Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Major Oil Spill in Arkansas: Has ExxonMobil Lost Control of More than Just its Tar Sands Oil?
The first pictures of the pipeline gash came from the law firm suing ExxonMobil on behalf of those hurt by the spill. The Duncan Firm of Little Rock posted four pictures on its [4]Facebook page[4] April 11, following an onsite inspection the previous day.
That was the same day that ExxonMobil complied with a subpoena and delivered 12,587 pages of documents, including hundreds of plans and blueprints to Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel. Commenting on the 22 foot long, 2 inch wide, smooth split in the pipeline, McDaniel said, “The pipeline rupture is substantially larger than many of us initially thought.”
Also that day, April 10, the Huffington Post ran a detailed story about widespread health complaints among people living near the pipeline and as much as a mile or more away. The next day, the Arkansas Times had a much [5]longer story[5] about the town with the headline: “Will Mayflower ever be the same after the Exxon spill?” Not surprisingly, there was no one who thought so.
Arkansas Paper Hears Ticking Time Bomb
The Arkansas Times story notes in passing “the still-ticking time bomb on the shores of Central Arkansas’s primary water source, Lake Maumelle, where the Pegasus pipeline comes within 600 feet of the shoreline.”
And the Duncan firm is reaching out to people along for full 300-mile length of the pipeline in Arkansas, suggesting on Facebook: “If this pipeline runs through your property you may have a claim for damages.”
None of this information came from ExxonMobil. Late on April 11, the ExxonMobil website’s freshest news was a Unified Command press release from April 10, featuring the usual good news about the air, water, fish, and residents.
April 10 looks like the day ExxonMobil lost [2]control of the story[2], at least for the moment.
Despite sketchy mainstream media coverage outside Arkansas, enforced by a county sheriff’s department obedient to ExxonMobil directives, the increased [3]flow of news[3] from the Duncan Firm, and Attorney General, and a local population losing patience with – and more importantly trust in ExxonMobil’s promises will be much harder for America’s most profitable corporation to control.
And Why Would Anyone Distrust ExxonMobil?
Some days ago, ExxonMobil gave four families well-publicized permission to return to their homes. The families chose not to return, because the Arkansas Dept. of Health suggested they wait till air quality tests confirmed it was safe.
ExxonMobil reported April 10 that “Fish in the main body of Lake Conway have not been affected.” The press release acknowledges obliquely that a cove that is part of the lake already has tar sands oil in it, but tries to reassure the reader that that’s as far as the diluted bitumen and its unknown, multiple chemical components will go .
One Mayflower resident who lives near that cove went to an ExxonMobil community meeting April 7 and heard an ExxonMobil panel of four guarantee that there was no tar sands oil in the cove. After the meeting, he went home and saw tar sands oil in the cove.
The Duncan Firm is pursuing the class action suit against ExxonMobil in federal court. On local TV April 9, Duncan Firm founder, attorney Philip Duncan said he expected the class of Arkansans harmed by ExxonMobil to grow into the hundreds.
Notes
[1] http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/271-38/16841-tar-sands-oil-arkansas
[2] http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/271-38/16855-the-press-and-public-are-contained
[4] https://www.facebook.com/pages/Duncan-Firm/118456371523836
Intellihub.com
Major Oil Spill in Arkansas: Has ExxonMobil Lost Control of More than Just its Tar Sands Oil?
Monday, April 1, 2013
Is Natural Gas the Next Bubble ? Has Fracking Promised More Than It Can Deliver?
This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.
Coal and nuclear power industries in the United States have seen better days. The main culprit, energy industry analysts say, is the low cost of domestic natural gas, coupled with carbon-reducing regulations imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the efforts of environmental groups.
Instead of paying the high costs to upgrade coal-fired plants and repair aged nuclear facilities to meet environmental regulations, power companies across the country have been making the switch to natural gas.
The Los Angeles Water and Power Company just announced a plan to go coal-free within 12 years, selling one coal-fired plant in Arizona and converting another in Utah for natural gas production. Both plants currently power roughly 40 percent of Los Angeles. Last month, in a Clean Air Act settlement, American Electric Power agreed to stop burning coal at its power plants in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky, and either make the switch to natural gas or retire the coal-fired units. Dozens of coal plants have closed in recent years under the same pressure, in large part, from cheap natural gas.
In February, Duke Energy decided it was more cost-effective to close its Crystal River nuclear plant in Florida and replace it with natural gas turbines than it would be to repair a $ 1.5 billion crack in its dome. Last year, Dominion Power opted to shutter its Kewaunee reactor in Wisconsin, citing low natural gas prices. Multiple decrepit U.S. nuclear power plants are being faced this same dilemma.
The American Electric Power settlement was celebrated by smaller grassroots organizations and national environmental groups such the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund, whose campaigns, respectively, to reduce coal use and to promote safer fracking regulations, are heavily funded by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an outspoken champion of shale gas drilling.
But while environmentalists are helping to accelerate this move away from coal, the attendant reliance on natural gas – and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to obtain it — offers a garden variety of environmental and health concerns of its own. The slowdown in domestic coal use and its related benefits in carbon reduction may also be offset by the simultaneous explosion of U.S. coal exports to Asia and Europe.
Additionally, nuclear power has glaring environmental, safety and health issues. But in relation only to carbon reduction, the switch from nuclear to natural gas – which emits about half the amount of carbon than coal – concurrent with booming coal use overseas, could leave global carbon emissions at roughly the same levels or even increase them. And that"s without considering another very problematic greenhouse gas, which is emitted during the fracking process: methane.
But what if cheap, domestic natural gas isn"t actually sustainable? What if rosy claims of fracking our way to energy independence is just an industry pitch that Washington has bought?
