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Excerpted from
Dubious Path to a Green Future
Originally published on 6/28/10
Many energy experts contend natural gas is the ideal fuel as the world makes the transition to renewable energy. But since much of that gas will come from underground shale, potentially at high environmental cost, it would be far better to skip the natural gas phase and move straight to massive deployment of solar and wind power.
by Daniel B. Botkin
For several years, many voices, including Texas energy baron T. Boone Pickens, have been touting natural gas as the best energy source to form a bridge between the current fossil-fuel economy and a renewable energy future. Proponents contend that not only is natural gas a cleaner-burning fuel than coal, producing lower greenhouse gas emissions, but that reserves of natural gas are far greater than previously believed because of vast reserves trapped throughout the U.S — and around the world — in huge underground formations of shale.
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But what is the reality behind the optimistic claims for shale gas? The U.S. Geological Survey lists natural gas “reserves” — the amount believed to be in the ground — in four categories: readily available with current technologies, which accounts for only 1 percent of the known natural gas in U.S. territorial limits; technically recoverable (5 percent); marginal targets for accelerated technology (6 percent); and unknown but probable (84 percent). Shale gas shares the fourth category with coal gas and methyl hydrates. The latter are a kind of water ice with methane embedded in it and occur only where it is very cold, in Arctic permafrost and below 3,000 feet in the oceans.
In researching how best to make the transition to the green energy future, one of the first calculations I made was to find out how long the natural gas in each of the four categories would last if we obtained it independently — that is, only from U.S. territory. I was shocked by the result: Just using our 2006 rates of use of natural gas consumption — not including any major transition to fueling our cars and trucks — the “readily available” gas within the United States would be exhausted in just one year. That, plus what is called “technically recoverable” gas, would be gone in less than a decade. What is termed “unknown but probable” would last about a century.
This means that any significant increase in our consumption of natural gas will have to come from the “unknown but probable” reserves, much of which will be from formations of shale, a sedimentary rock formed from muds in which bacteria released methane. Most of this gas is so deep underground or otherwise not very accessible that nobody is really sure that we can get at a lot of it, or of how high an environmental price we must pay to retrieve it.
Read entire piece at e360.yale.edu
Analyst: Shale gas may be next bubble to burst
Eric Fox: What could go wrong with shale plays
Must-read: How neutral is the potential gas committee?
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Tags: alternative, Pickens, shale gas
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“Once you know, you can’t not know.” – Calvin Tillman
image credit http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/27/2938051.htm
“Once your water’s polluted, it’s too late.” – citizens of New York State
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Tags: water contamination
Editorial, The River Reporter, Narrowsburg, NY
http://www.riverreporter.com/issues/10-06-10/editorial.shtml
A bridge to nowhere
As we approach peak oil—the point at which petroleum production enters into decline—the major focus of the energy sector has been on finding ways to suck up every last drop of increasingly inaccessible fossil fuels. The result has been the development of increasingly invasive and complex technologies, and the extension of production to more and more vulnerable and ecologically vital areas, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Upper Delaware watershed.
It has been argued that this pursuit is justified because we need such reserves as a bridge to a future in which humankind relies solely on renewable energy sources. There is some merit to this argument; certainly, we cannot stop producing oil and gas overnight. But the thing to remember about bridges is that their principal purpose is to get to another place, and that there is no point in building a bridge if you find out, when you get to the other side, that by building the bridge you have destroyed your destination.
To avoid destroying our destination in this particular case means that the human race should establish a goal of leaving as much fossil fuel in the ground as possible. Climate change is proceeding at such a pace that, according to a joint study released in May by Purdue University and Australia’s University of New South Wales, there is a 50/50 chance that half of the globe’s surface will have become uninhabitable by 2300. Even if we find ways to extract the most inaccessible fossil fuels left in the crust, it would be suicidal to burn it all.
But we have to find, extract and burn up some of it. And since it is getting riskier to extract the remaining reserves and production is extending into ever more sensitive and vulnerable areas, it is more important than ever to take care about what we are doing. The lesson of the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is that we cannot let our greed and desperation to scrape the bottom of the fossil fuel barrel blind us to the potentially disastrous consequences of the methods we use to do so.
