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U.S. Oil Industry Earned Over $130 Billion in Profit During Iran War
That was almost three times as much as what businesses producing and refining oil in the United States made in the same period in 2025.
By Rebecca F. Elliott and Keith Collins
Oct. 30, 2026, 6:35 a.m. ET
The war with Iran has been very lucrative for American oil companies, which have earned more than $130 billion in profit as people pay much higher prices for gasoline, diesel and other fuel.
That is a conservative estimate based on the performance of more than 50 large U.S. oil and gas companies, most of them producers or refiners, in the six months from April through September. It does not reflect profits earned in March, the first month of the war, or in October.
These companies earned less than $47 billion collectively during the same period in 2025, a challenging stretch when oil was cheaper and companies were navigating the early fallout from President Trump’s trade war.
The blockbuster oil profits this year highlight longstanding concerns about who gains, and who pays the price, when wars interrupt the flow of energy. As of this week, Americans had spent an extra $147 billion on gasoline and diesel since the United States and Israel began striking Iran on Feb. 28, according to an analysis by Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab. That amounts to more than $1,100 per household.
Some companies are benefiting more than others. U.S. refiners have fared especially well because fuel-making plants have been badly damaged by hostilities in the Middle East and Russia. With fewer refineries available to meet global demand, profit margins soared for those that remain online.
Refining Company ProfitsSource: S&P Global Market Intelligence.
U.S. Oil Industry Earned Over $130 Billion in Profit During Iran War – The New York Times
The wartime boom has extended to American producers, most of which are reaping greater income from higher prices without having to contend with the danger or cost of operating in conflict zones. That said, their profits generally remain below 2022 levels, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused oil and natural gas prices to soar. U.S. oil prices averaged around $90 a barrel from April through September of this year, compared with roughly $100 during the same period in 2022.
Exxon Mobil and Chevron, the biggest U.S. oil companies, reported their highest third-quarter earnings in years on Friday, buoyed by their refining businesses.
“We certainly acknowledge that the higher fuel prices put pressure on families and businesses,” Neil Hansen, Exxon’s chief financial officer, said in an interview. “But this is one of those situations and type of business where you can’t invest your way out of these conditions overnight. The decisions that matter today were made years ago.”
Exxon’s third-quarter profit more than doubled. Chevron’s almost tripled.
“The cash is going on the balance sheet,” said Eimear Bonner, Chevron’s chief financial officer. “That’s an asset that obviously we lean on in hard times and we strengthen in times when we see higher prices.”
Dozens of other U.S. oil companies will report third-quarter results in the coming weeks. The New York Times analysis relied on a combination of financial results and, if those were not yet available, analyst estimates compiled by FactSet, a financial data firm. The review did not extend to pipeline companies or service providers, whose performance has been less directly affected by the global oil shock.
For now, many companies are following a similar playbook, paying down debt and parking their extra cash rather than investing in producing more oil than they originally planned or expanding refining capacity.
“We’re not going to change our approach to capital investments just because we have a lot of cash,” Homer Bhullar, chief financial officer of the refining giant Valero Energy, told Wall Street analysts last week. Valero’s third-quarter profit soared more than sixfold.
“Over time, all the excess cash we’re accumulating will ultimately be directed toward our owners,” Mr. Bhullar said. He did not discuss specifics, but that usually involves increasing dividends or buying back company stock.
U.S. refiners have performed especially well because a lot of the oil they process is delivered by pipeline, insulating them from sky-high shipping costs. These companies are a vital link between oil producers and consumers because they transform the crude oil that is pumped from the ground into usable fuels like gasoline and diesel. Some companies, such as Exxon and Chevron, produce oil and refine it, but many specialize in just one of those businesses.
Large European companies reported bumper profits, too. Shell earned $12.06 billion in the third quarter, more than doubling its profit from a year earlier, partly because refining was so lucrative. The French oil major TotalEnergies’ third-quarter profit also more than doubled, to $8.26 billion.
United Refining, a privately held fuel maker in western Pennsylvania, plans to use this year’s windfall to pay down debt, said John Catsimatidis, the company’s chief executive and a longtime Trump ally. Or, perhaps, to buy a new corporate plane.
