Two stark numbers illustrate the challenge the administration faces in ensuring pipeline safety while pressing ahead with new pipeline projects: 135 federal inspectors oversee 2.6 million miles of pipeline, which means each inspector is responsible for almost enough pipe to circle the Earth.
Source: Exclusive: Pipeline Safety Chief Says His Regulatory Process Is ‘Kind of Dying’ | InsideClimate News
“Spectra neither cares for the public nor the workers. This is a fact. They do not care what happens as long as they flow gas.”
Source: Spectra Exposed
“Like every other company, Spectra gives a tremendous presentation about their commitment to safety, but their actions lack any kind of resolve. No one ever says, ‘Safety’s #2 here…’ At every turn when I made a safety suggestion, I was met with monumental resistance from the company on every level.”
Source: Former inspectors allege safety issues with Spectra pipeline project
Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) is urging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to consider environmental concerns posed by residents living along a proposed natural gas pipeline route.
How do you know when a campaign you are waging is having an impact? When the target of your campaign cancels a regularly scheduled meeting because you are openly organizing to bring a large number of people to it to call them out for their outrageous behavior.
This is what happened three days ago when FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, canceled its May monthly public meeting because of Beyond Extreme Energy’s plan to be there in large numbers. They moved it up to May 14, assuming that our movement wouldn’t be able to get it together to turn out on such short notice. So now, we are mobilizing for the kind of turnout on that day, and the kind of turnout May 21-29, that will ratchet up even more the pressure on FERC to change its fracking-enabling ways.
In August 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit distributed an intelligence bulletin to all field offices warning that environmental extremism would likely become an increasing threat to the energy industry. The eight-page document argued that, even though the industry had encountered only low-level vandalism and trespassing, recent “criminal incidents” suggested that environmental extremism was on the rise. The FBI concluded: “Environmental extremism will become a greater threat to the energy industry owing to our historical understanding that some environmental extremists have progressed from committing low-level crimes against targets to more significant crimes over time in an effort to further the environmental extremism cause.”
Not long after the bulletin was distributed, a private security firm providing intelligence reports to the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security cited the FBI document in order to justify the surveillance of anti-fracking groups. The same security firm concluded that the “escalating conflict over natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania” could lead to an increase in “environmentalist activity or eco-terrorism.”
In late March, in Elkins and Bridgeport, WV, FERC held two public scoping meetings on the proposed massive Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Supply Header Pipeline.
Doddridge County resident Christina Woods is a member of the Doddridge County Watershed Association. Christina is also an OVEC member. She was among those quoted in a West Virginia Public Radio story covering the FERC scoping meeting at the Bridgeport meeting on March 24, where she delivered these comments:
My wish for all of you is clean air, clean water and a safe place to live. Water contamination from fracking-related activities is real in Doddridge County. (Ed. note: An earlier speaker with ties to the oil and gas industry had implied that water contamination from fracking activities was not real, saying that one could find anything on the internet.)
My home is approximately one mile from the Supply Header Pipeline. The proposed Mountain Valley Pipeline runs parallel to the Supply Header Project in our area. Why would we allow two pipelines so close to one another?
At a meeting in Doddridge County, Dominion told us that the pipeline’s blast zone radius will be 942 feet — everything 942 feet around any point of explosion along the pipeline will basically be gone/toast. (The blast radius is the distance that the fire from the explosion consumes, measured in feet from the epicenter to the outer edge of the burned area.)
Here is how big that is: 2,787,740 sq ft or 63.99 acres or approximately 48.5 football fields. The company should have to mark, in red, on their maps 942 feet on either side of the pipeline indicating the blast zone radius, so that the public really can see the danger of this pipeline.
Local governments all over the country are trying stop the surge in oil and gas development by embracing a novel legal tactic–community-based rights ordinances. It’s a strategy that carries risks.
In rural Conestoga Township, Lancaster County concerned residents want to stop a $3 billion interstate gas pipeline from coming through their community. Oklahoma-based Williams Partners Atlantic Sunrise project is one many proposed pipelines in Pennsylvania facing intense opposition. If approved, it would cut through 10 counties and carry Marcellus Shale gas as far south as Alabama.
As Williams prepares its formal application for federal regulators, Conestoga Township residents are fighting for more local control.
“A direct challenge to existing law”
Conestoga resident Kim Kann fears her wooded lot will never be the same. As she looks out at the trees and horse paddock, she worries. Although she opposes the Atlantic Sunrise project, her land could be taken by eminent domain.
“We’ve used the land for horses and had goats over the years,” she says. “The kids 4-wheel and camp–all the things we thought they’d be able to do forever on a property like this.”
