U.S. fracking linked to higher hospitalization rates: researchers

Image Credit: REUTERS/ANDREW CULLEN

People who live in areas near hydraulic fracturing are more likely to be hospitalized for heart conditions, neurological illnesses and cancer, according to researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University.

Fracking is an oil and gas extraction technique using a mixture of water, chemicals and sand to break apart underground rock formations. It has triggered a surge in U.S. energy production in recent years, along with a debate over whether the process causes air and water pollution.

The study, published this week in the journal PLOS ONE, looked at hospitalization rates in parts of Pennsylvania from 2007 to 2011 and found them significantly higher in areas with fracking compared to those without.

“At this point, we suspect that residents are exposed to many toxicants, noise and social stressors due to hydraulic fracturing near their homes and this may add to the increased number of hospitalizations,” Reynold Panettieri, one of the study’s authors, said in a press release.

The team found that 18 ZIP codes in its study had a well density greater than 0.79 wells per square kilometer, and residents living in these ZIP codes were predicted to have a 27 percent increase in hospitalizations for heart conditions compared to areas without any drilling. The study also showed higher rates of hospitalization for neurological illness, skin conditions and cancer.

The researchers said the study does not prove any cause and effect between drilling and health problems but that the findings “suggests that healthcare costs of hydraulic fracturing must be factored into the economic benefits of unconventional gas and oil drilling.”

Read Full Article: Reuters

Oklahoma says fracking companies can be sued over earthquakes

Oklahoma’s highest court agreed energy companies can be sued for injuries to people and damage to property sustained during earthquakes.Plaintiffs in two lawsuits claim fracking companies are responsible for the earthquakes.

In a 7-0 decision, with two justices abstaining, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the plaintiff, Sandra Ladra, may seek damages from two energy companies for injuries sustained to her legs during an earthquake on November 5, 2011.

The quake shook the victim’s hometown of Prague, causing rocks to fall from Ladra’a chimney onto her legs. It was the highest magnitude trembler the state has ever experienced, registering 5.7 on the Richter scale.

“The size of rock is about the size of your head, certainly, and a significant sized and heavy rock,”Scott Poynter, Ladra’s attorney, told KFOR News Channel 4.

Poynter told the news channel Ladra is not looking for a payout, but the industry needs to stand up and pay for the problems they’re causing. Ladra has been in pain since the incident and Poynter said she is going to have knee replacement surgery.

Specifically, the lawsuit was filed against two Oklahoma companies, New Dominion and Spess Oil Company. It claims the companies’ storage of wastewater from the fracking process in high-pressure disposal wells is causing shifts in fault lines, resulting in earthquakes.

Earthquakes have been shaking central Oklahoma since late 2011. The Oklahoma Emergency Management Agency said three earthquakes in the Prague area with magnitudes of 5.0 and higher had destroyed six houses and damaged 172 others from November 5 to 8 of last year.

Attorneys for New Dominion and Spess argued in court that the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, not the court system, was the proper venue for damage claims, because the commission has sole authority over oil and gas operations, but the state’s Supreme Court justices disagreed.

“Allowing district courts to have jurisdiction in these types of private matters does not exercise inappropriate ‘oversight and control’ over the (Corporation Commission),” says the opinion, written by Justice James Winchester. “Rather, it conforms to the long-held rule that district courts have exclusive jurisdiction over private tort actions when regulated oil and gas operations are at issue.”

The court’s decision also gives the go ahead to another lawsuit filed against the same two energy companies over property damage, this one filed by Jennifer L. Cooper, also of Prague. Cooper claims her home sustained more than $100,000 in damage from three Prague earthquakes.

Poynter is also representing Cooper and is seeking class-action status for another suit covering nine counties in the state, which, if granted, could lead to damage awards potentially worth tens of millions of dollars. The suit states that the class would consist of people in those counties who have owned homes or business properties since November 5, 2011.

The US Geological Survey found that central Oklahoma experienced one to three 3.0 magnitude earthquakes per year from 1975 to 2008, The Nation reported. That number jumped to an average of 40 a year from 2009 to 2013.

Read Full Article: RT

New York formalizes ban on fracking, ending 7-year review

Image Credit: NCPR

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — New York formalized its ban on high-volume hydraulic fracturing for natural gas on Monday, concluding a seven-year environmental and health review that drew a record number of public comments.