“I am serious,” Mr. Catsimatidis said in an interview. “You know why? I’m 78 years old. If I don’t buy a new airplane now, when am I going to buy it? When I’m dead?”
Lisa Friedman contributed reporting.
Rebecca F. Elliott covers energy for The Times.
Keith Collins is a Times visual reporter and editor in the Graphics department.
Trump Loosens Rules for Oil Firms to Cut Methane, a Potent Warming Gas
The Biden administration had sought to crack down on methane leaks, a big driver of climate change. Those rules are now being scaled back.
By Brad Plumer
Reporting from Washington
Oct. 27, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/27/climate/trump-methane-rules-epa-greenhouse-gas.html?unlocked_article_code=1.MFE.4WCG.UBsTE-ryBq8s&smid=em-share
The Trump administration is moving to weaken federal rules designed to force oil and gas companies to cut their emissions of methane, a gas considered a “super pollutant” because it traps so much heat in the atmosphere.
President Trump announced the plan at a campaign rally on Tuesday evening in Lubbock, Tex., for Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton. Mr. Trump said the Biden-era rules were “expensive and unnecessary.”
The move marks one of the most significant steps by the Trump administration to scale back federal policies designed to tackle climate change.
Methane, the main component of natural gas, traps about 80 times more heat in the atmosphere in the short term than carbon dioxide does. It is responsible for nearly one-third of the rise in global temperatures since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and experts have said that reducing methane leaks is one of the fastest ways to slow global warming.
The Biden administration issued rules in 2023 that would have required oil and gas facilities to monitor their operations and prevent methane from leaking into the atmosphere. The Trump administration had already delayed those rules from taking effect.
Now the Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to relax requirements to curb methane emissions from hundreds of thousands of “marginal” oil and gas wells that are nearing the end of their useful lives and have relatively low output. These wells account for around 7 percent of U.S. oil and gas production but produce roughly half of the industry’s methane emissions, the agency has previously said.
Trump administration officials have cast the move as an effort to bolster U.S. oil and gas production and ease prices for consumers. High fuel prices, driven up by the U.S.-led war with Iran, are weighing on Republican candidates ahead of next week’s midterm elections. In Texas, the nation’s top oil-producing state, polls show Mr. Paxton trailing Democrat James Talarico, and Mr. Trump is aiming to boost his campaign.
Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, said that the Biden-era rules would have shut down a number of smaller wells and estimated that easing the requirements would save the industry $45 billion through 2050.
“Behind every barrel of oil and every cubic foot of natural gas produced in the U.S. are millions of workers, businesses, and the heartbeat of this nation’s economy,” Mr. Zeldin said in a statement. “The Biden E.P.A. destructively targeted all this. President Trump promised to end the war on oil and natural gas.”
Oil and gas production is the largest industrial source of methane emissions in the United States. Methane can leak from wells, pipelines, storage tanks and other fossil fuel infrastructure. The gas can also come from natural sources such as cows, rice fields and wetlands.
Environmental groups criticized the rollbacks, saying that methane leaks from oil and gas operations were a form of waste that it made sense to curb. They also pointed out that the Biden-era methane rules had been expected to cut other harmful pollutants such as volatile organic compounds, which can form smog, and benzene, which has been linked to cancer.
“Methane leaks are the dumbest kind of pollution because the industry is losing the very product it is selling,” said David Doniger, senior strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Many large oil and gas companies have said they support at least some limits on methane emissions, noting that they have already invested in expensive technologies to monitor and capture the gas.
But a number of small and independent operators have opposed many of the regulations as costly and overly restrictive. They have said that requiring marginal wells that don’t produce very much oil to cut emissions would force producers to simply shut many of them down.
Mr. Zeldin indicated that the agency would rework regulations for marginal wells, typically classified as those that produce 15 barrels of oil equivalent per day or less. In 2024, those wells accounted for roughly three-fourths of the more than 900,000 oil and gas wells in the United States. While they account for a small fraction of total production, multiple studies have found that these wells yield an outsized proportion of methane emissions.
