Hydro Fracking, showing potential sources of environmental concerns (Wikipedia)

Cross posted from Pruning Shears.

The quality of reporting on fracking in large outlets has been of varying quality. Day-to-day coverage of the latest developments is usually pretty good, but bigger picture trend pieces have a tendency to be positively fawning towards the industry. A couple of recent articles in the New York Times have been particularly bad, and one of them also foreshadowed an additional development.

The first was a credulous look at how great fracking is for the communities it occurs in. We are told how fat fracking checks are “swelling the bank accounts of some working-class families” in “amounts the recipients say are a bit disorienting.” Even better: “More is probably on the way, potentially much more.” So these struggling families have suddenly had their financial anxieties erased, their future incomes assured. I’m sure the ombudsman would say that the hazards of fracking were beyond the scope of the article, but wow does it read like a love letter.¹

The Paper of Record followed that with another blow job the next month, this one the heartwarming tale of “a rare victory for the littlest of the little guys in global trade.” It turns out there’s a bean in India that is absolutely essential to fracking, and the Halliburtons of the world are just showing up and handing out big bags of money: “Tractor sales are soaring, land prices are increasing and weddings have grown even more colorful.” (Note the True Love theme.)

The piece includes the obligatory party pooper caveat: fracking “may also have spoiled some rural water supplies and caused environmental damage in parts of the United States” – yes, it may have (via) – but don’t let that dampen your spirits: “Farmers, traders and processors around Jodhpur admitted fulfilling some long-held dreams with the profits they made last year. Some took trips to Europe; some bought gold; others got married.” Isn’t that touching? Fracking is allowing them to fulfill long-held dreams like getting married!

The subtext of both pieces is identical: Hardscrabble life in wretched backwater transformed by heavy industrialization. The second story also has this: fracking “has led to a surge in natural gas production, a decline in oil imports and a gradual transition away from coal-fired power plants.” A couple of weeks later NPR elaborated on that theme, which was then followed a few weeks ago by the news that carbon dioxide levels had dropped to a twenty year low.

This in turn produced a round of thoughtful chin stroking from commentators who claimed to have been on the fence about fracking but, now that it turned out to be such a boon to humanity, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. Sure it may cause some pollution in a few places, but it’s wonderful in others, and in case we need a tiebreaker just look at how it reduces greenhouse gases.

Read the rest of this entry →

Cross posted from Pruning Shears.

One of the biggest threats fracking poses to the environment is the way it endangers the water supply. It does so in several ways, one of which has large-scale implications. Global impact like that is a little unusual; environmental issues are more likely to be local. Whether it’s fracking, lead paint/asbestos in old buildings, or a Superfund site, once you get a few miles away from it the greatest hazard is usually mitigated.

Fracking permanently removes water from the hydrological cycle, though, at which point it may as well be on the far side of the moon for as much use as it is. This goes beyond competition for scarce resources during a dry season, though the oil and gas industry is well positioned to elbow everyone else aside (via) if it comes to that. It is about the slow draining of the amount of water available for human use.

There are still the usual local concerns, though. Since fracking is exempt from the requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act due to the Halliburton loophole, communities are left to do the work that the EPA is theoretically in charge of. I suppose an open abdication of responsibility – thanks, Dick Cheney! – is better than maintaining the charade that a worthless regulator is ostensibly on the case. Either way, though, there is no cop on the beat.

While the industry is supposed to provide an adequate amount of transparency (speaking of charades), there is no substitute for a little local activism. Much of the posting I’ve done on fracking so far has focused on more public and contentious settings. Going to a council meeting to encourage representatives to be responsive to public sentiment, or going to an industry sponsored dog and pony show to to provide a little push back – those can be fairly high profile and emotionally charged settings. Not everyone is up for that.

For those who oppose fracking but are deeply reluctant to put themselves in a potentially confrontational situation, there are other options. Like getting over their reticence. Do you think any of us LIKE doing that, for God’s sake? No normal person wants to pick a fight. Those of us who have spoken out so far have done so because we sincerely believe our quality of life, and perhaps even our ability to live in our communities, may be threatened. We feel like the industry has backed us into a corner and that we have no choice but to fight back. I can’t speak for any of my fellow activists, but I for one would rather be playing Portal 2.

