Energy News
Five Questions: Kallenberg sits on the Chris Garcia Hotseat – Statesman.com, Cox Newspapers
We spoke to Gregory Kallenberg, director of the documentary “Haynesville: A Nation’s Hunt for Energy.”
The film “takes place in the Louisiana backwoods, and follows the momentous discovery of the largest natural gas field in the United States — and maybe the world. It examines the historic find — a formation called the “Haynesville Shale” — from the personal level as well as from the higher perspective of the current energy picture and pending energy future.” (Kallenberg is a former reporter for the American-Statesman.)
More about the movie and its trailer HERE.
How did you come across this subject and what made it seem worthy of its own movie?
Gregory Kallenberg: Well before anyone knew the massive scale of the Haynesville discovery, there was this buzz going around northwest Louisiana. You couldn’t go anywhere without people whispering about “secret wells” and leasing checks being written for “millions of dollars.” It was this surreal “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” moment that makes you want to pick up a camera, hit the REC button and see what happens. At that point, the film was going to be a story about people’s experiences with this weird boomtown hysteria. Once we found out that all of this was true AND the impact of this find would have national impact, we knew we had a film that could address the bigger issue of energy, its human cost and what role that energy could play in our energy future.
What’s the film’s narrative and who are the main players?
The movie documents the discovery of the largest natural gas field in the U.S. The find, called the Haynesville Shale, has an estimated $1.75 trillion in gas and contains more energy than Brazil and Mexico combined. The film follows the beginning fervor of the Haynesville Shale and its effect on three people’s lives. Kassi, a single mom, fights for her community’s environmental rights. Pastor Reegis is an African American preacher who believes that God has delivered the Haynesville Shale and its riches to his congregation. And Mike, a self-described “country boy,” wrestles with the idea of giving up his pristine land in exchange for becoming an “overnight millionaire.” At the same time, you see academics, environmentalists and pundits discuss the broader impact of this find.
Your movie arrives amid a flux of activist docs about energy, conservation and food production. What does yours add to the dialogue?
“Haynesville” is unique in that it avoids the current trap of being a histrionic first-person, hyper-biased film. My goal as a filmmaker was to make a balanced piece about energy and its human cost and larger perceived benefit. I want people to see that energy is an amazingly complicated issue with very few easy answers. What’s most important to me is that people walk out of this film and start the conversation that will lay the foundation for our energy future. For the first time in history, I believe all of us have the power to chart the course for a clean energy future, and I hope “Haynesville” helps start that movement.
What do you think should be done with the Haynesville Shale? Are you conspicuously stepping aside from the argument or does the film make your point?
While I hope the film communicates my point, I will provide a bit of a spoiler here. I personally think we should have gotten off of coal yesterday. The extraction of coal is environmentally obscene and the emissions from coal are borderline poisonous. That said, I only believe in the use of vast energy sources like the Haynesville if we can figure out how to extract in as safe a way as possible that’s fair to landowners and environmentally responsible. If the gas industry and the environmental movement can work together on this, then we have a good shot at a clean energy future.
You screened the movie in Copenhagen at the big climate summit. What was the response? Are you galvanizing people and opinion?
Our screening in Copenhagen was an amazing experience for three reasons: 1) I had the unique opportunity to show my film at the world’s premiere environmental conference. 2) I saw an audience made up of environmentalists and energy lobbyists nodding together at the screen and, afterwards, coming together and discussing the film’s message. And 3) I fulfilled my life’s dream of eating Danish danishes and, I’m happy to report, they were way better than I ever imagined.
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Review: “Kallenberg Excels With Heartfelt ‘Haynesville'”
FROM CollegeMovieReview.com:
I sit here speechless (which doesn’t happen often) after watching Haynesville, a fascinating documentary on the Haynesville Shale, called “this century’s gold rush,” located in the northwest corner of Louisiana. The Haynesville Shale is a massive deposit of natural gas thousands of meters beneath the ground, just waiting to be accessed. This reserve of natural gas, with the others already known in the States, is large enough to power the nation’s electricity for the next 104 years (which is pretty important considering that Americans use more energy and electricity than any other country in the world)! This natural gas has so many implications both positive and negative, not only for the people of Northwest Louisiana, but for the entire country.
