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Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Air Too Dangerous to Breathe: How Gas Drilling Can Turn Rural Communities Into Industrial Wastelands [With Photos]

AlterNet.org



Drilling is just the tip of the iceberg. Compressor stations have been associated with significant headaches, bloody noses, skin lesions, blisters, and rashes.

Photo Credit: Nina Berman/NOOR

View a slideshow from award-winning photographer Nina Berman below. You can see more of Nina's work at NOOR.

The exploding faucet may have launched the movement against fracking, but it's the unsexy compressor station that is pushing it to maturity.

Last week, more than a hundred activists from Pennsylvania and New York, including actor Mark Ruffalo, brought thousands of gallons of drinking water to 11 families in Dimock, Pa., who had been left dry after Cabot Oil and Gas stopped their water deliveries.

The mess Cabot created in 2009 from shale gas drilling had now been cleaned, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), which meant no more water for the Dimock 11, the holdout families in a long-running feud over water contamination and cleanup.

At issue was the safety of well water symbolized by a jug filled with brown fluid taken from Dimock resident Scott Ely's well. Held aloft by Ruffalo, who was flanked by families and Gasland director Josh Fox, the crowd challenged officials to come and take a swig if the water was so safe. Paul Rubin, a hydrogeologist, painted a grim picture, laying out a future of continued water contamination. The Ely water had arsenic, manganese, aluminum, iron, and lead at several times the maximum contaminant level (MCL) for safe drinking water.

The visuals were dramatic, and the anti-frack action ended with supporters triumphantly holding a huge water line that snaked from a tanker truck on Carter Road to a family's "water buffalo" — a large storage tank. The Dimock 11 were now supplied.

Next door pro-gas families and a Cabot industry representative held a dueling press conference calling their anti-frack neighbors liars and greedy for money. They bemoaned the besmirching of Dimock by their neighbors and outside agitators.

How the water went bad, how it was tested, when it was tested, who tested it and for what are just some of the issues confronting residents of the Marcellus Shale region and lawyers around the country suing drilling companies for alleged water contamination.

Many of these legal cases have lagged on for years, leaving residents dependent on bottled drinking water and "good neighbor" gestures by drilling companies that deny blame but temporarily supply water, until they decide to stop as Cabot did in Dimock.

Missing from this debate is what many environmentalists see as an equally important issue in shale gas exploration: the air quality.

An invisible product of the huge industrialization of the Marcellus Shale region is the air pollution created not just from thousands of transport trucks used in well construction and fracking, but the added infrastructure required to bring gas to market, most significantly the compressor stations.

These stations are essential to push gas through the pipelines. They can be loud; they emit methane, and BTEX compounds, benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes. They have been associated with significant headaches, bloody noses, skin lesions, blisters, and rashes. They operate continuously and permanently.

"Compressor stations are not just accessories to gas production facilities — they are large-scale industrial installations. In some parts of the West, compressor engines contribute an average of nearly 60 percent of all nitrogen oxide emissions from oil and gas operations," said Nadia Steinzor, the Marcellus Shale Regional Organizer for Earthworks.

The same day activists staged the water mercy mission to Dimock, a remarkable but largely unnoticed event occurred a few miles north, in Montrose.

At the local high school, for the first time ever in Pennsylvania history, the DEP allowed a public hearing on a compressor station.

The Shields station slated for Dimock is the fifth compressor station proposed in the last four months for Susquehanna County.

That the meeting even happened was considered by activists to be a great victory, given the longstanding secrecy and industry bias, which has characterized the Pennsylvania DEP.

"Pennsylvania has a history of welcoming extractive industries, so there is definitely more of a culture of let's move forward quickly on these," said Jay Duffy, a staff attorney for the Clean Air Council in Philadelphia. Canvassing door to door the past two months generated such a large number of written comments on the Shields application to convince the DEP to hold a hearing.

Residents who had never attended a protest, who didn't see themselves in the pro-fracking or anti-fracking camp, showed up to learn and express their concerns about air quality. They left with few answers.

"They are not providing the public with full files. When we request file reviews, they have been just allowing us to see the applications. They are not allowing us to see the full permit, " Duffy said. Last month, the Clean Air Council asked the EPA to step in, charging that the Pennsylvania DEP has consistently failed to comply with public input requirements regarding Marcellus Shale permitting activity.

