like wildlife sanctuaries and preserved lands, the state Department of Environmental Protection said after it issued “incompleteness letters” to the plant in October, a local newspaper, The Times Online, reported.

Areas at Risk From Falcon Pipeline

Now, in a rare detailed look at this early stage of pipeline planning, the FracTracker Alliance, a nonprofit focused on “the risks of oil and gas development,” has published a Falcon Public Environmental Impact Assessment Project, detailing the impacts and risks the Falcon pipeline will bring to Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

New NASA Study Solves Climate Mystery, Confirms Methane Spike Tied to Oil and Gas

January 17, 2018

New NASA Study Solves Climate Mystery, Confirms Methane Spike Tied to Oil and Gas

Global map of percent changes in acres burning

Over the past few years, natural gas has become the primary fuel that America uses to generate electricity, displacing the long-time king of fossil fuels, coal. In 2019, more than a third of America’s electrical supply will come from natural gas, with coal falling to a second-ranked 28 percent, the Energy Information Administration predicted this month, marking the growing ascendency of gas in the American power market.

But new peer-reviewed research adds to the growing evidence that the shift from coal to gas isn’t necessarily good news for the climate.

A team led by scientists at NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed that the oil and gas industry is responsible for the largest share of the world’s rising methane emissions, which are a major factor in climate change — and in the process the researchers resolved one of the mysteries that has plagued climate scientists over the past several years.

Missing Methane

That mystery? Since 2006, methane emissions have been rising by about 25 teragrams (a unit of weight so large that NASAnotes you’d need over 200,000 elephants to equal one teragram) every year. But when different researchers sought to pinpoint the sources of that methane, they ran into a problem.

If you added the growing amounts of methane pollution from oil and gas to the rising amount of methane measured from other sources, like microbes in wetlands and marshes, the totals came out too high — exceeding the levels actually measured in the atmosphere. The numbers didn’t add up.

It turns out, there was a third factor at play, one whose role was underestimated, NASA‘s new paper concludes, after reviewing satellite data, ground-level measurements, and chemical analyses of the emissions from different sources.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How a Judge Scrapped Pennsylvania Families’ $4.24M Water Pollution Verdict in Gas Drilling Lawsuit

April 14, 2017

How a Judge Scrapped Pennsylvania Families’ $4.24M Water Pollution Verdict in Gas Drilling Lawsuit

Ely family

For many residents of Carter Road in Dimock, Pennsylvania, it’s been nearly a decade since their lives were turned upside down by the arrival of Cabot Oil and Gas, a company whose Marcellus Shale hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) wells were plagued by a series of spills and other problems linked to the area’s contamination of drinking water supplies.

With a new federal court ruling handed down late last Friday, a judge unwound a unanimous eight-person jury which had ordered Cabot to pay a total of $4.24 millionover the contamination of two of those families’ drinking water wells. In a 58 page ruling, Magistrate Judge Martin C. Carlson discarded the jury’s verdict in Ely v. Cabot and ordered a new trial, extending the legal battle over one of the highest-profile and longest-running fracking-related water contamination cases in the country.

In his order, Judge Carlson chastised the plaintiff’s lawyers for “repeatedly inviting the jury to engage in unwarranted speculation” and wrote that, in his personal estimation, the plaintiffs had not presented enough evidence to warrant the jury’s $4.24 million in damages. The original complaint for the case was filed in November 2009.

Nonetheless, Judge Carlson declined to throw out the lawsuit entirely, ordering Cabot to re-start settlement talks with the Ely and Hubert families. If those talks fail, the trial process will begin anew, extending the already years-long legal battle into months or even years to come.

“The judge heard the same case that the jury heard and the jury was unanimous,” Nolan Scott Ely, the lead plaintiff in the case, said in a statement. “How can he take it upon himself to set aside their verdict? It’s outrageous.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

New Report by Top Senators Details Financial Ties Between Fossil Fuel Industry and Clean Power Plan Opponents

October 1, 2016

New Report by Top Senators Details Financial Ties Between Fossil Fuel Industry and Clean Power Plan Opponents

Rolls of hundred dollar bills.

