Frackopoly: The Battle for the Future of Energy and the Environment
274
Frackopoly: The Battle for the Future of Energy and the Environment
274eBook
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Overview
Over the past decade a new and controversial energy extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as fracking, has rocketed to the forefront of US energy production. With fracking, millions of gallons of water, dangerous chemicals, and sand are injected under high pressure deep into the earth, fracturing hard rock to release oil and gas.
Wenonah Hauter, one of the nation’s leading public interest advocates, argues that the rush to fracking is dangerous to the environment and treacherous to human health. Frackopoly describes how the fracking industry began; the technologies that make it possible; and the destruction and poisoning of clean water sources with the release of harmful radiation from deep inside shale deposits, creating what the author calls “sacrifice zones” across the American landscape.
The book also examines the powerful interests that have supported fracking, including leading environmental groups, and offers a thorough debunking of its supposed economic benefits. With a wealth of new data, Frackopoly is an essential and riveting read for anyone interested in protecting the environment and ensuring a healthy and sustainable future for all Americans.
“A passionate history and critique of the energy industry, from Standard Oil to Enron . . . . [A] journalistic exposé of fracking outrages in which aggressive entrepreneurs in pursuit of profits wreak havoc on the land and poison the water.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A truly powerful manifesto about one of the greatest environmental fights on our planet today—from one of its greatest champions!” —Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author of Oil and Honey
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781620970171 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New Press, The |
| Publication date: | 07/19/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 274 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
IN THE BEGINNING ...
The healthful balm, from Nature's veriest spring. The bloom of health and life to man will bring. As from her depths the magic liquid flows. To calm our sufferings, and assuage our woes.
— advertisement for Kier's Petroleum, early nineteenth century
Through the ages, long before methane was removed from deep in the earth through a process known as hydraulic fracturing or "fracking," its seemingly strange properties confounded those who happened upon it seeping from the ground. In ancient Greece, or so the story goes, a goatherd moving his flock stumbled upon a burning flame on Mount Parnassus in Delphi, and he knew that he had witnessed the divine. Local wise men built a temple to Apollo at the site where the fumes of methane and other gases seeped from the ground.
From roughly 700 B.C. to A.D. 380, a long succession of priestesses, all named Pythia, went deep into the bowels of the temple and breathed deeply of the vapors that made the sacred flame burn. In 458 B.C., the clever Greek playwright Aeschylus wrote that the priestess, known as the Oracle of Delphi, would breathe fumes from a crack in the ground; upon deeply inhaling the magic vapors, she would go into a trance and become the voice of Apollo. Another Greek writer described how Pythia drank water with magic properties as it flowed from a spring into the temple chamber. The mythmakers of ancient Greece documented pilgrims coming from far and wide to learn their fates or to be given wise advice.
This incident was dismissed as legend until a team of scientists investigated the geology beneath the temple ruins and found evidence that methane had fueled the long-ago flame. They tested the nearby spring water and the mineral deposits on the ruins and discovered evidence of methane and ethane, as well as traces of the hallucinogenic gas ethylene. Traversing faults had shifted and collided, creating intense heat that, over eons, cooked the remnants of living matter from ancient seas into these hydrocarbon vapors. The gases escaped through faults, fractures, and other natural pathways to seep into the air and into the nearby spring.
The bewitching properties of methane vapors escaping from the ground and ignited by lightning played a role in many of the world's oldest religions — from the burning bush in Exodus to the eternal flames worshiped by the Hindus and Zoroastrians.
Today soothsayers are still divining the magic of methane. Across the globe, self-serving modern oracles — from the financial centers that power the global economy to the powerful governments that make public policy — prophesy that natural gas will do everything from fixing the economy to solving the crisis of global climate change.
Odorless and colorless, natural gas expands to fill the area where it is contained. Unlike oil and water, it can be compressed, so its volume depends on the surrounding pressure and temperature. Naturally occurring gas is mostly methane, but it can include other components in various amounts, such as butane, hexane, propane, helium, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide, as well as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylenes, which are extremely toxic hydrocarbons collectively known as BTEX. Over millions of years, layers of buried plants, sea animals, rocks, mud, and sand were subjected to extreme heat and pressure. The original energy taken in by these plants from the sun was transformed and stored deep underground in the form of oil, coal, and natural gas. That is, the sun's energy was stored in the strength of the molecular bonds between the hydrogens and carbons that make up those hydrocarbon fuels. Once discovered, the desire to exploit this ancient energy has grown exponentially with each passing century.
