Rural Pennsylvania town fights big gas

[MNeagle]

EAGLES MERE, Pennsylvania (Reuters) – In the rush to develop America's biggest new source of domestic energy, one community is fighting to protect its rural way of life from the environmental strains that accompany shale gas drilling.

Residents of this wealthy north-central Pennsylvania vacation community are refusing to lease their land to energy companies scrambling to grab a piece of the Marcellus Shale, a massive natural gas deposit believed to contain enough of the fuel to satisfy total U.S. natural gas demand for 20 years.

Most of the doctors, lawyers and executives who own homes in the resort about 150 miles northwest of Philadelphia are unmoved by offers of lease payments of at least $2,500 an acre, or by the promise of royalties on gas harvested from what is expected to become America's most productive shale field.

Other U.S. communities have spoken up about the deforestation, air pollution, truck traffic and what they consider ground water contamination that have accompanied shale gas development elsewhere. Residents of Eagles Mere are seeking to stop it from happening in their backyard.

Eagles Mere differs from some other rural communities where economic hardship, particularly among farmers, makes it more likely that landowners accept checks from the energy firms.

"The overwhelming majority of landowners have no desire to lease their land," said Geoff Stoudt, a lawyer and president of the Eagles Mere Association, which owns 220 acres including the lake around which the town is built and its shoreline.

The association this summer turned down a lease offer from Chesapeake Energy Corp, which has sunk 186 Marcellus wells statewide -- most of them in neighboring Bradford County -- and wants to expand production southwards into Sullivan County surrounding Eagles Mere.

Chesapeake spokesman David Spigelmyer denies the company is aggressively seeking additional acreage in Eagles Mere.

But Nancy Liebert, spokeswoman for the Protect Eagles Mere Alliance, said at least 20 landowners and two community groups have recently declined the company's lease offers.

Williams Companies Inc is also seeking to lease land at Eagles Mere and has signed leases in surrounding towns, residents said.

SHARP REJECTIONS

Like some other rural communities in shale-gas areas, Eagles Mere residents say they fear becoming an industrial zone like the northeastern Pennsylvania town of Dimock. Residents there have sued Cabot Oil & Gas, saying it has contaminated water wells, sickened children and hurt real estate prices.

Drillers say fluid containing toxic chemicals -- used in a technique called hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" -- cannot contaminate aquifers because the two are separated by steel and concrete casings. They also argue that the chemicals are used thousands of feet (meters) below drinking water sources -- too far away to contaminate the water.

Hydraulic fracturing is used for extracting gas from shale about a mile underground.

Over the next decade, the industry is expected to drill at least 30,000 Marcellus wells across Pennsylvania, according to a recent study by Pennsylvania State University, compared with the current total of about 1,800.

Gas company representatives approaching Eagles Mere home owners are likely to be sharply rejected, residents said.

Gail Meyer, a retired school teacher, said she was telephoned in late August by a Chesapeake official who asked if she would lease her land -- less than an acre -- for gas drilling.

"I told him, 'Absolutely not,' and hung up," Meyer said.

Such a lease, Meyer said, would endanger an idyllic rural enclave where her great-grandmother -- whose portrait dominates Meyer's living room -- built a house in 1905 and where her family has spent summers for six generations.

Meyer, 71, is one of about 200 year-round residents, a population that swells to some 3,000 in the summer months when people enjoy the community's lake, where swimming, sailing and kayaking are permitted but power boats and jet-skis are not.

The mile-wide lake is fed only by underground springs, which residents fear could be contaminated by the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing.

If lake and well water became tainted, property prices would plunge and the community that began in the late 19th century would be finished, residents argue.

The few landowners who have signed leases have generated anger among the majority who have not, residents said. They are now waiting for the local country club to decide whether to lease, and some have threatened to resign if it does.

"There are some things that are just not worth risking," said Bob Spahr, a physician who has been coming to Eagles Mere since 1994 and is now a year-round resident. "The Marcellus Shale is so huge, and there are other opportunities."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100908/us_nm/us_usa_environment_drilling

[MNeagle]

Report: Fracking chemicals in NE Pa. water wells


DIMOCK, Pa. (AP) -- A private consulting firm says it found toxic chemicals in the drinking water of a Pennsylvania community already dealing with methane contamination from natural gas drilling.

Environmental engineer Daniel Farnham said Thursday that his tests, which were verified by three laboratories, found industrial solvents such as toluene and ethylbenzene in "virtually every sample" taken from water wells in Dimock Township, Susquehanna County.

Farnham, who has tested water for both gas interests and for local residents, said it would be impossible to say that the chemicals he found were caused by gas drilling.