“After years of exhaustive research and examination of the science and facts, prohibiting high-volume hydraulic fracturing is the only reasonable alternative,” Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Joe Martens said in announcing the decision. “High-volume hydraulic fracturing poses significant adverse impacts to land, air, water, natural resources and potential significant public health impacts that cannot be adequately mitigated.”

In its decision, the DEC noted that more than 260,000 public comments were submitted on its environmental impact study and proposed regulations, an unprecedented number. The agency said most of the comments urged it to severely restrict or prohibit fracking.

New York is the only state with significant natural gas resources to ban fracking, which has allowed other states to tap huge volumes of gas trapped in shale formations deep underground. The technology has produced new jobs, created economic growth and reduced energy prices but has triggered concern that it could pollute air and water, cause earthquakes and pose long-term health effects that aren’t yet known.

While environmental groups praised the ban, drilling proponents have said the decision was based on politics rather than on science.

“Hydraulic fracturing is a proven, 60-plus-year-old process that has been done safely in over 1 million American wells,” said Karen Moreau, executive director of the New York branch of the American Petroleum Institute. “Surging production of natural gas is a major reason U.S. carbon emissions are near 20-year lows.”

Moreau noted an Environmental Protection Agency report earlier this month that found fracking had not caused widespread threat to drinking water, but it warned of potential contamination of water supplies if safeguards aren’t maintained.

“Remaining questions cited by EPA have all been addressed by a wide array of strong state regulations, industry standards, and federal laws,” Moreau said.

Read Full Article: AP

Study: Mega injections of wastewater triggers more quakes

Image Credit: AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File

WASHINGTON (AP) — The more oil and gas companies pump their saltwater waste into the ground, and the faster they do it, the more they have triggered earthquakes in the central United States, a massive new study found.

An unprecedented recent jump in quakes in America’s heartland can be traced to the stepped up rate that drilling wastewater is injected deep below the surface, according to a study in Thursday’s journal Science that looked at 187,570 injection wells over four decades.

It’s not so much the average-sized injection wells, but the supercharged ones that are causing the ground to shake. Wells that pumped more than 12 million gallons of saltwater into the ground per month were far more likely to trigger quakes than those that put lesser amounts per month, the study from the University of Colorado found.

Although Texas, Arkansas, Kansas and other states have seen increases in earthquakes, the biggest jump has been in Oklahoma. From 1974 to 2008, Oklahoma averaged about one magnitude 3 or greater earthquake a year, but in 2013 and 2014, the state averaged more than 100 quakes that size per year, according to another earthquake study published Thursday. Since Jan. 1, the U.S. Geological Survey has logged more than 350 magnitude 3 or higher quakes in Oklahoma.

Studies have linked the increase in quakes to the practice of injecting leftover wastewater into the ground after drilling for oil and gas using newer technologies, such as hydraulic fracturing. Recent studies have linked the damaging 2011 magnitude 5.7 quake that hit Prague, Oklahoma, to a nearby high-rate injection well.

Unlike other studies, this new University of Colorado study looked at 18,757 wells that were associated with earthquakes within 9 miles of them and the nearly 170,000 that didn’t have any quake links. Looking for the difference between the two groups, researchers determined that it was how much wastewater was pumped and how fast, said lead author Matthew Weingarten.

Even though quake-associated wells were only 10 percent of those studied, more than 60 percent of the high-rate wells — 12 million gallons or more — were linked to nearby earthquakes, the study found.

And of the 45 wells that pump the most saltwater at the fastest rate, 34 of them — more than three out of four — were linked to nearby quakes, the study found.

Physically, it makes sense because “high-rate injection creates much higher pressure over the relative time scale,” said study co-author Shemin Ge, a hydrogeology professor at the University of Colorado.

Possible other factors Weingarten and Ge looked, such as cumulative amounts of saltwater injected or depth, didn’t show up as significant in the large database.

A different study that just looked at quake-struck Oklahoma, released at the same time in the journal Science Advances, pointed more toward cumulative amounts of liquid rather than high rates. But study co-author Mark Zoback of Stanford said both papers can be right because factors might be slightly different in Oklahoma than elsewhere.

Read Full Article: AP

The Texas town that banned fracking (and lost)

When a Texas town voted to ban fracking inside city limits, it was a shock to the oil-friendly state. But the response from the Texas legislature and energy firm has residents questioning what power they have left.

