Big topic. Big state. Big thread.
Intro. Yes I Am a Traitor Since this topic has been the subject of much discussion lately, I will say up front that I live in Texas. I have lived here for more than forty years. I practiced medicine here for over a decade and watched my patients suffer the effects of environmental neglect. Right now, I live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. That will not make a difference to those who are going to accuse me of “Texas bashing” for having the temerity to write something critical about
my state. Some folks will probably accuse me of being a stealth Californian, even though I use Texas colloquialisms frequently in my work (how many people from San Francisco talk about “folks”?)
Recently, I suggested that Texas, with its decade of redder than red Republican rule, has been able to avoid rock bottom unemployment levels, because of its policies which favor business over the needs of employees and the community. This was considered heretical. Unpatriotic even.
Well, I am going to commit treason again and criticize the
Barnett shale . Or rather, recent attempts to tap the natural gas buried beneath the Barnett shale in the urban area of Fort Worth, my home.
I. What Is the Barnett Shale? If you live in the Metroplex (Dallas-Arlington-Fort Worth) you know what the Barnett shale is. It’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It is a $25,000 check for anyone lucky (or unlucky) enough to own an acre of land in certain parts of North Texas. It is drilling rigs in urban areas and contaminated water spills and dirty air….
What? You have not heard about that last stuff? Maybe that is because the folks who tell the news in this part of Texas do not want anyone to get a bad impression of the urban and suburban gas wells that are putting money into the pocketbooks of local governments. Money is good. For some of us, money is more than good. It is godly.
If you need a primer on the Barnett shale, wiki’s entry is probably accurate enough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnett_ShaleBasically, Texas was once a shallow ocean and lots of organic matter got trapped below sediment that later turned into rock hard rock with trapped natural gas. Lots of natural gas. At one point, drilling was thought to be impossible. That was before they invented so called horizontal drilling, a process in which water is used to fracture the bedrock and release the gas.
Unfortunately, natural gas is not the only thing released.
II. Don’t Breathe the Air I can remember when the air in Fort Worth was---a breath of fresh air. After growing up in the mega-polluted Gulf Coast region south of Houston, it felt great to be able to go outside in the summer without having a asthma attack.
Then, something began to change. I first noticed it among the patients in my family practice in the late 1980s. People who had outgrown their childhood asthma began to suffer relapses. Or kids, whose asthma had been mild up until that point, began requiring hospitalization in the summer. One local physician’s teenage daughter dropped dead of asthma. So did a beauty queen. These were people who had never been seriously ill. After a few seasons of this, it became clear that something was in our air besides oxygen and sunshine.
In the 1990s, the federal government declared what Metroplex residents already knew. Our air was not safe. Something had to be done. Dallas-Fort Worth responded by blaming folks outside the region for our poor air quality. Half of our air pollution came from the Houston area, they said. We could not be held accountable for what Houston did. This lead to a series of missed deadlines (and missed opportunities) as area leaders scrambled to do a whole lot of nothing----while promising that things would get better if we just had a few more years. Below is the
plan which they finally came up with last year, a decade after the problem was identified.
http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/e51aa292bac25b0b85257359003d925f/c86667176ecbffa685257479006b7219!OpenDocumentMore about North Texas air quality here.
http://www.tceq.state.tx.us/assets/public/implementation/air/sip/dfw/DFW_SIP_fact_sheet.pdf http://www.tceq.state.tx.us/implementation/air/sip/dfw.htmlWhat is that I hear?
Lay off the air. At least we have jobs. Air pollution does more than send asthmatics to the hospital (and morgue). Air pollution is also a proven cause of heart attacks. And childhood pneumonia. It has been implicated as a factor in infant mortality (which is sky high in Tarrant County). It forces kids and adults to stay indoors, which cuts down on their exercise and Vit. D (from sunlight). Vit. D is being recognized now an important protector against heart and other disease.
Thank God we finally have a plan!
II. The Best Laid Plans….Something funny happened between the late 1990s and today. For years, we who live in this area have been told that our air pollution comes from two sources. One is from the exhaust of cars and trucks. Since a busy Metroplex is an economically prosperous Metroplex, it is hard to call for reductions in road use. Mass transit is very unpopular in many regions of the south, because it allows poor folks and minorities to visit the areas where rich folks live and shop. For instance, the city of Arlington, the 7th largest city in Texas and 50th largest in the nation has resisted efforts to create a city wide system of buses. When the issue comes up for a vote, neighborhood “safety” is cited as a reason to reject public transportation. If God wanted poor people to shop for groceries and have a decent job, he would have given them a car.
The other half of our air pollution comes from “point” sources. For years we have been told that these are factories far, far away. Or Mexican forest fires in the spring. Or acts of God that we have no control over. And then, a report about the Barnett shale came out last year. A scientist calculated that
half of our area ozone actually comes from natural gas wells in the north Texas area, including urban wells. Today, the state of Texas confirmed his results.
http://www.star-telegram.com/metro_news/story/1413456.html State environmental officials say that an SMU researcher was correct: Gas drilling in the Barnett Shale contributes about as much air pollution to the Dallas-Fort Worth area as car and truck traffic.
