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give example(s) of The Little Guy not getting crushed by The Big Guy. They would only be insignificant exceptions that prove the rule
there's a crucial difference between "most of the time" and ""always" you seem to be unalive to, but perhaps your ideological rigidity requires it.
give example(s) of The Little Guy not getting crushed by The Big Guy. They would only be insignificant exceptions that prove the rule
exceptions test the rule. lol Latin fail.
... still waiting for your exceptions
Goliath doesn't win every time. The hoi polloi occasionally get a remedy in court. The availability (and occasional success) of that remedy isn't anything to be scoffed at, IMHO.
political ins utions change over time. we don't design them just as we please, but we do have input.
if development is heedless of the social impacts, there can be political and economic costs; bans, regulation, etc..
Perfect example of how Corporate-Americans dictate the (state) laws and regulations that govern (favor, immunize, exempt) Corporate-Americans.
ALEC's Fracking Chemical Disclosure Bill Moving Through Florida Legislature
ALEC's model bill was proposed by ExxonMobil at its December 2011 meeting and is modeled after a bill that passed in Texas' legislature in spring 2011, as revealed in an April 2012 New York Times investigative piece. ALEC critics refer to the pro-business organization as a "corporate bill mill" lending corporate lobbyists a "voice and a vote" on model legislation often becoming state law.
Taken together, the two bills are clones of ALEC's ExxonMobil-endorsed Disclosure of Hydraulic Fracturing Fluid Composition Act. That model — like HB 71 — creates a centralized database for fracking chemical fluid disclosure. There's a kicker, though. Actually, two.
First kicker: the industry-created and industry-owned disclosure database itself —FracFocus — has been deemed a failure by multiple legislators and by an April 2013 Harvard University Law School study.
Second kicker: ALEC's model bill, like HB 157, has a trade secrets exemption for chemicals deemed proprietary.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/22011-alecs-fracking-chemical-disclosure-bill-moving-through-florida-legislature
More than 1,000 medical professionals say that fracking must be stopped.
On Thursday, the Environment America Research & Policy Center delivered letters from nurses, doctors, and other health professionals to President Obama and various state officials.
The medical experts say that two immediate steps should be taken to protect our families and our communities.
They want President Obama to close the regulatory loopholes that exempt fracking from public health and environmental laws, and they say that our nation must declare some areas – like the sources of our public drinking water – off limits to the natural gas industry.
Dr. Catherine Thomasson of Physicians for Social Responsibility said, “Generating electricity shouldn't be a source of illness; power shouldn't be poisonous.”
http://truth-out.org/news/item/22029...opped-and-more
NIMBYism by CFO (chief fracking officer)
Exxon CEO Joins Lawsuit to Stop Fracking Near His Home
Tillerson has joined a lawsuit that cites fracking’s consequences in order to block the construction of a 160-foot water tower next to his and his wife’s Texas home.
The Wall Street Journal reports the tower would supply water to a nearby fracking site, and the plaintiffs argue the project would cause too much noise and traffic from hauling the water from the tower to the drilling site.
The water tower, owned by Cross Timbers Water Supply Corporation, “will sell water to oil and gas explorers for fracing [sic] shale formations leading to traffic with heavy trucks on FM 407, creating a noise nuisance and traffic hazards,” the suit says.
Though Tillerson’s name is on the lawsuit, a lawyer representing him said his concern is about the devaluation of his property, not fracking specifically.
When he is acting as Exxon CEO, not a homeowner, Tillerson has lashed out at fracking critics and proponents of regulation. “This type of dysfunctional regulation is holding back the American economic recovery, growth, and global compe iveness,” he said in 2012.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/0...?detail=email#
Fracking Boom Leaves Texans Under a Toxic Cloud
Since 2008, more than 7,000 oil and gas wells have been sunk into the brittle, sedimentary rock. Another 5,500 have been approved by state regulators, making the Eagle Ford one of the most active drilling sites in America.
- Texas' air monitoring system is so flawed that the state knows almost nothing about the extent of the pollution in the Eagle Ford. Only five permanent air monitors are installed in the 20,000-square-mile region, and all are at the fringes of the shale play, far from the heavy drilling areas where emissions are highest.
- Thousands of oil and gas facilities, including six of the nine production sites near the Buehrings' house, are allowed to self-audit their emissions without reporting them to the state. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), which regulates most air emissions, doesn't even know some of these facilities exist. An internal agency do entacknowledges that the rule allowing this practice "[c]annot be proven to be protective."
- Companies that break the law are rarely fined. Of the 284 oil and gas industry-related complaints filed with the TCEQ by Eagle Ford residents between Jan. 1, 2010, and Nov. 19, 2013, only two resulted in fines despite 164 do ented violations. The largest was just $14,250. (Pending enforcement actions could lead to six more fines).
- The Texas legislature has cut the TCEQ's budget by a third since the Eagle Ford boom began, from $555 million in 2008 to $372 million in 2014. At the same time, the amount allocated for air monitoring equipment dropped from $1.2 million to $579,000.
- The Eagle Ford boom is feeding an ominous trend: A 100 percent statewide increase in unplanned, toxic air releases associated with oil and gas production since 2009. Known as emission events, these releases are usually caused by human error or faulty equipment.
- Residents of the mostly rural Eagle Ford counties are at a disadvantage even in Texas, because they haven't been given air quality protections, such as more permanent monitors, provided to the wealthier, more suburban Barnett Shale region near Dallas-Fort Worth.
http://readersupportednews.org/off-s...-a-toxic-cloud
Sky People Poisoning The Na'vi
Why Are So Many Workers Dying in Oil Fields?
The Houston Chronicle published an extensive investigation of worker injuries and fatalities in Texas oil and gas fields, highlighting a lack of federal safety standards protecting onshore drill workers.
From 2007 to 2012, 664 US workers were killed in oil and gas fields, with 40 percent of deaths taking place in Texas. Sixty-five Texas oil and gas workers died in 2012 alone. In that same year, seventy-nine lost limbs, eighty-two were crushed, ninety-two suffered burns and 675 broke bones while working in the fields.
Reporter Lise Olsen finds several factors contributing to these numbers, from oil and gas employers recklessly cutting corners to government inspectors glossing over safety hazards. On top are lax federal regulations that don’t do much to spur improvement. Consider this:
At onshore oil and gas drilling sites, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is required to investigate only those accidents that kill workers or that cause three or more to be hospitalized. That translated to only about 150 of 18,000 work-related injuries and illnesses in the last six years in Texas.
