Embedded Files
And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
Genesis 1:28
And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you.
Leviticus 18:28
40 acre well spacing http://www.un-naturalgas.org/
BP: Halliburton Destroyed Key Gulf Oil Spill Evidence
CAIN BURDEAU 12/ 5/11
NEW ORLEANS - BP in a high-stakes court filing is accusing Halliburton of destroying damaging evidence about the quality of its cement slurry that went into drilling the oil well that blew out last year and caused the nation's worst offshore oil spill.
On Monday in a New Orleans federal court, BP accused Halliburton of having intentionally destroyed evidence about possible problems with its cement slurry poured into the deep-sea Macondo well about 100 miles off the Louisiana coast. An oil well must be cemented properly to avoid blowouts.
Also in the court documents, BP accused Halliburton of failing to produce incriminating computer modeling evidence. Halliburton says the modeling is gone.
BP asked a judge to penalize Halliburton and order a court-sponsored computer forensic team to recover the missing modeling results.
Re-cycling Drilling Waste in PA
July 25, 2011 by gdacc
1. Pollution of your well (two wells?). How did this show up?
Bohlander: We have two wells on the farm (190 acres). We had a detailed baseline water testing done on both before any of the gas activity happened in our area. We subsequently have had another 6 or so tests done on these wells. It is crucial to have certified baseline testing done prior to any activity by gas companies or they will claim there is no proof they are the cause and argue it was a pre-existing condition. We also retained a very competent hydrologist (who has the gas company clients) who was the plaintiffs hydrologist in the Dimock, PA contamination (highlighted in the movie Gasland). The well for the barn/and original farmhouse was so contaminated with methane they thought it would explode so the well pump was disconnected for six months and water was trucked in by the gas companies for the animals, and spring water for the humans!
2. The operations end up being more extensive than anticipated. The “pads” are large, and end up being used for other operations.
Bohlander: Gas companies are major deceivers. They do this many ways. One is using land agents that are not their employees so that they can claim “we never said that ..they did”
Most all the neighbors were told that the gas wells would be drilled, it would take 3 months or so, and then land would be restored to earlier state. In reality this is what happens. They excavate a pad obliterating the natural terrain, hauling in 100’s of trucks of stone, gravel, etc. Once the pad is completed, they only drill 2-4 actual gas wells of what ultimately are likely going to be 12 or so on that pad. They may not frack the drilled wells immediately, but wait sometimes a year. The intention is to refrack over and over the same drilled wells. They are now claiming there is 60 years of gas here. Simultaneously, although not on all pads, they use the pads for other things such as equipment storage, frack water storage, and the worst: frack water recycling which we have three in our neighborhood and 2 are 10 year permits (one is in the review process, 9 days to go). These are REGIONAL frack water recycling operations bringing in dirty radioactive brine from 15 miles away or more, operating 24/7 with extensive noise, lights and traffic. DEP is way behind on enforcement. The neighbors are the enforcers, but it is David vs. Goliath (the gas companies). After four years now, I have not seen one well pad restored back to the original state. The stated plan by the gas companies is that there will be one well pad every 50 acres. If the well pad is 10 acres, 20% of our surface land area will be a perpetual well pad.
3. Extensive light pollution due to 24/7 operation.
Bohlander: Re frack water recycling: They power huge lights that light of the pads for the whole night. They don’t use street electric but generators which contribute to the noise. The trucks have large pumps that due to the volume of 5200 gallons per truck are large motors, the trucks endlessly are using their backup safety beepers, horns for instructions to the ground crew, etc. The three sites in our neighborhood will generate 800 trucks a day, 1600 with return trip passes.
The gas drilling when it goes on makes it almost impossible to sleep. 24/7, 7 days a week.
4. Extensive trucking.
Bohlander: The gas companies make new roads over smaller older roads to accommodate their extensive traffic. The state allows them to exceed the weight limit of the road by paying some fee or posting a bond. The small country road in front of our farm is now elevated 3 feet in the air from normal ground level. Certain roads are used as main arterial roads after they have been rebuilt –this happened to ours. The trucks are hauling huge amounts of gravel, fill, fresh water for fracking and the dirty brine water out, as well as all the equipment for the drilling process. Each well on the pad uses 5 million gallons of water. 60% flows back and is recycled, but removed from the site. Our road was destroyed initially and impassible. The gas companies then closed 10 mile stretches of the road for months at a time as they began rebuilding it. One landowner could only get to and from his property with a four wheeler.
5. Feel free to add any other relevant details.
Bohlander: The gas companies have a very systematic playbook from the years of operating and polluting Colorado, Wyoming, Texas, etc. They have two sides: a friendly neighborly “give $35K to the fire company” and then a ruthless no-holds-barred side. Three times they threatened that in 24 hours they were going to stop trucking in water for the cows in our barn unless we agreed to things. These things include non-disclosure agreements, consent not to sue, etc. Read the book Collateral Damage. A lot of good environmental activist groups with websites and a lot of info. Many have been to our house. We were one of the first contaminated sites in this region from the drilling.
The public does not have any idea how bad the permanent environmental contamination is going to be. There has been major barium and radiation poisoning with some already. One not far from us is a 13-year- old girl with barium poisoning. One of our immediate neighbors’ daughters is having clumps of hair fall out and his dog got sick and parakeet died from drinking his well water. He abuts one of the frack water recycling sites.
Air pollution is the sleeping giant. Each well pad on an ongoing basis emits things into the air (like toluene) as the gas goes through a preliminary filtering process at the well pad. The absolutely worst are the gas compression stations for both noise and air pollution.
As you may know, the gas drilling is exempt from the Clean Water Act — we actually are more apt to be fined if manure is spread on the road, than these major infractions the gas company are doing. The environmental enforcement agencies only slap their wrists with fines. Cost of doing business to gas companies –easier to just pay the fine.
https://gdacc.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/re-cycling-drilling-waste-in-pa/
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Less Fracking Jobs Than Expected, Money Leaking Out of State
Posted on August 30, 2011 by Greg #
Even though the numbers are big, there are less fracking jobs than the industry predicted, and less wealth staying in Pennsylvania. It’s called “leaking” by economists – where money looks like it’s benefiting one area but is actually moving elsewhere.
