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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
ProPublica’s New Project
The American Oil Industry’s Playbook, Illustrated: How Drillers Offload Costly Cleanup Onto the Public
Oil executive Tom Ragsdale walked away from his old wells, making the pollution left behind the state of New Mexico’s problem. His tactics, however, are ubiquitous in the industry.
by Mark Olalde, illustrations by Peter Arkle, special to ProPublica
Co-published with Capital & Main
December 30, 2024, 5:00 am
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.
In December 1990, officials in the federal agency tasked with regulating offshore oil and gas drilling received a memo with a dire warning: America faced a ticking time bomb of environmental liability from unplugged oil and gas wells, wrote the agency’s chief of staff. Those wells and their costly cleanup obligations were being concentrated in the hands of cash-strapped drillers at the same time as production was shrinking. (The document, unearthed by public interest watchdog organization Documented, was shared with ProPublica and Capital & Main.)
More than three decades later, little action has been taken to heed that warning, and the time bomb is threatening to explode.
Read More
SAFE’s Long-Running Challenge to Illinois Fracking Rules Heads Back to Court December 7
9/24/2026
For more than a decade, Southern Illinoisans Against Fracturing Our Environment (SAFE) has challenged the process by which Illinois adopted regulations governing high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing.
That fight is still going.
On Monday, December 7, 2026, at 9:00 a.m., attorney, Pat Handlin and Vito Mastrangelo, representing SAFE and the other plaintiffs are scheduled to appear before Judge Foster at the Madison County Courthouse in Edwardsville, Illinois, for hearings on two motions seeking dismissal of our complaint.
This is an important moment in a case that stretches all the way back to 2014—and we would like our supporters, allies, and friends to be there.
IDNR Fracking Hearing in Chicago. How Did We Get Here?Illinois enacted the Hydraulic Fracturing Regulatory Act in 2013. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) was then responsible for developing the administrative rules that would govern high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing in the state.
Thousands of Illinois residents participated in that rulemaking process. According to the current complaint, IDNR received approximately 38,000 public comments totaling more than 43,000 pages before the rules were finalized.
SAFE was part of that public process. Our organization had already been educating Southern Illinois residents about fracking, the proposed law, and the regulations being developed under it. SAFE’s role in public education concerning the Hydraulic Fracturing Regulatory Act and IDNR’s regulations is described in the current complaint.
But SAFE and other participants believed there were serious problems with the way the rulemaking process had been conducted.
Among other things, the plaintiffs allege that IDNR failed to follow mandatory procedures established by Illinois law and that those failures deprived Illinois citizens of their right to participate fully in the development of the regulations.
One example involves something fundamental to public participation: notice of public hearings.
The current complaint states that five public hearings were held during the rulemaking process—in Chicago, Ina, Effingham, Decatur and Carbondale. The plaintiffs allege that none received the 20 days of notice they contend was required under the applicable administrative rule. According to the complaint, Chicago received 11 days’ notice, Ina 18 days, Decatur 11 days, Carbondale 13 days, and the rescheduled Effingham hearing received no notice in the Illinois Register.
The plaintiffs contend that these and other problems impaired the public’s ability to review, understand and respond meaningfully to the proposed rules.
For SAFE, public participation in decisions that can affect our land, water and communities is not a technicality. It matters.
There is another principle underlying SAFE’s long involvement in this fight.
Article XI of the Illinois Constitution is devoted specifically to the environment. Section 1 declares it the public policy of Illinois to “provide and maintain a healthful environment for the benefit of this and future generations.” Section 2 goes further:
“Each person has the right to a healthful environment.”
The Constitution also provides that people may enforce that right against governmental or private parties through appropriate legal proceedings, subject to reasonable limitations established by law.
That constitutional commitment has particular meaning to an organization like SAFE.
We believe decisions involving activities with the potential to affect our water, air, land and communities deserve rigorous scrutiny, sound science and meaningful public participation.
Those principles helped motivate people to become involved when Illinois was developing its fracking regulations. They continue to matter today.
INDR hearing at Rend Lake. SAFE Went to Court in 2014On November 10, 2014, SAFE and individual plaintiffs filed the original lawsuit challenging the rulemaking process.
Four days later, on November 14, IDNR filed the high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing rules with the Illinois Secretary of State, at which point the rules became effective.
The lawsuit has continued, in various forms, ever since.