Olsen shows how under these standards, the details of accidents “remain locked away in confidential company safety reports, insurance archives or remote courthouse files in lawsuits.” She tells the story of a rig collapse that left a drill worker with a broken jaw, cracks in his spine and permanent brain and memory damage. While the well operator (Apache Corp.) settled with the worker in court, OSHA did not investigate the accident because less than three workers required hospitalization.
There’s a lot more in the investigation, which you can read here. The Chronicle will publish a second part this Sunday.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/178523...ng-oil-fields#
Sky People don't care. Na'vi are expendable wage slaves.
Texas Officials Turn Blind Eye To Fracking Industry’s Toxic Air Emissions
KARNES CITY, Texas — In January 2011, with air quality worsening in Texas’ booming oil and gas fields, state environmental regulators adopted rules to reduce emissions.
The industry rebelled. So did the state legislature.
A few months later, lawmakers passed SB1134, effectively preventing the new regulations from being applied in the Eagle Ford Shale region of South Texas, one of the nation’s biggest oil and gas booms. Since then, more than 2,400 air emissions permits have been issued in the Eagle Ford without additional safeguards to reduce the amounts of benzene, hydrogen sulfide and other dangerous chemicals that drift into the air.
The legislature’s rush to protect the oil and gas industry reflects a culture in which politics and business have become almost inseparable.
State Rep. Tom Crad , a Republican who championed the House version of SB1134, owns stock in nine oil companies, five of which are active in the Eagle Ford. In 2013, the stock was worth as much as $1.5 million. Crad , his corporations and partnerships also received royalties of as much as $885,000 for mineral rights. Corporations and unions are banned from giving to Texas candidates, but since 2000, industry employees and related political action committees have given Crad ’s campaigns more than $800,000.
The industry also invested $600,000 to help Crad ’s daughter, Christi, win a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, which issues drilling permits.
Other Texas lawmakers also benefit from the oil and gas industry’s largesse.
Forty-two of the body’s 181 members or their spouses own stock or receive royalties from companies active in the Eagle Ford, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of financial disclosure records. Those holdings could be worth as much as $9.6 million, according to a conservative estimate based on 2012 data.
Republican Gov. Rick Perry, who signed SB1134, has collected more than $11.5 million in campaign contributions from those in the industry since the 2000 election cycle. Attorney General Greg Abbott, favored to win the Republican nomination for governor, has raked in more than $4 million. Abbott has sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 18 times for interfering in Texas affairs.
Supporters say oil and gas has been good to Texas, and they are right. The industry employed 315,000 people and paid $8.5 billion in taxes in 2010. It has been especially important to counties in the Eagle Ford. The tax base for the industrial sector in Karnes County, in the center of the drilling, exploded from $217 million in 2008 to $6.2 billion last year.
The downside is industrial air pollution in a rural area where people of limited means rarely share in the bounty.
Most of the Eagle Ford’s roughly 1.1 million residents live in small towns or on farms. About 23 percent live below the federal poverty line, compared to 17 percent statewide and 15 percent nationally.
“Let’s be blunt. That is not really a body of voters that the power structure in Austin has any real concern about,” said Larry Soward, a former commissioner of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality who is now president of the board of Air Alliance Houston, an organization dedicated to reducing air pollution.
...
http://www.nationalmemo.com/texas-officials-turn-blind-eye-fracking-industrys-toxic-air-emissions-2/
Next fracking controversy: In the Midwest, a storm brews over 'frac sand'
Sand is used in the fracking process, and there's plenty of it to be mined in the upper Midwest. As a sand-mining boom has emerged, residents are divided over whether it's lifting or ruining their communities.
Sand has become a valuable – and deeply divisive – commodity in the upper Midwest. Hydraulic fracturing, a method of extraction also known as fracking that has boosted oil and natural gas production across the United States, requires sand, and there's plenty of it here. And so in dozens of small towns and rural townships in Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa and especially Wisconsin, the demand for frac sand, as it's called, has brought a surge of new mining activity. Scores of companies have poured in, eager to take advantage of the thick sandstone that underlies the bluffs and ridges of the region's picturesque river country.
The sand rush has created jobs and enriched landowners, but it also has divided neighbors, strained local governments, and set off fierce debates over its benefits and its costs to the land, public health, and quality of life.
"I don't think we were surprised that they found ways to extract it," says John Kimmel, the mayor of Arcadia, a town of 3,000 residents in Wisconsin's Trempealeau County. "I think we were surprised at the effect it's had on the community – and on how many mines have just started to pop up all over."
Indeed, where State Trunk Highway 95 winds among the farms and hills just east of Arcadia, new mines stand out as gashes of raw earth and yellow stone. Pyramids of sand await transport to distant drilling fields. Joe and Cindy Slaby and their son Kyle, who farm just north of the highway, have proposed mining their sand, too. "It's some of the best in Trempealeau County," Ms. Slaby says.
Others are less cheerful. The mining boom has alarmed many residents who worry that it will pollute the air, harm local water supplies, and, in places like Arcadia, mar the rural loveliness that has given the town its name.
"We have a beautiful land here, and they are going to destroy it," says Patricia Kamla, who is in her late 70s and lives near a mine on the outskirts of Arcadia.
In December, concerns like these seemed at least partly vindicated when Wisconsin's attorney general announced a $200,000 fine against a Pennsylvania company for repeated violations of air and storm-water regulations at a mine in Blair, a town 12 miles east of Arcadia. (The company, Preferred Sands of Radnor, Pa., says it's fixed the problems.) Since 2012, Wisconsin has found nearly two dozen sand-mining operations in violation of air and water pollution rules.
Residents complain that the mining boom has overwhelmed the state agencies responsible for monitoring it. It also has sorely tested local officials, few of whom knew anything about sand mining until it came. And it's become politically contentious. Many communities have tried to use their zoning and police powers to limit where, when, and how mines can operate. But Wisconsin Republicans, who are trying to make the state friendlier to business, want to curb those powers.
A big question about sand mining is the risk to public health from dust. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), prolonged exposure to airborne crystalline silica – tiny particles of sand – can cause silicosis and increase the risk of lung cancer. It's not known exactly how much crystalline silica sand mining puts into the local air, in part because of the difficulty and expense of measuring it. But many residents are worried.
Crispin Pierce, director of the Environmental Public Health program at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, says his preliminary testing outside 15 mines and processing plants in western Wisconsin revealed levels of fine dust that exceeded standards set by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Some of this dust was probably crystalline silica. Testing by the US Mine Safety and Health Administration found that, on average, crystalline silica makes up 14.5 percent of the dust at Wisconsin sand-mining operations.
