API number is a unique identification code

The Ohio River Valley Institute (ORVI) recently released a report entitled Diversified Energy: A Business Model Built to Fail Appalachia. Over the last several years, Diversified Energy has become the largest owner of oil and gas wells in the country! However, Diversified is not, for the most part, in the business of drilling new wells. It is buying up existing, declining wells and milking them now for all they are worth. But in the future thousands of their wells will not be producing enough gas to even pay to operate themselves, let alone to save the money to plug them.

Diversified already has a little more than 2000 wells in West Virginia right now that should already have been plugged! They only plugged 75 of these wells since January last year. Their disclosures to their stockholders (in Great Britain) raise a question whether thousands more that will need plugging will be coming, and whether Diversified will have the money in the future to plug somewhere around 10,000 wells in West Virginia that reach the end of their economic lives. We think they will become orphaned wells.

If you have a Diversified well on your land, and if it is not producing, please get hold of us. We would like to help to try to get it plugged while some money is still available, or by some other means, rather than have it left unplugged on you. Contact us through lawyer and co-founder Dave McMahon whose contact information is at the bottom of this blog.

Generally you will know if the well on your land is operated by Diversified because it will have Diversified’s name on it. If it does not and you still suspect it might be a Diversified well then:

There are two ways we can find out if the Diversified well on your land is producing (and if it is in fact operated by Diversified). One, you can send us your surface tax ticket or the information on it (we would need the county, district name, map and parcel number from that). Two, another more certain way to make sure we have the right well is for you to go to the well and get the API number off of the well. That number will look like 047 – 0_ _ – 0 _ _ _ _. (Other numbers that don’t look like that can be an old company well number of an equipment part number) Get us that API number. Here is a web page about API numbers. Or that page tells you how you can look up the information yourself on the West Virginia Geologic and Economic Survey website and others.

While you are there at the well listen to hear if it is making a hissing sound in the pipes. That will mean that it is producing and we may not be able to get it plugged soon, but if you have other questions about it let us know. (If it is making a hissing sound as gas is escaping out of the pipes into the air, be sure to contact us!) If there is a no sound it may not be producing and, again, let us know about it – we might be able to do something to get it plugged to stop devaluing your land or before it pollutes your surface land, groundwater, air etc,

To avoid any lawyer ethical problems, or even the appearance of impropriety, this communication is branded as “advertising material”. We also have to note that the lawyer responsible for this email is David McMahon, a co-founder of WVSORO. His number is 304-415-4288. His address is 1624 Kenwood Rd, Charleston, WV 25314. His email is wvdavid@wvdavid.net. He is the person to contact about the well on your property.

>>> Advertising Material from David McMahon, Lawyer, Charleston, WV

Reference ~ West Virginia Surface Owners’ Rights Organization, 1500 Dixie Street, Charleston, WV 25311
info@wvsoro.org 304 346 5891

It is absolutely essential to breathe clean air

According to the Environmental Health Project, active frack pads, compressor stations, and processing facilities regularly emit particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and other chemical pollutants that we aren’t able to see. When ingested, these emissions can cause or exacerbate a host of short- and long-term health problems, including headaches, eye and throat irritation, respiratory complications, chest pain, asthma, and various types of cancer.

This Thursday, join the first session of our webinar and Q&A on air pollution and inadequate regulation in the Ohio River Valley. Ohio regulatory agencies’ inadequate monitoring and oversight of fracking-related air pollution in Belmont County endangers our health and livelihoods, especially if an ethane cracker plant is also built in the region. Join our webinar to learn more!

Register here for the webinar and Q&A this Thursday, November 5th, from 6:30pm to 8:00pm EST.

If you can’t make it this Thursday, we’re hosting a second session of Making the Invisible Visible on Thursday, November 19th at 6:30pm Save the date and register here.

The Ohio River Valley is already endangered by the cumulative pollution caused by the fracking industry, including toxic chemicals and radioactive particulate matter. Join us to learn more about how you can protect yourself by participating in a community monitoring program to establish baseline air quality data and advise residents of their exposures and associated health effects.

What you’ll get from this presentation:

>> Information on the potential health risks posed by proximity to shale gas wells and other fracking-related facilities.

>> An understanding of state regulatory agencies’ complicity in allowing petrochemical facilities to emit potentially dangerous levels of chemical pollutants into the air we breathe.

>> Access to free air monitoring equipment, enabling you to evaluate and track the air quality of your home or backyard.

>> The opportunity to discuss air pollution in Belmont County with scientists, air monitoring experts, public health professionals, and community advocates during a 30-minute Q&A session.

This presentation was made possible with the help of the Freshwater Accountability Project, the American Geophysical Union’s Thriving Earth Exchange, Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab, FracTracker Alliance, Concerned Ohio River Residents, Halt the Harm Network, and the Southwestern Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project.

Thanks for reading! We look forward to seeing you on Thursday,

Ben Hunkler, Organizer, Concerned Ohio River Residents

#. #. #. #. #. #. #. #. #. #. #. #.

See this video: “Hydrofracking and Exposure to Ionizing Radiation,” David O. Carpenter, MD, SouthWest Penna. Environmental Health Project, October 15, 2020

Drilling, fracking and production operations involve methane emissions

From an Article by Kristina Marusic, Environmental Health News, April 23, 2020

Methane emissions are vastly undercounted at the state and national level because we’re missing accidental leaks from oil and gas wells, according to a new study.

Methane is a greenhouse gas that, when initially released, is about 87 times more potent than carbon dioxide at driving global warming (it doesn’t last as long in the atmosphere, however, so when averaged over a century methane is about 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide at driving global warming). Methane causes about 25 percent of human-driven climate change according to the Environmental Defense Fund, and the oil and gas industry is the leading emitter of methane. Last year, global atmospheric methane reached a 20-year high.

