Come One, Come All, to the mass
gun rally at Doodles at 2 p.m. today (Saturday the 22nd). Yes, the civil rights of guns are being threatened
and therefore there will be a rally to raise public support for the rights of
guns. Rumor has it that there will be an
altar constructed on which will be laid a gold-plated AR-15 for everyone to bow
down and worship. If the services of a
priest can be obtained, there might even be a blessing of guns, with a call to
God above to rain down his blessings on all gun owners everywhere, as surely
they are His anointed and are doing His work by ensuring that there will be a
veritable arsenal in the hands of every able-bodied (and perhaps not so able-bodied)
man, woman and child in the land. The
mantra to practice before attending is, “Don’t let them take our guns! Don’t let them take our guns.” For surely we know that although “they” have
never said a word about taking our guns, and have indeed insisted that they
have no intention of taking our guns, they have every intention of doing so as
soon as they can round up a few hundred thousand more jack-booted thugs to
invade our homes to do just that. Oh,
and don’t forget the password for admittance to the event, which is the answer
to the question: “What is the most important
amendment to the U. S. Constitution?”
Saturday, June 22, 2013
Monday, May 20, 2013
Fracking in backyard in WV
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
You Have to See It to Believe It: What It's Like to Have Fracking in Your Backyard
April 15, 2013 |
This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org [3].Ed Wade’s property straddles the Wetzel and Marsh county lines in rural West Virginia and it has a conventional gas well on it. “You could cover the whole [well] pad with three pickups,” said Wade. And West Virginia has lots of conventional wells — more than 50,000 at last count. West Virginians are so well acquainted with gas drilling that when companies began using high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing in 2006 to access areas of the Marcellus Shale that underlie the state, most residents and regulators were unprepared for the massive footprint of the operations and the impact on their communities.
When it comes to a conventional well and a Marcellus well, “There is no comparison, none whatsoever,” said Wade, who works with the Wetzel County Action Group [4]. “You live in the country for a reason and it just takes that and turns it upside down. You know how they preach all the time that natural gas burns cleaner than coal; well, it may burn cleaner than coal, but it’s a hell of a lot dirtier to extract.”
To understand what’s at stake, you have to understand the vocabulary. Take the word “fracking” for example. When people say it’s been around since the 1950s, they are referring to vertical fracturing, but what’s causing all the contention lately is a much more destructive process known as high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing. Or they’re using "fracking" in a very limited way. “The industry uses [fracking] to refer just to the moment when the shale is fractured using water as the sledgehammer to shatter the shale,” scientist Sandra Steingraber told AlterNet [5]. “With that as the definition they can say truthfully that there are no cases of water contamination associated with fracking. But you don’t get fracking without bringing with it all these other things — mining for the frack sand [6], depleting water, you have to add the chemicals, you have to drill, you have to dispose of the waste, you have drill cuttings. I refer to them all as fracking, as do most activists.”
The potential impacts that go well beyond the moment the well is fracked are mammoth. What has been most discussed is the concern that the chemicals used in the fracking process, as well as naturally occurring but dangerous substances underground like arsenic, heavy metals and methane, can migrate back to the surface with water through faults, fissures and abandoned mines. That’s deeply concerning, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The footprint of the well site, which now often includes freshwater or wastewater ponds and tankers full of chemicals, has grown expotentially from the size of conventional wells -- they certainly aren't the size of a few pickup trucks. Here's an aerial view of a new home, built in rural West Virginia that is now surrounded by a fracking operation after the owner's neighbor leased to a drilling company.
(Photo credit: Robert Donnan/ Marceullus Air)
Fracking takes rural communities and turns them into industrial zones — and citizens have little recourse. Thanks to the so-called “Halliburton Loophole” in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, fracking is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act and there are exemptions also in the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. In West Virginia, a state with a long history of energy extraction, industry has a controlling hand in local and state politics and thus far, seems to be calling the shots. To make matters worse, many properties had their mineral rights separated over a century ago. So, people may own their homes and properties, but not the minerals underneath. Their property can be destroyed by drilling and they will have no financial gain.
Or, they can lose virtually everything, simply by living next door to someone who does lease. A story by WDTV reporter Zach Maskell gives a glimpse of what life is like for those people. Here’s his interview with Leanne Kiner who lives in Harrison County, West Virginia.
As if the disruptions to her quality of life and property values weren’t bad enough, Kiner’s water well became contaminated with unsafe levels of arsenic. She came home from work one day to find that, without any notice, someone working for the drilling company had disconnected her house from her well and installed a large “water buffalo” tank outside her home. Companies have been known to supply water tanks to affected residents (although usually with no admission of guilt) temporarily, and then leave the residents high and dry months or years down the road, even when water pollution problems persist.
Water is a big and multifaceted issue when it comes to fracking. Horizontal wells in the Marcellus can take upward of 5 million gallons of water during fracking. The wells can be fracked multiple times and there can be as many as 10 wells drilled on a single well pad. Multiple that by the thousands of wells that have been fracked thus far and that's a lot of water. All those hundreds of millions of gallons are often taken from local streams and creeks.
Then there is the wastewater to contend with, beginning with “drilling brine” which can contain high levels of salts, as well as arsenic, mercury, chromium and naturally occurring radioactive materials. What to do with this wastewater? “In the past, the drilling brine, with the cuttings have been put in pits, and after the solids are settled, the liquid has been sprayed on the land,” reports [7] the West Virginia Sierra Club. “If too concentrated it kills vegetation, so even if sprayed thinly enough not to be deadly, it cannot be helping the land. The pits with remaining solids and plastic liner, if used, are buried on site.”
There is also the wastewater from the fracking process, and what's called "produced water," which flows from the well as it it producing. This can contain some of the toxic mix of chemicals (which most companies won’t reveal) that doesn’t remain underground. WV Sierra Club reports [7], “Because of the increased volume of wastewater to be disposed of from Marcellus wells, the WV DEP [Department of Enivornmental Protection] is asking drillers to dispose of it by injection in underground injection wells.” Much has been written about the potential risks [8] (including earthquakes) from this manner of disposal and some companies have been nabbed for illegally dumping [9] this toxic wastewater into storm drains, creeks and other waterways. And there have been reports of it dumped on roads.