But concerns about dust extend far beyond the Midwest to where frac sand is used. The National Ins ute for Occupational Safety and Health issued a "Hazard Alert" after a study of 11 fracking sites in five states found levels of crystalline silica that consistently exceeded occupational health standards, sometimes by as much as 10 times. In September, OSHA proposed cutting in half the permissible levels of exposure to crystalline silica at work sites.
Minnesota recently began testing for crystalline silica and other fine particles at mines and along a busy haul route. It is also rewriting air-quality standards for sand mining. Wisconsin has declined to undertake similar testing or to develop its own air-quality rules. State officials argue that a combination of existing air monitoring, national air-quality standards, and requirements to contain dust by technological means is adequate to protect public health.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2014/03...over-frac-sand
BigCarbon is one nasty, filthy business.
Tougher Regulations on Deadly Silica Dust Trigger Backlash
Senate accusations of prejudice have forced a US government agency to defend its actions over a proposed tightening of regulations concerning industrial workers’ exposure to deadly silica dust.
The row blew up late last year when the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) began a public consultation on setting new limits for working with the dust, which is a major hazard for construction workers, causing serious lung disease. The agency ruffled feathers in the Senate when it asked that those submitting evidence should declare their funding sources.
Last November, a group of 16 senators wrote an open letter to OSHA criticizing the move for its implication that the agency might prejudge submissions. The consultation period closed on 11 February, and OSHA is now vigorously defending its request.
“What I’m doing here is essentially saying the information that we will base our standard on has to be of the highest integrity, and we have to do it in a transparent manner, and conflict-of interest disclosure is an important component of both of those,” David Michaels, the head of OSHA, told Nature. “It would be surprising right now if a scientific journal didn’t ask for that information.”
Produced by tasks such as grinding concrete and sandblasting, used in the construction and other industries, crystalline silica dust can cause silicosis — an incurable disease involving inflammation of the lungs — and lung cancer. The dust is thought to kill or disable thousands of people in the United States every year, but guidelines on working with it have not been updated for more than 40 years.
“Our current standard is antiquated,” says Michaels. “There are literally millions of workers in the United States who are exposed to dangerous levels of silica.”
The present rules generally advise limiting exposure to roughly 100 micrograms of crystalline silica per cubic meter of air, averaged over 8 hours. OSHA has proposed halving this limit. Workers would also have to be better protected, for example by dust being ‘wetted down’ and with the use of extraction fans. OSHA estimates that the new regulations will cost about $640 million a year, with employers picking up most of the tab, but the agency believes that the rules will save up to 700 lives a year. US standards are also influential in other countries, some note, potentially saving many more workers’ lives.
The proposals were published in the Federal Register last September, at the start of the consultation period. In a first for OSHA, those wishing to submit scientific evidence as part of their comments were requested — although not required — to provide information on the funding sources of the research, as well as any funding received by the commenters that could potentially be considered a conflict of interest.
The Associated General Contractors of America, an industry group based in Arlington, Virginia, called the proposals “significantly flawed” and “rife with errors and inaccurate data”. And shortly after they were published, the group of senators, led by Lamar Alexander (Republican, Tennessee), a senior member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, wrote to OSHA saying that they were “very concerned about OSHA’s attempt to have commenters disclose their financial backers”. They added that the request “raises questions” about whether OSHA would prejudge submissions on the basis of who was sending them.
“The chilling effect the financial disclosure could have seems counter to the idea of robust inclusion of a diverse set of ideas and views to inform the rule-making,” Liz Wolgemuth, a spokeswoman for Alexander, told Nature.
But pharmacologist Lisa Bero of the University of California, San Francisco, says that her own research on similar rule-making processes for tobacco control found that scientists opposing rules were often funded by industry groups. She supports the new disclosure request. “The regulatory agencies have to be in a position to critically appraise the studies that come to them,” she says.
There is also support for the new silica standard. Tee Guidotti, a physician in Washington DC and a member of the American Thoracic Society’s Environmental Health Policy Committee, says that the scientific case for the proposed limit is “close to being bulletproof”. He adds that, if it is successful, it could provide a template for how OSHA deals with similar hazards, such as dust and radon.
But Susan Dudley, director of George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center in Washington DC, which conducts independent research on regulatory proposals, argues that there has already been a drop in exposure to silica dust and its health effects in recent years. She supports a lower exposure limit, but believes evidence is weaker for some of the specific requirements proposed to reach it, such as dust wetting.
The viewpoints contained in the 1,600 or so comments received through the consultation will be discussed in public hearings starting on 18 March. It will probably be several years before a final rule is enacted.
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...SA_SP_20140310
The businesscritters fighting OSHA aren't the ones who will be horribly sickened and painfully killed by silicosis.
Chesapeake Energy’s $5 Billion Shuffle
At the end of 2011, Chesapeake Energy, one of the nation’s biggest oil and gas companies, was teetering on the brink of failure.
Its legendary chief executive officer, Aubrey McClendon, was being pilloried for questionable deals, its stock price was getting hammered and the company needed to raise billions of dollars quickly.
Chesapeake executed an adroit escape, raising nearly $5 billion with a previously undisclosed twist: By gouging many rural landowners out of royalty payments they were supposed to receive in exchange for allowing the company to drill for natural gas on their property.
In lawsuits in state after state, private landowners have won cases accusing the companies like Chesapeake of stiffing them on royalties they were due. Federal investigators have repeatedly identified underpayments of royalties for drilling on federal lands, including a case in which Chesapeake was fined $765,000 for “knowing or willful submission of inaccurate information” last year.
But the impact of the Financial Maneuvers that he made to save the company will reverberate for years. The winners, aside from Chesapeake, were a competing oil company and a New York private equity firm that fronted much of the money in exchange for promises of double-digit returns for the next two decades.
The losers were landowners in Pennsylvania and elsewhere who leased their land to Chesapeake and saw their hopes of cashing in on the gas-drilling boom vanish without explanation.
People like Joe Drake.
“I got the check out of the mail… I saw what the gross was,” said Drake, a third-generation Pennsylvania farmer whose monthly royalty payments for the same amount of gas plummeted from $5,300 in July 2012 to $541 last February. This sort of precipitous drop can reflect gyrations in the price of gas. But in this case, Drake’s shrinking check resulted from a corporate decision by Chesapeake to radically reinterpret the terms of the deal it had struck to drill on his land. “If you or I did that we’d be in jail,” Drake said.
