2012 July 17

Protecting Groundwater: A Guide To Fracking Risks And Best Practices

by Tom Kenworthy

As controversy over the use of hydraulic fracturing mounts across the U.S., the Natural Resources Defense Council has produced a handy fact sheet on best practices that can reduce risks of pollution from the technique.

The four-page publication details the various risks to both surface and underground water from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which is used in oil and gas drilling operations and has become more widespread with the development of large new reserves found in shale rock formations.

Fracking is used to stimulate oil and gas production and involves the injection of a mix of water, chemicals and sand underground at high pressure to fracture rock and release the oil or gas.

Risks to surface water supplies include depletion of fresh water supplies, spills of fracking chemicals, and leaks of flowback fluids that can include fracking chemicals once the well is completed. Threats to underground water supplies can come when wells are poorly constructed, when fractures extend farther than planned, and when old oil and gas wells that have been capped serve as a migration corridor for fracking fluids used in new wells nearby.

In order to avoid those possible problems, NRDC recommends, among other things, that the public be fully informed of chemicals used in fracking, that fracking be regulated under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, and that wastes associated with oil and gas development be regulated under federal and state hazardous waste laws.

In addition, NRDC lists many best industry practices that should be uniformly used, including better site planning and analysis, careful well construction, cementing and casing, and proper handling of wastewater.

This list of recommendations is a must-read for industry, policymakers, and environmental groups.

Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow at American Progress.

Podcast: The Consequences Of Offshore Oil Drilling In Arctic Waters

The Arctic is undergoing rapid changes accelerated by a warming planet, opening up new potential shipping routes, tourism opportunities, and fossil fuel reserves.

Royal Dutch Shell is leading the charge in oil extraction. The company has already shipped its fleet of rigs up to Alaska where it is waiting for the go-ahead from the federal government to begin exploratory drilling in icy Arctic waters.

Other companies such as Exxon Mobil, Gazprom, Statoil, and Total are also planning on expanding future operations in the Arctic.

But a growing group of disaster-response officials, political leaders, environmental groups, and scientists are all raising concerns about the environmental impact of this new drilling activity. With virtually no infrastructure in place to clean up an oil spill, the consequences of a well blow-out could be disastrous.

The long-term consequences could be equally bad. As Arctic sea ice continues its death spiral, fossil fuel companies seeing new opportunities under the waters are swooping in — increasing the extraction of carbon-based fuels that are contributing to global warming.

In this podcast, linked above, we’ll speak with Michael Conathan, director of oceans policy at the Center for American Progress, who has been watching the activity in the Arctic closely. He’ll discuss a new report, Putting a Freeze on Arctic Ocean Drilling, and talk about the various environmental and infrastructure challenges in the region.

You can follow our podcast RSS feed here. A transcript of the conversation is below:

Michael Conathan: Now as climate change has taken its toll up there and the sea ice has receded, we’re really starting to see that the Northwest Passage is likely to become a reality in the coming years. So what that’s doing is increasing activity, sort of, across the board, industrial activity in the Arctic. Everything from the long sought after shipping route to ice retreating and exposing areas of the intercontinental shelf that are thought to contain massive oil and gas reserves.

There are also issues of fisheries opening up. There is basically an untapped fishery resource in the Arctic and the world has to decide how they are going to manage that. Are they going to manage it like all other international fisheries or, because it is this untapped resource is there the ability to do something different up there in that regard.

Cruise Lines are starting to look at the Arctic as potential destinations.

So really there is a big of a gold rush going on in the Arctic right now.

Stephen Lacey: What has Shell proposed as it moves into the Arctic to do exploratory drilling? This is a new phenomenon, they are not quite sure what they’re going to find. There are estimates of massive amounts of reserves but they’re not quite sure. This is anybody’s guess…

MC: They’re not sure but Shell has spent several years and over $4 billion trying to get access to these resources in the Arctic, so obviously they believe strongly that there is a significant resource there for them to tap into. Where we are right now is that over the past year or so the Obama Administration has been moving towards issuing permits for Shell to drill 5 exploratory wells. In the Beaufort Sea and the Chuckchi Sea which are bodies of water of the north slope of Alaska.