The hydraulic fracturing has started again in Denton, and so too have the protests.

Months ago, the town became the first in Texas to ban hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in their area.

Fracking is a method of shale gas extraction that uses large amounts of water pumped at high pressure into channels drilled into rock to release gas.

It has been a boon for US energy production and the focus of major protest from environmental groups

But while this part of Texas is no stranger to oil, the fight back against fracking was driven by extreme proximity.

“There are nearly 300 wells in the city limits of Denton, but this neighbourhood was sandwiched by two gas well pad sites,” says Dr Adam Briggle, a Denton resident and an environmental studies professor at University of North Texas.

“It was when people saw this and how close to homes they were drilling that we realised we had to look after each other here.”

Campaigners turned to the ballot box. They received the required signatures to put a town-wide fracking ban to a vote and took on powerful Texas energy companies.

“They threw everything at us, but the harder they worked to turn it into a knock-down political fight, the more it turned against them,” Dr Briggle says.

In November of last year, Denton voted overwhelmingly to ban fracking, and the drilling stopped immediately.

“It felt like vindication, an indication that grassroots democracy can still work in this country,” Dr Briggle says.

Not everyone thought so. The very next day, two lawsuits were filed in Austin, the Texas capital.

“What was at stake here were the rights of those families, mineral owners, that were being denied access to their property which is protected under the US constitution,” says Todd Staples, President of the Texas Oil and Gas Association.

“Our operators were very willing to work to find solutions, but the path that Denton took was unsustainable,” he says.

Mr Staples has been one of those lobbying not only to overturn the ban in Denton, but also to ensure such a ban never happens again anywhere in Texas.

And he has gotten what he wanted. In May, the state passed a bill that in essence, prohibits bans on fracking.

Fracking has undoubtedly revolutionised the energy industry here.

But there are questions about the environmental impact and the nuisance of drilling sites near residential areas. It’s what moved Denton residents to act.

At a site on a hill just outside the town, a tall barricade has been erected.

This is the site where fracking was about to begin in November 2014, just as Denton voted for the ban. Just days after it was overturned, trucks and heavy machinery are rolling back in.

As we spoke to residents, it was clear many were not opposed in principle to fracking, but just the way it had been done in their town.

“I’m not totally against fracking, I just think they should give more thought and consideration to people already there,” says a woman who didn’t want to give her name, but who is one of the closest neighbours to the new fracking site.

There’s also a feeling that both the energy companies and politicians who had supported fracking behaved arrogantly.

“People are trying to frame us as being crazy environmentalists,” says Dwight Jillik, who lives close to a fracking site with his wife and two young children. “But this issue rallied this community in a way that has nothing to do with left, right or moderate views.

Jillik says the companies just didn’t “give a damn”.

“No one ever returned our calls or answered our letters about our concerns about fracking.”

Texas is a state with a reputation for supporting local control. Many Denton residents are angry the fracking has resumed, despite their vote.

Mr Staples argues the vote to ban fracking in Denton was motivated by scaremongering.

“The opponents of the oil and gas industry were providing information that water quality was damaged, air quality was damaged and gave misinformation about what was occurring,” he says.

But even for many of those with environmental concerns, like Dr Adam Briggle, there is now a new dimension to their outrage over what has happened in Denton.

“I think the biggest point now is not what the rules are, but who gets to make them,” Dr Briggle says, adding the new law strips Texas communities of their power.

Read Full Article: BBC News

Alabama Earthquakes Stun Residents And Geologists Alike

Early one morning last November, Jim Sterling was frightened when the ground began shaking outside his 156-year-old antebellum home in Alabama.

He grabbed his gun and ran outdoors, where he found horses galloping, cows mooing and dogs barking. It was an earthquake.

“I heard a boom and felt the shaking,” Sterling said. “It really upset me.”

Since that day, more than a dozen weak earthquakes have shaken western Alabama’s Greene County. Geologists are now working to find out what has caused this swarm over the last seven months, in an area of the South that’s used to large tornadoes but not light tremors.

“It is interesting that recently there has been more activity there than in the last four decades,” said Sandy Ebersole, an earthquake expert with the Geological Survey of Alabama.