But the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality doesn’t plan on taking any action about chemicals released during gas drilling because they typically happen in rural areas, not in the immediate metro area, where the EPA is forcing state and local governments to control air pollution.
And it’s more efficient to tackle the Metroplex’s air problem by going after other sources of pollution, such as cars and trucks, Andrea Morrow, a spokeswoman for the environmental commission, said via e-mail.
But…but…Does this mean we will finally get a working mass transit system? If they are planning one, it is being kept a secret. Most of the talk in Fort Worth is about a new freeway that will connect downtown with the southwestern suburbs. And that will mean more, not less road traffic.
You can not blame North Texas for allowing tens of thousands of natural gas wells to be built in the area at the same time that we were supposed to be thinking of some way to clean up the air. I mean, who knew that natural gas drilling caused air pollution?
Smog and other airborne emissions are caused by the natural gas process. A study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency showed in 2003 alone natural gas drilling and production added 125.9 million metric tons of methane, a greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere. That makes natural gas production the second-largest source of methane in America and nearly a fifth of all methane produced in the country during that year.
The University of Colorado researchers found natural gas-related emissions didn't just contain methane but also chemicals like benzene and formaldehyde.
http://dthreetechnology.blogspot.com/2008/12/money-talks-in-natural-gas.htmlOh my.
So basically, at the same time that we were supposed to be working to reduce our toxic air emissions, we have been
doubling the amount that we pour into the atmosphere by building all these wells.
III. God Damn the Barnett Shale For a while, you could see the words
God Bless the Barnett Shale plastered across Fort Worth buses. Actor Tommy Lee Jones was hired to convince us that true Texas patriots supported urban gas drilling. After all, it has made a lot of folks a lot of money. From the link above:
In 2007, Chesapeake's total assets were valued at $30.7 billion, with net income of $1.4 billion. Devon had assets and net income of $41.4 billion and $3.6 billion, respectively.
Yet property owners make money too. And Fort Worth city staff said before residents complained about environmental degradation, they needed to ask themselves whether they too played a role in that.
"What the citizens probably didn't take into consideration is that they had total control whether drilling is coming to their neighborhood," Fullenwider said. "If they decided they didn't want to lease, then drilling wouldn't be happening."
snip
"The main thing is: Watch the greed," Young said. "People look at the money only and forget the things that matter the most."
http://dthreetechnology.blogspot.com/2008/12/money-talks-in-natural-gas.htmlThis article provides a useful summary of the many problems which urban gas drilling has caused. People have lost property to eminent domain. Turns out that gas drillers are considered a utility, and utilities have more rights than the rest of us. There has been increased road traffic. Toxic spills containing radioactive material have occurred….
Radioactive material?
http://www.texaskaos.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=5635 The Texas Railroad Commission is investigating the site of a tanker truck spill near Vandagriff Elementary School that appears to be contaminated with Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material (NORM). Rancher Jay Marcom measured low level radiation at the site on October 23rd after a tip by an Aledo resident reporting dead trees and grass near the scene of a tanker truck accident. The operator, Texas Transco, was hauling water produced from gas drilling when the truck overturned on September 26th.
Mr. Marcom, who owns land in Parker County, purchased his own Geiger counter to test for radiation after his ranch in Stephens County was contaminated by a spill involving produced water from a gas drilling storage tank. Mr. Marcom believes that trucks carrying produced water should have warning labels to alert first responders to possible hazardous materials in gas drilling waste including NORM and BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene and xylene).
According to Marcom, the real danger is not from the low level radiation, but from the radium molecules that bond with the chlorides in the water to form scale deposits. "The concern is if the powder becomes airborne and is inhaled, the radium would never leave your body. The half-life of radium is 1600 years." The United States Environmental Protection Agency's website describes radium as a potent human carcinogen.
The phrase “a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips” comes to mind. In our short sighted zeal to acquire a few extra bucks, are we creating a problem that will haunt our children?
IV. Don’t Drink the Water….Assuming You Can Find Any Urban gas drilling in north Texas has another effect on the water. It uses it up. Anyone who lives in the Southwest, knows that water is becoming the new oil. Cities must have the stuff in order to grow. Farms need it, too. As communities expand in size, they began to compete with agriculture for limited water reserves. The north Texas area has been stricken with drought a number of times since I moved here. Such problems are likely to get worse in the future, since this is an area that sees a lot of growth.
Growth in the natural gas drilling industry will only increase our need for water.
http://www.jsg.utexas.edu/news/feats/2007/barnett/thirst.html To coax gas out of the concrete-like Barnett Shale, operators pump large amounts of water down their wells to fracture the rock. One horizontal well uses about 3 million gallons of water. Most of the water for these so-called “frac jobs” comes from groundwater.