The E.P.A. is also planning to end its Methane Super Emitter Program, which would have empowered third-party monitors to use satellites and other sensors to quickly identify and report significant methane leaks. Some gas producers had complained that the program would have handed too much regulatory power to environmental groups.
And the agency is proposing to reverse a Biden-era rule that would have required operators to capture associated gas that comes out of oil wells and sell it. The agency said that doing so was not always practical, and that companies would be allowed to burn off the gas, a practice known as flaring, which produces carbon dioxide emissions.
The E.P.A. will solicit public comments on the proposed changes for 45 days before finalizing the rule.
The Trump administration has separately disavowed a Biden-era pledge to cut U.S. emissions roughly in half by 2035. And last year, Republicans in Congress passed a bill that would delay for 10 years a steep fee that Democrats and the Biden administration had imposed on oil and gas firms for larger methane leaks.
Some oil- and gas-producing states are nonetheless moving forward with their own methane regulations. Last month, Colorado adopted rules that would essentially replicate the Biden-era standards. New Mexico, the second-largest producer of crude oil after Texas, is also considering new methane rules.
Shortly after Mr. Zeldin previewed the E.P.A.’s proposal, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, highlighted satellite data that showed that the state’s existing rules had already cut methane emissions in half compared with neighboring Texas.
“Rolling back federal standards means more pollution drifting into the lungs of families living next to wells and flares, and a hotter planet for all of us,” Ms. Lujan Grisham said. “In New Mexico, we won’t stand for that. Our methane rules will remain firmly in place, and we’re planning to strengthen them while collaborating with other states to share our nation-leading best practices.”
For the Love of Water
2016-2026: A Ten-Year Retrospective Report
Snow fell at Standing Rock on the first day of April, covering the Plains of the Očéti Šakówiŋ with a blanket of feathery snow and frost. Beneath that stillness runs the same river that has sustained life here since time immemorial, where the waters of the Cannonball meet the Missouri as they have for generations beyond memory.
The day marked the ten-year anniversary of the founding of Sacred Stone Camp, which set in motion the #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock and continues to inspire movements to protect the water.
Standing Rock: For the Love of Water, 2016–2026: A Ten-Year Retrospective documents the history, legal landscape, and continuing consequences of the Indigenous-led resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Drawing on court records, government documents, legal observation, and the lived experiences of those who were present, the report traces the events leading up to the construction of the pipeline, the emergence of the #NoDAPL movement, and the years that have followed—including the destruction of sacred sites, the criminalization of Water Protectors, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, and the growing global convergence of Indigenous resistance movements.
In the report, we identify four defining recalibrations that emerged from Standing Rock: it elevated the global importance of water under the rallying cry Mni Wiconi — Water is Life; it re-centered treaties and Indigenous sovereignty in legal and political discourse; it revealed a coordinated corporate–state counteroffensive against environmental defenders; and it catalyzed a global Indigenous-led climate resistance movement that continues today.
The report provides an in-depth examination of:
- the historical context of the Očéti Šakówiŋ and treaty lands
- the emergence of the #NoDAPL movement and the founding of Sacred Stone Camp
- environmental risks and documented harms associated with pipeline construction
- failures of tribal consultation and environmental review
- the legal landscape of Dakota Access Pipeline litigation (2016–2026)
- corporate strategies targeting environmental defenders
- international human rights documentation related to Standing Rock
- the global legacy of Indigenous-led resistance movements
The report is accompanied by appendix volumes totaling more than 1,400 pages of documentation, including legal filings, historical records, and supporting materials. Because this history belongs to the people, the digital version of the report and its supporting documentation are publicly available at no cost.
The report is dedicated to Water Protectors, past and present.
This report features photography used with special permission from Ryan Vizzions and John Willis. Their images helped document the spirit of the camps and the strength of the people who gathered there, and we are deeply grateful for their generosity in helping preserve this history.
This report is titled “For the Love of Water” for a reason. For the tens of thousands of Water Protectors who gathered at Standing Rock, the movement was ultimately—and foremost—about the water that is life. People came in prayer, in responsibility, and in defense of something fundamental: the life-giving waters that sustain all of us.
