Drought & climate change are quite severe in Central America

From an Article by Will Bunch, Common Dreams, April 26, 2019

No issue has flummoxed our rage-prone 45th president more than the rise in unauthorized crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border — even after promising his xenophobic base that his harsh immigration crackdown would make America great again.

When numbers came into the White House showing this decade’s biggest surge in refugees at the border — with Border Patrol agents detaining as many as 4,000 migrants, many of them women and children, in a single day. Then Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was forced out of her job, partly because she wouldn’t buy into the president’s ideas to fight migration with moves that were probably illegal and unworkable and certainly immoral. Trump killed the nomination of a new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chief who wasn’t “tough enough, fired other top Homeland Security officials, and flirted with ideas like sending detained children to Gitmo. The president was “increasingly unhinged” about border crossings.

The Trump administration needs to do something so far alien to them — Embrace science. The President must start accepting that climate change is real, that it’s occurring right now, and that responses like mass migration are an unavoidably human reaction to drought, floods and misery.

Experts believe that a sizable portion of the recent steep increase in migrants making the long and dangerous journey from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are doing so because record drought in the region — the result of a warming planet — has destroyed crops and left destitute farmers desperate to save their families.

“People have been displaced by climate for millennia, but we are now at a particular historical moment, facing a new type of environmentally driven migration that will be more fast and furious,” Maria Cristina Garcia, a Cornell University professor publishing a book on climate-driven migration, said recently. “It will require incredible adaptability and political will to keep up with the changes that are forecasted to happen.”

Conor Walsh, who works for Catholic Family Services in Honduras, wrote recently in the Arizona Daily Star that severe drought in neighboring Guatemala in 2018 resulted in significant crop loss for as many as 300,000 subsistence farmers there. Indeed, the cycle of arid days without rain and severe floods has become so pronounced in the key growing regions of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras during the 2010s that the area is now called “the dry corridor.”

Experts note that the last big drought in 2014 matched up with the last big surge in U.S. border crossings. And the World Bank says climate change may cause as many as 1.4 million people to leave Central America and Mexico over the next 30 years.

But “incredible adaptability,” to steal professor Garcia’s phrase, is not a hallmark of the Donald Trump presidency. Imagine a world where the president sat at the Resolute Desk and listened to the story of Fredi Onan Vicen Peña, a 41-year-old Honduran coffee farmer who told the New York Times he’s seen a drought-fueled disease called coffee rust destroy 70 percent of his crop, while most of his family members have already left for the U.S. or elsewhere.

Can the United States — a.k.a. “the Colossus of the North” — do anything to help the struggling farmers of Honduras and Guatemala? The answer, not surprisingly, is “yes.” Sebastian Charchalac, a Guatemalan agronomist who was running a program with about $200,000 in U.S. aid — a mere pittance in the Land of Billion-Dollar Stealth Bombers — told the New Yorker he was seeing real success in helping farmers diversify crops, conserve water, and, as a result, save their land. Then in 2017 the Trump administration arrived and killed the program.

Indeed, one element of Trump’s rage-frenzied rampage over border crossings has been an announcement that the U.S. will end all foreign aid to the three key Central American nations — about $350 million to 400 million a year, already down sharply from the Obama years — as a spiteful punishment for the supposed failure to curb migration. That money goes not just for farm aid but also for programs that attack problems like urban gang violence — i.e., all of the horrible things that would cause people to abandon their native countries, undertake an arduous and dangerous long journey, and seek freedom and safety in the United States.

Ending foreign aid and covering our eyes and pretending that climate change doesn’t exist are all but guaranteed to drive the number of refugees from Central America even higher.

Meanwhile, climate change-driven migration — and the famines, wars and other crises created by this — are only going to get worse. In January, the Pentagon warned yet again that climate change is a major national security issue for this country. But Trump has not been listening!

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See also: Climate change a major factor in Central American migration, Univision, May 11, 2018

Source: Ernst vs EnCana 2013

Researchers call for effective groundwater monitoring in Canada

From an Article by Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee.ca, April 11, 2017

A new University of Guelph study proves what many western Canadian landowners have long documented — that methane gas leaking from energy industry wells can travel great distances in groundwater and pose safety risks, contaminate water and contribute to climate change.

