Mar 18
2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/us/18blast.html?_r=1&hp

Fatal Blast Wounds a City to Its Core

bozemanblastnyt_600

BOZEMAN, Mont. – In the struggle to keep its historic core viable, this city, with throngs of college students, Yellowstone-bound tourists and wealthy second-home owners, has defied the trend of declining downtowns.  Main Street is a bustling place.

But a natural gas explosion nearly two weeks ago ripped a hole in the heart of Bozeman’s downtown, killing a woman, leveling five historic buildings that contained thriving businesses and damaging several more whose condition will not be known for some time. Dozens of plate glass windows on Main Street were blown out.

Concern about the future of the historic downtown, a five-block stretch of Main Street and a block on either side, grew last week when investigators said the cause of the explosion was a leak in a gas line to one of the destroyed businesses, Montana Trails Gallery. The line was more than 70 years old. The woman who died, Tara Bowman, the gallery director, was working when the explosion occurred. City officials say that no estimate of damages has been released.

Beyond the obvious destruction, the blast delivered a deep psychic blow to the business district, which was already going through some difficulty because of the declining economy.

“The explosion has significantly rocked this community,” said Chris Pope, a commercial real estate agent and the owner of a severely damaged building.  “People are holding their breath. The stark realities of doing business in 2009 is in the front of everybody’s mind. There will be businesses that leave downtown.”

The accident comes as the economy here, as in so many other places across the country, has been hit hard. Bozeman though, with the likes of the media mogul Ted Turner and Tim Blixseth, developer of the super-rich Yellowstone
Club, has seen more of a boom than other parts of the state and so is feeling the impact more deeply.

“We’re not immune to the recession,” said Chris Kukulski, the city manager.  “And to have a hole in the ground and all the businesses that brought people downtown gone is going to be felt.”
…..

All of that affects Bozeman’s downtown business district. “Since last fall we’ve seen planned projects come to a halt,” said Mark Hufstetler, chairman of the city’s Historic Preservation Advisory Board.  “I don’t think we’ll see a parking lot in the middle of downtown Bozeman,” he said, but a replacement building “won’t be constructed as readily because of the economy.”

The explosion has taken an emotional toll, as well.

“People have a lump in their throat,” said Laura Ryan, an owner of Barrel Mountaineering, across the street from the blast site. “I didn’t cry for me or for my store, but I cried for the buildings that are gone and for downtown. Here’s where I based my life, and it’s gone and it hurts.”

Ms. Ryan’s store survived, but two of its large plate glass windows were blown out and much of the inventory ruined.

Residents worry about the potential for other gas line problems. A leak a year and half ago closed part of downtown for one day. The fire department is fielding four to six calls a day from worried residents; most are false alarms, but three more gas leaks have been found.

Still, some downtown business owners insist Bozeman will recover. “It’s going to be long and hard, but this town will not let downtown die,” Ms. Ryan said. “It’s a gorgeous little downtown.”

For now, people still seem to be coming to grips with what happened.  “It’s still a very fresh wound for a lot of people,” Ms. Ryan said.

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Mar 18
2009

My name is Joan Tubridy.  I live in the town of Meredith, Delaware County.  I am writing to submit comments to the Draft Scope for Draft Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (DSGEIS) on the Oil, Gas and Solution Mining Regulatory Program.

I am in full support of the option outlined in the draft scope of work: “7.0 Alternative Actions” which calls for, “the prohibition of development of Marcellus Shale and other low permeability reservoirs by horizontal drilling and high-volume hydraulic fracturing”.

Secondly, I am calling for an entirely new GEIS to be completed by the DEC.  The 1988 Draft and 1992 FGEIS are outdated and irrelevant to the type of gas drilling proposed in the Marcellus Shale.  The new GEIS should include impacts of: gas drilling over time, gas pipelines, and greenhouse gas emissions.  None of these were included in the scope of work.

I was a farmer for many years, raising in succession dairy, beef, whitetail deer, fingerling potatoes, and market garden vegetables.  Since returning to college in 1992, I have been an elementary/middle school teacher.