On May 26, 2012 Christina Woods was mowing the lawn when a truck dumped water on her road for dust suppression. Christina and her husband Wayne had made numerous complaints about the road condition since fracking operations began. At times, the dust from constant truck traffic had made it impossible for them to even open their windows or sit outdoors. After the truck went by on May 26, Christina Woods immediately got a sore throat and her tongue felt numb. They quickly realized it wasn’t clean water that was being sprayed on the road. “The emergency response team didn’t come until three days after,” said Wayne, “and the morning they did the air quality samples it rained.” The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) did find that the company, Jay-Bee, had sprayed “wastewaters from natural gas production” on their road and issued a fine.
But water is just one of the issues. For those living near fracking sites, life itself is drastically changed. Diane Pitcock and her husband and son moved from near Baltimore, Maryland to a rural haven of over 100 acres in New Milton, West Virginia six years ago. Their timing couldn’t have been worse. “It's so sad because we never moved here expecting this,” said Pitcock, who has started an organization called West Virginia Host Farms Program [10] to call attention to what is happening in her community. Her neighbor leased his property to Antero Resources and now the Pitcock’s land abuts a drilling site known as the Ruckman well pad of the Erwin Valley Project. “It’s four separate well pads on his land, having 27 individual permits for horizontal legs,” she explained.
In July, the forest at her property border was so think you couldn’t see the sky, she said. Three weeks later the forest had been cleared with earthmovers and much of it burned in massive piles.
Here’s Pitcock's husband viewing the scene from their property line in August.
(Photo credit: Tara Lohan)
By March, this is what the Pitcocks saw from their property line:
And this was a sand truck traveling too quickly:
West Virginia Host Farms posted this photo of a truck reported to be carrying friction reducer (part of the fracking cocktail) that ended up in Meat House Fork Creek not far from the Pitcocks in Doddridge County:
Truck traffic is also a nightmare for residents. Another Doddridge County resident, Maryanne Daggett took this picture of the line of trucks, delaying traffic, headed for construction of a well site near her home:
Truck traffic, accidents and road damage is now something residents endure daily. It's not just inconvenient, it's dangerous. "The overcrowded highways and dangerous fracking trucks already have crushed and killed two children, ages 6 and 10, in northcentral West Virginia," wrote [11] Charlotte Pritt, a former state senator and delegate from Kanawha County, in an op-ed.
The entire process is dangerous. Wade took this photo of an explosion at a well site on Sept. 9, 2010:
"It burned for something like nine days," said Wade. "But the DEP said there were no cases of air pollution. You believe that?"
Explosions have occurred at well sites and pipelines in West Virginia; the most recent occurred just days ago [12] in Tyler County, taking the lives of two workers and injuring another.
"Many of these dangers, risks and deaths could have been averted if the Legislature had acted on behalf of the citizens rather than the fracking industry," wrote [11] Pitt. "The West Virginia Legislature must pass legislation to protect us, or West Virginia will become the dumping ground of the hazardous, toxic and radioactive waste of the entire Marcellus Shale area. I have been calling my legislators, good people who have made some outrageously bad decisions, and asking them to make amends by protecting me and the other citizens of our state. For the sake of your property, health, children and grandchildren, you must call yours as well. We need a moratorium on hydrofracking now until our legislators have an opportunity to study the costs and impacts, but also to have dialogue with their constituents."
A moratorium on fracking in West Virginia seems a long way off, but as Wade said, "People think they can't do nothing against big money. And some are gaining from it -- they're trading their livelihoods and their health and everything else for it. They're too damn blinded by the money to see it. I prefer to be poor and have clean air and clear water. You sacrifice something for a little gain and you really need to ask yourself: is it worth it?"
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/environment/you-have-see-it-believe-it-what-its-have-fracking-your-backyard
Arrogance Indeed
Arrogance indeed.
This man dares to assume the mantle of the presidency, while black. Dares to try to govern, while black. Dares to try to
push his agenda, while black. Dares to stride confidently across stage as
though he belongs there, while black. Dares to survive a week of scandal—three of
them, no less—with no decrease in his approval rating, while black. And all while
standing under an umbrella held by a white Marine, while black. Sounds like uppity to me.
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Bombing North Dakota
[Sorry, I couldn't get photos and charts to embed. this story catches my interest because I lived in North Dakota for seven years, in the 80s. I cannot believe what I am hearing.]
Bombing North Dakota
Living amid the Bakken
Oil Boom
Then the oil wells
arrived. They began appearing in 2006, and within just a few years dominated
the area landscape. Today at least 25 oil wells stand within two miles of the
Jorgensons’ home, each with a pump, several storage tanks, and a tall flare
burning the methane that comes out of the ground along with the petroleum.
Like most people in
North Dakota, the Jorgensons only own the surface rights to their property, not
the subsurface mineral rights. So there was nothing they could do when, in May
2010, a Dallas-based oil company, Petro-Hunt, installed a well pad on the
Jorgensons’ farm, next to a beloved grove of Russian olive trees. First, heavy
machinery brought in to build the well pad and dig a pit for drilling wastes
took out some trees. Then the new hydrology created by the pad drained water
away from the olives, while others became exposed to the well’s toxic fracking
fluid. Some 80 trees were dead by the summer of 2011.
On February 2, 2012,
drilling started on a second well even closer to the Jorgensons’ home. “The
smell of ammonia permeated the house,” Brenda says, “and the yard was thick for
quite a while too. The workers told us the smells came from corrosion
inhibitors and biocide.” Indignant, Richard called Governor Jack Dalrymple’s
office. A North Dakota health inspector arrived – but not until days later,
after the drilling had stopped and trucks had left, and when neither of the
Jorgensons were home. “We knew he’d come only because we found his card on our
door,” Brenda says drily. She tried contacting the county to see if they could
re-zone their land as industrial, which they hoped would lead to closer
regulation. County employees referred her to the North Dakota Industrial
Commission, which regulates oil drilling. When she got ahold of staffers at the
industrial commission, she was told she needed to talk to the county.