The chemicals, at least one of which, ethylbenzene, may cause cancer, are among dozens used to hydraulically fracture shale deposits to unlock natural gas trapped thousands of feet underground. The chemicals are also used in an array of products ranging from paint thinner to gasoline.

The contaminated Dimock wells are in the gas-rich Marcellus Shale, where a rush to tap the vast stores has set off intense debate over the environmental and public health impact of the drilling process. Millions of gallons of water mixed with numerous chemicals and sand are blasted deep into the earth to free gas from the shale rock. As much as 90 percent of the mixture is left underground.

Dimock residents sued Houston-based Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. last year, alleging the drilling company polluted their wells with methane gas and other contaminants. Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection said defective casings on at least three of Cabot's wells allowed gas to pollute groundwater. Cabot was fined more than $240,000 and ordered to clean up the pollution.

On Thursday, DEP said it would spend about $10.5 million to provide safe water for the affected Dimock residents, connecting their homes to a municipal water supply in Montrose, about six miles away. The residents balked at an earlier fix that would have placed large, whole-house water treatment systems in each of the 14 affected homes.

DEP chief John Hanger told The Associated Press that the connection to public water is "the best, and really only, solution" and that if Cabot balks at paying the tab, the state will pay for the work itself -- then go after Cabot for the money.

Officials and residents had discussed another option -- drilling a well or wells and piping that water to the homes, but Hanger said it was dropped because "we don't believe that will ensure a permanent, safe supply of water."

A person who took part in the discussions said Hanger told residents the entire aquifer might be polluted by gas drilling operations.

"He said, 'I cannot guarantee that there is any water in the aquifer that is clean today, that will be clean next week, that will be clean six months after the whole system is put in, because of the drilling activity and the damage to the aquifer.' It was repeated twice," said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a private meeting

On Tuesday, 13 families in Lenox Township, about eight miles from Dimock, sued another Houston driller, Southwestern Energy Co., claiming their wells were contaminated with fracking fluids. Southwestern denied any problems with its well.

In Dimock, Farnham said the water samples were tested independently by three labs, all of which showed the same results.

But Farnham said it's impossible to tell where the chemicals came from.

"Can anybody say that this came from fracking, or from frack flowback? There's no way a true scientist would be able to make that determination based on the data that we have," he told The Associated Press on Thursday. "Until and unless we are able to put a die or marker in the frack liquid, it's going to be awfully difficult to prove irrefutably that it's coming from frack."

Cabot spokesman George Stark said the chemicals existed in some wells before drilling began.

"We have asked for samples of the affected well water so we can do an independent analysis," he said.

Dimock residents have claimed their wells were contaminated shortly after Cabot started drilling near their homes, saying the water that came out of their faucets suddenly became cloudy, foamy and discolored, and smelled and tasted foul.

One resident's well exploded on New Year's Day 2009, prompting a state investigation that found Cabot had allowed combustible gas to escape into the region's groundwater supplies.

Cabot says the methane in the residents' wells might be naturally occurring.

Farnham -- hired by Cabot in 2008 to perform pre-drill testing of residential water wells in Dimock -- said those tests did not turn up any problems, adding he did not even test for the chemicals that Cabot claims existed prior to drilling.

After the drilling began, Farnham was asked by residents to test their water, and was later hired by plaintiffs' attorneys.

"It doesn't take me or any scientist to see some of the impacts on the drinking water," he said. "Your drinking water goes from clear and fine, to a week later being yellow-colored, sediment on the bottom, foam on the top and an oily smell to it. It's not a figment of anybody's imagination."

The Dimock test results were first reported by The Times-Tribune of Scranton.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Report-Fracking-chemicals-in-apf-1940934689.html?x=0

[ShortJohnSilver]

Probably what will happen is that they will create a lot of problems, people complain, then they buy them off (only 14 families affected, chump change for a large company), depopulate the area, then they can do what they want.

[MNeagle]

The travesty is it probably happened right under their feet, with no prior knowledge.

If it can happen there...

[Book]

http://media.trb.com/media/photo/2009-07/48216313.gif

http://planetsave.com/files/2009/03/gas_fire.jpg

Flames will soon be coming out of Mamboni's faucet.

:o

[Glass]

In Australia


Tests confirm carcinogen at Arrow wells
Follow-up tests have confirmed the presence of a carcinogen in three coal seam gas wells in central Queensland, Arrow Energy says.

Arrow last week said routine tests at the company's Moranbah gas project, west of Mackay, had detected traces of benzene in samples taken from three of 60 wells.

