DS Frac Sand Mine, Boomer, Wisconsin

Presentation to Chippewa County’s Land Conservation & Forestry Department monthly meeting on January 20, 2016

My name is Johnne Smalley. I own and pay taxes on land in Wheaton Township in Chippewa County, Wisconsin.  I am here today to find out what Chippewa County envisions for its future.

I have read Chippewa County’s Comprehensive Plan, but I don’t see the county following it. Page 173, Section 6.4 states:

Goal 1 – Maintain the physical condition, biodiversity, ecology, and environmental functions of the landscape, including its capacity for flood storage, groundwater recharge, water filtration, plant growth, ecological diversity, wildlife habitat, and carbon sequestration.

Goal 2 – Maintain the capacity of the land to support productive forests and agricultural working lands to sustain food, fiber, and renewable energy production.

How many acres of land have been removed from productive forests and agricultural working lands to support frac sand mines owned by and operated for the financial benefit of people that are not from our area, often not even from our state, and sometimes, not even from our country?

How have all these frac sand mines maintained the physical condition, biodiversity, ecology, and environmental functions of the landscape, including its capacity for flood storage, groundwater recharge, water filtration, plant growth, ecological diversity, wildlife habitat, and carbon sequestration?

What I’m seeing is a bunch of eyesores scarring our land, devastation of forested hillsides, businesses that were dependent on tourist trade closing, increased costs for agricultural businesses dependent on rail transport of fertilizers into the area and corn out of the area, decreased wildlife habitat resulting in increased crop destruction as the wildlife relocate into adjacent cropland, and tons of colloidal clay from their ponds washing into our trout streams and ruining the trout habitat. There are toxic levels of silica 2.5 dust in the air which affect our health and probably animal health. In other localities near frac sand facilities, veterinarians have noticed increased fertility problems including a significant lower conception rate and higher rate of stillborn and weak calves. There have been similar reports by farmers near mine sites in Chippewa County. Coincidence?

I’m also seeing a tremendous increase in the number of homes for sale around these sites and at greatly reduced prices. Some people have given up and just walked away from their home to move elsewhere.

Now I am seeing the approval of another reclamation permit for a 1300+ acre frac sand mine, processing plant, and trans-load station. This permit has been granted to a company with a known history of disregarding DNR regulations that protect our groundwater from contamination.

I have also read a good bit of The Chippewa County Code of Ordinances.

The Chippewa County Code of Ordinances Chapter 30, Sec. 106 lines 741-744 states:

“Sec. 30-106. Permit denial. An application for a nonmetallic mining reclamation permit shall be denied if any of the factors specified in Wis. Admin. Code NR § 135.22 exist.

NR 135.22 Denial of application for reclamation permit, clearly states, “An application to issue a nonmetallic mining reclamation permit shall be denied if

(c) 1. The applicant, or its agent, principal or predecessor has, during the course of nonmetallic mining in Wisconsin within 10 years of the permit application or modification request being considered shown a pattern of serious violations of this chapter or of federal, state or local environmental laws related to nonmetallic mining reclamation.”

Northern Sands, LLC has more than 20 DNR violations of inappropriate exploratory borehole abandonments in Chippewa County. Leaving holes open can create a direct conduit for entry of contaminants to waters of the state and is a serious violation of ch. 281, Wisconsin Statutes and ch. NR812, Wis. Adm. Code. (Just ask anyone who has to drink water from an aquifer that has had liquid manure dumped down a hole into it).

The proposed post−mining land use given in 3.0 of the Howard Township Properties Nonmetallic Mine Reclamation Plan “include a combination of commercial and passive recreational uses….Approximately eighty-five percent of the site will be reclaimed as prairie grasslands: approximately fifteen percent of the area will be reclaimed as woodland.” The Chippewa County Land Conservation and Forest Management staff can explain better than I can that prairie grasslands are not the same as productive agricultural cropland that sustain food, fiber, and renewable energy production. (See goal 2 from Chippewa County’s Comprehensive Plan as quoted above.)

NR 135 also states, “The proposed post−mining land use shall be consistent with local land use plans.” In addition, State law Sec.66.1001. Wis. Stats. requires that local land use-related decisions be consistent with the goals and objectives of that community’s comprehensive plan. I am not seeing how taking more and more productive cropland and forest away to return it to native prairie “maintains the capacity of the land to support productive forests and agricultural working lands to sustain food, fiber, and renewable energy production”.

I would also like to question why Chippewa County is not requiring an independent expert or consultant to do the monitoring and reporting of this mine site with reimbursement costs paid back to the county by Northern Sands. This permit allows Northern Sands to do their own checking and reporting. Their history has shown how well they have done that in the past. On multiple occasions, their actions and reports have been fabricated and falsely reported to both the Howard Town Board and the Wisconsin DNR. Having county personnel or even state personnel checking to make sure the monitoring and reporting is being done accurately is just adding to the taxpayers’ burden. With Northern Sands history, they will need close oversight and this cost should fall back onto Northern Sands—not the taxpayers.

An agency-designated consultant with recognized experience in the areas of financial assurance and reclamation should also be required to evaluate any financial assurance given by Northern Sands with the costs incurred paid by Northern Sands. Reclamation Surety Bonds for other mining endeavors have proved inadequate in the past. Repeatedly, the Surety Bonds have been for inadequate amounts. They may cover the cost of reclamation as outlined, but usually fail to cover any problems that may occur—especially the cost of re-working an area where reclamation failed and the cost of pollution clean-up. Also, there is a history of Surety Bond issuers failing when it comes time for the actual reclamation. In some instances there has been a close tie between the surety bond company and the mine owner.