To this extent, those who insist that Marcellus Shale drilling should be undertaken full speed ahead, without any further environmental study and with a minimum of regulation, cannot claim that natural gas drilling is justified as a bridge. By ignoring the consequences, they make it clear that they don’t care where that supposed “bridge” eventually leads.
At the June 2 announcement by American Rivers that the Upper Delaware has been chosen as its most endangered river of 2010, there was a telling exchange between Rep. Maurice Hinchey and a heckler in the crowd that bears on this issue. Hinchey was speaking about the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf as an illustration of why it is important to be scrupulously careful as to how drilling is regulated. At this point, someone in the crowd shouted out, “That’s why we need to drill on land, in the Marcellus Shale!”
What is interesting about the heckler’s comment is that it was not made in response to an assertion that we should altogether ban drilling in the Marcellus shale—a position we have never heard Hinchey espouse—but only to the idea that the Gulf disaster teaches us how important comprehensive and well-enforced regulation of drilling is. There is no way in which the inadvisability of drilling in the deep ocean, or anything else about the horrific events in the Gulf, can be taken to mean that we must drill in the Marcellus without careful study and stringent oversight. On the contrary, such precautions must be part of the architecture of any bridge that can get us safely to a sustainable energy future.
But there is one more step that must be taken if natural gas and other remaining fossil sources are truly to serve as bridges: we need to focus the majority of our time, money, personnel and imagination on developing the alternative energy sources and sustainable lifestyles that lie on the other side. The longer we focus on exploiting the next piece of the disappearing fossil fuel stockpile, the further off that other side will get.
This is an area in which the American people, industry and government have all fallen down badly. But events like the American Rivers “endangered river” designation provide at least a symbolic start. They remind us that there are things more vital than the stop-gap pursuit of a vanishing energy source. If we proceed full bore ahead to suck the Marcellus Shale dry, only to find when we are done that we have lost our river, streams, forests, wildlife and personal health, it will turn out that natural gas was, after all, nothing but a bridge to nowhere.
Republished with permission; source River Reporter.com
Tags: bridge fuel, bridge to nowhere
Is natural gas really a clean fuel?
“Natural gas is marketed as a clean fuel with less impact on global warming than oil or coal, a transitional fuel to replace other fossil fuels until some distant future with renewable energy. Some argue that we have an obligation to develop Marcellus Shale gas, despite environmental concerns. I strongly disagree.
“Natural gas as a clean fuel is a myth.”
- Cornell professor: “Gas and drilling not clean choices”
See also Cornell scientist tarnishes natural gas’s clean image
The Associated Press reports:
Gas line explodes in Panhandle
Nov. 5, 2009, 9:29AM
AP
Flames blazed more than 400 feet high above a natural gas line explosion that rocked Bushland, Texas about 1 a.m. today.
BUSHLAND — A natural gas pipeline exploded in the Texas Panhandle on Thursday, shaking homes, melting window blinds and shooting flames hundreds of feet into the air, authorities said. Three people were injured in the blast, which occurred at 1 a.m. near Amarillo, and they were taken to an area hospital with burns, said Potter County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Roger Short. “My home is about 20 miles something away and I could see the flames from my home,” Short said. “You could hear the roar of the flames 20 miles away.” Firefighters were able to contain most of the flames by 5:30 a.m. though small grass fires continued to burn, Short said. Nearby residents were evacuated, and the pipeline’s gas was shut off, Short said. One house was destroyed, and several others were damaged in Bushland, about 15 miles west of Amarillo, he said. “The heat onto the homes, it did a lot of damage. You could see blinds inside the homes that were melted … it was very hot,” Short said. Bushland Middle School principal, Mark Reasor, said about 60 people who were evacuated took shelter at the school for a few hours before returning home before dawn. Gas service had been cut off to nearby homes and Bushland’s schools, officials said. Messages left with the hospital for conditions of those injured were not immediately returned Thursday. A team of investigators was heading to the pipeline, said Robert Newberry, a spokesman for El Paso Natural Gas. El Paso Natural Gas is a subsidiary of Houston-based El Paso Corporation.
