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File:  ltr to Congress, 76 scientists 2012.pdfResource Type: Letters

File:  ltr to Congress, 76 scientists 2012.pdfResource Type: Letters

With the help of RAFI’s Beginning Farmer Stipend, Aronson will purchase a small 4x6 enclosed trailer to hitch it to the farm’s SUV in order to transport more product to markets, which will make farmers market participation much more financially viable.

The post Ida Aronson appeared first on RAFI.

Cameron and his wife Terris now operate Brownstone Family Farms in Scranton, South Carolina, growing produce for their local farmers market.

The post Jason Cameron appeared first on RAFI.

Class’s Beginning Farmer Stipend will be used to rehabilitate and convert a stall in the property’s 60-year-old pole barn into a drying area for seed saving.

The post Deena Class appeared first on RAFI.

With the help of RAFI’s Beginning Farmer Stipend, Hunt will invest in improving housing for the homestead’s animals to support healthier living conditions and increase productivity.

The post LaShauna Hunt appeared first on RAFI.

With the help of the Beginning Farmer Stipend, Johnson is building a new cold storage room to help store more produce and keep it fresher for longer.

The post Lindsay Johnson appeared first on RAFI.

Lawrence is harnessing this Beginning Farmer Stipend to improve infrastructure and prepare for late summer and fall planting.

The post Shakera Lawrence appeared first on RAFI.

The couple is excited to expand their production to include reishi and lion’s mane mushrooms for culinary, health, and wellness purposes.

The post William Romney and Becky Bacheller appeared first on RAFI.

Snow is harnessing RAFI’s Beginning Farmer Stipend to install a drip irrigation system, purchase planting and harvesting tools, and expand the farmstand stall and parking lot.

The post Cody Snow appeared first on RAFI.

Stachowicz will use the Beginning Farmer Stipend to purchase tools that will help increase efficiency of the market garden operation.

The post Liana Stachowicz appeared first on RAFI.

Wallace began farming to provide fresh, organic food in order to help address health challenges in his community.

The post Chris Wallace appeared first on RAFI.

An investigation by ABC News has shed new light on the problem of abandoned mines in the Western U.S. and across the country. The investigation compiled records from the Office of Surface Mine Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), part of the Department of the Interior, to create an interactive map of more than 230,000 documented abandoned mine sites.

Many of the documented abandoned mines are in coal-producing regions in the eastern U.S. The investigation points out that since the 1970s, coal mining companies have been required to develop and execute remediation plans to restore the land after coal mining operations have ended, and OSMRE’s Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Program, established in 1977, addresses legacy coal mines using fees on current coal production. However, there is not a similar funding source for reclaiming hardrock mines, which are much more common in the West. The ABC News map shows just how many documented abandoned mines are concentrated across Western states.

OSMRE officials also acknowledge that there may be many more abandoned mine sites that are not documented or identified. “Mining back in 1865 or 1880 or 1890, there are no records of that. No one kept records,” Lanny Erdos, an OSMRE official, told ABC News. “There potentially can be mines out there that we would have no idea that they are there until they express themselves in some adverse way.”

Quick hits As Pitkin County looks toward management of the Maroon Bells, what does it mean for the iconic place?

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Quote of the day

What’s it going to be? ‘The Maroon Bells brought to you by Budweiser’?”

—Victor Valinskas, visitor to the Maroon Bells Scenic Area, CPR News

Picture This @greatbasinnp

On a cool September evening, sundown reveals the Great Basin one layer at a time: rock and rabbitbrush, sagebrush and pinyon-juniper, the broad basin below, and distant mountain ranges rising beyond it.

These isolated ranges are sometimes described as “sky islands”—higher, cooler habitats surrounded by lower, drier country. Each change in elevation brings changes in temperature, moisture, plants, and wildlife.

But this landscape offers something that cannot be measured by elevation alone.

Quiet. Distance. Room to breathe.

Great Basin National Park preserves not only mountains, caves, ancient trees, and dark night skies, but also opportunities to experience solitude. Sometimes the landscape’s quietest moments tell its story best.

What do you notice first when you look across the Great Basin?

Photo Credit: NPS/G. Zierdt

 

Featured image: An abandoned mine in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, D&RG Railfan via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 3.0

The post Abandoned mines ‘a constant problem’ across the West appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

This article is part of Food Tank’s primer series, “Food Tank Explains.” Each installment unpacks the ideas, innovations, and challenges shaping today’s food and agriculture systems, offering clear insights into complex topics. To explore more articles in the series, click here.

Food labels provide information about food products and their contents. Most identify the product and list its ingredients and net quantity. Labeling requirements generally apply to packaged and prepared foods, although the information required—and how manufacturers must present it—varies across countries and food categories.

