Read this story from Mother Jones on a new law that will bar doctors from revealing to their patients the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing that may be affecting their health. (March 23, 2012)
Under a new law, doctors in Pennsylvania can access information about chemicals used in natural gas extraction—but they won't be able to share it with their patients.* A provision buried in a law passed last month is drawing scrutiny from the public health and environmental community, who argue that it will "gag" doctors who want to raise concerns related to oil and gas extraction with the people they treat and the general public.
Pennsylvania is at the forefront in the debate over "fracking," the process by which a high-pressure mixture of chemicals, sand, and water are blasted into rock to tap into the gas. Recent discoveries of great reserves in the Marcellus Shale region of the state prompted a rush to development, as have advancements in fracking technologies. But with those changes have come a number of concerns from citizens about potential environmental and health impacts from natural gas drilling.
There is good reason to be curious about exactly what's in those fluids. A 2010 congressional investigation revealed that Halliburton and other fracking companies had used 32 million gallons of diesel products, which include toxic chemicals like benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene, in the fluids they inject into the ground. Low levels of exposure to those chemicals can trigger acute effects like headaches, dizziness, and drowsiness, while higher levels of exposure can cause cancer.
I'm down in New Zealand at the moment, filming for a feature documentary involving the unconventional gas industry - particularly the increasingly controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" - which I've been working on for the past year with a fellow Canadian filmmaker.
Why New Zealand?
We came here to follow the main subject of our film, a young First Nations man from the heart of the Canadian (and one could argue global) fracking industry. Caleb Behn worked for a number of years as a lands manager for several First Nations, addressing both of the major shale gas plays in Northeast BC, where the two sides of his family come from - the Horn River Basin near Fort Nelson and the Montney Shale formation, which extends beneath communities like Hudson's Hope, Dawson Creek and several hundred kilometres East across the Alberta border.
After years of frustration attempting to respond to the deluge of paperwork inundating his offices over proposed seismic testing, well sites, water extraction and disposal, toxic flaring, access roads, security gates and fences and myriad other incursions onto his traditional territory and way of life, Caleb decided to lawyer up. He felt a legal background could help him more effectively represent his people in dealing with industry, so he has been studying at UVic Law for the past several years.
For his final term he decided to venture down to another Victoria University - this one in Wellington, New Zealand - to learn from Maori people facing similar challenges from the oil and gas industry down here.
Maori and concerned citizens in New Zealand have been dealing with the oil and gas industry for a long time; but Caleb's timing couldn't have been more appropriate, as it is just in the past several years - and particularly the past few months - that fracking operations have really been ramping up. And the parallels between the two countries, as we have been learning quickly, are positively striking.
Perhaps most interestingly, a Canadian company I'd never heard before this week - one TAG Oil, based Vancouver of all places - is on the cusp of a major expansion of fracking operations across the North Island of New Zealand, where Caleb is studying and we're doing most of our filming.
Yesterday, Caleb was invited to speak about his people's experiences with the Canadian unconventional gas industry at a packed community forum in the town of Napier, in the Hawkes Bay region on the West Coast of the North Island (watch the national news story on the event here). It was an eye-opener for us to hear from other speakers of the mounting concerns amongst New Zealanders about this Canadian company, which has been operating mostly in the Taranaki region on the other side of the North Island - both onshore and offshore. The company has formed joint ventures with Apache Canada, the Canadian subsidiary of Texas gas giant Apache Corp.
Just in the past several months, TAG Oil has been pursuing "aggressive" (their own words) expansion plans, with seismic testing and exploratory drilling in the Hawkes Bay region where the forum was being held. The community gathering heard from a farmer named Sarah Roberts - who has been referred to us by a number of people as the "Erin Brockovich of New Zealand" (a title she wears reluctantly), for her wealth of knowledge on the emerging industry and her principled stand against it. Sarah made the journey across the island from Taranaki, where her farm has been under siege from TAG Oil's operations. She described to us how the company is flaring fumes over her and her neighbours' dairy farms (milk is New Zealand's biggest export and, along with tourism, the cornerstone of its economy). She also told us how some local farmers have been convinced to take "produced" (the industry's term for contaminated) water from them and dispose of it on their fields a s "fertilizer".