Today the plaintiffs include SAFE and seven individuals: Marie Smith, Mark Donham, Vito Mastrangelo, Sam Stearns, Tabitha Tripp, Nathan Czuba and Annette McMichael.
Many of those individual plaintiffs are Southern Illinois landowners or mineral-rights owners.
For the people who have carried this case forward, the stakes are personal. This is about protecting the land, water and communities we call home—and ensuring that ordinary citizens have a meaningful voice when government decisions may affect their environment.
It’s about the places where people live.
Video from IDNR Effingham Hearings:
More Than a Decade Later, the World Has Changed
There is something else worth remembering as this case returns to court.
Illinois’s fracking regulations were written more than a decade ago.
Since then, scientific knowledge about oil and gas development, induced seismicity and climate change has continued to grow.
The relationship between oil and gas operations and induced seismicity—earthquakes triggered by human activity—is now well established. The U.S. Geological Survey says hydraulic fracturing itself can induce earthquakes and has been linked to larger earthquakes, although wastewater disposal associated with oil and gas production is responsible for most induced earthquakes in the central United States.
That distinction is important. So is the larger lesson: activities involving the injection of fluids underground can, under certain geological conditions, cause faults to slip and produce earthquakes.
At the same time, the realities of a changing climate have become increasingly difficult to ignore.
Here in Illinois, we have witnessed extraordinary severe weather. The Illinois State Climatologist reports that as of July 1, 2026, Illinois had already recorded 173 tornadoes, breaking the previous full-year state record of 142 set in 2024. At that point, Illinois had recorded twice as many tornadoes as the next-most-active state in the nation. Illinois has now experienced more than 100 tornadoes in four consecutive years; before 2023, that threshold had been crossed only four times since 1950.
Tornado activity is influenced by many factors, and those statistics alone do not establish that climate change caused Illinois’s recent tornado outbreaks.
But the broader climate question cannot be ignored when considering the future of fossil-fuel development.
The environmental and scientific context in which we are having this conversation today is not the same as it was when Illinois’s fracking rules were adopted in 2014.
For SAFE, that makes the principles underlying this fight no less relevant—and perhaps more important.
How carefully should government act when making decisions that can affect the environment?
What opportunity should the public have to participate in those decisions?
And what does Illinois’s constitutional promise of a healthful environment mean in practice?
Those are questions worth asking even after twelve years.
What Is SAFE Asking the Court to Do?
The Fourth Amended Complaint seeks declaratory judgment and permanent injunctive relief.
For example, under one of the remaining claims, the plaintiffs ask the court to find that IDNR failed to comply with required rulemaking procedures and that plaintiffs’ rights to participate fully in the rulemaking process were violated. They ask the court to declare the HFRA rulemaking invalid, prohibit IDNR from implementing or using those rules, and direct the defendants to publish notice that the rulemaking has been invalidated. The complaint also seeks reasonable litigation expenses, including attorney fees as provided by Illinois law.
In other words, this case is not simply an argument over whether someone is “for” or “against” fracking.
It raises a fundamental question about government accountability:
When an Illinois agency creates rules governing an activity with potentially significant consequences for communities, landowners and the environment, must the agency follow the public rulemaking procedures required by law?
SAFE and the other plaintiffs believe that question matters—not only for fracking, but for meaningful public participation in government decision-making.
At the most recent case management conference, the court rescheduled hearings on two motions seeking dismissal of the plaintiffs’ complaint.
Those hearings are now scheduled for:
Monday, December 7, 2026
9:00 a.m.
Madison County Courthouse
Edwardsville, Illinois
The attorneys are expected to appear in person.
We are also checking on whether a Zoom option will be available for members of the public who cannot attend in person. We will update this page as soon as we know more.
The public is welcome to attend the hearing.
And SAFE would very much like to see supporters there.
Stand With SAFE on December 7Court cases can feel distant from everyday life. They take years. They involve motions, briefs, hearings and procedural questions that rarely make headlines.
But behind all of that paperwork are people.
For more than a decade, individual plaintiffs, attorneys, SAFE volunteers and supporters have continued showing up because we believe Southern Illinois’ land, water and communities are worth protecting—and because the public deserves a meaningful voice in decisions that affect them.
On December 7, we’re asking you to show up with us.
You do not have to be a plaintiff. You do not have to be a lawyer. You don’t have to understand every count in a 66-page complaint.
You can simply be there.
A strong public presence in the courtroom is one way to demonstrate that, after all these years, people are still paying attention.