Food labeling has expanded beyond identifying a package’s contents. Today, labels communicate information about nutrition, allergens, food safety, preparation and storage, production practices, and other product characteristics.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) identifies nutritional information as a central feature of food labels. Nutrition labels typically provide a product’s energy content and levels of nutrients including carbohydrates, protein, fat, sugars, sodium, vitamins, and minerals, typically reported per serving or specified quantity.

Labels also communicate food safety information. Allergen disclosures identify ingredients that may trigger reactions, while storage, preparation, and handling instructions help consumers use foods safely. Date markings such as ‘sell by’ and ‘best before’ can provide information about a product’s safety or quality over time. But date labeling can also be confusing to consumers, leading to safe food going to waste.

According to the European Commission and the FDA, food labels are intended to help consumers make informed choices by explaining what a product contains and allowing them to assess dietary needs and compare products.

They aim to provide clear comprehensible information to enable efficient decision-making at the point of sale, describes the World Health Organization (WHO). Data from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shows that the majority of in-store shoppers spend an average of 13 seconds evaluating a brand before purchasing, with most decisions taking less than 10 seconds.

Food-labeling requirements vary globally. Research published in Frontiers in Public Health has identified mandatory nutrient-declaration policies for processed foods in at least 95 countries, with differing requirements for front-of-package labels and health and nutrition claims.

The FAO and WHO develop international standards through the Codex Alimentarius Commission, including baseline principles for labeling prepackaged foods that can inform national regulations.

In the United States, the FDA and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) share primary responsibility for food labeling. Federal regulation dates to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which targeted adulterated and misbranded foods. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 expanded labeling requirements, while the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 established mandatory nutrition labeling for most FDA-regulated foods.

The European Union takes a more centralized approach, establishing common labeling requirements across its member states. The United Kingdom’s voluntary ‘traffic light’ system uses green, amber, and red to identify nutrient levels, while Chile requires black, octagonal ‘high in’ warnings on products exceeding thresholds for calories, sugar, sodium, or saturated fat.

As food labels communicate more information, they can also become more difficult to interpret. Consumers must navigate nutrition and ingredient information alongside claims, certifications, warnings, and other disclosures, making relevant information harder to identify and understand.

Government labeling resources often target producers and use technical language that consumers may struggle to interpret, Laurie Beyranevand, Director of Vermont Law School’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems and Professor of Law, tells Food Tank.

And because the pages contain technical jargon, consumers may not always understand what they read.

A study published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior finds that 89 percent of respondents believed they understood date labels, but just 24 percent correctly identified their meaning.

“I think there are real trust issues with our food supply. Having access to information and having clarification of what those things mean is really important,” Dr. Roni Neff, Professor at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for a Livable Future, tells Food Tank.

Confusion around date labels can also contribute to food waste. A European Commission study estimated that confusion and other practices surrounding date marking contribute to approximately 10 percent of food waste in the EU. Consumers may discard food that remains safe to eat after misinterpreting ‘best by,’ ‘sell by,’ or ‘use by’ dates.”

Public health organizations increasingly identify food labels as a potential policy tool. The World Health Organization (WHO) identifies nutrition labeling as one approach to helping consumers make healthier food choices, while UNICEF reports growing evidence that nutrition labels can improve consumers’ understanding of nutritional quality.

But labels can only serve that purpose if consumers can understand and use the information they provide. WHO recommends that front-of-package labels present nutrition information in a convenient and readily understood format, while the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) emphasizes the need for clear, reliable labeling as global food supply chains increase the distance between consumers and producers. For policymakers, Beyranevand says, that means prioritizing accessibility and comprehensibility when developing labeling requirements.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia

The post Food Tank Explains: Food Labeling appeared first on Food Tank.

Headline News:

• “Invasive Plant Spreads Across Portugal And Lengthens Allergy Season” • Pampas grass, Cortaderia selloana, has large feathery plumes that make it a familiar in decorative arrangements in gardens. But what many regard as a showy plant is, in Portugal, an invasive alien species that can spread rapidly with potential consequences for health. [Euronews]

Pampas grass (Arnim Littek, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped)

• “Physicist Raises Alarm Over Proposed Massive Nuclear Power Project” • A proposal for a huge industrial project in Utah would be powered by over 450 nuclear reactors. Dr Robert Davies, a professor of physics at Utah State University, worries that current regulations do not consider the massive thermal footprints that facilities like this can leave behind. [KSL News]
• “Von Der Leyen Turns To Europe’s Refineries As Shrinking Capacity Raises Energy Security Concerns” • President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission announced a new “strategic dialogue” on European refineries, drawing attention to a growing vulnerability for the EU: Its refining capacity has been declining since 2009. [Euronews]
• “GWEC Alliance Unveils Floating Wind Action Plan” • The Global Wind Energy Council and more than fifty companies and organizations have set out an industry action plan aimed at commercializing floating wind. The plan focuses on reducing costs and demonstrating value, scaling the supply chain and expanding access to finance and insurance. [reNews]
• “Heart’s Electric Airliner Still Needs Fuel” • For 27 minutes, batteries flew a machine roughly the size of the regional aircraft Heart Aerospace eventually wants airlines to operate. There was no engine aboard aside from the electric motors, but by adding a turbogenerator, the airplane can fly as a hybrid aircraft. Further development will doubtless come. [CleanTechnica]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.

