Drilling, fracking and wastewater injection create underground disturbances

From an Article by Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee News Service, May 26, 2021

This new warning comes from a former senior scientist with the BC province’s oil and gas commission.

Since 2005, British Columbia’s experiment with hydraulic fracturing of gas wells has changed the geology of the province’s northeast. It is now home to some of the world’s largest fracking-induced earthquakes outside of China. In 2018, one magnitude 4.6 tremor tied to fracking even rattled buildings in Fort St. John and stopped construction on the Site C dam. It was followed by two strong aftershocks.

Now, a comprehensive new scientific study warns that stress changes caused by the technology could trigger a magnitude 5 earthquake or greater in the region, resulting in significant damage to dams, bridges, pipelines and cities if major regulatory and policy reforms aren’t made soon.

Allan Chapman, the author of the paper, served as a senior geoscientist for the BC Oil and Gas Commission and as its first hydrologist from 2010 to 2017. Prior to working for the commission, he directed the Ministry of Environment’s River Forecast Centre, which forecast floods and droughts.

Chapman, now an independent geoscientist, told The Tyee that he felt compelled to write the paper because researchers have concluded that fracking “induced earthquakes don’t have an upper limit” in terms of magnitude. In addition, “there is a clear and present public safety and infrastructure risk that remains unaddressed by the regulator and the B.C. government.”

The BC Oil and Gas Commission rejected Chapman’s conclusions in a statement to The Tyee, saying his study contained “speculation.”

Recent events in China’s Sichuan province prove that fracking can trigger large and destructive earthquakes. Gas drilling operations there generated shallow earthquakes between magnitude 5.3 to 5.7 in recent years that resulted in deaths, extensive property damage and angry protests by local citizens.

Chapman says the commission’s current system for managing tremors, known as a “traffic light protocol,” can’t prevent larger magnitude earthquakes because it ignores how cumulative fracking over time destabilizes shale formations with high pressures and increases seismic risk. “To protect people and infrastructure, we are going to have to avoid fracking in some areas,” he told The Tyee.

Public infrastructure placed at risk by fracking now includes “the communities of Dawson Creek, Fort St. John, Taylor, Hudson’s Hope, Upper Halfway (Halfway River First Nation) and possibly others, and infrastructure such as the WAC Bennett, Peace Canyon and Site C dams, community water supply and treatment systems, the Taylor Gas Plant, the Taylor Bridge crossing of the Peace River, numerous earthen water storage dams, and others,” said the paper.

The Taylor Bridge, for example, was built in 1960 prior to the fracking boom, which has changed both seismic patterns and risks in the region. The bridge, now deteriorating, is responsible for transporting millions of dollars of merchandise, food and fuel every hour between Fort St. John and Dawson Creek in the province’s Peace Region.

More fracking, more tremors

Given that 60 to 70 per cent of earthquakes greater than magnitude 3 are already caused by hydraulic fracturing in the giant Montney shale formation that straddles B.C.’s border with Alberta, Chapman forecasts more and larger tremors in the future.

One factor, he says, is accelerated drilling to serve Shell’s LNG Canada project in Kitimat, B.C. Another factor he cites is that the injecting of fracking fluid deep into the ground appears to have a cumulative effect.

Chapman’s study documents how fracking-induced earthquakes “increase in both frequency and magnitude in relation to frack fluid injection volumes, and that there appears to be a cumulative development effect where prior frack fluid injection possibly resets the seismic potential in certain tectonic environments to allow for eased earthquake initiation related to future lower-volume injections.”

As a consequence, writes Chapman, “the future in the Montney is not if earthquakes greater in magnitude than 5 will occur, but when, with that occurrence possibly without any precursor warning.”

Chapman’s study, published in the Journal of Geoscience and Environmental Protection this week, also sheds a light on companies triggering the earthquakes as well as the inadequacy of current mitigation measures and legislation.