She knows the community rights ordinance is a long shot, because pipelines like this one are regulated by the federal government.
“We are pursuing it as a direct challenge to existing law.”
In the energy world, FERC regulates ‘midstream everything.’ ”
So said Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) in a July 2014 floor speech, answering her own question about why nominations to the little-known Federal Energy Regulatory Commission mattered. “Midstream,” in energy parlance, is the business of getting energy from where it is produced to where it is used. FERC’s purview of “midstream everything” includes oil and gas pipelines and storage facilities—infrastructure that is experiencing rapid growth, thanks to the shale oil and gas boom driven by hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking. There is a lot more energy to move around, and if you want to build new infrastructure to move it, you need FERC’s permission.
FERC has a longstanding reputation as an industry-friendly agency. As then-Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman observed in a scathing report after the Enron collapse in 2002, “Oftentimes, FERC seemed to view itself not as a regulator but as a facilitator—not as a market cop, but as a market cheerleader.” As the main government body charged with regulating Enron, FERC exhibited “a shocking absence of regulatory vigilance,” the report concluded, as well as an ironic failure “to meet the demands of the new, market-based system that the agency itself has championed.”
Many reasons have been provided for the dramatic plunge in the price of oil to about $60 per barrel (nearly half of what it was a year ago): slowing demand due to global economic stagnation; overproduction at shale fields in the United States; the decision of the Saudis and other Middle Eastern OPEC producers to maintain output at current levels (presumably to punish higher-cost producers in the US and elsewhere); and the increased value of the dollar relative to other currencies. There is, however, one reason that’s not being discussed, and yet it could be the most important of all: the complete collapse of Big Oil’s production-maximizing business model.
Until last fall, when the price decline gathered momentum, the oil giants were operating at full throttle, pumping out more petroleum every day. They did so, of course, in part to profit from the high prices. For most of the previous six years, Brent crude, the international benchmark for crude oil, had been selling at $100 or higher. But Big Oil was also operating according to a business model that assumed an ever-increasing demand for its products, however costly they might be to produce and refine. This meant that no fossil fuel reserves, no potential source of supply—no matter how remote or hard to reach, how far offshore or deeply buried, how encased in rock—was deemed untouchable in the mad scramble to increase output and profits.
In recent years, this output-maximizing strategy had, in turn, generated historic wealth for the giant oil companies. Exxon, the largest US-based oil firm, earned an eye-popping $32.6 billion in 2013 alone, more than any other American company except for Apple. Chevron, the second biggest oil firm, posted earnings of $21.4 billion that same year. State-owned companies like Saudi Aramco and Russia’s Rosneft also reaped mammoth profits.
How things have changed in a matter of mere months. With demand stagnant and excess production the story of the moment, the very strategy that had generated record-breaking profits has suddenly become hopelessly dysfunctional.
To fully appreciate the nature of the energy industry’s predicament, it’s necessary to go back a decade to 2005, when the production-maximizing strategy was first adopted. At that time, Big Oil faced a critical juncture. On the one hand, many existing oil fields were being depleted at a torrid pace, leading experts to predict an imminent “peak” in global oil production, followed by an irreversible decline; on the other, rapid economic growth in China, India and other developing nations was pushing demand for fossil fuels into the stratosphere. In those same years, concern over climate change was also beginning to gather momentum, threatening the future of Big Oil and generating pressures to invest in alternative forms of energy.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday unveiled the nation’s first major federal regulations on hydraulic fracturing, a technique for oil and gas drilling that has led to a significant increase in American energy production but has also raised concerns about health and safety risks.
The Interior Department began drafting the rules, focused on drilling safety, in Mr. Obama’s first term after breakthroughs in the technology, also known as fracking, led to a surge in the production of oil and gas.
The fracking boom has put the United States on track to soon become the world’s largest oil and gas producer. But environmentalists fear that the technique, which involves injecting a cocktail of chemicals deep underground to break up the rocks around oil and gas deposits, could contaminate surrounding water supplies and wildlife.
As the practice of fracking has soared, fights over how and whether to regulate it have broken out across the country. The states have jurisdiction over drilling on private and state-owned land, where the vast majority of fracking is done in the United States. The new federal rules, by contrast, will cover about 100,000 oil and gas wells drilled on public lands, according to the Interior Department.
Connecting hoses between a pipeline and water tanks at a Hess fracking site last year near Williston, North Dakota. Credit Andrew Cullen/Reuters
Still, Obama administration officials hope that the federal rules will serve as a de facto standard for state legislatures grappling with their own regulations.
“Current federal well-drilling regulations are more than 30 years old, and they simply have not kept pace with the technical complexities of today’s hydraulic fracturing operations,” said the interior secretary, Sally Jewell.