Both Sarah and Caleb's words resonated as a warning to the people of Hawkes Bay of the dangers to come if TAG OIl and Apache Canada are able to expand their operations into that region as they are now planning. Following yesterday's meeting I did some googling on TAG Oil - astonished that I'd never come across this company which is a key player in the emerging New Zealand unconventional gas industry. While its headquarters are located not a kilometre from my home in downtown Vancouver, - at 885 West Georgia St. - in its 10 year history it has focused almost exclusively on New Zealand. It appears as though the relatively small company secured its foothold by obtaining leases and permits here, then reaching out to the larger Apache Canada to provide the capital and industrial muscle to exploit these resources. TAG, Apache and other shale gas companies clearly have big designs on this small island state in the South Pacific.
And yet, there's clearly a movement afoot to turn the tide on the industry's expansion. A Maori leader from the Taranaki region Caleb spoke to the other day evinced with tears that it may be too late to save her territory from the impacts of oil and gas development, but that she hoped in sharing her people's experiences with other New Zealanders, she could help protect them from the same fate. The people of Hawkes Bay took careful note of Caleb and Sarah's words for the same reason.
The audience also heard from a young, ambitious Green Party MP and Energy Critic, Gareth Hughes, who has been travelling the country of late, drumming up support for a moratorium on fracking while the government conducts a parliamentary review of the industry.
Already the city of Christchurch has recently passed a local moratorium and other communities are considering following suit. We will be traveling to the South Island in a few days to speak to the people who were instrumental in that strong stand against the industry's planned expansion into their region.
Read this article from the Calgary Herald on the decision by the Nova Scotia Provincial Government to put a two year moratorium on natural gas hydraulic fracturing while it gathers more science on the controversial practice. (April 19, 2012)
CALGARY - Companies searching for oil and gas in the Maritimes received conflicting messages this week around the use of hydraulic fracturing to develop the resources.
New Brunswick granted a five-year licence to Calgary-based Windsor Energy to explore and drill for natural gas on Tuesday while Nova Scotia banned fracking until the summer of 2014 to have more time to review the contentious technology.
Energy Minister Charlie Parker said the provincial government wanted to study reviews being drafted by the U.S. Environment Protection Agency and Environment Canada on the effects of fracking.
Parker cited other jurisdictions have been reviewing how fracking could affect water re-sources and earthquakes.
"We think it's important to get the best possible information that's out there and make an informed decision after we've learned all that," Parker said.
Critics of the NDP administration suggest the government is freezing discussion about hydraulic fracturing until after the next election.
Public concern has in-creased in the past year about the technology, which pumps massive amounts of waters and chemicals down well bores to crack open reservoirs of so-called tight oil and gas. Protests against frack-ing escalated in areas such as the Maritimes, where little onshore oil-and-gas development has occurred.
Monday's announcement was a setback for companies such as Elmworth Energy, a subsidiary of Triangle Petroleum Corp., which holds a 10-year lease representing the province's first shale-gas development project.
Read this letter by celebrated environmentalist and author Sandra Steingraber - published on the Orion Blog - on the story that's been sending shock waves through the American environmental community over the past month. Steingraber takes her once beloved Sierra Club to task for accepting $25 million in secret donations from major unconventional gas player Chesapeake Energy. (March 23, 2012)
Dear Sierra Club,
I’m through with you.
For years we had a great relationship based on mutual admiration. You gave a glowing review of my first book, Living Downstream—a review that appeared in the pages of Sierra magazine and hailed me as “the new Rachel Carson.” Since 1999 that phrase has linked us together in all the press materials that my publicist sends out. Your name appears with mine on the flaps of my book jackets, in the biography that introduces me at the speaker’s podium, and in the press release that announced, last fall, that I was one of the lucky recipients of a $100,000 Heinz Award for my research and writing on the environment.
I was proud to be affiliated with you. I hoped to live up to the moniker you bestowed upon me.
But more than a month has past since your executive director, Michael Brune, admitted in Time magazine that the Sierra Club had, between 2007 and 2010, clandestinely accepted $25 million from the fracking industry, with most of the donations coming from Chesapeake Energy. Corporate Crime Reporter was hot on the trail of the story when it broke in Time.
From the start, Brune’s declaration seemed less an acknowledgement of wrongdoing than an attempt to minister to a looming public relations problem. Would someone truly interested in atonement seek credit for choosing not to take additional millions of gas industry dollars (“Why the Sierra Club Turned Down $26 Million in Contributions from Natural Gas Interests”)?