The new study, conducted by researchers at Cornell University and published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, looked at 589,175 operator reports on methane leaks from both fracking and conventional oil and gas wells in Pennsylvania from 2014-2018. The researchers found that methane emissions in the state are at least 15 percent higher than previously thought—and they believe a similar under-counting is happening at the national level.

“Another 15 percent of methane going into the atmosphere that we didn’t know about is very significant for climate change in the short term,” Tony Ingraffea, professor emeritus of engineering at Cornell and the study’s lead author, told EHN.

Ingraffea also authored a groundbreaking study in 2011 that determined methane emissions from fracking accelerate global warming more than carbon dioxide emissions from either coal or conventional oil and gas. Pennsylvania is the second largest producer of natural gas in the country after Texas. Ingraffea’s study comes on the heels of a study published this week by Harvard researchers that found methane emissions in the Permian basin in Texas and New Mexico are more than two times higher than federal estimates.

Methane exposure is rarely a threat to human health except under extreme circumstances, but “as a climate change exacerbator,” Ingraffea said, “it affects the health of every human on the planet.”

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PA DEP) has required all oil and gas well operators in the state to measure the amount of methane leaking from producing wells once per quarter since 2014. Fracking wells are required to submit quarterly reports on their findings, while conventional wells must submit reports at least once a year. No other state has such extensive methane leak monitoring, and this study, which took three years to complete, marks the first time the data has ever been analyzed.

While other studies have estimated methane leaks from oil and gas, such as flying over gas wells in aircrafts with methane detection equipment, this is the first to use data that’s been self-reported by oil and gas well operators.

“This is a profoundly important database,” Ingraffea said. “There’s nothing comparable happening in any other part of America.”

Ingraffea and his colleagues found that the Pennsylvania oil and gas wells that reported methane leaks over the five year period emitted an average of about 56 gigagrams (or 56 billion grams) of methane into the atmosphere every year. These emissions are not currently included in the state’s methane emissions inventory.

PA DEP director of communications Neil Shader told EHN the agency is still reviewing the study’s findings and can’t yet speculate about what actions it may take in response.

A series of studies conducted by the Environmental Defense Fund previously estimated that around 10 teragrams (or 10 trillion grams) of methane are leaking from the oil and gas sector across the country each year. “The amount of methane coming from leaks in Pennsylvania is a relatively small subset of that,” Ingraffea said. “But if we take a wild guess and extrapolate what we’re seeing in Pennsylvania to all of America, we’re looking at three million wells and 20 times the methane emissions we saw in the Pennsylvania data.”

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has proposed rolling back existing methane regulations at the federal level through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA’s rule, which is not yet finalized, aims to lift rules from the Obama Administration that required companies to detect and fix methane leaks. In a statement, EPA Administrator said the revisions would remove “unnecessary and duplicative regulatory burdens from the oil and gas industry.”

“EPA is moving in the wrong direction,” Ingraffea said, adding that a major part of the problem is a failure to accurately measure our current methane emissions.

“Missing 10 to 15 percent of methane emissions would be like saying we’re off about carbon dioxide emissions by factor of two,” he added. “No one would accept that. Everyone would be saying, ‘We’re in big trouble.’ Being off this much in our methane accounting is just as important.”

Unreliable reporting has been the norm

Marcellus Shale rig and gas well operation in Jackson Township, Pennsylvania. (Credit: WCN 24/7/flickr)

Ingraffea noted that their calculations are likely on the low end of true methane emissions from oil and gas well leaks in Pennsylvania.

There are around 132,000 operating oil and gas wells in the state, but fewer than half of those reported data on methane leaks to the PA DEP as required. Of the some 60,000 wells that submitted reports, about half of those didn’t actually include any data, citing various reasons they couldn’t take measurements on methane leaks (like inability to access the well site). The study also only looked at data from wells that are actively producing—it didn’t account for methane leaks from abandoned wells or wells that were still being actively drilled or fracked (and not yet producing).

Shader said that the wells missing data are conventional wells, not fracking wells, and include things like home-use wells and wells from small operators. “DEP often receives data from these operators on paper, and it must be entered manually, which can cause delays in making the data available electronically,” he said, “however, DEP has and will continue to take enforcement actions against operators that do not comply with the reporting requirements.”

The Pennsylvania Independent Oil & Gas Association (PIOGA) declined to comment on whether the industry is working to resolve these issues with reporting.

The researchers also noted some major issues with the reliability of the data. For example, some wells that reported large quantities of methane leaks for several years in a row would suddenly report none after being purchased by a different operator the following year. One likely reason for this is a lack of consistency in testing techniques, Ingraffea said. Operators aren’t all required to use the same testing equipment or methods.

“Not only is much of the data unreliable,” he said, “but I will go on record as saying that some of the data being reported to the state is downright fraudulent.”

There’s also no minimum reporting requirement, so some operators would note that the emissions were too low to report, but the researchers have no way of knowing what threshold they used to determine that. All of these factors likely mean the reported emissions the researchers analyzed are underestimates.

Ingraffea said there should be a requirement to measure and report on methane leaks in a consistent manner and “super emitters” should be targeted and required to fix leaking equipment.

“Most wells aren’t leaking,” he said. “If they’re operating correctly, they shouldn’t leak. Maybe just 10 percent of all unconventional wells are leaking, for example, but they’re not all leaking the same amount, either. Some leak just a little, and some, the super emitters, leak like sieves. DEP should require those to be fixed.”

Many of those super emitters are coalbed methane wells, most of which are located in the Southwestern part of the state where a majority of the state’s fracking also occurs.

“DEP is also concerned with these ‘super emitters,’ Shader said, “and is exploring ways to identify them, as well as being interested in suggestions for identifying them.”