These are wells that are basically test wells. Shell believes, based on seismic testing, based on geology, that there are significant deposits and resources up there for them to tap into. This is sort of the “lets prove it” mechanism.

SL: The real scary thing here is not just that we are focusing our resources on more oil and gas, that could accelerate the problem of climate change, but that locally there is no infrastructure in place to deal with an oil spill, if it did take place. Talk about what you’ve found out about when evaluating infrastructure needs and ecosystem constraints.

MC: Yeah there are a couple of issues in that regard. I think, paramount, what we found in our report is the remarkable lack of infrastructure on the north slope of Alaska. This really is the last frontier. It’s incredibly distant. Its 1,000 miles away by air from the closest coast guard station. There is one highway that goes from Anchorage, Alaska, through Fairbanks to the North Slope. There is no rail access. There are no major airports up there. There is just these tiny little communities up there on the North Slope that are not connected by road. Everything is connected by small plane air traffic. The communities themselves, they have no hotels. There is one hotel on the North Slope of Alaska, in Barrow. There is an incredible lack of infrastructure in this region.

When you compare that to the Gulf of Mexico, where most of our current drilling operation takes place, and where the Deepwater Horizon incident occurred, where we had tens of thousands of people who could rush to that area and have places to sleep and wash and eat and take care of the basic needs of, effectively and army of responders. There is nothing like that on the North Slope of Alaska. If there is an accident on the North Slope of Alaska, the infrastructure to deal with it simply does not exist. You can’t get resources there, you can’t get people there, you can’t put them up when they are there.

From an environmental perspective, there is an incredible lack of information about what happens to oil when it’s in icy, Arctic water. It’s a very different situation from when it’s in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The weather conditions, the drilling season will occur from July 1^st to either the end of September in the Chukchi Sea or the end of October in the Beaufort Sea. And as you get towards then end of those drilling seasons, that’s when the ice starts to roll back in. And if a spill happens towards the end of that drilling season, now you are dealing with a situation where you have to clean up, you have to respond as the temperatures are getting colder, the light is disappearing, the ocean is literally icing over.

SL: And they may literally have to just keep the spill under the ice if it’s at the end of the drilling season.

MC: Shell has said in their response plans that one of their contingencies is that if a spill occurs at the end of the drilling season and it is iced over, that they let it sit until it melts in the spring and then they deal with it then.

SL: Have you evaluated what they could feasibly recover? They’ve said that they could recover an extraordinarily high amount of oil and when you look at previous oil spills, you are looking at a small fraction of what was actually spilled. Can you go over some of those numbers and what did you find about the feasibility?

MC: There have been wide reports that Shell’s response plans stipulate that they can recover 95% of any spilled oil. That’s a bit of an interpretation of what’s actually in their drilling plan but, regardless, they talk in pretty significant detail about recovering a large percentage of spilled oil; which is difficult to conceive given that they will also acknowledge that we don’t know what oil does in icy water and that you’re going to let it sit under ice for an entire Arctic winter and that you are potentially going to somehow be able to recover an extraordinarily higher percentage of oil than has ever been recovered from any oil spills even under ideal circumstances. So that is a definite concern. That needs further investigation.

SL: So what have the folks at agencies responsible for responding to an oil spill, what have they said about the lack of infrastructure? Have they responded to some of the analysis that you’ve put together? What are people saying publicly about what’s going to happen in this region?

