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WV — Don’t leap into pooling

EDITORIAL – Morgantown Dominion Post Newspaper, November 21, 2014

As heated issues go, most lie just below the surface — simmering — until they start spewing controversy. No one’s calling a proposal in the state Legislature on pooling mineral tracts to drill horizontal Marcellus wells an eruption, yet. But this issue will explode once the regular legislative session begins in January.

This legislation is only a proposal for now, and many of the lawmakers it was presented to this week during an interim legislative session will no longer be in office in 2015. Yet this bill will undoubtedly be on the front burner in what promises to be a turbulent session.

We’re not going to quibble over whether to call it forced pooling or fair pooling, for now. Obviously, where you stand on that detail depends on where you sit. Energy lobbyists, who had a front row seat while ironing out this bill’s specifics during talks among the state’s two major oil and gas industry groups, have gone so far as to deem this measure “fair to all parties.”

However, we are going to lock horns with this proposal on two substantive issues that bulldoze directly over the rights of mineral owners who refuse to participate in pooling projects.

The bill stipulates that the driller must have agreements with mineral owners who own 67 percent of the project’s acreage before it can apply to the state for a pooling order. That percentage is too low. Especially since it conceivably could allow just one owner of that percentage of a mineral rights tract unit to approve such projects.

It’s also conceivable that drilling projects could take a page out of politics’ playbook and gerrymander or manipulate and design project tracts to give drillers every advantage. We recommend raising that percentage to at least 75 percent for the time being, creating a tougher standard for pooling orders.

The issue of just how much is revealed to reach a market-based value vs. what is just and reasonable is also far from clear. More transparency about what other mineral rights owners are receiving and how those figures are reached is also essential to this process. Why not make the prices paid for all leases of mineral rights pubic information?

A final concern of ours is during interviews with legislative candidates this fall, some did note that the issue of pooling would come up in January. It already has and the energy lobby’s pressure on legislators will be relentless from hereon. Only a few candidates were knowledgeable about pooling, earlier. So we call on every lawmaker to do his or her homework and learn the particulars of this proposal.

But even more crucial is that the public also vent its concerns on this issue.

"Stop the Frack Attack" Rally

Environmental Uprisings Abound

S. Tom Bond, July 31, 2012

Largely unnoticed by the mainstream media (MSM), a whole series of strong environmental reactions are taking place over the country. They are seldom connected in the MSM, but they arise from the same cause.

Since this is being published in the Marcellus shale area, I would assume most of the readers would be familiar with the reaction that industry is getting in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York, and now in Ohio, Maryland and Delaware. The reaction started in Texas and the West, where shale drilling started, and it is now everywhere it has been tried. At present there are more than 200 Internet sites against shale drilling. Just this week past there was a demonstration against “fracking,” as it is commonly called, in Washington, D. C. [The “Stop the Frack Attack” rally may well have involved close to 10,000 people in its various aspects.]

A second huge protest has been against the Keystone XL Pipeline, which will bring the Canadian Tar Sands “oil” all the way across the U. S. from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The extraction of tar sands “oil” requires huge investment of energy, producing carbon dioxide at the source, and results in huge quantities of waste from the process. It pollutes surface water, causes cancer and other sickness, has very low energy return on energy invested, and pollutes aquifers. The pipeline crosses major rivers, including the Missouri River, the Yellowstone, and the Red River, and the Oglala Aquifer for a total of 2147 miles. Three feet in diameter, it is designed to move as much as 830,000 barrels a day. There is a full-fledged, national campaign to prevent it from being built. Not only environmentalists are fighting it, but also meteorologists (who fear the vast amount of carbon dioxide), public health people, farmers and many others.

Mountain top removal of coal is another topic readers will be familiar with here in Appalachia and across the nation. Powerful interests ignore health and social effects of the thousands of square miles affected by strip mining for coal.

Most people are familiar with the PB Macondo well disaster in the Gulf of Mexico through the high profile “we’re good guys” advertisements on TV. The three month long, 5, 000,000 barrel leak was the result of incompetence and indifference on the part of BP and its subcontractors. This kind of deep-ocean drilling is being done all over the world, and BP is well and thoroughly hated in the Gulf.

So what is going on? Is there some kind of plot against the hydrocarbon extraction corporations, so favored by government and investors? Hardly. There are two big reasons for the reaction. The first is the growing recognition that the earth’s temperature is rising because of human activity.

Foremost among causes of global warming is additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Although the increase in temperature is slight by some standards, enough is known about earth’s climate in the past to understand that carbon dioxide is capable of warming the earth substantially and having dire effects. The time has come when climate change deniers, financed by the very interests finding new ways of getting additional carbon out of the earth to burn, are loosing their creditability. It is clear carbon dioxide is the culprit.

Few people understand that the carbon dioxide produced by burning carbon in fuels weighs far more than the carbon. The ratio is 12 to 44. One pound of carbon in a fuel produces three and two-thirds pounds of carbon dioxide. Whole geological formations have been converted to get the energy. A ton of coal produces over three and a half tons of carbon dioxide.

The second reason for these political movements is also simple to understand. In resource development, the “easy stuff,” the part that yields product with least effort and investment is taken first. As time passes more difficult resources are drawn on. The human race is going to greater extremes, using more difficult technology, investing more energy, taking greater risk, doing more environmental damage to get carbon energy.

Environmental damage is really destruction of other resources to get the objective, in this case energy. Environmental damage is loss of pure water, soil that can produce food, timber, un-contaminated living space and other resources society needs. It is frequently seen to some as an effort to maintain a pristine original state of the out of doors, a conservatism of “nature.” This is true of parks. But “nature” is the standard of comparison, not the final objective for large areas. Protection of biological productivity is the value most everywhere.

As time passes we will see more and more people adopting this view of nature. Hopefully, sooner rather than later, the sentiment will coalesce into a movement against subsidies for hydrocarbon miners, against exceptions for them from laws designed to protect the public from toxins, and against exceptions to laws to protect their workers. Hopefully we will see laws favoring renewable energy and ways to get energy from the constant immense flows around us in sunlight, wind and waves of the sea.

The good news is that efficiency of solar, wind and wave power, being in the early stages, is increasing rapidly. In a few years these will be cheaper than the increasingly expensive hydrocarbons. After all, human history goes back over 10,000 years. Won’t hydrocarbons be useful in the future if we don’t burn them all up in the next few decades?

S. Thomas Bond is a farmer and citizen of Lewis County, West Virginia.  He is a retired chemist and teacher in the public schools.