"The secondary tests have confirmed similar or lower levels of the BTEX group chemicals in all three wells (between one and three parts per billion)," the company said in a statement late on Wednesday.
Advertisement: Story continues below

The Arrow incident, and others like it, have forced the Bligh government to defend its safeguards for the coal seam gas industry.

The opposition has called for an independent watchdog to oversee the sector, but the government insists adequate checks and balances are in place to protect farmland and water supplies.

The BTEX chemicals benzene, toluene, ethylene and xylene can be naturally occurring, but are also used by some coal seam gas operators to help fracture rock seams and to extract gas.

The chemicals can also be present in oil-based lubricants, diesel and petrol.
............

............

It said any public health risk was "unlikely" due to the very low levels detected and the isolation of the affected wells.

"The water from these wells is managed in accordance with regulations governing coal seam water and is contained in lined, fenced ponds for treatment or removal," it said.

"There are no registered bores within at least five kilometres of the three wells, and coal seam water is not used for feedstock.

"However, as a precaution, Arrow will conduct testing of water from bores closest to the area."

Last month, benzene was also found in eight wells at Origin and Australia Pacific LNG's CSG wells.

And earlier this year, another gas extraction project - Cougar Energy's pilot underground coal gasification plant near Kingaroy - was forced to suspend operations after traces of benzene and toluene were found in nearby bores.



Full article.... (http://www.theage.com.au/business/tests-confirm-carcinogen-at-arrow-wells-20101118-17y51.html)

[MNeagle]

Pa. gas driller signs Grandma for $50 an acre; cut-out grandkids complain, get $8,000 offer


MONTROSE, Pa. - As she lived out her final years in a nursing home, 94-year-old Bernice Price had a visitor one day, a stranger interested in her family's wooded, 115-acre spread. Would she care to lease it to one of the nation's biggest energy companies?

It was a paltry offer, only $50 an acre. Price accepted it, signing a 10-year lease giving Chesapeake Energy Corp. the right to sink gas wells on the former dairy farm in northern Pennsylvania.

While other landowners living atop the gigantic Marcellus Shale gas field made similar bad deals as the gas rush began in 2007 — signing industry-friendly leases for a relative pittance — Price's leasing story came with a twist: She wasn't the only person who had a say in what happened to the land. Her three grandchildren shared ownership and they knew nothing about the agreement.

Chesapeake not only didn't get their consent, the company never approached them about the land that's been in their family since the 1830s.

"We weren't even invited to the party," said Craig Stevens, her 50-year-old grandson.

Stevens and his siblings were incensed when they found out, accusing Chesapeake of going behind their backs and disregarding their rights as co-owners. They worried that drilling would ruin the land. They also remembered the words of their late father — Bernice Price's son — who had voiced deathbed concerns about the approaching gas boom and warned them not to sell out.

Now they were confronted with a dilemma.

Should they fight to keep Chesapeake off the property? Or should they swallow their anger and try to persuade the company to make them an offer, one that would not only pay more than their grandmother had agreed to but include adequate protections for the place they held dear?

Their story, played out over years and concluded just this month, illustrates both the promise and the peril for landowners above the vast Marcellus Shale, a rock formation more than a mile deep that holds the largest known reservoir of natural gas in the United States — one that could supply the entire East Coast for 50 years.

rest of story (http://www.startribune.com/business/110645719.html?elr=KArks:DCiU1OiP:DiiUiacyKUnciaec 8O7EyUr)

[ShortJohnSilver]

Key paragraph from end of article:


The company's offer was now $8,000 an acre over 10 years — 160 times the amount of money that Price and two of her children had accepted — plus 20 percent of the value of any gas extracted from the property, up from the 2007 lease's state-mandated minimum of 12.5 percent. That could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars for each grandchild over the life of a well. There were additional environmental and legal safeguards, too.

115 acres = $900 K plus ... not bad for a farm you could have bought outright for $400k before all this started.

[MNeagle]

Fracking Insiders Admit To Employing Military 'Psychological Operations' On American Citizens


Robert Johnson (http://www.businessinsider.com/author/robert-johnson) | Nov. 9, 2011, 10:09 AM




http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/4b9434c77f8b9af736280000/radar-war.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Fracking (http://www.businessinsider.com/blackboard/fracking) is a contentious business. The process of injecting chemicals at high-pressure into the earth to pull out gas and oil has prompted as many reports condemning it as there are declaring it safe.


Homeowners concerned for the safety of their well water, and environmentalists, who believe the drilling even caused the Oklahoma earthquake (http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/11/08/did-fracking-help-cause-oklahoma-earthquakes/?xid=gonewsedit), have formed movements against the practice, and it was these efforts that came up for discussion at last week's oil industry conference in Houston.
Filled with industry insiders all facing the same challenges and concerns, speakers lectured openly on how they handled the American public in communities where they drilled.