The study, “Economic Impacts of Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania: Employment and Income in 2009,” bills itself as the first paper to look at not just the number of jobs and amount of revenue generated by drilling but also where that money is going and how quickly it’s being spent.
The jobs figure, as with previous studies, accounts for actual jobs created — front office jobs, drilling jobs, engineering jobs — as well as “induced” and “indirect” jobs, which are those not created by the industry itself but by the money the industry spreads around to local suppliers, hotels and restaurants, for example.
The study suggested that the industry generated around $3.1 billion in economic activity — $1.2 billion in income and $1.9 billion in “added value.”
Also of note was that locals who benefit from the gas play do not spend their lease and royalty checks immediately, meaning the money is not a direct, immediate benefit to the local economy. By surveying landowners in Bradford and Tioga counties, the study’s authors estimate that leaseholders save or invest about 55 percent of leasing proceeds and about 66 percent of royalty payments in the year they are received, instead of spending the money.
http://www.keystonepolitics.com/2011/08/less-fracking-jobs-than-expected-money-leaking-out-of-state/
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Frackers to Outdoor People: "Stay Inside"
"It is scary to me personally. I never would have guessed in a million years you would have that kind of danger here," Debbee Miller, a manager at a Pinedale snowmobile dealership, said Monday.
In many ways, it's a haze of prosperity: Gas drilling is going strong again, and as a result, so is the Cowboy State's economy. Wyoming enjoys one of the nation's lowest unemployment rates, 6.4 percent. And while many other states are running up monumental deficits, lawmakers are projecting a budget surplus of more than $1 billion over the coming year in this state of a half-million people.
Still, in the Upper Green River Basin, where at least one daycare center called off outdoor recess and state officials have urged the elderly to avoid strenuous outdoor activity, some wonder if they've made a bargain with the devil. Two days last week, ozone levels in the gas-rich basin rose above the highest levels recorded in the biggest U.S. cities last year.
"They're trading off health for profit. It's outrageous. We're not a Third World country," said Elaine Crumpley, a retired science teacher who lives just outside Pinedale.
Preliminary data show ozone levels last Wednesday got as high as 124 parts per billion. That's two-thirds higher than the Environmental Protection Agency's maximum healthy limit of 75 parts per billion and above the worst day in Los Angeles all last year, 114 parts per billion, according to EPA records. Ozone levels in the basin reached 116 on March 1 and 104 on Saturday.
The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality urged the elderly, children and people with respiratory conditions to avoid strenuous or extended activity outdoors.
The Children's Discovery Center in Pinedale set up indoor obstacle courses and turned kids loose on computers instead of letting them out on the playground in the afternoon.
High levels of ozone happen in the Upper Green River Basin only during the winter. They result from a combination of gas industry emissions, snow on the ground, bright sunshine and temperature inversions, in which cool air near the ground is covered by a layer of warmer air. Pollution builds up during the day and becomes visible along the horizon as a thin layer of brown smudge - smog - by midafternoon.
People have noticed the air just isn't as clear as it once was.
"It's like maybe when you're not wearing your glasses when you ought to be," said Miller, whose daily commute from her log home includes an eight-mile snowmobile ride just to get to a plowed road.
The gas industry has drilled hundreds of wells in the basin over the past decade and made the basin one of the top gas-producing areas in the U.S.
"Ultimately it comes down to accountability," said Linda Baker, director of the Upper Green River Alliance. "It doesn't seem to me the companies are being very accountable to the residents here." High ozone, she said, gave her a constant nosebleed three days last week.
Crumpley, 68, reported having difficulty on walks and showshoe trips. "You feel a tightness in your chest. You seem to be less able to hold in air. My eyes burn and water constantly, and I've had nosebleed problems," she said.
Drilling of new wells, routine maintenance and gas-field equipment release substances that contribute to ozone pollution, including volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides. Last week's ozone alerts weren't the first in the basin - they also occurred in 2008 and 2009 - but they were the first in more than two years.
Gas industry officials say they are working hard to curb smog by reducing truck traffic and switching to drilling rigs with pollution control equipment. They have also postponed well completions and routine maintenance until the ozone advisories have passed, said Shell spokeswoman Darci Sinclair.
"Shell has taken some meaningful measures to really reduce our measures. Some were voluntary and some were mandatory, but they've resulted in some significant reductions," Sinclair said.
Indeed, gas industry emissions that contribute to ozone pollution, as reported by the petroleum companies themselves, are down by as much as 25 percent in the Upper Green River Basin since 2008, said Keith Guille, spokesman for the Department of Environmental Quality. Gas production in the basin is up 8 percent over that time.
Gov. Matt Mead, state regulators and industry representatives met on Monday to talk about what else companies can do to control pollution.
"We talked about the effectiveness of these contingency plans. We've seen them, they are good. However, we haven't been able to prevent these exceedances," Guille said.
Crumpley said the warnings to stay indoors are hard to take.
"We're all outdoor people here. We don't live inside," she said. "That's why we chose to be here."
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associate
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LITTLE ROCK — Conway County Judge Jimmy Hart, who is president of the County Judges Association of Arkansas, says county leaders in the area of the Fayetteville Shale play in the north and central parts of the state are “caught between a rock and a hard place.”
On the one hand they are embracing the natural gas drilling that is going on in their counties, he says. It’s bringing millions of dollars and jobs to the region at a time when many areas of the country are struggling financially.
On the flip side, he says, the hauling of large equipment used in the drilling to the remote sites is wreaking havoc on many of their rural roads, and county judges are reluctant to press the issue with natural gas companies for fear of making them mad.
“It is a two-edged sword,” he said.
The problem is so bad in Faulkner County that Judge Preston Scroggin has come up with a plan for reducing the road damage, a plan he says won’t drive the drilling industry away.