He added that DEP is aware that methane leaks are also a problem at abandoned wells (which were not looked at as part of the Cornell study), but that the agency “has very few resources to devote to plugging,” and hopes initiatives like Governor Wolf’s Restore PA initiative, which would provide funding for critical state infrastructure including plugging abandoned wells, will help address the leaks.

Lack of regulations, lack of accounting

In December, Pennsylvania’s Environmental Quality Board voted in favor of a new set of regulations aimed at reducing emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOC) like benzene, toluene, and other chemicals linked to cancer and other health effects from fracking sites. The rule is slated to be enacted following a 60-day public comment period, which the PA DEP said is expected to occur sometime this year, “likely next month.”

Governor Tom Wolf’s office, which drafted the regulations, claimed the new rule would also indirectly reduce methane emissions by more than 75,000 tons (about 68 gigagrams) per year, but environmental advocates expressed frustration that the rule doesn’t directly address methane leaks.

“We have known for years that PA DEP’s emissions inventory, which relies on industry-reported data, significantly understates the actual emissions coming from the Pennsylvania oil and gas sector,” Joseph Otis Minott, executive director and chief counsel for Philadelphia-based advocacy group Clean Air Council, told EHN. “We are encouraged to see that DEP estimates its proposed existing source rule will reduce over 75,600 [tons per year] of methane emissions and would respectfully urge the Department to open a public comment period on the proposal as soon as possible.”

Ingraffea said there have been “hundreds of reports and papers looking at methane emissions published since my first paper came out in 2011…and the scientific consensus is that what EPA is reporting to all of us, and to Congress, and to the President significantly underestimates the actual methane emissions from the oil and gas industry.”

Forward-Looking Infra-Red Camera (FLIR) detects infrared radiation at $3,000.

Letter from Barbara Daniels, Morgantown Dominion Post, January 20, 2020

Anyone who still believes that natural gas is a clean fuel might be surprised by the Texas Sharon FLIR videos, with commentary, showing cancer-causing VOCs (volatile organic compounds) and methane freely exiting from horizontal hydrofracturing (hhf) units.

Now a 2019 Cornell study reveals that eliminating this flood of fracked methane, a greenhouse gas at least 86 times more powerful than CO2, would keep the planet under the 2 degrees Celsius, warming limit.

Moreover, in 2016, a University of Michigan team discovered that hhf further emits significant amounts of warming ethane, which also forms lung- and crop-damaging smog. Most alarming is that cheap ethane provided by fracking feeds cracker-plant plastic production, a process so energy intensive that, cradle to grave, by 2050 plastics will emit 50 times more CO2 than all U.S. coal-fired power plants combined do in a year, according to University of Massachusetts professor, Judith Enck.

Eliminating hhf might be difficult however because, at all times, its damage is being hidden. Hhf was the apparent subject of the early 2000s secret meetings between then Vice President, Dick Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton and the heads of energy companies. These meetings resulted in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 which exempted hhf (fracking) and its wastes from the Safe Drinking Water Act, along with six other federal safeguards.

Why were these meetings held in secret, and why does hhf need exemptions from seven major environmental laws? After compiling over 1,600 reports, the Nobel-Prize-winning Physicians for Social Responsibility and others have concluded hhf cannot be regulated to safety.

Besides uncontrollable air pollution, the below-ground effects are unpredictable and it generates unmanageable amounts of toxic, radioactive waste.

For these and other reasons, 11 nations, three U.S. states and Quebec have banned hhf. They petitioned, used media such as Facebook and newspapers and contacted legislators. In view of hhf‘s extraordinary hazards, we might wish to do the same.

Call our state’s Legislature’s switchboard at 304-347-4836, and Congress’ switchboard at 202- 225-3121.

Barbara Daniels, Concerned Citizen, Richwood, WV

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

See also: The Fracking Industry’s Flaring Problem May Be Worse Than We Thought | DeSmog, Justin Mikulka, January 29, 2019

Pipelines, compressors, flares, leaks, fires, natural gas are issues

From an Opinion Article by Adam Carlesco, The Hill, October 24, 2019

As the agency responsible for permitting interstate natural gas pipelines and electric transmission, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is the gatekeeper of America’s transition to a carbon-free future — a future desperately needed, given the dire warnings the global scientific community has issued concerning climate change. Which is why it is so astonishing that the agency does not even consider the climate impacts of the projects that it approves.

Right now, FERC has two unfilled seats, following the passing of former Chairman Kevin McIntyre and the departure of Obama nominee Cheryl LaFleur. But the Trump administration appears determined to transform the historically bipartisan commission into a partisan vehicle to serve the interests of fossil fuel companies. With the nomination of James Danly, FERC will be made up of three Republican appointees and an intentionally empty seat, bucking a decades-long trend of appointing Republican and Democratic commissioners together.

Given this partisan reality, it is perhaps no surprise that FERC has begun to refuse to abide by binding judicial decrees requiring the agency to adequately assess the climate impacts of its permitting before approval. It goes without saying that the next FERC commissioner must be someone who will comply with these judicial directives.

The courts are very clear. In its 2017 decision, Sierra Club v. FERC (Sabal Trail), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit stated that since downstream emissions are indirect effects of permitting, the commission must assess all reasonably foreseeable emissions and climate impacts resulting from its approval of expanded natural gas pipeline infrastructure. By refusing to review the effects of these emissions, FERC failed to adequately balance “the public benefits against the adverse effects” of natural gas pipelines — effectively putting a finger on the scale in favor of locking America into decades of fossil fuel dependence.

Despite this, FERC continues to turn a blind eye to the looming climate crisis. This disregard was on display in recent litigation, dismissed on procedural grounds by the D.C. Circuit, brought about because FERC, in an order on a single project, introduced a sweeping new policy that would no longer evaluate greenhouse gas emissions upstream (that is, methane emissions from increased fracking facilitated by expanded pipeline capacity) or downstream (the combustion of natural gas for electric generation) from pipeline projects.