If you would like to attend but need assistance getting to Edwardsville, please contact SAFE at info@dontfractureillinois.org. We don’t want transportation or distance to prevent someone who wants to stand with us from participating.
We will share additional information about the hearing, transportation coordination and possible remote access as it becomes available. Sign up here to get on the email list.
Demonstration in front of Bradley’s office. Help SAFE Keep GoingThere is another way you can help.
Please consider making a donation to SAFE.
SAFE is a small, grassroots organization. We don’t have a separate legal fund or a large institutional budget behind this work. Donations go to SAFE’s general operating account and support the organization and the work necessary to continue our mission—including public education, outreach, organizing and our continuing efforts to protect Southern Illinois from the impacts of fracking and oil and gas development.
Long-running work like this requires more than attorneys appearing in a courtroom. It requires communicating with the public, maintaining records and research, reaching supporters, keeping people informed, organizing participation and making sure that Southern Illinois voices continue to be heard.
A contribution of any size helps SAFE continue that work.
At the final IDNR hearing, we packed the SIU-C ballroom with standing room only and celebrated our 38,000 comments submitted in opposition. More Than a Decade—and We’re Still HereWhen this lawsuit was first filed in November 2014, no one could have known that we would still be talking about it more than a decade later.
But some fights take time.
SAFE has spent years educating the public about fracking and oil and gas development, advocating for Southern Illinois communities, and insisting that the people who live here deserve a meaningful voice in decisions affecting their homes, property, water and environment.
On December 7, another chapter of that work will unfold in a Madison County courtroom.
We hope you’ll stand with us.
Attend the hearing. Share this story. Support SAFE. Donate if you can. And help us remind Illinois that Southern Illinois is still paying attention.
Interested in attending the hearing, please contact us at info@dontfractureillinois.org
Climate Goals Missed, U.N. Says World Must Now Remove Carbon at Scale
Carbon removal combined with emissions reduction is the only remaining pathway to avert catastrophic levels of warming, a new report warns.
Published Sept. 2, 2026
The world has failed in its goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial times, the United Nations said on Wednesday, in a sober assessment that laid out a new goal for fighting climate change that would set the world on an uncertain path.
A decade ago, most of the world’s countries agreed in Paris to try to limit global temperature rise to “well below” two degrees Celsius while aiming for the more ambitious target of 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
But Wednesday’s 141-page U.N. report warned that the world is certain to breach that mark and should focus on finding ways to limit “overshoot” and eventually bring global temperatures back down.
Despite advancements in wind and solar power, countries have continued to burn oil, gas and coal, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere where it traps heat and has raised average global temperatures by about 1.4 degrees Celsius. The damage from global warming is now felt across the planet, with intensifying heat, drought, floods, fire and other threats to humans, animals and plants.
The idea laid out in the U.N. report would be extremely difficult because it would require pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere on a colossal scale. Achieving that would potentially mean blanketing enormous parts of the world with forests or relying on novel technologies for sucking carbon out of the air that haven’t yet worked on any significant scale.
Under such a scenario, the planet would still continue to heat up for the foreseeable future, and wouldn’t return to temperatures like today’s for decades or even centuries. And some changes, like glacial melting or rising seas, would be essentially irreversible.
“This is by no means an acceptable or preferred pathway,” the U.N. said in its report Wednesday. “It is simply the best remaining option.”
But even this fallback plan would require the kind of climate ambition and major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that have long been out of reach. To add to the challenges, the Trump administration has withdrawn the United States, the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, from the global fight against climate change and weakened domestic environmental policies.
Based on current climate policies among nations and trends, the planet is expected to warm 2.6 degrees Celsius, or 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century.
“So long as we fail to find political will, we will be marching past every target we put out there. That is the danger,” said Michael Mann, a professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved with the report.
Dr. Mann noted that even at current levels of warming, “dangerous and catastrophic climate change is here,” referencing last week’s deadly glacial collapse and flood in Nepal.
António Guterres, the U.N.’s secretary general, had previously acknowledged that the 1.5 Celsius mark — the most ambitious aspect of the Paris Agreement among nations to limit global warming — would inevitably be breached. The new report makes clear just how little margin there is for the overshoot plan to be feasible.
Specifically, in order for temperatures to be brought back to the 1.5-degree mark this century, global warming at its peak would have to be limited to 1.8 Celsius (3.2 Fahrenheit), compared with preindustrial times. Most scientists describe that as unlikely.