Records from the U.S. Geological Survey show the first of 14 earthquakes occurred on Nov. 20, when a magnitude 3.8 earthquake was recorded about 10 miles northwest of the community of Eutaw. The second occurred in mid-December, followed by another in January and three within a few hours of each other on Feb. 19.

The tremors have continued ever since, with the most recent occurring June 6, when a magnitude 3.0 quake rattled the area. All the tremors have been weaker than the initial jolt in November, and Ebersole said some have been too slight for residents to detect.

Located about 35 miles from Tuscaloosa, the whole of Greene County has only about 8,700 residents, and the area where the quakes are occurring is sparsely populated. Farmlands and forests are dotted by hunting preserves and old homes left over from Alabama’s past as a cotton-producing, slave-holding state.

Experts have installed a seismic monitor in a field to enable them to get better information about the quakes, none of which has caused major damage. Ebersole said researchers are trying to rule out potential causes such as blasting for quarries and sonic booms. They’ve even held meetings with rattled area residents.

The quakes could be linked to underground cracks, or faults, found in the area in recent years at varying depths, Ebersole said. But just what has been causing the ground to shake is unclear.

One potential source that regulators are discounting is hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” a process for extracting underground oil or natural gas that has been blamed for earthquake swarms elsewhere, including Oklahoma. Wastewater is sometimes injected underground, a method the government has blamed for quakes.

While Greene County is on the edge of Alabama’s primary region for oil and gas production, state geologist Nick Tew said no such production or disposal work is going on in the area where the quakes are occurring.

Read Full Article: The Weather Channel

Fluid injection causes ground to creep before quakes

Image Credit: Yves Guglielmi/Institut Pythéas

Injecting water into a geological fault causes the rock to move harmlessly for a short time before it slips enough to produce an earthquake, a study shows. The discovery suggests that energy companies might be able to control the start of the earthquakes that they sometimes trigger as they inject fluids into the ground during oil, gas or geothermal exploration.

To test how fluid injections affect seismic activity, geologists squirted water 282 metres deep into rocks at an underground laboratory in southeastern France. They measured, more carefully than ever before, exactly how the ground shifted as the fluid coursed through it.

For the first several minutes, the ground moved quietly, with no earthquakes. “Only after a while do you see some seismicity occurring,” says team leader Yves Guglielmi, a geologist at the University of Aix-Marseille in France, whose findings are published in Science¹.

Pumping fluid into the ground can trigger earthquakes by unclamping the stresses that hold the sides of a geological fault together. The extra fluid relieves those stresses and allows the rock to shift.

Researchers have understood the basics of this phenomenon since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the US Geological Survey counted the earthquakes set off as operators injected fluids down an industrial well. But Guglielmi’s team went further by carefully controlling and measuring the whole process from start to finish.

Slip and slide

The researchers developed a cylindrical probe that can record precisely how a fault moves in all three dimensions, while monitoring fluid pressure². They lowered the instrument into a borehole that penetrates a fault in limestone rocks at the Low-Noise Underground Laboratory in Rustrel, France.

Over a half an hour, the scientists injected a total of 950 litres of water into the fault, at rates comparable to industrial injections. During the first part of the test injection, the rocks crept along without generating any earthquakes. Then they began to move faster, and small earthquakes began to break out. By the time the researchers turned off the water, one rock face in the fault had moved a little more than 1 millimetre past the other. “The experiment is quite tiny,” says Guglielmi.

If operators of commercial wells can monitor their equipment as carefully as the research team did, they might be able to control how much the ground slips by adjusting the rate of fluid injection, says François Cornet, a geophysicist at the University of Strasbourg in France. In 2009, a geothermal project in Basel, Switzerland, was shut down because of the risk of triggering earthquakes. In Oklahoma, oil and gas operators are facing a huge public backlash because of a rash of small earthquakes that have been rattling the region, almost certainly linked to wells that inject waste water deep into the underlying rocks.

Read Full Article: Nature

EPA: No “widespread” harm to drinking water from fracking

Image Credit: AP Photo/Keith Srakocic, File

WASHINGTON (AP) — Hydraulic fracturing to drill for oil and natural gas has not caused widespread harm to drinking water in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday in a report that also warned of potential contamination of water supplies if safeguards are not maintained.

A draft study issued by the agency found specific instances where poorly constructed drilling wells or improper wastewater management affected drinking water, but said the number of cases was small compared to the large number of wells that use hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking.