Chesapeake’s conduct is part of a larger national pattern in which many giant energy companies have maneuvered to pay as little as possible to the owners of the land they drill. Last year, a ProPublica investigation found that Pennsylvania landowners were paying ever-higher fees to companies for transporting their gas to market, and that Chesapeake was charging more than other companies in the region.
ProPublica pieced together the story of how Chesapeake shifted borrowing costs to landowners from do ents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, interviews with landowners, people who worked for the company and employees at other oil and gas concerns.
The deals took advantage of a simple economic principle: Monopoly power.
Boiled down to basics, they worked like this: When energy companies lease land above the shale rock that contains natural gas, they typically agree to pay the owner the market price for any gas they find, minus certain expenses.
Federal rules limit the tolls that can be charged on inter-state pipelines to prevent gouging. But drilling companies like Chesapeake can levy any fees they want for moving gas through local pipelines, known in the industry as gathering lines, that link backwoods wells to the nation’s interstate pipelines. Property owners have no alternative but to pay up. There’s no other practical way to transport natural gas to market.
Chesapeake took full advantage of this. In a series of deals, it sold off the network of local pipelines it had built in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Louisiana, Texas and the Midwest to a newly formed company that had evolved out of Chesapeake itself, raising $4.76 billion in cash.
http://www.propublica.org/article/ch...ailynewsletter
SkyPeople are some nasty, thieving, cheating sonsof es
Contaminated Water Supplies, Health Concerns Ac ulate With Fracking Boom in Pennsylvania
As the first official research is published that confirms water contamination by hydraulic fracturing, an alarming amount and array of hazardous chemicals and compounds - including arsenic, chloride, barium and radium - are found in Pennsylvania groundwater.
Shortly after a gas company in Donegal, Pennsylvania, began storing fracking wastewater in an impoundment pit, a water well at a nearby home showed some alarmingly elevated levels of barium and strontium.
The Southwest Pennsylvania home sits within 2,000 feet of the impoundment pit, which began leaking in late 2012, Kathryn Hilton told Truthout. Hilton is a community organizer at the Mountain Watershed Association, a nonprofit dedicated to water conservation in the state's Indian Creek Watershed.
In August, 2012, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) test results showed levels of barium and strontium above EPA standards. "Those are hazardous chemicals that can cause health problems when exposed to for extended periods of time," Hilton said.
Environmentalists, scientists and residents worry that other homeowners may be facing similar, often unknown, threats from contamination throughout Pennsylvania - where the fracking boom has positioned the state as the third-largest producer of natural gas. Those concerns are growing as shale development continues to expand and transforms Pennsylvania communities that were once quaint rural areas into areas filled with drilling equipment and trucks.
"These drilling sites are really industrial sites," said David Brown, a toxicologist at the Environmental Health Project in Washington County, Pennsylvania. "There is a lot of diesel fuel around, a lot of chemicals brought in to frack the rock, and it is all dumped in water or the air."
Significant Findings
At the well in Donegal, the levels of chemicals such as strontium that were measured in the well could be high enough to cause some skin or gastrointestinal reactions, environmental scientist Vanessa Lamers told Truthout. An elderly person or infant would be even more susceptible.
"That's a lot of strontium and barium," Lamers said after reviewing the sample results. "The chloride is four times over the limit."
This case is not the only example of chemicals and compounds contaminating drinking water in areas with fracking activity. Between 2008 and fall 2012, state environmental regulators determined that oil and gas development damaged the water supplies for at least 161 Pennsylvania homes, farms, churches and businesses.
Two Sources
Shale gas development in Washington County, Pa. (Photo: Vanessa Lamers)
Keystone State environmentalists, along with biologists and toxicologists, associate health concerns with two possible streams of contamination.
Leaks of drilling fluids and other contaminants from well casings is the first potential source of pollution. "One in 20 wells leak immediately, and over time the percentage increases," said Anthony Ingraffea, an engineering professor at Cornell University.
"Casing is a very big issue," Lamers told Truthout. Intense pressure - sometimes as high as 18,000 to 20,000 psi - is put on the well during the hydraulic fracturing process.
"You have all this pressure from the fracking and drilling," Lamers said. "Then at the end of the process, which can take three weeks or three months, they are going to pull the wastewater back up. That wastewater will go back up through that casing. And if the casing is not still in great shape, after all that pressure, that's a concern [for possible contamination]."
The second possible stream is the millions of gallons of wastewater produced during fracking. Monika Freyman, a water program scientist with Ceres, is one of those experts. Freyman worries about the way wastewater is stored, transported and treated. "And now they are talking about barging it," Freyman said. The scientist spent months studying the effect of the industry on water resources, including the mul ude of pathways the fracking fluids can go after a well is fracked.
Hilton points to a Duke University study conducted last year that shows some of the Marcellus shale wastewater pours directly downstream into water sources for Pittsburgh and other cities, with uncertain health consequences.
And violations issued by the state DEP to companies, ranging from failure to report a spill to inadequately storing wastewater, shows just how dangerous the industry is in Pennsylvania, Hilton told Truthout.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/22407...n-pennsylvania
We know now that Cheney knew fracking would cause this , so he exempted fracking from the authority of the Clean Water Act.
Why The Oil & Gas Industry Makes Such A Big Deal Of The Shale (Retirement) Party
How much faith can we put in our ability to decipher all the numbers out there telling us the US will soon be cornering the global oil market? There’s another side to the story of the relentless US shale boom, one that says that some of the numbers are misunderstood, while others are simply preposterous. According to energy expert Arthur Berman, a geological consultant with thirty-four years of experience in petroleum exploration and production, the truth of the matter is that the industry has to make a big deal out of shale because it’s all that’s left. “Shale is not a revolution, it’s a retirement party”. Interview by James Stafford of Oilprice.com.
Oilprice.com: Almost on a daily basis we have figures thrown at us to demonstrate how the shale boom is only getting started. Mostly recently, there are statements to the effect that Texas shale formations will produce up to one-third of the global oil supply over the next 10 years. Is there another story behind these figures?
Arthur Berman: First, we have to distinguish between shale gas and liquids plays. On the gas side, all shale gas plays except the Marcellus are in decline or flat. The growth of US supply rests solely on the Marcellus and it is unlikely that its growth can continue at present rates.
On the oil side, the Bakken has a considerable commercial area that is perhaps only one-third developed so we see Bakken production continuing for several years before peaking. The Eagle Ford also has significant commercial area but is showing signs that production may be flattening. Nevertheless, we see 5 or so more years of continuing Eagle Ford production activity before peaking. The EIA has is about right for the liquids plays–slower increases until later in the decade, and then decline.