A culture of secrecy and industry favoritism is just one problem. The other is that the Pennsylvania DEP refuses to acknowledge any kind of cumulative impact that occurs when one compressor station is followed by another and then another.

In Southwestern Pennsylvania, for example, there are now 10 compressor stations and a processing plant in a 13-mile radius.

"The DEP says these are all small sources, but when you have a house that is in the middle of it all, sucking in 900 tons a year of pollutants. Only the DEP is looking at them individually, the community is breathing them in cumulatively," Duffy said. The Clean Air Council is suing the DEP on the cumulative impact issue.

"They have a lot of exemptions for the industry. They have the failure to do inventory, the failure to do long-term monitoring. These are all things that are fairly unique in Pennsylvania — kind of kowtowing to the natural gas industry here," Duffy said.

Organic farmers Mary and Adron Delarosa and their young daughter sat through half of the hearing before leaving. Matt Walker, a Clean Air Council organizer had visited their one-room home earlier in the evening to urge them to attend. For more than a year, they had experienced the anxiety of living within a mile of four wells and not knowing if their water was safe. A compressor station is planned nearby. Already, farmers they know have been told their products are no longer wanted, because they are grown in Susquehanna County. The Delarosas left the meeting knowing one thing for certain. They won't be living by the new compressor station. In February, they're giving up their farm, putting their house on a trailer and leaving Pennsylvania.

Nina Berman is a photographer and the author of Purple Hearts: Back From Iraq.

Friday, December 2, 2011

Lawmakers Push Disastrous Legislation on Keystone XL

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 2, 2011
4:11 PM

CONTACT: Center for Biological Diversity

Noah Greenwald, (503) 484-7495

Lawmakers Push Disastrous Legislation on Keystone XL

Law Would Force Presidential Decision on Controversial, Destructive Pipeline in 60 Days

WASHINGTON - December 2 - The House Subcommittee on Energy and Power held a hearing today on legislation called the “North American Energy Security Act,” which would require President Barack Obama to issue a permit on the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline within 60 days of the law’s enactment or determine the pipeline is not in the national interest. The legislation comes on the heels of a decision by the State Department to delay the pipeline’s approval to allow for more study of its environmental impacts on our land, air, water and climate.

“Once again congressional Republicans are paying more attention to their deep-pocketed campaign contributors in oil and gas than to the American public, which overwhelmingly opposes more tar-sands development, including the Keystone pipeline,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “If it passes, this law will end careful consideration of the devastating impacts of Keystone, doing terrible damage to representative government as well as to the environment.”

The 1,700-mile pipeline would, every day, transport up to 35 million gallons of oil derived from tar sands in Alberta, Canada, through the middle of the United States to refineries in Texas. In the process it would cross hundreds of streams and rivers and pass through wildlife habitat that would be at an increased risk of disastrous oil spills.

Strip mining of oil from Alberta’s tar sands has already destroyed tens of thousands of acres of boreal forest and polluted hundreds of millions of gallons of water from the Athabasca River, creating toxic ponds so large they can be seen from space. Processing and refinement of tar-sands oil produces two to three times more greenhouse gases per barrel than conventional oil and represents a massive new source of fossil fuels, which leading climate scientist Dr. James Hansen has called “game over” for our ability to avoid climate catastrophe.

If this were not enough, the caustic oil known as bitumen, which would be transported across six states and thousands of water bodies, poses an unacceptable risk of spill. An existing pipeline, Keystone 1, has already leaked 14 times since it went operational in June 2010; one spill dumped 21,000 gallons of tar-sands crude. Another tar-sands pipeline spilled more than a million gallons in the Kalamazoo River.

“From the Alberta tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico, the Keystone XL pipeline would be an environmental disaster,” said Greenwald. “Americans deeply value clean air and water, and we need to be able to trust our leaders to protect our children’s future. Keystone XL should not be approved at all, and clearly it shouldn’t be rushed to approval by cynical politicians making an end run around democracy.”

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At the Center for Biological Diversity, we believe that the welfare of human beings is deeply linked to nature - to the existence in our world of a vast diversity of wild animals and plants. Because diversity has intrinsic value, and because its loss impoverishes society, we work to secure a future for all species, great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction. We do so through science, law, and creative media, with a focus on protecting the lands, waters, and climate that species need to survive.