Hydraulic fracturing blasts large volumes of pressurized water, sand and chemicals deep into concrete-like shale formations one to two kilometres in the Earth. That force shatters rock underground with a network of fractures so that methane, oil or natural gas liquids can be released. It can also connect to natural faults triggering swarms of earthquakes.

‘Speculation’ says oil and gas commission

In a statement to The Tyee, the BC Oil and Gas Commission outright rejected Chapman’s analysis. “Our geological and engineering experts have concluded it is based on a number of unproven assumptions or incomplete consideration of the factors cited.”

The commission added that the paper didn’t look at Montney’s structural setting, fault types and local rock stress. It added: “Speculation such as is in this paper requires expertise in seismology, fracturing, reservoir engineering, ground motion and critical infrastructure. All of the commission’s research and changes to regulatory framework are vetted through partner organizations that retain full-time, trained seismologists.”

The commission did not specifically answer questions from The Tyee on the adequacy of the traffic light protocol in the Montney. The commission is entirely funded by industry.

Unlike most papers on fracking and earthquakes, Chapman’s study is one of the first to name companies responsible for large tremors in northeastern B.C. The scientist said he did so for reasons of accountability. “It is in the public interest for their names to be known.”

Since 2012, 77 per cent of the earthquakes triggered by fracking in the Montney have been caused by three companies: Petronas, Tourmaline Oil and Ovintiv (formerly Encana).

Petronas, a Malaysian company, holds the record for most quakes. Its fracking activities are associated with 78 per cent of the earthquakes in the northern Montney and almost one-half the earthquakes in the entire Montney over the 2013 to 2019 period.

Researchers estimate that one out of 150 wells fracked wells in Western Canada will trigger a magnitude 3 tremor. But Chapman found that that 1.7 per cent of fracked wells (about one out of 60 wells) in B.C. are associated with earthquakes with magnitudes of 3 and up. That’s nearly double the rate of earlier research.

The Montney shale formation, which contains both methane and liquid condensates, sits under a vast area of timber, farmland and wilderness on 26,600 square kilometres of Treaty 8 land extending from south of the community of Dawson Creek to 200 kilometres northwest of the community of Fort St. John.

Between 2012 and 2019, nearly a dozen companies have fracked 2,865 wells with 39 million cubic metres of water in the Montney. The volume of pressurized water used per well has increased steadily in recent years from an average of 7,077 cubic metres per well in 2012 to 22,054 cubic metres per well in 2019.

Many operators including Ovintiv, Petronas and CNRL have fracked wells using more than 30,000 cubic metres per well. ConocoPhillips stands out for using 83,000 cubic metres per well for 13 wells in 2019.

Beginning in 2008, industry started to trigger “felt” earthquakes greater than magnitude 3, raising concerns throughout the region. B.C. and Alberta regulators initially denied the industry could cause earthquakes that significant and then called them “anomalous” or minimized their shaking motions to a truck driving by.

As industry injected more volumes of water into the ground to fracture gas-bearing rock, the frequency of earthquakes jumped from an average of 1.6 magnitude 3 quakes a year to almost 6.9 magnitude 3 tremors by 2019. Petronas led with the highest earthquake rate: “39 per cent of its fracked wells are associated with earthquakes,” followed by Tourmaline Oil with 29 per cent and Ovintiv at nine per cent.

Part 2 — To appear tomorrow ….

Landowners facing irreparable harm from MVP, lawyers argue

From an Article by Kate Mishkin, Charleston Gazette-Mail, September 26, 2018

Mountain Valley Pipeline never sufficiently showed that it would face harm without access to landowners’ properties, lawyers for those landowners told the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, on Tuesday.

They also said that, as court battles over the pipeline continue to play out, the landowners are facing irreparable harm. Oral arguments were available on audio recording Wednesday.