In conclusion, I would like to repeat my question of how the Chippewa County envisions its future and how its actions in permitting these frac sand mines support this vision.

Thank you.   Johnne Smalley, Wheaton Township, Chippewa County, Wisconson

Source:  Frac Sand Sentinel, Special Issue, January 20, 2016

Address: Save The Hills Alliance, 12568 44th Avenue, Chippewa Falls, WI 54729

Extensive background information, photographs and updates are posted by the Concerned Chippewa Citizens and by the Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy of New York State.

More Drilling at Morgantown & Monongahela River

NSF: Could deep-Earth microbes help us frack for oil & gas?

From an Article by Sean Cockerham, McClatchy DC News Service, July 28, 2015

On a muddy hill above a World War II ordnance plant that made material for atomic bombs, a fracking crew will drill thousands of feet underground in a search for life itself.

The drilling is a hunt for microscopic organisms, first introduced hundreds of millions of years ago, which have evolved to live in the shale 7,000 feet below the ground, at pressures 600 times that of the surface, and temperatures around 160 degrees F.

Little is known about what lives at those extreme depths and whether the microbes are even down there. But, if found and given a food source that allows them to thrive, they have properties that offer the potential to help drillers pump more natural gas and prolong the U.S. energy boom.

‘Is the Master out of his mind?’ she asked me. I nodded. ‘And he’s taking you with him?’ I nodded again. ‘Where?’ she asked. I pointed towards the centre of the earth. – Jules Verne, “Journey to the Center of the Earth”

Paula Mouser, assistant professor of engineering at Ohio State University, calls it the “next frontier.”  Among the life she expects to find in the shale rock more than a mile below the surface of the Earth are organisms that produce methane, the primary component of natural gas. “Imagine a situation where you could actually enhance methane recovery or methane production by providing organisms at these depths what they need to live,” said Mouser.

The researchers have obtained samples containing such bacteria bubbling up from other oil and gas drilling wells. The organisms are rod-shaped critters, some with tails, and have similarities to what is found in the deep ocean.

But those samples were collected after the fracking already happened. So it is not clear whether the microbes were really living far underground, or if they were introduced by outside sources like the water that drillers pump below to fracture the shale rocks and get the oil and gas.

This time will be different. The drillers in the coming months will haul up pristine core samples before the fracking starts. So researchers can see what lives in the shale rock far below. While there’s been study of ocean microbes (some of which eat hydrocarbons and help clean up oil spills), the deep shale rock was long elusive to scientists. There wasn’t so much incentive for companies to spend millions on drilling a well before the fracking boom hit in 2009.

The hunt for life is part of a much broader effort called the Marcellus Shale Energy and Environment Laboratory, or MSEEL. The $11 million MSEEL initiative will give unprecedented access to US Dept. of Energy and university researchers over five years to fracking wells being drilled by Northeast Natural Energy, a company based in Charleston, WV.

Researchers will track air and water quality and measure the environmental effects that have made fracking controversial. Fiber optics in the wells will pinpoint the most efficient ways for drillers to fracture the shale rock with high-pressure water and release the natural gas inside.

Northeast Natural Energy drilling manager Jay Hewitt called the research a valuable chance to explore new technology to pump oil and gas. He has some doubts about the search for deep life, though, saying the shale rock is packed so tight he’s not sure much could be living there. “They’re going to have to prove that to me,” Hewitt said.

The microbes would need to be able to survive incredible conditions, living amid tight and crushing rock, blind darkness and intense heat, packed into higher concentrations of salt than the ocean.

‘Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.’– Jules Verne, “Journey to the Center of the Earth”

The organisms would need special adaptations to live. That includes osmoprotectants, which would protect them from the high concentration of salt. If isolated in a lab, those have potential use in human medicine for getting pharmaceuticals successfully into the bloodstream, said Mouser of Ohio State, MSEEL’s lead investigator.

Such organisms also produce chemical compounds called biosurfactants, which can make it easier to pump oil and natural gas by causing the shale to become more porous. The chemical compounds help the microbes consume carbon, which they need to build cells and survive.

Mouser, who is working with scientists at West Virginia University and Ohio State University through a National Science Foundation grant, said microbes also can pose problems. They can corrode drilling equipment and clog the rock fractures needed for oil and gas to flow.

The idea is for scientists to figure out how to encourage the beneficial microbes and block the problems. Researchers will collect samples at nine specific depths far below the ground in West Virginia. They’ll extract the biological signs of life from those samples and attempt to culture the organisms in a lab.

Interest is rising in finding methods to more efficiently recover oil and gas as energy prices drop and companies scramble to keep up production with less money. There’s far more natural gas in tight shale rock than drillers can easily tap, according to the Department of Energy, and researchers believe life deep in the shale has the potential to lend a hand.

“We don’t know much about life at these depths in rock,” Mouser said. “And the oil and gas industry doesn’t have a good handle on how small organisms like microbes and bacteria can help oil and gas recovery.”

See also: “Northeast Natural Energy, LLC – Making History for the Future of Energy“