MC: Well one of the, interestingly, the Coast Guard is the primary agency that responds to oil spills. They are sort of our EMTs, our first responders in these instances. Initially, Admiral Robert Papp who is the commandant with the Coast Guard, said that ‘we really don’t have the capacity to respond to a spill in the Arctic.’ He’s on record as talking about that. Subsequently, he’s backed away from some of those statements, saying, you know, ‘we will be able to do what’s required for this upcoming drilling season.’

The Coast Guard will have one of their three new ships onsite in the Arctic for the entirety of the drilling season. National Security Cutter is a state of the art Coast Guard cutter and it is really sort of the new flag ship of the Coast Guard fleet. So it will spend the summer up there in the Arctic, watching over Shell’s drilling operations. Sort of left unsaid in the argument is what else that ship would have been doing if Shell had not been doing in the Arctic this summer.

Is it the taxpayer’s responsibility to effectively be up there overseeing a private operation? Which, on the one hand, you’ve got the scenario where sure, if something happens we want our best response capabilities on scene. On the other hand, if Shell is ultimately the entity that is going to profit from these operations, I think that’s a tough thing to say. Especially because having that response capability there takes it away from somewhere else. The Coast Guard is an agency that’s stretched extremely thin.

SL: What I’m hearing you saying when your outlining many of the potential challenges in the Arctic, is that when we think about oil spills, typically we’re looking backward. Why is that way of thinking, always looking toward the previous problem, in this case the Gulf oil spill, why is that problematic when thinking about this range of new issues that we’re presented with in the Arctic?

MC: Yeah, I think it’s not just oil spills where we do that. We do that in everything, we do that in homeland security. You know the shoe bomber tries to take down an aircraft and now we all take our shoes off when we go through security. We all put our liquids in little plastic bags. We’re always responding to the previous threat and that’s certainly the case with oil spill response.

When we really think back at all, you also have to remember that when Deepwater Horizon occurred, that was the first big oil spill after the Exxon Valdez, that was the last real big major focusing event of an oil spill. I don’t want to minimize spills that happened in the interim, but those are sort of looked at as sort of the two major focusing events when it comes to offshore oil spills.

In between those occurrences, we really did nothing to improve our oil spill response technology. We simply didn’t fund the research. So when the BP spill happened, we were still using Exxon Valdez era technology. So we weren’t, in that instance, we weren’t even looking at the last problems, we were looking at no problems, when we were in the down period sort of in between major accidents. Now in the aftermath of BP, everybody is talking about blowout preventers and capping stacks and do you have a vessel on site to drill a relief well? And those are important things and they are important questions to answer but, again, we’re still looking at drilling in the context of the Gulf of Mexico, where you have ideal weather conditions, ideal response capacity, very experienced personnel, lots of scientific research. None of that exists in the Arctic.

So what we really need to be doing is saying ‘given the conditions we have in the Arctic and given that we need to know more about these ice operations and that we need to know more about weather patterns and ocean circulation and just the chemistry of what happens with oil in this very different kind of water,’ those are areas that are really lacking research and we really haven’t looked at those.

SL: So ultimately when we talk about this it’s impossible not to talk about it within the context of climate change. The environment in the Arctic is changing rapidly and that is opening up potential operations for oil and gas drilling. By doing so, you are drilling for more oil and gas and accelerating the problems that are opening up this area to begin with. The Administration itself has recognized that but has encouraged this process to move forward anyway. How do we talk about this within the climate context and why is it important to continue that discussion given the political discussion that we are having about this?

MC: Well, I think you have to talk about it from a climate perspective because , you’re right, the tragic irony of opening up the Arctic to offshore drilling is that if it were not for climate change, we wouldn’t be able to open the Arctic for offshore drilling. The changing climate has caused the ice sheets to retreat and has allowed access to these resources, which, once extracted, are going to accelerate the negative feedback loop of climate change. That’s just how this process unfolds and so the climate question is integral.