“They’re going to tell us where these (drilling) pads are going, and we’re going to sit down with them and we’re going to map out a route on these roads and they’re going to stick to it,” Scroggin said last week.
Drilling industry vehicles that stray from the routes and cause damage to roads will then be required to pay for the repairs, he said.
Officials with the natural gas industry said last week they are willing to work with Faulkner and all other counties to try and reduce the damage done by their heavy equipment to rural roads.
“We’ve just got to try to get a handle on this, because when they come on some of these drilling sites they’re like an army of ants,” Scroggin said.
Scroggin said he has become frustrated with the continuing road damage, especially in the northern part of the county. In some cases, he has persuaded various gas drilling companies to return and repair the damages, but even that has become increasingly more difficult.
His county’s road crews can barely keep up with the normal repairs and maintenance, let alone the damages caused by the drilling equipment, he said.
“We have some roads that have been damaged for a year and a half and two years and have yet to be fixed,” he said.
“We’ve had some pads built and there are two or three different ways into it, and the contractors just kind of do what they want,” he said.
“We’re not going to charge anything and there will not be any permits,” Scroggin said. “All we want is for them to stay on the designated routes and fix the roads if they don’t.”
Hart said he likes the Scroggin’s proposal.
“What we’re needing to develop is a system where you say, “OK, this is the designated route you are going to use,’” Hart said. “We want to develop some protocols and also (want to see) the industry develop some regulations that say, ‘Contractor, this is the designated route, and if you get off that designated route and damage the road it’s (going) to cost you.’”
Marks Raines, spokesman for Chesapeake Energy, said his company is willing to work with the county officials.
“We’ve been doing that ever since we started … and we will continue to look at the designated routes, and if those are the routes they want to use then we’ll use them,” he said.
Raines also said his company is currently taking bids on a variety of road repair jobs on some of those rural roads.
“We know we’ve got several miles of roads that need to be repaired,” he said.
The damage isn’t limited to county roads, however.
Arkansas Department of Highway and Transportation Director Dan Flowers said recently that natural gas drillers has caused more than $200 million in damages to state highways in the region.
Trying to address that problem, the Arkansas Highway Commission in June authorized the department to use the agency’s revenue from the natural gas severance tax, about $33 million, to repair some of those roads.
The Legislature in 2008 raised the severance tax on natural gas from three-tenths of one cent per 1,000 cubic feet of gas to 5 percent of the sale price, minus the cost of treating and transporting the gas. The new rate took effect Jan. 1, 2009.
Ninety-five percent of the revenue goes toward road improvements, with 70 percent of that going to highways in the state, 15 percent to county roads and 15 percent to municipal roads. The remaining 5 percent goes to general revenue.
Revenue was projected at about $62 million during the first full year of the tax, but it has come in at about half that because of a significant drop in the price of natural gas.
“Nobody anticipated the kind of damage we’re seeing,” said department spokesman Randy Ort. “We don’t want to be negative because this is a huge boon to the state of Arkansas, but I don’t think anybody foresaw the amount of damage it was creating.”
Much of the $33 million from the highway department will be used to repair Arkansas
124, a major highway for natural gas industry vehicles, which cuts through Conway, Faulkner, Van Buren and Cleburne counties.“We’re tickled to death the highway department is about to spend more than $30 million on 124,” Scroggin said. “It’s in pretty rough shape.”
http://arkansasnews.com/2010/08/02/road-damages-caused-by-gas-drillers-irk-county-judges/
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2011 Press Releases
Tests Find Banned Carcinogen in Air Near Fracking Sites
Despite Admission by Drilling Company, Texas Regulators Refuse to Act
DENTON, TX, Aug. 23 - State air tests in two communities in the Barnett Shale gas patch found strong evidence that a cancer-causing chemical -- banned for most uses for more than 25 years -- was used in hydraulic fracturing of natural gas wells, according to a newspaper investigation. But despite the test results and the drilling company's admission that it used a banned biocide, state regulators have recanted their own findings and refuse to take action.
The Denton Record-Chronicle reported Sunday that air tests by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) found levels of 1,2-dibromoethane, or EDB, at least six times since December 2010 near natural gas facilities in the towns of Argyle and Bartonville. EDB, formerly used as a fumigant pesticide, was banned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1983 for all but minor uses after it was found to cause cancer and reproductive damage. Four of the six detections were over TCEQ's safe level for long-term exposure.
Community residents say they are sure the chemical came from natural gas operations because they took their own baseline samples of the air, water and soil before wells were drilled and found no EDB. Last December, a representative of the company operating three of the sites, Gulftex Operating Inc. of Dallas, told the Bartonville Town Council they had discovered they were using a "biocide that was . . . banned in commercial uses" and would find an alternative, according to an audio recording of the meeting by the Argyle-Bartonville Community Alliance.
In response to complaints by the Alliance, TCEQ officials at first said there was nothing they could do because they believed the chemical came from historical use of EDB before the wells were drilled. Then, two days before the newspaper prepared to publish its investigation, TCEQ backed off from its own air tests, saying they couldn't be sure they had found any EDB in the air. An agency spokesman said the results "may be due to the sampling and analytical procedure itself instead of actually being present in the ambient air."
"So their scientific testing is not very scientific?" asked Susan Knoll, a member of the community alliance. "If what they're doing is not accurate, then who in tarnation is supposed to protect us from what's happening in our community?" Detailed data from tests by the state and the alliance are on the alliance's website, and the group has appealed to the EPA for a federal investigation.
Sharon Wilson, an organizer with Earthworks' Oil & Gas Accountability Project, which works closely with the alliance, said the incident is another example of state regulators' inaction in the face of evidence of health risks of fracking.
"It looks like the TCEQ is trying to preempt a scandal by pretending it never happened," said Wilson. "Or else, they are admitting their science is unsound and we really don't know what's in the air we are breathing in the Barnett Shale. This is a scandal, plain and simple. If TCEQ can't clean up their act, then we need a new sheriff in town.'