Basically, this documentary takes everything we ought to know (but don’t) about energy: its extraction, consumption, storage (or the lack thereof), cost, uses, and effects—like pollution—and puts all of it into 72 mind-blowing minutes. “By coincidence or by God’s will, the United States is given a chance to have the cleanest fuel that will bridge it over to the next generation of fuels and technologies. That is right in front of us.”
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Public Radio’s Julie Moody Interviews “Haynesville” Director
From intro by KUT’s Julie Moody:
“Haynesville” played at SXSW film. It had one screening only, but if you are interested in the subject, and you should be, you can purchase the DVDhere. The film has already played at the Copenhagen Climate Summit and had its world premiere at Doc/Fest in England, where it was honored with a Green Doc Award nomination. Director Gregory Kallenberg is one of the nicest filmmakers that call Austin home.I think my favorite movie of this year’s SXSW Film fest was “The Happy Poet”, but “Haynesville” is a close second, and completely different from the other so let me just say this, both are very good films. See them both if you can.
Listen to the entire interview…
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I Feel Another Coal Rant Coming On – HaynesvillePlay.com
Coal is getting under my skin again. Two things in particular are bothering me: coal ash and the myth of “clean coal.”
In catching up on articles this past weekend, I read an article in Sierramagazine about the problems associated with the coal ash ponds created by the huge coal-fired electric plant in Colstrip, MT. As coal is burned, it leaves behind a certain amount of residue, but unlike the wood in our fireplace, coal ash is filled with dangerous heavy metals and toxins, including mercury. Some of the ash is turned into building materials, but much of it wastes away in holding ponds along with sludge from srubbers that remove a portion of the pollutants from the smokestacks. Unfortunately these ponds lead to even more pollution as the chemicals in the water both leech into the groundwater and evaporate into the air.
I also saw a piece in the New York Times about the difficulties in cleaning up the massive coal ash spill in Kingston, TN. This massive spill in 2008 made us all aware of the dangers of these holding ponds. Outside of the sheer magnitude of the cleanup (the article notes that the disaster spilled “5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash across 300 acres into the Emory River and an affluent shoreline community near Knoxville(,) enough ash to cover a square mile five feet deep.”), the cleanup crews are having trouble finding appropriate dumping grounds for the sediment. The spilled ash is horrible stuff, filled with heavy metals that can lead to cancer, and not many landfills can handle it, especially not in these massive volumes. The one landfill that does take the sludge, located in tiny Uniontown, AL, has received so much rain lately that it has to deal with 100,000 gallons of tainted water per day as a result. The cleanup contractors are looking across the southeast for sites to process the tainted water, including in my home state of Louisiana. That situation is not yet resolved.
It is hard for me to believe the environmental furor over hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, a practice that has not created a single documented instance of groundwater contamination, when there are hundreds of these toxic retention ponds at coal plants all over the country, many of which are classified by the EPA as “high hazards” or disaster sites (see map below). I can certainly understand the desire to avoid other potential new hazards, but the outrage directed towards fracking, especially in the Northeast, would be much better spent preventing the spread of toxic pollution associated with coal-fired power plants.
Which brings me to the oxymoron of “clean coal.” It makes my head hurt to try to find two words that go less well together. That large scale carbon sequestration and storage (CSS) has not yet been demonstrated is fairly well known, but what happens if it is finally possible? The amount of carbon captured for storage from coal generating plants would be huge. We would quickly run out of places to store it. On top of that, coal plants would have to burn lots more coal just to power the CSS process. Talk about a win-win for the coal industry!
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Visualizing The U.S. Electric Grid – NPR.org
The U.S. electric grid is a complex network of independently owned and operated power plants and transmission lines. Aging infrastructure, combined with a rise in domesticelectricity consumption, has forced experts to critically examine the status and health of the nation’s electrical systems.