The study, published in Nature Geoscience this month, also concluded that current monitoring for gas leakage, usually at ground level and adjacent to wells, is inadequate to detect contamination.

“Current surface and subsurface monitoring efforts of shale gas development are thus insufficient to meaningfully detect or assess methane impacts to atmosphere and groundwater,” the study found.

British Columbia’s floundering shale gas industry has drilled and fracked nearly 10,000 wells in northeastern B.C. over the last decade, causing more than 1,000 earthquakes in the region. Impacts on groundwater are not being systematically monitored.

The study took a novel approach, said Aaron Cahill, lead author and groundwater researcher at the University of British Columbia. “We asked if leaks occur from an energy well, what happens to the groundwater and where does the methane go, and nobody had looked at that before.”

Cahill and other scientists at Guelph’s Institute for Groundwater Research injected methane over a 72-day period into a shallow sand aquifer at Canadian Forces Base Borden in Ontario at a rate of about a cubic metre a day — a volume much less than actually recorded at many leaking oil and gas wells in Alberta and B.C.

Guelph researchers tracked the injected methane for more than eight months via monitoring wells as the explosive gas travelled through the ground, entered the atmosphere or dissolved into groundwater, causing subtle but important changes to water chemistry.

In an aquifer, bacteria can metabolize methane and generate undesirable byproducts such as hydrogen sulfide. Bacterial reactions can also bring about the release of trace elements, changing water quality and potentially rendering it undrinkable.

“We didn’t see a lot of methane reacting. It degraded at low rates. In other words, if a leak were to occur the methane wouldn’t go away too rapidly from the aquifer,” Cahill said.

Cahill also noted that the study covered only a short time period and used only small amounts of methane. “For larger leaks over longer times and greater areas, these findings would indicate that the groundwater would likely become unusable,” he said.

Cahill said the distance travelled by the methane in a relatively shallow sand-based aquifer and complex interactions showed the importance of monitoring groundwater around energy developments.

Alberta, for example, only classifies a leaking well as “serious” when it leaks 300 cubic metres of methane a day, but the research showed extensive impacts on groundwater with a leak of just one cubic metre per day.

Methane leakage from tens of thousands of shale gas, coalbed methane, inactive and abandoned wells pose a major and costly environmental problem throughout North America where the energy industry has drilled more than 4 million holes since the 1850s.

There are 1,500 inactive and leaking wells in Alberta’s cities (some are in malls and playgrounds) and more than 150,000 abandoned or inactive wells in rural Alberta.

Reports of groundwater contamination are common throughout oil and gas regions in North America. In Pennsylvania alone there have been hundreds of cases of groundwater contamination from energy wells.

Although industry argues that shale gas wells are too deep to affect groundwater, most methane leaks come not from the production source or bottom of the well but from shallower geological formations closer to the surface of the well. Gas flows up then enters groundwater or the atmosphere via corroded, old or faulty seals.

Because all energy wells puncture the earth and caprocks, they often serve as effective pathways for the migration of methane, and other gases such as cancer-causing radon over time.

Phil Rygg, director of communications for the BC Oil and Gas Commission, said there were “some important learnings from the study” but that it only looked at how methane moves through beach sand in Ontario. He added that “it did not examine how gas could move along a shale gas well and enter groundwater.”

However, the researchers noted in their paper that methane will migrate much farther and faster in fractured sedimentary rock, like that found in northern B.C. and Alberta, compared to a sand aquifer.

Rygg said that a similar groundwater study is now being done by UBC and supported by Geoscience BC with technical input from the B.C. Oil and Gas Commission. Its goal is “to understand methane behaviour in the subsurface in northeast B.C., and includes drone and remote sensing research.” “The commission will continue to support research in this area, and supports the general recommendation for enhanced monitoring,” he said.