Then, countries would have to ramp up an enormous program for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Even under the most optimistic scenarios, a single decade of warming could take about 50 years to reverse.
Glen Peters, a senior researcher at the CICERO Center for International Climate Research in Norway, said the idea of bringing down temperatures might sound as easy as “planting a billion trees” to absorb carbon dioxide. But tracts of land larger than entire American states would need to be reforested. Conflicts with agriculture could arise. Higher temperatures could hinder forest growth. And of course, wildfires could stymie progress.
“Anything at scale, you’re going to run into some sort of problem,” said Dr. Peters, who was not involved in the report.
The report says that while tech-based solutions would be needed, it noted that the current industrial capacity to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is extremely limited. The technology has long been controversial in part because the fossil fuel industry has pitched it as a way for their products to continue to be used. Over the course of the industrial age, the burning of fossil fuels has released immense amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Climate Analytics, a Berlin-based climate science and policy institute, said in a statement that the U.N. report risked “being a call to apathy,” and criticized the report for not more explicitly mentioning the need to phase out fossil fuels. Countries committed to pivot away from oil, gas and coal at an international climate summit in 2023 but carbon emissions continue to climb.
The U.N. report predicted the rise in average global temperatures would eclipse 1.5 degrees Celsius in “the next few years.” At that level of warming, “there are no good outcomes,” said Inger Andersen, the executive director of the U.N. Environment Program.
Already common extreme weather events, like heat waves and floods, will intensify, as will the melting of glaciers, the rising of sea levels and the bleaching of coral reefs, the report said. There is also a risk of changes in crucial global systems, like the weakening or collapse of ocean currents that carry heat northward from the tropics, the report said, with the potential to “reshape the world forever.”
Judge orders federal logging project halted in Shawnee National Forest
Ruling finds Biden administration’s approval violated Endangered Species Act
by Hannah Meisel -September 1, 2026
A federal judge this week ordered the U.S. Forest Service to suspend a commercial logging project in southern Illinois’ Shawnee National Forest, finding the 2024 approval of the project under President Joe Biden violated the Endangered Species Act.
The agency improperly approved the project in October 2024 without waiting for a final “biological opinion” from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, an East St. Louis judge ruled Monday. That opinion, which was completed six weeks after the Forest Service approved the logging project, identified the roughly 70-acre project area as home to the federally protected Indiana bat.
Environmental groups sued the Forest Service last summer, alleging the agency’s own August 2024 assessment of the area disclosed Indiana bats had been detected in the project area. The assessment, an internal, nonpublic document, concluded that even if the Forest Service implemented all legally required mitigation measures, the logging project would be “likely to adversely affect” the endangered bats.
The groups alleged the agency’s “decision memo” approving the project that fall was “written to falsely suggest that the Forest Service’s surveys detected no endangered bats in the project area” and did not mention or even cite its August 2024 assessment in the memo.
But the Forest Service argued that it hadn’t violated the Endangered Species Act because it didn’t commit any resources to the project until early 2025 — well after the Fish and Wildlife Service issued its final opinion approving the project so long as the Forest Service agreed to certain mitigation measures.
Additionally, the Forest Service maintains the other agency’s opinion contained “no new information” that wasn’t included in its own assessment and points to mitigation measures included in both agencies’ project directives. Therefore, the Forest Service argued that nothing about the project’s approval would have changed had the agency waited for the final opinion in 2024.
The Forest Service further argued that the project approval wouldn’t change in 2026 even if a court vacated the decision memo and ordered officials to take the final opinion into account before reapproving it. But U.S. District Judge Nancy Rosenstengel didn’t buy that argument.
“An agency cannot evade the jurisdiction of the federal courts merely by promising that it will not change its mind even if a court orders it to reconsider; otherwise, an agency could act as arbitrarily and capriciously as it wished and simply moot every challenge that came its way,” she wrote in her 27-page opinion. “Fortunately, this is not the law.”
Indiana bats, found primarily in Midwestern states, were first identified as endangered in the mid-1960s. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, by 2019 the population had declined by half in the five decades since, and has been particularly affected by white-nose syndrome since its 2007 arrival in North America.
While the bats spend winter hibernating in caves and mines, colonies of Indiana bats typically spend the warmer months roosting in the peeling bark of large, often dead trees. The Fish and Wildlife Service’s final opinion advised against the Forest Service doing the logging project between April and October.