The resistance and resilience shown at Standing Rock remain deeply inspirational to this day. Yet we also hold a vision of a world where such resistance and resilience are no longer necessary—where the Earth and her waters are protected not through confrontation and sacrifice, but through a shared conviction that life itself must be safeguarded. We envision a world where corporate accountability is no longer deferred indefinitely, and where the protection of land, water, and sacred places is understood as a collective responsibility.
Resilience is sustained through a practice of hope. In the meantime, we continue the uphill work alongside Water Protectors and frontline communities of protecting the land, the water, and the sacred places for the generations yet to come.
Read the full report:April 2026: Standing Rock: For the Love of Water, 2016-2026: A Ten-Year Retrospective Report
Fracking Hazards Obscured in Failure to Disclose Wells – Bloomberg
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)
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
“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% FrackedBloomberg 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 ReportsOil 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 UnreportedMore 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 ConcernsHomeowners 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 ReportingFor 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’ ChoiceWhile 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 RatesAmong 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 CompletionsQEP 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 ThirdOf 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 SecretsGaps 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 RequirementsAll 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 DatabaseThe 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.
Fracking Operations Run Roughshod over Pennsylvania Homeowners
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.
Chesapeake Testing ‘Green’ Fracking Fluids in Shale Wells – Bloomberg
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 SlimeSome 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.
Oil and Gas Leases: Issues and Considerations
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.
Cabot’s Methodology Links Tainted Water Wells to Gas Fracking – Bloomberg
Halliburton’s Radioactive Frack Rod Found Alongside Texas Highway After Going Missing
Holy frack that was close!
Public relations people and top-level executives at Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oilfield services companies, are likely breathing a sigh of relief after the oilfield services company found a radioactive rod that it lost last month, the Guardian reports. The seven-inch rod of americium-241/beryllium was found alongside a Texas highway some miles away from where it was being used to locate oil and gas deposits eligible for fracking.
Previously, members of the FBI, the Texas National Guard and Halliburton had been searching for the radioactive tool that is classified as a “category 3” source of radiation and could prove fatal if held for an extended period of time. It is the first incident of a lost radioactive tool of its kind in the past five years, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Bloomberg reports.
But radioactive materials sometimes do turn up in unexpected places. In 2010, Italy experienced the worst radiological incident in its history when a shipping container arrived in the port city of Genoa with unsafe levels of radiation, WIRED reports. The source turned out to be a radioactive rod not much larger than a pencil.
Still, concerns over safety violations are nothing new for Halliburton. The conglomerate once led by former Vice President Dick Cheney faced criticism for its role in BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill after reports emerged that it provided faulty cementing in constructing the well. More recently, critics have raised concerns over the effects its fracking fluid has on nearby drinking water, even prompting one executive to publicly drink Halliburton fluid to prove that its ingredients are benign .
Halliburton’s Radioactive Rod Found Alongside Texas Highway After Going Missing.
Italy earthquakes = FRACKING! Two DOZEN people dead in two weeks !! – YouTube
Two DOZEN people killed in since May 20, 2012 (the first large 6.0M+ at this location)…At the epicenter — drilling / pumping / fracking operation .
The days of denying — by so-called ‘professionals’ — are over. Coordinates for this recent 5.8M today (5/29/2012) from USGS:
44.814°N, 11.079°E
USGS stats: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/usb000a1mn.php
download google earth for FREE here … http://earth.google.com
At least 15 people dead THIS time (5.8M on 5/29/2012)
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/29/world/europe/italy-earthquake/index.html
7 dead on May 20, 2012:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Emilia_earthquake
Category:
5/29/2012 — Italy earthquakes = FRACKING! Two DOZEN people dead in two weeks !! – YouTube.
#fracking #humaninducedearthquakes #Italy #Earthquakes #frackingandearthquakes
No fracking for ten years – says EU Commissioner for Energy – Local – Leitrim Obse
No fracking for ten years – says EU Commissioner for Energy – Local – Leitrim Observer.
Senator Paschal Mooney with EU Commissioner for Enerfy G�nther Oettinger.
Published on Saturday 29 September 2012 09:00
EU Commissioner for Energy Gúnther Oettinger has informed Drumshanbo Senator Paschal Mooney that no decisions should be taken on hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” for ten years.