The case challenges the preliminary injunctions issued by three district judges that granted Mountain Valley Pipeline immediate possession in condemnation proceedings. It’s the first of five pipeline hearings playing out in Richmond this week. On Friday, a panel of judges will hear arguments in two cases challenging permits issued to the Mountain Valley Pipeline, and two challenging the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.

On Tuesday, though, lawyers challenged the injunction granted to developers, and their ability to take property without immediately compensating landowners. “You’d better believe losing possession is important to these landowners,” Christopher Johns, a lawyer for the landowners, said. “It’s substantive to them, and it makes a difference to them.”

Allowing early possession through a preliminary injunction through condemnation under the Natural Gas Act is far-reaching and unconstitutional, Johns argued. And Mountain Valley Pipeline’s claims of irreparable harm without access to land were only possible, not inevitable, said Derek Teaney, an Appalachian Mountain Advocates lawyer.

Mountain Valley Pipeline had said it would face economic loss and lose its Federal Energy Regulatory Commission certificate without speedy access to properties, Teaney said. The project would span 300 miles from Northern West Virginia to Southwest Virginia.

Initial plans said the project would cost $3.7 billion and be completed by the end of 2018. But after a panel of judges on the 4th Circuit said the federal government had skirted rules when it approved the pipeline, and FERC halted the project. Developers say that halt pushed completion into 2019 and caused the price of the project to climb to $4.6 billion.

That decision was made by Judges Stephanie Thacker and William Traxler, and Chief Judge Roger Gregory. On Tuesday, Gregory and Judges James A. Wynn Jr. and Pamela Harris heard arguments. Gregory, though, questioned the general merits of eminent domain, calling it one of the “remnants of monarchy.”

“When it comes to condemnation, condemnation is the death penalty, in terms of property. We talk about life, liberty and property,” he said. “That’s the highest form of punishment. It’s death penalty, because I’m going to take from you what you own, because I’m the monarchy.”

Wade Massie, a lawyer for Mountain Valley Pipeline, maintained that developers had followed all the rules in gaining eminent domain. “We have a right to condemn now,” he said.

The lives if real people in the USA & elsewhere are being disrupted

From an Article by Oliver Milman, The Guardian, September 24, 2018

After her house flooded for the third year in a row, Elizabeth Boineau was ready to flee. She packed her possessions into dozens of boxes, tried not to think of the mold and mildew-covered furniture and retreated to a second-floor condo that should be beyond the reach of pounding rains and swelling seas.

Boineau is leaving behind a handsome, early 20th-century house in Charleston, South Carolina, the shutters painted in the city’s eponymous shade of deep green. Last year, after Hurricane Irma introduced 8in of water into a home Boineau was still patching up from the last flood, local authorities agreed this historic slice of Charleston could be torn down.

“I was sloshing through the water with my puppy dog, debris was everywhere,” she said. “I feel completely sunken. It would cost me around $500,000 to raise the house, demolish the first floor. I’m going to rent a place instead, on higher ground.”

Millions of Americans will confront similarly hard choices as climate change conjures up brutal storms, flooding rains, receding coastlines and punishing heat. Many are already opting to shift to less perilous areas of the same city, or to havens in other states. Whole towns from Alaska to Louisiana are looking to relocate, in their entirety, to safer ground.

Children on Isle De Jean Charles, Louisiana, play outside where only 20 families are left. Channels cut by loggers and oil companies eroded the island. What little remains will eventually be inundated as the sea level rises.

The era of climate migration is, virtually unheralded, already upon America.

The population shift gathering pace is so sprawling that it may rival anything in US history. “Including all climate impacts it isn’t too far-fetched to imagine something twice as large as the Dustbowl,” said Jesse Keenan, a climate adaptation expert at Harvard University, referencing the 1930s upheaval in which 2.5 million people moved from the dusty, drought-ridden plains to California.