The idea that Texas shales will produce one-third of global oil supply is preposterous. The Eagle Ford and the Bakken comprise 80% of all the US liquids growth. The Permian basin has notable oil reserves left but mostly from very small ac ulations and low-rate wells. EOG CEO Bill Thomas said the same thing about 10 days ago on EOG’s earnings call. There have been some truly outrageous claims made by some executives about the Permian basin in recent months that I suspect have their general counsels looking for a defibrillator.
Recently, the CEO of a major oil company told The Houston Chronicle that the shale revolution is only in the “first inning of a nine-inning game”. I guess he must have lost track of the score while waiting in line for hot dogs because production growth in U.S. shale gas plays excluding the Marcellus is approaching zero; growth in the Bakken and Eagle Ford has fallen from 33% in mid-2011 to 7% in late 2013.
Oil companies have to make a big deal about shale plays because that is all that is left in the world. Let’s face it: these are truly awful reservoir rocks and that is why we waited until all more attractive opportunities were exhausted before developing them.
It is completely unreasonable to expect better performance from bad reservoirs than from better
reservoirs.
The majors have shown that they cannot replace reserves. They talk about return on capital employed (ROCE) these days instead of reserve replacement and production growth because there is nothing to talk about there. Shale plays are part of the ROCE story–shale wells can be drilled and brought on production fairly quickly and this masks or smoothes out the non-productive capital languishing in big projects around the world like Kashagan and Gorgon, which are going sideways whilst eating up billions of dollars.
None of this is meant to be negative. I’m all for shale plays but let’s be honest about things, after all! Production from shale is not a revolution; it’s a retirement party.
That’s my whole point about shale plays–they’re expensive and need high oil and gas prices to work
OP: Is the shale “boom” sustainable?
Arthur Berman: The shale gas boom is not sustainable except at higher gas prices in the US. There is lots of gas–just not that much that is commercial at current prices. Analysts that say there are trillions of cubic feet of commercial gas at $4 need their cost assumptions audited. If they are not counting overhead (G&A) and many operating costs, then of course things look good. If Walmart were evaluated solely on the difference between wholesale and retail prices, they would look fantastic. But they need stores, employees, gas and electricity, advertising and distribution. So do gas producers. I don’t know where these guys get their reserves either, but that needs to be audited as well.
( so the future of US shale and gas depends on BigOil raising its retail prices, simply because they can (like financial sector raises its fees). Who doubts they will? )
There was a report recently that said large areas of the Barnett Shale are commercial at $4 gas prices and that the play will continue to produce lots of gas for decades. Some people get so intrigued with how much gas has been produced and could be in the future, that they don’t seem to understand that this is a business. A business must be commercial to be successful over the long term, although many public companies in the US seem to challenge that concept.
Investors have tolerated a lot of cheerleading about shale gas over the years, but I don’t think this is going to last. Investors are starting to ask questions, such as: Where are the earnings and the free cash flow. Shale companies are spending a lot more than they are earning, and that has not changed. They are claiming all sorts of efficiency gains on the drilling side that has distracted inquiring investors for a while. I was looking through some investor presentations from 2007 and 2008 and the same companies were making the same efficiency claims then as they are now. The problem is that these impressive gains never show up in the balance sheets, so I guess they must not be very important after all.
The reason that the shale gas boom is not sustainable at current prices is that shale gas is not the whole story. Conventional gas accounts for almost 60% of US gas and it is declining at about 20% per year and no one is drilling more wells in these plays. The unconventional gas plays decline at more than 30% each year. Taken together, the US needs to replace 19 billion cubic feet per day each year to maintain production at flat levels. That’s almost four Barnett shale plays at full production each year! So you can see how hard it will be to sustain gas production. Then there are all the efforts to use it up faster–natural gas vehicles, exports to Mexico, LNG exports, closing coal and nuclear plants–so it only gets harder.
This winter, things have begun to unravel. Comparative gas storage inventories are near their 2003 low. Sure, weather is the main factor but that’s always the case. The simple truth is that supply has not been able to adequately meet winter demand this year, period. Say what you will about why but it’s a fact that is inconsistent with the fairy tales we continue to hear about cheap, abundant gas forever.
I sat across the table from industry experts just a year ago or so who were adamant that natural gas prices would never get above $4 again. Prices have been above $4 for almost three months. Maybe “never” has a different meaning for those people that doesn’t include when they are wrong.
Resource estimates can be hugely misleading because they are guesses and have nothing to do with economics
OP: Do you foresee any new technology on the shelf in the next 10-20 years that would shape another boom, whether it be fossil fuels or renewables?
Arthur Berman: I get asked about new technology that could make things different all the time. I’m a technology enthusiast but I see the big breakthroughs in new industries, not old extractive businesses like oil and gas. Technology has made many things possible in my lifetime including shale and deep-water production, but it hasn’t made these things cheaper.
That’s my whole point about shale plays–they’re expensive and need high oil and gas prices to work.
We’ve got the high prices for oil and the oil plays are fine; we don’t have high prices for the gas plays and they aren’t working. There are some areas of the Marcellus that actually work at $4 gas price and that’s great, but it really takes $6 gas prices before things open up even there.
OP: In Europe, where do you see the most potential for shale gas exploitation, with Ukraine engulfed in political chaos, companies withdrawing from Poland, and a flurry of shale activity in the UK?
Arthur Berman: Shale plays will eventually spread to Europe but it will take a longer time than it did in North America. The biggest reason is the lack of private mineral ownership in most of Europe so there is no incentive for local people to get on board. In fact, there are only the negative factors of industrial development for them to look forward to with no pay check. It’s also a lot more expensive to drill and produce gas in Europe.
There are a few promising shale plays on the international horizon: the Bazherov in Russia, the Vaca Muerte in Argentina and the Duvernay in Canada look best to me because they are liquid-prone and in countries where acceptable fiscal terms and necessary infrastructure are feasible. At the same time, we have learned that not all plays work even though they look good on paper, and that the potentially commercial areas are always quite small compared to the total resource. Also, we know that these plays do not last forever and that once the drilling treadmill starts, it never ends. Because of high decline rates, new wells must constantly be drilled to maintain production. Shale plays will last years, not decades.
Recent developments in Poland demonstrate some of the problems with international shale plays. Everyone got excited a few years ago because resource estimates were enormous. Later, these estimates were cut but many companies moved forward and wells have been drilled. Most international companies have abandoned the project including ExxonMobil, ENI, Marathon and Talisman. Some players exited because they don’t think that the geology is right but the government has created many regulatory obstacles that have caused a lack of confidence in the fiscal environment in Poland.