There, recording it all, was environmental activist Sharon Wilson, director of the Oil & Gas Accountability Project.


In the following recording, given to CNBC (http://www.cnbc.com/id/45208498), one presenter tells the crowd to download a copy of the Army's counterinsurgency manual. "Because," he said, the movement opposing the industry is an "insurgency."


In this next recording (also given to CNBC (http://www.cnbc.com/id/45208498)) the speaker tells listeners that his organization maintains several military veterans who served as psychological warfare specialists. These former "psy ops" soldiers, he explains, are using their skills in Pennsylvania.


Wilson paid full price for attendance to the conference and wore a nametag identifying herself and her organization.


In his forum called “Designing a Media Relations Strategy To Overcome Concerns Surrounding Hydraulic Fracturing,” Range Resources (http://www.rangeresources.com/) communications director Matt Pitzarella explains how to "overcome stakeholder concerns" surrounding fracking.


“We have several former psy ops folks that work for us at Range because they’re very comfortable in dealing with localized issues and local governments,” Pitzarella said. “Really all they do is spend most of their time helping folks develop local ordinances and things like that. But very much having that understanding of psy ops in the Army and in the Middle East has applied very helpfully here for us in Pennsylvania.”


It was during Anadarko Petroleum's manager of external affairs, Matt Carmichael's, session on “Understanding How Unconventional Oil & Gas Operators are Developing a Comprehensive Media Relations Strategy to Engage Stakeholders and Educate the Public" that he suggested his colleagues:


“Download the U.S. Army-slash-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual, because we are dealing with an insurgency,” Carmichael said. “There’s a lot of good lessons in there and coming from a military background, I found the insight in that extremely remarkable.”


To be clear on exactly what Carmichael meant when he said they're "dealing with an insurgency" we obtained a copy of the FM 3-24 — the final edition of the 2006 Counterinsurgency manual provided to psy ops soldiers. We substituted the word government with corporation.


" ... insurgency has been a common approach used by the weak to combat the strong. At the beginning of a conflict, insurgents have the strategic initiative ... the insurgents generally initiate the war. They may strive to disguise their intentions, and the potential counter-insurgent will be at a great disadvantage until [corporate] leaders recognize that an insurgency exists and are able to determine its makeup and characteristics to facilitate a coordinated reaction.


While the [corporation] prepares to respond, the insurgent is gaining strength and creating increasing disruptions throughout the state. The existing [corporation] normally has an initial advantage in resources, but that edge is counterbalanced by the requirement to maintain order. The insurgent succeeds by sowing chaos and disorder anywhere; the [corporation] fails unless it maintains order everywhere.


Check out FM 3-24 below, section 1-1 provides the overview of an "insurgency." It provides an interesting insight into how corporations impacting the daily lives of US citizens conduct policy.
FM_3-24 (http://www.scribd.com/doc/72148508/FM-3-24)








Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-fracking-industry-admits-to-employing-military-psychologial-operations-on-american-citizens-2011-11#ixzz1dE8YvoHn


http://www.businessinsider.com/the-fracking-industry-admits-to-employing-military-psychologial-operations-on-american-citizens-2011-11

[Dogman]

Did Fracking Help Cause Oklahoma Earthquakes?

Posted by Bryan Walsh (http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/author/bryanrwalsh/) Tuesday, November 8, 2011 at 11:57 am




http://timeecocentric.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/130238727.jpg?w=300&h=200 (http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/11/08/did-fracking-help-cause-oklahoma-earthquakes/attachment/130238727/)


Bloomberg / Getty Images



The good people of Oklahoma were rattled on Nov. 5 when the state was hit by its largest earthquake on record, a 5.6-magnitude temblor (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Quakes/usb0006klz.php) that struck 44 miles (71 km) east of Oklahoma City. (The previous biggest quake was a 5.5-magnitude tremor that hit in 1952.) Fortunately, no one was hurt, although 14 homes were damaged (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/07/us-quake-usa-oklahoma-idUSTRE7A50A020111107), and the state was shaken by a number of moderate aftershocks (http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/smaller-tremors-follow-record-setting-56-magnitude-earthquake-in-central-oklahoma/2011/11/08/gIQASChEzM_story.html).

Oklahoma isn't California — this is a state that is usually pretty seismically stable, one with about 50 small quakes a year until 2009. But the number of quakes spiked in 2009, and last year 1,047 tremors shook Oklahoma. All of which begs the question: Has something changed to make the Sooner State unstable? Perhaps something like hydraulic fracturing (http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/05/12/a-musical-introduction-to-fracking/)?