The chemical trucks
returned on February 9. Brenda emailed the governor’s office asking for air
quality monitors. There was no response. That night, their seven-year-old
granddaughter, Ashley, who lives on the same road less than a mile away, woke
up screaming from a headache. On February 10, the governor’s office called,
saying the governor would speak to the head of the Industrial Commission’s
Department of Mineral Resources, Lynn Helms. Nothing happened. The fracking
started on February 18. Brenda quit hanging out laundry to dry because the
clothes smelled so bad and the air burned her nostrils.
Then, in August of 2012,
the Jorgensons had their worst scare yet. Richard and Brenda had just finished
a long drive home from a funeral service when they found that the gas flare on
the well 700 feet from their house had gone out. They could smell the foul,
rotten-egg scent of hydrogen sulfide gas, and knew that along with it would be a
cocktail of methane, butane, and propane. The couple didn’t know what to do.
Petro-Hunt hadn’t given them an emergency number, and when they called the
company’s office no one answered and there was no way to leave a message. So
the couple threw open all the windows in their house, turned on fans, and left
to move their horses farther away from the gas line.
Brenda phoned me that
night. She was in tears and at wits’ end. “Who do you call?” she cried. “What
do you do?”
The Jorgenson’s
experience, dramatic though it might be, is not necessarily exceptional in
western North Dakota these days. In just five years North Dakota has gone from
a quiet agricultural state to a rapidly industrializing energy powerhouse. By
the middle of 2012 North Dakota was producing about 660,000 barrels of oil a
day, more than twice as much as just two years before. That number makes North
Dakota the second largest oil producing state in the United States, after
Texas.
All of the new oil is
coming from a vast underground deposit called the Bakken Shale that stretches
from North Dakota west into Montana and north into Canada. The US Geological
Survey estimates that the reservoir contains between 3 and 4 billion barrels of
recoverable oil, a figure that would put it on par with Alaska’s North Slope.
According to the USGS, the Bakken is the largest known oil reserve in the lower 48.
Unlike conventional oil deposits – which are found in liquid pools and flow
toward the surface when tapped – the “shale oil” in the Bakken is trapped amid
layers of rock roughly two miles beneath the surface of the earth. Oil
geologists have known about the formation since 1953. But the petroleum there
wasn’t recoverable until hydraulic fracturing technology was perfected in the
early aughts.
With the advent of
fracking, the oil rush into North Dakota has been relentless. Some 150
companies, both wildcatters and oil majors, are drilling up to eight
exploratory wells a day. In 2007, about 175 new wells were completed and
started to pump oil. In 2009, 450 new wells were in put into production. By
2011 the number of new wells completed doubled to 900.
North Dakota’s political
establishment – Democrats and Republicans alike – view the oil boom as a huge
success. Thanks largely to the new oil play in the Bakken, the state’s economy
is surging. More than 41,000 workers were hired in North Dakota between 2008
and 2012, and the state has the lowest unemployment rate in the country.
National leaders are pleased, too. All the oil pouring out of North Dakota has
markedly improved US energy security. As recently as 2005, the US was importing
60 percent of the oil it consumes; today imports account for 42 percent of
consumption. “Kuwait on the Prairie,” is how one headline writer described the
Bakken.
But not everyone is
happy about the situation. Traveling across northwest North Dakota it is not
difficult to find farmers, ranchers, and Native Americans who are outraged by
what they are experiencing. Many North Dakotans view the oil rush as an assault
on their communities and the places they love. The current oil rush seems to
them different than the last oil boom that took over the state in the 1970s.
The petroleum in the Bakken Shale is what the fossil fuel industry refers to as
“tight oil,” or what environmentalists call “extreme energy.” Like the
petroleum locked in the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, shale oil is hard to get
at even with the most advanced technologies. All of the extra effort involved
in extraction means that Bakken oil has an especially heavy impact – on water
resources, on land use, on wildlife and habitat, on the fabric of communities.
The oil rush in North Dakota has turned life there inside out. As White Earth
rancher Scott Davis puts it: “We’re collateral damage.”
The anger some North
Dakotans feel toward the oil and gas industry is fueled by the feeling that the
situation is totally out of their control. In many instances, people say, the
oil companies haven’t been invited to drill – they’ve just invaded.
Owning a piece of land
is not the same as owning the rights to what is beneath its surface, the
mineral rights. Beginning in the 1940s, oil, coal, and gas companies approached
Dakota families and offered to buy the mineral rights of their properties. Many
people agreed; the possibility of development seemed remote and the payments
felt like free money. As a result, out-of-state investors and corporations own
the mineral rights to much of the land in the state. When the Jorgenson family
bought their most recent 1,000 acres, for instance, they did not have the
option to buy mineral rights; those rights had long since been sold to a broker
in Louisiana.
Between 2006 and 2009
oil companies approached mineral rights owners and offered $30 to $50 an acre
and 18 to 20 percent royalties for a lease “option” to drill on their land. A
typical lease option runs for three years, with the oil company having a second
option to renew it for another two years at the same price. The owner of the
mineral rights cannot refuse this renewal. If no drilling occurs during the
renewal period, the oil companies must renegotiate at market rates.
Between 2009 and 2011,
as the extent of the Bakken reserve became clear and the global price of oil
fluctuated around $75/barrel, oil companies radically increased the pace of
drilling. They did not want the option renewals to expire and thus be forced to
renegotiate the price at market rates, which by 2010 had skyrocketed to between
$1,000 and $3,000 per acre, depending on how near the land was to proven finds.
“People feel
powerless. The oil company is coming on your property. You push the monster
back, but at a certain point it’s gonna walk on top of you.”