There are other ways to get involved, however, and the Sierra Club has one that is perfect for any able-bodied individual who needs quieter options. Called the Water Sentinels program, the group makes simple water testing kits available to those who want to monitor the quality of their systems. The idea is simple: record some basic metrics about your water supply – or any nearby source – as a base line, then follow up every month or two with additional tests. Increase the frequency of the testing if fracking (or some other potentially significant event) occurs.

Here are stories about the testing being done in Colorado, Illinois and Ohio. I accompanied an activist on a recent test, and there really wasn’t much to it at all. Here is what the measuring instrument looks like:

Take it and a glass jar to a water supply, then fill the jar:

Use the instrument to measure the basic water quality:

Then record the numbers:

The power of this is not in a single test, though. It’s in the accumulation of tests, with the eventual creation of a database in mind. If enough people in enough areas are able to do this kind of monitoring it will be much easier to make the case that, say, toxic fracking waste from a nearby well has poisoned a local waterway.

It isn’t one hundred percent certain, obviously, and the industry will surely look to discredit such testing should it ever feel threatened by it. But if done well and diligently, it could provide a powerful common sense argument against fracking. It also gives even the most painfully shy introverts a way to be involved – and maybe just persuade their neighbors.

The Sierra Club’s Water Sentinels site is here.

Thursday’s post on Hiram’s public fracking meeting mainly covered residents’ interaction with local officials. The bigger part of the meeting, though, featured two speakers with ties to the oil and gas industry.

A representative from the company Mountaineer Keystone (MK) made a few opening remarks. He then turned things over to Rhonda Reda of the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program (OOGEEP ), a group that is “funded exclusively by Ohio’s crude oil and natural gas producers and royalty owners.”

As the MK rep goes through his introduction a resident asks (begins¹ at 1:10) “Can’t we start out with questions from the floor?” From the reaction it was clear at least some in the audience were in favor. There was a real concern that what was about to commence was a dog and pony show that would eat up precious time and do nothing to quiet any concerns.

Now, the speakers clearly had spent time on their presentations and wanted to go through them in an orderly way. I can understand their concern that a free for all might cause their carefully prepared remarks to get jumbled. But surely there were options beside a rigid adherence to the game plan and chaos, no? Couldn’t the MK rep or Reda have started with five minutes of questions from the most concerned citizens, then gone through their material?

Apparently not, because the rep responds “I think we’re going to go with education first.” And with that Reda takes over. Many in the crowd really wanted to start off with questions, though. One resident says (same clip as above, 2:29):

I have questions and I know other people in the audience have questions that I can assure you will not be in your talk. And I can assure you that the majority of the people in this room who are not from Mountaineer Keystone…

At which point a town trustee interrupts and assures her all her questions will be answered by the educational material. Many were not so sure, though, as represented by this exchange (starts at 3:50):

REDA: A lot of the people here may not have heard or seen some of this, and so I do want to try and address their questions as well…

CITIZEN: Sounds like a filibuster to me.

REDA: Excuse me?

CITIZEN: It sounds like a filibuster to me – spending time…we already told you. You say that you want to start with education. We don’t…

REDA: Ma’am, anybody that wants…

CITIZEN: Who wants to start with questions? [scattered applause]

REDA: In order to ask an educated question you have to be educated on the subject, and based on the number of hands you do not have to stay. If you’ve already listened to this you do not have to stay for this, but there’s a lot of people that requested this presentation and this educational format². So if you’re not interested in it, you are welcome to leave [gestures to exit], but I am going to go through this and try to address a lot of the questions.