The EPA assessment tracked water used throughout the fracking process, from acquiring the water to mixing chemicals at the well site and injecting so-called “fracking fluids” into wells, to collection of wastewater, wastewater treatment and disposal.

The report identified several vulnerabilities to drinking water resources, including fracking’s effect on drought-stricken areas; inadequately cased or cemented wells resulting in below-ground migration of gases and liquids; inadequately treated wastewater discharged into drinking water resources; and spills of hydraulic fluids and wastewater.

Congress ordered the long-awaited report in 2010, as a surge in fracking fueled a nationwide boom in production of oil and natural gas. Fracking rigs have sprouted up in recent years in states from California to Pennsylvania, as energy companies take advantage of improved technology to gain access to vast stores of oil and natural gas underneath much of the continental U.S.

Fracking involves pumping huge volumes of water, sand and chemicals underground to split open rock formations so oil and gas will flow. The practice has spurred an ongoing energy boom but has raised widespread concerns that it might lead to groundwater contamination, increased air pollution and even earthquakes.

An estimated 25,000 to 30,000 new wells were drilled annually from 2011 to 2014, the report said. While fracking took place in at least 25 states, most of the activity occurred in four states: Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania and North Dakota.

About 6,800 public drinking water sources serving more than 8.6 million people were located within 1 mile of a fracked well, the report said.

The report identified 151 cases from 2006 to 2012 in which fracking fluids or chemicals spilled on or near a drilling well. The spills ranged from 5 gallons to more than 19,000 gallons, with equipment failure the most common cause. Fluids reached surface water in 13 cases and soil in 97 cases, the report said. None of the spills were reported to have reached groundwater.

Industry groups hailed the EPA study as proof that fracking is safe, while environmental groups seized on the report’s identification of cases where fracking-related activities polluted drinking water.

“After more than five years and millions of dollars, the evidence gathered by EPA confirms what the agency has already acknowledged and what the oil and gas industry has known: hydraulic fracturing is being done safely under the strong environmental stewardship of state regulators and industry-best practices,” said Erik Milito, upstream group director of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s top lobbying group.

But Lauren Pagel, policy director of the environmental group Earthworks, said: “Today EPA confirmed what communities living with fracking have known for years: Fracking pollutes drinking water.”

“Now the Obama administration, Congress and state governments must act on that information to protect our drinking water and stop perpetuating the oil and gas industry’s myth that fracking is safe,” she said.

EPA officials said the report was not intended to prove whether fracking is safe, but instead was aimed at how state regulators, tribes, local communities and industry can best protect drinking water and reduce the risks of fracking. The report has cost $29 million since 2010, the EPA said, with another $4 million expected this year.

“It’s not a question of safe or unsafe,” Tom Burke, deputy assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Research and Development, said in a conference call with reporters.

The issue for the EPA is “how do we best reduce vulnerabilities so we can best protect our water and water resources?'” Burke said.

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said the report was “the latest in a series of failed attempts” by the Obama administration to link fracking to systemic drinking water contamination.

“The Obama administration is now zero for four,” Inhofe said. “EPA, the U.S. Geological Survey and others have said that hydraulic fracturing is indeed safe.”

But Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., said fracking and related activities have the potential to severely impact the nation’s drinking water and endanger public health and the environment.

Read Full Article: AP

NAACP announces civil rights probe into N. Carolina coal ash pollution, fracking

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is exploring whether coal ash pollution and fracking pose disproportionate public health hazards to poor communities and people of color in one county in North Carolina.

The NAACP announced its probe Wednesday. It is specifically aimed at uncovering whether environmental racism has played a part in the placement of coal ash waste water and fracking test sites in Stokes County, North Carolina. The investigation has implications for communities of color nationwide, as well as for North Carolina’s decision-making processes determining where power plants and waste facilities are placed.

“We wish we didn’t have to, but we are committed to doing so, to investigate and really bring justice around this issue of coal ash and about fracking, and about the injustices of these industries that operate without any regard for the human rights of the people who are impacted by this pollution,”Jacqui Patterson, director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program, said at a news conference in North Carolina, according to Common Dreams.

The NAACP will be working with the organization’s North Carolina and Stokes County chapters during the investigation.

In an interview with RT, Patterson added that there have already been reports of health issues in Stokes County.