How would you describe your job as Coastal Bird Technician to someone who's never heard of it?  As a coastal bird technician most of my job has to do with monitoring shorebirds. That work varies...

Fracking Hazards Obscured in Failure to Disclose Wells – Bloomberg Oct 24, 2012 11 min read

Seeking to quell environmental concerns about the chemicals it shoots underground to extract oil and natural gas, Apache Corp. (APA) told shareholders in April that it disclosed information about “all the company’s U.S. hydraulic fracturing jobs” on a website last year.

Actually, Apache’s transparency was shot through with cracks. In Texas and Oklahoma, the company reported chemicals it used on only about half its fracked wells via FracFocus.org, a voluntary website that oil and gas companies helped design amid calls for mandatory disclosure.

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Aug. 14 (Bloomberg) — U.S. Representative Diana DeGette, a Democrat from Colorado, talks about regulation of the energy fracking industry. She spoke with Bloomberg’s Benjamin Haas on June 6. (Source: Bloomberg)

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Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp., has praised the website and called for extending its voluntary approach to disclosure overseas. Photographer: F. Carter Smith/Bloomberg

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“FracFocus is just a fig leaf for the industry to be able to say they’re doing something in terms of disclosure,” said U.S. Representative Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat. Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Energy companies failed to list more than two out of every five fracked wells in eight U.S. states from April 11, 2011, when FracFocus began operating, through the end of last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The gaps reveal shortcomings in the voluntary approach to transparency on the site, which has received funding from oil and gas trade groups and $1.5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy.

“FracFocus is just a fig leaf for the industry to be able to say they’re doing something in terms of disclosure,” said U.S. Representative Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat. DeGette, along with Pennsylvania Senator Robert Casey, introduced legislation in March 2011 that would require companies to disclose fracking chemicals. The bills haven’t advanced in either the House or Senate.

With FracFocus, “companies that want to disclose can do it but the other ones don’t have to,” DeGette said.

85% Fracked

Bloomberg compared oil and gas well records from eight states — Arkansas, Colorado, Louisiana, Montana, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Wyoming — against disclosures that companies made for those states on FracFocus. While the state data didn’t reveal whether wells were fractured, regulators in each state said that at least 85 percent of their wells were fracked. The Congressional Research Service puts the national estimate at more than 90 percent.

In the eight states, companies told regulators that 18,158 wells were readied for production or were newly producing from April 11, 2011 through Dec. 31, 2011. They disclosed 8,555 of them on FracFocus. If 85 percent of the total wells were fracked, that means 45 percent of the fracks weren’t disclosed on the website.

Bloomberg’s analysis, covering states that accounted for 64 percent of U.S. gas production in 2010, shows the difficulty of getting a full picture of the industry’s transparency. Because there’s no official national database of fracked wells, Bloomberg chose states that had reliable records on when gas and oil wells started producing or were completed — that is, made ready to flow — and thus were candidates for posting on FracFocus.

No Reports

Oil and gas companies have gotten better at listing their fractured wells on the website over time, said Dan Whitten, a spokesman for America’s Natural Gas Alliance, one of two industry groups that help pay operational costs for the website. Some states now require companies to make disclosures on FracFocus, he said.

“ANGA operators are committed to transparency, and support public disclosure of the additives used in the hydraulic fracturing process,” Whitten said in an e-mail. “If you were to look at a complete timeframe of FracFocus, you would see a progressively higher rate of participation.”

Companies participating in the voluntary system agree to disclose information about wells on the website once they have been fractured, which is the start of the completion process. Data from three other leading states — New Mexico, North Dakota and Pennsylvania — are incomplete or don’t list well-completion dates. For Texas, Bloomberg used the date companies submitted completion reports, which are supposed to be filed within 30 days.

Half Unreported

More than half of new wells went unreported on FracFocus in each of three states: Texas, Oklahoma and Montana. In all, 1,126 companies had at least one well in the analysis period. While it’s possible that some companies didn’t use hydraulic fracturing, the data show that 1,038 of them, or 92 percent, didn’t report any wells on the website.

In hydraulic fracturing, companies blast millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals deep underground to break up rock formations and free oil and gas. The technique has unlocked vast new sources of energy. At the same time, concerns center on the hundreds of chemicals — including known carcinogens — used in the process.