When we farmed, we made a conscious decision to become organically certified.  We did this with the belief that any meat or produce that we raised should be raised with the same care and attention that we gave to the food on our family’s dining table.  We took very seriously our stewardship of the land, protecting both the health and viability of the soil, as well as the two creeks that ran through our farm.

In my role as a Social Studies teacher I learned, along with my students, that the world is experiencing a water crisis.  Though water covers about 2/3 of the Earth, it is mostly too salty for consumption.  The 2 1/2 % that is not salty is not all available; some is locked up in icecaps and glaciers, some too remote, and some arrives too suddenly as in monsoons and floods.  What remains available to humans is 0.08% of the Earth’s water, and by 2020 our demand for water will increase by about 40%.

Five months ago, I first encountered the realities of natural gas drilling when citizens from Wyoming and Colorado came to our county to warn us by way of their own experiences over the past 8 years.  My deep concern about the mad rush to drill for natural gas grew as I felt compelled to spend these past months reading everything I could find about this topic.  Through this research I have found numerous instances of water well and aquifer contamination as a result of gas drilling.  Though these contamination claims have been documented by courts, as well as state and local governments, they are largely denied by the gas drilling companies.  Even the 2004 EPA report on hydraulic fracturing stated that fluids migrated unpredictably and to great distances through different rock layers in about half the cases studied in the U.S.  Surprisingly, this kind of evidence was buried in the 424-page EPA report and largely ignored in its conclusion.  While much of the negative impacts on water have been documented in the West, gas drilling activity in the Northeast has also resulted in a number of examples of water contamination in Pennsylvania and New York.

Given the irrefutable evidence linking drilling for natural gas to contamination of water wells and aquifers, I would like to know how the DEC will protect our most valuable resource – water?

What steps will be taken to pre- and post-test our water resources so that there is a baseline by which to measure contamination from gas drilling?
Who will be responsible for funding this water testing?
Without knowing the types of “proprietary chemicals” used by gas drilling companies, how will we know what to test our water for?
Once contamination is found in our water systems, who will be responsible for providing us with clean, potable water?
Given the possibility that fracturing fluids may migrate over time, how long will responsibility for water contamination endure?
What comparable studies will the DEC research to come to their conclusions about how to deal with this real threat to our water?

The 1999 United Nations Programme Report stated, “The environment remains largely outside the mainstream of everyday human consciousness, and is still considered an add-on to the fabric of life.”  I fear that though water is the very essence of life, we are willing to put money above this irreplaceable resource.  I hope that we never have to explain to our children, our grandchildren, and countless generations beyond why we were so shortsighted as to burn down the house to stay warm for one night.

Thank you for considering my grave concerns as you move forward in this critical work.

Sincerely,

Joan Tubridy
Delhi, NY



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Mar 9
2009

Thursday, March 05, 2009

Ploughing resources into the use of natural gas as an alternative energy supply could lead to global shortage within 20 years time, according to a leading energy expert.

Professor in Physics at Uppsala University in Sweden, Kjell Aleklett, says reliance on natural gas – believed by many to be a key source of alternative fuel for the future – would be a major mistake.

Whilst it could provide a short term solution to the energy issue, Professor Aleklett believes it is not the long term answer we need to tackle what he predicts will be a continuing decline in global oil production.

Professor Aleklett will outline his views this evening (Thursday 5 March) in his lecture Global Energy Resources – The Peak Oil View– which takes place as part of the institution’s Energy Controversies lecture series.

Professor Aleklett said: “The problem we should be concerning ourselves with is not climate change but the fact that there are too many people and not enough energy resources.

“We have reached a level where economic growth in the oil and gas industry is no longer possible. Looking for alternative energy sources has to become a key priority to counteract the continuing decline in global oil production which I predict we will experience.

“Many are looking to natural gas as a solution for electricity production in the future, but this is a massive mistake. Natural gas could generate enough energy to meet the demand for the next five to 10 years, but it is not a long term sustainable option.