If you haven’t watched any of the video clips at this point, please try to if you can. No one asking questions does so with the slightest bit of menace. There is no violence or threat of violence, no one gets into her personal space, no one does so much as point an aggressive finger in her direction. Yet when another audience member challenges her qualifications, she has him thrown out. She then takes on an air of wounded grievance and indulges in some dramatic, persecuted rhetoric (start of clip):

I’m going to apologize to folks and explain to you why I have asked for police officers to be here. I’m a mom. I’ve got two kids. My son I just dropped off at Kent State, if any of you are Kent State fans, he’ll be playing football at Kent State. I plan on seeing my son’s football games. I also have a daughter who just got engaged. I plan on being at her wedding. Unfortunately at some of these public events we have been aggressively approached, we’ve had death threats and other things just explaining the science. It is my family’s request that these officers are here, and it’s the only way I agreed to continue doing these presentations, which is a shame that here in the country I have to have security officers to explain the process.

To me that’s just a cheap psychological ploy to try and gain sympathy from the crowd and stifle dissent. I don’t know if the former happened but the latter sure did. It is abundantly clear throughout the entire presentation that she is never in the slightest danger, yet she invokes the specter of physical assault – and even death. Whatever the intent, it had the effect of completely shutting down citizens at a public meeting. In my book that’s not someone dealing in good faith.

As you might imagine, the rest of her speech was uneventful. There are more clips from the night at the Shalersville Against Fracking site (click on the You Tube icon to go to our channel), and while I did not record the entire presentation there should be enough video to give you a sense of its tone and viewpoint.

I’ll just leave you with a visual editorial moment. Reda seemed to assume there was a silent majority of the room on her side, that those who were speaking out were just a handful of malcontents in a sea of supporters. Here’s a clip of one of those silent supporters taking out a cell phone and killing time with a game of solitaire while Reda was educating us.

No one was asking questions, though. Mission accomplished.

1. As with last week, I once again apologize for the quality of the clips. I was using a small handheld recorder and also trying to wrangle a bored and restless child (citizen journalism!); please excuse the occasional wandering view and quiet audio.
(Back)

2. I’m not sure how many people requested that particular educational format – none of the residents I was aware of did – but those who felt a little dubious about it had reason to feel that way. Some of the material was almost crazily broad and unsupported. One of the slides basically read (and this is only a slight exaggeration):

JOBS
Here are some jobs that pay a lot of money!
(table)

(Back)

On Tuesday the town of Hiram, OH, held a public meeting with representatives of the company Mountaineer Keystone (MK). MK, a subsidiary of First Reserve Corporation, is set to begin fracking operations in Hiram next month. The company is a bit of an enigma; for one, it does not appear to have a web site, just a generic landing page at First Reserve. Also, according to Business Week it was founded in 2010 and lists no Key Executives. So who exactly the public was meeting with was something of a mystery.

Before the MK portion kicked off, though, we had remarks from one of the township trustees, and another from its counsel. The subtext of the evening seemed to be, you can’t do anything. (With local officials there was also a leitmotif of “our hands are tied.”) Over and over citizens pressed: we don’t like this, we don’t want this here, what can we do about it? And the answer, over and over again, was: Nothing; this is a done deal. It all smacked of an effort to inculcate a sense of despair, hopelessness, cynicism or at least sullen resignation among citizens.

The town counsel began by taking some questions, and residents tried to probe for different ways to slow down this runaway train. Ohio has home rule nominally enshrined in its Constitution, but the Small Government Conservatives in Columbus have happily chipped away at it whenever it has threatened (as in this case) to result in a messy outburst of local control.

Residents asked some creative questions, though. One asked about being annexed by a larger neighboring municipality in order to get a greater degree of local control.¹ (starts around 3:35):

Counsel could have said, yes that’s an option and maybe something we could look into. Instead he hems and haws a little bit, then says it still wouldn’t help to ban fracking. That, though, is a straw man argument. At the start of the clip (around 1:00) a resident asks about keeping the roads in good condition, and seeing trucks sloshing fluid all over. The speaker says, somewhat hilariously, “they’re supposed to prevent that.” Somehow they aren’t, though! And for a township crying poverty – see below – as a reason for why it cannot enforce the law within its borders, perhaps annexation to a larger community might make those resources available. It’s not about banning fracking at this point, just trying to keep existing ordinances observed.

Another resident asked (start of clip) why a noise ordinance couldn’t be enforced. The trustee responded that the township didn’t have the manpower to enforce it, and after a little back-and-forth she says: How about volunteer police officers?

