Energy News
ILoveMountains.org Wants You to Help Them Stop Coal
A message from ILoveMountains.org:
Today, organizations across the nation are joining forces with iLoveMountains.org to send a powerful message to the Obama Administration that blasting on America’s Most Endangered Mountain-Coal River Mountain- needs to stop now. This could be the largest day of action on mountaintop removal ever, and we need your help to make history.
Use the form below to send your message now.
Coal River Mountain is the last remaining mountain untouched by mountaintop removal in the Coal River Valley of southern West Virginia- but Massey Energy wants to turn it into a 6,600-acre mountaintop removal wasteland. Local residents have a different vision for Coal River Mountain – a wind farm that could provide 70,000 households with clean energy, sustainable jobs and a symbol of hope for new industry in the Appalachian coalfields.
The fate of Coal River Mountain is still uncertain, but its implications for our energy future are clear. Will we continue down the path of destroying our nation’s oldest mountains for a few years worth of coal, or seize the opportunity to produce clean wind power and generate green jobs and a new energy economy?
Use the form below to ask the Obama Administration to do the right thing – save Coal River Mountain today!
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Gas Company Won’t Drill in New York Watershed
Bowing to intense public pressure, the Chesapeake Energy Corporation says it will not drill for natural gas within the upstate New York watershed, an environmentally sensitive region that supplies unfiltered water to nine million people.
The reversal seems to signal a more conciliatory tone from the gas industry, which is facing mounting opposition in New York to its drilling practices. The decision also increases the pressure on state regulators to reverse their decision to allow drilling within the watershed.
“We are not going to develop those leases, and we are not taking any more leases, and I don’t think anybody else in the industry would dare to acquire leases in the New York City watershed,” Aubrey K. McClendon, the chief executive officer at Chesapeake Energy, said in an interview on Monday in Fort Worth. “Why go through the brain damage of that, when we have so many other opportunities?”
He spoke on the eve of the first scheduled hearing on proposed state rules governing the drilling, on Wednesday in Loch Sheldrake in Sullivan County.
Chesapeake, one of the nation’s biggest gas producers, is the largest leaseholder in the Marcellus Shale, a subterranean layer of shale rock that runs from New York to Tennessee. The shale is believed to hold substantial natural gas reserves.
But extracting gas from shale relies on a method called hydraulic fracturing that has stirred broad concerns. Water, laced with chemicals, is blasted down gas wells at high pressure to break the rock and allow gas to flow out more easily. The technology has vigorously expanded in recent years, allowing for enormous growth in the nation’s natural gas reserves.
But the concerns include the use of chemicals, the disposal of wastewater and the danger of leaks and spills into groundwater and deep aquifers. There also has been a string of explosions from Wyoming to Pennsylvania.
Under energy legislation passed in 2005, the industry won an exemption from the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.
Chesapeake acquired 5,000 acres in the watershed when it bought Columbia Natural Resources a few years ago, and it is currently the only leaseholder in the area.
Over all, Mr. McClendon said, the company’s holdings in the watershed are “a drop in the bucket” compared with the Marcellus field’s potential. He suggested that Chesapeake had more to lose by drilling there than by forgoing it, even though he contended such drilling would do no harm.
“How could any one well be so profitable that it would be worth damaging the New York City water system?” he said.
But Chesapeake and other companies are still expected to drill for gas in areas of the state outside the watershed.
State officials have been eager to embrace the drilling because of its potential economic benefits, especially in the current downturn. This month, the state’s environmental agency said it would allow companies to drill throughout the state, imposing few specific limits on operations.
The proposed regulations, which were requested last year by Gov. David A. Paterson, do not ban drilling in the watershed, as many New York City officials and environmental advocates had urged, but would require buffer zones around reservoirs and aqueducts.
Gas industry representatives say the rules, if enacted, will be among the most restrictive in the country. Opponents say they would be inadequate to prevent contamination.
The New York watershed is an area of about one million acres, representing 4 percent of the state’s total surface. Thanks to gravity, water from the region’s rivers and streams flows to six reservoirs in the Catskills, and then, through a series of aqueducts and tunnels, to the taps of New Yorkers. This system provides unfiltered drinking water for half the state’s population, including 8.2 million people in New York City and about one million people in Westchester, Putnam and Dutchess Counties.
Some New York City politicians welcomed Chesapeake’s decision and said they hoped it would have a broader impact. “To proceed with drilling doesn’t make any business sense and doesn’t make environmental sense, and I think Chesapeake understands this, and I am happy they have come to that decision,” said James F. Gennaro, chairman of the City Council’s Committee on Environmental Protection. “If only we could get the state government to come to the same realization. It is strangely ironic.”
