Fracking Our Future: Western Resource Advocates

Source: Western Resource Advocates

We are entering a new era in oil and gas development in the West, and nowhere is that more evident than along the Front Range of Colorado. Increased drilling and production near communities and populated areas — much closer to population centers than in previous decades — are raising new questions about potential impacts to water supplies, air and water quality, noise levels, and property values.


This report addresses one of the most important issues: that of water availability for new oil and gas development in Colorado. Specifically, it addresses the questions, “How much water is required for new production, and where will that water come from?” Colorado is a semi-arid state with limited water resources that must be shared by a wide variety of water users. Western Resource Advocates (WRA) — along with communities, businesses, institutions, and citizens throughout the state — have concerns about water needs for oil and gas development and how that demand impacts our water resources. This report will inform elected officials, decision makers, communities, and families about oil and gas industry water needs and the potential impacts and tradeoffs that must be addressed. It provides specific recommendations that decision makers can use in creating policies to make sure that Colorado’s water resources are properly managed along with oil and gas development. 



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Priscilla Stuckey: A revolutionary law—for people and nature

tck tck tck

April 23, 2012

This is a guest post by Priscilla Stuckey, a finalist in the TckTckTck Rio Blogger Prize competition. If you would like to see this entrant as the official TckTckTck blogger at Rio+20 this June, please help spread the word by sharing this post on your social networks.

My friend in the next county lives near a gas well. It’s a fracking well, where millions of gallons of toxic liquid are pumped a mile underground under high pressure to crack shale and extract methane. Her county holds 18,000 oil and gas wells, and her town of Erie, Colorado, once a peaceful village with panoramic views of the Rocky Mountains, now has more methane in its air than Houston, Texas, with its oil industry.

My friend’s son asked her recently, “Why are they doing this to us?”

What can she say? That corporations don’t care they are poisoning the air and water and causingearthquakes? That local governments won’t protect their citizens?

Thomas Linzey is an attorney who thinks the problem goes far deeper:

Local people don’t have the power to say no

Current law elevates the rights of corporations over those of local people. “Under our present system,” hesays, “it is perfectly legal for a small number of people within a corporation to override whole communities.”

Continue reading...

Crew Stops Flow of Gas at Well Blowout - Residents Evacuated

Source: WyoFile
April 27,2012

Natural gas is no longer venting from the Combs Ranch Unit 29-33-70 1H well north of Douglas as of 11:05 a.m. today (Friday), according to a state official.

Well control specialists Boots & Coots and oilfield services company Halliburton had initiated well-plugging efforts at 9:25 a.m. today at the Chesapeake Energy (NYSE:CHK) drilling location 10 miles north of Douglas, according to the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (WOGCC). The well had been venting gas since a blowout on Tuesday afternoon.

Chesapeake is one of several operators testing the Niobrara and other deep formations in the southern Powder River Basin for shale oil potential. The rig is owned by Canadian-based Trinidad Drilling (TSX:TDG).

“At 11:05 am April 27 OGCC field inspector reported that pumping of drilling mud continues into the Combs Ranch well and that the natural gas venting to the atmosphere as ceased, approximately 68 hours after the loss of well control and venting of natural gas occurred,” commission supervisor Tom Doll said in a prepared statement this morning. ” I will get another report before 2:00 pm today confirming the time venting ceased and the duration.  It is expected by then that the well capacity should be filled with drilling mud.”

No workers were injured in Tuesday’s blowout, according to company officials. The incident occurred at about 4 p.m. Tuesday as a crew was installing steel casing. Venting occurred at the mouth of the well below the rig. According to Chesapeake, the well also spewed oil-based drilling mud, which is mostly contained on location.

Well control specialists Boots & Coots (a division of Halliburton) was on location and prepared to implement plugging operations on Thursday morning, but had to delay the operation due to variable wind conditions that day, Chesapeake spokeswoman Kelsey Campbell told WyoFile. No local fire crews are on hand, said Converse County Emergency Management coordinator Russ Dalgarn, because Boots & Coots is prepared to fight a fire if there is an ignition.

Approximately 50 of the 70 residents living within a 2.5 mile radius of the Chesapeake well had voluntarily evacuated their homes on Tuesday evening.

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Fracking Our Way to a Toxic Planet

Mother Jones

By Michael T. Klare

April 2, 2012

When corporations roll back environmental protections to exploit our natural resources, they're also exploiting us

This story first appeared on the TomDispatchwebsite.

The "curse" of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land. Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet's twenty-first-century "new Saudi Arabia" for "tough energy"—deep-sea oil, Canadian tar sands, and fracked oil and natural gas. But here's a question no one considers: Will the oil curse become as familiar on this continent in the wake of a new American energy rush as it is in Africa and elsewhere? Will North America, that is, become not just the next boom continent for energy bonanzas, but a new energy Third World?

Once upon a time, the giant US oil companies—Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco—got their start in North America, launching an oil boom that lasted a century and made the US the planet's dominant energy producer. But most of those companies have long since turned elsewhere for new sources of oil.

Eager to escape ever-stronger environmental restrictions and dying oil fields at home, the energy giants were naturally drawn to the economically and environmentally wide-open producing areas of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America—the Third World—where oil deposits were plentiful, governments compliant, and environmental regulations few or nonexistent.

Here, then, is the energy surprise of the twenty-first century: with operating conditions growing increasingly difficult in the global South, the major firms are now flocking back to North America. To exploit previously neglected reserves on this continent, however, Big Oil will have to overcome a host of regulatory and environmental obstacles. It will, in other words, have to use its version of deep-pocket persuasion to convert the United States into the functional equivalent of a Third World petro-state.

Continue reading... 'Welcome to the Third World Energy'

The formula for making Canada and the US the "Saudi Arabia" of the twenty-first century is grim but relatively simple: environmental protections will have to be eviscerated.