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For More Information
Contact:
Susan Knoll, Argyle-Bartonville Community Alliance: (214) 282-6554
Gwen Lachelt, Earthworks OGAP, (505) 469-0380
EARTHWORKS | 1612 K St., NW, Suite 808 | Washington, D.C., USA 20006
202.887.1872 | info@earthworksaction.org | Privacy Policy
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America Needs Laws That Protect Clean Air, Water
By A.J. Otjen, Montana REP coordinator, and Jim DiPeso, REP vice president for policy and communications, published August 15, 2011 in the Billings Gazette
No matter how carefully energy companies go about their business, accidents like the Yellowstone River oil spill are inevitable.
Exxon actually has a good record for tracking their performance. We know this because there is a cop on the beat to make sure pollution control standards are set and enforced. It’s part of the social contract for maintaining a livable environment for everyone.
That was the thinking that went into the passage of laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act by bipartisan majorities a generation ago. Congress gave the job of enforcing those laws to the Environmental Protection Agency, established by President Richard Nixon in 1970.
It’s hard to understand the thinking behind efforts to weaken those laws — such as the appropriations bill pending in the House that is littered with “riders” that would throttle enforcement of anti-pollution laws. We don’t want to leave our children a huge debt but we also don’t want to leave them a dirty planet to inherit. Fiscal and environmental stewardship are two sides of the same coin.
Other provisions in the bill would impose disproportionate budget cuts on conservation and clean-water programs.
And the bill would do little to correct America’s fiscal imbalances. Indeed, if EPA were put out of business entirely, the budget savings would be equivalent to a mere two-tenths of 1 percent of the federal budget.
Here is what it would do in its present form:
Enact budget language that in effect would block limits on emissions of airborne toxins from cement kilns.
Likewise, block cleanup of mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants.
Chop a revolving loan fund for sewage treatment plant construction by more than half.
Cut a voluntary endangered-wildlife conservation program by 95 percent.
Reduce the Land and Water Conservation Fund 80 percent below last year’s level and 95 percent below the fully authorized amount of $900 million per year. These drastic cuts would affect Montana directly. The state has received $36 million for open space and recreation projects in all 56 counties. The fund has supported conservation of great Montana treasures, including the Meeteetse Spires on the eastern slope of the Beartooth Mountains, and conservation easements on the Rocky Mountain Front.
There are more such provisions. No one should argue that conservation and pollution control programs should be exempt from budget scrutiny. Taxpayers deserve assurances that they’re getting the most value out of every dollar spent on keeping air and water clean and on protecting America’s backcountry and wildlife heritage.
The appropriations bill under consideration, however, goes well beyond careful scrutiny. It has the appearance, instead, of a spasmodic attack, rooted in an unfortunate and inaccurate perception that protecting the environment is strictly for “liberals.”
That perception might be politically correct in Republican circles, but it doesn’t fit at all with the traditional conservative ethic of stewardship. Russell Kirk, the conservative thinker who was Ronald Reagan’s favorite author, once said, “Nothing is more conservative than conservation.”
Kirk’s ideas are rooted in the thinking of Edmund Burke, the statesman widely regarded as the founder of modern conservatism. Burke taught that society is an intergenerational contract, which imposes a duty on today’s generation to protect what it has inherited on behalf of generations to come.
That’s what stewardship is all about — taking care of what we have so we can pass on something good to our kids. That goes for the nation’s finances and it goes for the air, water, and natural resources that underpin our civilization.
Lawmakers who call themselves conservatives (and the corporations that support them) would do well to ponder those conservative values — before they weaken common-sense laws that could prevent the next Yellowstone River spill
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Alberta farmers and Big Oil and Gas exist side by side. One group works the land. The other drills underneath it, pumping up profits, tax revenues and fuel for energy hungry North America. But the natural gas industry also pumps up something else: a noxious brew as deadly as cyanide. One farming family claims it’s slowly killing them and as exploration and U.S. demand increase, it could harm thousands more……………
FLARE UP
By Andrew Nikiforuk
On the afternoon of October 18,1998, Darrell Graff went for a walkabout with his Sheltie cross, a dog named Tim, on his parents’farm near Vulcan in southern Alberta. The warmth of the sunny, blue-sky autumn day just invited a stroll on windswept grasses.
The 20-year-old, who raised sows and award-winning hay, was in good health and regularly went for lengthy rides (sometimes up to 60 kilometres) on his mountain bike. As Darrell trekked southeast, he heard a distant roar behind him that sounded like a jet airplane. He knew Crestar Energy Inc. was drilling for gas on his family’s land upwind (northwest) of the homestead. And, like most Albertans, he knew the oilpatch never rested on Sundays.
But the young farmer had no idea the company was going to ignite a 30-foothigh fl are that day to dispose of waste gases. A flare typically burns about as cleanly as a broken barbecue and incinerates between 65% to 85% of a well’s toxic contents. As a result, a noxious brew of hydrocarbons is sent floating downwind. In Alberta, farmers often compare the experience of breathing a fl are’s emissions to sucking on the end of a car’s tailpipe. When the cloud of gas from Crestar’s fl are drifted into Darrell’s path, be abruptly lost his breath and staggered. He pressed on, then doubled over. Gasping for air, he headed for home, hobbling from fence post to fence post. In the farmhouse, his mother, Barbara Graff, was alarmed by the noise. It rattled the windows and cracked the ceiling plaster.
After she found her son, ashen-faced, slumped in the doorway, she phoned the emergency number for Alberta’s Energy and Utility Board (EUB), the oil and gas industry’s regulator. Crystal Cassidy took the call and told Barb the firm shouldn’t be flaring. Minutes later, Crestar shut down the well. The next morning a Crestar employee chastised the family for not phoning his company first.
And that was just the beginning of a series of injustices that introduced the Graffs to North America’s relentless energy matrix.