Chesapeake’s announcement was also praised by environmental advocates. They said the company’s position should encourage the state to reverse its decision and impose an outright drilling ban throughout the watershed.
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Clean Water Act Could Block Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining Permits
Very big news out of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) this morning – the agency has determined that all 79 mountaintop removal mining permits submitted to them for review by the Army Corps of Engineers would likely violate the Clean Water Act. After eight long years of rubber-stamp permits being issued during the Bush Administration, this is one of the most dramatic and encouraging actions yet by the Obama Administration, and marks a welcome return of the rule of law to the coalfields of Appalachia.
Mountaintop removal – a devastating form of coal mining that involves blowing up mountains and dumping the former mountaintops into neighboring valleys, burying streams – is governed by a patchwork of laws and federal agencies. Permits to bury streams with mining waste are initially issued by the Army Corps of Engineers, but EPA has ultimate oversight and may veto Corps-issued permits if they fail to comply with the Clean Water Act.
During the Bush Administration, EPA never opposed or challenged a permit, despite the fact that they clearly violated laws on the books to protect clean water and public health. Apparently, those days are over. This dramatic announcement by EPA that every single one of the 79 pending permits violates the Clean Water Act is a condemnation of the quality of permits being churned out during the Bush Administration and is a testament to the Obama Administration’s sincere commitment to science, transparency, and enforcing environmental safeguards.
All of these permits had piled up behind a court decision that was issued in February, and so most of them were written during the Bush Administration. For those eight years, permits were being issued that violated the Clean Water Act, but EPA was prevented from objecting to the permits. Clearly there is a new sheriff in town.
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Scientists: Biofuel Laws May Harm the Environment
[From the NPR transcript – for full story, please click link]
We have a reminder this morning of just how complicated it can be to fight global warming. Anti-global warming rules now in effect may actually encourage people to cut down forests. That news comes just as we prepare for a lot of talk about climate change. The Senate is debating an energy bill next week, and in December, Copenhagen will host a global conference on climate.
Officials may have to give thought to a finding in today’s Science magazine. It focuses on biofuels which are made from plants. Current laws on biofuels have unintended consequences which in turn make climate change worse.
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Tulane’s Green Wave Announces “Thank You” Screening of Haynesville Documentary
The Tulane Energy Institute will host a screening and panel discussion on Monday (Oct. 26) of Haynesville, a new documentary that examines the discovery of the nation’s largest natural gas field in rural northwest Louisiana and its impact on individual landowners and the world.
The politics, law, personal lives and creative response to the historic Haynesville, La., natural gas discovery will be the subject of a panel discussion after the film preview, sponsored by the Tulane Energy Institute.
The preview screening is at 7 p.m. at the Contemporary Arts Center, 900 Camp St., New Orleans. The panel discussion, moderated by Eric Smith, associate director of the Tulane Energy Institute, will feature Gregory Kallenberg, director and producer of Haynesville; Christopher Fettweis, Tulane assistant professor of political science; Mary Blue, professor of practice in the Tulane film studies program; and Marjorie McKeithen, an attorney with Jones Walker and former secretary of the Louisiana Minerals Management Board.
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Energy Firms Find No Unity on Climate Bill
WASHINGTON — As the Senate prepares to tackle global warming, the nation’s energy producers, once united, are battling one another over policy decisions worth hundreds of billions of dollars in coming decades.
Producers of natural gas are battling their erstwhile allies, the oil companies. Electrical utilities are fighting among themselves over the use of coal versus wind power or other renewable energy. Coal companies are battling natural gas firms over which should be used to produce electricity. And the renewable power industry is elbowing for advantage against all of them.
Some supporters of global warming legislation believe that the division in the once-monolithic oil and gas industry, as well as other splits among energy producers, could improve the prospects for the legislation.
“It’s much harder to pass clean-energy legislation when big oil and other energy interests are united in their opposition,” said Daniel J. Weiss, climate policy director at the liberal Center for American Progress. “The companies that recognize the economic benefits in the bill can help bring along their political supporters.”
The American Petroleum Institute trade group, dominated by major oil companies, opposes the legislation, saying it would discourage domestic exploration and lead to higher oil prices. But some natural gas companies, though longtime members of the institute, have formed a separate lobby and are working actively with the bill’s sponsors to cut a better deal for their product.
The proposal moving through Congress would cap the emissions of greenhouse gases each year and allow companies to buy and sell permits to pollute. That approach, known as cap and trade, is meant to guarantee that emissions will decline, while providing market incentives for companies to invest in low-carbon technologies.
The measure would effectively put a price on carbon, raising the prospect that some energy producers might have to pay more than others. For that reason, billions of dollars could be at stake in some of the most arcane language in the bill.