That lawsuit explained that FERC violated several federal laws by shirking its responsibility to consider emissions facilitated by expanded pipeline capacity during its environmental review, and that the agency decreed that its entire environmental review policy has changed — an action in clear violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires such significant policies to be changed through a transparent notice and comment rulemaking that includes public participation.

FERC has continued this radical policy shift by refusing to assess upstream and downstream emissions in subsequent environmental reviews, and segmenting larger infrastructure buildouts so that each smaller section appears as though they result in no environmental impact.

This is a dangerous path. Not only does it show a flagrant violation of federal law by the commission, it demonstrates a willful disregard of the grave repercussions of continued fossil fuel extraction and combustion outlined in the federal government’s own research — including severe threats to the food system, increased scarcity of fresh water, and potential disruptions of the very fossil fuel supply chain that FERC seeks to expand through its faulty project review process.

It is vitally important that the Senate refuse the Trump administration’s partisan nomination of Danly, and instead confirm a commissioner who will uphold statutory environmental review requirements and the directives of the federal judiciary. The stakes could not be higher, and the wrong choice to fill out this commission could have wide-reaching detrimental impacts.

Now is the time to begin a just transition to a carbon neutral society; intelligent FERC policy must foster that transition.

>>> Adam Carlesco is a climate and energy attorney with Food & Water Justice, the legal division of Food & Water Watch, which works for corporate and government accountability.

Flares burn excess natural gas & pollute the air

From an Article by Justin Nobel, Rolling Stone Magazine, March 13, 2018

Photo: Flares burning at fracking industry site on federal land near Counselor, New Mexico, where environmental groups and indigenous people are fighting back against the expansion of the fracking industry.

The most authoritative study of its kind reveals how fracking is contaminating the air and water – and imperiling the health of millions of Americans

“Our examination…uncovered no evidence that fracking can be practiced in a manner that does not threaten human health,” states a blistering 266-page report released today by Concerned Health Professionals of New York and the Nobel Peace Prize-winning group, Physicians for Social Responsibility. Drawing on news investigations, government assessments and more than 1,200 peer-reviewed research articles, the study finds that fracking – shooting chemical-laden fluid into deep rock layers to release oil and gas – is poisoning the air, contaminating the water and imperiling the health of Americans across the country. “Fracking is the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” says Dr. Sandra Steingraber, one of the report’s eight co-authors, a biologist who has worked as a public health advocate on issues like breast cancer and toxic incinerators. “Those of us in the public health sector started to realize years ago that there were potential risks, then the industry rolled out faster than we could do our science.” In recent years, the practice has expanded from rural lands to backyards, farms, and within sight of schools and sources of drinking water. “Now we see those risks have turned into human harms and people are getting sick,” says Steingraber. “And we in this field have a moral imperative to raise the alarm.”

The researchers behind the report, titled “Compendium of Scientific, Medical and Media Findings Demonstrating Risks and Harms of Fracking,” are quick to point out that fracking, or “unconventional oil and gas extraction,” extends far beyond the idea of a single well obediently gurgling up natural gas or oil. Fracking is part of a complicated extraction process with a spider web of infrastructure that extends many miles from the well pad. At virtually every turn, the process contains public health hazards. Residents living near an active site breathe air laced with carcinogens, including benzene and formaldehyde, and research has shown an increased risk of asthma, a decrease in infant health and worrisome effects on the development of a fetus, such as preterm births and birth defects. “Pregnant women have a major risk, not only themselves but they’re carrying a fetus whose cells are multiplying continuously,” says Dr. Lynn Ringenberg, a retired Army colonel and the president-elect of Physicians for Social Responsibility. “If those cells get hit by some toxic chemical from fracking, it may not manifest itself for years.”

Fracking sites have caught fire – others have exploded, as happened last month in Belmont County, Ohio – torching chemicals whose dangerous components local fire chiefs may be surprised to learn are an industry secret. Communities have long feared the fracking process can contaminate underground aquifers with hazardous chemicals and research in Texas and Pennsylvania has now confirmed this to be the case. Fracked gas flows via pipelines, whose leaks and explosions are now well-documented. Piped gas must continuously be re-pressurized at compressor stations which have been documented to emit methane, fine particulate matter, as well as benzene, formaldehyde and other known human carcinogens. Report co-author Dr. Kathleen Nolan, a pediatrician and bioethicist who has examined numerous people sickened by fracking-related contamination, describes the harrowing case of one western Pennsylvania family. “They would see a yellow fog, kind of like a chemical mist coming from the compressor station,” says Nolan. “Their two youngest children, nine and 11, started having tics where their muscles would go into spasms, those spasms would persist even when they were asleep.”

Then there’s the issue of the waste that flows back up a fracked well. Although the industry calls it “brine” or “produced water,” this material contains carcinogenic chemicals, can be flammable and, in much of the country, also contains radioactive elements from deep below the surface. Occasionally, this toxic waste is used to frack new wells. Often, it is hauled by trucks that must weave around narrow local roads to sites called injection wells, where this hazardous slurry is injected deep into the earth, a process that has repeatedly been linked to earthquakes. In 2016, in Barnesville, Ohio a truck spilled approximately 5,000 gallons of fracking wastewater when it crashed beside a stream that leads into one of the village’s main reservoirs.

Last November a truck carrying fracking waste overturned near Coolville, Ohio and emptied fluid into a culvert that connects to a creek. Residents were prepared; they’d been living for years with the menace of injection wells, including what resident Susie Quinn calls a “chemical factory like smell” around their homes. Like many in the region, she spends free time researching risks the industry and her own government have failed to protect her against. More than a week after the frack truck overturned, she visited the site to take samples, but forgot gloves. “About an hour and twenty minutes later all the fingers on my left hand were burning underneath my fingernails,” says Quinn. Tests later revealed the culvert was loaded with barium, as well as strontium, whose isotopes can be radioactive.