Since 1986 Canada has steadily increased natural gas exports to the U.S. (see “Export Boom,”). Even though Canada has only 1% of global gas reserves, we now export more gas than any other country, with the exception of Russia. Every year, more than three trillion cubic feet of gas head south. That figure could rise to five trillion by 2010. In 2001. this highly critical export brought in a record $26 billion, an increase of 25% from the previous year. Most of the gas came from Alberta – about $2 million worth from the Graff’s own backyard.
To satisfy America’s growing demand for energy, industry will have to drill 200,000 exploration wells over the next 10 years, or twice as many as now dot rural Alberta. Each one will occupy a hectare of land and many will need roads, flares and pipelines. That level of activity guarantees more conflict between industry and landowners, and more toxic incidents like the one that has turned the Graff family upside down.
Barbara Graff doesn’t think most consumers “are aware of the human cost of a gigajoule of gas” and she’s probably right. Her family’s descent into hell not only illuminates the rapid pace of change in the natural gas business (the Graffs have now dealt with four companies), but also serves as a cautionary tale about the inability of a government to regulate its key revenue sources.
Alberta toxicologist Bob Coppock, who for years has monitored the tension between the agriculture and fossil fuel industries, asks a big moral question: “How does society manage a nonrenewable resource industry around an existing biological economy such as farming?” As the Graft’s will sadly attest, government is still searching for a just an answer.
Alberta is at the same time blessed and cursed by sour
gas. Blessed because it brings in $2 billion annually.
Cursed because of an abiding public-health controversy
Before their unwelcome encounter with Alberta’s golden revenue earner, the Graffs were a poster family for the province: diligent, frugal and God-fearing. They believed government served the majority and companies fixed their mistakes. The Graffs’ independent forefathers had lived off the rich prairie soil in southern Alberta for three generations. When Barbara and Larry married in 1970, they started with less than $1,000. Over the years the couple slowly bought seven quarters of land (one quarter equals 160 acres) and rented another five sections (640 acres) to grow grain. They built up a herd of 100 cows. Unlike most farmers, the Graff’s had money in the bank. “My wife and my family didn’t demand high living,” explains Larry, a quiet 58-year-old. “They sacrificed to keep the farm going.” Barbara, a soft-spoken woman with piercing blue eyes, loved her garden and small orchard. “We were almost self-sufficient and spent a lot of time at home,” she says. The Graff’s, however, had little experience with the oilpatch.
For much of the last 50 years, industry has mined the shallow gas fields of southeastern Alberta. But in the late 1990s these wells started to go dry. Exploration began moving west, toward the Rockies and the farming community of Vulcan.
The Graffs introduction to Big Oil began innocently enough when a seismic crew showed up on their land three months before Darrell’s collapse. Seismic involves cutting a straight line across a parcel of land. The crew generally explodes dynamite at intervals in 18-metre-deep holes in order to create measurable shock waves that outline gas deposits below. The seismic gang cut across Larry’s wheat crop and paid him for the damage. “They came through and everything went okay,” recalls Larry.
Later that summer, two Crestar “land men,” Toni Dawson and Jason Gouw, appeared on the family’s doorstep. They told the Graft’s about the origin of Alberta’s great wealth: every parcel of land comes with two titles and two rights. The Graft’s owned the surface title and the right to farm their topsoil. But Crestar, a midsized Calgary firm, had acquired the mineral rights and wanted to drill just 540 metres northwest of the Graff’s house into the Turner Valley Zone a patch of hellish-smelling gas some 1,600 metres underground.
The company offered the Graffs $17,000 for the inconvenience and an annual rent of $3,750. Larry noted that Darrell had a mild case of asthma, then tentatively asked if the well could he dug northeast of the house, so westerly winds wouldn’t blow fumes their way. The answer from Dawson and Gouw, says Larry, was no. (When contacted by National Post Business on this and other charges levelled by the Grafts, Dawson had no comment and Gouw could not comment because of litigation.) After much discussion, Larry reluctantly signed off on the well. Dawson also told the Graffs that the facility would be classified as a Level One sour well. That bit of news meant nothing to the family.
About 30% 0f the gas in Western Canada is subqualitv or sour, meaning it is dirtied by a high proportion 0f hydrogen sulphide (H2S), a highly corrosive substance that’s as poisonous as cyanide.
The Canadian government so admired its lethal qualities during World War II that it employed H2S in a secret chemical warfare program. It’s not hard to understand why: H2S targets the brain and lungs and starves them of oxygen. As a result, H2S can knock
a person dead in levels as small as 700 parts per million (that’s .007%). The heavy gas tends to settle in low areas, where people and cattle often dwell. The gas can also disarm a person’s defence system by destroying the sense of smell at 100 ppm.
Before sour gas can be sold or exported, industry must pump it through pipelines to one of 250 plants in Western Canada, where 97% 0f the sulphur is removed. No other area, with the possible exception of Saudi Arabia or Kazakhstan, is blessed or cursed with as much sour gas as Alberta.
The blessing is economic: each year the province’s 6,000 sour gas wells deliver nearly $2 billion 0f revenue in taxes and royalties. The curse is an abiding public health controversy
In the last 30 years, exposure to H2S leaks, flares or emissions has killed at least 34 workers in Alberta and British Columbia and disabled hundreds more (see “Gas Attacks,”).
In addition, sour gas incidents have downed cattle and forced the evacuation of aboriginal reserves. Thousands of rural Albertans living downwind of sour gas facilities have for decades persistently reported health problems and reproductive abnormalities among livestock.
Toxicologist Dr. Tee Guidotti calls H2S the "elephant in Alberta’s living room.”
Industry, however, has challenged any suggestion that chronic H2S exposures are anything more than a nuisance or a “perceived risk to human health and safety.” The Petroleum Communication Foundation, for example, notes that “people living near sour gas and flaring operations have much stronger views about the effects of sour gas and flaring than those who live in areas of little or no oil and gas activity’.”
For its part, the Alberta government hasn’t made much effort to protect the health of its citizens. It has refused to fund proper toxicology studies or to set up an H2S registry. In 1998, the EUB owned only one mobile air monitor and it typically arrived on scene only after winds had blown the evidence to Saskatchewan.