As the drilling began,
farmers and ranchers discovered they had little say over what the oil companies
did. Long-established common-law tradition concerning “split estates” holds
that mineral rights are dominant over surface rights. If landowners decide not
to allow access for drilling, the drilling company has the right to sue – and
invariably wins. By landowners’ accounts, even modest requests for change, such
as the plea to move a well pad to the other side of a fence to allow for
calving or to move a well’s location to save a prairie wetland, are often
ignored. Oil companies tell landowners that “plans have been made” and that
it’s “too late” to change them.
When an oil company
builds a well pad (which can range in size from seven to 10 acres), farmers and
ranchers lose the use of that land. North Dakota law requires companies
exercising mineral rights to compensate landowners for that loss. But the
companies only pay fees similar to those asked for grazing cattle or growing
crops – usually no more than $45 per acre a year. There is no compensation for
losing the use of land adjacent to the well pad. Don Nelson, 48, a
second-generation wheat and hay farmer who lives near Keene, ND, says that when
a seven-acre well pad was built in the middle of a 20-acre field, the whole
piece of property became useless to him. “It’s not economical to farm around
it,” he says. Nelson still had to pay taxes on the entire 20 acres, and the
compensation didn’t cover his losses.
In 2011, North Dakota
began requiring oil companies to negotiate with surface rights owners who
claimed present and probable future damages to their land, but the state didn’t
require them to reach a settlement. Those landowners who have secured
settlements normally receive about $1,750 an acre per year in damages. One
White Earth rancher who refused to give her name because she worried about
“violent retaliation” by oil company workers (she said cattle in the area have
been shot by oil workers) says: “You either take the money or they take it [the
land] from you anyway by court order.”
“People feel powerless,”
says Derrick Braaten, a Bismarck attorney who represents surface-rights owners
who are battling oil companies. “The oil company is coming on your property.
You don’t have the ability to protect the land. You push the monster back, but
at a certain point it’s gonna walk on top of you.”
Farmers and ranchers
also find themselves struggling with new roads, dust, air pollution, and litter
that came with the industrialization.
The intrusion of fleets
of trucks on rural roads has degraded quality of life in western North Dakota.
From exploratory drilling through completion, it takes about a thousand truck
trips to frack a shale oil well. Rancher Don Nelson says that in his community
near Keene “people have stopped going to town on Saturday night. The truck
traffic makes it too risky.”
“Our people at the Ft.
Berthold reservation are literally being killed by oil companies,” says Kandi
Mosset, a resident of New Town and the climate campaign organizer for the Indigenous
Environmental Network. “We’ve suffered over a dozen truck-related deaths on our roads
since 2008.”
With thousands of
tractor-trailers hauling fracking fluids and drilling equipment across red-rock
gravel roads each day, dust has become a problem. It rises in plumes for
hundreds of yards, creating polluted, hazy skies that resemble those of Los
Angeles on a bad summer day. “If you have a post box on the side of the road,
it’s full of dirt,” says Walter Deville, a lifelong resident of Mandaree, the
major oil producing area on the Ft. Berthold Reservation.
Pat Hedstrup, a
second-generation rancher in her forties who lives west of Dickinson, says the
air pollution has gotten so bad that sometimes the cattle reject the dust-laden
feed. “It’s so full of dirt you have to wash it or nothing will eat it,” she
says. “Sometimes the hay has so much dirt the cattle won’t even lay on it.”
Open range cattle in North Dakota have begun to die from dust pneumonia, a
disease usually limited to feedlots.
Farmers and ranchers
have also found that the land they love is literally trashed by oil company
workers. Shelly Ventsch, a farmer in her fifties, lives with her sister east of
New Town, on a farm on which they grew up. The North Dakota she knows is one of
“quiet, wide open prairies, clean and beautiful … a sanctuary for a yearning,
weary soul.” Less than a year ago, a well was installed on her property. In
March 2012 she walked through the field and recorded a portion of what the
workers had left behind: “There were cigarettes, lunch meat, toe warmers,
butterscotch buttons, brownies, safety eyewear, a pipe wrench, pizzas and work
gloves, plastic bags of all sizes, DANGER tape, boxes and labels, a placard in
plastic reading ‘Texas Buyer 82L-1098 Seller Dragon Products’, and human waste
deposits along with paper.”
The damage to western
North Dakota’s once-bucolic quality of life is the result of a larger, more
violent process: the fracking itself. The very name of the drilling method, “hydraulic fracturing,” sanitizes what can more accurately be described as “hyperbaric bombing” – using intense pressure to create an explosion.
violent process: the fracking itself. The very name of the drilling method, “hydraulic fracturing,” sanitizes what can more accurately be described as “hyperbaric bombing” – using intense pressure to create an explosion.
In conventional oil
drilling, several dozen trucks converge on a site and bring pipes, cement, and
about 60,000 gallons of water and chemical lubricants to facilitate the
drilling. In contrast, fracking a shale oil well requires up to 1,000 truck
trips to bring in – and then remove and relocate – up to thousands of tons of
sand and millions of gallons of water and chemical solvents.
Here’s how it works.
First the drill descends about two miles underground. At that point the drill
bit moves horizontally for more than a mile and the horizontal pipe is then
perforated. High-powered compressors then pump between three and six million
gallons of water, and an additional 30,000 to 120,000 gallons of toxic-laden
chemical fluids, into the well at pressures ranging from 3,000 to 15,000 psi.
(Federal law doesn’t require disclosure of which chemicals are used in fracking
fluids and the industry won exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act in 2005,
right before the boom began.) The explosive force of the chemically saturated
water creates fractures in the shale rock, allowing oil and gas to flow out.
Between 1,000 and 2,000 tons of sand are pumped into the newly fractured well
seams to keep them from closing. The chemical mix further assists in keeping
the seams open.
Trouble Brewing
If the oil companies and
North Dakota officials have their way, the drilling occurring today is just a
glimpse of what’s to come. In August, Lynn Helms of the North Dakota Industrial
Commission announced that during the next 15 years oil companies would drill an
additional 35,000 wells and increase production to two million barrels a day –
about three times what it is now. Here’s what that would mean.