Just like in the Old West, right? Deputize concerned citizens, but instead of handing them Colt 45′s hand them decibel meters. Give them a pad of citations and some quick instructions for how to document them. Let them hand out fines to offenders, or even just mail them. No need to risk any kind of confrontation. It could all be done in a completely peaceful and lawful way. Include a series of escalating sanctions, starting with fines and eventually leading to eviction.

That would be a bit of an unorthodox approach, but this is a circumstance that calls for a little outside the box thinking, no? Home rule has been gutted, town officials are saying they’re broke – why not give it a shot, especially since (KEY POINT AHEAD!) it is a matter of great concern to a large number of citizens?

Both the trustee and lawyer bat her concerns away, though, and her comment at 2:24 is a good summary for the meeting: “That’s my question. I guess you don’t have an answer.” After which counsel points to the next resident. No answer indeed.

The unresponsiveness of the officials brought to mind a concept I first encountered in Dana Nelson’s Bad For Democracy (p. 177): plebiscetary democracy. As Barney Frank described it relative to the Bush years, this is a system “wherein a leader is elected but once elected has almost all of the power” (Cf. Bush’s accountability moment).

These officials continually defer all proposals to the state level. Try getting the industry-friendly government in Columbus to do something about it, they say – which is really just a polite way of saying shut up and go away. By and large local officials bristle at any kind of pressure to act on this issue. There was an accountability moment a couple years ago, is the implication. You had your chance, now buzz off. See you next election day.

Some citizens, though, believe accountability moments happen at more frequent intervals.

1. Video was shot with my modest handheld recorder, so the quality is a bit iffy in places. If you can turn the volume way up it will probably help to hear everything.
(Back)

On Tuesday a group of Shalersville, Ohio residents attended a meeting of its trustees to voice their objections to fracking. Video of all the statements can be seen at the Shalersville No Fracking web site. There was a three minute speaking limit so the clips are short. (If you cannot watch video where you are, this is a rough transcript of my own remarks.) Here is just one of them, and note how the resident talks about her opposition to fracking from both a technical and visceral perspective. There are logistical, technological and environmental reasons to not want a fracking operation in your town, but there are emotional ones too:

Those speaking out at the meeting were prepared. In general people were not speaking off the cuff, but working from a prepared statement or note cards. We did our homework on this.

One of the recurring themes environmental activists have been hearing at the local level is that fracking is a state-level issue and that municipalities have limited ability to address it. That has been true in Portage county generally, and it was the case in Shalersville on Tuesday night. At the start of the meeting, one of the trustees announced that the speakers were strictly there for public comment and that no questions would be permitted.

The trustee then stated that they were essentially powerless to do anything because the state of Ohio had eliminated most mechanisms of local control (which incidentally is in defiance of the state constitution’s guarantee of home rule – more on that here). Fortunately, one well prepared resident addressed that issue head on in her response. Namely, at times in our history we have had immoral laws – ones that permitted slavery and banned universal suffrage, to name just two.

Simply declaring that the law must be obeyed under all circumstances is not persuasive. It’s fair to ask first if the law is right and just. And if a great many people are persuaded it is not, that is an issue that ought to be addressed instead of swept aside. Read the rest of this entry →

The Beauty of Fracking (image: SS&SS/flickr)

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

The fight against fracking in Ohio comes at a time when the state is approving new wells at a rapid pace. Local activists are organizing in an environment where the ground is constantly shifting under their feet – sometimes literally.

Anti-fracking activism has been influenced by developments both inside the state and beyond. At a recent public anti-fracking meeting a representative from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) described the experience of activists in western Pennsylvania several years ago.

Residents there began seeing lots of drilling sites, processing plants and other fracking infrastructure pop up. Neighborhood opposition responded through the regulatory process. Drillers needed permits, so locals educated themselves on permit writing. They enjoyed some early victories as improperly written permits were thrown out.

The wins were only temporary though. Drillers came back weeks or months later with rewritten permits that fixed the problems in the earlier ones. The new permits passed regulatory muster and the frackers moved in. At one point counsel for the companies jokingly thanked a CELDF representative for its help in putting together a bulletproof permit-writing process. As you might imagine, this was not the intended outcome.

