Week-long well flaring, 24/7, West Virginia

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“‘I’ve signed farmers who were sitting there with broken-down equipment, a broken roof, losing money because they wouldn’t put a fence up to keep critters out of their corn silo,’ Casale said. ‘You go and write them a check and they’ve got a brand-new tractor and a brand-new Ford truck, and the corn silo’s still the same. You know that old adage, the shoemaker’s kid doesn’t have shoes? I hate to say it, but I see a lot of them worse off than when they started.’

“Sometimes, he told me, he found himself thinking, I’m killing this county.”

- Playboy,  current issue, “Drill!”

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We usually leave events to the events calendar.  The announcement below is worth an exception because of its particular combination of pic and text:  The industry and its lobbyists have been working the halls of state capitols and wining & dining local officials for a long time. The citizens were the last to know.

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Press release

July 15, 2010

Clearfield County (PA) District Attorney, William A. Shaw, Jr., announced that an investigation is ongoing to determine the circumstances surrounding the recording of fraudulent deeds filed at the Clearfield County Courthouse.

Shaw reported that “the investigation is focusing on irregularities that appear in several deeds claiming ownership of gas rights for nearly 2700 acres of property in the Morrisdale area, known as the Wigton Coal Reservation”.  Shaw stated that “the investigation began after the District Attorney’s Office received a complaint from a property owner seeking to enter a lease agreement with a gas company”.

Shaw said that “as a result of fraudulent deed recordings, land owners in the Morrisdale area seeking to enter lease agreements with gas companies may be required to file lawsuits to protect their legal interests.  Gas companies intending to drill wells are reluctant to enter lease agreements when ownership of the gas rights is clouded by fraudulent deed recordings”.

Shaw stated that, “the investigation has identified what appears to be fraudulently recorded deeds claiming ownership of gas rights.  The theft of gas rights may have an enormous economic impact on the true owners of the gas rights.  Land owners should not be required to spend thousands of dollars to file lawsuits to protect their ownership interests”.

Shaw is concerned that “many property owners may be making life altering decisions based upon inaccurate or false information”.  Shaw “encourages all landowners to exercise caution and seek the advice of legal counsel when entering into any type of agreement relating to gas rights”.

Shaw said that “any fraudulent recordings can impact land owners for many years if corrective action is not taken”. “Simply trying to buy or sell a house could become an issue if the fraudulent deeds are not identified and corrected”, Shaw said.

Shaw reported that the investigation has been referred to the Pennsylvania State Police, Woodland Barracks.  Shaw anticipates that criminal charges will be filed in the near future.

Shaw described the land identified by the investigation as generally surrounded by or touching the Deer Creek Road to the Allport Cutoff to the Morrisdale Allport Highway to the Deer Creek Road.

Anyone with knowledge or information about a crime is asked to call Clearfield County Crimestoppers at (800)-376-4700.

What happened to conservative values? It has been very disappointing to see our conservative values continue to dwindle under the pressure from large corporations.  In Texas our politicians talk conservative values right up to the point where they fail to follow them.  Two foundation pieces of conservatism, are property rights and the free market system.  In Texas, our “conservative” politicians have taken away both from the average Texan.  You are allowed to enjoy your property, as long a corporation or someone with more money doesn’t want it.  This used to be a state where you could move out in the rural areas, buy a piece of land, and live in peace.  Now if you move to the country to have some property, you are an immediate target for a corporation to take your land, or make it unlivable.

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The prime example of this is the oil and gas industry.  The State of Texas has taken away most of the rights that pertain to land ownership from the citizens and given it to these large corporations.  One glaring example is the natural gas pipeline midstream companies, which have been given the tremendous power of eminent domain.  These are private, for profit companies that have been awarded all the power of government to condemn property.  This not only takes away property rights, but it destroys the free market system that allows for a property owner to negotiate in good faith for the use of their property.  Instead the private property owners are immediately subjected to threats and intimidations.  Due to these companies being for profit, it is in their best interest to obtain the easement and install the pipeline as cheap as possible, and they use whatever tactic necessary to achieve this.  Therefore, private property owners are paid a fraction of the value of the land and not compensated for associated property damage.  This is not limited to the active drilling areas, due to pipelines being installed all over the state.

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Another example is what is known as forced pooling.  It has many names and variations, but again it is another method to transfer private property rights to large corporations.  This again takes away the requirement to negotiate in good faith from the private property owner for their mineral properties.  In Texas the minerals are the dominant property right, so the surface owners have little input on what happens to their property.  However, under forced pooling, the energy companies can even take your minerals without your consent.  This again takes away private property rights and undermines the free market system.  The private property owner also has no protection if something goes wrong in the process.  Therefore, these corporations can take your property without your consent, destroy it, and the only recourse is a lawsuit that may cost the private property owner tens of thousands of dollars.

