by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 21, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Hernán Scandizzo, Latinamerica Press
Members of the Mapuche community say the Argentine government’s aggressive push to increase energy supplies by allowing oil companies to explore in their lands will cause irreversible environmental and social damage.
According to Argentina´s Energy Secretariat, close to 87 percent of Argentina’s energy is generated from fossil fuels. The government agency said that in 1988 Argentina had enough gas supplies for 36 years. But by 2009, this outlook was slashed to seven years. Oil supplies fell from 14 to nine in the same period.
Additionally, starting in 2003, when the economy was stabilizing after its financial collapse two years earlier, consumption of fossil fuels increased sharply. A report of the US Energy Information Administration said that the use of oil and oil products increased more than 37 percent between 2003 and 2010 in Argentina, while gas consumption increased 23 percent in the same period. To cover its energy needs, Argentina’s fuel imports, mainly of liquefied natural gas, gasoil and fuel oil, increased more than seven times, from US$549 million to US$4.5 billion, according to Argentina’s Economy Ministry.
In December 2010, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales, or YPF, owned by the Spanish firm Repsol, announced it found a large shale gas reserve, in Loma de la Lata in the southern Neuquen province, and then it found an even bigger one in the same site.
Now other oil companies, including the US-based Chevron, Exxon and Apache, and the France´s Total, are exploring in Neuquen.
According to the US Department of Energy, Argentina is home to the world’s third-largest potential reserves of unconventional gas, with a potential 774 trillion cubic feet, behind only to China with 1.28 trillion cubic feet and the United States with 862 trillion cubic feet.
There is also hydrocarbon exploration in Rio Negro province. The provincial governments of Mendoza and Chubut are evaluating whether to allow for exploration there, too. The Entre Rios province, which has no history of gas exploration, signed an agreement with Repsol-YPF in 2009 for unconventional hydrocarbon exploration, and established an agreement with Uruguay for cross-border exploration with the state oil company Ancap.
New conflicts emerge
But there are consequences for the indigenous groups who live in the path of the expansion.
“There is no doubt that all of the official announcements about these mega-fields are a direct and clear threat to the life and culture of the affected Mapuche communities,” said Jorge Nahuel, a member of the Xawvnko Area Council of the Neuquen Mapuche Confederation.
Last November, members of the Gelay Ko community in Neuquen blocked work on a gas well on their land that US oil company Apache had been drilling, saying that they were not previously consulted of the project. They demanded that the provincial government create two commissions, one to evaluate the social, cultural and environmental impact, and the other for control and monitoring.
Fracking uses millions of gallons of water mixed with chemicals and sand at high pressure, to break through rock like shale to free natural gas and oil.
“There is no policy in place to measure the impact of this new technology,” said Nahuel. “That is what the communities are reacting to, in Loma de la Lata and in the central part of the province.”
Oil and gas exploration began 60 years ago, and indigenous residents estimate that there are 200 wells there and they have been demanding an end to the activity in the area for the last decade.
Mapuche community authority Cristina Lincopán of the village, said the government brings water each month in trucks to the area from Zapala, a city 60 kilometers (38 miles), because the water is so contaminated from the oil industry.
She said that community members are suffering from blindness, skin diseases and diarrhea.
“The truth is the company Apache is killing us day after day,” she said.
In September 2001, German consultancy Umweltshutz provided the Kaxipayiñ and Paynemil communities an environmental impact study that found 630,000 cubic meters of soil contaminated with chromium, lead, arsenic, naphtaline and pyrene, as well as other heavy metals in the water above legally accepted levels.
Gabriel Cherqui, a werken, or spokesman from the Kaxipayíñ community, said that since early 2011, they blocked YFP from exploring in the region because local government officials failed to clean up the current environmental damage. In 2002, his community, along with the neighboring Paynemil village filed a lawsuit against Repsol-YPF for social-environmental and cultural damage. Back then the cleanup cost was estimated at US$445 million, and is now at US$1.6 billion, according to Cherqui.
Even though Argentina ratified Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization on indigenous peoples, one of whose main points is the previous consultation of indigenous groups, the state has not ensured this.
Now it is an issue local courts are evaluating. In February, Judge Mario Tommasi in Cutral Có town in Neuquen rejected an injunction request by Petrolera Piedra del Águila to do seismic testing in the Huenctru Trawel Leufú Mapuche community. Meanwhile, in March, the provincial Supreme Court approved an injunction against Chinese company Emprendimientos Mineros for copper exploration in the Mellao Morales community.
James Anaya, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Indigenous Peoples, who visited Argentina in late 2011, said the country’s institutions need to do more to defend indigenous peoples’ human rights.