“To expand the use of natural gas would be a mistake which could have catastrophic economical consequences for UK, Europe and across the globe in 20 years time. When we are hit by “Peak Gas” there are no alternatives for power generation. We have a discussion about future energy policy – it’s time to start to discuss the future power policy.”

http://www.oilvoice.com/n/Natural_Gas_as_Answer_to_Oil_Decline_Could_Lead_to_Catastrophe_Says_Leading_Expert/0f1ba832.aspx



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Mar 6
2009

Modified from a post on MarcellusGasInfo:

The following is an outline from James Lovelock’s book, Revenge of Gaia, pages 74-76.  Lovelock is a member of Britain’s Royal Society (a scientific body) and originator of the Gaia theory, which postulates that the atmosphere, oceans,  and biosphere (all life)  compose a single system that regulates the Earth’s climate.
——————
To reduce global warming, governments welcome the chance to burn natural gas instead of coal or oil.

The main constituent of natural gas is methane – one molecule is composed of 1 carbon and 4 hydrogen atoms.

For the same amount of energy, methane combustion releases only 1/2 as much carbon dioxide as burning oil or coal.

Unfortunately, some natural gas leaks into the air before it is burned. Society of Chemical Industry’s 2004 report indicates 2%-4% of natural gas is lost to leakage.  Most of the leakage is at production sites, but leakage also occurs in pipelines and in our homes.

Methane is 24 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Methane has a shorter residence time in the air: 8% oxidizes each year.

In 12 years, only 37% of escaped methane remains, the rest having oxidized into carbon dioxide and water vapor.

Carbon dioxide has an effective residence time in the air of between 50 and 100 years.

If only 2% (the conservative end of the 2-4% estimate) of natural gas leaks before burning, it causes, over a period of 20 years, a peak global warming equal to coal burning.

If 4% leaks, natural gas causes 3X more warming than coal burning over a 20 year period.

The claim that natural gas halves carbon dioxide emissions is only true if there are no leaks anywhere (and also if the CO2  emissions from the very hydrocarbon-consumptive extraction process is not factored in).

Difficult to find estimates of natural gas leakage.  An April, 2004 article in the journal Nature estimates 1.4% leakage from Russian piplines and 1.5% from US pipelines.  This report does not include leakage at production sites or when the gas is burned.

Failure to consider the effects of natural gas leakage on global warming is a serious gap in our knowledge.  The International Panel on Climate Change(IPPC) should study this phenomenon further.

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Mar 6
2009

1) compose an e-mail sort of like this one…Heck, it could even BE this one:

—————————————–

Why the softball approach to T Boone Pickens?  He used you. And you’ve got to keep abreast with your viewers, many of whom already know the following:

A) His only agenda is his own profit – but he’s pretty damn slick at making it look otherwise, isn’t he?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70HFEHB6dag

B) The “Energy Plan” is his ticket to increasing demand for a dirty fuel that ruins lives everywhere it’s extracted, and in fact will NOT be used for energy independence.  A great deal of it is slated for export.  I’m talking about natural gas, or as we like to call it, UN-natural shale gas.   The process of hydraulic fracturing, which pollutes vast amounts of precious water across the nation and leaves dead zones and sick  people in its wake, is used to get natural gas out of tight shales.   We need clean water, clean air, healthy cropland and healthy people much more than we need a few years’ worth of a dirty hydrocarbon fuel.

Want to know more?  Visit:
http://www.un-naturalgas.org
http://un-naturalgas.org/weblog/?cat=107

http://txsharon.blogspot.com/2009/03/take-action-tboone-pickens-gets-free.html

http://otegony.com/t-boone-pickens
http://www.journeyoftheforsaken.com/fracpage.htm
http://www.journeyoftheforsaken.com/whatyouneedtoknow.htm
http://www.journeyoftheforsaken.com/consortiumofthefraced.htm
http://www.endocrinedisruption.com/home.php
http://www.earthworksaction.org/oil_and_gas.cfm

THIS is the story you should be telling.  Women across the country will thank you.

As will I.
————————————-

2) Add or substitute your own URL or your favorite URLS (can you imagine, 50 URLs a day?*)

3) Go to the e-mail page for The View:
http://abc.go.com/daytime/theview/ask

4) Paste your e-mail into the window and send it.