“The folks there have reported clusters of health impacts they are seeing in their communities, whether it is nerve damage, high levels of strokes, a number of odd cancers,” she said. “They are tying it to the pollution of the coal ash pond.”

Patterson said coal ash is residue left from burning coal to create electricity. It is either stored in piles or put into coal ash ponds. The ash contains innumerable concentrated toxins from selenium to lead to manganese.

The investigation could lead to a lawsuit, but Patterson said the organization first needs to find out what is going on and document not only the placement of the coal ash ponds, but the movement of the toxins, including how far they travel.

“Are they leeching into the groundwater? Are they leeching into the ground where people are growing food and then eating the food? Where are those points of exposure? Who is living there? What are the health impacts? What do hospital records show?” said Patterson.

Patterson argued that because poor communities are often not politically powerful, residents think companies are choosing to dump in those areas because they won’t find much resistance. This could be evidence of environmental racism, she said. Corporations and government officials, when approached, argue the sites are chosen because the property is less expensive or because water is available, stressing the choice of locations in minority areas is not intentional.

Patterson said it will be hard to prove intent, but the investigation will explore whether there is a pattern of discrimination in the location of facilities and the resulting impact on community health. If a pattern of discrimination is established to exist, a lawsuit will be filed to exact justice.

Read full Article: RT

Texas Governor Prohibits Cities And Towns From Banning Fracking

Image Credit: Star-Telegram

HOUSTON May 18 (Reuters) – Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Monday signed a bill into law that prohibits cities and towns from banning an oil drilling practice known as hydraulic fracking, giving the state sole authority over oil and gas regulation.

Lawmakers in Texas, a state that is home to the two of the most productive U.S. shale oil fields, have been under pressure to halt an anti-fracking movement since November, when voters in the town of Denton voted to ban the oil and gas extraction technique.

“This law ensures that Texas avoids a patchwork quilt of regulations that differ from region to region, differ from county to county or city to city,” Abbott, a Republican, said in a statement.

In fracking, a mixture of pressurized water, sand and chemicals is directed at rock to unlock oil and natural gas. Operators say it is safe because, but many environmental groups oppose the practice, calling it wasteful, polluting, dirty and noisy.

Read Full Article: The Huffington Post

Oklahoma set to overturn local drilling controls as backlash brews

Image Credit: Fortune

Facing a backlash over the side effects of its oil and gas boom, Oklahoma is poised to overturn an 80-year-old statute that allows cities and towns to ban drilling operations within their borders.

The legislation, now being finalised, would help insulate energy companies from local movements that have grown in response to the rapid expansion of oil and gas drilling and a dramatic spike in earthquakes across the central state.

Oklahoma now sees 600 times more tremors than it did before 2008, a surge seismologists say is linked to vast amounts of wastewater injected into the ground as a result of drilling for oil and from hydraulic fracturing – a process to extract natural gas that is also known as fracking.

The bill was championed by energy companies, which contend that local interference in drilling practices would endanger the production bonanza that has boosted their profits and brought the United States within sight of energy independence.

Opponents say the bill severely restricts the right of local communities to protect themselves from the earthquakes and drilling operations that encroach on residential areas.

The move by Oklahoma’s Republican-majority legislature follows a similar law signed on Monday by Texas Governor Greg Abbott in response to a fracking ban passed by one municipality.

In April, the state-run Oklahoma Geological Survey said the rise in tremors is “very likely” linked to injection of wastewater into disposal wells.

Those concerns have spawned local protest movements, with some towns weighing new restrictions on oil and gas production, although none in Oklahoma have called for a total ban.

“The legislature has basically sent a message which is: we’re going to continue enabling the industry,” said Ed Shadid, a city councilman in Oklahoma City, where protests in December led to an oil company withdrawing plans for new wells.

The bill – which passed with strong majorities in both houses and now awaits changes in the Senate – would repeal a 1935 statute that gives municipalities broad rights to restrict oil and gas operations within their borders.

Under the new bill, municipalities can establish “reasonable” restrictions on oil and gas operations such as traffic, odor, or noise regulations, but cannot effectively ban drilling or other operations.

“We don’t feel it’s appropriate that the oil and gas industry should be singled out,” said Kim Hatfield of the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association, which supported the bill.

OIL’S BIG ROLE

Oil booms are synonymous with prosperity in Oklahoma, where production taxes on oil andnatural gas contributed more than 7 percent of gross state revenues in 2014. The state is now facing a $600 million budget deficit, in part due to the economic stress wrought by months of low oil prices.