Tags: pipelines
Unnatural Gas: The Inflated Promise of a Not-So-Clean Fuel
Meanwhile, in competing with Big Coal for the affections of Congress, the newly formed America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA) launched an $80 million advertising and lobbying campaign earlier this year to promote its “clean, abundant, American, reliable, and versatile” product. As climate bills work their way through Congress, ANGA’s efforts appear to be paying off.
Risking our water so we can burn more natural gas will not be the planet’s miracle climate cure. For the United States to achieve necessary reductions in greenhouse emissions – estimated at more than 80 percent – will require not more energy production, even if somewhat cleaner, but deep cuts in energy consumption.
Coal must be phased out as quickly as possible, but more gas won’t accomplish that. While electric utilities’ gas consumption doubled from 1996 to 2007, coal use continued its steady climb.
What if, with shale drilling, we could achieve another doubling of gas-fired electricity generation, but this time eliminate an equivalent amount of coal-fired generation? Even that steep escalation of gas drilling would cut the utility industry’s carbon emissions by only 12 percent and the nation’s total carbon emissions by just 5 percent, based on Energy Department figures.
Financier T. Boone Pickens recommends running our vehicles on natural gas. But substituting natural gas for gasoline in all vehicles would reduce the nation’s total carbon emissions by less than 9 percent. Converting all gasoline-powered vehicles would consume more natural gas than electric utilities, homes and businesses combined. Consequences for the nation’s water would be disastrous.
Natural gas is being hailed by some, including Pickens, as a high-energy “bridge” to a renewable future, and by others as sufficiently climate-friendly to be a “destination” fuel. But as gas’ environmental drawbacks become more evident, it’s looking more like a bridge to nowhere.
Read the entire piece at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/04-5
http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/article/20091031/NEWS01/91031008
Two teens killed in gas pipeline explosion
Two teenagers died in an early morning explosion at a gas pipeline in Carnes.
Wade White, 18, and Devon Byrd, 16, died at site of the explosion, which happened around 4 a.m. today near White’s home on Phillip White Road.
Byrd was a sophomore at Forrest County Agricultural High School and White had just graduated.
“They were two wonderful kids,” said Wanda White, Wade’s mother. “We just can’t understand what happened. My babies are gone.”
White said she and her husband were awakened by a noise early in the morning. After discovering the boys weren’t in the house, they discovered the fire just a stone’s throw from their home.
“Pretty much in the middle of nowhere” describes a lot of places in upstate New York. What natural gas has done to DISH, Texas, it will do to us too.
"DISH is located just off FM 156, a few miles west of I-35 and Denton. It's pretty much in the middle of nowhere, which, from the drillers' point of view, made it the perfect place for gathering, compressing, and transmitting natural gas to and from all directions." - Fort Worth Weekly, 10/14/09
And what has the natural gas industry done to DISH, Texas, that it will also do here? Here’s an excerpt from an October 14 article:
The wind blows through pretty freely now, however, since most of the trees have recently died.
“After the explosion and what happened to my horses, all my boarders took their horses out of there,” said Burgess, now 56. “Who could blame them? This was going to be my retirement, but now it’s valueless.”
The words “valueless” and “worthless” come up a lot in conversation with people from DISH.
Read the entire article:
Sacrificed to Shale
More from DISH’s mayor:
The news that I continually get makes this nightmare worse and worse. I have yet another twenty something young lady who has undiagnosed neurological problems that started when she moved here. She has been shipped out of state for testing on a number of occasions, and they have been unable to diagnose the problems she is having. I am having difficult time in know what the next move should be. I wonder if there is a medical doctor out there who may come to help us here? Maybe there would be someone who could perform toxicology tests on the citizens. Please give me any input you may have, and if you know of anyone who may be willing to help, please let us know. Maybe you could post something on your websites or blogs soliciting help. Together I know you reach thousands of people. Thanks.