In West Virginia and Pennsylvania, radioactive fracking waste is being processed at facilities like Antero Clearwater in Doddridge County, West Virginia, which claims it can produce water clean enough to be discharged back into nearby local waterways. But Antero’s website contains scant details on how this is done, and radioactivity experts, like Dr. Marvin Resnikoff, a nuclear physicist and international consultant on radioactive waste, remain concerned. “The radioactive levels at the Marcellus shale formation are off the charts,” he says, referring to the gas-rich layer that underlies much of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. “What is radioactive underground is still radioactive when it’s brought to the surface,” says Resnikoff. “This is not alchemy where radioactivity disappears.” A tour last February with local residents through heavily-fracked Doddridge County revealed Antero’s facility, located just six miles from Doddridge County High School, was emitting tremendous amounts of steam that drifted away in the wind. “There may be radioactive elements in the steam,” says Resnikoff.

The “Harms of Fracking” report also highlights astonishing risks for an often overlooked group in the public health discussion on fracking: The workers. Fracking has created 1.7 million jobs, says the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the industry has potentially exposed workers on the ground to extremely dangerous conditions. “These are killing jobs,” says report co-author Dr. Sandra Steingraber. “We have actually detected benzene in the urine of workers at levels known to raise the risks of leukemia.” Dr. Pouné Saberi, a Philadelphia-based occupational and environmental medicine physician says workers face a wealth of risks, but their injuries rarely show up in the data, for a variety of reasons. They often work as non-unionized sub-contractors, allowing parent oil and gas companies to avoid reporting injuries, and the oil and gas industry is exempt from certain worker safety rules. Also, doctors and major Pennsylvania health care providers that service the industry, potentially a valuable source of worker data, says Saberi, rarely mention anything negative about fracking. “There is a code of silence that exists,” she says. Plus, workers themselves rarely report injuries or hazards, for fear of losing their jobs.

“If you asked too many questions, you were labeled a tree-hugger and you were gone,” says former fracking waste truck driver Randy Moyer, who describes his stomach-turning experience on a website called Shalefield Stories. “Every day was different,” he writes. “Some days I’d carry mud, but most days I’d haul wastewater from fracked wells…It was an endless parade of trucks on those back roads.” Moyer was never told the contents of the waste he was hauling. At the well-site, waste was kept in a makeshift pit, and when loading his truck Moyer often had to climb in and squeegee out material. To avoid getting their boots wet, “some guys would go in there in their bare feet.” Moyer was given no safety gear, aside from a flame-resistant coat, because, he explains, “If the public sees guys in hazmat suits they’re going to start to ask questions.” As one would anticipate from a human being with direct exposure to radioactive waste, Moyer became quite sick.

“My tongue, lips, and limbs all swelled up,” he writes. “I’ve had three teeth snap off. The first two broke while I was eating garlic bread and spaghetti. I have burning rashes all over my body that jump from place to place.” Moyer has seen over 40 specialists across West Virginia and Pennsylvania. “One told me that I had bed bugs. Another said it must be a food allergy.”

The report, which is in its fifth edition, flips the narrative on an energy rush that is quite literally powering the nation. Fracking has “bolstered our economy and energy security” says Seth Whitehead, a consultant with Energy in Depth, a website affiliated with the Independent Petroleum Association of America. The numbers bear out: Fossil fuels supply the U.S. with a majority of its electricity, and gas has overtaken coal as America’s number one power source. Meanwhile, about 60 percent of the gas produced in America and 48 percent of the oil now comes from unconventional oil and gas deposits. Fracking has helped ease America off foreign fossil fuels. And the boom extends far beyond the well pads.

Ethane, one of many components in fracked gas, serves as the base ingredient for the production of numerous plastics and petrochemicals. On the Gulf Coast, these industries are making big investments in infrastructure to take advantage of America’s newly abundant cheap gas. “With more than $35 billion in planned chemical plant expansions in our area over the next five years, these are the ‘good old days,’” Chad Burke, President of the Economic Alliance Houston Ship Channel Region, posted on the organization’s website. The American Chemistry Council bullishly estimates that over the next decade the plastics industry will generate over 300,000 jobs. “The surge of natural gas production from shale has reversed the fortunes of the U.S. plastics industry,” states a 2015 Council report.

But these glowing numbers rarely take into account the fracking boom’s epic toll on public health, the American landscape and the world’s climate. In fact, against a mounting pile of personal testimony and scientific data, the industry continues to claim it is doing nothing wrong. “The science clearly indicates that, with an emphasis on prevention…energy production can and is being done right, and that hydraulic fracturing is not leading to widespread, systemic effects to drinking water resources,” Stephanie Wissman, an Executive Director with the American Petroleum Institute, stated at a recent meeting of the Delaware River Basin Commission. “It’s sad,” Marcellus Shale Coalition spokesperson Erica Clayton Wright wrote in an email, “that some shoddy so-called ‘studies’ focused on attacking American energy and the tens of thousands of hardworking Pennsylvanians that work across the industry are the subject of fake news stories like these.”

But the science on fracking is getting more difficult to dismiss. “With fracking,” says Steingraber, “we had six peer reviewed articles in 2009 pointing to possible public health risks. By 2011 we had 42. Now there are more than 1200.” Some states are indeed listening to the scientists. New York, Maryland and Vermont have banned fracking, and even Florida’s state legislature is seriously considering a ban. “The chickens are going to come home to roost,” says Ted Auch, an environmental scientist with FracTracker Alliance. He believes that as negative impacts on health and water supplies continue to stack up, the fracking industry will have an increasingly difficult time gaining investors, an issue highlighted in a December article in the Wall Street Journal. “Shale has been a lousy bet for most investors,” the article states, referring to the deposits where fracking typically occurs. Within the past decade, says the Journal article, “energy companies…have spent $280 billion more than they generated from operations on shale investments.”