The Commissioners opinion was in response to a serious of questions from Senator Mooney at a meeting of Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport Energy and Communications which the Commissioner attended during his visit to Ireland last week.
In a series of questions submitted by Senator Mooney to the Commissioner about the EU Commissions Policy on fracking Commissioner Gúnther Oettinger replied that he believed no decisions should be taken until the environmental impact of fracking was established and that could take between five and ten years. He further informed Senator Mooney that he was already in discussions with scientists and those with technical expertise and has opened a dialogue with the Polish Government where fracking has already commenced. The Commissioner revealed that the extraction of shale gas could be chemical free in a number of years which is a major point of controversy and he intended visiting the United States next Spring to see at first-hand how shale gas is extracted.
“I welcome this recognition by EU Energy Commissioner of the sensitivities involved over this controversial process” stated Senator Mooney. “The Commissioner is obviously aware of the adverse environmental impact of current practices associated with the extraction of shale gas. The Commissioner is proceeding cautiously before coming to any conclusions. I am delighted that the person charged with Energy Policy in the European Union is consulting widely with the scientific technical and political community as part of an on-going process and I am now confident that the Energy Commissioner will not rush into a decisions that would harm the environment as a result of the fracking process” concluded the Leitrim Senator.
Meanwhile, Sinn Féin MEP and Environment Committee member, Martina Anderson last week voted in the European Parliament against the exploration and extraction of shale gas.
Speaking from Brussels she welcomed the outcome of the vote. “Among the encouraging proposals voted by the Environment Committee are; mandatory environmental impact assessments for fracking projects, the exclusion of EU funding for the shale gas industry and the obligation for fracking companies to declare which chemicals are used in the fracking process.”
“Given the associated risks with the process used to extract shale gas known as hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’, it is baffling that a more robust system of regulation is not already in place. Local communities’ concerns regarding the environment and public health must outweigh any commercial and monetary incentives for large gas companies.”
“The very real and dangerous risks of water contamination and noise pollution from fracking have the potential to seriously damage both agriculture and tourism – two very important sectors of Ireland’s economy. Even before exploration of the gas begins an Environmental Impact Assessment should be an absolute necessity. There is too much at stake to continue with these risks.”
“Indeed, at a time when we are quickly heading towards a point-of-no-return with climate change and the environment, it seems that we’re missing the bigger picture. With an agreed upon need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it is essential that we move away from the business-as-usual use of fossil fuels and towards renewable energies and a greener, safer and more sustainable economy.”
#FrackingChemicals #EuropeanUnionNoFracking #FrackingMoratorium #banfracking #media #EU #FrackingintheEuropeanUnion #moratorium
Pennsylvania State Representative Jesse White calls for probe of Dept of Environmental Protection wa
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has created incomplete lab reports and used them to dismiss complaints that Marcellus Shale gas development operations have contaminated residential water supplies and made people sick, according to court documents and other sources.
As a result, state Rep. Jesse White, D-Cecil, today called on state and federal law enforcement agencies to investigate the DEP for “alleged misconduct and fraud” described in sworn depositions in a civil case currently in Washington County Common Pleas Court.
“This is beyond outrageous,” Mr. White said in a press release. “Anyone who relied on the DEP for the truth about whether their water has been impacted by drilling activities has apparently been intentionally deprived of critical health and safety information by their own government.”
The DEP quickly responded Mr. White’s statements in an email to the Post-Gazette.
Department spokesman Kevin Sunday said the DEP’s testing lab received a “glowing” review last year in a peer review by the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
He added, “Jesse White is ideologically opposed to responsible drilling regulations which is evidenced by, among other things, his vote against Act 13,” a state law that regulates Marcellus Shale drilling and gas production.
“The battery of analyses we order during investigations are thorough and give us the results we need to make sound determinations, which we fully stand behind,” Mr. Sunday said.
“DEP takes very seriously instances where we do determine gas migration has occurred from drilling — this administration issued the largest single civil penalty in the history of the state’s oil and gas program last year for such a case.”