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Small Town, Big Find: The energy debate gets personal in ‘Haynesville’ – Austin Chronicle
By Joe O’Connell
The Rev. Reegis Richard was wandering through a field, hungrily eyeing a dilapidated former school and dreaming of the possibilities, when a Haynesville producer climbed over a fence out of curiosity. Five minutes later, a camera crew was set up, says documentary director Gregory Kallenberg.
It was the sort of serendipitous moment that has guided his documentary, which explores how a massive shale natural gas find in Louisiana is both fueling the dreams of Louisiana’s downtrodden and crushing them, while providing a potential solution to our nation’s energy thirst.
Richard sees the bucketloads of cash the find is bringing to the area as the fulfillment of a personal prophecy to save his dirt-poor African-American neighbors. “He truly believes God gave him these riches,” Kallenberg says. “He wants to give back to a congregation that literally has nothing. He ends up being this incredibly inspirational character. His passion I hope comes through on the camera.”
It does, as the preacher uses the sudden riches to bring the school back to life on screen. Kallenberg interweaves Richard’s story along with those of Mike Smith, a good old boy who finds himself a sudden multimillionaire from the shale his 300 acres of land contains, and – perhaps the doc’s most gripping character – Kassi Fitzgerald, a single mother who turns into a driven community activist to make sure both her economically depressed neighbors and the environment are treated fairly.
Kallenberg, who cut his teeth as an Austin American-Statesman technology reporter as the tech boom was blossoming in the late Nineties and later jumped into that boom full force at Austin’s NotHarvard.com, approached the film originally with a clear eye for the personal narrative, a storytelling philosophy that took root further in his days as a University of Texas film student. He originally followed 11 people affected by the Haynesville find. “As with most documentaries like this, some stories fizzled, and once some saw how obtrusive a camera can be, some people opted out,” he says. “I was left with about seven really compelling ‘personal’ narratives.” The final three stories made the cut “because they are such strong characters, and they embodied all sides of what was happening during this crazy time in Louisiana.”
Kallenberg had moved to Shreveport in 2007 and was in search of a next project. Haynesville fell in his lap while he was enjoying the legendary strawberry pie in Strawn’s Eat Shop. “I was sitting in this cafe, and these farmers out of central casting come stumbling in like they just left the creek at Sutter’s Mill,” he says. “I think it was the fervor as they discussed this secret gas well that put me into eavesdropping mode.” The northeast Louisiana discovery was not yet in the news, so Kallenberg, camera in hand, jumped in at an opportune time to tell the story. “It turned out this thing was real,” he says. “It blew up on me.”
The final film is one Kallenberg sees as significant in a much larger sense. “This issue of energy has become so prevalent,” he says. “It’s complicated. I really think the film transcends being just about these people but also how we are going to handle our energy future. My personal belief is there’s a lot of energy under the feet of Louisiana. We’ve got to work with the industry, and we have to dictate how it’s going to be extracted in a fair way, an environmentally safe way.”
That battle is portrayed in the film by single mother Fitzgerald, who never completed high school. She throws herself into tireless research and grassroots footwork once she realizes the oil companies are paying different amounts to different neighbors for gas rights, primarily based on the person’s economic situation. “She tries to overcome her lack of education by pure gumption,” Kallenberg says. “She comes really close to winning against greater odds. She ends up suing Exxon and wins the ability to move from federal court to parish court. Nobody told her that Exxon’s a big fucking conglomerate.”
Kallenberg makes an interesting choice with the oil industry’s side of the tale. “When it came to presenting the larger energy story, I wanted to be very careful and present it the right way,” he says.”I wanted it to be a compelling argument, and I wanted it presented by people outside of the oil industry. As a result, the bigger views on energy are delivered by academics like Tad Patzek, pundits like Austinite Robert Bryce, and world-renowned environmentalist Bill McKibben.”
The doc’s goal is more about engaging discussion about our energy future than pushing any one agenda – though Kallenberg is clear in his distaste for coal as an energy source. Haynesville screened at December’s Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, an event that hit home for him the importance of this chance project. “There were hardcore energy lobbyists on one side and hardcore environmentalists on the other,” he says. “It was heartening to see both sides look at the screen and nod at it. Haynesville really shows the issue from all levels. There is an intimate, tertiary exploration of the issue as these people on the ground grapple with consequences of the find. But Haynesvile also zooms out to a macro level, where you get to see what this energy could mean in getting us to a clean, renewable-based energy future. At the end, I really wanted to leave my audience in a place where they could start a conversation … and what they envision as an energy future.”