HIGHLIGHTS
BOOM and BUST – INDUSTRY TREADING SHALE WATER : Oil and Natural gas prices have steadily declined over the past 2 years, and have taken a big drop in the past 6 months, yet the cost of extraction has remained the same or slightly increased.
NO PIPELINE LEFT UNOPPOSED: Cheryl LaFleur, Chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) remarked that opposition to pipelines is unprecedented.
GROUP UPDATES: Spotlight on what groups are doing to oppose pipelines.
PIPELINE UPDATES: Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline (ASP) FERC Docket: PF14-8, PennEast FERC Docket: PF15-1 and other pipelines being proposed
MARCELLUS SHALE PLAYERS: The often mentioned and long awaited Marcellus Shale Players data is Now Available ON-LINE. Ever wonder what a hockey team owner has to do with shale? Look up Terry Pegula on the Marcellus Shale Players to find out. Explore the Marcellus Shale Players, follow the money, connect the dots and create your own diagrams!
The data tell me that climate change—and the fossil fuel infrastructure that stokes its fires—are existential threats to my children and the entire generation of which they are a part. The World Health Organization is very clear on this point, and I have spent my professional life studying and writing about this evidence.
The Seneca Lake gas storage project near my home poses multiple risks to the safety and health of my children, as good science shows.
Yet FERC ignores and sweeps aside independent science that we submit in response to this and other proposed projects. It is this willful deafness of FERC to matters of ultimate concern and its willingness to play the role of good German in the face of an unfolding climate catastrophe that is the reason for the ongoing protests and civil disobedience.
We have now reached the straw-that-breaks-the-camel’s-back moment in the climate change story, and FERC is widely perceived—both inside the scientific community and out—as the agency that permits the piling on of even more straws even while blithely claiming that each straw poses only negligible risk for harm and must be evaluated individually and on its own merits.
The government’s job is to protect the citizenry and assure its security and well-being. And yet, by this blindered approach and by its commitment to further entrenchment and investment in fossil fuel infrastructure, FERC is a branch of government that seems satisfied with recklessness and reductivist thinking precisely at the moment in which ethos and wisdom are required.
FERC’s atomized, compartmentalized approach to decision-making likely served it well in the past. But a continuing refusal to look at cumulative impacts over time and space is anachronistic, dysfunctional and downright treacherous in 2015.
That is why I and many others are becoming reluctant civil disobedients in the face of FERC projects that are rolling over our communities and jeopardizing our health and our climate.
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The head of the federal commission that will decide whether the PennEast pipeline gets built expressed concern in a recent speech over the “unprecedented opposition” to the construction of new natural gas pipelines, prompting new criticism from pipeline opponents.
“We have a situation here,” Cheryl A. LaFleur, director of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said at a National Press Club luncheon in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 27.
“Pipelines are facing unprecedented opposition from local and national groups including environmental activists,” LaFleur said. “These groups are active in every FERC docket, as they should be, as well as in my email inbox seven days a week, in my Twitter feed, at our open meetings demanding to be heard, and literally at our door closing down First Street so FERC won’t be able to work.”
LaFleur’s comments were blasted by opponents of the proposed $1.2 billion pipeline stretching through six counties from Northeastern Pennsylvania to Hopewell Township in Mercer County.
“My thoughts are with Harry Truman,” said Hopewell Township Mayor Harvey Lester. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
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DEERFIELD — A federal tort action filed by the town against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission earlier this month has been amended to add the U.S. Department of Energy to the complaint as a defendant.
Under the Federal Tort Claims Act private parties have the right to sue the federal government for damages if they are injured due to the negligence of one of its employees. The town’s claim is directed at Tennessee Gas Pipeline’s Co.’s proposed 36-inch diameter natural gas pipeline, which is expected to pass through Deerfield and seven other Franklin County towns.
The original action, filed with the FERC on Feb. 4 by Cristobal Bonifaz, a Conway lawyer representing the town free-of-charge in its fight against the project, claimed that a 2005 amendment to the federal Natural Gas Act that gave the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission authority to regulate the transportation and sale of natural gas destined for sale overseas violates the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. It seeks $675.50 in damages for costs associated with holding public forums related to the pipeline.
“At no time has DOE taken into account in its permitting processes to export natural gas that the transportation of gas for export, including Kinder Morgan’s gas, is carried through pipelines approved by FERC under alleged authority granted to FERC by 2005 Amendments to the Natural Gas Act, and that approval by FERC of such transportation of Natural Gas for export is in violation of the Constitution of the United States,” Bonifaz wrote, in the amended claim.
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