The UK could really use the gas from the Bowland Shale and, while it’s not a huge play, there is enough there to make a difference. I expect there will be plenty of opposition because people in the UK are very sensitive about the environment and there is just no way to hide the fact that shale development has a big footprint despite pad drilling and industry efforts to make it less invasive.
Let me say a few things about resource estimates while we are on the subject. The public and politicians do not understand the difference between resources and reserves. The only think that they have in common is that they both begin with “res.” Reserves are a tiny subset of resources that can be produced commercially. Both are always wrong but resource estimates can be hugely misleading because they are guesses and have nothing to do with economics.
Someone recently sent me a new report by the CSIS that said U.S. shale gas resource estimates are too conservative and are much larger than previously believed. I wrote him back that I think that resource estimates for U.S. shale gas plays are irrelevant because now we have robust production data to work with. Most of those enormous resources are in plays that we already know are not going to be economic.
Resource estimates have become part of the shale gas cheerleading squad’s standard tricks to drum up enthusiasm for plays that clearly don’t work except at higher gas prices. It’s really unfortunate when supposedly objective policy organizations and research groups get in on the hype in order to attract funding for their work.
I fear putting climate change policy in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians more than I fear climate change (which I fear).
OP: The ban on most US crude exports in place since the Arab oil embargo of 1973 is now being challenged by lobbyists, with media opining that this could be the biggest energy debate of the year in the US. How do you foresee this debate shaping up by the end of this year?
Arthur Berman: The debate over oil and gas exports will be silly.
I do not favor regulation of either oil or gas exports from the US. On the other hand, I think that a little discipline by the E&P companies might be in order so they don’t have to beg the American people to bail them out of the over-production mess that they have created knowingly for themselves. Any business that over-produces whatever it makes has to live with lower prices.
Why should oil and gas producers get a pass from the free-market laws of supply and demand? ( because they own Congress?)
I expect that by the time all the construction is completed to allow gas export, the domestic price will be high enough not to bother. It amazes me that the geniuses behind gas export assume that the business conditions that resulted in a price benefit overseas will remain static until they finish building export facilities, and that the compe ion will simply stand by when the awesome Americans bring gas to their markets. Just last week, Ken Medlock described how some schemes to send gas to Asia may find that there will be a lot of price compe ion in the future because a lot of gas has been discovered elsewhere in the world.
The US acts like we are some kind of natural gas superstar because of shale gas. Has anyone looked at how the US stacks up next to Russia, Iran and Qatar for natural gas reserves?
Whatever outcome results from the debate over petroleum exports, it will result in higher prices for American consumers. There are experts who argue that it won’t increase prices much and that the economic benefits will outweigh higher costs. That may be but I doubt that anyone knows for sure. Everyone agrees that oil and gas will cost more if we allow exports.
OP: Is the US indeed close to hitting the “crude wall”—the point at which production could slow due to infrastructure and regulatory restraints?
Arthur Berman: No matter how much or little regulation there is, people will always argue that it is still either too much or too little. We have one of the most unfriendly administrations toward oil and gas ever and yet production has boomed. I already said that I oppose most regulation so you know where I stand. That said, once a bureaucracy is started, it seldom gets smaller or weaker. I don’t see any walls out there, just uncomfortable price increases because of unnecessary regulations.
We use and need too much oil and gas to hit a wall. I see most of the focus on health care regulation for now. If there is no success at modifying the most objectionable parts of the Affordable Care Act, I don’t suppose there is much hope for fewer oil and gas regulations. The petroleum business isn’t exactly the darling of the people.
OP: What is the realistic future of methane hydrates, or “fire ice”, particularly with regard to Japanese efforts at extraction?
Arthur Berman: Japan is desperate for energy especially since they cut back their nuclear program so maybe hydrates make some sense at least as a science project for them. Their pilot is in thousands of feet of water about 30 miles offshore so it’s going to be very expensive no matter how successful it is.
OP: Globally, where should we look for the next potential “shale boom” from a geological perspective as well as a commercial viability perspective?
Arthur Berman: Not all shale is equal or appropriate for oil and gas development. Once we remove all the shale that is not at or somewhat above peak oil generation today, most of it goes away. Some shale plays that meet these and other criteria didn’t work so we have a lot to learn. But shale development is both inevitable and necessary. It will take a longer time than many believe outside of North America.
OP: We’ve spoken about Japan’s nuclear energy crossroads before, and now we see that issue climaxing, with the country’s nuclear future taking center-stage in an election period. Do you still believe it is too early for Japan to pull the plug on nuclear energy entirely?Arthur Berman: Japan and Germany have made certain decisions about nuclear energy that I find remarkable but I don’t live there and, obviously, don’t think like them.
More generally, environmental enthusiasts simply don’t see the obstacles to short-term conversion of a fossil fuel economy to one based on renewable energy. I don’t see that there is a rational basis for dialogue in this arena. I’m all in favor of renewable energy but I don’t see going from a few percent of our primary energy consumption to even 20% in less than a few decades no matter how much we may want to.
OP: What have we learned over the past year about Japan’s alternatives to nuclear energy?
Arthur Berman: We have learned that it takes a lot of coal to replace nuclear energy when countries like Japan and Germany made bold decisions to close nuclear capacity. We also learned that energy got very expensive in a hurry. I say that we learned. I mean that the past year confirmed what many of us anticipated.
OP: Back in the US, we have closely followed the blowback from the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed new carbon emissions standards for power plants, which would make it impossible for new coal-fired plants to be built without the implementation of carbon capture and sequestration technology, or “clean-coal” tech. Is this a feasible strategy in your opinion?
Arthur Berman: I’m not an expert on clean coal technology either but I am confident that almost anything is possible if cost doesn’t matter. This is as true about carbon capture from coal as it is about shale gas production. Energy is an incredibly complex topic and decisions are being made by bureaucrats and politicians with little background in energy or the energy business. I don’t see any possibility of a good outcome under these cir stances.
OP: Is CCS far enough along to serve as a sound basis for a national climate change policy?
Arthur Berman: Climate-change activism is a train that has left the station. If you’ve missed it, too bad. If you’re on board, good luck.
The good news is that the US does not have an energy policy and is equally unlikely to get a climate change policy for all of the same reasons. I fear putting climate change policy in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians more than I fear climate change (which I fear).
=================
Who is Arthur Berman?