One of the basic
problems of fracking is that as much as a third of what goes down the well bore
comes back up. Western North Dakota contains thousands of waste pits from oil
wells. A typical pit is 50 yards long, 20 yards wide, and 15 feet deep. It receives
wastes such as drilling mud and the combination of water and fracking fluids
that come back to the surface (known as “produced water” or “brine”). In April
2012, North Dakota started requiring companies to put liquid wastes in tanks
for transport to “disposal wells,” but it still allows them to leave solid
wastes such as drilling mud in pits, where the oil companies bury them.
Watchdog attorney Braaten questions if the new law is being implemented. “I
suspect that not a lot of the personnel on the rigs has changed, so it’s just a
question if their employers bothered to educate them on the new rules,” he
says.
Because North Dakota’s
oil deposits are so deep, there is less danger than in other states that
fracking fluids will contaminate underground aquifers in the course of oil and
gas extraction. Nevertheless, there are risks involved. As with any oil
drilling, spills sometimes occur. Some wells lose pressure and release fracking
fluids at or near the surface, where they can enter the water supply. Storage
pits have been known to leak. “In rainy springs like we had in 2011 and 2012
the pits overflow,” Braaten says. “Plastic pit liners wear out and tear. The
life of chemicals is much longer than the life of liners. Clay is not
impermeable. Those wastes are going to move over time.”
An investigation last
summer by the nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica, using North Dakota
public records, found that more than 1,000 accidental releases of oil, drilling
wastewater, and other fluids occurred in 2011 – as many as in the previous two
years combined. Many of the spills were minor, but some were large, including a
spill of 2 million gallons of brine that sterilized 24 acres of land.
The 1,000-spills figure
includes only incidents that oil drillers report themselves. State regulators
admit that many more spills and the intentional dumping of wastewater occur but
go unnoticed. Kris Roberts of the North Dakota Health Department told
ProPublica: “What’s the solution? Catching them. What’s the problem? Catching
them.”
When leaks and blowouts
occur and are reported, oil companies frequently minimize the numbers. “It’s
all self-reporting by the companies,” Braaten says. “When companies report a
spill, it’s always one barrel or ten, because that minimizes their
responsibilities.” Braaten also says state regulators, under pressure from the
oil companies and politicians, often look the other way when accidents happen.
He recalls an episode in which he drove to a farmer’s field where an oil well
had blown out and there was “an oil sheen all over the snow.” He called a local
inspector from the North Dakota Industrial Commission. “I don’t want to get
involved,” the inspector responded. Braaten then called the North Dakota Health
Department. A staffer drove out to the well site. “Mother Nature will take care
of it,” he concluded, then walked off.
Allison Ritter,
spokesperson for the North Dakota Industrial Commission, disputed Braaten’s
account of the episode, saying, “A conversation like that never happened.” She
then said: “We at the oil and gas division have lots of interests to look out
for – mineral rights owners, surface owners, operators. We can’t impede on the right of the mineral owners to develop their
minerals. It’s in our state constitution.” [Ah,
yes, but nothing in the constitution about personal rights, civil rights,
property rights, rights to clean air and clean water, environmental protection…]
The North Dakota
Petroleum Council and two major oil companies drilling in the state did not
respond to repeated requests for interviews.
There is one ongoing,
structural form of leakage occurring in the North Dakota oil fields that everyone
agrees is happening: the routine leaking of natural gas. Methane is so abundant
below ground, and so mixed with oil, that everything that comes up the well is
full of natural gas. Much of this is burned off at flaring stations near the
wells for the simple reason that gas is cheap while oil is valuable. At one
level, it’s an enormous waste. Some 100 million cubic feet of gas are burned at
well sites each day, enough to power a city of 500,000 – and all because oil
companies find it more expedient to burn the gas rather than build pipelines to
carry it off. In reality, though, flaring burns only a portion of the gas.
Because of the constant pressure on seams, joints, and valves, the systems leak
gases during transfers. This leakage has an environmental impact far beyond the
North Dakota. Methane, after all, is a potent greenhouse gas. Over its 12-year
lifespan it is about 50 times more heat-trapping than CO2.
It’s not as if the
people of western North Dakota don’t want any oil drilling. Almost all of the
farmers and ranchers who express concern about fracking at one time either
worked for the oil companies themselves or have family members who did.
Oil-related jobs are often the only way to get the money to build a farm or
ranch. But the current boom – largely unregulated and proceeding without
careful consideration for the long-term impacts – isn’t facilitating rural
livelihoods anymore. It’s destroying them. Even some veteran oil patch workers
express surprise at the Wild West frenzy underway. A rancher near White Earth recalls a conversation he had with an oil
worker last summer. “There’s going to be nothing left in northwest North
Dakota,” the oilman said. “I’m 62 years old and I’ve worked 40 years in oil
fields all over the country, but I’ve never seen any place like this. It’s a
free-for-all out here. It will be a toxic waste dump. No one will be able to
live here.”
Longtime North Dakota
residents and experienced oil industry employees Jacki and Steve Schilke feel
much the same way. Jacki no longer works in the industry, but Steve still does,
inspecting pipelines for an independent maintenance company. A decade ago they
bought a 160-acre ranch just north of Williston, a fulfillment of their
lifelong dream to raise cattle. Starting in 2008, 35 wells went in along the
roads within three miles of their home. In May 2010, drilling began on a well
and drilling-waste disposal pit about 600 yards from their house. Soon the air
began to smell of gases. In June 2011, their previously healthy Yorkie died. Then
the cattle sickened. By the fall of that year, Jacki says, “I was so sick I
couldn’t walk.” She traveled to a clinic in Montana, where urine tests revealed
arsenic poisoning. The arsenic most likely came from the fly-ash used to
reinforce the fracking wastewater pits.