Here, on top of the Marcellus Shale, along the border between Pennsylvania and New York—where we are surrounded by land leased to the gas industry; where we live in fear that our water will be ruined, our mortgages called in, our teenage children killed in fiery wrecks with 18-wheelers hauling toxic fracking waste on our rural, icy back roads; where we cash out our vacation days to board predawn buses to rallies and public hearings; where we fundraise, donate, testify, phone bank, lobby, submit public comments, sign up for trainings in nonviolent civil disobedience; where our children ask if we will be arrested, if we will have to move, if we will die, and what will happen to the bats, the honeybees, the black bears, the grapevines, the apple orchards, the cows’ milk; where we have learned all about casing failures, blow-outs, gas flares, clear-cuts, legal exemptions, the benzene content of production fluid, the radioactive content of drill cuttings; where people suddenly start sobbing in church and no one needs to ask why—here in the crosshairs of Chesapeake Energy, Michael Brune’s announcement was met with a kind of stunned confusion.
Listen to this interview by Sean Holman of documentary filmmaker Damien Gillis on his recent trip to Northeastern BC to learn about some of the effects of the unconventional gas industry on farming families around the Dawson Creek area. Gillis has been working for the past year on a feature documentary film involving the controversial fracking business and recently followed independent BC MLAs Bob Simpson and Vicki Huntington to the community of Farmington to engage with local landowners on the issue. The pair have worked hard to raise in the Legislature issues surrounding the regulation of the industry and its impacts on water, health, and the province's economy. (March 24 - 20 min)
Whether or not salmon farms continue operating in BC's marine waters may depend more on economic than environmental factors. Despite withering criticism concerning the ecological safety of its open net-pen operations, the salmon farming industry has doggedly continued on its corporate course. However, two unforeseen factors may compromise its viability, thereby accomplishing what no amount of environmental censure has managed.
First, the US International Trade Commission has removed a two-decade 24 percent import duty levied on farmed salmon imported from Norway. This ruling may ultimately negate one of the major rationales Norwegian corporations used in 1991 to circumvent the duty by growing Atlantic salmon in BC waters. The removal of the duty now places a 24 percent disadvantage on farmed salmon exported from BC to the US, a trading handicap exacerbated by the rising value of the Canadian dollar.
And second, after the horrific 70 percent collapse of salmon farming in Chile due to the industry's inadvertent importation of infectious salmon anemia, Chilean banks and governments are applying pressure for a re-start of operations. This will result in more farmed fish on the global market and will depress the price for salmon. Combined with the lower cost of growing salmon in Chile, the result may threaten operations in BC. The salmon farming industry in BC, critics note, is already precarious due to high operating costs. A flood of Chilean farmed fish on the world market and cheaper product from Norway may be lethal blows to the industry here. And, as everyone knows, the business of making money is not imbued with sentimentality - if salmon farming is not profitable here, the industry will politely express its ritual condolences and leave.
Oil raises more complicated and serious issues than salmon farming. And Enbridge's proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, that intends to move tar sands bitumen from Alberta to BC's West Coast, may cause far more economic damage than a few salmon farms abandoning Canada. To assess this damage, we need to know something about oil pricing.
Most North Americans are likely unaware that the price of oil is determined in two ways. The Canadian and US price is set "at a confluence of pipelines at Cushing, Oklahoma, where prices are determined for a specified grade of crude termed West Texas Intermediate" (Island Tides, Mar. 8/12). WTI is presently priced at about $108 per barrel. But for the rest of the world, in regions such as Asia and Europe, their oil is priced by international markets at a higher "Brent" rate. The Brent price is presently about $126 per barrel. The price difference is important to the oil industry. And this explains the significance of the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline.
Alberta crude from the tar sands would not pass through the pricing gate in Cushing, Oklahoma. Indeed, it would be destined for Asia where the Brent rather than the WTI price applies. Any corporation producing oil from the tar sands would benefit measurably from the premium value of Brent and would push for this pricing structure. At the very least, in free market conditions, the price difference between Brent and WTI would force up the cost of oil to consumers in Canada.