Contamination Concerns

Homeowners in Pennsylvania, Texas and Wyoming have complained that their well water was contaminated with chemicals or methane gas from nearby frack jobs. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last year linked the method to contaminated drinking water in Pavillion, Wyoming; the agency is now retesting some of those findings. The EPA has little authority to regulate fracking; Congress in 2005 stripped it of most such power.

States have responded in various ways. Pennsylvania officials require that companies disclose chemicals within 60 days after fracking. New York has a moratorium on the practice until its environmental impact can be determined. Vermont has banned it outright. Texas began mandating disclosure of fracking chemicals this year, after officials determined that operators were voluntarily reporting about half their fracked wells to FracFocus, according to the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas wells.

Oil and gas executives say the FracFocus website helps eliminate the need for any new federal oversight that might unify the regulatory approach.

‘Positive Thing’

“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” said Cal Cooper, manager of special projects for Apache. “This is a positive thing. It shows industry can get its act together and make things happen in a short amount of time.”

Apache hadn’t reported some wells in Texas that received only minor frack treatments, Cooper said — though he said they should have been disclosed on the site. The company also struggled to get some of its contractors to disclose their chemicals, he said. Both issues have been addressed, he said.

“We certainly expect to post all of our 2012 frack jobs in the U.S. on FracFocus,” he said. The company is updating its 2011 disclosures on the site as well, “and we fully expect to reach our goal of 100 percent disclosure from Jan. 1, 2011,” Cooper said.

Some of the largest oil and gas companies posted more complete data to the site. For example, Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA), Europe’s top oil producer, disclosed fracking chemicals for 107 wells in the eight states during the analysis period. The company reported 115 wells to state regulators, records show. Shell reported all its fracked wells to the website, said Kelly Op De Weegh, a Shell spokeswoman, indicating that eight of the wells weren’t fractured.

Chesapeake’s Reporting

For the same period in 2011, Chesapeake Energy Corp. (CHK), the second-biggest U.S. gas producer, disclosed information on 85 percent of the 1,148 wells listed for it in the eight states. Most of the missing wells were fractured before Feb. 15, 2011, when the company started reporting to FracFocus, said Michael Kehs, a company spokesman.

Chesapeake’s own records show it has withheld FracFocus reports on 10 wells fracked since it began disclosing on the website, Kehs said. In each case, there are unresolved discrepancies in information provided by contractors that did the fracking, he said.

“Chesapeake has reported 99 percent of our wells to FracFocus since the initiative was launched,” Kehs said.

Companies’ Choice

While FracFocus was designed to display all wells fracked in 2011, its voluntary approach allows companies to choose when they want to begin reporting. ConocoPhillips (COP), the largest independent oil and gas producer by market value, decided to report only wells fracked after April 30, 2011, said Davy Kong, a company spokeswoman. That decision left 86 wells from the period Bloomberg examined that were fracked prior to May 2011 unreported, according to data the company provided.

Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM), the biggest oil company by market value, didn’t publish 28 percent of the 856 wells listed in records for the eight states. Rex Tillerson, the CEO of the Irving, Texas- based company, has praised the website and called for extending its voluntary approach to disclosure overseas.

Exxon focused on training staff to file the necessary data during the first half of last year, said Jeff Neu, an Exxon spokesman. In the year’s second half, the company reported more than 80 percent of its fracked wells, and it expects to report all of them going forward, he said.

“Today, we have monitoring tools in place that show we are meeting that expectation,” Neu said.

Lowest Rates

Among the largest operators, the companies with the lowest rates of disclosure in the eight states were Midland, Texas- based Concho Resources Inc. (CXO), which reported none of its 160 wells to the website, and SandRidge Energy Inc. (SD), which didn’t disclose 84 percent of its 779 wells. QEP (QEP) Resources Inc. reported 74 of 153 wells listed in state records. Apache was fourth lowest.

Concho executives wanted to wait until various state regulators finalized their own reporting requirements before it began disclosing its chemicals, said Steven H. Pruett, the company’s senior vice president of corporate development. As of February, 2012, when Texas and New Mexico began mandating disclosures, the company has reported all its chemicals on frack jobs, he said.

SandRidge, based in Oklahoma City, began reporting all its frack jobs in Texas to FracFocus on Jan. 1, 2012, and those in Oklahoma and Kansas on March 1, 2012, Kevin White, a spokesman, said in a telephone interview. The company made only a few earlier reports, he said. SandRidge doesn’t drill in other states.

“We’re comfortable that we weren’t doing anything to the environment whether you had filing or not,” he said.

All Completions

QEP began submitting reports to FracFocus in the third quarter of last year, said Noel Ryan, a spokesman for the Denver-based company. “QEP currently registers all new well completions on this database,” he said.

Continental (CLR) Resources Inc. didn’t report 54 of its 64 wells in the eight-state group. The company didn’t immediately require staffers to list wells on FracFocus, said Mike Cantrell, the Oklahoma City-based company’s vice president for government and regulatory affairs.