Then, that same season,
a creek on the Schilke’s land that ran below the hill with the oil well turned
yellow and bubbled instead of freezing. When the well behind the house was
being fracked, Jacki grew dizzy. Once she passed out for five hours. Eventually
the North Dakota Health Department acceded to the couple’s requests to test
their well water, and found that it contained ethylene dichloride, a chemical
the EPA calls a “probable carcinogen.” Ethylene dichloride is commonly
used by the extraction industry as a solvent to remove oil and grease from
metal pipes and to bond cement. The Schilkes tried to get the North Dakota
Health Department to test their air, but were rebuffed. They then hired a
private firm from Texas to do the tests. The results showed high levels of
benzene, toluene, and methane 24 hours a day. A Michigan medical specialist
confirmed that Jacki had been exposed to neurotoxins and hydrocarbons. This and
the arsenic exposure were the probable causes of her physical problems.
Today, Jacki continues
to battle health problems. Even the Schilkes’ cattle suffer. “Our cattle
started to waste away to nothing,” Steve says. “We won’t sell them to slaughter
not knowing what’s wrong, so we shoot them when they get that sick.”
The Schilkes know they
are being poisoned, but they can’t prove the source. They want to leave their
home, but they fear that, because of the oil wells, their home and grazing
lands are close to worthless. “We want to get out of here and move to Montana,
but we can’t,” Jacki says with bitterness in her voice. “Every penny is tied up
in this land. Hundreds of places around here are for sale or rent. We’re living
in the middle of hell.”
James
William Gibson last wrote for the Journal about the removal of the Rocky Mountain
gray wolf from the Endangered Species List
Monday, April 22, 2013
Fracking in North Dakota
This is not a short article, but I am posting it because it is especially poignant to me, because I was a high school teacher in White Shield School on Ft Berthold Indian Reservation in the 80's. It is very wrenching to read about what the great fracking boom is doing to them. Although I fully undetrstand that for some people, it really is a boom, or boon. At least for now.
The North Dakota Oil Fracking Boom Creates Clash of
Money and Devastation
September 22, 2012 |
NEW TOWN N.D. --When the black gold
rush began, no one on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation expected it to take
down Main Street.
A modest strip of one- and two-story
buildings framed by undulating plains, Main Street doubled as the reservation’s
community hub, in the tradition of small towns. Neighbors caught up at the Jack
and Jill grocery, elders strolled to the library, children rode their bikes on
the streets.
No one imagined tanker trucks
barreling up and down Main Street, back-to-back like freight trains, seven days
and nights a week. No one predicted construction zones that grind traffic to a
halt as far as the eye can see, the deafening clatter of semis, the dust kicked
up by 10,000 vehicles pulverizing the two-lane road every day or the smell and
taste of diesel. No one anticipated the accidents, two or more a week on Main
Street and all over the rutted reservation roads, costing lives and shattering
families.
In fact, Fort Berthold, home of the
Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, or Three Affiliated Tribes, did not reckon
on a lot when North Dakota invited the energy industry to Drill Baby Drill. No
one knew that energy companies in search of housing for their workers would buy
private property and evict some of the reservation’s poorest residents from
their homes. No one planned on police and fire calls multiplying. No one
guessed that on a reservation of nearly one million acres, all the deer would
disappear.
In the heart of the refuge of
recession America, this little-known tribe is grappling mightily with the
consequences of striking oil.
“It’s horrible,” said Becky
Deschamp, a 41-year-old lifelong Fort Berthold resident.
Deschamp offered that verdict while
packing her trailer, not by choice. In November, an oil company bought the
run-down Prairie Winds Trailer Park two blocks off Main Street where she and
her husband and two children have lived for seven years. With land and housing
nearly impossible to find, the park’s 45 families—more than 180 adults and
children in all— were given two extensions before the final Aug. 31 deadline to
leave.
Just six weeks before the deadline,
when the tribe cleared and prepared a lot three miles outside of New Town, the
evictees still had no idea where they would go. But they were luckier than
some. Last year, a nearby trailer park was sold and its residents given 30 days
to move. The tribe offered them a field about 10 miles away, but soon after
they moved there, the lot buckled under sewer and water demands. When the
ground began to sink, families had to relocate again, even farther away from
town.
“The tribe didn’t count on these
disruptions,” Deschamp said, surveying the boarded trailers and junked cars
left behind by neighbors. “I know I didn’t.”
What the tribe counted on when the
boom hit two years ago was money. It never had any to spare and the recession
made things worse. About 40 percent of the tribal workforce was unemployed and
people were leaving the land where the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara have lived
for more than a millennium. For a nation with only about 4,500 of its 13,000
enrolled members living on the rez, the wretched economy threatened the
community’s very survival. Then Fort Berthold turned into a black gold mine.
The reservation’s swath of prairie
and pasturelands sits over the Bakken, the biggest sea of oil discovered in the
United States in 40 years. Until a few years ago, the Bakken, which also
stretches across parts of South Dakota, Montana and Saskatchewan, was too deep
to mine. Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which
involves blasting chemical-laced water and sand deep underground to break apart
shale and release gas, has given oil companies the means to have their way with
the Bakken. And so they have.
Several states have banned fracking
as too environmentally taxing. Other states have limited the practice. Not
North Dakota.
With few regulations and little
protest, oil production is proceeding at a dizzy pace. Last year, North Dakota
became the third largest oil producing state in the nation, bumping California.
This year it replaced Alaska for the number two spot after Texas. The oil patch
is now producing more than 600,000 barrels of oil a day. Thanks to oil taxes
and related revenue, North Dakota is expecting its surplus to top $2 billion
within the year. This in a state with only 641,480 people pre-boom.
New Town, with about 1,500 residents
pre-boom, now boasts North Dakota’s fastest growing economy. But while it is on
Fort Berthold, it is considered part of Mountrail County, not part of the
tribal nation.
Still, the tribe is raking in cash.
The Fort Berthold reservation received more than $117 million in royalties in
2011, according to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Individual tribal members who
own mineral rights on their private land, or allotments, receive anywhere from
hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars a month. That’s about two-thirds of
the tribe’s total royalties.
