December 09, 2009 05:30 AM UTC

Will McInnis Support Clean Air and Water?

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• by: ClubTwitty

(Even Tea Parties need water…Now With Poll…Updated – promoted by ClubTwitty)

The Associated Press is reporting:

EPA agrees to review oil, gas pollution standards



DENVER – Federal officials have agreed to review air pollution standards for oil and gas operations to decide if they need to be updated.

The proposed settlement of a complaint by two environmental groups calls for the Environmental Protection Agency to start the review in January 2011. The settlement needs court approval.

WildEarth Guardians and the San Juan Citizens Alliance filed a complaint in January saying the EPA hasn’t updated air quality standards for oil and gas development despite increased activity. The groups also want the EPA to set standards for pollutants not currently regulated, including greenhouse gases.

Will energy giant EnCana lobbyist GOP gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis stand up for clean air?  Or will he accuse the federal government’s pre-eminent environmental agency of doing it’s destroying jobs?

Based on his answers to Adam Schrager’s interview on 9News, as considered by the Colorado Independent, we might speculate that it is likely to be the latter:

Scott McInnis can hold forth on TV (watch clip 2 of 12) as though the only energy jobs in the state are jobs in the oil and gas industry, as if it were 1965.

“The governor, the current administration, came up with the toughest oil and gas rules in the country. So now… we’re clear at the bottom as a state to do business in as far as it’s related to the energy industry… There’s nothing wrong with business. Let’s go back to the free market,” he told 9 News’s Adam Schrager.

Both of the successful complainants have strong Colorado roots.  San Juan Citizens Alliance, based in Durango, has been working to bring balance to gasfields of New Mexico’s San Juan Basin and Southwest Colorado for years. While the New Mexico based WildEarth Guardians has recently grown to include Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action, with the key climate and energy staff remaining Denver-based.  

And the significance of the EPA’s decision has direct Colorado effect. Cumulative impacts to air quality in gasfields–from VOCs, well flaring, and dust–is a contributor to rising ozone levels, decreased visability, and threats to public health.  

Dust is also linked with impacts to the Rocky Mountain snowpacks, threatening both our economy and our water supply. And, obviously it should seem, there also remain other major issues with that second basic environmental necessity–water–across Colorado’s drilling zones.

Of the 300 or so compounds the Bureau of Land Management suspects are being used by drillers in the Wind River Range and Pinedale Anticline, 65 are listed as hazardous by feds, including benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene. Many of the rest are unstudied and unregulated.

Even more alarming, up to two-thirds of the fluids are never recovered through ‘flowback’ and remain underground … somewhere, according to Halliburton’s own records.

…On April 30, 2001 Ballard Petroleum blew out a well at their G33 pad in Dry Hollow in Western Colorado. Larry and Laura Amos could see the derrick from their kitchen window. On that day, 82,000 gallons of frack fluid were injected at 3,600 pounds of pressure. The Amoses’ drinking water well suddenly popped its top and began belching muddy water.

…State inspectors did not test fracking fluids because they had no idea what to test for. As for the methane, the Amos’ were told that methane occurs naturally and is harmless. Inspectors warned them, however, to keep the windows open and vent the basement, just in case.

Ballard denied any responsibility while their field rep provided the Amoses’ with bottled water for a while. They said the fracking had taken place nearly a mile underground, far below the 225-foot water well, and there was no chance the fluids could have travelled that far up.

Yet Geoffrey Thyne, a geologist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, who studied the incident for the County, said, “Water wells just don’t do that unless you apply pressure to the bottom.”

Two years later, Larry’s wife Laura came down with a very rare condition of a tumor in her adrenal gland. She begged EnCana, who bought out Ballard, for the ingredients of the fracking chemicals to help her in her diagnosis. For months, the company denied 2-BE, a highly toxic and common fracturing fluid, had been used. Amos’ lawyers eventually obtained documents from EnCana showing that 2-BE had, in fact, been used in at least one adjacent well.

The couple has since clammed up after a reported multi-million settlement from EnCana in 2006.

…In February a frozen 200-foot waterfall was discovered on the side of a massive cliff near Parachute, Colo. According to the State, 1.6 million gallons of fracturing fluids had leaked from a waste pit and been transported by groundwater, where it seeped out of the cliff. Nearby in Rock Springs, a rancher was hospitalized after he drank well water out of his own tap. Tests showed benzene in his water, and the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission cited four gas operators, not knowing which one was responsible for the spill.

Problems are not limited to Colorado as the article notes.  

…In December 2007, a house in Bainbridge, Ohio exploded in a fiery ball. Investigators discovered that the neighborhood’s tap water contained so much methane that the house ignited. The resulting study concluded that pressure caused by hydraulic fracturing pushed the gas, which is found naturally thousands of feet below, through a system of cracks into the groundwater aquifer.

…As many as 22,000 fish and mussels were found dead last September along 43 miles of Dunkard Creek, a Monongahela River tributary. West Virginia DEP said the kill was a result of “saline conditions from natural resource extraction from nearby coalbed methane operations.”

And this widespread and increasing list of problems has led to a push in Congress to include fracking under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

…”Troubling incidents have occurred around the country where people became ill after fracking operations began in their communities,” said U.S. Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY).

Hinchey, with Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), and fellow Reps. Diana DeGette (D-CO) and Jared Polis (D-CO), is co-sponsoring the FRAC Act – Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act – which would amend the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) of 1974.

Here McInnis could actually take a stronger stand than Gov. Ritter, and support this legislation. Instead he is taking the weaker approach.  While the State of Colorado’s new rules don’t go as far as the federal FRAC Act–sponsored by Colorado Reps. DeGette and Polis–they do in fact strengthen reporting and other requirements where few existed before.  Not that such, still insufficient, safeguards matter to the paymasters of Scott McInnis. Apparently they he thinks they go too far.  

The GOP needs to explain their plans to address the state’s considerable infrastructure and other needs while decreasing taxes and gutting services eliminating waste, as several diaries have duly noted.  

But we should also demand the details on how McInnis would ensure the protection of our shared resources–like air and water, public lands, wildlife, and general welfare–while easing drilling regulations and greasing the skids for the rigs.    

Anything short of this is just a bunch of, well, gas from the erstwhile energy lobbyist.

 

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