Cantrell initially said Continental began disclosing all its wells on Nov. 1, 2011. Data show the company reported only six out of 20 wells it completed in November and December 2011. In a subsequent e-mail, Cantrell said that three of those 20 wells weren’t fracked, and said the company didn’t begin reporting fracks in its south region, which includes Oklahoma, until January 2012.

Missing Third

Of 22 companies with at least 150 wells in the eight states from April 2011 through December 2011, 11 didn’t disclose a third or more of them on FracFocus, the data show.

“The data is so incomplete, it doesn’t help,” said Shane Davis, research manager for the Rocky Mountain chapter of the Sierra Club, which supports stronger state and federal regulation of fracking. Davis said he has studied more than 1,000 drilling-related spills in Colorado.

For members of the public, the website can be frustrating. Wendy Leonard wanted to know about wells in her area after she saw one being drilled near her children’s school in Erie, Colorado. She asked state regulators, who referred her to FracFocus, she said.

Found Nothing

“And then I’d go home and wouldn’t find anything,” she said. Leonard and her family ended up moving to a town an hour away because of health concerns related to fracking, she said.

FracFocus is operated by two groups: the Groundwater Protection Council, a group of state water officials; and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, an association of states that produce the fuels. The council’s own analysis shows that about half the wells that have been fracked in the U.S. have been reported through the site, said Mike Nickolaus, special projects director for the GWPC.

“Companies can take it or leave it where it’s voluntary, but we see more and more companies using FracFocus to say, ‘This is a good mechanism for us to get our information out there and be transparent,”’ Nickolaus said.

The website’s operational costs, which total “a few hundred thousand dollars” a year for server space and site maintenance, according to Mike Paque, executive director of the GWPC, are paid for partly by America’s Natural Gas Alliance and the American Petroleum Institute, two Washington-based industry groups.

Industry Benefit

“We’re unapologetic about the industry cost-sharing on FracFocus because they get a big benefit from the website,” Paque said in a telephone interview. There’s no penalty for failing to participate, he said.

Public money helped create FracFocus. From 2009 to 2011, the U.S. Department of Energy gave grants totaling $3.84 million to the GWPC, records show. About $1.5 million of that sum was used to develop the website, according to Paque. The government plans additional grants for the GWPC totaling $2.12 million through 2014, Energy Department documents show.

Since the website’s inception, seven states, including Texas, Pennsylvania and Colorado, have either allowed or required companies to use FracFocus to fulfill disclosure mandates. The federal Bureau of Land Management, which oversees oil and gas rights on 700 million acres — more than four times the size of Texas — is considering adopting FracFocus as the basis for chemical disclosures by companies operating on its land.

Trade Secrets

Gaps remain on the website even when wells are disclosed. Companies skip naming certain chemicals when they decide that revealing them would give away what they consider trade secrets. Many of the wells that are listed on FracFocus have at least one or two chemicals marked confidential. Others have far more.

Nine undisclosed chemicals were pumped into Marathon Oil Corp. (MRO)’s Cherry Bilsky well in Gonzales County, Texas, between San Antonio and Houston, according to the website. The company also withheld the amounts of eight other chemicals used in the well. The purpose of one product, identified only as “EXP- F1008-10,” is listed as “experimental.”

“Marathon Oil provides the fullest amount of information that has been provided by our suppliers for each fracturing job,” said Lee Warren, a spokeswoman for the company, in an e- mail. Some suppliers consider detailed listings of certain chemicals or specific ratios proprietary, she said.

Information Requirements

All operators are required by law to keep detailed product information for each additive, and make it available to first responders and medical providers in cases of emergency, Warren said.

In May, Pennsylvania regulators issued violations after a pit for holding waste fluid from fracked wells in Tioga County leaked into the vicinity of the Rock Run stream and the surrounding landscape. The Responsible Drilling Alliance, an activist group that tried to figure out what was in the fluids, was stymied when it checked FracFocus, said Ralph Kisberg, the group’s cofounder.

That’s because EQT Corp. (EQT), the Pittsburgh-based company that operates the Tioga wells, omitted some information about its chemicals. Of five wells it disclosed in the county, one didn’t include any identification numbers for the chemicals, and four others provided no information about the quantities of chemicals used.

‘PR Effort’

“There are mistakes; some of the data is incomplete,” said Kisberg, of Williamsport, Pennsylvania. “We see FracFocus as a PR effort to placate people.”

EQT staffers made some errors in manually transferring data into the FracFocus system, said Natalie Cox, the company’s director of communications. After Bloomberg News asked about the incomplete disclosures, EQT fixed the errors, Cox said. The company is committed to fully disclosing its fracking fluids, she said.

