BP's Tony Hayward tells World Economic Forum of 'game changer' technique to serve world's energy needs.
Excitement in the industry over "unconventional" gas supplies has led to a wave of investment in America which Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive, believes could eventually spread around the world.
BP inherited a major stake in shale operations when it took over Amoco 12 years ago, but has added to that by spending $1.75bn buying shale interests from rival Chesapeake Energy in the summer of 2008. Last November BP showed its determination to extend the use of the techniques when it signed a production-sharing agreement with the government of Indonesia to exploit new reserves in Kalimantan.
by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica - April 7, 2010.
Series: Buried Secrets: Gas Drilling's Environmental Threat.
A federal study of hydraulic fracturing set to begin this spring is expected to provide the most expansive look yet at how the natural gas drilling process can affect drinking water supplies, according to interviews with EPA officials and a set of documents outlining the scope of the project.
The research will take a substantial step beyond previous studies and focus on how a broad range of ancillary activity – not just the act of injecting fluids under pressure – may affect drinking water quality.
The oil and gas industry strongly opposes this new approach. The agency’s intended research "goes well beyond relationships between hydraulic fracturing and drinking water," said Lee Fuller, vice president of government affairs for the Independent Petroleum Association of America in comments (PDF) he submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency.
See 22 page Powerpoint, Hydraulic Fracturing Applicability of the Safe Drinking Water Act and Clean Water Act Science Advisory Board Discussion.(2010).
Eighteen Republican members of the Colorado State Legislature Monday sent a letter (pdf) to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) demanding the federal agency refrain from regulating the natural gas drilling practice of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” no matter what a two-year EPA study of the process reveals.
See: Christoper Hayes. The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC: Fossil Fuel Follies, at 2:22.
"Across vast regions of the country, gas companies are using a technology called hydraulic fracturing to produce natural gas from previously untapped beds of shale."
Environmental concern about hydraulic fracturing is creating political obstacles for gas drilling companies.
The most immediate hazard from the national drilling bonanza, it is clear, involves contamination of residential drinking water wells by natural gas. In Bainbridge, Ohio, an improperly drilled well contaminated groundwater in 2007, including the water source for the township’s police station, according to a complaint filed this year. After building to high pressures, gas migrated through underground faults, and blew up one house.
Here in Dimock, about 30 miles north of Scranton, Pa., 13 water wells, including that of Ms. Switzer, were contaminated by natural gas. One of the wells blew up.
Powder Keg
The gas industry has been busy in Wyoming's prairies and grasslands, building thousands of miles of roads and sinking more than 10,000 wells in the past three years. But in the Powder River basin, ranchers are joining environmentalists to try to still the drills.
See: C-Span Book TV Oct. 2, 2004. Bushwacked: Life in George W. Bush's America. Chapter: "Dick, Dubya, and Wyoming Methane." (152)
Abrahm Lustgarten. Flypmedia. Issue 21. January 16-29, 2009. "Drilling for Truth". Page 11.
Includes photos, graphics and videos.
Experimental Flash based interactive online magazine. Last updated Fall 2009. On April 19, 2010, Flyp announced that it will close.
See: Drilling Wastewater Disposal Options in N.Y. Report Have Problems of Their Own - ProPublica
Cornell Daily Sun Editorial. Published: 2/16/10.
Peter Meinig, chairman of the Cornell University Board of Trustees and former associate of a large natural gas company, is at the center of many competing interests, and should not participate in any decisions the University makes regarding leasing land for natural gas drilling.
...In order to reach the most appropriate outcome for Cornell, and for the University to remain above reproach and second-guessing by the many interested parties, Meinig should recuse himself from all decisions and discussions regarding the leasing of land for natural gas drilling.
New York Times Editorial. Published: October 16, 2009.
Regulators must amend the rules to bar drilling in the New York City watershed: a million acres of forests and farmlands whose streams supply the reservoirs that send drinking water to eight million people.
Accidental leaks could threaten public health and require a filtration system the city can ill afford...“fracking” has been implicated in hundreds of cases of impaired or polluted drinking water supplies in states from Alabama to Wyoming.
New York Times Editorial. Published: November 2, 2009.
Among the many dubious provisions in the 2005 energy bill was one dubbed the Halliburton loophole, which was inserted at the behest of — you guessed it — then-Vice President Dick Cheney, a former chief executive of Halliburton.
It stripped the Environmental Protection Agency of its authority to regulate a drilling process called hydraulic fracturing. Invented by Halliburton in the 1940s, it involves injecting a mixture of water, sand and chemicals, some of them toxic, into underground rock formations to blast them open and release natural gas.
Hydraulic fracturing has been implicated in a growing number of water pollution cases across the country. It has become especially controversial in New York, where regulators are eager to clear the way for drilling in the New York City watershed, potentially imperiling the city’s water supply. Thankfully, the main company involved has now decided not to go ahead.