“There are a lot of jobs and a lot of tax revenues realized through oil and gas production,” said Cory Williams, a Democratic House member who opposed the bill.

“There is a lot of hesitancy to do something that might appear to regulate or burden oil and gas.”

But officials in Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and other states at the forefront of the U.S. energy boom now face the challenge of balancing the revenue that comes from pumping more oil and gas with the problems it can cause for residents.

Central to that is what to do with the massive volumes of water generated by extraction.

While briny water is a common byproduct of oil and gas production, some of Oklahoma’s fields are especially water-logged, producing up to 20 barrels of water for every barrel of oil recovered. The state-wide average is about 10 to 1.

Injection wells are crucial to the economics of production in Oklahoma, those in the industry say. Firms including Devon Energy, Sandridge Energy, Tulsa-based New Dominion, and others operate disposal wells in Oklahoma.

“This really is the only way to dispose of the water,” said Dewey Bartlett, Jr., the mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s second-largest city, who is also president of a local oil firm.

Before the Survey’s announcement in April, state officials had been publicly skeptical the industry was triggering the quakes. As late as February, Republican Governor Mary Fallin was quoted saying the state didn’t know enough to understand the cause.

Hatfield, of the OIPA, said that no one within the industry “is disputing that it is a possibility” that injection wells and earthquakes are linked.

In March, the Commission ordered some well operators to prove they were not dumping water below the state’s deepest rock formation. Regulators also doubled the number of disposal wells under scrutiny.

This month, the Commission announced that more than 50 wells have reduced their depths, 150 wells have cut their water volumes in half, and other wells are keeping their volumes below 1,000 barrels per day. There are about 3,200 active oil and gas disposal wells across the state.

Still, Oklahoma is on track to hit 941 earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or greater in 2015, according to the survey, compared to 584 last year.

Read Full Article: Reuters

Texas officially prohibits cities from banning fracking

Image Credit: Reuters/Terry Wade

A new Texas law signed by Republican Governor Greg Abbott prohibits cities and towns from imposing local ordinances to prevent fracking and other potentially environmentally harmful oil and natural gas activities.

In debating the law, Texas lawmakers emphasized the state’s successful development of oil and gas for more than 100 years. The bill received a two-thirds majority vote in the Texas House and Senate. The law preempts municipal authorities from regulating oil and gas operations “within its boundaries or extraterritorial jurisdiction.” Local authorities can only pass ordinances and other measures to “regulate only surface activity” in ways that are “commercially reasonable” to oil and gas operations.

“HB 40 does a profound job of helping to protect private property rights here in the State of Texas, ensuring those who own their own property will not have the heavy hand of local regulation deprive them of their rights. This law ensures that Texas avoids a patchwork quilt of regulations that differ from region to region, differ from county to county or city to city,” said Governor Abbott in a statement.

“[It] strikes a meaningful and correct balance between local control and preserving the state’s authority to ensure that regulations are even-handed and do not hamper job creation.”

Texas lawmakers had introduced 11 bills to put limits on local control after 60 municipalities decided to restrict drilling or fracking in some way. The city of Denton outlawed fracking last fall, but was sued by the Texas General Land Office and Texas Oil and Gas Association after passing the ban. Denton is situated over the Barnett Shale, considered one of the largest reserves of natural gas in the US.

“It had gotten to the point where various municipalities have been writing extremely detailed and onerous ordinances, making it difficult for companies to operate,” Ed Ireland, head of the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council, told the Associated Press.

The passage of the law has angered officials in Denton, according to the Wall Street Journal. Officials said they only supported the ban after failed attempts to resolve quality-of-life problems, “including a well explosion and noisy drilling near homes and schools.”

“It’s a bad situation when city leaders’ hands are tied,” Denton Councilman Kevin Roden told the WSJ.“There seems to be an attitude that big state government knows better than the citizens of a city. I just think—conservative or liberal—that is something you don’t do in Texas.”

The law does include exemptions for Forth Worth and Dallas, both of which passed setback ordinances that push surface drilling away from residential and commercial areas. Dallas, specifically, doesn’t permit drilling closer than within 1,500 feet of homes, schools or churches. In Fort Worth, the distance is 600 feet.

Read Full Article: RT