In a press conference, he said the government needs to regulate the consultation process before extractive industry projects can receive a green light.
Other encroachments on indigenous lands
According to figures from the Neuquen Observatory on Indigenous Peoples’ Indigenous Rights, there are 59 Mapuche communities in the region, 19 of them affected by the oil industry or on the radar of companies looking to expand exploration.
Five of them – Logko Purrán, Gelay Ko, Antipan, Kaxipayiñ and Paynemil – are home to gas exploitation. Oil is being extracted from Wiñoy Folil, Maliqueo and Marifil; and in 11 others, there are concessions for exploration of either.
Salta, in northern Argentina, is also the scene of conflicts over extractive industry in or near the lands of indigenous peoples. In October and November of 2011, the Wichí Lewetes Kalehi and Lote 6 communities in the municipality of Rivadavia Banda Norte tried to stop seismic testing on their lands and reported being harassed by the company Wicap, which was contracted by the Unión Transitoria de Empresas Maxipetrol, as well as by police.
In the Chubut province, in Patagonia, an exploration/exploitation concession in Ñirihuau Sur, in June 2011, put Mapuche Tehuelche communities on alert. In mid-October, they held a trawun, or parliament, to evaluate the impacts of the industry, in which Neuquen Mapuche also participated.
It was a similar story in Chaco, where the province was divided into 12 blocks, some of them including Wichi, Qom and Moquit lands. In mid-2011, the Servicios Energéticos del Chaco-Empresa del Estado Provincial and Argentina Energy Service, a state-owned company, started exploring for hydrocarbons.
From Gáldu
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 17, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Environment News Service
A natural gas drilling rush is on in rural North Dakota. And with it, residents are reporting growing numbers of respiratory ailments, skin lesions, blood oozing from eyes, and the deaths of livestock and pets.
Elsewhere, residents of Texas, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Wyoming and other states who thought they’d hit the lottery by signing natural gas drilling leases have watched their drinking water turn noxious: slick, brown, foamy, flammable.
In December, for the first time, federal regulators scientifically linked hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to the contamination of an aquifer, refuting repeated industry claims that the practice does not pollute drinking water.
It happened in the rural ranching community of Pavillion, Wyoming, an area riddled with 162 natural gas wells dug between 1990 and 2006. Despite a decade of complaints from residents that their reeking water was undrinkable – and that many suffered from nerve damage, asthma, heart trouble and other health problems – state officials did nothing.
Finally the EPA stepped in, launching a three-year study running from 2008 to 2011.
In its report, the EPA identified numerous fracking chemicals in Pavillion’s water. Cancer-causing benzene was found at 50 times safe levels, along with other hazardous chemicals, methane, diesel fuel, and toxic metals – in both groundwater and deep wells.
Now, across the country in Pennsylvania, the EPA is testing drinking water in 61 locations in Susquehanna County for possible fracking-related contamination.
Nationwide, residents living near fracked gas wells have filed over 1,000 complaints of tainted water, severe illnesses, livestock deaths, and fish kills. Complaints, sometimes involving hundreds of households, have risen in tandem with a veritable gold rush of new natural gas wells – now numbering about 493,000 across 31 states.
This month’s hearings on the EPA’s Pavillion report, led by the House subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, have been contentious, with pro-drilling politicians and industry representatives attacking its conclusions.
“The EPA is trying to go after fracking everywhere they can,” said subcommittee chairman Andy Harris, a Maryland Republican. “They’ve had absolutely no proof that fracking had polluted drinking water, that I know of.”
Both he and industry spokesmen implied that the media had created a poorly-informed frenzy, spreading fear and mistrust of fracking.
However, James Martin, the EPA’s regional administrator for the West, testified that cement casings that should have protected drinking water were weak or missing – a possible source of contamination.
Other witnesses, including Dr. Bernard Goldstein, of the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health, argued that the public should be concerned, noting that policy makers lack adequate information to protect public health.
Still, the fracking industry goes virtually unregulated. Why? The answer is money.
The oil and gas industry has reaped billions in profits from fracking. And since 1990, they’ve pumped $238.7 million into gubernatorial and Congressional election campaigns to persuade lawmakers that fracking is safe, which has effectively blocked federal regulation.
Republican candidates received at least three times more cash than Democratic candidates. Fracking industry spending especially targeted oversight – members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
Top Congressional recipients include Joe Barton and John Cornyn, both Texas Republicans, with contributions of $514,945 and $417,556 respectively; Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, who received $372,450; and Tim Murphy, a Pennsylvania Republican who took in $275,499.
James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, who accepted $357,788, claimed the EPA study was “not based on sound science but rather on political science.”