But the Forest Service’s project approval contained no directives on timing, and the logging company the agency contracted for the job began its work in mid-August 2025. By the time Rosenstengel issued a temporary restraining order halting the logging project eight days later, the contractor had already thinned out 40 of the 67 acres constituting the project area in rural Pope County along the Ohio River.
Though the judge dissolved her order less than two weeks later, the contractor still hasn’t returned to finish the job in the year since it left. Rosenstengel pointed out the lack of urgency to complete the project undercut the Forest Service’s arguments that vacating its project approval would result in delays that “could reduce wildlife habitat, increase soil erosion” and cause economic harm as the already cut lumber has been laying on the forest floor for a year, possibly decaying.
“In other words, all of the harms contemplated by the Forest Service when discussing vacatur are already accruing through its contractor’s inaction,” she wrote. “The Court has not prevented the Forest Service from requiring its contractor to re-initiate work, from hiring a different contractor, or from finishing the work itself.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration this summer has moved to change two federal rules that would make it easier to approve logging projects on federal land and national forests like Shawnee, in addition to oil and gas drilling and other development.
In July, the administration finalized a rule weakening the Endangered Species Act, narrowing the definition of “harm,” which has for decades been interpreted broadly to block encroachment on areas where threatened and endangered animals live. Under the new rule, wildlife habitats would be fair game for industry so long as the animals themselves aren’t injured or killed in the process.
In another rule proposed last month, the Forest Service is rolling back a 25-year-old policy blocking road construction in federally owned land, which would open the door to logging and mining activity on tens of millions of acres controlled by the government. The administration maintains the rule has prevented proper maintenance of forest land, increasing wildfire risk. But many environmental groups claim clearing more trees and building more roads would have the opposite effect.
Some areas of Shawnee, including an area near the Pope County logging project, is currently subject to the so-called “Roadless Rule.”
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
NPR spent 2 years tracking deaths from heat. We found a staggering hidden toll
Thousands of Americans die every year from a chronically underreported cause: heat.
August 31, 2026
by Alejandra Borunda
Read article here
As summer heat intensifies because of human-driven climate change, the United States’ official tally of heat-related deaths does not come close to capturing the full human toll. The data feeding into nationwide death counts is collected inconsistently and rarely thoroughly.
The result is a vast undercount of the number of people who die because of heat. And experts say failing to recognize and address this may cost more people their lives.
So NPR set out to create a more comprehensive national count.
Here’s why an Arizona medical examiner is working to track heat-related deaths
We partnered with Boston University to find the total number of deaths influenced by heat every year in the United States. The investigation took two years and involved building a statistical model that assessed nearly every county in the country. The full analysis will soon be published in a scientific journal.
An accurate assessment of the true scope — as well as understanding who is affected, where and why — is critical for developing lifesaving solutions, says Quinn Adams, a research scientist at Boston University’s Center for Climate and Health and the lead partner in the joint NPR-BU investigation.
COMIC: How excessive heat kills and how to stay safe
Beyond the statistical assessment, NPR set out to find people whose deaths slipped through the cracks — those who might not have died if heat hadn’t pushed them beyond their breaking point — to understand exactly how heat could be missed as a factor. We will be bringing you their stories in the coming days.
But first, here are three key takeaways from our research — and why it matters.
How big is the undercount?The scale of the undercount is significant.
The primary keeper of cause-of-death records in the U.S. is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It keeps an annual tally of heat-related deaths in the U.S., which is compiled from state reports based on whether heat is noted on individual death records.
From 2004 to 2018, the national number of heat-related deaths compiled by the CDC was low: on average, around 700 a year. The number has crept up in recent years, averaging around 1,700 but sometimes topping 2,000, as heat risks grow and counting strategies evolve.
But even that number is an underestimate, according to NPR and BU’s analysis. On average between 2018 and 2025, we estimate that some 9,000 deaths each year in the country are impacted by heat — a factor of five higher than the official average over that same period.
Some years, heat-related deaths can top 10,000.
The true figure could be even higher, says Adams, because of some limitations in the data and the conservative nature of our analysis.
The dangers from heat are growing every year because of human-caused climate change. The heat wave season has extended by a month and a half since the 1960s. In 50 of the country’s biggest cities, the number of heat waves has doubled since the 1980s. Heat domes that settle over the country regularly expose tens of millions of Americans — sometimes well over 100 million at a time — to dangerous heat.