States that require companies to disclose on FracFocus are adopting the website’s limitations. In North Dakota, where fracking has turned the state into the biggest U.S. oil- producing state after Texas, regulators mandate disclosure on the website within 60 days of a well’s completion.

“We require whatever FracFocus requires,” said Alison Ritter, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Mineral Resources’ Oil and Gas Division. “Whatever their rules are, those are our rules in terms of reporting.”

Private Database

The website isn’t searchable by chemical, or by date. State regulators who wish to check whether companies are making their required disclosures face a time-consuming task. The website doesn’t make its underlying database available to the public.

Improvements are planned for this autumn that will allow users to search by chemical name, chemical abstract number and date. The groups that maintain the website are talking with industry representatives and state officials about how to give regulators in states that require posting on FracFocus access to the database, said Nickolaus, the GWPC’s special projects director.

It remains unclear whether the database will ever be downloadable for the general public. Nickolaus said that’s “not a specific goal of the system.”

Not releasing the database was a prerequisite that companies insisted on before they’d participate, he said.

To contact the reporters responsible for this story: Benjamin Haas in New York at bhaas7@bloomberg.net Jim Polson in New York at jpolson@bloomberg.net Phil Kuntz in New York at pkuntz1@bloomberg.net Ben Elgin in San Francisco at belgin@bloomberg.net

Fracking Hazards Obscured in Failure to Disclose Wells – Bloomberg.

#FrackingHazards

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Fracking Operations Run Roughshod over Pennsylvania Homeowners Oct 24, 2012 3 min read

On a recent trip to western Pennsylvania, I visited a man who lived along a leafy country road. He showed me around the house he had built for his wife and three sons and said he wanted to raise his family in a quiet rural area. He thought he had the perfect spot until an energy company showed up on his property and said it had the rights to drill for natural gas beneath his land.  Although he owned his land and home—and paid taxes on them—he could not protect his property from a drill pad, wells and a pipeline he did not want.

Soon tractor trailers began delivering compressors the size of shipping containers, tanker trucks hauled in fracking chemicals, and workers built an industrial drill pad near his house. The last straw came when the company hired security guards to patrol the area—and stationed them right in the middle of the family’s yard.

There was nothing the man could do to stop them.

Every affected family that I met with in western Pennsylvania said they felt displaced on their own property after natural gas companies muscled their way into backyards and fields.  Existing health or environmental safeguards are too weak, and poorly enforced. Instead, gas companies are allowed to run roughshod over homeowners and their communities.

Fracking operation, including wastewater pit, next to corn field. Photo: Melanie Blanding

Pennsylvania is no stranger to fossil fuel development. The first oil discovered in America was found in Oil Creek in 1859, and Standard Oil built its empire on the state’s oil fields. Coal has been mined in the region for decades, and old mine shafts dot the landscape.

Local residents told me they thought natural gas would be the next wave in a familiar tide. Most were used to seeing the occasional “donkey” oil pumps bobbing up and down on a hillside, and figured natural gas operations would have a similar profile.

But once drilling began, they realized that fracking goes way beyond anything they had seen before. Instead of a single donkey, a drill site can be the size of several football fields. Half of it may consist of a huge pit holding water and wastewater. When a well is fracked, operators run compressors 24 hours a day for days. People told me their houses shook the entire time.

Even people who gave energy companies the right to drill on their property are overwhelmed by the scale of industrial development. One man told me, “My dad allowed oil drilling on his land years ago, and he got income from the company. It was just one pump out there. It wasn’t a big deal.” He figured he would follow in his father’s footsteps, but then the massive fracking equipment arrived, and he realized he had been boxed into a corner.

Many oil and gas companies turn out to be careless and furtive neighbors. Homeowners are especially concerned about the chemicals sitting in the giant open wastewater pits called impoundments. Yet the oil and gas industry has resisted every attempt to make companies more transparent, and as a result, too few states require them to disclose the chemicals used in fracking fluids, even in some cases to doctors trying to find out why people may be suffering from medical conditions. Standards for managing and reporting on toxic wastewater are too lax and companies sometimes flout the rules. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that one company worker was dumping fracking wastewater right into a local river.

This isn’t an isolated incident. Researchers at PennEnvironment Research and Policy Center found that of the 4,596 fracking sites operating in Pennsylvania between 2008 and 2011, companies violated environmental laws 3,355 times. Some companies see the meager fines levied against them as a cost of doing business. Homeowners, meanwhile, pay the price in polluted air, contaminated water, and decimated property values.

Strong national standards could help protect residents from reckless companies and ineffective state regulators. Yet Senator Hoeven (R-ND) recently introduced a bill that would make it harder for the federal government to regulate fracking. Big Oil’s giant lobbying association, the American Petroleum Institute, welcomed the bill, but many local residents will not. Americans should be protected from the hazards of fracking no matter what state they call home.