Energy lobbies are using every tactic in the book to protect their industries, producing alarming studies about $5 gasoline and other steep cost increases that might result from a cap-and-trade system. They are also financing protest groups and advertising campaigns. In one case, a public relations firm working for the coal industry even sent opposition letters to Congress under forged names.
The divisions in the energy sector mirror a split in the broader business community. Several large companies like Apple and the utility Exelon left the United States Chamber of Commerce recently over the group’s opposition to climate change legislation.
But the biggest fights are among energy producers. They have spent more than $200 million in the first half of the year on lobbying efforts in Washington, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group, up from $174 million in the same period last year.
“The fact that the lobbying is so fast and so furious is a positive sign that this thing is moving along,” said Mark Brownstein, a managing director at the Environmental Defense Fund and an advocate of climate legislation. “The fact that everyone is rushing to Washington tells you people believe it is real.”
As legislation inches through Capitol Hill, onetime allies in the utility sector, like Exelon, which operates low-emission nuclear plants, and the Southern Company, a big consumer of coal, find themselves on opposite sides of the debate over renewable energy.
Utilities that have access to hydroelectric power or operate nuclear plants tend to favor a national mandate to increase the use of renewable power, because their carbon emissions are relatively low. Many coal-dependent utilities, particularly in the Southeast and Midwest, oppose the provision because they emit more carbon and would have to buy more permits over time.
In past energy policy debates, the oil and gas lobbies were largely united. In 2005, they won incentives for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Two years later, after Democrats had taken control of Congress, producers were unable to block a huge new mandate for alternative fuels like ethanol and biodiesel, but managed to save valuable oil industry tax breaks that some Democrats tried to end.
Today, each energy subsector, fearing any legislation that might give it a disadvantage, is battling for favor. The gas producers, for example, have formed the American Natural Gas Alliance, which is spending heavily on advertising and lobbying to point out that gas emits roughly half the carbon dioxide of coal. The group has also helped organize its allies in Congress into a new natural gas caucus, with two dozen members.
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NASA Scientist Jailed for Mountain Top Removal Protest
LEXINGTON, MASS. — Our planet’s pre-eminent climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen of NASA, faces the very real threat of spending a year in jail. He and 30 others were arrested in June, during an act of civil resistance at an elementary school in West Virginia where children learn their lessons at the defenseless edge of the 2,000-acre mountaintop-removal mine on Coal River Mountain, owned by Richmond, Va.-based Massey Energy.
The school “stands as the prime example of just how far this country has gone to support its addiction to coal, and just how far Massey Energy will go to support its profit margin,” wrote the resisters on the day of the arrests. “The West Virginia Supreme Court has joined Gov. [Joe] Manchin in turning their backs on these children, subjecting them to expanded operations within 300 feet of the school. . . . According to Massey’s own documents, [the expanded] operations will add over three tons of coal dust to the air the children breathe every school year during their most formative years.”
Hansen’s prospects for a fair trial don’t look good. Big Coal, and Massey in particular, have undue influence in West Virginia courts. The state Supreme Court has twice overturned a $50 million jury verdict against Massey: In each case, the deciding vote was cast by a judge with a close relationship to the company’s CEO, Don Blankenship.
After the first vote, photographs surfaced of Justice Elliott Maynard dining with Blankenship on the French Riviera. When the court reconsidered the case, Justice Brent Benjamin, who tipped the scales the second time, failed to recuse himself even though Blankenship had spent more than $3 million on television advertisements for his election campaign. The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled this a violation of the Constitution. The case will be reconsidered.
The schoolchildren, their parents and their neighbors near the mine on Coal River Mountain face other dangers from this most destructive form of coal mining: A 2.8 billion-gallon sludge dam stands 400 yards upstream from the school, and Massey has an egregious history of water pollution. In 2000, a break in a dam at a Massey mine in Kentucky released 250 million gallons of coal slurry and killed wildlife as far as 60 miles downstream. Last year, the company agreed to pay $20 million to settle a lawsuit by the Environmental Protection Agency over more than 4,600 documented cases of illegal dumping into Appalachian waterways.
For almost three decades, Jim Hansen has been warning of a threat that stands to kill many times the human population of all Appalachia and eliminate perhaps half the other species on Earth: human-induced climate change. Coal represents the single largest component of that threat and the one that could push the planet across the threshold where catastrophic change cascades out of our control.
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New York Times Editorial: Shale and Water
New York State’s environmental regulators have proposed rules to govern drilling in the Marcellus Shale — a subterranean layer of rock curving northward from West Virginia through Ohio and Pennsylvania to New York’s southern tier. The shale contains enormous deposits of natural gas that could add to the region’s energy supplies and lift New York’s upstate economy. If done carefully — and in carefully selected places — drilling should cause minimal environmental harm.