The stakes are high not only for the environment, but for fossil fuel companies — and those companies have poured enormous sums of money into efforts that would help ensure the Clean Power Plan never goes into effect, according to a report issued this week by four members of Congress.

The report is formatted as an amicus curie — or friend of the court — brief but was not filed with the court, and it takes a detailed look at the money that has moved behind the scenes. It’s entitled, “The Brief No One Filed.”

It was issued by U.S. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, and Edward J. Markey — some of the most powerful Democrats in the Senate. Senators Whitehouse, Boxer, and Markey serve on the Environment and Public Works Committee, while Sen. Reid is the Senate Democratic Leader.

“The American public is aware of and alarmed by the massive influx of special interest money and considers this a top problem with elected officials in Washington,” the four senators wrote.  “More than 80 percent of Americans believe the government cannot be trusted to do what is right most of the time.”

Large sums of money — over $100 million — have been funneled from the fossil fuel industry to key players in the litigation, the report concludes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

High Levels of Chemicals Found in People Living Near Gas Wells: New Report

June 18, 2016

High Levels of Chemicals Found in People Living Near Gas Wells: New Report

Chemicals from gas wells were discovered in biological samples drawn from residents of Pavillion, Wyoming, at levels as much as ten times the national averages, according to a new report. The study is the first to sample both the air near drilling sites and the levels of chemicals in people living and working near those wells, allowing researchers to study the ways that toxic air pollutants are entering people’s bodies near gas wells and putting their health at risk.

The researchers found evidence of 16 potentially dangerous chemicals in 11 individuals who volunteered to participate in the study by wearing air monitors and providing blood and urine samples. They found benzene, toluene, 2-heptanone, 4 heptanone and evidence of roughly a dozen other substances — including some known to be quite dangerous and others for which little safety information is available.

Wilma Subra, a chemist and microbiologist who has spent three decades researching the impacts of toxic chemicals, and who participated in the new report, told DeSmog that there was reason to be concerned about the health of the people included in the study, saying that they found chemicals “above acceptable levels in many cases.”

The health concerns would be about the same in many gas fields across the U.S., she said. “It is very similar to other areas where shale has been developed,” she added, “but also to areas where conventional drilling has taken place over the years.”

Pavillion is perhaps best-known nationwide for its battles over water contamination and fracking, which began in roughly 2008 when locals first reported that their water tasted different and carried strange odors. The Environmental Protection Agency launched a study, then dropped it, leaving the investigation to state regulators who have yet to reach any final conclusions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Top Shale Fracking Executive: We Won’t Frack the Rich

April 24, 2016

Top Shale Fracking Executive: We Won’t Frack the Rich

“’We heard Range Resources say it sites its shale gas wells away from large homes where wealthy people live and who might have the money to fight such drilling and fracking operations,’ said Patrick Grenter, an attorney and Center for Coalfield Justice executive director, who attended the lawyers’ forum,” the Post-Gazette reported. “A handful of attorneys in the audience confirmed that account,” and added that the Range Resources official had prefaced his remarks by saying “To be frank”.

The comments were made by Terry Bossert, Range Resources’s vice president for legislative and regulatory affairs, during a presentation at the Pennsylvania Bar Institute’s Environmental Law Forum on April 7. In 2004, Range Resources was the first company to drill in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale – but it has racked up a string of environmental violations so severe that state regulators slapped it with a record-breaking $4.15 million fine in 2014, followed the next year by an $8.9 million fine over a different incident.

The company has also repeatedly been sued by landowners – and not just in Pennsylvania, but also in their home state of Texas. It made international headlines when a gag order – part of a $750,000 settlement agreement between the company and a family over a contaminated 10-acre farm in Mount Pleasant, PA – barred two children from speaking about fracking for life (a ban that the company later repudiated, after the settlement terms were unsealed and made public).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

BREAKING: $4.2 Million Jury Verdict Against Cabot Oil & Gas in Dimock, PA Water Contamination Lawsuit

March 11, 2016

BREAKING: $4.2 Million Jury Verdict Against Cabot Oil & Gas in Dimock, PA Water Contamination Lawsuit

The defendant in the lawsuit, Cabot Oil and Gas Corp., had strenuously denied that it had caused any harm to the plaintiffs or their drinking water. In 2012, the company reached a settlement with roughly 40 other residents along Carter Road in Dimock, but the terms of that settlement were never made public and included a “non-disparagement” clause that prevents those who settled from speaking out about their experiences with Cabot.