As a result, many companies have taken extreme measures to politically protect their investments. Last month, Wyoming became the third state, after Iowa and Ohio, to introduce a bill criminalizing protest activities like the ones undertaken at Standing Rock. “It is a war,” says Tina Smusz, a retired emergency medicine and palliative care physician and Virginia-based member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. “And in this war one of your most valuable weapons is science.”

Along the Ohio River in Southeast Ohio

From a Press Release, Ohio Chapter, Sierra Club, February 21, 2018

COLUMBUS, Ohio— Seven conservation groups have filed an administrative protest challenging a Bureau of Land Management plan to auction off 345 acres of Ohio’s Wayne National Forest for oil and gas fracking leases in March.

The protest, filed late Tuesday, notes that the leases would lock in dangerous fracking in the Wayne. Despite known threats from hydraulic fracturing, the BLM planned the auction using only a cursory review that avoids site-specific analysis of potential harm from fracking operations.

That means the public will have no information about pollution risks to streams, eradication of endangered species habitat and harm to nearby communities, which is required under the National Environmental Policy Act. “The Bureau of Land Management is unlawfully cutting corners in its push to develop the Wayne. Our protest filing is intended to rein in the agency,” said Nathan Johnson, attorney for the Ohio Environmental Council. “The Wayne is one of Ohio’s finest natural treasures, plain and simple. It deserves to be protected from heavy industrial development.”

The auction comes after the U.S. Forest Service announced plans to revise its 2006 forest plan governing land management in the Wayne. Conservation groups last year sued the Forest Service and the BLM, which oversees drilling and fracking of federal oil and gas. The lawsuit says federal officials relied on the outdated plan and failed to analyze threats to public health, water, endangered species and the climate before opening 40,000 acres of the Wayne to fracking

“There are very few vestiges of wilderness left in Ohio for wildlife habitat and outdoor recreation. Ohio’s only national forest should be preserved, not plundered for private industry profits,” said Jen Miller, director of Ohio Sierra Club. “We call for the stop of all fracking and pipeline activities, and for a robust, transparent process to revise the forest management plan in a way that maximizes wildlife protections and recreational opportunities for generations to come.”

“The Wayne is being opened up to fracking pollution based on a dangerously outdated management plan that ignores major risks,” said Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity. “The lack of transparency in this process is disturbing. The Forest Service needs to listen to the public and spare Ohio’s only national forest from fracking industrialization and contamination.”

Clear-cutting for well pads, roads and other infrastructure would reverse decades of forest and watershed recovery in the Wayne and destroy habitat for endangered Indiana bats and threatened northern long-eared bats. The bats are already imperiled by forest fragmentation, white-nose syndrome, and climate change. Pollution from fracking operations, explosions and spills would damage water supplies that provide drinking water for millions of people.

Since 2016 the BLM has auctioned off more than 2,300 acres of Wayne National Forest. Three lease sales have used “determinations of NEPA adequacy,” sometimes known as DNAs, which avoid any analysis of site-specific environmental harm before leasing public lands to industry. Conservation groups have mounted administrative or legal challenges to these lease sales.

“In a time of accelerating climate change, biodiversity loss, and air and water pollution crises, this action by the supposed stewards of our natural resources is unconscionable,” said Heather Cantino of Athens County Fracking Action Network.“Wayne and BLM justifications for this action are not based on science or the public interest, which by law they must be. Today’s protest stands up for the law and the rights of the American people.”

The Trump administration recently issued a directive calling for expanded use of DNAs for fracking leases on public lands across the country. That directive effectively excludes the public from the public-lands leasing process, shortens protest periods to just 10 days from 30 days, and restricts BLM staff from deferring industry-nominated land parcels from lease sales to protect sensitive resources.

“It’s extremely disappointing that, after all of the climate disasters of 2017, the Bureau of Land Management is still choosing to sacrifice our National Forest for fossil fuel industrialization,” said Becca Pollard of Keep Wayne Wild. “BLM should instead focus on the forest’s natural ability to absorb greenhouse gases while providing habitat for wildlife and wild places for people to visit.”

The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.6 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.

Contacts:
>> Nathan Johnson, Ohio Environmental Council, NJohnson@theOEC.org;
>> Becca Pollard, Keep Wayne Wild, keepwaynewild@gmail.com;
>> Heather Cantino, Athens County Fracking Action Network, heather.cantino@gmail.com;
>> Tabitha Tripp, Heartwood, info@heartwood.org;
>> Roxanne Groff, Buckeye Environmental Network, roxannegroff1227@gmail.com;
>> Jen Miller, Sierra Club Ohio Chapter, jen.miller@sierraclub.org;
>> Taylor McKinnon, Center for Biological Diversity, tmckinnon@biologicaldiversity.org

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

SUMMARY — In December 2016 and March 2017, the Bureau of Land Management leased a total of 1900 acres of Ohio’s only national forest to fracking operations. They will continue to lease up to 40,000 acres of Wayne National Forest to oil and gas unless we show overwhelming public support for the Wayne.
​
The OEC, Center for Biological Diversity, Heartwood and Sierra Club are filing suit in federal court to stop the lease of up to 40,000 acres of Wayne National Forest to oil and gas operations. Donate today to fund their fight to save the Wayne! The Wayne, which rests in the foothills of Appalachia, is Ohio’s only national forest. The impacts of drilling and fracking this critical habitat will devastate endangered species and degrade this beautiful recreational space. Please give today, and you can help secure lasting protections for the Wayne!