Mr. White’s call for an investigation came after the release of two depositions of DEP employees, one of whom, Taru Upadhyay, the division director of DEP’s Bureau of Laboratories, said the department’s lab reports to property owners didn’t contain a full array of contaminants found by the lab’s testing.
Mr. White said there’s no excuse for withholding some of the water test results because they could hold the key to residents’ water supply problems.
“If these allegations are true, there needs to be a thorough and objective investigation to determine if someone belongs in a jail cell,” he said.
In her deposition, Ms. Upadhyay said the department’s oil and gas division directed the lab to generate water test reports to homeowners that omitted the full menu of findings for heavy metals, including lithium, cobalt, chromium, boron and titanium, some of which are human carcinogens, as well as volatile organic compounds that are associated with hydraulic fracturing fluids.
Those metals are Marcellus Shale markers, found in the shale layer a mile or more underground in Pennsylvania. They are released by hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” of the shale and can be carried by flowback fluids to the surface.
Finding them and certain volatile organic compounds in the water test results would link contamination of groundwater to gas well drilling and fracking operations, said John Smith, an attorney with Smith Butz, a firm representing eight people in the Washington County case against Range Resources and 12 of its subcontractors. Their case contends that they face serious health problems and increased cancer risk due to exposure to toxic chemicals in their air and well water near Range’s Yeager drill site in Amwell.
“Despite these significant health consequences, the DEP purposely never considered information concerning all of these metals in each of the plaintiffs’ water supplies before making any of its determinations and purposely failed to alert the plaintiffs to their presence,” said Mr. Smith in a court filing Wednesday.
Kendra Smith, another Smith Butz attorney, today sent a 10-page letter to DEP Secretary Michael Krancer about the incomplete test results and requested a review of the practice. She sent copies of the letter to state Attorney General Linda Kelly; the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region III; David Hickton, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania; and five state legislators.
According to the deposition transcript, Ms. Upadhyay said the DEP’s state laboratory tests water samples for a full battery of contaminants, but at the direction of the department’s Office of Oil and Gas Management, limits the number of contaminants reported to the oil and gas division and the property owner.
In a second deposition filed in the case, John Carson, a DEP water quality specialist, said a special lab code for Marcellus Shale water contamination complaints is used statewide. He also said the department failed to provide its water quality specialists with training to help them interpret the lab reports and identify contaminants that could signal Marcellus Shale-related impacts.
A Post-Gazette review of DEP water quality reports generated under the department’s “942 Suite Code” found that those reports didn’t disclose all of the contaminants found in well water samples. The water complaints in these cases were dismissed because the abbreviated reports did not support the property owner complaints in Amwell, Washington County, the Woodlands area in Butler County, and Dimock in Susquehanna County.
Ms. Upadhyay’s statements came in response to questions from Ms. Smith and are contained in a 336-page transcript of her deposition taken Sept. 26 for an Environmental Hearing Board case. The case, brought by Loren Kiskadden of Amwell, alleges that DEP’s investigation of his well-contamination complaint was inaccurate and incomplete.
The depositions were filed as supporting documents in the related Washington County Court case. In that case, four homeowners, including Mr. Kiskadden, who live near the Yeager well site, allege their private water supplies were contaminated and they suffered a variety of health problems.
Range, owner of the Yeager well site, has denied any responsibility for any contamination from its operations, which included three wells, a 13 million-gallon impoundment and a drill cuttings pit.
By Don Hopey / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
First Published November 1, 2012 6:17 pm
State representative calls for probe of DEP water testing reports – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
#ContaminatedWater #MarcellusShalerelatedimpacts #Pennsylvania #PennsylvaniaDepartmentofEnvironmentalProtection #DEPwaterqualityreports #DEP #MarcellusShale #misconductandfraud
Big storms and fracking: what’s at stake?
Here in Washington, D.C. the winds are fast, furious, and loud as we await the brunt of Hurricane Sandy. Winds have been clocked up to 90 mph as the storm hits land with the lowest pressure ever recorded in the northeast. Images of a crane dangling off a Manhattan skyscraper are as scary as the reports that flooding will occur as far north as Vermont and New Hampshire.