It was the Chinese who first recognized the energy-giving properties of natural gas around 400 B.C., when they used it to boil saltwater in order to extract salt. Within a few centuries, the Chinese began methodically looking for gas, piping the fuel through bamboo tubes and in some cases refining it with the first known carburetor. They also pioneered drilling technologies in their search for water, drilling as deep as three thousand feet by dropping a heavy chiseling tool from a tall bamboo structure to pulverize the rock.
The mysterious properties of gas also were known in North America. In 1626 French explorers noted that Native Americans lit gas seepages in the Lake Erie region, ironically where fracking is being pursued today. Long before settlers intruded into this region, the Mound Builders, then the Erie, and eventually the Iroquois inhabited it and made use of the gas rising from the ground. During his time as a surveyor, George Washington recorded a "burning spring" on the banks of the Kanawha River near where Charleston, West Virginia, is located today.
No resourceful European colonists are recorded taking advantage of the seeping gas until William Aaron Hart came along. A talented gunsmith, he also invented and patented the percussion cap — a lock-and-ignition system for guns. Hart observed gas bubbles in a creek in western New York. In 1825 he hand-dug a well that was almost thirty feet deep and used hollowed-out logs to transport the gas a short distance to provide lighting in the small village of Fredonia, New York.
Hart soon built a rudimentary storage vat to hold the gas, called a gasometer, and transported it through lead and tin pipes to thirty-six gaslights in Fredonia. When the town was incorporated in 1829, the city fathers included five oil-light burners in the town seal, and there is still a street near the well's location named after him. Hart eventually moved to Buffalo, becoming a successful businessman with the Buffalo Gas Lighting Company.
Although Hart moved on, the modern story of gas in the area around Fredonia was just beginning, and the battle over fracking was far in the future. In 1857, a distant relative of Hart's through marriage, twenty-six-year-old Preston Barmore, convinced prosperous local residents to invest in a gas company. A graduate of Fredonia Academy, a forerunner of the State University of New York at Fredonia, he obviously had done his research. Barmore and his associates were not content to rely on gas seepages for their new business. Based on a geological report, they purchased property and began using a crude method of drilling. A four-inch-diameter hole was bored more than 120 feet into the hard rock, and when no gas appeared, Barmore used gunpowder to create an explosion to release the gas (and water), creating the first gas well.
By 1858 Barmore had drilled two wells that produced enough gas and water to pipe into the town. He incorporated the first gas company in the country, eventually named the Fredonia Natural Gas Company. By 1859, gas-flame lights had been installed in most stores and businesses in Fredonia.
Around the same time, sixty miles from Fredonia, Colonel Edwin Drake drilled the first oil and gas well in Titusville, Pennsylvania. A colorful character, Drake had never served in the military but adopted the title of colonel to impress the local townspeople with his respectability. Even so, they began to call him crazy as he struggled to capture the oil that they had seen seeping from the ground. Drake had been hired by a group of speculators who secured land leases after hearing reports of oil in western Pennsylvania and were privy to a Yale chemistry professor's report of its use for lighting and lubrication. After many false starts, Drake decided that the methods used in salt mining were the solution.
Salt recovery was a thriving business in many regions of the country, and oil and gas were often waste products. Drake traveled to a salt mine in nearby Tarentium, Pennsylvania, to observe the techniques and look for equipment and workers. He hired an experienced salt driller, William "Uncle Billy" Smith, to help manage the drilling project. Drake and Smith refined the cable-tool drilling technique employed by the nineteenth-century salt industry, in a process very similar to the one used by the Chinese centuries before. Fueled by a steam engine, a two-foot chisel hanging by a rope from a wooden structure was lifted and dropped, creating a deeper hole each time. He encountered the same problem that Barmore had experienced: water filled the hole as he went deeper. So Drake pounded a pipe into the bedrock and drilled within it — an innovative solution that protected the upper part of the well from cave-ins and kept the water outside of the pipe's perimeter.