Prof. Ingraffea: Methane gas is increasing rapidly

From an Article by Sharon Kelly, DeSmog Blog, April 11, 2018

In 2011, a Cornell University research team first made the groundbreaking discovery that leaking methane from the shale gas fracking boom could make burning fracked gas worse for the climate than coal.

In a sobering lecture released this month, a member of that team, Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, Professor of Engineering Emeritus at Cornell University, outlined more precisely the role U.S. fracking is playing in changing the world’s climate.

The most recent climate data suggests that the world is on track to cross the two degrees of warming threshold set in the Paris accord in just 10 to 15 years, says Ingraffea in a 13-minute lecture titled “Shale Gas: The Technological Gamble That Should Not Have Been Taken,” which was posted online on April 4.

That’s if American energy policy follows the track predicted by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which expects 1 million natural gas wells will be producing gas in the U.S. in 2050, up from roughly 100,000 today.

The Difference of a Half Degree

An average global temperature increase of 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) will bring catastrophic changes — even as compared against a change of 1.5° C (2.7° F). “Heat waves would last around a third longer, rain storms would be about a third more intense, the increase in sea level would be approximately that much higher and the percentage of tropical coral reefs at risk of severe degradation would be roughly that much greater,” with just that half-degree difference, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explained in a 2016 post about climate change.

A draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was leaked this January, concludes that it’s “extremely unlikely” that the world will keep to a 1.5° change, estimating that the world will cross that threshold in roughly 20 years, somewhat slower than Ingraffea’s presentation concludes.

Earlier models, like an often-cited 2012 paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Science, dramatically underestimated the rise in temperatures, when its projections are compared against more than a half-decade of additional temperature recordings, Ingraffea says. “Every one of these scenarios under-predicted actual global warming,” he points out as he describes the models presented in that landmark 2012 study.

“Whereas the worst-case scenario brought us to 1.5 degrees Centigrade in 2040,” he adds, “we’re almost there today.”

A Different Energy Future, if Not for Fracking? So what happened?

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, U.S. natural gas production was flat or falling. If that trend had continued along the same track it was following from 2006-2008, then wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources might have had a chance to displace both natural gas and coal as major energy sources in America, according to Ingraffea.

Instead, the shale gas rush, propelled by hydraulic fracturing (fracking), swept across the U.S., with drillers snapping up land to drill for previously inaccessible fossil fuels locked in geologic formations of shale rock from coast to coast.

If the shale gas rush hadn’t disrupted trends around that time, Ingraffea estimates that the wind energy sector alone could have produced roughly triple the amount of energy expected by the end of this coming decade, a difference of roughly 400 gigawatts.

“We can easily see there is a loss of potential — large amounts of wind energy — because of the injection of shale gas into our energy economy,” Ingraffea explains in the lecture.

While the shale gas industry promised benefits like jobs and American energy security, Ingraffea notes, those benefits would have been almost exclusively aimed at just 5 percent of the world’s population, North Americans. But the harms will affect the remaining 95 percent of the world as well.

It’s an alarming message — even though the shale rush has stumbled somewhat as gas prices collapsed and many drillers went bankrupt, the cumulative impact of American fracking appears to have set the entire world on a collision course with climate change’s most extreme effects.

The climate is changing faster and more dramatically than it might have otherwise, and — far from serving as a bridge fuel — fracking huge amounts of natural gas has already played a significant role in pushing the world toward a vastly more difficult future.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Prof. Ingraffea’s lecture, part of the Spring Creek Project’s Bedrock Lectures on Human Rights and Climate Change series, can be viewed below:

“Shale Gas: The Technological Gamble That Should Not Have Been Taken” by Anthony Ingraffea, published on YouTube.

Marcellus drilling operation at Morgantown Industrial Park in Monongahela River valley

From an Article by Sharon Kelly, DeSmogBlog, January 16, 2018

Over the past few years, natural gas has become the primary fuel that America uses to generate electricity, displacing the long-time king of fossil fuels, coal. In 2019, more than a third of America’s electrical supply will come from natural gas, with coal falling to a second-ranked 28 percent, the Energy Information Administration predicted this month, marking the growing ascendency of gas in the American power market.

But new peer-reviewed research adds to the growing evidence that the shift from coal to gas isn’t necessarily good news for the climate.

A team led by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed that the oil and gas industry is responsible for the largest share of the world’s rising methane emissions—which are a major factor in climate change—and in the process the researchers resolved one of the mysteries that has plagued climate scientists over the past several years.

Missing Methane

That mystery? Since 2006, methane emissions have been rising by about 25 teragrams (a unit of weight so large that NASA notes you’d need more than 200,000 elephants to equal one teragram) every year. But when different researchers sought to pinpoint the sources of that methane, they ran into a problem.

If you added the growing amounts of methane pollution from oil and gas to the rising amount of methane measured from other sources, like microbes in wetlands and marshes, the totals came out too high—exceeding the levels actually measured in the atmosphere. The numbers didn’t add up.

It turns out, there was a third factor at play, one whose role was underestimated, NASA’s new paper concludes, after reviewing satellite data, ground-level measurements and chemical analyses of the emissions from different sources.

A drop in the acreage burned in fires worldwide between 2006 and 2014 meant that methane from those fires went down far more than scientists had realized. Fire-related methane pollution dropped twice as much as previously believed, the new paper, published in the journal Nature Communications, reports.

Using this data, “the team showed that about 17 teragrams per year of the increase is due to fossil fuels, another 12 is from wetlands or rice farming, while fires are decreasing by about 4 teragrams per year,” NASA said in a Jan. 2 press release. “The three numbers combine to 25 teragrams a year—the same as the observed increase.”