Also called fracking, the practice — producing small fractures in the earth miles beneath the surface with explosives in order to tap trapped oil and gas deposits — is common in Oklahoma, a center of the fossil fuel extraction industry. It's not hard to wonder whether injecting millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals deep underground in order to break up rock might worsen existing faults or even trigger a tremor.

(MORE: Can Shale Gas Power the World? (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2062456,00.html))

There's some evidence that fracking may induce minor tremors. A report (http://www.ogs.ou.edu/pubsscanned/openfile/OF1_2011.pdf) (PDF) written earlier this year by Austin Holland of the Oklahoma State Geological Survey concluded that a swarm of about 50 very small quakes — from magnitudes 1.0 to 2.8 — may have been related to hydraulic fracturing. And just last week, a report (http://www.cuadrillaresources.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Final_Report_Bowland_Seismicity_02-11-11.pdf) financed by the U.K. energy company Cuadrilla Resources found "strong evidence" that two minor quakes and 48 weaker seismic events in Britain resulted from Cuadrilla's fracking practices. Alexis Flynn of the Wall Street Journal reports (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203804204577013771109580352.html):
The report could complicate efforts by privately held Cuadrilla to resume hydraulic-fracturing activity that was halted after the two seismic incidents.

The company said the report concluded that none of the events recorded, including one in April of 2.3 and one in May of 1.5 on the Richter scale, had any structural impact on the surface above.
But the quakes in England and earlier this year in Oklahoma were much smaller than the Nov. 5 temblor, which rocked the state 3 miles (4.8 km) underground, releasing the equivalent energy of 3,800 tons of TNT. Can fracking really trigger a quake that big?

(VIDEO: The Fuss over Fracking (http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,876880045001_2062814,00.html))

Experts say it's unlikely, simply because fracking is so much less powerful. The Associated Press reports (http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gnMAj02_yXaZ986T_c0NmzRLHzFA?docId=35f0abf91 9f542789520f9ed9e4b0820):
The typical energy released in tremors triggered by fracking "is the equivalent to a gallon of milk falling off the kitchen counter," said Stanford University geophysicist Mark Zoback.

In Oklahoma, home to 185,000 drilling wells and hundreds of injection wells, the question of man-made seismic activity comes up quickly. But so far, federal, state and academic experts say readings show that the Oklahoma quakes were natural, following the lines of a long-known fault.

"There's a fault there," said U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Paul Earle. "You can have an earthquake that size anywhere east of the Rockies. You don't need a huge fault to produce an earthquake that big. It's uncommon, but not unexpected."
That doesn't leave fracking — and more broadly, oil and gas exploration — off the hook altogether when it comes to causing quakes. While the amount of energy used in a typical gas frack is tiny compared with the power of even a minor quake, there's some evidence that in areas where far greater amounts of drilling wastewater has been injected deep underground — including states like Arkansas, Texas and Colorado — the process may put more stress on faults and help lead to stronger quakes. More from the AP report (http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gnMAj02_yXaZ986T_c0NmzRLHzFA?docId=35f0abf91 9f542789520f9ed9e4b0820):
One issue is that areas that are prone to earthquakes are also places where oil and gas flow along fractures, experts said. In some studies, scientists have taken earthquake data and, like detectives, tracked its causes to deep injections of lots of liquid under high pressure, such as ones that peaked at magnitude 3.3 at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport in 2008 and 2009, said USGS geophysicist William Ellsworth. The Switzerland quake was in the city, Basel, so it did cause damage, he and others said.
The link between fracking and seismic activity is clearly worth studying — and the National Academy of Sciences is set to issue a report on the subject next year. But of all the concerns over the rapid spread of gas fracking — possible water contamination (http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/08/11/can-a-government-panel-calm-fears-over-fracking/), the industrialization (http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/06/30/is-new-york-about-to-get-fracking-not-exactly/) of the countryside, additional carbon emissions (http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/04/11/frack-is-shale-natural-gas-worse-for-the-climate-than-coal/) — man-made earthquakes seem pretty low.


Read more: http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/11/08/did-fracking-help-cause-oklahoma-earthquakes/#ixzz1dEHM1Kgu

[mightymanx]

They had better take the deal or they will get Kelo'd and be left with nothing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London

http://hotair.com/archives/2009/05/07/flight-93-conundrum-eminent-domain-to-seize-the-land-for-memorial/

Please don't confuse this as me siding with the vultures or the government for "We the political campaign contributers."

They will be left with nothing shortly so you might as well get some resettlement FRN's out of the deal.