It would be great if we could get a hundred e-mails in to them in the next couple of weeks – enough for them to notice, anyway – a counter-offensive to industry efforts to increase demand for un-natural shale gas.  The marketplace rules:  less demand, less pressure on us and our homes, water, air, politicians, regulating agencies…

*With apologies to Arlo:

"And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a
study in black and white of my fingerprints.  And the only reason I'm
singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar
situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if you're in a
situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into
the shrink wherever you are ,just walk in say "Shrink, WE DON'T WANT YOUR
STINKIN' UN-NATURAL SHALE GAS."  And walk out.  You know, if
one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and
they won't take him.  And if two people, two people do it, in harmony,
they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them.
And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in
singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an
organization.  And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said
fifty people a day walking in singin' a bar of Alice's Restaurant and
walking out.  And friends, they may think it's a movement.

"And that's what it is , the Anti-Shale-Gas Anti-Massacre Movement, and
all you got to do to join is ... put your URL on the end and e-mail it."

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Mar 5
2009

T Boone Pickens is on a roll.  He pretends to be about wind power, but that deal is really about absconding with other people’s water supply.  (This should sound really familiar to all of us here in DEC [Fracking 'R Us] territory.)  Here’s the real scoop:

So, ya gotta wonder:  what’s he really up to with pushing “The Energy Plan”?  – otherwise known as The Pickens Plan, and which, by the way, includes more and more and more not-so-very-much- “cleaner-burning”  un-natural shale gas.

Are you still feeling OK?  Then consider how Pickens titled the link to the video below on his site (take our word for it; don’t go there, go here instead: http://txsharon.blogspot.com/2009/03/take-action-tboone-pickens-gets-free.html):  “Boone Campaigns For Women.”  (Pickens, you’re smarmy and pathetic.)  When in fact, he’s campaigning for his own interests and trying to sell it TO and THROUGH women, not FOR them.

And how come some higher-up tells Barbara Walters to “be nice to him”? Ahem.   And what on earth got into Whoopi?  Blech.

OK, you look chartreuse enough; you don’t have to drink the frack water.  Yet.

Here’s the link to The View’s e-mail URL:

Let them know that any energy plan that T Boone Pickens is shilling is a pig in a poke.  We don’t want his un-natural shale gas.  And we’re not buying his wind-power-as-an-excuse-for-water-theft either.

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Mar 5
2009

Last night, the noise was way over the top from the well that was due for fracking this week. From about 1 a.m. to 3 a.m., the noise level was unbelievable. We were inside our house, which has fairly good windows, and we literally had to shout to hear each other inside. The booming and crashing, what sounded like alarms going off, and loud honking were incredible. I don’t know if they had another equipment malfunction, but we couldn’t sleep. I let my kids sleep in and drove them to school (the bus comes at 6:45) and the other moms bringing kids in at 8:00 or so were all complaining about the noise.

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Trackback  •  Posted in Bad Neighbors, Community Effects, Cost Externalization, General, On the Bleeding Edge  


Mar 4
2009

I finally heard from the DEP about the results of testing they did of my water and well. I do have methane, but lower in level than some of my neighbors whose wells have exploded, etc. He said he will stop by to check for free methane in the head space of my water well again, now that we have it capped loosely enough to remove. I asked him if the level of methane could increase now that they are fracking the well on the other side of my house, and he said it is possible, with all of the activity going on. He is finding some methane in almost all the wells around here. This seems consistent with the idea that it can migrate for miles through an aquifer. The contaminated wells that I know of in Dimock are in clumps, with apparently ok houses with wells between them. I definitely need to test for bacteria. Today I accidentally drank some water and got violently sick. That’s how it was for the months of December and November last year, for our whole family, which was when they were drilling and fracking  the gas well 500 feet from our water well. We stopped drinking the water after our next door neighbor noticed her water smelled strongly of solvents or formaldehyde, and the lady about 5 houses away had her water well explode.

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