NRDC is helping achieve that. We are fighting to put stronger state and national safeguards in place, and we created the Community Fracking Defense Project to help local communities to define their own fracking ordinances.

Lawmakers may sit in Harrisburg or Washington and say there is no need for environmental standards, but people living next door to leaking wastewater pits and polluting wells know better. It’s time we honor their experience and start holding companies accountable.

Fracking Operations Run Roughshod over Pennsylvania Homeowners | Frances Beinecke’s Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC.

#NRDC

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Chesapeake Testing ‘Green’ Fracking Fluids in Shale Wells – Bloomberg Oct 24, 2012 2 min read

SAFE comments: Development of environmentally friendly constituents for “slick water” used in fracking does not eliminate, reduce or otherwise rectify that highly saline and radioactive materials, in addition to volatile chemicals inherent in petroleum harvesting, will still come up with the waste water. No amount of “green” fluid injected into the ground can prevent these constituents from coming back up in the flowback.

Chesapeake Energy Corp. (CHK), the second- largest U.S. natural gas producer, is testing hydraulic- fracturing fluids composed solely of environmentally-benign components in wells.

Chesapeake plans to develop a 100 percent green mixture of fluids used to fracture gas and oil formations underground, Jody C. Jones, the company’s manager of environmental and regulatory affairs, said today during a gathering of energy-industry executives in Columbus, Ohio.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves using high- pressure jets of water, sand and chemicals to smash fissures into rocks so gas and oil may flow. Current fluid formulations often include hazardous components such as hydrochloric acid or diesel fuel and environmentalists say the practice poses a threat to water supplies. Chesapeake, based in Oklahoma City, is testing various green recipes in several shale formations that Jones declined to identify.

“It’s not quite there yet,” Jones said at the Utica Shale Development & Growth Forum sponsored by IQPC Ltd. “The main concern with testing something like this is you just spent $4 to $6 million to drill a well and taking an untested frack system and shooting it down a well could ruin a reservoir and you’d be throwing away all that money.”

Chesapeake is experimenting with green fracking fluids to minimize threats from surface spills near lakes, creeks and rivers that abut drilling sites, Jones said. Such formulations also would reduce workers’ exposure to potentially harmful substances, he said.

Bacteria Slime

Some of the world’s largest fracking-service providers have been working on ways to offer more environmentally friendly fluids. Halliburton Co. (HAL), the world’s largest fracking company, now offers “CleanStim,” which uses food-safe ingredients to stifle the growth of subterranean bacteria that can form a thick slime and impede oil and gas flow.

Halliburton has also developed a process using ultraviolet light to kill bacteria in the fracking fluid, pairing the technology with a recycling process called “CleanWave” that uses an electrical charge to separate contaminants and clean the water.

Baker Hughes Inc. (BHI), the world’s third-largest provider of fracking services, offers a fluid called “VaporFrac” that replaces almost all of the water used in fracking with nitrogen- based foam.

Chesapeake rose 1.3 percent to $19.54 at the close in New York.

Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM) is the biggest U.S. gas producer.

To contact the reporter on this story: Joe Carroll in Chicago at jcarroll8@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Susan Warren at susanwarren@bloomberg.net

Chesapeake Testing ‘Green’ Fracking Fluids in Shale Wells – Bloomberg.

• Chemicals
• Media
• National Media

   

Oil and Gas Leases: Issues and Considerations Oct 24, 2012 5 min read

Leases do not include the same information that companies give to their shareholders. Landowners are not told the actual risks associated with hydraulic fracturing.  There are ways to challenge a lease if a company was not honest about the risks associated with the processes involved in fracking.

The following document regarding gas leasing practices provides important insight into issues to be considered regarding leasing and what is often omitted in leasing offers. The entire content of “Drilling Doublespeak” can be obtained for download at the following link:
http://static.ewg.org/pdf/Drilling_Doublespeak.pdf

SAFE has been examining leases, and is working toward building this page as one that will help you assess your own lease for language that protects you (issues such as burden of proof , compensation for damages). Please check back on this page as we update this information.

Contact Our Legal Committee

L. Cook

legal@dontfractureillinois.net

SAFE has seen a lease that explained the lessee’s rights as follows:

“with the exclusive right for the purpose of exploring *** and operating for and producing *** and the exclusive right *** to inject water, brine and other fluids into the subsurface strata, as well as any industry enhanced recovery methods.”

Note the use of the relatively innocuous sounding term “other fluids” after “water” and “brine” and also note the use of the term “industry enhanced recovery methods”.  The lessor explained to us that they were not told that horizontal high-volume, high-pressure hydraulic fracturing could be used on his property.

If this language was intended to encompass horizontal fracking, it is far from a model of clarity and is misleading.