Despite evidence of serious methane leakage into groundwater from energy wells, many regulators and energy companies have denied the scale of the problem, claimed the methane naturally migrated into the groundwater or was caused by bacteria.   But the study challenges those assumptions by showing how a methane leak actually behaves in an aquifer.

Moreover, the study found that methane leakage into groundwater can affect water over a large area and “is an equivalent, if not, more significant process relative to atmospheric emissions.”  Once methane migrates into a pump house or basement it can be explosive in confined spaces.

“There has been no science-based groundwater monitoring using modern methods at fracking sites,” said Beth Parker, director of the G360 Institute for Groundwater Research and a co-author of the paper.  “Our findings are evidence that prospects for insightful information obtained from such groundwater monitoring are good, which goes against the ‘conventional wisdom’ mostly based on speculation or intuition.”

In recent years the chronic problem of methane leakage has been aggravated by hydraulic fracking, which causes more wear and tear on well plumbing and seals with intense pressures, shaking and well-banging seismic activity.

John Cherry, one of Canada’s top hydrogeologists and one of the paper’s authors, said the new study should put to rest any arguments that there is no point monitoring groundwater for methane contamination from energy wells “because it will move like little snakes in channels and you’ll never find it.” “The study found that very small amounts of injected methane ended up having a large impact on the aquifer — the magnitude was huge, and the methane hung around for a long time.”

No Canadian regulator has set up proper groundwater monitoring near shale gas facilities as recommended by a 2014 Council of Canadian Academies report on fracking. “No regulator has yet done what we recommended,” confirmed Cherry. Alberta doesn’t have a protocol for investigating methane contamination of groundwater.

The Council of Canadian Academies report found that the fracking industry, the foundation of B.C.’s failing liquefied natural gas strategy, had marched ahead without credible baseline data, scientific knowledge and necessary monitoring and had put groundwater at risk.

Jessica Ernst, a landowner who is suing the Alberta government and Encana alleging negligence in the fracking of shallow coal seams more than a decade ago, welcomed the Guelph study as long overdue.   Ernst said she would include the study in filings to support her lawsuit alleging the government’s “negligent investigation and cover-up of Encana’s fracking practices when the company illegally fractured my community’s drinking water aquifers and put us in explosive risk in our homes.”

Ernst said that the water reservoir in her hamlet of Rosebud blew up in 2005 — an incident the local paper attributed to an “accumulation of gases” that seriously injured a county worker.

In a separate incident a year later, “Alberta rancher Bruce Jack and two industry gas-in-water testers were also seriously injured and hospitalized after industry’s leaking methane and ethane caused his water to explode,” said Ernst. A 2011 Alberta Innovates report on the leak that identified industry contamination was never released to the Alberta public.

The Guelph study adds some cold and hard science to the growing debate about methane migration from oil and gas wells.

Nearly a half a dozen studies done by scientists at Duke and Stanford universities have consistently found elevated levels of methane in water wells near shale fracking operations but couldn’t always identify the source or the mechanism for contamination.   Other studies have found chemistry changes in groundwater near energy wells.

A 2014 University of Texas study, for example, looked at 100 water wells in the heavily fracked Barnett Shale and found that approximately 30 per cent of the wells within 2.9 kilometres of gas drilling sites showed an increased amount of arsenic and other heavy metals.

An earlier 2013 University of Texas study suggested that elevated levels of strontium, barium, selenium and methanol in water wells near gas wells could be due to a variety of factors, including hydro-geochemical changes from lowering of the water table, or industrial accidents such as faulty gas well casings.

For decades, fracking technology patents filed by industry noted that “it is not uncommon during hydraulic fracturing for the fracture to grow out of the zone of productive interest and proceed into a zone of non-productive interest, including zones containing water.”

But industry has repeatedly dealt with abuses of groundwater by offering landowners money and demanding that they sign non-disclosure agreements. In the absence of any credible groundwater monitoring, governments such as that of British Columbia can also claim, “There has never been a confirmed case of groundwater contamination in B.C. as a result of hydraulic fracturing.”

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers still maintains that “more than 215,000 wells have been hydraulically fractured in B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan without a demonstrated impact on drinking water, according to regulators.”