Calvin Tillman
Mayor, DISH, TX
(940) 453-3640
Tags: air emissions, air pollution, deaths, DISH, livestock, pipelines, TX
http://www.weny.com/News-Local.asp?ARTICLE3864=9148471
| Corning Gas Pipeline Leaking for 2 Years | |
| Patrick Card | |
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| October 13, 2009
Caton, NY — A Caton man says a gas pipeline running through his property has been leaking for almost two years. Gary Jellifs told WENY-TV News that the pipe was fixed once but started leaking again just a few months later. Now he says Corning Gas Company is unwilling to fix the pipe because the company has bigger problems to deal with. “You guys are our last option. We called everybody. We went through the proper channels. We called the gas company. We called the fire department. We called the state organizations and you guys are our last chance,” Jellifs said. “People need to know these gas lines are dangerous. Somebody needs to do something,” he added. The pipe can be heard bubbling underneath the surface and natural gas is visibly escaping from the hole in the ground. Corning Gas Vice President of Operations Matt Cook admitted it has known about the leak for years and have largely ignored it because of more pressing concerns. But he also claimed they are among the best in New York State at replacing old pipeline. “We’re replacing pipes with new more modern material in order to prevent leaks from occuring and to eliminate any existing leaks that are out there.”  |
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Residents returning home after gas pipeline catches fire in Marrero
By Times-Picayune Staff
October 03, 2009, 1:44PM
A giant ball of fire covers most of 4th Street near the intersection of Ames Boulevard on Saturday.
About 40 apartments at the St. Bakhita complex were evacuated as a precautionary measure after a fire in a gas pipeline in the 4000 block of Fourth Street at Ames Boulevard, authorities said. The $22 million apartment complex opened in April.
No one was injured in the incident that was reported around 10:25 a.m. Chief Rickie Eslick of the Marrero-Ragusa Volunteer Fire Department said that residents were allowed to return aroiund 12:30 p.m.
Eslick said the cause of the fire is still under investigation.
Atmos Energy officials said they received a report shortly after 10:30 a.m. of a fire near an 18-inch main gas line that runs long Fourth Street. Company officials said they believe that a gas leak from the pipe was ignited by overhanging Entergy powerlines, causing the explosion and fire.
Entergy officials could not be reached for comment.
Complete story at: http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/10/post_41.html
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NewsAdvance.com, Lynchburg, VA reports:
Appomattox heals, one year after pipeline blast
Published: September 12, 2009
APPOMATTOX — Deputy John Mattox still patrols the stretch of Virginia 26 that’s just north of town.
He passes the spot daily — right there, at the crest of the hill — where a year ago he stopped, stepped out of his cruiser and snapped a photo.
He knew what he had to do early that Sunday morning, and he thought it would kill him. The photo, he reasoned, would help investigators piece together how he died.
As he felt the air sucking away from him and into an expanding fireball just down the hill, Mattox tucked the camera under the driver’s seat. Then he ran toward the inferno fueled by a ruptured natural gas line, going door to door to move residents from their homes to safety.
A year later, new grass and weeds cover the scorched earth. The wreckage of two homes blown apart in the explosion is gone. Except for melted siding on a few homes up the road and some boarded-up windows, there is little physical evidence of the blast that rocked this tight-knit community on Sept. 14, 2008.
Even Mattox’s photo is gone. He deleted it from his camera a few months later.Details of that day, though, are seared in his memory. It is the same for many Appomattox residents who lived through the crisis — similar to the way that history-changing events are etched in the minds of those who experienced them, like President John F. Kennedy’s assassination or the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Greg Heath still remembers his panicked realization that morning that the pipeline he helped maintain had ruptured.
The Williams Gas Company employee was awake in his bed when the phone rang. As he answered the call, his wife went to the window. She yelled for him to come look.
“I looked at the fireball and I knew we started it,” he said. “The only thing that can burn like that is a ruptured pipeline. I thought, `Good God, we’ve set the world on fire.”
Heath has worked for Williams for 24 years and is trained in what to do in an emergency. He hopped into his truck and drove to the compressor station, a tenth of a mile from his home. The control panel there showed dangerously low pressure in one of the lines. He pushed a button to shut down the pumps that moved gas through the lines.
As he tried to report the rupture to the company’s control office, other local Williams employees called from valve locations along the pipeline demanding to know which line to shut down completely. They didn’t need to be called. They had seen, and heard, the rupture.
Heath didn’t go out to the site of the blast until four days later.
“I was devastated,” he said. “Everything was just blackened and awful. It was like a piece of hell.” Heath still doesn’t like to ride past the site, about three miles from his home, even though most evidence of the damage has been erased.