This enormous migration will probably take place over a longer period than the Dustbowl but its implications are both profound and opaque. It will plunge the US into an utterly alien reality. “It is very difficult to model human behaviour under such extreme and historically unprecedented circumstances,” Keenan admits.

The closest analogue could be the Great Migration – a period spanning a large chunk of the 20th century when about 6 million black people departed the Jim Crow south for cities in the north, midwest and west.

By the end of this century, sea level rise alone could displace 13 million people, according to one study, including 6 million in Florida. States including Louisiana, California, New York and New Jersey will also have to grapple with hordes of residents seeking dry ground.

“There’s not a state unaffected by this,” said demographer Mat Hauer, lead author of the research, which is predicated on a severe 6ft sea level increase. There are established migration preferences for some places – south Florida to Georgia, New York to Colorado – but in many cases people would uproot to the closest inland city, if they have the means.

“The Great Migration was out of the south into the industrialized north, whereas this is from every coastal place in the US to every other place in the US,” said Hauer. “Not everyone can afford to move, so we could end up with trapped populations that would be in a downward spiral. I have a hard time imagining what that future would be like.”

Within just a few decades, hundreds of thousands of homes on US coasts will be chronically flooded. By the end of the century, 6ft of sea level rise would redraw the coastline with familiar parts – such as southern Florida, chunks of North Carolina and Virginia, much of Boston, all but a sliver of New Orleans – missing. Warming temperatures will fuel monstrous hurricanes – like the devastating triumvirate of Irma, Maria and Harvey in 2017, followed by Florence this year – that will scatter survivors in jarring, uncertain ways.

The projections are starting to materialize in parts of the US, forming the contours of the climate migration to come.

“I don’t see the slightest evidence that anyone is seriously thinking about what to do with the future climate refugee stream,” said Orrin Pilkey, professor emeritus of coastal geology at Duke University. “It boggles the mind to see crowds of climate refugees arriving in town and looking for work and food.”

Pilkey’s new book – Sea Level Rise Along Americas Shores: The Slow Tsunami – envisions apocalyptic scenes where millions of people, largely from south Florida, will become “a stream of refugees moving to higher ground”.

“They will not be the bedraggled families carrying their few possessions on their backs as we have seen in countless photos of people fleeing wars and ethnic cleansing, most recently in Myanmar and Syria,” Pilkey states in his book. “Instead, they will be well-off Americans driving to a new life in their cars, with moving trucks behind, carrying a lifetime of memories and possessions.”

Dejected with frigid New York winters, Chase Twichell and her husband purchased a four-bedroom apartment in Miami Beach in 2011, with the plan of spending at least a decade basking in the sunshine. At first, keeping a pair of flip-flops on hand to deal with the flooded streets seemed an acceptable quirk, until the magnitude of the encroaching seas became apparent when the city spent $400m to elevate streets near Twichell’s abode.

Twichell began to notice water pumps were spewing plastic bags, condoms and chip packets into the bay. Friends’ balconies started getting submerged. Twichell, a poet, found apocalyptic themes creeping into her work. Last year, she sold the apartment to a French businessman and moved back to upstate New York.

“It was like end of the world stuff,” she said. “It was crazy for us to have such a big investment in such a dangerous situation.” Her neighbours initially scolded her but now several are also selling up, fretting that the real estate and insurance markets for properties like theirs will seize up.

“It was horrible but fascinating to see it,” Twichell said. “It’s like we got to see the future and it wasn’t pretty. It’s like a movie where there’s a terrible volcano that is destroying everything, only it’s much slower than that.”

A sense of fatalism is also starting to grip some local officials. Philip Stoddard, mayor of South Miami, has seen a colleague, spooked by sea level rise, move to California and some neighbours sell their houses before an expected slump in prices. Stoddard and his wife regularly discuss buying a fallback property, perhaps in Washington DC.

“Most people will wait for the problem to be bad to take action, that’s what I worry about,” he said. “We can buy a lot of time, but in the end we lose. The sea level will go over the tops of our buildings.”

