A coalition of people who live and work near the drilling rigs that have allowed the U.S. to see incredible booms in oil and gas production is in Washington, D.C. this week demanding that both government and industry be held accountable when drilling causes health and environmental problems.

Members of the “Stop the Frack Attack” coalition held a forum yesterday because, as their website states:

Impacted communities [are] “experts” schooled in the curriculum of hard knocks doled out by the oil and gas industry.

In total, 16 people spoke at the forum representing eight different states. They included ranchers, mothers, librarians, nurses, and former industry employees. They came from various political backgrounds — in fact, one speaker held up the Constitution, the Bible, and his badge from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this year to relate how he has pled with Republicans to help communities pushed to the wayside by oil and gas companies.

All of the speakers described the impacts of oil and natural gas drilling on their health and property. For example, Kristi Mogen, whose community in Wyoming was evacuated after a well blowout in April 2012, spoke of her two daughters and husband who suffered nosebleeds and other health effects afterwards. And Rod Brueske of Longmont, Colorado explained how his “American dream was shattered by multinational companies” after a natural gas well across the street from his farm released chemicals into the air.

This is an important moment for oil and natural gas policy in Washington, D.C.  The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee this week is holding the final two of its three recent forums on natural gas policy issues. Of the 36 witnesses invited to share their opinions about natural gas in the U.S., none are citizens from affected communities.

And, last week, the Department of Energy announced the approval of a second facility to export natural gas to other counties, while the Department of the Interior released rules governing hydraulic fracturing on public lands that lack basic public right-to-know measures.

A new report released from the Center for American Progress shows that the five largest oil companies earned more than $30 billion in profits in just the first quarter of 2013. Put a different way, in only one minute these companies make more than “what 95 percent of American households earn in an entire year.”

And yet, citizens living near drilling rigs have to deal directly with the costs of drilling. As Jon Fenton, a rancher in Wyoming who admitted he hadn’t been on an airplane until six years ago when he began working on behalf of his community stated at the forum yesterday, “It’s us who have to bear that burden…but now I know that there are things worth fighting for.”

DeSmogBlog notes that the Bureau of Land Management’s recently-released rules governing fracking on federal lands ”will adopt the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model bill written by ExxonMobil for fracking chemical fluid disclosure on U.S. public.” It uses a voluntary online chemical disclosure database that has “truck-sized” loopholes, most notably that it’s voluntary — editors.

By Frances Beinecke via NRDC

When I talk to people who live near fracking operations, they often ask me the same question: “What is this doing to my drinking water?” Homeowners have shown me jugs of water from their kitchen sinks that look like rusty mud. One man said he could light his tap water on fire after energy companies put a drill pad in his neighborhood. Others tell me they worry their water is causing health problems for their families.

People across the country share these concerns. From Pennsylvania to Texas to Colorado, residents see wastewater pits leak, smell chemicals in the air, or read the scientific research showing that fracking can contaminate water supplies and pose a host of other threats. No one should have to live with these dangers: we all want to keep our drinking water safe from dangerous chemicals and reckless industrial activity.

And yet the federal government just released draft rules for fracking that fail to protect people from harm. Instead the rules protect the oil and gas industry from having to follow strong public health and environmental standards.

There is a lot at stake here. The Bureau of Land Management’s draft rules would cover fracking on public lands, including millions of acres of wild landscapes and private property where the federal government owns mineral rights. An enormous amount of land is involved, but also water.  The weak rules in the draft need to do more to protect the water supplies for millions of Americans. Residents of Denver, Washington, DC, and Santa Barbara, for instance, live downstream of public lands where fracking could or already does occur.

Would you want your tap to run brown? Would you want to serve toxic water to your family?

Ordinary citizens have a hard time forcing energy companies to keep our water and air clean. We count on the government to do that job. Yet when it comes to fracking, states have proven ill equipped for the job. Only about half of the 30 states with fracking, for instance, require companies to report which chemicals they use in fracking fluids. And in most of the states with disclosure rules, companies can withhold information they deem confidential without any justification or oversight.

The federal government hasn’t been much better. The oil and gas industry has won exemptions from critical sections of our nation’s most basic environmental laws – the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Now the Bureau of Land Management has issued woefully inadequate rules for fracking on public lands. The current draft rules are even weaker than a previous draft leaked several months ago, and they read like an industry wish list.

They could exempt huge tracts of state and tribal lands from the safeguards. They offer only weak chemical disclosure requirements that would make it hard for homeowners or medical professionals to find out all the chemicals being used in fracking operations. And they ignore key areas of health and environmental concern like the huge wastewater pits have been known to leak toxic and radioactive materials.