The safety of the nation’s water supply should not have to rely on luck or the public relations talents of the oil and gas industry. Thanks in part to two New Yorkers — Representative Maurice Hinchey and Senator Charles Schumer — Congress last week approved a bill that asks the E.P.A. to conduct a new study on the risks of hydraulic fracturing. An agency study in 2004 whitewashed the industry and was dismissed by experts as superficial and politically motivated. This time Congress is demanding “a transparent, peer-reviewed process.”
Philadelphia Enquirer editorial. Published: Mar. 22, 2010.
...Representatives of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, an industry trade group, point out that not a single case of groundwater contamination has been linked to their drilling technique, called hydraulic fracturing or "fracking."
It involves pumping up to three million gallons of water (per well), combined with sand and chemicals, more than a mile underground to shatter the rock and release the gas.
But fracking does carry potential risks to the environment. Those concerns are causing government officials elsewhere to proceed cautiously on Marcellus drilling. New York state has imposed a moratorium on Marcellus wells until it completes an environmental-impact assessment.
Tempers and dangers are ramping up in the gas field we call home.
"Ah, for the good old days in the springtime of the Barnett Shale boom, when the words “royalty check” were enough to get homeowners to sign away their mineral rights and everyone still thought the 3 a.m. screech of drilling equipment was just the sound of money.
When no one thought that wells could possibly send property values tumbling or turn well water brown, before drilling sites and pipelines had started leaking, burping, and blowing up. When there were no neighborhood groups ganging up to demand higher royalties, tighter controls, or — say it ain’t so — trying to stop wells outright...
...Even gas company officials admit that the boom is drawing more and more inexperienced workers to drilling sites. “Veteran crews are being divided up and filled with people who have no experience whatsoever working rigs, laying pipe, and such,” said pipeline company manager Jerry Holsworth.
And so accidents are increasing. At least two people have been killed in Barnett Shale operations thus far.
Pennsylvania environment officials are racing to clean up as much as 8,000 gallons of dangerous drilling fluids after a series of spills at a natural gas production site near the town of Dimock last week...
...The incident is the latest in a series of environmental problems connected to Cabot’s drilling in the Dimock area. Last winter, drinking water in several area homes was found to contain metals and methane gas that state officials determined leaked underground from Cabot wells. And in the spring, the company was fined for several other spills, including an 800-gallon diesel spill from a truck that overturned.
Site includes extensive background information.
Flash format article featuring accounts of local communities confronting life with gas drilling and how real local jobs are not being created without community pressure, despite industry claims about job creation.
It will be interesting to see how the environmentally sensitive French react to the widespread use of the controversial hydraulic drilling technology known as “fracking” on their home turf.
Toreador Resources, a Texas oil company, has been awarded drilling rights to 750,000 acres of the Paris Basin, its licenses stretching for hundreds of kilometers from St Dizier, on the edge of the Champagne region, to Montargis, just south of the royal palace of Fontainebleau according to an article in The Australian.
Craig Mackenzie, chief executive of the Dallas based Toreador Resources is reported as saying the company wants to start drilling three pilot wells early in 2010, at a cost of US$30million, and to be producing oil from them by the end of the year.
Gas drilling and toxic terrorists: New York City Mayor says risks of gas drilling 'unacceptable'.
PA farmers Wayne and Angel Smith's spring water smells like fuel after Spectra Energy's operations.
According to the Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy group based in Washington, drilling companies are side-stepping a permitting requirement for the use of diesel fuel in their fracturing fluids by using similar petroleum distillates that contain the same toxins as diesel, but require no permitting.
The report also cites evidence that drilling companies continue to inject diesel fuel underground without the proper permits.
Includes public comments.
As a City Hall-named committee charged with designing the study began its discussions Wednesday, representatives of Chesapeake Energy, Devon Energy and XTO Energy insisted that any findings of contaminated air around natural gas facilities be examined "in context."
That's how the gas industry's PR machine tries to deflect any blame for poisonous air. The argument goes like this:
Well, yes, benzene causes cancer. And yes, benzene is one of the hazardous chemicals that can be brought to the surface and escape into the air as a result of natural gas drilling and related activities. But measurable levels of benzene can also come from many other sources, like the gasoline station down the street or the road paving project two blocks away. You can't blame it all on us.
That's good spin, just enough truth in it to throw the gullible off guard.
A boom in natural-gas drilling in Pennsylvania could bring millions of barrels of salty toxic waste into Ohio.
That's a warning Ohio's oil and gas industry and environmentalists are sounding as hundreds of deep wells are drilled into Marcellus shale.
Tom Stewart, vice president of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association, and Jack Shaner, lobbyist for the Ohio Environmental Council, predict that Pennsylvania companies will soon truck their well wastes to Ohio, where brine is injected into 159 privately owned, state-regulated disposal wells. It is illegal to dump brine in Ohio streams and rivers.
Stewart said, "I have a big problem that that (well) capacity isn't overloaded by out-of-state water."
Shaner said, "We're looking at a wave of toxic brine headed into this state."
That's why both support a bill in the Ohio legislature that would create a 20-cent-per-barrel disposal tax on brine shipped in from other states. That's four times as much as a proposed 5-cent-per-barrel tax on Ohio brine.