“It was hard for me to see what we had done,” he said. “Those people lost everything they own. … I felt like we did a good job of taking care of what needed to be done.”
Mattox, the deputy, was called a hero for his actions getting residents to safety. He knows it is a miracle, really, that no one died in the blast.
“This caught me off guard by its magnitude,” he said recently. “I will always remember the size of that fireball. That fireball was massive. … I believed that it would spread to adjacent residences.”
Just before Mattox took the photograph, he met Junior and Dorothy Bryant on the road as they fled from the cloud of dust and the rocks that punctured their roof and landed in their living room.
A year later, Bryant’s home — located a few hundred yards from the blast site — sits empty with a for sale sign in the front yard. Sometimes, he drives to his home of six years and sits in the driveway just to think. The Bryants never really returned to that house except to gather their belongings.
The couple lived with family members for a few months before settling with Williams. The company bought their old house and their new one, just down the street from the company’s compressor station. Some people joke about their new address, but Dorothy loves the house, Junior Bryant said.
“People look at us like, `Didn’t you get enough?’” he said. “I don’t find no fear in it. This thing was not supposed to happen.”
He’s hiked and hunted along those pipelines for most of his life. The Bryants looked at other places after the blast, but fell in love with the spacious house on Pumping Station Road.
It took a while, though, for Junior and Dorothy to be comfortable in their new home. Sounds of maintenance on the compressor station startled them. And once in a restaurant when a balloon popped, Junior almost hit the bottom of the table.
He thanks God that he and his wife are still alive.
“If it had been at night, I’m not sure we would have gotten out,” Bryant said. “If we hadn’t gotten out before the fireball, we wouldn’t have made it.”
He remembers sitting in the emergency shelter eating dinner with Dorothy that night a year ago.
“I would have thought it would never happen to me, where we live,” Bryant said. “We were sitting there eating dinner and thinking, `Wow, this is real.’ One morning things are normal and the next, the world’s upside down.”
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The rupture brought the pipeline to the attention of many in Appomattox who had previously ignored it.
“People in the county didn’t know the pipeline was near their houses,” said Timmy Garrett, Appomattox’s fire chief. “We had people who bought their houses, and had no idea that they were 25 feet from a gas line.”
Now, strange or loud noises around the pipeline and compressor station prompt calls to emergency dispatch, said Bobby Wingfield, the county’s emergency services director.
“With the presence of the gas pipeline, any abnormality, any suspicious activity draws attention,” he said. “People, not just pipeline people, are more aware of it.
“It will take a while for people, when they hear a loud sound, to think it’s something other than the pipeline.”
KRGV.com reports, 9/13/09
RIO GRANDE CITY – The sky in Rio Grande City was lit up Saturday night by a huge fireball. It was the result of a natural gas pipeline explosion.
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Firefighters say it was a challenging blaze for them because they couldn’t get to it to tackle it. Fire crews waited for the gas company to turn off the gas to that location first and waited for the fire to subside a bit before battling it. The fire burned for at least two hours and then dwindled on its own.
Fire crews are meeting with the pipeline company tomorrow morning to find out what caused the explosion. They say one possibility is that the lines could be old. The lines will stay turned off for now.
Complete story at:
http://www.krgv.com/news/local/story/Gas-Pipeline-Explodes-in-Rio-Grande-City/9ZYzNbqk-kSpqAK11wFqYg.cspx
KRGV.com in Texas, 11/26/08:
Dangers of Gas Pipelines Under Neighborhoods
Reported by: Will Ripley
MCALLEN – NEWSCHANNEL 5 uncovered the potential danger caused by natural gas pipelines under Valley neighborhoods.
Six weeks ago, a natural gas pipeline exploded in McCook. The ball of fire was 400 feet high and over 1,500 degrees. The flames melted everything around them, including the asphalt on the road.
NEWSCHANNEL 5 spent the past six weeks traveling across Texas, digging up documents, and tracing a trail of pipelines. We found the pipelines weaving under your neighborhoods, your homes, and your schools.
We also learned natural gas is being blamed for a series of house explosions in north Texas.