Surely America can do a better job of holding industry accountable for its actions. Fracking is already moving full steam ahead on our public lands. Now is the time to enact strong standards, not issue giveaways to oil and gas companies.

The Obama Administration should be a leader in establishing safeguards that protect public health and the environment. And the industry—which is drilling in our backyards, near our schools, and in our natural treasures—should accept these stronger safeguards. Americans deserve to know their water is safe from fracking chemicals.

– Frances Beinecke, President of NRDC, reposted from NRDC Switchboard with permission

The Department of the Interior is about to propose a revised version of rules to govern the practice of hydraulic fracturing of oil and gas wells on federal lands. The department’s Bureau of Land Management oversees drilling on 700 million acres of land, including almost 60 million acres of private land where the agency owns the mineral rights.

It has been a year since the BLM took its first stab at this task — and fell short of what is required. As CAP’s chair and counselor John Podesta said on May 4, 2012, about that effort:

Natural gas is a key component to establishing a clean energy future in the United States, but the public must be confident that it is done safely and responsibly, and the proposed rule released today by the Department of the Interior misses the mark.

The federal rules governing the controversial well stimulation technique commonly called fracking — which haven’t been updated since 1988 — should be a model of thorough, transparent and workable government oversight.

Most of the lands where they will be applied belong to all Americans, a birthright that we hold in trust for generations to come. That alone requires the Interior Department and the Obama administration to not cut corners in deference to the oil and gas industry. Unfortunately there are numerous indications that, as Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) said last week, “The Interior Department seems to be making the rule weaker, not stronger.”

The tests that the new rules should meet include the following:

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By Sharon Kelly via DeSmogBlog

Today’s shale gas boom has brought a surge of drilling across the US, driving natural gas prices to historic lows over the past couple of years. But, according to David Hughes, geoscientist and fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, in the future, we can expect at least the same frenzied rate of drilling – but less and less oil and gas from each well on average.

“It’s been a game changer,” Mr. Hughes said of the shale gas boom at a talk last week in Maryland, “but I would say a temporary game changer.”

After crunching data from hundreds of thousands of oil and gas wells across the U.S., Mr. Hughes found that just five of the country’s 30 best shale plays have been responsible for 80 percent of domestic shale gas production: the Haynesville shale in Louisiana; the Barnett shale in Texas’s Fort Worth region; the Marcellus shale, which underlies New York, Pennsylvania, and parts of Maryland and West Virginia; the Fayetteville shale in Arkansas; and Oklahoma’s Woodford shale. When it comes to natural gas, all of the other plays pale in comparison to these five regions.

But the data reveals that in four of these top five shale-gas plays, drillers have been less and less successful in hitting the next big strike-it-rich well. Average well productivity in four of the five best American shale plays has been falling since 2010, Hughes found. The exception, at least for now, is the Marcellus.

Everywhere else, the regional drop-offs are steep. In the Haynesville play, which quite recently was the nation’s top shale play, wells delivered roughly one third less gas on average in 2012 than in 2010, Hughes found.

In other words, shale gas regions start to lose their luster fast. Mr. Hughes pointed out that the Haynesville was hardly even targeted by shale gas drillers until 2008 – and now the best areas, the sweet spots that produced the gushers the Haynesville became famous for, seem to have been found.

By Sharon Kelly via DeSmogBlog

“It’s coming,” a baritone voice warns as images of a fiery hellscape flash across the screen. “Lies. Deception,” someone whispers, just before the narrator launches into a diatribe about Josh Fox’s new documentary, Gasland Part II, in a youtube clip whose esthetic falls somewhere between b-horror movie and election season attack ad. It’s the sort of video that might be campy if it wasn’t made with an actual budget.

Posted last November under the account energyforamerica, the faux trailer is one of the first hits in a Gasland 2 youtube search.

“I think it’s kinda unprecedented,” Mr. Fox said after the mock trailer appeared on youtube five months ago. “I don’t know of any other trailer that has attacked a film before even the actual trailer of the film has come out.”

Mr. Fox, the documentarian who made the Emmy-winning Gasland in 2010, and whose new movie Gasland Part II is now making its world premiere at Tribeca, has already withstood an aggressive P.R. campaign the likes of which few journalists and film-makers have ever experienced. The man who forever linked fracking to flaming tap water in the public mind has found himself, once again, in the oil and gas industry’s doghouse.

With funding from an array of oil companies, front groups like Energy in Depth have created entire websites devoted to “debunking” the first-hand reports shown in the first Gasland, produced their own film titled Truthland, and maneuvered behind the scenes to undermine Gasland’s credibility amongst the media.