The industry spent an additional $726 million on lobbying from 2001.
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett also received hefty election support – $361,207. Corbett has signaled willingness to sign a fracking bill passed by the state Senate this month that offers huge benefits to natural gas drillers and essentially prevents municipalities and environmentalists from taking action against the location of wells.
Today, only four of 31 fracking states have significant drilling rules, while the gas industry is exempted from seven major federal regulations.
One of these, the “Halliburton loophole,” pushed through by former Vice-President/former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney, exempts corporations from revealing the chemicals used in fracking fluid – bypassing the Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water Acts.
Recently, five states have adopted disclosure rules, though they still allow for “proprietary trade secrets.”
Another loophole leaves hazardous waste, including contaminated soil, water and drilling fluids, unregulated by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
Still another loophole dodges the Superfund law, which requires that polluters remediate for carcinogens like benzene released into the environment – except if they come from oil or gas.
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, which was invented by Halliburton in the 1940s, injects water, sand and chemicals into the ground at high pressure, blasting apart shale bedrock to release natural gas. However, industry’s reassurance that fracking is an old technology with a proven safety record is misleading.
Modern fracking is drastically different, using new chemical mixtures and millions rather than thousands of gallons of water injected at far higher pressure. It takes between one and 10 million gallons of water to frack one well.
Last week it was revealed that one well in Carrollton, Ohio, required 969,024 pounds (484.5 tons) of chemical additives, 5,066 tons of sand and 10.5 million gallons of water. Up to 40 percent of that water returns to the surface, carrying toxic drilling chemicals, high levels of salts, and sometimes, naturally-occurring radioactive material.
A 1990 industry study concluded that radium in drilling wastewater dumped off the Louisiana coast posed “potentially significant risks” of cancer for people who regularly eat fish from those waters.
Most fracking water remains underground, potentially polluting aquifers and drinking water. Streams and groundwater can be contaminated by spills, surface wastewater pits, and by millions of tons of chemical-laden dirt removed during the drilling process. Sewage treatment plants aren’t equipped to treat chemicals or radioactivity in frackwater that could end up in drinking water.
Today, 65 probable fracking chemicals are federally listed as hazardous. Many others remain unstudied and unregulated, making it impossible to assess the effects on water resources.
EPA documents note that some “cause kidney, liver, heart, blood, and brain damage through prolonged or repeated exposure,” and that fracking fluid migrates over unpredictable distances through different rock layers.
Last August, a national association of pediatricians published concerns that children are more susceptible to fracking chemical exposure than adults.
Read more from Environment News Service:
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 14, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Repression at Home, Toxification
By Maura Stephens
Pennsylvania’s state legislature has effectively signed a death warrant for some number of residents, who knows how many. Corbett’s about to make it official.
Pennsylvanians: Fight back — or suffer the consequences.
The fracking industry has written a bill that gives itself legal permission to poison Pennsylvanians-and keeps doctors who treat them once they’re poisoned from telling anyone else what poisoned them. The bill also essentially permits all gas drilling and processing activities anywhere, including in residential areas.
It’s all being sold as an “impact fee” bill. Counties that want the income will sign on — and that probably means most counties will.
The industry was helped in this covert operation by crooks in political office. Those political criminals should be held accountable (more on this below).
The 174-page bill, HB1950, was signed in both the House and Senate of the state’s General Assembly, and on Friday (2/10/12) the Senate passed it to Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett for signature.
This is yet the latest egregious example of industry-state denial of municipalities’ right to protect themselves. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that this is the legal permitting of murder — and legalization of coerced suicide.
There can be no question that the legislators who signed it are in collusion with industry. They are corrupt. There can be no other explanation. These people have an obligation to protect the citizens of Pennsylvania, and not only are they not doing so, but they are also denying citizens the right to protect themselves—and denying physicians and nurses the ability to protect their patients!
And if this outrage does not get Pennsylvanians (and everyone) out in the streets, in Harrisburg at the governor’s mansion demanding a veto, and at the offices of state legislators, demanding a reversal of the bill’s passage, I do not know what will.
As Berks-Mont News reported on January 25, Pennsylvania municipalities currently do “have the legal right to decide where and how gas development occurs. Both the Municipalities Planning Code and the State Constitution vest municipalities with the authority and responsibility to address local environmental and public resources. State Supreme Court rulings have also made it clear that the state Oil and Gas Act allows municipalities the right to use zoning codes to restrict the location of gas wells.”
This law negates those rights and completely strips communities of their rights to self govern. This is a blatant abrogation of the United States constitution and all the hackneyed assertions that We the People have any say any longer in crafting U.S. law.