West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and eastern Ohio are all expected to be hit by the storm. What could it mean for fracking sites in the Marcellus shale?
One of the greatest risks at these sites are spills and what is called “stormwater runoff.”
Under the Clean Water Act, there is something called the Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasure (SPCC) rule which includes requirements for oil spill prevention, preparedness, and response to prevent oil discharges to navigable waters and adjoining shorelines. The rule requires specific facilities to prepare, amend, and implement spill prevention plans. Sounds like a no-brainer. But in Fiscal Year 2011, EPA officials visited 120 sites oil and gas development sites and found 105 were out of compliance– 87.5%. (Note: these do not have to be oil production sites. For example, natural gas pads may have enough fuel for drill rigs stored on site to trigger this requirement.)
Almost every single oil and gas site inspected lacked a mandatory spill prevention plan meant to protect our rivers and streams. This is an unacceptable flouting of our environmental laws.
In addition to a spill prevention plan, oil and gas companies should have something called a Storm Water Pollution Prevention Plan. During a rainstorm, flowing water can pick up pollutants along the way, including toxic materials like fracking chemicals or fracking waste. Most companies are required by the Clean Water Act to get a stormwater permit by submitting a Storm Water Pollution Prevention Plan outlining precautions the company will take to avoid illegal discharge of pollutants and impacts to nearby rivers and streams. Ensuring prevention of stormwater run-off is not rocket science. It requires simple measures such as sufficient berms and containment systems. But the oil and gas industry is exempt from having to get a permit, which means regulators do not have to approve a pollution prevention plan–or even see if a company really has one for each site.
This is all increasingly terrifying as Sandy bears down on the Marcellus region, where there are many open pits filled with fracking and related waste. Because the oil and gas industry is also exempt from our hazardous waste laws, no one knows exactly how dangerous the waste at any particular site might be, but we know it can be very toxic and also radioactive. NRDC opposes storing of fracking and production waste in these open air pits, but it is still allowed.
What does a flooded wellpad look like? Here is a photo of a flooded wellpad in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, after Tropical Storm Lee in September, 2011:
Photo credit: Carol French, used with permission.
And here is a photo of how dangerously close millions of gallons of potentially toxic fracking waste can be to homes, in this case in Washington County, Pennsylvania:
Photo credit: Robert Donnan, used with permission.
NRDC opposes having dangerous fracking waste stored so close to people’s homes. Hurricane Sandy is terrifying for many reasons. For people living next to fracking waste sites, one of them is that the storm may flood these sites and cause toxic substances to flow onto their land, their home, or their farm. It is well past due for the toxic waste loophole for the oil and gas industry to be closed.
Big storms and fracking: what’s at stake? | Amy Mall’s Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC.
#StormWaterPollutionPreventionPlan #frackingwaste #HurricaneSandy #Control #flooding #stormwaterrunoff #Bigstormsandfracking #easternOhio #Pennsylvania #SpillPrevention #andCountermeasureSPCCrule #WestVirginia
Justices Grapple With Questions of Jurisdiction in Case Against Oil Companies
The justices are considering whether states and localities can try to hold oil companies responsible for damages from climate change. If Boulder, Colo., wins, the companies could owe enormous sums.
Oct. 5, 2026Updated 1:10 p.m. ET
The Supreme Court justices wrestled on Monday with the first case of their new term, a complex dispute over whether local governments can hold oil companies responsible for the damages of climate change — with billions of dollars potentially hanging in the balance.
Officials in Boulder, Colo., sued two oil companies, Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy, claiming that they should be liable for the costs of a changing climate, like droughts, fires and floods.
Depending on its scope, a decision for the oil companies could doom dozens of other similar lawsuits by states, cities and tribes percolating in courts throughout the country.
As the justices begin their latest term, their docket is shaping up to reflect some of the continuing cultural flash points in American life. They are poised to hear arguments on President Trump’s immigration agenda, religious rights and whether assault weapons bans violate the Second Amendment. Throughout the summer months, they have been asked to weigh in on a number of elections-related cases as the midterms approach, and they may see more such disputes.