“A fun thing about this study was combining all this different evidence to piece this puzzle together,” lead scientist John Worden of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California said in a statement.

Shale Boom, Methane Boom

Less fun, unfortunately: the implications for the climate. Methane is a major greenhouse gas, capable of trapping 86 times as much heat as the same amount of carbon dioxide in the first 20 years after it hits the Earth’s atmosphere. So relatively tiny amounts of methane in the air can pack a massive climate-changing punch.

“The sharp increase in methane emissions correlates closely with the U.S. fracking boom,” said Jim Warren, executive director of the climate watchdog group NC WARN. “Leaking and venting of unburned gas—which is mostly methane—makes natural gas even worse for the climate than coal.”

The new NASA study is not the first to call attention to the connection between oil and gas and methane leaks. A study in March last year found that natural gas power plants put out between 20 and 120 times more methane pollution than previously believed, due in part to accidental leaks and in part to deliberate “venting” by companies. And as far back as 2011, researchers from Cornell University warned that switching over from coal to gas could be a grave mistake where climate change is concerned.

The NASA study may help settle the science on the oil and gas industry’s role in rising methane emissions.

To conduct their research, the scientists examined the methane molecules linked to different sources, focusing on carbon isotopes in the molecules, which helped them match the methane to different sources. Methane molecules rising from wetlands and farms have a relatively small concentration of heavy carbon isotopes, oil and gas-linked methane higher amounts, and methane from fires the most heavy carbon. The scientists also cross-checked their findings by looking at other associated gases, like ethane and carbon monoxide—and the numbers all fell into place.

It turns out that fires worldwide burned up roughly 12 percent less acreage during 2007 to 2014, compared to the prior roughly half-dozen years—but the amount of methane from those fires fell more sharply, plunging nearly twice as fast, measurements from NASA’s Terra and Aura satellites revealed.

“There’s been a ping-pong game of explanations going back and forth about what might explain this,” Penn State University atmospheric scientist Ken Davis told Mashable. “It’s a complicated puzzle with a lot of parts, but [the study's conclusions] do seem plausible and likely.”

That 2006-2014 lull in fires may be part of a larger trend. Historically, “burning during the past century has been lower than at any time in the past 2000 years,” one 2016 study points out, due in large part to the spread of fire suppression techniques.

But don’t expect the lower methane emissions from less burning worldwide to last forever. One of the impacts of climate change is to make large wildfires more likely, the Union of Concerned Scientists points out.

“Wildfire seasons (seasons with higher wildfire potential) in the United States are projected to lengthen, with the southwest’s season of fire potential lengthening from seven months to all year long,” the group said. “Additionally, wildfires themselves are likely to be more severe.”

In the meantime, even while fires declined worldwide, methane emissions overall have continued to rise sharply—and, according to NASA’s latest research, it turns out pollution linked to the oil and gas industry is responsible for the biggest chunk of that growing problem.

Greenhouse Gases: Methane, carbon dioxide, etc.,

From an Article by Matthew Daly (AP), Washington Post, October 4, 2017

WASHINGTON — Rebuffing the Trump administration, a federal judge on Wednesday ordered the Interior Department to reinstate an Obama-era regulation aimed at restricting harmful methane emissions from oil and gas production on federal lands.

The order by a judge in San Francisco came as the Interior Department moved to delay the rule until 2019, saying it was too burdensome to industry. The action followed an earlier effort by Interior to postpone part of the rule set to to take effect next year.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte of the Northern District of California said Interior had failed to give a “reasoned explanation” for the changes and had not offered details why an earlier analysis by the Obama administration was faulty. She ordered the entire rule reinstated immediately.

The rule, finalized last November, forces energy companies to capture methane that’s burnt off or “flared” at drilling sites on public lands during production because it pollutes the environment. An estimated $330 million a year in methane is wasted through leaks or intentional releases on federal lands, enough to power about 5 million homes a year.

Methane, the primary component of natural gas, is a leading contributor to global warming. It is far more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide but does not stay in the air as long.

“It’s a good thing the courts are protecting Americans from oil and gas industry pollution, because the Trump administration has completely abdicated that responsibility,” said Michael Saul, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that challenged the Trump rule along with California and New Mexico.

“The methane rule puts modest constraints on a dirty practice that endangers public health and wastes billions of taxpayer dollars,” Saul said. President Donald Trump and Interior Secretrary Ryan Zinke “are not above the law and the court has made it clear: They have to stop putting polluters above the people they were sworn to protect,” Saul said.

The court ruling follows a defeat in Congress, when the Senate unexpectedly turned back a bid to overturn the methane rule after three Republicans joined Democrats in voting to uphold it. The vote promped Interior officials to promise to suspend, revise or rescind the regulation as part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to unravel what it considers burdensome regulations imposed by former President Barack Obama.

The methane rule imposes a “significant regulatory burden that encumbers American energy production, economic growth and job creation,” especially in North Dakota, Colorado and New Mexico, Interior said.

Environmental groups sharply disagreed.

Rolling back the methane waste rule “makes no sense and is yet another example of the lengths this administration will go to sell out our public lands,” said Jenny Kordick, an energy policy expert for The Wilderness Society.

Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., said the methane rule provides badly needed revenue to states like New Mexico for public education and other services.

Prior to the rule, an estimated $100 million in taxpayer-owned natural gas was wasted each year from oil and gas wells operating on public lands in New Mexico, Udall said, adding that the rule has helped to reduce dangerous air pollution across the West, including a methane cloud the size of Delaware that hangs over the Four Corners region of New Mexico, Utah, Arizona and Colorado.

“This rule is simply good policy — good for taxpayers, good for the economy and good for the environment,” Udall said. He and other Democrats encouraged the public to speak out to defend the rule during a 30-day public comment period that begins Thursday.