Now the oil industry is gearing up for a new campaign to attack the sequel. And early signs indicate they plan to pull out all the stops.

Energy for America, which posted the Gasland 2 youtube video, turns out to be an organization that is tied to the Koch brothers and funded by the American Energy Alliance (AEA), the Institute for Energy Research (IER) and Americans for Prosperity, according to Sourcewatch, which adds that all three organizations are funded by the energy industry.

Here’s the anti-Gasland trailer produced by Energy for America:

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A 2011 magnitude 5.7 quake in OK, linked to wastewater injection, buckled US Highway 62. (Credit: John Leeman)

After pulling massive amounts of fossil fuels out of the Earth’s crust so we can burn it up into our atmosphere, we have a good sense of where the stuff goes. Our oceans. A global greenhouse. Our lungs. But what happens to the ground formerly occupied by those fossil fuels?

It’s becoming increasingly clear that oil and gas extraction processes are actually weakening the structural integrity of the Earth’s crust just enough to cause more frequent earthquakes, in places not used to them.

Oklahoma, for instance, is not known for earthquakes. Yet the central U.S. has seen an elevenfold jump in recent years, including the Sooner State’s largest earthquake on record. This 5.7-magnitude quake occurred on November 6, 2011 near Prague, Oklahoma. And research published yesterday in Geology from the University of Oklahoma, Columbia University, and the U.S. Geological Survey has made a direct connection to the disposal of wastewater from conventional oil production:

A new study in the journal Geology is the latest to tie a string of unusual earthquakes, in this case, in central Oklahoma, to the injection of wastewater deep underground. Researchers now say that the magnitude 5.7 earthquake near Prague, Okla., on Nov. 6, 2011, may also be the largest ever linked to wastewater injection. Felt as far away as Milwaukee, more than 800 miles away, the quake — the biggest ever recorded in Oklahoma — destroyed 14 homes, buckled a federal highway and left two people injured. Small earthquakes continue to be recorded in the area.

The recent boom in U.S. energy production has produced massive amounts of wastewater. The water is used both in hydrofracking, which cracks open rocks to release natural gas, and in coaxing petroleum out of conventional oil wells. In both cases, the brine and chemical-laced water has to be disposed of, often by injecting it back underground elsewhere, where it has the potential to trigger earthquakes. The water linked to the Prague quakes was a byproduct of oil extraction at one set of oil wells, and was pumped into another set of depleted oil wells targeted for waste storage.

As Climate Progress has written before, this practice of disposing chemical-laced water generated during the extraction of oil and gas has far-reaching effects. Drillers have been doing this for more than a decade, and the researchers note that the Oklahoma quake did not actually require very much wastewater. In fact, because we have been doing this for so long, the built-up pressure in the Earth’s crust changes the criteria of how quakes happen. The study’s abstract notes:

Significantly, this case indicates that decades-long lags between the commencement of fluid injection and the onset of induced earthquakes are possible, and modifies our common criteria for fluid-induced events.

So we could be paying for more than a decade of wastewater injection and fracking for quite some time with earthquakes. There’s not much more room 9,000 feet down. Wellhead records indicate that pressure in these areas underground increased by a factor of ten from 2001 to 2006.

Read more

By Jane Dale Owen via chron.com

All the hype by the fossil fuel industry about energy independence from fracking (hydraulic fracturing) in tight gas reservoirs like the Barnett Shale has left out the costs in energy, water and other essential natural resources.

Furthermore, a recent report from the Post Carbon Institute finds that projections for an energy boom from non-conventional fossil fuel sources is not all it’s cracked up to be.

The report cites a study by David Hughes, Canadian geologist, who says the low quality of hydrocarbons from bitumen – shale oil and shale gas – do not provide the same energy returns as conventional hydrocarbons due to the energy needed to extract or upgrade them. Hughes also notes that the “new age of energy abundance” forecast by the industry will soon run dry because shale gas and shale oil wells deplete quickly. In fact, the “best fields have already been tapped.”

“Unconventional fossil fuels all share a host of cruel and limiting traits,” says Hughes. “They offer dramatically fewer energy returns; they consume extreme and endless flows of capital; they provide difficult or volatile rates of supply over time and have large environmental impacts in their extraction.”

We must ask, is it worth the cost when it takes from 3 million to 9 million gallons of water per fracture to extract this fuel? The withdrawal of large quantities of surface water can substantially impact the availability of water downstream and damage the aquatic life in the water bodies, says Wilma Subra, scientist and national consultant on the community and environmental impact of fracking. When groundwater resources are used, aquifers can be drawn down and cause wells in the area to go dry.