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Energy Storage: Will We Find the Holy Grail? – RenewableEnergyWorld.com
Stephen Lacey of the Renewable Energy World podcast reports from a renewable energy conference in Austin.
Here is the text explaining this podcast:
We’d all like to see a world powered mostly by renewables. But is it possible? With the right planning, we can develop a lot of intermittent renewables without storage. At some point, however, we’ll need both short-term and long-term storage technologies to help stabilize the grid.
Storage is often seen as the “Holy Grail” of technologies for integrating wind and solar. In this podcast, we’ll have a roundtable discussion on storage and look at emerging applications, market opportunities and ask whether these technologies are ready for large-scale applications.
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A Natural Choice – Washington Post – Editorial
IN AMERICA’S climate debate, one of the most promising developments of recent months has been the growing recognition in Washington that natural gas may play a key role in curbing carbon emissions. The resurgence of gas comes through the discovery of massive deposits in Appalachian shale formations and elsewhere — a reserve that offers the prospect of stable domestic supplies and relatively low prices. Since burning natural gas produces half the emissions of burning coal, switching the two fuels could put a significant dent in America’s carbon footprint.
The rumor this month was that such arguments had swayed the White House and that President Obama would back policy aimed at discouraging coal and encouraging natural gas at a speech he delivered to the Business Roundtable on Wednesday. The rumors didn’t bear out. That’s too bad. With climate-change legislation still stalled in Congress, nudging gas forward is something that the government can do quickly and relatively cheaply to meet its medium-term emissions goals if current trends persist.
To be sure, America doesn’t want to depend too much on one commodity. Drastically ramping up the amount of natural gas burned to generate electricity would require infrastructure investments in certain regions as well as retrofits of certain plants or the construction of entirely new ones.
But existing gas-fired plants are running at only about 25 percent capacity, in part because many are switched on only when demand spikes. The Congressional Research Service reports that doubling the use of existing plants could replace about a third of coal-fired power, getting America a third of the way to its goal for 2020. For reasons of infrastructure, that might be too optimistic a scenario. But BP — which has a stake in natural gas — estimates that retiring the 80 dirtiest coal plants and replacing them with gas-fired power would get America 10 percent of the way to its 2020 emissions target and increase domestic gas consumption by only 5 percent.
Even if you don’t trust BP’s numbers, a range of attractive policy options is available, starting with tax incentives to decommission old coal plants. Natural gas is so competitive, it might not take much more than that. However, policymakers might also consider coupling that with some carrot to switch to gas. States that demand that utilities derive a certain portion of their electricity from clean sources could also allow natural gas to count in such requirements, discounting for the carbon emissions it does produce. Federal legislators contemplating a similar, national standard might also consider this.
In the long term, natural gas is only a bridge fuel as America weans itself off carbon, since it still produces plenty of emissions. With a rising carbon price, natural gas will become too expensive to burn. But it can provide the country some time to bring to market the cleaner technologies on which America eventually must run.
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Natural Gas As A Climate Fix Sparks Friction – NPR.org
LISTEN TO STORY:
PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT:
STEVE INSKEEP, host:
A lot of big energy companies, like ExxonMobil, are betting that natural gas will provide a lot more of the country’s electricity in the future. It’s become more affordable as more companies extract gas from enormous shale rock formations – from New York to Texas. And electricity from natural gas produces about half the global warming pollution that coal does.
Some national environmental groups have started pushing natural gas as a climate fix. But as NPR’s Elizabeth Shogren reports, it’s sparking friction with some of their local members.
ELIZABETH SHOGREN: The Sierra Club’s internal dispute over natural gas flared up recently, at Cornell University.
(Soundbite of machinery)
SHOGREN: During a ribbon-cutting ceremony and tour of a plant that will help Cornell switch from coal to natural gas.