“We have a very volatile situation,” says Jay Marcom. The north Texas farmer was in Austin, testifying to the Railroad Commission about the danger of natural gas pipelines. He says worn-out pipelines are leaking natural gas, polluting his land, and putting lives at risk.
“They’re just sitting out there waiting and rusting, waiting to explode,” Marcom says.
He agreed to come to the Valley with special equipment used to detect natural gas leaks. It didn’t take long before we found one. It was less than three miles from the McCook explosion site.
“You can smell the natural gas in this area,” commented Marcom.
NEWSCHANNEL 5 learned there are literally hundreds of miles of natural gas pipelines, running under thousands of Hidalgo County homes. This includes houses in McAllen, Mission, Edinburg, and Pharr. In fact, Hidalgo County has more pipelines than all the other Valley counties put together.
Railroad Commission documents show some of these lines are over five decades old. Back then, the pipelines were surrounded by empty fields.
Now, new homes and businesses are going up in the area. We’re told the land is too valuable not to develop.
“You’re moving out into the oil field and you’re exposing yourself to danger when you do that,” says Marcom.
City and pipeline operators work together to keep you as safe as possible. Companies try to keep a 50-foot buffer zone around the lines. But NEWSCHANNEL 5 found out that doesn’t always happen.
We saw one pipeline running directly underneath homes. Another pipeline runs right under McAllen Memorial High School.
Gas companies insist it is safe to build over pipelines, as long as the public knows they’re there.
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NEWSCHANNEL 5 spent two days searching for pipelines. Most of the sites looked well maintained. All of them were fenced off, keeping us and our testing equipment out.
We tried talking to the HESCO Gathering Company, which owns the pipeline that blew up in McCook. They also own gas lines that run right under Valley neighborhoods. They turned us down for an on-camera interview.
But they did agree to answer some of our questions by phone and email.
HESCO says they’re still waiting on lab reports to confirm the official cause of the McCook explosion. But they tell NEWSCHANNEL 5 it was likely a “corrosion issue.”
We asked if HESCO’s other gas lines are corroding too. They responded, “We do significant testing on our pipelines.”
But they couldn’t give us an exact date. They did say, “We are constantly inspecting and treating our pipelines.”
More than a dozen companies operate natural gas lines in the Valley. Only one company, Shell, agreed to an interview. They have three full time inspectors in the Valley. They check 600 miles of pipelines, preventing problems before they happen.
Shell spokesperson James Blanton says, “The safety of the public and the environment is of the utmost importance to us.”
We asked him if the accident in McCook could happen in McAllen.
“Yes, hypothetically, yeah it could happen,” says Blanton, “But I’m very confident it will not be a Shell line.”
The Texas Railroad Commission also has four inspectors covering more than a thousand miles of pipelines in the Valley. Their job is to make sure those pipelines are well-maintained.
But even the state admits whenever you mix pipelines and people problems are bound to happen. According to the Railroad Commission, 200 such accidents happen a week in Texas. That’s more than 28 accidents a day.
Most accidents happen when construction workers dig and hit a gas line.
Ramona Nye of the Texas Railroad Commission explains, “This is the number one cause of accidents in the state. We are working hard to reduce those accidents.”
The Railroad Commission will soon begin fining people who dig into pipelines, without calling to find out where they are.
But Marcom says with so many gas lines in such a populated area, it’s only a matter of time before the next big accident.
“You’ve got the same ticking time bomb out in the country, in McAllen, in the Valley, with these unregulated gas gathering lines that are just waiting to explode,” he says.
We should point out the local government makes millions of dollars in tax revenue from these gas gathering lines.
The official report on the McCook explosion is due out in two weeks. As soon as we get that information from the company that owns the line, we’ll share it with you.
If you’re buying a home, it’s up to you to look around and see if there are any gas pipelines in the area. If you live near a natural gas line, the Texas Railroad Commission says you should always call before you dig. You can dial 811 or call 800-545-6005.
If you see or smell gas, get away from the area immediately and don’t use your cell phone because it could spark an explosion. Once you’re in a safe area, call police to report a possible gas leak.
Complete story at:
http://www.krgv.com/content/news/investigations/story/Dangers-of-Gas-Pipelines-Under-Neighborhoods/IFdmgVrTAEqwnRvsStHctw.cspx
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