“Once water is used for fracking, it is lost to the water cycle forever,” Subra says.

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Congressmen Jared Polis (D-CO) and Matt Cartwright (D-PA) yesterday introduced two bills that would repeal exemptions for oil and gas companies under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.  As a press release from the members noted, the bills were introduced:

… in order to ensure that the hydraulic fracking industry follows the same rules that other industries do in preserving our natural resources. This legislation is focused on ensuring the safety and the health of the communities where the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, process is already taking place.

Polis’ bill, the “Bringing Reductions to Energy’s Airborne Toxic Health Effect (BREATHE) Act” (H.R. 1154) is based on the premise that oil and gas wells and their associated infrastructure can cause significant air pollution.  The bill would require companies to cumulatively account for air pollution from all of their wells in one area by requiring aggregate permits, rather than individual permits for each well.  The bill also adds hydrogen sulfide to the list of hazardous air pollutants regulated under the Clean Air Act.

Cartwright’s bill, the “Focused Reduction of Effluence and Stormwater Runoff Through Hydraulic Environmental Regulation (FRESHER) Act” (H.R. 1175), would require stormwater runoff permits for oil and gas construction and operations to protect surface water resources.  This is essential because rain causes runoff from fracking sites that can contain sediment and other pollutants which end up in nearby waters.  It would also mandate a study on the effects of oil and gas operations on surface water.

In additions to these exemptions from parts of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, the oil and gas industry enjoys loopholes in a handful of other laws including the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Superfund Act, the Community Right to Know Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.

At the same time oil and gas companies benefit from loopholes in laws designed to protect public health and the environment, they are making record profits.  Last year, the largest five oil companies–– BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell– made $118 billion in profits.  They also receive $2.4 billion in tax breaks every year, effectively making Americans pay twice for gasoline, both at the pump and through the U.S. Treasury.  Unfortunately, the House of Representatives seems set to continue this preferential treatment of the oil and gas industry.  Just this week, the House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget preserves tax breaks for oil companies while calling for the sell-off of public lands.  More benefits for big corporations, paid for by the middle class.

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Today, the Wall Street Journal editorial board published a gem of an editorial titled “Drill, Barack, Drill.” You might be able to guess what it’s about from the title.

It takes a report from the Congressional Research Service about drilling on public lands, engages in some flagrant cherry picking, shoots out some outright falsehoods, and concludes that the Obama Administration has been standing in the way of fossil fuel development on federal lands.

The truth, while sobering, is very different from the creative accounting performed by the Wall Street Journal ed board. Here’s the reality.

WSJ Says: “All of the increased [oil] production from 2007 from 2012 took place on non-federal lands.”

That’s one cherry to pick. There’s a whole tree though. Looking at the whole CRS report gives you the full story:

When comparing fiscal year 2010 with 2007, growth in the federal share of production was about 82 percent of the total.

That’s a lot of growth in production not on private and state lands. The report also says that crude oil production will continue to be significant, and “could remain consistently higher than previous decades.”

WSJ Says: “Federal share of total U.S. oil production has slid under Mr. Obama to 26% in fiscal year 2012 from 31% in fiscal 2008.”

In fact, oil production from federally owned places was higher in every one of the past four years compared to 2008, when oil hit a record high price of $142.50 per barrel. In fiscal year 2008, total crude oil production was 1,550 thousand barrels per day. The rate of production for the next four years has been: 1,731, 1,989, 1,715, and 1,627 thousand barrels per day. The Wall Street Journal may be trying hard here, but none of those numbers is smaller than 1,550.

The domestic boom is driven by ample tight oil (shale oil) and shale gas resources on private lands. In 2012, Adam Sieminski, the Administrator of the Energy Information Administration testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee that:

Because the shale resource basins are largely outside of the Federal lands, so too is shale production. In this case, the geology is working in favor of non-Federal landowners.

The rapid increase in natural gas production from shale resources, found largely outside the Federal lands, over the last 5 years has significantly reduced natural gas prices and the relative attractiveness of conventional natural gas resources, including those of Federal and Indian lands. (EIA)

Also, most oil and gas shale plays in the contiguous U.S. are on private lands:

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Sean Lennon, Yoko Ono, and a flotilla of celebrities sing a song titled “Don’t Frack My Mother” that opposes fracking in New York State. The video has some actual information in it, but you’ll get distracted by the sustained barrage of familiar faces. And the fact that they rhyme:

Now we can’t afford for this world to get hotter

with

And we can’t afford polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons in our water

That’s gotta be a first time PAHs have appeared in a pop song.