Unemployment, now between six and
seven percent, keeps dropping. Businesses are thriving. The Four Bears Casino
is adding 160 rooms to its 97-room hotel and plans to offer ferryboat gambling
on Lake Sakakawea, the Missouri River reservoir that runs through the
reservation.
People who used to come to the
tribal offices asking for help no longer do. “We appreciate the money that’s
coming in and helping to improve incomes and the socioeconomic status of our
members,” said Dennis Fox, the tribe’s CEO.
But, Fox added, despite all the oil
money coming in from royalties and taxes, Three Affiliated Tribes is spending
all of its new income—and then some --dealing with the oil production’s
impacts.
In an interview at tribal
headquarters, Fox offered a “but” for every positive impact of the oil rush.
The tribe’s budget for special projects is now double its average yearly
operating budget of between $40 and $50 million, he said. But the tribe
estimates that it will cost more than $100 million just to repair the reservation’s
road system.
“It’s a matter of playing catch up,”
he said. “We’re trying to beef up all of our infrastructure. Nobody anticipated
the great influx of workers and the impact on the roads and housing and
everything else.”
The tribal chairman, Tex Hall,
regularly treks to Washington, D.C. to plead for road relief. “I already
receive almost daily calls telling me of serious accidents involving our
members,” he told a Congressional appropriations subcommittee in April.
“In fact, we now have so many accidents
on my reservation that my staff does not even both to call me unless the
injuries are life-threatening. The situation has now gotten to be that bad.”
All over the Bakken lands of Western
North Dakota, known as the oil patch, towns are going through many of the same
challenges. Highways are getting pounded to dust, police, fire and social
service departments are scrambling and housing is beyond hard to find.
In a way, history is repeating
itself. Cities and towns across the country have gone through similar upheavals
for the sake of energy production and jobs, including the small towns of
southwest West Virginia and eastern Kentucky during the heyday of coal. That
part of central Appalachia is still struggling to pick up after booms went
bust.
Of course, North Dakota invited the
oil companies. But the oil patch is like the high school wallflower who
announces a backyard kegger on Facebook, only to find the entire student body
has shown up. Before it gave oil drilling a go, North Dakota was the nation’s
least-visited state. The once-overlooked, now overwhelmed oil patch never
dreamed it would become the center of the biggest, messiest migration to one
state since the California Gold Rush.
That it was unprepared for the
deluge is painfully obvious. The oil patch looks like the aftermath of a
natural disaster. There are long lines everywhere, from gas stations to taco
trucks, store shelves look ransacked and forget about getting a hotel room
within a hundred miles. Man camps, the makeshift encampments for oil workers,
crop up overnight in fields where cows graze. So many newcomers crash at the
Wal-Mart parking lot in Williston – at least 100 vehicles from all over the
country every night – that it’s almost becoming a neighborhood.
And traffic in the patch is like
traffic nowhere else, not even in the nation’s biggest cities. It can take 90
jaw-clenching minutes to drive 30 miles. Pity the passenger car driver
surrounded on every side by tankers, flatbeds and cement mixers. Everywhere you
go, people are beleaguered and out of sorts.
Fort Berthold is suffering all the
woes of the Bakken boomtowns, and many more.
The tribe is a federally recognized
sovereign nation, which makes its challenges more complicated. North Dakota is
creating a fund for road repairs and upgrades in the oil patch, for example,
but, Fox said, the tribal nation is not eligible for the money.
Its biggest day-to-day problem is
policing the reservation. Under Federal law, imposed by a 1978 Supreme Court
ruling that has bedeviled Indian Country, tribal nations have no criminal
jurisdiction over non-Indians.
So while police calls on Fort
Berthold have more than doubled, many of the calls involve newcomers who are
not tribal members and who tribal police lack the power to arrest.
Crime is up all over the oil patch.
Police blotters in communities where a stolen bike was once noteworthy now list
robberies, assaults, prostitution, drug trafficking and organized crime, not to
mention many traffic accidents.
For a Fort Berthold tribal officer,
answering a call can be a day’s work. The tribal force of 11 tribal officers
patrols over 1,000 miles of road. Since the reservation includes about 150
miles of state highways and 660 miles of county roads, a tribal officer can
call a sheriff’s department if an incident is on county land—the reservation
includes parts of six counties—or they can call state police if the incident
falls in their jurisdiction. Or they can call on federal officers, from the
Army Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Dept. of Homeland Security,
if non-tribal members commit crimes that fall under those entities’
jurisdictions.
It was an inefficient and sometimes
ineffective system before the oil boom. Now, with law enforcement agencies all
over the Bakken lands overburdened, there are not enough officers to handle
every incident. The tribe is working with local and state law enforcement
agencies and the Bureau of Indian Affairs to revamp its policing and develop a
strategy to empower its force, such as cross-deputizing tribal police with
sheriff’s departments.
What residents of Ft. Berthold say
they miss most is their peace. Peace and quiet has always been Western North
Dakota’s primary currency, the main answer hardy souls could pitch to those who
might ask why anyone would live Way Out There. These days, long-time residents
often complain that they no longer feel safe. They read stories in the papers,
see warnings of registered sex offenders on community bulletin boards, bump
into newcomers who don’t make eye contact.
It’s a culture shock on a
reservation with five tight-knit villages, each with just hundreds of
residents. People grow up here knowing which neighbor gets home when by the
sound of their cars—the hum of a 4x4, say, or the putt-putt of an old Jeep.
Now, they hear rumors. “It’s kind of
scary,” said Loren Fox, as he sold $6 Indian tacos under a white tent by his
family’s trailer in the rural community of Mandaree.
He kept his daughters, two and four
years old, tucked by his side.
“Before there was no problem,” said
the 41-year-old Fort Berthold native. “But you hear stories—people coming
around talking to kids and stuff.”