According to the Texas Railroad Commission, in 2005, about 2.6 billion gallons (or 8,000 acre-feet) of water were used for frac jobs in the Barnett Shale. That represents 1.6 percent of the water pumped from the Trinity Aquifer for all human uses.
That might not seem like a large percentage. It is an average, though. In some areas, gas drilling might represent 10 or 20 percent of the local usage.
“On average for the aquifer, this is not a big deal,” says Jean-Philipe Nicot, a geological engineer at the Bureau of Economic Geology. “But for some heavily drilled areas like Denton County, it may be an issue. If that drilling expands elsewhere in the area it may become significant.”
Right now, the city of Fort Worth is so desperate for more water that it is trying to purchase it from Oklahoma. If that falls through, I guess we could start recycling and reusing our city waste water. However, the waste water from Dallas-Fort Worth is what keeps the Trinity River flowing, and the Trinity fills Lake Livingston which gives Houston water. So, increased water needs up here can affects folks down south.
Hmm. Since they have been sending their air pollution up here, maybe it is only fair that they share in our drought.
V. Go Boom! The title means just what it says. Gas drilling has lead to…explosions. If the well happens to be in an urban area, it leads to urban explosions.
http://startelegram.typepad.com/barnett_shale/2008/05/erath-county-sa.html Last year, in Erath County a saltwater disposal well caught fire and blew up.
A report from the Texas Railroad Commission says the initial explosion blew a saltwater tank up and out of a protective dirt berm. It landed 40 feet away. Contaminated water and hydrocarbons leaked into a nearby stream. Hours later, the operator still had not called a cleanup crew, the report says.
Good thing that explosion happened in a rural area and not in a city, where wells are often built in parks and near homes. City leaders in Fort Worth reacted by banning saltwater tanks.
Here is more on exploding gas wells.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,178903,00.html The pipeline exploded just before 2 a.m. Friday near the intersection of U.S. 180 and Texas 16, about 12 miles west of Palo Pinto.
The sound from the blast shook residents for miles around an area, and the flash was visible for 100 miles, Palo Pinto County sheriff's dispatcher Linda Ezell told Associated Press Radio.
The blast formed a large crater and ignited secondary fires for a mile around, but just one worker at a nearby drilling rig was slightly injured, Sheriff Ira Mercer told Dallas-Fort Worth television station WFAA.
The secondary fires were been extinguished, but the residual gas continued to burn throughout the predawn hours, Mercer said.
Here is YouTube with video footage of a gas well fire in Parker County in 2007. Luckily, the site was rural again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQOiJ3Ne7j0 The woman who was forced to let a gas company build a pipeline in her front yard (see the dthreetechnology link above) probably thinks about that footage from time to time. Imagine that fireball in your backyard. But we all know that gas well operators will be extra cautious in urban areas…
However, less than a year earlier, on April 22, 2006 in the Forest Hill area of south Fort Worth an explosion at a natural gas well killed one worker and forced hundreds of residents out of their homes.
http://www.durangotexas.com/eyesontexas/fortworth/barnettshale.htm. VI. Minor Nuisance Chances are that most folks who live next to a natural gas well with never wake up to see a fireball in their backyard. However, many of them are going to have a problem with noise.
The public hearing opened with a presentation from the Gas Drilling Task Force to talk about proposed amendments to add a noise mitigation plan to the gas well permit application. Many in the crowd, when it came their turn to speak, related their experiences with excessive noise, caused not only by well fracing, but the by the 24-hour-operations of compressors. One speaker talked about buying a home next to a vacant lot and never receiving a straight answer about the lot's intended use. Within months a well site moved into the location and he claims to wake up and go to sleep every day and night to the sound of a compressor, a sound he compares to hearing a plane go overhead.
http://www.pegasusnews.com/news/2008/jun/09/gas-drilling-task-force-public-hearing-draws-large/Noise pollution is a serious public health problem, which can affect your hearing and your physical and mental well being.
http://www.geogise.com/environmental-issues/noise-pollution.phpIf the neighborhood well keeps you awake at night, maybe you can spend that time counting the money you got from your gas lease check---as I mentioned before those can be as high as $25,000. What? You didn’t get a check but you still have to listen to the noise? Join the club. From the PegasusNews link above.
The feeling of desperation came from all the individuals who had experienced how little the laws protected their property rights and quality of life. They were mostly fed up with the Fort Worth City Council, who one speaker remarked, "has yet to see a high impact permit it wouldn't approve." For many in the room, the Task Force represented their last hope to be protected, and several reminded Chairman Bob Riley and the other members of that responsibility during their allotted three minutes.
Someone else wrote it, not me. I am not here to bash Texas. I love the state enough to live here. That is why I want it to be a place where people can thrive just as well as business.
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