Arthur Berman is a geological consultant with thirty-four years of experience in petroleum exploration and production. He is currently consulting for several E&P companies and capital groups in the energy sector. He frequently gives keynote addresses for investment conferences and is interviewed about energy topics on television, radio, and national print and web publications including CNBC, CNN, Platt’s Energy Week, BNN, Bloomberg, Platt’s, Financial Times, and New York Times. You can find out more about Arthur by visiting his website: http://petroleumtruthreport.blogspot.com
Read more at http://cleantechnica.com/2014/03/30/...HezCIleLXhX.99
U.S. Shale-Oil Boom May Not Last as Fracking Wells Lack Staying Power
Chesapeake Energy’s (CHK) Serenity 1-3H well near Oklahoma City came in as a gusher in 2009, pumping more than 1,200 barrels of oil a day and kicking off a rush to drill that extended into Kansas. Now the well produces less than 100 barrels a day, state records show. Serenity’s swift decline sheds light on a dirty secret of the oil boom: It may not last.
Shale wells start strong and fade fast, and producers are drilling at a breakneck pace to hold output steady. In the fields, this incessant need to drill is known as the Red Queen, after the character in Through the Looking-Glass who tells Alice, “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
The U.S. is producing 7.8 million barrels of oil a day, more than it has in a quarter-century. Crude from shale formations has cut reliance on imports and put the U.S. closer to energy independence than it’s been since 1989. The International Energy Agency predicted last year that the U.S. would overtake Saudi Arabia by 2020 as the world’s largest producer.
Whether current production can hold up is the subject of debate. David Hughes, a geoscientist and president of Global Sustainability Research, has examined the life span of shale wells. “The Red Queen syndrome just gets worse and worse and worse,” he says.
“The higher production goes, the more wells you need to offset the decline.”
http://www.businessweek.com/articles...-staying-power
More fracking, more water used, poisoned, taken out of the water cycle. lovely.
Thanks, Sky People!
NIMBYism by CFO (chief fracking officer)
Exxon CEO Joins Lawsuit to Stop Fracking Near His Home
Tillerson has joined a lawsuit that cites fracking’s consequences in order to block the construction of a 160-foot water tower next to his and his wife’s Texas home.
The Wall Street Journal reports the tower would supply water to a nearby fracking site, and the plaintiffs argue the project would cause too much noise and traffic from hauling the water from the tower to the drilling site.
The water tower, owned by Cross Timbers Water Supply Corporation, “will sell water to oil and gas explorers for fracing [sic] shale formations leading to traffic with heavy trucks on FM 407, creating a noise nuisance and traffic hazards,” the suit says.
Though Tillerson’s name is on the lawsuit, a lawyer representing him said his concern is about the devaluation of his property, not fracking specifically.
When he is acting as Exxon CEO, not a homeowner, Tillerson has lashed out at fracking critics and proponents of regulation. “This type of dysfunctional regulation is holding back the American economic recovery, growth, and global compe iveness,” he said in 2012.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/0...?detail=email#
Vast oil trove trapped in Monterey Shale formation
San Joaquin Valley's Monterey Shale formation may hold 15 billion barrels of oil, but no one has found an affordable way to extract it.
Monterey Shale formation, which covers 1,750 square miles, roughly from Bakersfield to Fresno.
But getting at that oil isn't easy. The Monterey Shale is unlike other oil shale formations across the United States. In those booming oil fields, reserves are pooled in orderly strata of rock. Once the rock is cracked open by fracking or other means, operators can sink a single well with multiple horizontal shafts and pull in oil from a wide area.
California's geology is far more complicated. The earth under the Monterey Shale has undergone constant seismic reshaping that has folded, stacked and fractured the substrate, trapping the oil in accordion pleats of hard rock at depths of up to 12,000 feet. To reach the crude using conventional methods requires oil companies to drill far-deeper wells, and more of them — a prohibitively expensive undertaking.
To crack the code, companies are busily drilling test wells here, using various fracking and acidization techniques in search of cheaper solutions. So far, no one seems to have found a method to profitably extract the oil.
"Very smart engineers are spending their waking hours trying to come up with the magic formula," said Rock Zierman, chief executive of the California Independent Petroleum Assn., a trade group that has many Monterey Shale prospectors among its members.
"What we do know is there is a heck of lot of oil down there," Zierman said. "What we don't know is how we can get it out of the ground in an economically viable way to justify the heavy investment."
The shallow, 1,000-foot wells in the established Bakersfield oil patch might cost a hundred thousand dollars to sink. In the Monterey formation, that expense might run to $5 million, and with every chance of yielding a dry hole.
Despite the difficulty getting at the oil, the potential bonanza is too big for many oil companies to ignore.
In Kern County — where the bulk of the Monterey formation lies — available land for drilling has nearly all been snapped up. Speculators are believed to be responsible for driving up the cost of obtaining leases.
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-m...#ixzz2yCtAXZSO
An implicit signal is that why do oil companies go after such difficult, risky oil like Monterey shale, go after low eROI like bitumen, drill 5 miles deep in the Gulf and elsewhere?
Because, as with coal, all the easy oil is going or gone, aka, peak "easy" oil is now past. And Saudi Arabia won't even tell us their situation.
Arthur Berman predicted in 2009 that the Haynesville Shale would never turn commercial because there would not be enough gas. Well they found much more than his waste of time predictions. Then he admitted he had erred in underestimating, And stated it would be a minor producer in 2010. In 2011 Haynesville became the largest producer in the US.
While I appreciate his watchdog status, all need to understand experts from both sides can be very wrong (and worse know they are wrong) We need guys like Berman. But we need them to be correct as well. Lay it all on the table. I have screwed up before but imo... A little of this goes a long way.
Now the flat out dirty accounting he has exposed is very useful. More of that, less with the future assessments.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
From NPR News this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block. Yesterday on the program we heard about the oil boom in South Texas along the Eagle Ford Shale. The drilling and fracking have brought an influx of industry and cash to formerly impoverished communities.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: It's progress. It has provided opportunity beyond belief, beyond what anybody could've imagined.
BLOCK: But there's a serious environmental and health toll as well, according to an investigative team that looked into pollution from the boom. The reporters decided to focus not on water pollution but on what they consider an equally serious problem that gets less attention: air pollution. Jim Morris is senior investigative reporter with the Center for Public Integrity and he led the eight-month investigation along with InsideClimate news and the Weather Channel. Morris describes the emissions as a toxic soup of chemicals being released into the air day in and day out along the Eagle Ford Shale.
