Natural-Gas

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

By Josh Fox Anti-Fracking Campaigners: We Won’t Be Silenced Gasland was intended to be both a chronicle of the way in which oil and gas companies have used vast sums of money to shield fracking from virtually all federal, state, and local regulations and a cautionary tale about the toll the process takes on people and the environment. Fortunately, the message of the film is getting through. Recent surveys show that 4 out of 5 Americans are concerned about fracking’s effect on our drinking water and seven out of ten Ohioans believe the process should be stopped until we know more about its effect on the environment and its relation to a series of earthquakes that have rocked the Northeastern part of the state. ...

By Adam Federman On August 27, 2009, Dan Cincotta, a fisheries biologist with West Virginia’s Department of Natural Resources, was conducting a routine inventory of Dunkard Creek, a small river that runs through West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania. He was accompanied by a consultant and an environmental engineer from the state’s largest coal and gas company, Consol Energy, which operates a coalmine, Blacksville #2, just outside of Wana, West Virginia. Cincotta was supposed to do electro-fish surveys, whereby the fish are temporarily stunned in order to assess populations, and to take a series of conductivity readings – a basic measure of how much salt is dissolved in water. ...

By Agence France-Presse Masked gunmen on Friday blew up a gas pipeline which supplies Egyptian gas to Israel, the official MENA news agency reported, in the eighth such attack this year. The saboteurs planted explosives under the pipeline, around 60 kilometres (40 miles) west of the town of El-Arish in the north of the Sinai peninsula, before fleeing, witnesses said. No one was injured and, due to maintenance operations at the time of the blast following recent attacks, there was no gas in the pipeline, MENA reported. ...

As controversial drilling for shale gas continues in Lancashire, Peter Marshall travels to the United States to see first hand how life has changed for people who have spent years living with fracking. Bradford County, Pennsylvania, is one of the most fracked places on the planet. Its gas-rush, which began in earnest in 2008, has seen around 600 wells drilled deep into the Marcellus Shale. The county seat is the town of Towanda. If you want to know what a gas-rush does to an area there is no better place to look for answers. ...