Although the local townspeople laughed at "Drake's Folly," on August 27, 1859, he made history as the oil and gas began to flow at sixty-nine feet. The well was destroyed in a fire when Uncle Billy's lamp ignited the gas. Drake never patented his casing idea, and in his old age, while others were acquiring fortunes in the region, he was sick and poor. In 1873, at the urging of the residents of Titusville, the Pennsylvania General Assembly authorized a $1,500 annual payment to him.
Although the oil boom began almost immediately after Drake hit oil, it was not until 1872 that the gas from the area where he drilled was utilized. Transmitted in the first-ever long-distance metal pipe, it flowed five miles in a two-inch iron pipe to Newton, Pennsylvania.
Interest in piping gas intensified, and other natural gas companies were organized. The United Natural Gas Company, a direct forerunner of the National Fuel Gas Company, built a pipeline between McKean County, Pennsylvania, and Buffalo, New York. At eighty-seven miles, it was the longest on record during this period, and, frighteningly, parts of it are still in use. In 1899 the company improved long-distance transmission by using a compressor to pump the gas at a constant pressure. Today National Fuel Gas Company operates through many subsidiaries and is deeply involved in fracking.
At almost the same time, in Indiana, Elwood Haynes invented a meter to measure gas flow and pressure as well as one of the first gas-regulating thermostats. A talented scientist, he studied chemistry, biology, and German at Johns Hopkins University. Although Haynes is remembered for creating Stellite, a hard metal used in toolmaking, in the 1890s, as a manager and owner of the Portland Natural Gas and Oil Company, he oversaw construction of one of the earliest natural gas pipelines. Extending from near Portland, Indiana, to Chicago, Illinois, it went a distance of 120 miles.
Yet the wide use of long-distance pipelines was still many decades in the future. Gas is difficult to corral and pipe, and during this period it was usually viewed as a waste product to be vented, burned, or left in the ground. Most of the gas used in urban areas during the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century was so-called manufactured gas, derived from coal, oil, and sometimes wood, and should not be confused with natural gas. During this period, manufactured gas for local use was produced in thousands of facilities in the United States and Europe.
The new magic of chemistry was used in these community-based facilities to create a combination of gases that could be burned for lighting, heating, or cooking. Created during a complex and highly polluting process, it left behind a legacy of toxic coal-tar components that include arsenic, benzene, leads, phenols, toluene, xylenes, and even cyanide. Once natural gas became available, the use of manufactured gas diminished in the 1920s, but its toxic legacy is still being remediated in some locations today.
Although manufactured gas was the primary fuel for lighting cities, natural gas had been discovered in seventeen states by the turn of the twentieth century. Attempts to capture it depended largely on location, availability, and the cost of other fuels such as kerosene. Gas was used widely in the central Appalachians, the Gulf Coast, Southern California,Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Between 1920 and 1940, as the population grew where gas was available, its use tripled.
Beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century, Congress answered the demands of the oil and gas industry to financially support technological advancements for the industry. The Bureau of Mines was established in 1910, and by 1913 included a petroleum division aimed at the "problems bearing on the increase of safety and efficiency and the lessening of waste in the development of oil and gas fields, and the storage, transportation, and use of petroleum and petroleum products, including natural gas." Congress passed the Foster Act in 1915, creating ten new research facilities across the nation to study the development of raw materials. One of these research stations, the Bartlesville Petroleum Experiment Station (BERC), located in Oklahoma, opened its doors in 1918. Over the next six decades the facility was an important source of federally funded inventions, patents, and demonstration projects for the oil and gas industry. Initially it delivered valuable technical information about drilling, transport, and pipeline engineering. Projects included research on water intrusion in wells, increased output from water flooding, geologic resource mapping, detection and prevention of leaks in natural gas pipelines, geophysical methods of prospecting, and the mechanics of extracting crude oil and natural gas.