The verdict, which was reported by the Associated Press, comes as long-awaited vindication for the Hubert and Ely families, who had refused to settle in part because they wanted their voices heard, they said at a press conference when the trial began in Scranton on February 22.

The lawsuit had stretched on for roughly seven years, and the plaintiffs were at one point forced to represent themselves in court after being unable to find legal counsel following the settlement of the vast majority of the plaintiffs.

The Huberts and the Elys still live on Carter Road, hauling their water by truck – a chore that became far more cumberson in the winter when hoses often froze and water tanks must be heated, Scott Ely, a former Cabot subcontractor turned whistleblower, had testified.

The Ely family, which owns the land on which the Huberts reside, would receive $2.75 million and the Hubert family $1.49 million, one local television station is reporting.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Oil Industry Caused 2005 Swarm of California Earthquakes: Newly Published Study

February 9, 2016

Oil Industry Caused 2005 Swarm of California Earthquakes: Newly Published Study

A string of quakes ending on Sept. 22, 2005 struck in Kern County near the southern end of California’s Central Valley  – and the new study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, concluded that the odds that those quakes might have occurred by chance were just 3 percent.

Instead, the researchers honed in on a very specific set of culprits: three wastewater injection wells in the Tejon Oil Field. Between 2001 and 2010, the rate of wastewater injection at that oil field quintupled, and up to 95 percent of that wastewater was sent to just that trio of closely-spaced wells, the scientists noted.

The largest of the earthquakes in the swarm measured magnitude 4.6 on the Richter scale meaning that the quakes were relatively small, unlikely to have done any damage to buildings but significant enough to be felt by those in the area.

To be sure, natural earthquakes have always far outnumbered human-caused quakes in California – but the researchers warned that even if the number of industry-caused quakes is small, wastewater injection could be responsible for larger, more dangerous quakes in the future.

“Based on our empirical results, injection-induced earthquakes are expected to contribute marginally to the overall seismicity in California,” the researchers from the California Institute of Technology, University of California, University of Southern California and two French universities, wrote. “However, considering the numerous active faults in California, the seismogenic consequences of even a few induced cases can be devastating.”

The researchers also warned that the number of California quakes tied to oilfield activities has been little-studied compared to other parts of the country and that natural quakes may have “masked” the oil industry’s impacts.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Coal Mining’s Financial Failures: Two Thirds of World’s Production Now Unprofitable

December 21, 2015

Coal Mining’s Financial Failures: Two Thirds of World’s Production Now Unprofitable

Both major types of coal — the coking coal used for making steel and the thermal coal burned in coal-fired electrical power plants — were included in Wood Mackenzie’s analysis. The estimate may be conservative, as the group excluded some costs incurred during mining, and focused primarily on the sharp drop in the price of coal.

Demand for thermal coal is also expected to slump further, in part because coal-fired power plants are expected to be required to meet increasingly strict standards for their emissions of toxic air pollution and greenhouse gasses.

And coking coal, which often sells for more than thermal coal, has been hard hit by the sudden downturn of China’s steel industry, which makes roughly half of the world’s steel.

A recovery for the steel industry may not come for years, analysts say. “It doesn’t help that Chinese steel production is about to see the most dramatic decline to the lowest in 20 years,” Herman Hildan, an Oslo-based analyst at Clarksons Platou Securities, told Bloomberg News about the steel industry’s prospects. “Demand growth is collapsing.”

Prices for some types of coking coal have already plunged more than 75 percent since 2011.

The Wood Mackenzie analysts concluded that now, “more than 65 per cent of world coal production operates at a loss.”

The situation is even more grim for some American coal mining regions, like Central Appalachia, where Wood Mackenzie concluded in March that 72 percent of the coal produced was being sold at a loss.

The firm does not expect a turnaround for the coal industry anytime soon.

“We’re bearish on 2016,” Matt Preston, who manages North American coal research at Wood Mackenzie, told The Billings Gazette.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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