The regulatory process may not be a suitable one for anti-fracking activists for other reasons as well. For one, regulations are not ultimately about protecting citizens; they are about legalizing harm. Regulation on, say, arsenic in drinking water is not based on the maximum amount that humans may safely consume, but on the maximum amount the industry can get legislators to allow. If they allow an amount that is unhealthy for humans or animals, those who suffer as a result have no legal recourse. The harm was permitted.

If you do not want the fracking to occur at all – if you think it is too unregulated, too opaque, and generally too hazardous – then fighting over regulation is a sucker’s game. You are not fighting over whether or not your community will expose itself to the tender mercies of the oil and gas industry, but over how much damage the industry will be allowed to do to it; and since the oil and gas industry is flooding the statehouse with lobbyists how do you think that fight will go?

Read the rest of this entry →

According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) extracts pockets of natural gas far beneath the earth’s surface via a process called directional drilling,

which involves steering a downhole drill bit in a direction other than vertical. An initially vertical drillhole is slowly turned 90 degrees to penetrate long horizontal distances, sometimes over a mile, through the Marcellus Shale bedrock. Hydraulic fractures are then created into the rock at intervals from the horizontal section of the borehole, allowing a substantial number of high-permeability pathways to contact a large volume of rock.

(See the map at the USGS site for the area covered by the Marcellus Shale. Fracking can be done anywhere, but the Marcellus Shale is one of the most actively targeted areas.)

The water is injected and comes back out as a toxic stew:

Along with the introduced chemicals, hydrofrac water is in close contact with the rock during the course of the stimulation treatment, and when recovered may contain a variety of formation materials, including brines, heavy metals, radionuclides, and organics that can make wastewater treatment difficult and expensive. The formation brines often contain relatively high concentrations of sodium, chloride, bromide, and other inorganic constituents, such as arsenic, barium, other heavy metals, and radionuclides that significantly exceed drinking water standards (Harper, 2008).

There are substantial hurdles associated with importing the frack water and then safely disposing of the resulting liquid Superfund waste (euphemistically termed “brine”). But there is perhaps an even more insidious hazard created by fracking. Think about it: A pocket of natural gas is deep underground. The surrounding area gets drilled, flooded with water, and then all of it – dislodged rock, water, gas – is removed.

What’s left? Nothing. A whole lot of nothing, with a lot of earth pressing down on it. What will that produce? Earthquakes. And people have started to notice. So in addition to the unbelievably dirty extraction, it literally leaves holes in the earth – holes which do not get filled in gracefully. At least not by human standards.

The entire process is so risky and damaging that insurers have started to ask questions (via). According to Jaime L. Brockway of Insurance & Financial Advisor, “an insurer may cancel or discontinue a policy if the consumer concealed information needed to determine risk, or if there was an increase in risk after the policy was issued. ‘Some carriers have started canceling policies for increasing hazard,’ [Claire] Pantaloni[, industry affairs director for Insurance Agents & Brokers,] told IFA.” (via)

A fracking protest has been organized by Food & Water Watch for tomorrow. (Here in my neck of the woods the groups No Frack Ohio and NEOGAP have partnered with them; environmental groups everywhere are doing so as well, so you might be able to find a local group to coordinate with.) Anyone who supports a halt to this environmentally harmful activity is urged to call the White House comment line (866-582-4813) from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. EST and ask the president to publicly and energetically support a fracking ban.

Please note: You do not have to take an angry or confronational tone. This is not about peering into the president’s soul or trying to guess at what he, in his heart of hearts, really thinks about the issue. It is about petitioning for an environmentally friendly policy, and signalling to not just the White House but all of Washington that not just industry lobbyists are interested in the issue. Building and sustaining a green message helps create the room for politicians to comfortably move in that direction.