Unidentified Man: We’re going to walk into the heating plant…
SHOGREN: Sierra Club’s Bruce Nilles came all the way from Washington cheer Cornell on. He heads the group’s fight against coal and he’s gung-ho about natural gas as a remedy to climate change.
Mr. BRUCE NILLES (Sierra Club): Natural gas is going to play a critical role in our energy mix for the next two to three, if not four, decades.
SHOGREN: Nilles believes part of the solution lies right under Cornell University and much of western New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia – the giant Marcellus shale gas field.
Mr. NILLES: We are for development but it’s got to be done right and allow us to get off of coal in the next two decades.
Ms. KATE BARTHOLOMEW (Chair, Sierra Club, New York Finger Lakes Region): That’s all well and good, but also one of the Sierra Club’s priorities is about clean water.
SHOGREN: Kate Bartholomew is the volunteer chair of Sierra Club’s local chapter in New York’s Finger Lakes region. She’s a high school biology teacher, and she’s worried that this area’s fabulous lakes and drinking wells will be poisoned by chemical-laced water pumped under ground by drilling companies. She says she confronted Nilles about this during a breakfast before the tour.
Ms. BARTHOLOMEW: Bruce and I had a little bit of a tense moment.
SHOGREN: The Sierra Club’s whole New York State chapter is fighting to keep Marcellus gas underground in direct opposition to the national group’s policy. Bartholomew says the state activists were spurred into action when they saw pictures of shale gas developments elsewhere in the country.
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Update on Fracking Probe in Washington – New York Times
Energy industry insiders say a new House probe of hydraulic fracturing is unlikely to hinder development of new domestic shale gas plays or stall a massive merger between Exxon Mobil Corp. and a large independent gas producer.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s two top Democrats asked eight oil-field service firms last week for details about chemicals they use during hydraulic fracturing, a decades-old drilling technique that blasts sand, chemicals and water into a wellbore to break apart compact rock and release hydrocarbons. The lawmakers also publicized for the first time details of a similar investigation that revealed that two drillers used diesel in their fracturing fluids in violation of a voluntary agreement with U.S. EPA.
“They’re certainly putting a new torpedo in the water,” said Jason Hutt, a partner at the Washington office of Bracewell & Giuliani. “There’s going to be a burden to respond to all this.”
“But frankly,” he added, “I think they’re fear-mongering.”
Moves by Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who chairs the Energy and Environment Subcommittee, come after months of congressional debate about the drilling technique, which has helped open access to massive domestic natural gas plays and also has raised concerns among environmentalists and some lawmakers about the technique’s environmental impacts and whether it is adequately regulated by individual states.
Waxman and Markey launched their inquiry just days after EPA’s top drinking water official said he had not seen documented evidence of contamination caused by fracturing and that state regulators were doing a good job overseeing the process.
“The week started out pretty good for us,” said Chris Tucker, a spokesman for the industry-backed group Energy in Depth. “Anytime the top drinking water official acknowledges the tremendous track record of state regulators, that’s a nice feather in your cap.”
Industry advocates say Waxman and Markey tried to spoil their good week and tilt the debate toward environmentalists.
“The debate was not trending in the direction opponents of fracturing wanted it to go,” Hutt said. “They had this one at the ready … and it let them steal the debate back a little bit.”
The oil and gas industry has used hydraulic fracturing for years to stimulate production from aging wells, and more recently, it has used the technique to tap unconventional sources of oil and natural gas, like coalbed methane and shale gas.
Concerns about the impact of hydraulic fracturing in coal seams on underground drinking water supplies led to a series of lawsuits in the late 1990s and early 2000s that prompted EPA to regulate the drilling practice under the Safe Drinking Water Act and study its environmental impact.
The EPA study, released in 2004, found that hydraulic fracturing posed “little or no threat” to drinking water.
Environmentalists contended that the study was scientifically unsound, but Congress endorsed it and used it to override the earlier decision to regulate hydraulic fracturing under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Lawmakers specifically exempted the practice from federal regulation in a broad 2005 energy law.
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