One reason for Alberta’s sluggish response is due to sour gas being such a complicated research topic. It mostly travels with other bad actors, such as benzene (a leukemia causer), carbon disulphide (a hormone-disrupter) and sulphur dioxide (a lungwrecker).
“There are probably additive and synergistic effects,” explains toxicologist Coppock. “I think that most toxicologists would say the potential for adverse effects at low levels is obviously there.”
A growing body of medical research from around the world agrees. Several European and U.S. studies indicate H2S (and its sulphurous companions) may be potent neurotoxins and fetus- aborters in levels as small as 1 ppm.
One 1999 U.S. study by Texas researcher Marvin Legator found that residents living downwind from a geothermal power plant (another H2S producer) showed central nervous impairment at levels of 10 ppb.
Studies on people who repeatedly inhaled 5 ppm of H2S or less downwind from a Los Angeles refinery noted they suffered permanent deficits in balance and reaction time or complained about dizziness, insomnia and fatigue.
Dr. Kaye Kilburn, an expert in chemically induced brain injuries at the University, of Southern California, doesn’t equivocate: “I think the evidence is pretty convincing that, even at levels as low as I ppm, H2S is insidious and cumulative and irreversibly damages the brain.”
Like most Albertans, the Graffs knew nothing about the science of H2S, or its troubling legacy. Nor did they know that nearly one quarter of Alberta’s population is routinely exposed to flare emissions including H2S. “We were naive,” says Barbara of the assurances by Crestar that all would he safe. To show their appreciation for the family’s cooperation, the company offered to send the Graffs on a weekend retreat to the mountains. “You are so nice to get along with,” declared one of the land men. But Crestar never delivered on its holiday promise. Instead, it resumed flaring the day after Darrell fell ill, and kept hard at it for the next week. “Well completion reports” filed by the company with the EUB reveal the family was repeatedly exposed to H2S. One report Amoung the symptoms alleged by the Graff family: dizziness, nausea, nosebleeds, paralysis, seizures, plus a tentative diagnosis of MS. stated the wind was blowing “traces of gas and ammonia towards residence.” Another found H2S odour still present and wind blowing towards farm.” The oil and gas industry and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency generally concede that a large flaring test well (the burning of gas to measure a well’s productivity) can release more pollutants in several days than can a large gas plant in a month. There is, though, no record of how much gas Crestar burned off during the period. But, as one former Crestar employee later admitted to this reporter at a public meeting: “We shouldn’t have done what we did that week. We were caught with our pants down.”
During the flaring, everyone in the Graff family experienced a variety of complaints: sore throat, dizziness, nausea, nosebleeds, headache. All are symptoms of low-level H2S exposure. One night, Larry found sooty particles the size of fish scales falling from the sky. Crestar employees said they had no idea where the particles came from. Two years later, the family read a University of Alberta study that warned smoky and sooty flares were highly toxic and “need to he avoided.”
With each flaring incident, Darrell’s health worsened. By January 1999, he was diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat and pneumonia. He also had trouble walking. His sister, Anita, a 23 yearold music teacher, experienced similar symptoms, as well as leg paralysis and fatigue. She kept tripping and couldn’t play the piano as well as she once did. Barbara lost 25 pounds and couldn’t sleep at night. She noted their symptoms often cleared when they drove away from the well site.
The following spring, Barbara lost 25% of her calving herd. Darrell’s pigs miscarried or aborted in record numbers. Anecdotal records kept by ranchers and farmers have associated livestock reproductive problems with gas-field emissions for nearly 50 years. Two recent Alberta studies confirmed the accuracy of the farmers’ accounts: beef cattle living downwind of H2S emissions did experience reproductive problems more often than those living upwind. A 2002 University of Alberta study also found that sulphur dioxide, a common byproduct of sour gas production, weakened the lungs and immune systems of cattle even at low levels.
As the family tried to sort out its health problems Crestar applied to upgrade its facility by the Graffs’ house to a Level Two well (level Four is the sourest). It also wanted to install a sour gas pipeline across the family’s land and put a new separator and flare stack at the well site. Larry protested the expansion and forced a public heating before the EUB. The regulator, thought the Graff’s, would surely protect their interests.
Funded largely by industry, the EUB has a mandate to regulate the province’s 1,000 oil and gas companies “in a manner that is fair, responsible and in the public interest.” Known as the Energy Resources Conservation Board during the era of former premier Peter Lougheed, it once earned respect with fair and toughminded decisions. But during the 1990s the board took conservation out of its name and now generally interprets the public interest as anything that helps sustain government revenue from the oilpatch. And with a shift to self regulation and cuts to staff, the EUB left landowners to fend for themselves,” explains Roger Epp, a political scientist at Augustana University College in Camrose. The EUB, now largely staffed by oilpatchers, approves as many as 8,000 wells a year. It rarely says no to industry. But in the fall 0f 1998, the board belatedly identified landowner concerns as “an emerging issue” after $10 million worth of industrial sabotage in Peace River and the murder of an oil executive in Bowden, Alta., by a disgruntled rancher.
In April 1999, three board members - two former oilmen and a retired firmer - heard the Graffs’ case. Crestar and its lawyer argued industry had a right and a need to develop resources from its wells. However, they also said the company would stop flaring near the Graffs and would introduce a safer, closed-production system. When it was their turn, the Graffs and their lawyer outlined the family’s growing health concerns.
By this point, Darrell was having seizures whenever he encountered well emissions. The Graffs wanted an end to the pollution and asked the board if Crestar could relocate the family to an area without sour gas developments.
Shortly afterwards the EUB issued Decision 99-13, a tersely worded ruling that noted “psychological stress, as well as odours, can act as triggers for asthmatic attacks.” But it also stated that “an absolute guarantee of no adverse human health effects” from wells “is not possible.” It then gave Crestar, the province’s fourth largest flarer of toxic gases in 1999, the go-ahead to expand.