B.C. Natural Gas Development Minister Rich Coleman denied that energy wells leak methane in 2014. In contrast, the BC Oil and Gas Commission does not deny this reality.

According to a report by three University of Waterloo engineers, more than 10 per cent of B.C.’s existing 20,000 active and abandoned wells leak. In addition, some of the province’s shale gas wells have become “super emitters” of methane.

In recent years one energy company spent $8 million in northern B.C. to repair a badly leaking shale gas well.

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See the technical article: Mobility and persistence of methane in groundwater in a controlled-release field experiment

What We Are Learning From Shale Drilling – Earth Sciences

Analysis by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor and Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV
 
Geologists and petroleum engineers are learning that the earth is really much more complicated than the simple conceptual diagrams that are in their textbooks and that they put out to the companies that want to drill.  Those diagrams are a bit like a layer cake.  They appear to have uniform thickness and consist of uniform, homogenous, single component layers. 

However, buried landscapes, compression and extension, lateral thrusts, percolating waters of various compositions, often highly corrosive or oxidizing, radioactivity, an immense amount of detail which changes unpredictably in a few yards vertically or a few tens of yards horizontally are left out.
 
They have to be, because every location is different.  Fracking gives an opportunity to find details which don’t appear in published diagrams.  Things like abandoned wells, cracks large enough for migration at depth, variations in the thickness and quality of the target rock.  Terry Engelder is quoted here as saying certain joints in the source rocks may “break out of the gas shales and populate the rock above these gas shales. [This] joint set may appear about 1000 feet above or even as much as 4000 feet above the gas shales.”  The industry vigorously denies this.  The economic value of shale varies tremendously within a few miles.  Nobody (almost) says anything about this.
 
Chesapeake Energy began selling investments with the assumption all drilling locations were more or less identical, and the wells would provide economic amounts of gas for 30 or 40 years, like conventional wells.  This has not proven true.
 
Something petroleum geologists and petroleum engineers are learning that they did not suspect is the rapid decline in production and the spottiness of production within a field.   Look up graphs of decline rates for various shale fields here.

Much more information for a sample of the Marcellus is printed here, but the graphs are harder to read.  Each diamond shape indicates a well’s production decline as of June 30, 2013.  The months it has been in production is along the horizontal axis and the percent decline is a long the vertical axis.  For example, the extreme right upper diamond represents a well in production for 48 months (just a little left of the 50 months line) and it has lost 79% of its production in that time.  Another, the diamond shape lowest in the left has lost 58% of its production in 12 months time. The beauty of this reference is that the information reported to Pennsylvania DEP (which by law is open to the public) is printed along with the graphs.  No argument can be made with this!

If you read much about shale drilling, you are already aware of the rapid decline in production of shale wells, compared to drilling in conventional reservoirs.  James Stafford quotes Arthur Berman: “… nobody thinks very much about is the decline rates shale reservoirs. Well, I’ve looked at this. The decline rates are incredibly high. In the Eagleford shale, which is supposed to be the mother of all shale oil plays, the annual decline rate is higher than 42%. They’re going to have to drill hundreds, almost [thousands of] wells in the Eagleford shale, every year, to keep production flat. Just for one play, we’re talking about $10 or $12 billion a year just to replace supply.”  What this means is illustrated in an article about the Barnette in The Oil Drum.  Instead of drilling wells and being able to sit back and relax and count on initial production to hold up for years at nearly the initial level, tens of billions of additional investment will be required to maintain initial levels. 

Another big thing discovered is what happens when pressures of thousands of pounds per square inch are applied to liquids pumped down disposal wells in volumes equal to several houses day after day, with only cracks and pores the size of a grain of sand in them to receive it.  Rumble, rumble!  It takes about 4.0 on the Richter Scale to cause damage, but one in South Texas got up to 4.8.  The Richter is a logarithmic scale so 4.8 is 6.3 times the magnitude of 4.0.  Definitely connected with the well, as many small quakes have between verified to be connected to disposal wells. 