The same cost pressure would apply to natural gas. Its North American price is determined by the volume moving through "a confluence of thirteen pipelines at Erath, Louisiana", the so-called "Henry Hub" (Ibid.). This price is linked to the WTI price of oil, and is presently selling at between $2 to $3 per million British thermal units (MMBtu). But natural gas in Asia and elsewhere is linked to the Brent oil price, where it commonly sells for two to four times the North American price. The huge volume of natural gas that would be diverted from BC and Alberta to several liquid natural gas (LNG) plants on the West Coast would bypass the Henry Hub on its way to Asia. Besides depleting a non-renewable resource with massive exports, the new market would force up the price of natural gas - if not for Canadians, then certainly for British Columbians.
Beyond the litany of environmental problems created by hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to retrieve natural gas from shale, and the inevitable spills associated with the pipeline and tanker movement of oil from the West Coast, British Columbians in particular - and Canadians in general - can expect to pay more for their petroleum based energy.
Globalization always has the effect of shifting prices toward a common denominator. In the case of wages, it pulls down high earnings to match lower Asian rates. In the case of energy such as oil and natural gas, it lifts prices toward matching the higher rates that apply beyond North America.
Even without considering the environmental costs and risks of producing and transporting oil and gas, opening our markets to Asia and elsewhere is an unwise strategy for British Columbians and Canadians. The oil and gas industry should be jubilant at the prospects of pipelines and tankers. But everyone else in this country should be worried. The social and economic costs of a few closed salmon farms in BC would pale beside the damage inflicted by higher energy prices.
Read this update from CBC.ca on a week-long rig fire at a Suncor fracking operation in Northeast BC. (March 14, 2012)
A fire at a drilling rig near Hudson's Hope in northeastern B.C. has been burning for six days, following a blowout Friday night.
Suncor spokesperson Sneh Seetal said while the fire continues to burn, the situation is under control.
"We've brought in well control specialists. We're conducting daily aerial fly-overs by helicopter. The fire has been contained to the site and the site is secure," she said.
Seetal said "a handful" of employees were working at the site at the time of the explosion, but no one was injured. She also said air quality is being monitored and is not a concern at this time.
Rafe Mair pulls no punches in this, the second of a two-part interview with BC NDP Leader Adrian Dix - grilling the potential future premier of BC on Liquid Natural Gas, fracking, the proposed Enbridge pipeline and salmon farms. Will the NDP stand up to Harper over Enbridge and open net pen aquaculture? Why do they favour LNG - and how do they reconcile their support for it with the controversial fracking process that would supply it with much of its gas? Watch and find out!
Listen to this highly informative 8 min radio interview from CBC's Daybreak North show - featuring Andrea Morison of the Peace Valley Environment Association discussing the proposed Site C Dam and its connection to the planned Liquid Natural Gas boom on BC's coast. (Feb. 14, 2012)
Read this story from Fort St. John's EnergeticCity.ca on BC Premier Christy Clark's recent comments that the controversial proposed Site C Dam is essential to building liquid natural gas plants on BC's west coast. (Feb 10, 2012)
Site C and B.C.'s proposed LNG development go hand in hand, according to Premier Christy Clark. In an interview with Moose FM/energeticcity.ca, Clark explained that the newly approved licence for Shell to export liquefied natural gas out of Kitimat will use 100 per cent of the power Site C would create.
"We cannot create this new industry in British Columbia, by adding value to natural gas, without the power that would come from Site C. It's an essential part of the plan in the long-term, to make sure that we're putting British Columbians to work."
She adds the province's power needs are going to grow substantially, so "we're going to need the power from Site C and we're also going to need the power from lots of independent power producers from across the province: wind energy, run of river, you name it." In saying so, she also criticized B.C.NDP leader Adrian Dix for supporting LNG development and not supporting Site C, saying he "can't have it both ways."
Clark says she is completely comfortable with the science behind fracking, and its possible associated health risks, and believes Northeast B.C. has the safest shale gas industry in the world. As she says, it can always get better, and the province has been pushing new practices, like publishing ingredients used in hydraulic fracturing on an online database.
"That will do two things: first, it will push companies to be even cleaner and greener all the time… I think it will drive innovation because we're open about it; but second, I think it builds confidence in what we do."
She points to instances where fracking has been done very badly elsewhere, like the U.S., and wants people to see what's been done in B.C. to set an example. The hope is that oil and gas companies will take it upon themselves to get the word out about how safe practices are in the province.
"We set the highest bar anywhere in the world for fracking, and people need to see what we're doing and need to understand it so they can too."