JIM MORRIS: It's a combination of what's called volatile organic compounds and that's carcinogens like benzene would be an example. Formaldehyde would be another. There's a long list of these chemicals. On top of that you've got sulphur dioxide, which is a component of smog. It's a respiratory irritant so people who already have or are prone to asthma for example, if they're exposed to sulphur dioxide it gets immeasurably worse.
BLOCK: And when you think about the health effects of these emissions, let's listen to voices of three people who live in the heart of the Eagle Ford Shale. They're from Karnes County. These are people you interviewed for a video report that you produced with the Weather Channel and InsideClimate News.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO INTERVIEW)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: For myself I've experienced a lot of difficulty with my breathing.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: I used to come out here this very park before and run literally about four or five miles a day without any problems. Now I rarely get a mile off before I start choking. It's just something heavier with the air.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: I have two-and-a-half acres and I can't bring my grandchild out here to enjoy it because I'm afraid for his health.
BLOCK: Jim Morris, how common were these complaints and is there medical evidence to back up what they're saying?
MORRIS: The complaints we heard were very common. We reviewed about 300 complaints that had been filed by citizens of the Eagle Ford with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and just saw a lot of common threads, headaches, nausea, breathing difficulties, nosebleeds. And when you look at the science on some of the chemicals that are coming out of these operations, you see those are the very symptoms that would be expected to be associated with emissions from the oil and gas industry.
BLOCK: Let's talk about the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, TCEQ, which is in charge of monitoring most air emissions. What's their track record?
MORRIS: The TCEQ's track record is not good either in terms of monitoring for toxics in the air - they've only got five permanent monitors in the entire Eagle Ford Shale, which is 20,000 square miles, twice the size of the State of Massachusetts.
BLOCK: And by monitor you mean an actual physical station (unintelligible)...
MORRIS: Physical station. We saw one in Floresville, Texas, which is on the sort of northern fringe of the shale play. And the other four are down on the border around Laredo. And so they don't have these permanent monitors in places where there's heavy drilling. So the record is not good in that regard. TCEQ's record on enforcement is not good either. We looked at nearly 300 complaints that have been filed by residents of the Eagle Ford. And there were 164 violations that were do ented by the TCEQ as a result of those complaints.
So they did find problems, but then we found that out of those 164 violations there were only two fines levied, the biggest of which was about $14,000. So it's not much of a stretch to see why companies don't really take that agency very seriously.
BLOCK: When you confronted folks from the oil industry with your reporting and said, look we're hearing all these complaints about health effects from air pollution emissions, from oil production facilities, what did they say? What's the response from the oil industry to this?
MORRIS: Well, the first problem we had was getting somebody to respond. We had a heck of a time when we were in Texas. And between us and InsideClimate News and the Weather Channel we made, I want to say, eight separate trips down there.
So there were plenty of opportunities to do on-the-ground, face-to-face, in some cases on-camera interviews with representatives of some of the big oil companies in the Eagle Ford, like Marathon Oil for example or Conoco Philips. And they all declined. They didn't want to talk to us. A couple of them answered questions in writing.
We did do an interview with a gentleman here in Washington named Steve Everley who's with a group called Energy in Depth. And his response was, there's no evidence that these emissions are causing any harm. The problem is, a lot of the concern associated with chemicals like benzene, you know, if it's a carcinogen you're not going to see the problem right away. You're going to see it 10, 20, 30 years down the road.
BLOCK: There is one other aspect too that's in your reporting which is no surprise, the oil and gas industry, especially in Texas, is immensely politically powerful.
MORRIS: I think what surprised us is that it's even more powerful than we realized. We did an analysis as part of our reporting and found legislators or their spouses had direct financial interest in the Eagle Ford. In other words, either got royalties from or held stock in companies that were actively drilling in the Eagle Ford Shale.
BLOCK: Why doesn't the federal Environmental Protection Agency step in if there are concerns that the state isn't doing its job in Texas on monitoring air pollution? What about the EPA?
MORRIS: That is a very good question and it's one that we're going to be asking in some of our follow-up stories. I mean, the states are responsible for enforcing the Federal Clean Air Act with the EPA as a supposed backstop. But there's really no evidence that the EPA has stepped in in Texas or will step in. And so that's a question we're going to be asking, I hope of the regional EPA administrator in the very near future.
BLOCK: Jim Morris, Thanks for coming in.
MORRIS: Thank you.
BLOCK: Jim Morris with the Center for Public Integrity. He led an eight-month investigation looking into air pollution from the Eagle Ford Shale.
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=301882345
Report offers grim predictions for South Texas air quality amid Eagle Ford oil boom
What might the oil- and gas-rich Eagle Ford Shale region of South Texas look like in 2018?
A newly released but largely unnoticed study commissioned by the state of Texas makes some striking projections:
- The number of wells drilled in the 20,000-square-mile region could quadruple, from about 8,000 today to 32,000.
- Oil production could leap from 363 million barrels per year to as much as 761 million.
- Airborne releases of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) could increase 281 percent during the peak ozone season compared to 2012 emissions. VOCs, commonly found at oil and gas production sites, can cause respiratory and neurological problems. Some, like benzene, can cause cancer.
- Nitrogen oxides — which react with VOCs in sunlight to create ground-level ozone, the main component of smog — could increase 69 percent during the peak ozone season.
These projections are included in a study prepared by scientists with the Alamo Area Council of Governments (AACOG) in San Antonio and paid for by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). The study was designed to determine the extent to which oil and gas development in the Eagle Ford region is contributing to rising ozone levels in the San Antonio metropolitan area, which lies north of much of the drilling. San Antonio’s ozone readings have violated federal air quality standards since August 2012, making the city vulnerable to sanctions under the Clean Air Act.
The study’s findings also have implications beyond San Antonio.
In February, the Center for Public Integrity, InsideClimate News and The Weather Channel produced a series of reports about air quality in the Eagle Ford and found that the Texas regulatory system does more to protect the gas and oil industry than the public. The TCEQ has installed only five permanent air monitors in the region, which is nearly twice the size of Massachusetts, and all of them are on the fringes of the shale play, far from the heavy drilling areas where emissions are highest.
...
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/...=publici-email
There's an oil glut on the Gulf Coast, but SA gasoline nearing $3.40, while the summer driving season of peak price hasn't started.
BigOil s us, because they can, and nobody can stop them.
Exporting crude, already started by criminal BP, will drive domestic prices higher, as BigOil makes USA compete for US oil with foreign oil buyers, exactly what will happen with US natgas sold to Asia where prices are 4x the US price.
How's that Drill Here, Drill Now working out for ya?
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