Cliff Frohlich, speaking at WVU, recently identified one of 5.7.  He thinks injection wells shouldn’t be sited in cities, but out in the country is OK.  (The “country hicks” don’t care if they are injured or their property is destroyed?  The insurance companies will compensate them for their losses?)  Earthquakes don’t happen at all disposal wells, but when one considers the facts above, then one has to wonder just where these toxic waste liquids do go and how long they will stay put.
 
Frohlich has the life expectancy of the Marcellus field down to less than 30 years (to 2040).  That’s assuming future wells do as well as the present wells, no doubt, in spite of the fact drillers avidly seek out the “sweet spots” and highest returns first.  And, assuming the investors are willing to cough up money to drill and drill and drill. 

Then there will be all those wells to plug.  Any body willing to say this generation of drillers will be more responsible about plugging their wells than those in the past?  What do you suppose it takes to plug a well that takes 3 to 8 million to drill?  Don’t you think that expense will be left for the public, just as wells and mines worked in the past must be remediated by government money, our taxes, or not at all?
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StateIm­pact Pennsylvania has reported on an active problem at a Shell drilling site in northcentral Pennsylvania……

The Pennsylvania Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion is inves­ti­gat­ing a poten­tial methane migra­tion prob­lem in Union Town­ship, Tioga County. A Shell spokes­woman says the company’s tests show “a very low haz­ard risk to peo­ple, veg­e­ta­tion, and fish in the imme­di­ate area,” but Shell has nev­er­the­less asked the hand­ful of peo­ple who live within a one-mile radius of the drilling site to tem­porar­ily evac­u­ate their homes. Shell has also sent a well con­trol spe­cial­ist team to the site.

DEP spokesman Daniel Spadoni con­firmed the probe in an email to StateIm­pact Penn­syl­va­nia. “DEP was noti­fied of the prob­lem by Shell on June 17,” he writes. “Shell is fully coop­er­at­ing with the response and investigation.” Accord­ing to Spadoni, a drink­ing water well located 4,000 feet from a Shell drilling site began over­flow­ing this week­end.  “Shell has sev­eral well pads in the area in var­i­ous stages of com­ple­tion.  They stopped all oper­a­tions in the area when noti­fied of a prob­lem,” he wrote, not­ing “bub­bling was also noted at mul­ti­ple loca­tions in a nearby stream.”

The Wells­boro Gazette has posted a pic­ture of that “bub­bling,” which looks more like a minia­ture geyser shoot­ing fluid more than a foot above the ground.  Methane migra­tion occurs nat­u­rally, but has also been asso­ci­ated with faulty well cas­ing. DEP blames well con­t­a­m­i­na­tion prob­lems in Dimock on the issue.

The rest of Spadoni’s state­ment is below:

PA-DEP Oil and Gas staff col­lected water and iso­topic sam­ples from the hunt­ing club well and stream on June 18.  A Shell con­trac­tor drilled a hole in the water well cas­ing and installed an over­flow line to stop the over­flow, installed methane alarms in the cabin, and will vent the well to the out­side today. PA-DEP has rec­om­mended the cabin not be occu­pied until fur­ther notice.

Addi­tional sur­face expres­sions of gas along the road lead­ing to the hunt­ing cabin were dis­cov­ered on June 18, and Shell has placed secu­rity guards at both ends of the road to limit access. Shell is mon­i­tor­ing con­di­tions con­tin­u­ously in this area for any changes that may require addi­tional controls.

On Tues­day, June 19, Shell’s con­sul­tants had sev­eral teams begin screen­ing within a one-mile radius of the hunt­ing camp to check for methane gas and sam­ple any pri­vate drink­ing water wells poten­tially impacted. That screen­ing con­tin­ued yes­ter­day, June 20, within a one-mile radius of the three Shell gas well pads in the area. Shell is con­duct­ing fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion and oper­a­tions on their nearby well pads. Yes­ter­day, June 20, PA-DEP Oil and Gas staff mon­i­tored the hunt­ing cabin and sur­face expres­sions. No deter­mi­na­tion has been made regard­ing the source or sources of the methane, and the inves­ti­ga­tion is continuing.