We chose to look at this from the infrastructure perspective, because in addition to the climate conversation we also have to look at the political realities of offshore drilling and of the conversation that is going on today in this country from a political and economic perspective. And if this is going to move forward, it is our job to ensure that it is done in the safest way possible and the problems that it potentially poses and the issues that it raises in terms of environmental damage to this pristine ecosystem are dealt with in the strongest way possible.

Nissan Unveils New Note (59 MPG US in JC08 Cycle)

Nissan has unveiled the new Note, a global hatchback that unfortunately might not find a way to the U.S. intact.

Report Finds 25,000 Jobs In Ohio’s Clean Energy Economy

On the eve of Mitt Romney’s campaign stop in Ohio, a new report from the Advanced Energy Economy Institute finds that the Buckeye State is home to 25,000 jobs in “22 advanced energy industry segments.”

Though Romney has repeatedly claimed that green jobs are “illusory,” the AEE report finds there are more advanced energy jobs in Ohio than the agriculture and mining industries combined:

“In Ohio, with its productive manufacturing base, robust infrastructure and transportation system, low cost of doing business, and excellent educational system, the advanced energy industry has established a strong foothold and has great capacity to grow.”

The jobs identified in the report are spread among 410 companies that work in “renewable energy, energy efficiency or high-tech manufacturing.” More than 7,000 of the jobs are in building materials, more than 4,000 are in heating, cooling and ventilation, and about 1,400 are in nuclear energy.

According to a recent report the Brookings Institution, green jobs in Ohio pay an average of $3,500 more than typical blue collar jobs. That report, which used a broader definition of the clean economy, also found that Ohio has over 105,000 jobs in the sector.

Ignoring the gains made in the clean economy — a sector that now employs more than 3 million Americans nationwide — Romney recently debuted a television ad attacking the industry. Ironically, there are 64,000 jobs in the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries in Romney’s home state of Massachusetts.

House Speaker John Boehner, who represents the state of Ohio, also seems to be ignoring — if not outright rejecting — the growth in this sector. Under Boehner’s leadership, the Republican-lead House has failed to extend the wind production tax credit (PTC), creating uncertainty in the wind market and leading to the abandonment of a $20 million wind project in Ohio that would have created as many as 200 new jobs. There are currently 6,000 wind jobs in Ohio — a large number of which could be threatened if the PTC isn’t extended.

Boehner has also railed against the 1603 grant program as a “Solyndra-style stimulus program.” That program, which helped tens of thousands of renewable energy projects get developed while also creating or saving up to 75,000 jobs, allowed the industry to post solid growth during the depths of the economic slowdown.

Boehner and Romney continue to ignore the tens of thousands of green jobs in their home states in order to satisfy their false narrative that clean energy doesn’t work.

– Max Frankel

NYC’s Bike-Share Launch Pushed Back to August

It was supposed to happen in July, but it now looks like we'll have to wait a bit more...

Rupert Murdoch Needs Some Schooling on Shale Gas & Climate Change

Rupert, shale gas is absolutely not a climate-friendly fuel, nor is climate change happening slowly.

This is What 37,000 Layoffs in the Wind Industry Looks Like

Here's a chart that voters in the Midwest probably aren't going to like:

Nation’s Top Climate Scientists: Omitting Climate Change From Keystone XL Pipeline Review Is ‘Neither Wise Nor Credible’

A group of prominent American climate scientists sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today urging her to consider the climate impacts of developing the Keystone XL pipeline.

Last summer, Secretary Clinton said she would “leave no stone unturned” in the State Department’s review of the pipeline. However, in its report on the project last August — released before President Obama denied the permit and encouraged TransCanada to choose another route — the State Department made almost no mention of climate change.

That’s a pretty big stone left unturned, say the nation’s top scientists.

The letter, which includes signatures from James Hansen and Michael Mann, says that avoiding climate change in an environmental review is “neither wise nor credible.”

This lack of serious consideration of climate change isn’t much a surprise. The Obama Administration has created a double standard on climate through both the Keystone XL pipeline and its support for Arctic offshore drilling.