By the 1920s, improvements in pipe technology made long-distance pipelines economically feasible. Seams in steel pipes could be welded electrically for durability, and problems with corrosion had been solved by a joint research program between the U.S. Bureau of Standardization and the natural gas and utilities industries. In 1925 Magnolia Gas of Dallas, Texas, laid the first all-welded steel gas pipeline, reaching 217 miles from northern Louisiana to Beaumont, Texas.
The first truly long-distance pipe was constructed in 1931, spanning one thousand miles; it reached from the Texas Panhandle to Chicago. Built at the cost of $75 million, it was funded by a number of smaller gas companies, such as Peoples Gas in Chicago. Fabricated from twenty-four-inch steel pipe, it crossed the Mississippi and required 2,600 right-of-way agreements.
Industry capture of important federal institutions intensified during this early period and the syndrome of a revolving door between industry and government was spawned. Many experienced researchers left their jobs in government research for the higher salaries offered by industry. Later many returned to the public sector as regulators, bringing their company loyalty and personal relationships with industry leaders to their jobs.
Federal research temporarily waned in the 1920s as one of the frequent boom-and-bust cycles hit the industry. New wells were drilled and then abandoned once the "easy" oil was gone. By the end of the decade, as the stock market plunged, Texas oil was dumped on the market, resulting in the lowest oil prices in history. Research resumed in the 1930s and 1940s when the Bartlesville Station teamed up with the American Gas Association (AGA) to create mathematical formulas to characterize flows through gas pipelines, and to determine new ways of gauging and controlling the flow from natural gas wells. The government subsidized the lion's share of the research, with the industry contributing only 20 percent of the funds.
Federal funding was also used to address safety-related problems, an area that industry was not interested in financing research on. The invisibility and lack of odor of gas could cause asphyxiation, fires, and explosions. When the AGA asked the federal government to do more research in the 1920s, researchers investigated eighty-nine different compounds, choosing fifty-seven to be tested between 1926 and 1930. They determined that ethyl mercaptan was the most effective, least corrosive, and most practical odorant to add to natural gas.
In spite of the research, the industry did not go to the expense of adding the odorant until a long sequence of mass-casualty accidents had taken place. Odorants began to be used in the 1940s, but it was not until 1970 that the use of a warning agent was mandated.
World War II Stimulates Petroleum Development
In the lead up to the war, government officials worked with industry to increase fossil fuel production. A field office was established in Franklin, Pennsylvania, in 1942. A natural gas specialist was among the staff hired at the research center to examine the geology of reservoirs — an expansion of work being done in other regions of the country. The researchers analyzed rocks to determine their physical and chemical composition and explored the most promising sites for water flooding. In these experiments, pressurized water was injected into the well to drive the oil or gas resource to the surface, the precursor to today's fracking techniques.
Congress also took several steps to encourage more exploration and production of oil and gas, especially on public lands, including updating the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920. The royalty payments of at least 12.5 percent were maintained, but the complex system of prospecting permits was replaced by a system allowing oil and gas companies to lease undeveloped public lands. In 1946 Congress further simplified the leasing process, making it more attractive to petroleum interests.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Frackopoly"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Wenonah Hauter.
Excerpted by permission of The New Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1. In the Beginning ...,
2. Setting the Stage,
3. The Natural Gas Heist,
4. Seeking the Roots of the Frackopoly,
5. The Frackopoly Comes to Power,
6. The Road to Ruin,
7. Mitchell Makes a Fortune,
8. Devon: Big Fish Polluting a Small Pond,
9. Chesapeake Energy: High-Rolling Fracking Drama,
10. When Will the Bakken Boom Go Bust for Good?,
11. Poisonous Legacy in Wyoming,
12. Politics, Betrayal, and Broken Communities,
13. Sacrifice Zones in the Keystone State,
14. Not a Drop Left to Drink,
15. The Real Cost of Fracking Infrastructure,
16. Exxon: More Powerful Than Ever,
17. The Climate Change Heist,
18. Pollution Trading: A Shell Game,
19. Hard-Fought Victory in New York,
20. The Ban Movement Grows, Stretching Coast to Coast,
21. A Global Movement to Ban Fracking,
22. The Way Forward,
Notes,
Index,