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I have seen other “conservative” states like Pennsylvania following the Texas policy of destroying private property rights, and not allowing private citizens to enjoy their property investments.  I would urge the other states to not do it the “Texas Way”.  In Texas it is only worth owning property, if you are willing to concede that you have no right to enjoy that property.  So you must ask yourself if that is what you want for the citizens of your state.  Private property rights and free market system are the values that are important to the “Average Joe” trying to live the American Dream; let’s not continue to destroy this.

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Calvin Tillman
Mayor, DISH, TX
(940) 453-3640

“Those who say it can not be done, should get out of the way of those that are doing it”

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Deposit (NY) Courier, Letter to the Editor, 6.30.2010

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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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Dispatch from Dimock:

The activity has really picked up here and over toward Elk Lake. Truck
and tanker activity is steadily increasing. Water/whatever trucks
running all night long. A dump truck roared by while I was along the
road and it reeked of an oily smell-what was he hauling? Dirt roads
are being widened and built up. Watched Brown Tree employees cut giant
trees along a road that I considered one of the most beautiful walks
in Dimock. The well site at Rayias has a pit. Thought pits were out?
The Lathrop Compressor is just the beginning-it will be expanded as
more wells come on line. Pipeline paths everywhere. After some
optimism last few weeks I am sad to inform you-the destruction if in
full swing, it does not look like we will get any help here in
Susquehanna County. Heard a Cabot worker bought the bar a round at a
local bar, dropped $600.00 on the crowd. Business is good…

- Victoria Switzer

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Remember this?
New York State town supervisors & boards – do you want to be had by the short hairs?

Mt Pleasant supervisors had voted against MarkWest’s plans to expand their compressor stations.  Hickory’s been taking it on the chin from gas extraction, and the supervisors knew that more compressor stations were not in the community’s interests.

So Range Resources threatened lessors with the possibility that their royalties might be affected if the compressor stations couldn’t be built.  And the lessors fell for it and pressured the supervisors.  And the supervisors caved.

www.observer-reporter.com

Mt. Pleasant officials OK compressing station expansions

HICKORY _ Two gas compressing stations in Mt. Pleasant Township got the OK to expand after supervisors voted 3-0 tonight on an agreement with MarkWest Liberty Midstream.

Supervisors approved an agreement that will allow the company to expand its Stewart and Fulton stations up to five compressors each.

MarkWest had been turned down by the zoning hearing board in May when it applied to expand the stations. The company processes natural gas for Range Resources.

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Suggestions from residents that the township monitor the air for toxic emissions at the stations were not acted upon because officials said air monitoring is a matter handled by the state Department of Environmental Protection, not the township.

- Full story at Mt Pleasant Okays Compressors

credit: http://pafaces.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/an-a1-industrial-zone/

Another report:

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Mt. Pleasant OKs expansion plan for gas processor

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The new 30 pieces of silver: MarkWest will pay the township $50,000 within 20 days and another $25,000 within a year to put its compressors in what is still zoned as an agricultural industrial zone.

Yes, $75,000 to the town buys the residents’ loss of property values, health and quality of life. And we all thought some things were priceless.

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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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The lies, the cost-cutting, the diversionary tactics are all standard operating procedure for the natural gas industry and its regulatory agency pals

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Contributed:

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Yesterday I went to the gas fields in Bradford County PA to see first hand what was going on. What you see first is an unbelievable amount of trucks. Gas company trucks literally by the thousands. People seemed willing to talk about the gas biz.  It sounds like there are a very few winners in this deal and the rest are all scrambling to get the leftover crumbs. The wellpads are not everywhere you look, many are not in sight of the roads but the ones I did see were huge. Really, like walmart parkinglot size. The story you get is that if you get one of these monsters on your property you get rich, like multi-millionaire rich, of course everyone else just has to deal with an industrial operation on a level never seen in this area. There is no containing this beast once it gets in the door. It totally consumed the area. Anyone not involved in the gas business seemed oddly out of place.

So then I headed north and crossed the New York border and it all just stopped.  All of it, the good, the bad, the ugly. No army of gas company support services, no shellshocked locals, just good old here.

Note: see comment on this post – click on sun icon at lower left

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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

Thanks to Friends of the Upper Delaware

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheFUDR

http://fudr.org/