In the case of Arctic drilling, the Interior Department noted in its environmental review of Shell’s drilling plans that the region is “experiencing variations that are accelerating faster than previously realized.” But the Interior Department did not use this assessment to question the prudence of drilling for more fossil fuels that will only accelerate that warming trend.

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, President Obama said he believes “that we’re going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way.” But when asked to respond to NASA Climatologist James Hansen, who said that opening up tar sands is “game over” for the climate, the President avoided making a direct connection between Keystone XL and climate change:

James Hansen is a scientist who has done an enormous amount not only to understand climate change, but also to help publicize the issue. I have the utmost respect for scientists. But it’s important to understand that Canada is going to be moving forward with tar sands, regardless of what we do. That’s their national policy, they’re pursuing it. With respect to Keystone, my goal has been to have an honest process, and I have adamantly objected to Congress trying to circumvent a process that was well-established not just under Democratic administrations, but also under Republican administrations.

The reason that Keystone got so much attention is not because that particular pipeline is a make-or-break issue for climate change, but because those who have looked at the science of climate change are scared and concerned about a general lack of sufficient movement to deal with the problem.

However, even with the President admitting that people are frustrated about inaction on climate, The White House and the State Department have largely avoided examination of the climate impacts of building the pipeline — a project that would bring up to 800,000 barrels of tar sands crude into the U.S. each day. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that tar sands emit up to 82 percent more greenhouse gases that average crude.

In that Rolling Stone interview, President Obama said he believed climate change would be an election-year issue. Encouraging the State Department to take a serious look at the climate impacts of the Keystone XL pipeline would be a great start.

Below is the letter sent this morning to Secretary Clinton:

Dear Secretary Clinton,

We are writing to ask that the State Department conduct, as part of its evaluation of the Keystone XL pipeline proposal, a serious review of the effect of helping open Canada’s tar sands on the planet’s climate.

At the moment, your department is planning to consider the effects of the pipeline on “recreation,” “visual resources,” and “noise,” among other factors. Those are important—but omitting climate change from the considerations is neither wise nor credible. The vast volumes of carbon in the tar sands ensure that they will play an important role in whether or not climate change gets out of hand; understanding the role this largescale new pipeline will play in that process is clearly crucial.

We were pleased that President Obama saw fit to review this project more carefully; it would be a shame if that review did not manage to comprehensively cover the most important questions at issue.

Sincerely,

John Abraham
Associate Professor, School of Engineering
University of St. Thomas

Ken Caldeira
Senior Scientist
Department of Global Ecology
Carnegie Institution

James Hansen
Research Scientist
The International Research Institute for Climate and Society
The Earth Institute, Columbia University

Michael MacCracken
Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs
Climate Institute

Michael E. Mann
Professor of Meteorology
Director, Earth System Science Center
The Pennsylvania State University

James McCarthy
Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography
Harvard University

Michael Oppenheimer
Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs
Woodrow Wilson School and Department of Geosciences
Princeton University

Raymond T. Pierrehumbert
Louis Block Professor in the Geophysical Sciences
The University of Chicago

Richard Somerville
Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Research Professor
Scripps Institution of Oceanography

George M. Woodwell
Founder, Director Emeritus, and Senior Scientist
Woods Hole Research Center

Related Posts:

• Study Finds Tar Sands Has Higher CO2 Emissions Than Thought, Calls Land Restoration Pledge ‘Greenwashing’

• Game Over: Hoffert On Unconventional Gas & Oil And Unconventional Self-Destruction Of Civilization

The Alternative Crowd: Unusual Renewable Energies

Considering their popularity, "alternative energy" is almost a misnomer for increasingly mainstream energy sources like wind, solar and biofuels. Some alternative energies still fit the title, however. These renewables, which will principally provide power for small devices, use unusual sources to create their juice, including vibrations, clothing, viruses, water — even the movements of the human body.