Gov. Hickenlooper's Fracking Ads For Colorado Oil And Gas Industry Draw Heat From Environmentalists

At first blush a fairly innocuous ad: everyone involved gets a pat on the back, especially the fiercely opposed conservation and gas industries.

But environmentalists have been quick to call shenanigans. Thirteen advocacy groups have sincesent Hickenlooper a letter highlighting the danger "accidental spills, corroded tanks and pipelines, and leaking containment pits" pose to Colorado's groundwater in addition to the dangers of fracking itself. Indeed, the Denver Post reports that since 2000 there have been more than 3,900 such spills.

An Executive Order signed in the midst of this has done little to quell the controversy. The order creates a commission to clarify the power local governments have in regulating oil and gas operations. "Once one county wants their own regulations, every county's going to want their own regulations, and that's going to force the oil and gas industry out of Colorado," Hickenlooper explained to Fox31.

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Chesapeake, Partners to Build Ohio Pipeline

Chesapeake Energy Corp. said Tuesday that it and two partners plan to build a $900 million pipeline system in eastern Ohio to transport and process natural gas tapped from the Utica Shale.

Eastern Ohio is seen as the latest hot oil-and-gas producing region, and Chesapeake was one of the first large explorers to move into the region, snapping up drilling rights to some 1.3 million acres at a cost of around $2 billion.

While the discovery of vast natural-gas stores locked in shale formations has pushed prices to 10-year lows this year, energy producers are optimistic about the Utica Shale. They expect large swaths of the deeply buried rock formation to yield oil and natural gas liquids, such as propane, butane and ethane, which trade at a premium to methane, or natural gas.

As of late last month Chesapeake had drilled 42 wells in Ohio, but only seven were producing as the company waiting to be completed, or hydraulically fractured, and connected to pipelines. The company has said it plans to ramp up drilling in Ohio this year, but like other new production fields, the area lacks crucial pipelines and other infrastructure to carry oil and gas to customers.

The planned Utica distribution system will carry and process both natural gas and liquids, which are often used in manufacturing. The abundance of shale ethane, for example, has prompted Royal Dutch Shell PLC to plan a plant in the region that converts the liquid into ethylene, a core component of plastics.

Oklahoma City based Chesapeake, through its publicly traded subsidiary Chesapeake Midstream Partners LP, will own 59% of the pipeline project and operate it. M3 Midstream LLC will control 33% and EV Energy Partners LP, a Houston firm with which Chesapeake owns some of its Ohio drilling land, will have an 8% stake.

French oil giant Total SA, which paid $2.32 billion for a 24% stake in 619,000 of Chesapeake's Ohio acres, has the right to participate in the project, Chesapeake said. Should Total choose to do so, the stakes of Chesapeake and EV Energy Partners would be trimmed.

The system is expected to be operational by the second quarter of 2013.

It's main cryogenic processing plant will be located in rural Columbiana County, northwest of Pittsburgh, and will be able to initially handle 600 million cubic feet of gas per day. Once separated there, gas liquids will be transported to a rail-connected complex in a nearby county that will be able to store up 70,000 barrels.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304450004577279920334359392.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Fracking Democracy: Why Pennsylvania's Act 13 May Be the Nation's Worst Corporate Giveaway

Pennsylvania, where the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were signed and where the U.S. coal, oil and nuclear industries began, has adopted what may be the most anti-democratic, anti-environmental law in the country, giving gas companies the right to drill anywhere, overturn local zoning laws, seize private property and muzzle physicians from disclosing specific health impacts from drilling fluids on patients. 

The draconian new law, known as Act 13, revises the state’s oil and gas statutes, to allow oil companies to drill for natural gas using the controversial process known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking, where large volumes of water and toxic chemicals are pumped into vertical wells with lateral bores to shatter the rock and release the hydrocarbons. The law strips rights from communities and individuals while imposing new statewide drilling rules.

 

“It’s absolutely crushing of local self-government,” said Ben Price, project director for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which has helped a handful of local communities—including the city of Pittsburgh—adopt community rights ordinances that elevate the rights of nature and people to block the drilling. “The state has surrendered over 2,000 municipalities to the industry. It’s a complete capitulation of the rights of the people and their right to self-government. They are handing it over to the industry to let them govern us. It is the corporate state. That is how we look at it.”

 

“Now I know what it feels like to live in Nigeria,” said recently retired Pittsburgh City Council President Doug Shields. “You’re basically a resource colony for multi-national corporations to take your natural resources, take them back to wherever they are at, add value to them, and then sell them back to you.”

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Faulty Wells, Not Fracking, Blamed for Water Pollution

Some energy companies, state regulators, academics and environmentalists are reaching consensus that natural-gas drilling has led to several incidents of water pollution—but not because of fracking.

The energy officials and some environmentalists agree that poorly built wells are to blame for some cases of water contamination. In those cases, they say, wells weren't properly sealed with subterranean cement, which allowed contaminants to travel up the well bore from deep underground into shallow aquifers that provide drinking water.

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Appalachia banks on natural gas, chemical plants

The mining and manufacturing industries have a checkered environmental record in the Appalachians, with watershed contamination, chemical spills and river dumping.

Rivers and forests have been degraded by mountaintop removal mining in which the tops of mountains are shaved off to get to the coal below, sending debris into to the valley.

"Don't get me wrong, I want jobs, but I don't want an environmental wasteland when the chemical plants leave," said Steve Terry, a laborer in Moundsville, West Virginia. "I want this area to prosper, not go to hell."

Despite the plans, some are not convinced ground will be broken for the Shell chemical plant, citing decades of broken economic promises to Appalachia by politicians and corporations.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/12/us-appalachia-chemicalplant-idUSBRE82B06820120312

Judge's ruling limits shale developer's drilling rights

Nunner said while Chesapeake can vertically extract gas and oil from underneath the hunt club's 187 acres of woods and fields, the energy company can't use the land to drill sideways to get at reserves from adjacent land.

He ordered Chesapeake, a dominant player in Ohio's shale production, to stop horizontal drilling that extends beyond Jewett's property line unless it gets the club's permission to go ahead.

Extracting natural gas and oil from shale formations depends on lateral drilling to carry millions of gallons of water under intense pressure to fracture surrounding rock. Horizontal bores can extend up to 10,000 feet, or almost two miles, from the drill hole. Chesapeake already had poured a 12-acre concrete pad for rigs but has sunk no wells.

"They don't have a right to come in and destroy our surface without fair compensation," said Jewett club president John Harris.

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In a first, gas and other fuels are top U.S. export

NEW YORK (AP) – For the first time, the top export of the United States, the world's biggest gas guzzler, is — wait for it — fuel.

easured in dollars, the nation is on pace this year to ship more gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel than any other single export, according to U.S. Census data going back to 1990. It will also be the first year in more than 60 that America has been a net exporter of these fuels.

Just how big of a shift is this? A decade ago, fuel wasn't even among the top 25 exports. And for the last five years, America's top export was aircraft.

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