So if you were upset about the recent changes to smog rules or if you were making your voice heard in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, here is another opportunity to send a message. Tuesday, September 13th, 866-582-4813, from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. EST. Get at it. Keep at it.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

BACKGROUND

According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the Marcellus Shale is “a sedimentary rock formation deposited over 350 million years ago in a shallow inland sea located in the eastern United States where the present-day Appalachian Mountains now stand” and it “contains significant quantities of natural gas.” How significant? Well, it kind of depends on whom you ask. University researchers said there was quite a bit, but a key industry player claimed a wildly larger amount (emph. added):

In 2008, two professors at Pennsylvania State University and the State University of New York (SUNY) Fredonia estimated that about 50 TCF (trillion cubic feet) of recoverable natural gas could be extracted from the Marcellus Shale (Engelder and Lash, 2008). In November 2008, on the basis of production information from Chesapeake Energy Corporation [remember that name! - ed.], the estimate of recoverable gas from the Marcellus Shale was raised to more than 363 TCF (Esch, 2008).

Asking Chesapeake Energy if it was worthwhile to drill in an area where they had a direct financial interest seems a bit like asking Tobacco Institute scientists if smoking is linked to lung cancer, no? An increase of over 700% ought to be looked into, not blandly passed along. But either way, there’s a lot of natural gas under them thar hills and it is, as the USGS helpfully notes in its summary, “an abundant, domestic energy resource that burns cleanly, and emits the lowest amount of carbon dioxide per calorie of any fossil fuel.”

Chesapeake is on the same page, touting natural gas as “clean, affordable, abundant” and flatly states: “The only scalable, affordable alternative to burning dirty coal is to burn clean natural gas.” This is an extremely relevant and compelling point if the natural gas packages itself, grows legs and walks to the surface. Sadly, it remains stubbornly immobile. So the alternative is to force it out via directional drilling,

which involves steering a downhole drill bit in a direction other than vertical. An initially vertical drillhole is slowly turned 90 degrees to penetrate long horizontal distances, sometimes over a mile, through the Marcellus Shale bedrock. Hydraulic fractures are then created into the rock at intervals from the horizontal section of the borehole, allowing a substantial number of high-permeability pathways to contact a large volume of rock (fig. 5).

This drilling process requires a large quantity of water to hydraulically fracture the rock (hence the nickname “fracking”), and that water turns into a toxic stew:

Along with the introduced chemicals, hydrofrac water is in close contact with the rock during the course of the stimulation treatment, and when recovered may contain a variety of formation materials, including brines, heavy metals, radionuclides, and organics that can make wastewater treatment difficult and expensive. The formation brines often contain relatively high concentrations of sodium, chloride, bromide, and other inorganic constituents, such as arsenic, barium, other heavy metals, and radionuclides that significantly exceed drinking water standards (Harper, 2008).

No matter how clean it is when you actually consume it, the process of getting to it is unbelievably dirty. Even the USGS acknowledges as much: “While the technology of drilling directional boreholes, and the use of sophisticated hydraulic fracturing processes to extract gas resources from tight rock have improved over the past few decades, the knowledge of how this extraction might affect water resources has not kept pace.”

Drilling technology sprinting past environmental protection – sound familiar?

EARLY RESULTS

That’s all very theoretical and academic, but how are these early adventures into fracking going? Not so well. In some cases it is merely disturbing, as in this video of a compressor station emitting lots of noise and…stuff. Since we still do not have any sensible regulation of this process – hell, since we aren’t even aware what the byproducts and long term consequences are – it’s kind of hard to see footage like that and not be suspicious of what exactly is going on. Literally no one knows.

The independent, non-profit news organization ProPublica has an entire series devoted to the threat posed by fracking, and has uncovered several examples of the damage done by it. An award-winning documentary called GasLand has shown in frightening detail just how hazardous it is. And these problems are just when it all goes according to plan. When things go wrong, as it did with one of Chesapeake’s operations in Pennsylvania last week, (via) it’s even worse (via).

This is not just happening in America, either. The industry is trying to get a foothold in Europe, but its reputation has already preceded it. Hilariously, UK gas company CEO Mark Miller trots out the bad apples argument to try and wave off the poor track record. (Ever since Abu Ghraib “bad apples” has been the go-to talking point for high ranking officials looking to evade responsibility. Even putting aside the cheap and obvious scapegoating involved, the phrase itself is a clip from a proverb that, if fully considered, isn’t exactly exonerating.)