Loren Fox is torn between believing
that oil is the best thing to happen to Fort Berthold and the worst. His cut
from royalties he shares with a half dozen relatives for seven wells drilled on
their land comes to about $2,000 a month. His wife receives between $400 and
$900 a month for mineral rights her family holds on their ancestral land.
But Fox has lost three family
members to car accidents with trucks in the last three years. He lost two
nephews, 28- and 25 years old, within four months of each other, he said. In
June, he lost a 40-year-old cousin to a crash with a semi.
He also laments the loss of
wildlife. The tribe is canceling deer season this year for the first time.
“All the traffic,” Loren Fox said,
“has scared the deer away, I guess.”
His guess is as good as anyone’s: no
one is quite sure why the deer have disappeared. Of all the talk of all the
problems in the oil patch, one barely hears a whisper about the possible
environmental consequences of the fevered development.
Environmental advocates have been
sounding the alarm on fracking for its potential to contaminate ground water,
the amount of energy it uses (hundreds of millions of gallons of water per
well) and its possible disruption to the earth. It has been linked to
earthquakes in Oklahoma, Texas and Great Britain.
Cities and towns in the oil patch
have had a problem getting a handle on all the accidental oil and wastewater
spills that occur. The Three Affiliated Tribes are also trying to stem the
deliberate dumping of chemical-laden wastewater along roads or in remote areas
of the rez.
Tribal police were getting so many
calls from people spotting trucks dumping toxic fluids-- several each week,
Dennis Fox said-- that in August 2011 it imposed fines of up to $1 million for
a third deliberate offense.
Then there are the gas fires.
All over the Bakken lands, startling
fires rise above the hayfields, spewing natural gas into the atmosphere. The
fires, or flares, are a byproduct of oil production. When fracked gas is
released, so is natural gas, but since natural gas is going begging on the
worldwide market, and building the infrastructure to capture the gas would be
expensive, companies just burn it. The fires spew over two million tons of
carbon dioxide into the air each year, the equivalent of nearly 400,000 cars.
The World Bank, which has been
campaigning for 10 years to get nations such as Russia, Nigeria, Iran and Iraq
to stop flaring, now ranks the United States as the fifth worst offender thanks
to North Dakota’s oil boom.
Neither North Dakota nor the Mandan
Hidatsa Arikara Nation have rules limiting flaring. But the tribe does plan to
capture the wasted natural gas. In July, it received the final permit approval
to build a crude oil refinery, the first to be built in the continental United
States in over 40 years. The tribe also plans to build a pipeline to move oil –
and gas—to the refinery.
What tribal leaders do not want are
more regulations. The Obama administration has proposed requiring that oil
companies disclose the chemicals they use in fracking, a move tribal leaders
say would slow down oil production.
Tribal leaders are determined to
make the most out of this oil boom, which they see as the ticket to
independence from the federal government. They remember all too well how the
tribe missed out on the last oil craze.
In the 1980s, when North Dakota
experienced a smaller, more conventional oil boom, the tribe was virtually shut
out. Oil companies skipped the reservation because the federal government,
which administers Indian lands, required that oil companies go through dozens
of steps, taking many months, before granting permits. Outside the reservation,
companies received permits within weeks.
To make sure they would not miss out
this time, the tribe made two moves. It struck a deal with North Dakota to
lower the taxes companies would pay the state and the tribe for leases on
tribal land and it lobbied the Bureau of Indian Affairs to set up “one-stop
shops” to streamline the permitting process.
Tribal leaders say they are looking
out for their own interests, tired of history repeating itself.
Fort Berthold children learn early,
in school and at home, that United States policies have betrayed the tribe
again and again. The U.S. government broke the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851,
which set the reservation’s borders, to seize millions of acres of reservation
land to establish Montana and expand railroad lines.
Then, in the late 1940s, the federal
government decided to damn the Missouri River to create hydroelectric power and
Lake Sakakawea. The project flooded river bottomlands that the tribe had so
assiduously cultivated and that provided its major source of income. Over
one-fourth of the reservation’s total land base was inundated by water. By
1954, nearly 80 percent of the tribe had relocated and almost all of its crop
and grazing land, 94 percent, was lost.
The reservation now comprises just
under a million acres. Only about half of that is tribal land, either owned by
the tribe or tribal members whose families received allotments under an 1887
federal act that sought to privatize Indian lands. The rest of the land is
either privately owned, largely by those whose ancestors settled in the Plains
when the federal government gave away “unclaimed” Indian lands to homesteaders
(beginning with the first Homeststead Act, in 1862) or public land, as in
national park land.
Tribal members lucky enough to have
mineral rights on their allotments are reaping the oil rush’s bounty. But even
some of those members feel cheated. After the first leases were signed, energy
companies began to “flip,” or sublease, their leases, at huge profits, with the
federal government’s approval but without the allotees’ permission. Since then,
tribal landowners have organized their own associations to maximize their
interests.
But not everyone is collecting
royalty checks. A little over half of the tribal enrolled membership now
receives oil checks. The rest: nothing. The new reality is creating a divide in
the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribe between the haves and have-nots.
No one blames the have-nots for
resenting the unmitigated upheaval they’re enduring while the haves buy new
cars and take vacations. Allotees receiving oil checks have formed a
development corporation to invest their money in ways that will benefit all
tribal members. Tribal leaders say that at some point in the future, they plan
to develop a fund to “share the wealth” with all tribal members.
Becky Deschamp, from the Prairie
Winds Trailer Park, is one of the have-nots. Her mistrust of government, honed
from both distant and recent history, now extends to the tribal government. She
is thrilled that the tribe found a place to house the evicted Prairie Winds
families but wonders why it took so long.
These days she avoid Main Street
unless absolutely necessary. Driving home still means running a gauntlet of
road construction on Route 23, dubbed “suicide road.” But she’s philosophical
about it: At least she still gets to overlook the meditative waters of Lake
Sakakawea. If the sewer and water systems hold up, she said, “I may never leave
my home again.”
]
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/environment/north-dakota-oil-fracking-boom-creates-clash-money-and-devastation
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