Read more from TruthOut:
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 14, 2012 | Lobbying, Mining & Drilling
By Mirel Bran, Guardian Weekly
Shukri Hussein was only 23 when he first bought some land, with a friend, to start a farm at Praventsi, a village close to Novi Pazar, in north-east Bulgaria. Ten years later the biology graduate heads a 110-hectare organic farm with a workforce of 35.
He was pleased with what he had achieved and had no intention of letting anyone spoil his dream. At the beginning of January he joined thousands of others to protest against plans to explore the huge shale-gas reserves in his region. Their efforts were crowned with success. In June last year the Bulgarian government had granted a permit to the US firm Chevron to prospect across 4,400 sq km around Novi Pazar.
But in January parliament withdraw the permit issued to Chevron, and also decided to ban exploration of shale-gas reserves using the controversial hydraulic-fracturing (fracking) technique.
MPs cited as a precedent a French ban enacted last July, as Bulgaria became only the second state to ban the procedure.
The government had hoped that the new energy source would reduce the nation’s almost complete dependence on imported Russian gas, supplied by Gazprom. Bulgarian shale-gas reserves are estimated to amount to at least 300bn cubic metres, according to the economy and energy ministry.
“To begin with everyone was really enthusiastic,” says Hussein. “We thought we’d get rich overnight. But when I realised the hazards this technology entails I was very concerned. I’ve worked hard for the past 10 years to build up the farm. If they start drilling for shale gas I’ll lose everything.”
Bulgaria’s reserves are several thousands of metres deep. Injecting water, sand and chemicals under high pressure to fracture the bedrock and release the gas involves a serious risk of groundwater contamination.
The risk is particularly serious in the Novi Pazar area, due to its particular geology. But looking further afield, fracking could affect the whole of the north-eastern Dobrudja region. “We were promised lots of jobs and other miracles,” says Vessko Dimov, a dental surgeon from Novi Pazar who launched the anti-fracking protest movement. “But when we woke up to the hazards involved we decided to oppose the project.”A petition collected 15,000 signatures in a month and, much to the protesters’ surprise, several councils in the area decided to oppose fracking.
The campaign spread to Veliki Preslaz, a small town about 40km southeast of Novi Pazar. This historic stronghold is a tourist attraction and feared that trade might suffer.
From 893 to 972 the town was the Bulgarian empire’s second capital and the ruins of the old citadel are testimony to its past splendour. “The travel trade is vital for our town,” says the leader of the local council Aleksandar Gorchev, elected three months ago. “Shale-gas exploitation is a real danger for us. Everyone would be OK if this technology did not pose any problems, but that’s not the case.”
In mid-January the anti-fracking demonstrations spread to the capital Sofia and a dozen other towns across Bulgaria. “I have to admit that at first, I didn’t believe we could do it,” says Hussein. “It’s a big victory for us. In Dubai, they spend a fortune to make the desert inhabitable, whereas here in Europe we have everything we need. We don’t want to turn it into a desert.”
From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/14/bulgaria-bans-shale-gas-exploration
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 10, 2012 | Climate Change
By Jeff Tollefson / Nature
When US government scientists began sampling the air from a tower north of Denver, Colorado, they expected urban smog — but not strong whiffs of what looked like natural gas. They eventually linked the mysterious pollution to a nearby natural-gas field, and their investigation has now produced the first hard evidence that the cleanest-burning fossil fuel might not be much better than coal when it comes to climate change.
Led by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Colorado, Boulder, the study estimates that natural-gas producers in an area known as the Denver-Julesburg Basin are losing about 4% of their gas to the atmosphere — not including additional losses in the pipeline and distribution system. This is more than double the official inventory, but roughly in line with estimates made in 2011 that have been challenged by industry. And because methane is some 25 times more efficient than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere, releases of that magnitude could effectively offset the environmental edge that natural gas is said to enjoy over other fossil fuels.
“If we want natural gas to be the cleanest fossil fuel source, methane emissions have to be reduced,” says Gabrielle Pétron, an atmospheric scientist at NOAA and at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and first author on the study, currently in press at the Journal of Geophysical Research. Emissions will vary depending on the site, but Pétron sees no reason to think that this particular basin is unique. “I think we seriously need to look at natural-gas operations on the national scale.”
The results come as a natural-gas boom hits the United States, driven by a technology known as hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking’, that can crack open hard shale formations and release the natural gas trapped inside. Environmentalists are worried about effects such as water pollution, but the US government is enthusiastic about fracking. In his State of the Union address last week, US President Barack Obama touted natural gas as the key to boosting domestic energy production.
Read more from Nature: http://www.nature.com/news/air-sampling-reveals-high-emissions-from-gas-field-1.9982