Most of the arguments regarding the climate change case on Monday were highly technical, focusing on whether federal law blocked these types of lawsuits, and whether the case had reached a point at which the Supreme Court had the power to hear it at all.
But justices across the ideological spectrum, including some conservatives, posed skeptical questions to the oil companies.
With one conservative missing — Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. recused himself from the case days before the argument — there was the possibility that Boulder would pick up the single vote from the court’s remaining five conservatives it would need to prevail. A 4-to-4 tie in the case would leave in place a Colorado Supreme Court ruling against the oil companies.
Still, some of the conservative justices appeared concerned about whether a ruling for Boulder would flood the courts with climate change lawsuits.
“Presumably if you prevail, the next day, a municipality in every single state will file a lawsuit that will probably copy your pleadings,” said Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. “How would you think that will work out on the ground?”
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh likewise raised concerns that the lawsuit and others like it could bankrupt energy companies.
The court’s three liberal justices seemed more sympathetic to Boulder’s arguments that the lawsuit should be allowed to at least move ahead in state courts.
Justice Elena Kagan analogized the case to landmark efforts to sue tobacco and opioid companies, calling those cases Chapters 1 and 2, and climate case Chapter 3, in efforts to hold companies responsible for broad societal harms.
Kannon K. Shanmugam, the lawyer for the oil companies, pushed back, arguing that the harms of climate change are a global problem that should be handled at the national level — not in piecemeal legal cases in state courts.
The Trump administration had flipped the government’s position in the case, reversing the Biden administration’s view that would have had it supporting Boulder, expressed in a recent similar case from Hawaii. Sarah M. Harris, a principal deputy solicitor general, told the justices that “interstate air pollution is an inherently federal area.”
A decision is not expected immediately. The justices announce their decisions by the end of June or early July, and they typically release their most consequential, closest opinions later in the term.
Justice Alito’s decision to recuse came after months of pressure from environmental and court watchdog groups to step aside. Although he gave no formal reason in his announcement, Justice Alito has recused in previous cases about oil companies because of stock he owns. The justice has publicly reported owning stock in the companies ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66.
Neither is directly involved in the Boulder case, but legal experts have said that oil companies could take broad financial hits from a decision allowing such state and local cases to move forward. He had also gone on a luxury fishing trip with an investor in a company involved in the dispute.
In an interview after his announcement, Justice Alito told Bloomberg that he had taken “into account the particular arguments that were made on both sides here” and decided that recusal was “the prudent step.”
Under the court’s ethics code, justices can recuse at their own discretion. They typically step aside if their impartiality could be questioned, including because of a financial tie to a party or a close friend or family member who is involved.
If the justices were to split 4 to 4 in Justice Alito’s absence, a lower court decision to allow the Boulder suit to move ahead would stand. Such deadlocked decisions set no binding national precedent.
The legal fight began in April 2018, when the city and county of Boulder sued Exxon and Suncor, asserting that the companies should be required to share in the costs of climate change, including damages from more heat waves, wildfires, droughts and floods.
Boulder argued that local governments and taxpayers “cannot pay the full costs of all that is needed, nor should they.” The suit contended that the companies “knowingly and substantially” fueled the climate crisis by “producing, promoting and selling a substantial portion of the fossil fuels that are causing and exacerbating climate change.” It also claimed that the companies concealed and misrepresented the dangers of their products.
After a decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to allow the case to continue in state court, the oil companies asked the justices to intervene. The Trump administration joined them, a reversal of the Biden administration’s stance on the climate lawsuits.
The oil companies argued that the case should be heard in federal court, not state. Federal courts are often thought to be a more business-friendly venue.
The companies claim that federal laws regulating the environment pre-empt Boulder’s lawsuit and that because climate change is a global problem, it cannot be handled in state courts.
Dozens of environmental activists had gathered on the sidewalk outside the Supreme Court on Monday morning for the argument. They wore bright orange T-shirts with the message, “People v. Big Oil,” and displayed a large banner with the words “Big Oil Knew.” In another sign of interest in the case, a long line of lawyers stretched around the corner of the building waiting to snag a seat in the courtroom.
Adam Liptak, Ann E. Marimow and Claire Brown contributed reporting.
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