Royalties

Other lease specify royalties that are calculated “at the wellhead.”  This means that no matter what is stated anywhere else in the lease, “at the wellhead” means the company is entitled to take all costs (i.e., any cost it can think of) out of its profits before it calculates any royalties.

Pipelines

Leases typically have paragraphs that sound like care is taken regarding pipelines, e.g., that pipelines will be buried below the plow line in crop fields. Yet those leases do not say that pipelines must be buried in a location that is not a crop field. This means they reserve the right to run a pipe line through your yard if they want to.

Damage Clauses

The “famous” liquified damages clause limits any damages payable to you (for any damages, of any kind, ever) to $5,000. We have even seen damage limits as low as $3,000.

Hold Harmless and Indemnify

Perhaps worse, the “hold harmless and indemnify” clause says no matter what happens, you, the landowner, is liable: for injury, damage to the land, to property or anything else. We have a signed copy of one of those leases. The Johnson County clerk’s office has many, many of these leases filed.

FAQ

Will Not Signing a Lease Prevent Drilling?

Q.  I am an owner of an oil/gas lease with Next Energy, LLC.  They have sent us a form that requests to change the original lease to allow horizontal drilling.  With everything I have read, I have not signed it as yet.  Will my not signing (my brother and sister haven’t either) prevent anything?

A. First, we need to know how the mineral rights are owned, before we can answer the question about you and your brother/sister not signing the lease. If they own any of the rights, and none of you have signed the lease, then yes, that can make a difference. The issue is a little complex, but basically it is this: In contract law, an issue has to be “within the contemplation of the parties” when they sign a contract for there to have been a “meeting of the minds.” If there has not been a meeting of the minds, there is a very good argument that a contract is invalid.

I am assuming that the contract that was originally signed was before horizontal fracking became an issue? If that is the case, then the parties had no way of knowing that the oil and gas company could potentially use fracking on their property, and therefore did not sign a lease with any intention of allowing horizontal fracking to take place. Therefore, there was no meeting of the minds, and if the oil and gas company does not get an amendment signed, and goes ahead with fracking anyway, they run the risk of being taken to court for an injunction forcing them to stop operations after they have already committed serious time and money and materials to the project.

So, NextEnergy is covering their bases and trying to get the amendment signed. Now, I must warn you they may try to bully you into it, by threatening you and saying they have the right to do it anyway, so you might as well sign. DO NOT fall for it. This is a standard tactic. They may also say you might as well sign, because they can drill on your neighbor and steal your gas, so you might as well sign. NOT TRUE. There IS something called forced pooling in Illinois, but if by some chance they get any gas or oil from under you, they have to pay you for it, no matter where they drill. And right now IDNR is not allowing forced pooling anyway, and has not even issued one permit for forced pooling in all this time. I talked to IDNR about this myself. So do not fall for that one either.

Threatened to Sign A Lease

Q.  My husband’s family has been presented with leases for their surprise inheritance of indivually-small shares in mineral rights under some property in southern Illinois. Ugh! I’m a member of a grassroots fractivist group in Colorado and am appalled. I thought it was a load of frack-fluid when the landman told my husband that if he didn’t sign the lease, my husband would become like a part owner of the drilling company and would incur expenses of drilling before receiving any royalties.

This sounds crazy, but it’s what the landman told us; he even sent us a copy of a letter to someone owning property in Louisiana (not Illinois) to present the idea. Also, I’ve heard from an attorney in Colorado that it is possible, but he’s not familiar with Illinois laws.

Can you help me with this? Have you heard this before? I haven’t had any luck in looking at the Illinois oil & gas regs.

A Chicago (where I grew up) attorney offered to check into it for $300-$400/hour; I’d have to sell my house to afford that. We’re contemplating the HORRIBLE idea of signing the lease and donating any royalties (expected to be very, very minimal – but even if they were huge) to fractivist organizations, including SAFE. Another HORRIBLE idea is to sell our house and try to hide the money if there’s any profit, rent an apartment, declare bankruptcy, and then sign the lease.

By the way, we’re so impressed with the SAFE newsletter, actions, number of volunteers, etc. Kudos! We wish you the very best – a statewide ban – of course!

A. This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard yet. No, you do not become part owner of the drilling company just because you do not sign a lease, and it is legally impossible to “draft” someone into becoming part of any company; no, you do not incur expenses of drilling before receiving any royalties just because you do not sign the lease. Yes, it is a load of frack fluid.

The only grain of truth in it is, if you DO sign a lease expecting to receive royalties, and the lease says your royalty is computed at the well head, they get to deduct all kinds of expenses before computing the royalties.

I would doubt anything the landmen say; I would doubly doubt any copies of letters they say they sent, as this is easily faked; and I would especially doubt anything they say they sent to Louisiana, as Louisiana is under Neopolitan law, unlike the rest of the US, and their laws do not apply to us.

• Leases