While major players are fiercely opposed to even simple disclosure, there is enough concern about the practice for some knowledgeable parties to sound the alarm – and thankfully not every politician is in the thrall of industry lobbyists. Still, ProPublica considers the industry at a turning point (via): one where we will either start seeing effective regulation or the same “consequences be damned” heedlessness we’ve seen elsewhere. I happen to be deeply skeptical of regulation, and I’ve gone on and on about it previously. The short version is that between cognitive regulatory capture and the starving of agencies of proper resources, the whole idea of regulation has not worked well in practice.

CLOSE TO HOME

Opposition to fracking has been growing (via), and Ohio is no exception. Our idiot governor has decided it’s a swell idea to approach economically desperate people with drilling proposals in exchange for a one-time shot of money. Chesapeake is aggressively buying up rights and has lined up a willing local front group to, I don’t know, put cartoon buckeye stickers on the equipment.

The state legislature is considering a proposal to open additional state lands to drilling, and in response local activists staged a protest on Tuesday (via ProgressOhio‘s Flickr page):

State Rep. Teresa Fedor spoke at the rally:

And she noted – with commendable understatement – “There’s a lot that we don’t know about this new and unconventional drilling.” (Read about previous Fedor awesomeness here.)

Her point shouldn’t really be controversial at all. Considering the problems, and in some cases catastrophes, that we already know about elsewhere it shouldn’t be terribly provocative to cool it for a bit and try to get a better grip on what’s happening. Unfortunately there are people like Tom Stewart of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association offering rebuttals such as this, which I wish I were making up:

With energy development or with any kind of economic activity, there’s always going to be an environmental footprint. Airplanes do fall out of the sky. … What Ohio citizens need to be concerned about is that the proper regulatory process is in place to regulate the industry, to ensure the public that they can have faith and trust that this is done properly.

The GOP-dominated legislature seems likely to do Chesapeake’s bidding and open up more public land for this private company to profit from. But the opposition has been getting the word out, and doing so with increasing visibility. The issue won’t go away until Chesapeake and their ilk go away (and until their sponsors in Columbus do as well), but in this case – as with the phenomenally energetic referendum effort to repeal SB 5 – citizen action might yet veto corporate greed.

Notes

• There’s a nice Marcellus Shale map for Ohio here.
• From the USGS paper:
  

  The United States uses about 23 TCF of natural gas per year (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2009), so the Marcellus gas resource may be large enough to supply the needs of the entire Nation for roughly 15 years at the current rates of consumption.

  From the Chesapeake site:
  

  now estimated to contain more than two quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas, more than doubling America’s previously estimated natural gas reserves, and giving us close to a 200-year supply of clean, affordable, American natural gas.

  Not sure where the extra 185 years supply comes from. But then notice this from the Guardian piece:
  

  Within two years, predicts James Smith, outgoing UK chairman of Shell, the company will go from being an oil business to a gas producer. “Estimates show that we could have enough gas to power the world for 200 years,” he said.

  So maybe 200 years is the Friedman Unit of fracking.

• From the Chesapeake site:
  

  Wind and solar facilities are not economic without taxpayer or ratepayer subsidies.

  From the USGS paper:
  

  From the mid-1970s to early 1980s, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funded the Eastern Gas Shales Project (EGSP) to develop new technology in partnership with industry that would advance the commercial development of Devonian shale gas (Schrider and Wise, 1980).

  Why is it that government funding is a partnership when given to fossil fuel companies but a subsidy when given to renewable energy companies?

• Last week I listened to the radio for the first time in a long, long while – probably over a year (see my “Free MP3 sites” blogroll!) I was tuned to a “morning zoo in the afternoon” type show for less than an hour. In that tiny, rare sampling of time I heard a Chesapeake commercial. A cheerful voice explained that no one cares more about the environment than Chesapeake, so if you own mineral rights why not give us a call? The fracking industry has been incredibly aggressive on this initiative.
• A minor complaint, but I don’t like seeing the word “brine” used to describe any part of the fracking wastewater. It makes it sound like something you might encounter when tromping around the Scottish highlands instead of the poisonous brew created by blowing a bunch of shit to smithereens deep underground and then hauling it to the surface.