There was one important condition: the company could not flare or release sour gas. The board also told the Graff’s it wasn’t in the farm relocation business.
After the ruling, Crestar’s Jason Gouw met Larry driving down a back road. According to Graft, Gouw, gloated over the decision and chimed, “We won the case!” Larry sadly replied that he now appreciated Wiebo Ludwig’s frustrations. At the time, the angry rhetoric of the bearded cleric, whose family had been gassed twice by H2S, dominated the news. Larry then broke into tears.
Gouw later went to the RCMP and reported that Larry had threatened the company. “We became fearful of Crestar after that day,’ says Barbara. The family decided that from then on they would only communicate with Crestar in writing.
Throughout that fall, activity at the well continued. There were more flares, more upsets. As Larry prepared to go to a relative’s funeral one day, he noticed another flare stack. He phoned the EUB to remind the agency of its April no-flaring ruling. Three hours later - Larry having given up on the funeral - an EUB official “reconfirmed” the board’s decision and ordered the flare stack be taken down.
Whenever the Graffs phoned in subsequent complaints, they say, EUB staff groaned. A few insinuated family members were chronic complainers and “the only ones having problems” with Alberta’s natural gas industry and, in particular, the aggressive tactics of its members.
Not so. In December 1999, for example, Crestar and Compton Petroleum Ltd. blasted a string of seismic test holes near Neel Roberts’ acreage just outside of Vulcan. As a consequence, the quality of the farmer and tax consultant’s three good water wells went down. ‘When Roberts’ hired hand warned the blasters that seismic often affected the water table, they replied,
“So what? Sue us!” Roberts doesn’t understand why the two firms didn’t offer compensation. “People here have had it with the oil companies,” says Roberts, who is suing the firms. “What happened to the Graffs is even more outrageous. And the most galling thing is that no one wants to take responsibility.”
Joanne and Ed Kettenbach, who have a farm near the Graffs, also experienced problems. Crestar, for instance, did notify them of its plans for a new sour well near their land but it did so nine days after it had been approved. That meant the Kettenbachs had missed the deadline to object. When Joanne, the mother of two boys, later raised questions about the health effects of flaring, one Crestar employee cheekily replied: “Well, why did you move here?” Another company employee told Joanne that the Graff’s were short of cash and were trying to milk Crestar. Joanne, who works in the energy sector as a consultant, was appalled by such cynicism.
“This is a terrible injustice,” she says, “and the government and the EUB and the company pretend nothing is happening.”
But bad things continued to happen. On January 13, 2000, a representative of Alberta Environment arrived to check out the Graffs’ complaints about being harassed by Crestar. On the way out the driveway, the civil servant accidentally ran over and killed Tim, the Sheltie cross. At the time, Darrell was sick in hospital on oxygen.
In June 2000, the Public Safety and Sour Gas committee visited Vulcan’s contentious gas fields.
The EUB had appointed the mission “as a result of increasing public health and safety issues and concerns regarding growth and operation of sour gas wells”
Although Barbara Graff was too sick to attend, other locals spoke directly, saying the EUB was a captive agency of industry that ignored the cumulative effects of gas drilling on landowners, and that “the companies were difficult and frustrating to deal with and arrogance and intimidation ... was not uncommon.”
That same month Crestar erected survey stakes for another three sour wells it wanted to put upwind from the Graffs’ farm. The family objected. But Crestar ignored them, later filing its drilling applications as “routine,” which indicated to the EUB there were no problems. As a result, Crestar quickly got new drilling licences and started to spud the first hole in August. When Larry saw the activity he frantically called Richard Secord, an environmental lawyer in Edmonton.
Secord, who has represented hundreds of landowners, including Ludwig, knew his way around the regulator. When he found out Crestar had withheld the Graffs’ objection from the board, he raised hell. The EUB, a stickler for protocol, pulled Crestar’s licence and suspended operations in mid-hole. Crestar protested, arguing the Graffs had an “agenda to continuously object to Crestar’s applications, raising the same unsubstantiated objections.”
That fall the company, which by then had been bought out by Calgary based Gulf Canada Resources Ltd. for $2.3 billion, took a different tack. It invited the family to take part in mediation as part of the EUB’s new “alternative dispute resolution” (ADR) process. By now the Graffs had sued Crestar for $5 million for loss of health and property. During the talks, the Grafts presented the findings of a Calgary respiratory specialist, Dr. Matthew van Olm. After four visits, van Olm concluded the Grafts had “no significant health problems or neurological symptoms until the winter of 1998.” He also said the family’s ill health was typical of the “neurotoxicity and general toxicity of hydrogen sulphide, ethane, methane, butane, roulette ... and other hydrocarbons.”
The ADR talks, which remain confidential, sputtered out in December without any resolution.
With that route a dead end, the EUB granted the family another hearing in March 2001. This time, EUB chairman Neil McCrank served as one of the three judges. (A retired corporate lawyer and a former oilpatcher were the others.) The family made a plea against further development upwind of their farm. Although Barbara Graff accepted Crestar had a right to exploit its mineral leases, she didn’t believe “they should take precedent over the rights of a human to breathe. Yet Crestar has taken away our most very basic rights to clean air, clean water, clean food and shelter.”
Anita Graft also addressed the board. The newlywed described her chemical sensitivities, fatigue, memory loss and inability to play the piano. She said the board and the oil companies could go home at night and enjoy their lives. She couldn’t. “A woman has the right to choose what happens to her body,” she said. “Well, those men have raped me of my health. They have ... deliberately robbed me of my freedom of choice .... And now these same men are before you asking your permission to repeat their actions.” The board also learned that Dr. Robert Bell, a University 0f Calgary neurologist, had tentatively diagnosed Anita and Darrell as having multiple sclerosis. MS is a degenerative disease of the central nervous system. “Turner Valley, home to the province’s oldest sour-gas field and the Black Diamond region, have the highest rate of MS in the country: 354 cases per 100,000 people. The national average is between 100 and 200 cases per 100,000.