But regulators must amend the rules to bar drilling in the New York City watershed: a million acres of forests and farmlands whose streams supply the reservoirs that send drinking water to eight million people. Accidental leaks could threaten public health and require a filtration system the city can ill afford.
Natural gas is vital to the nation’s energy needs and can be an important bridge between dirty coal and renewable alternatives. The process of extracting it, however, is not risk-free. Known as hydraulic fracturing, it involves shooting a mix of water, sand and chemicals — many of them highly toxic — into the ground at very high pressure to break down the rock formations and free the gas.
The technique is used in 90 percent of the oil and gas operations in the United States. And while most drilling occurs without incident, “fracking” has been implicated in hundreds of cases of impaired or polluted drinking water supplies in states from Alabama to Wyoming.
The dangers are particularly acute in the Marcellus Shale, which, unlike the relatively shallow formations found elsewhere, lies miles underground. Getting the gas out will require far more water and heavy doses of chemicals. While the rules would require drillers to take special precautions in the watershed, there are too many points — from the delivery of the fluid to the drilling site to the removal of spent fluid after it surfaces — where poisoned water could escape into the water supplies.
Quarantining the watershed also makes economic sense. The shale contains only one-tenth of the gas in the southern tier. One big accident could undo everything the city and state have done — buying up property, creating buffer zones around the reservoirs — to protect the watershed from development and pollution.
State officials worry that if they deny landowners the right to lease the mineral resources under their property — 70 percent of the watershed is privately owned — they will face expensive “takings” claims. But the state has a right and responsibility to prevent drilling that poses a clear danger to public health.
The state insists it has made a good-faith effort to assess the hazards, and its 800-page report is replete with scientific analysis. But it is the state’s analysis. What the state has not done, and what it must do, is give those who have serious doubts about drilling in the watershed a fair chance to state their case.
New York City’s acting environmental commissioner, Steven Lawitts, has warned of “chronic and acute impacts to water quality.” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and the Manhattan borough president, Scott Stringer, have asked the state for extensive public hearings. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has commissioned an independent scientific study of the risks to the watershed.
A fair review will not be possible unless the state’s absurdly quick Nov. 30 deadline for public comment is extended. The mayor’s study will not even be completed until mid-December. It is dangerously irresponsible to rush this decision.
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European Shale Gas – New Way to Tap Gas May Expand Global Supplies
OKLAHOMA CITY — A new technique that tapped previously inaccessible supplies of natural gas in the United States is spreading to the rest of the world, raising hopes of a huge expansion in global reserves of the cleanest fossil fuel.
Italian and Norwegian oil engineers and geologists have arrived in Texas, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania to learn how to extract gas from layers of a black rock called shale. Companies are leasing huge tracts of land across Europe for exploration. And oil executives are gathering rocks and scrutinizing Asian and North African geological maps in search of other fields.
The global drilling rush is still in its early stages. But energy analysts are already predicting that shale could reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas. They said they believed that gas reserves in many countries could increase over the next two decades, comparable with the 40 percent increase in the United States in recent years.
“It’s a breakout play that is going to identify gigantic resources around the world,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy expert at Rice University. “That will change the geopolitics of natural gas.”
More extensive use of natural gas could aid in reducing global warming, because gas produces fewer emissions of greenhouse gases than either oil or coal. China and India, which have growing economies that rely heavily on coal for electricity, appear to have large potential for production of shale gas. Larger gas reserves would encourage developing countries to convert more of their transportation fleets to use natural gas rather than gasoline.
Shale is a sedimentary rock rich in organic material that is found in many parts of the world. It was of little use as a source of gas until about a decade ago, when American companies developed new techniques to fracture the rock and drill horizontally.
Because so little drilling has been done in shale fields outside of the United States and Canada, gas analysts have made a wide array of estimates for how much shale gas could be tapped globally. Even the most conservative estimates are enormous, projecting at least a 20 percent increase in the world’s known reserves of natural gas.
One recent study by IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consulting group, calculated that the recoverable shale gas outside of North America could turn out to be equivalent to 211 years’ worth of natural gas consumption in the United States at the present level of demand, and maybe as much as 690 years. The low figure would represent a 50 percent increase in the world’s known gas reserves, and the high figure, a 160 percent increase.
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60 Minutes Explores the Nastiness of Coal Ash
We have been discussing it here for weeks, but the mainstream media has finally jumped on board. Check out this awesome bit of reporting on “60 Minutes”. Leslie Stahl does a great job blowing the lid off a main by-product of the burning of coal.
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