Sanitation is an immediate preoccupation for Stoddard, given the large proportion of residents who aren’t served by sewage works. “If you’re using a septic tank and your toilet starts to overflow into your bathroom because of water inundation, that’s a basis-of-civilization problem,” he said. “A medieval city wasn’t a nice smelling place and they had a lot of diseases.”

Those living near the coasts will face pressures of the gradual (sea level rise) as well as dramatic (storms) nature but people inland will also be harried to move by climate change.

Farming techniques and technology have improved immeasurably since the Dustbowl but rising temperatures are still expected to diminish yields for crops such as maize, soybeans and wheat, prompting the departure of younger people from farming. By 2050, Texas county, the largest wheat-producing county in Oklahoma, could spend an extra 40 days a year above 90F (32C) compared with now.

Ashley Cooper, Lake District National Park

From an Article by Lorraine Chow, EcoWatch.com, November 22, 2016

For the past 13 years, award-winning environmental photographer Ashley Cooper has traveled across seven continents, amassing the world’s largest collection of climate change images.

His work can be viewed on Global Warming Images as well as his new 416-page photo book, Images From a Warming Planet, featuring 500 of his best images. A selection of photos is also on display at the Archive Gallery at the Heaton Cooper Studio in the UK. The exhibition will run until the end of the year.

“[Climate change is] quite simply, the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced,” the UK-based artist told EcoWatch. “It has the potential to essentially wipe 80 percent of humans off the planet, and most of the biodiversity we depend on.”

“I hope that the book will act as a wake up call to show folks the devastating impacts that climate change is already having at one degree of warming and motivate action so that we stand some chance of avoiding the worst excesses of climate change,” he said.

In 2010, Ashley Cooper won the prestigious, world-wide Environmental Photographer of the Year award in the climate change category. His website, Global Warming Images, is sponsored by WWF International and he regularly works with the Met Office and United Nations Climate Change Program.

The self-taught photographer has captured climate change’s impact on people, places and wildlife around the world, including the Middle East refugee crisis that has been exacerbated by drought, Canada’s destructive tar sands in northern Alberta and a polar bear that starved to death due to sea ice melt on the Arctic island of Svalbard.

On a more positive note, Cooper has photographed renewable energy projects such as green buildings and environmental pioneers such as the founder of an ashram in India that’s 100 percent powered by renewables.

“You have to remain optimistic otherwise there’s no point continuing. This is an issue about which every one of us can do something to make a difference. We all have a carbon footprint; we are all responsible,” Cooper said.

Environmentalist Jonathon Porritt, the co-founder of the sustainability nonprofit Forum for the Future, provided a forward for the photo book and describes Cooper’s work as a call to action.

“Do not flick through this extraordinary photographic record as just another snapshot in time,” he said. “Do not be tempted into any kind of passive voyeurism; do not allow the power of the images to come between you and the people whose changing lives they portray. See it more as a declaration of solidarity, and as the powerful call to action that it surely is.”

“These striking and powerful images remind us what’s at stake on the one planet we’ve got—and the duty we all have to try and preserve it!” Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, said.

Ashley Cooper, 54, currently resides in Ambleside with his wife Jill and Border Collie, Tag. The photographer graciously provided us with some samples of his work, which we included in the video above, and took the time to answer our questions via email.

What first motivated you to do it?

I first started reading about climate change around the turn of the century. I was already doing a lot of outdoor/environmental photography and I decided to organize a specific climate photo shoot to Alaska in 2004. I spent a month looking at permafrost melt, glacial retreat, forest fires and had a week on Shishmaref, a tiny island between Alaska and Siberia that was home to 600 Inuits. There homes were getting washed into the sea because the sea ice that used to form around their island around late September, even in 2004, wasn’t forming till maybe Christmas time.