Dr. Murray Young, a physician hired by GuIf/Crestar, contested van Olm’s argument that sour-gas flaring had caused Darrell’s and Anita’s disabilities and made them chemically sensitive to hydrocarbons. Young, who declined to be interviewed for this article, called the whole area of chemically induced allergies and injuries a “highly controversial field.” Yet he admitted that governments in both Germany and Sweden recognized chemical sensitivities triggered by hydrocarbons.
GuIf/Crestar later tabled a report suggesting another source of H2S - manure, in this case from the Graff’s farm. Yet the EUB decision noted that a technician had found “a sour gas leak that could he heard and smelled” at Crestar’s well.
In summer 2001, the EUB ruled Gulf/ Crestar should address “deficiencies in the company’s practices,” such as the sour gas leak, and make improvements. It then gave the Graff’s three months to sell their farm. After that period Crestar could start drilling again. Secord calls the decision ‘unprecedented .... It doesn’t seem like much. But you show me a EUB decision that even comes close to this. It was an admission the family had suffered.”
It took nearly three years, but the Graffs finally sold their home section for half of its appraised value this fall. The buyer will work the farm but not reside there. Barbara and Darrell are still looking for a safe place to live and often camp out in a 24-foot-long trailer 18 kilometres upwind of their farm to escape fugitive H2S emissions.
Anita and her husband have relocated to B.C. Darrell walks with a cane and frequently needs oxygen. Larry, whose dream was to die a farmer, despairs about the future: “This was home. Everything is in storage. This is a nightmare. Our farm, our way of life, everything is upset.”
When she’s not feeling sick, Barbara attends EUB public meetings as a silent witness to what she believes to be the board’s bias against landowners. She recently helped convince a group of ranchers to freeze seismic activity in a 100 kilometre area along the Rockies. She says she’s been in touch with more than 100 farmers who have been displaced or harmed by flaring or sour gas activity. Many now live in B.C. “I don’t want this to happen to another family, ever again,” she declares.
Since the Graff incident, the EUB has reviewed its sour gas policies and promised to implement all 87 recommendations made by the Committee on Public Safety and Sour Gas, tabled in December 2000. That report chastised the regulator on a host of issues, including inadequate monitoring, inadequate health data and industrial bias.
ConocoPhillips wants a solution. But it says the Graffs aren’t cooperating.
Nor will they accept machines that could monitor the air.
Since then the EUB has increased sour gas inspections, ordered a study on the industry’s effects on land values and is developing personal air monitors capable of detecting low levels of H2S. It has admitted the growth in demand for sour gas “has resulted, at times, in a conflict.” Of 28 facilities where it monitored H2S emissions in 2001, 32% were poisoning downwinders or, as the EUB put it, had “off lease” problems.
EUB chair McCrank refused to be interviewed for this article. When asked to address the displacement of the Graffs, board staff replied: “The scale and pace of development within Alberta sometimes leads to public concern .... These concerns translate into personal choice. People have the right to decide to buy and sell property” The Lethbridge Herald wasn’t impressed by such arguments.
An editorial stated: “Gulf/Crestar is running a southern Alberta family off its land, may in fact be poisoning its members as it does, and all the technical gobbledegook in the world isn’t going to make it seem even remotely right.”
Houston-based Conoco Inc. bought out Gulf Resources in May 2001 for $9 billion. It was just one of scores of mergers that saw the majority of Canada’s natural gas reserves pass into U.S. based hands. Peter Hunt, Conoco’s general manager of public affairs, describes the Graffs as an inherited problem and swears the company is a good neighbour. “A set of allegations have been made and we have to establish some facts,” he explains. He says the company wants to arrive at a solution but the Graffs, he adds, aren’t cooperating. Nor will they accept air monitors. Hunt, who seems genuinely concerned, confesses the issue has brought him to tears.
Barbara Graff says Conoco’s statements are disingenuous, noting that the family has repeatedly called for proper monitoring downwind of the well. (Farmers say industry, prefers to monitor upwind.) “When do the perpetrators of a crime dictate how a crime will he solved? Just where was the monitoring equipment on October 18? The real issue is injury and displacement. When you buy a company, you buy responsibility for resolving its mistakes.”
After years of denial and inaction, says Dr. Guidotti, government and industry have changed their attitudes on sour gas. “They have come to realize what they don’t know might hurt them.” He’s now working on a $15 million animal-health study he believes will answer questions about the toxicity of low-level emissions.
Alberta Health, however, has abruptly cancelled a parallel human-health study”. “They redirected the money to debt reduction,” adds Guidotti wryly.
Canada continues to export its gas with what some might call irrational exuberance. A third of a proposed 200,000 new gas wells will be sour. New drilling (an average of 10,000 wells a year) has not replaced what has been extracted since 1982, a state of affairs that worries the Canadian Gas Potential Committee, an independent group of Calgary geologists.
Earlier this year, it warned that dwindling Canadian supplies will not be able to meet rising U.S. demands within a year or two. That means higher prices and possible shortages for Canadians.
No one has yet contested the committee’s analysis. Several months after it bought Gulf - and nearly two years after Gulf bought Crestar - Conoco merged with Oklahoma based Phillips Petroleum Co. to become a $35 billion conglomerate.
The new firm, ConocoPhillips, is the world’s sixth largest energy company. In a letter to the Graffs, John Benton, a Conoco manager, said he couldn’t talk about the gassing of Darrell Graff due to pending litigation.
“Perhaps legal action wouldn’t be necessary if they, would honestly and openly discuss those events,” says Barbara Graft. The determined mother, a gentle Christian, now compares her encounter with the continent’s energy dynamic to being hit by a drunk driver in a car with a broken carburater. She says she’s not asking for much - just an export vehicle with a clean muffler and a sober navigator who respects human life.
The article appeared in the National Post Business Magazine October 2002, Page 94
© Andrew Nikiforuk
http://www.andrewnikiforuk.com/
http://www.saboteursandbigoil.com/
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