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…b u t. . r e m e m b e r. . w h o. . w i n s. . i n. .t h e. . e n d .

Gas Drilling in Beautiful Susquehanna County, PA from VeccVideography on Vimeo.

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From “The Spill Seekers,” Outside Magazine, November 2010

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While I was in Louisiana, there was an event at the Cajundome, in Lafayette, called the Rally for Economic Survival:  11,000 people packed the place to hear the governor, the lieutenant governor, and, of all people, the executive director of the Louisiana Seafood Marketing and Promotion Board rail against the Obama administration for stealing their jobs by imposing a six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling.

“Enough is enough!” raged the lieutenant governor, Scott Angelle, in his thick Cajun accent.  “Louisiana has a long and strong, distinguished history of fueling America, and we proudly do what few other states are willing to do. …America is not yet ready to get all of its fuel from the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees!”

True, but of the six billion to seven billion barrels of oil consumed by the U.S. each year, only about 10 percent comes from federal Gulf of Mexico waters; we get the same amount from both the Persian Gulf and Canada.  Louisiana is no longer a significant source of crude, on- or off-shore.  What it does supply is cheap labor and a pliant local government.  In this, it’s eerily reminiscent of Third World places ruined by oil.  The BPs of the world would have you believe oil brings prosperity to the countries where it’s discovered, but it brings misery so dependably that economists have a name for the phenomenon:  the resource curse.

Ecuador, Venezuela, Iraq:  Bad things happen to countries “blessed” with oil.  The Niger Delta is the Mississippi River Delta’s separated-at-birth twin, offering the scariest cautionary tale of all.  This tropical river delta held some of the greatest wetlands on earth, with abundant shellfish, crabs, and shrimp, the foundation of the economy and culture, but it also harbored vast oil reserves.  In the past 50 years, Shell has grown preposterously wealthy off that oil, while Nigeria, with the tenth-largest oil reserves in the world, has become a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  Almost three times as much oil has spilled into the Niger River Delta as was spilled by the Deepwater Horizon:  546 million gallons and counting.  The creeks are black, and the crabs and shrimp are dead.  There are always leaking, corroded wellheads and pipelines.  Gangs of rebels and oil thieves roam the jungle.  Flaring rigs fill the air with mercury, arsenic, and carcinogens.  Disease is rampant.  The government is cardboard.

Southern Louisiana is no Nigeria, but it’s also no longer quite recognizable as the United States.  The trailer homes on pilings, the dearth of education, the chronic disease, the fat parish chiefs – I know the Third World when I see it.  Cajuns haven’t grown rich on crude; Houston has.  And when the oil runs out, there’s nothing left to fall back on.

I bet Angelle would simply argue that oil is worth billions more than seafood.  But that’s only because we aren’t sophisticated enough to put a value on all the multifarious “ecosystem services” the gulf provides:  benefits of the natural world, resources and processes we all too often take for granted.  If we were to add these things to the ledger – all that gulf seafood and the health savings from it, the hurricane protection and wildlife habitat in all those marshes, to name only a few – and apply the calculus of their self-perpetuating sustainability, the astronomical value would blow your mind.  It leaves petroleum in the pit.  … How much are all those acres of disappearing land worth?  What price the mental anxiety of a culture watching its homeland disintegrate?  How much added value do you assign oyster reefs because they’ve never, ever blown up and killed anyone?  It’s only ignorance – an inability to tally all the gains and losses – that makes oil look good.

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Do yourself a favor: pick up a copy at your favorite newstand and read the whole piece.  And say thanks to Outside Magazine.

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Pipeline ‘pig’ crashes through Grand Prairie home

GRAND PRAIRIE — Those worried about the growing number of gas pipelines in North Texas may have new justification for their concerns.

This time, it’s not a leak or an explosion, but a pipeline testing device that was launched into the air like a missile.

Some say the end result could have been just as deadly.

To Grand Prairie residents living near a pipeline construction project at Arkansas Lane and Highway 161, the equipment and activities had been little more than a eyesore.

Until last Friday, that is, when a device called a “pig” — being used to pressure test a pipeline under construction — was launched like a missile out of the end of a pipe, straight toward a house 500 feet away.

As the photographs provided to News 8 showed, it was a direct hit — right into Robert Heredia’s bedroom.

“It looked like a war zone in here when it hit, it was really bad,” Heredia said.

He and his wife were not at home at the time, but his daughter Christina was. While she was in another part of the house, he realizes the incident could easily have had tragic consequences.

“If it would have been 20 minutes later, she probably would have been in here getting ready to go to work,” Heredia said. “That’s what gets me as a dad… you know what could have happened.”

The 150 lb. flying object was retrieved by its owners, DFW Midstream. They admit their mistake and have offered to pay for damages to two homes.

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“It could have killed somebody,” [Heredia] said. “Still I haven’t heard from anybody since Friday, the day it happened.”

Heredia feels that by just paying for his damages, the company avoids paying a price for endangering lives.

Even though the accident took place on Friday, the incident was not officially reported to the Texas Railroad Commission until Wednesday after News 8 began inquiring about what happened.

Reportable incidents are supposed to be brought to the attention of Railroad Commission investigators within two hours.

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From an Associated Press article published 9/13/10:

“‘That’s an issue we’re going to have to look on a bigger scale — situations in which pipes of some age were put in before the dense population arrived and now the dense population is right over the pipe,’ he said.

“Thousands of pipelines nationwide fit the same bill, and they frequently experience mishaps. Federal officials have recorded 2,840 significant gas pipeline accidents since 1990, more than a third causing deaths and significant injuries.”

-  http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_pipeline_explosion

In February 2009 we posted here:

“The infrastructure is aging: For years Matt Simmons, the only Peak Oil activist among the oil & gas industry elite, has been warning about, besides peak oil, the aging energy delivery system:

“’If the world wants to keep using energy from oil and gas, it will have to rebuild the infrastructure and the cost of doing this could rival the combined cost of the World War II war machine, the post-war Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe, and the post-war buildout of the U.S. interstate highway system.’

“Simmons said the costs could be enormous–in the $50- to $100 trillion range. Triage needs to happen immediately to prioritize which links in the system are the weakest and need to be repaired or replaced first. Pipelines are old, some dating to World War II. The average age of the drilling rig fleets onshore and offshore is 24 years. Refineries are even older.”

Source:
http://blogs.oilandgasinvestor.com/leslie/2008/05/05/matt-simmons-rust-happens/

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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

See also

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?

Remember this when you hear those slick commercials touting decades worth of natural gas from tight shales

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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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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

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

and http://un-naturalgas.org/weblog/2009/03/if-2-leaks-the-co2-impact-of-natural-gas-is-the-same-as-burning-coal/

Gas line explodes in Panhandle

Nov. 5, 2009, 9:29AM

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.

Cancer-causing toxin found in air near gas facilities

State says more tests needed to assess cancer risk

Scientists call for more Dish air studies

Food for thought:

• Is this what we want here?
• On what basis doe the DEC’s draft Supplemental Generic Impact Statement base its claim that air quality isn’t going to be much of an issue in NYS?
• Natural gas accounts for about 24% of electricity generation in the US. What’s our individual responsibility to people living with the effects of natural gas extraction and transmission, no matter where it’s happening?

It’s past time for a real change.

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.

"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

By Times-Picayune Staff

October 03, 2009, 1:44PM

Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune
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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