I saw for the first time something I have seen many times since: That those least responsible for climate change, are most impacted by it. I was blown away by the impacts that even in 2004, was blindingly obvious that the Arctic was changing very rapidly. Important to remember that in 2004, around 50 percent of people I talked to about my planned photo shoot, had never heard of climate change.

What is your photographic background?

I’m completely self taught. My hobby changed into my profession. Initially, I just started using a camera to document the stuff I loved doing in the outdoors, climbing, caving, cycling, walking, etc. About 20 years ago, I started selling images to outdoor magazines and it all went from there.

Any particularly interesting stories from your travels?

I nearly fell down a snow bridged crevasse on the Greenland ice sheet. I was arrested by the Chinese Army, when I unknowingly pointed my long lens at a Chinese army barracks that has a load of solar panels on the roof. I was marched inside and spent two hours being interrogated, and was made to delete all the files on my camera. As soon as I got back to my hotel, I put the card through a recovery package and pulled them all back up again.

In the Canadian tar sands I was told by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that If I so much as took one step off the highway they would arrest me for trespassing and lock me up for three months. I was tailed everywhere by police and security guards.

I was tailed for seven hours around London by four Metropolitan Police officers while documenting the protest against the third Heathrow Airport runway.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

FERC Can Use Eminent Domain Authority

Conservation Groups & Landowners Schedule Meeting for November 10th

Announcement from April Pierson-Keating, Mountain Lakes Preservation Alliance

Location: Jackson’s Mill Conference Center, Weston, WV

Date & Time: Thursday, November 10^th from 6 to 8 PM.

This Thursday, November 10, from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m., at Jackson’s Mill, the Mountain Lakes Preservation Alliance along with Sierra Club WV will be hosting alternative public meetings to involve the public in the process of approving or not approving the Mountain Valley Pipeline and its sister pipeline, the Equitrans Expansion Project. This may be the last public opportunity in WV to leave your comments for a FERC representative on the MVP. A professional transcriptionist will be sure your comments get recorded verbatim and filed with the FERC.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has been conducting comment sessions in West Virginia regarding the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) where members of the public could speak directly to a FERC agent about their concerns over the pipeline. These meetings were held in private.

The alternate public meetings are an open forum for citizen to express their views and concerns over the project, as well as highlight the continuing lack of transparency and public disclosure by the FERC during the environmental review process for this and several other large pipelines planned for the region. Many residents have safety concerns, questions about water contamination, and issues over the use of eminent domain to pressure landowners into signing leases and granting easements.

Members of the press are invited to speak with landowners and concerned citizens starting at 6:00 pm outside the hearing, which will take place in the West Virginia Building at Jackson’s Mill. We encourage the press to attend and interview participants during the meeting. Snacks and refreshments will be served.

For anyone who made comments during the pre-filing period (before November 5, 2015) is advised to do so during the certification period, since all comments made during pre-filing are no longer being considered. The comment period on the MVP is open until December 22, 2016. If you cannot make it to the meeting and wish to comment:

1. Go to https://ferconline.ferc.gov/ and click on “e-Comment.”
2. Fill in the information field and look for an e-mail from FERC.
3. Click on the link in that email and enter the docket number for the pipeline you wish to comment on:

>>> Atlantic Coast Pipeline CP 15-554-001

>>> Supply Header Project CP 15-555

>>> Mountain Valley Pipeline CP16-10

>>> Equitrans Expansion Project CP 16-13

>>> RT Rover Project CP15-93

>>> Leach Express CP15-514

>>> WB Express CP16-38

1. You may also click “e-Subscribe” to receive alerts and the content of other comments.
2. If you wish to submit a hand written or typed comment you may mail it to: Ms. Kimberly Bose, Secretary, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, 888 First Street NE, Room 1A, Washington, D.C. 20426

Contact: April Pierson-Keating, 304-642-9436

Mountain Lakes Preservation Alliance

www.mountainlakespreservation.org

Clean Water Through Clean Energy