“The frequency and the duration of these heat events has been expanding very rapidly,” says Adams. “That’s what we can expect moving forward into the next few decades: having more heat waves, and having them last longer, and having them be more intense such that people don’t get the escape from the heat that they need to physiologically reset.”
The reasons for the undercount are complex. But a crucial issue, says doctor and researcher Sameed Khatana of the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, is that heat’s role in a death is often masked by other more obvious causes of death, like a heart attack.
“Heat is what people often call the silent killer, compared to things like hurricanes and typhoons,” says Khatana.
Climate Why certain medications can increase your risk in the heatHeat, he says, can often be the trigger that pushes someone’s health condition — like cardiovascular disease — from manageable to fatal. “The heart starts beating faster and harder,” he explains, to shunt blood to the skin to cool the body. And eventually, if someone’s heart is already weak, it may not be able “to keep up with the demand that was required of it,” he says. That can lead to something like a heart attack.
But often, Khatana says, because heat leaves no obvious mark behind for doctors or coroners to examine, the cause of death gets marked down only as a heart attack. Heat isn’t noted on the death certificate, and therefore it is not included in the tallies reported to the municipality, the state and eventually the federal recordkeepers.
Such omissions are understandable, Khatana says. But repeated thousands of times, in all parts of the country, they create a blind spot that obscures the scale of heat’s danger.
National risks — even in unexpected placesThe NPR and BU investigation found that heat is killing people in nearly every corner of the country.
Our analysis finds that Florida and Texas have the most heat-related deaths overall. That is in part due to their large populations. But those states remain among the most impacted even when adjusted for their size.
But the losses are not limited to states historically considered hot.
Source: CDC’s WONDER database; ERA5-Land weather database
Our model finds that more than 100 people die from heat-related causes in Michigan every year, 10 times the official reported numbers. In Massachusetts, official records say only about 5 people die from heat each year, but our estimate suggests that number could be more than 60.
And in Florida, the difference is even more dramatic: We estimate more than 1,900 deaths each year, about 40 times as many as reported.
Heat can be particularly dangerous for people who are not already used to it. And in many parts of the country that were not historically hot, infrastructure to keep cool is less common. Nearly all homes in Alabama have some form of air conditioning, for example. But in Washington state, only 53% of homes do. In Maine, 70% do. Yet the risks of heat exist, and are growing, in those states as well as those where it is a more entrenched problem.
Counts are getting more accurate — but not everywhereThe official national counts from the CDC have trended upward in recent years, rising from an average of roughly 700 between 2004 and 2018 to about 1,700 between 2018 and 2025.
That increase is due in large part to two things: Heat is simply getting worse, according to the most recent National Climate Assessment, and also there is better counting of heat-related deaths in some parts of the country.
Arizona’s Maricopa County — home to Phoenix — has developed sophisticated protocols for sussing out the subtle influences of heat on people’s deaths. Maricopa County trains “death investigators” to look for signs of heat stress, such as asking about the state of the deceased’s air conditioning system, their ability to pay electric bills to run ACs, their use of medications that increase heat sensitivity, and more.
But Maricopa County is something of an outlier. In contrast, the counties home to Los Angeles and Houston report very few heat-related deaths. Yet our model finds hundreds of people likely die in each of those counties because of heat each year.
Los Angeles recognizes the problem, says Nichole Quick, the chief science officer at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. The county’s official numbers “are vast undercounts,” Quick says. “The true impact of this is higher than I think a lot of the numbers show.”
Short Wave Summers are getting hotter. Here’s how experts say to cope with itBut solving the counting problem isn’t simple. It took Maricopa County years to fine-tune its strategies for more accurately assessing heat’s impact on deaths. And many doctors who certify deaths in emergency rooms and hospitals, or for patients who die at home, don’t have protocols for confidently identifying heat impacts, says Khatana.
Until such issues are addressed, says Adams, the undercount will remain, and heat’s true toll will remain obscured — making it harder for policymakers, planners and families to understand the urgency to protect themselves.
“Most people do not see themselves as vulnerable to heat. They’re like, ‘Oh, that’s someone else. It’s not me,'” says Adams. But the data is clear: Heat can take anyone, anywhere in the country. “But then, you know, push comes to shove and it actually is you.”
NPR will be continuing this coverage in the coming days, exploring why deaths slip through the cracks and how lives can be saved.
Credits
Nick McMillan contributed to this report.
This reporting was supported by a Nova Institute for Health Media Fellowship. It was also supported by the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism.
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