Two new reports reveal that the natural gas narrative may be more hype than reality and warn that putting too much of our eggs into this energy basket could be detrimental to our future economic health.
Shale Gas Boom or Bust?
Currently, natural gas remains cheap, around $ 3.50 per thousand cubic feet (Mcf). In the short-term at least, this has been good for consumers, as it has translated into lower energy bills. But in the near-term, it has been deadly for the companies drilling for shale gas and their stakeholders, who are losing their shirts.
“I"ve spent thousands of hours working through data and consulting and collaborating with very knowledgeable colleagues,” said Art Berman, an oil and gas geologist who heads Labyrinth Consulting, a Houston-based geological consulting firm. “Right now, everybody"s losing money. And the whole picture is highly tenuous.”
Berman, after digging into the true numbers of these shale gas plays a few years ago, was one of the first in the oil and gas industry to publicly question the shale gas boom narrative. What he found was exceedingly high production decline rates from the shale gas wells, which forced operators to maintain a furious drilling pace just to keep up with production targets.
His analysis turned out to be correct. The frenzied drilling eventually led to a glut, or overproduction, of shale gas, which depressed prices and made these projects losing propositions. Today, the overall U.S. gas supply is flat, which it has been for over two years now.
“It looks like an industry that"s in big trouble,” Berman said in a phone interview. “That"s what it looks like to me. You look at the balance sheets of these companies and they"re terrible. Most of them don"t have any retained earnings from their gas efforts. Giant write-downs every quarter.”
As a consequence, he noted, drilling activity has plummeted.
“If you look at plays like Haynesville, there are fewer than 30 rigs running in Haynesville,” Berman said. “At one time, there were over 200. Barnett, there are something like 30 rigs. At one time there was something like 185.”
A new study by independent geologist David Hughes supports prior findings by Berman and also the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which shows operators greatly overestimating actual well production on shale plays throughout the country, from a minimum of a 100 percent to as much as 400 to 500 percent. (A “shale play” is an area of land that companies believe might be productive.)
The Hughes report, published by the Post Carbon Institute in February, performed an analysis on 60,000 shale wells and every play in the U.S. and their numbers corresponded with findings by the USGS.
While Pennsylvania State University professor Terry Engelder agrees that production has plummeted and there is a glut of natural gas, he said it"s “a bit of a red herring” to claim that the shale gas wells have vast decline rates.
Engelder, who openly admits his research at Penn State is heavily funded by the natural gas industry, said that industry economic models were always based on those decline rates.
“So everyone who went into this went in with their eyes wide open,” he said in a phone interview. “And only later on have the naysayers started then turning around the argument saying, "Look how fast the wells are declining, this is a losing situation."”
But Berman strongly disagrees.
“These wells,” said Berman, “have decline rates that are just off the charts and that was really not anticipated.”
The Coming Consumer Squeeze?
Back in 2009, when Berman started speaking publicly about the realities of the so-called shale gas boom, Deborah Rogers, a member of the advisory committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas at the time, found the irate industry response to Berman highly suspect.
“I mean the Chesapeakes and Devons of the world just went ballistic,” Rogers, a former Wall Street investment banker and a financial consultant, said in phone interview. “As a financial person at the time, back in 2009, I remember thinking this is very interesting because this reaction is just over the top.”
So she began to do some digging herself into well data from shale companies, discovered the numbers didn"t add up, and soon became one of the early industry insiders to sound the alarm about the overestimation of shale gas wells.
Further scrutiny led Rogers to realize that Wall Street, similar to its selling of toxic assets during the real estate boom, had worked behind the scenes to manipulate prices in order to facilitate better fees for themselves.
She explores both of these findings and their implications in a new report, “Shale and Wall Street: Was the Decline in Natural Gas Price Orchestrated,” which was released in February.
Rogers reveals how Wall Street drove the shale gas drilling frenzy by overestimating the amount of well returns, which resulted in prices lower than the cost of production for the operators who bought the drilling leases. Consequently, these operators borrowed millions of dollars on assets that either don"t exist or may never be commercially viable to extract. Wall Street then also profited greatly via mergers and acquisitions and other transactional fees.
Rogers, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Energy Policy Forum, and a recently appointed primary member to the U.S. Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative for the Department of the Interior, makes clear that the investment banks didn"t do anything illegal in performing these shale gas transactions.
Her issue, she said, is that there"s absolutely no way the banks didn"t realize those wells weren"t performing anywhere close to projected numbers.
“Everything they did before the mortgage-backed securities bubble was legal, too,” noted Rogers. “And we saw the consequences of that. But that"s another good argument for why we need financial reform.”
What may be most troubling to analysts like Rogers, however, is that the shale gas bubble won"t just hurt operators and their shareholders. They say American consumers are next in line.
Rogers and other energy analysts agree that the industry"s plan to export natural gas overseas to countries like China, where they can sell it for much higher prices, will inevitably drive up domestic prices.
In her report, Rogers cites financial analyst calls going back to 2007 and 2008, which reveal this was the natural gas industry"s plan all along, while it continues to sell American consumers and utility companies on becoming ever more dependent upon natural gas.
If successful, she said, “We will have affected essentially exactly the same scenario that we find ourselves in with crude oil now — much more dependent and at much higher price.”
Rogers added, “So we get squeezed, but they make off like bandits.”
Tue, 03/26/2013 – 14:52
Is Natural Gas the Next Bubble ? Has Fracking Promised More Than It Can Deliver?
Is Natural Gas the Next Bubble ? Has Fracking Promised More Than It Can Deliver?
This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.
Coal and nuclear power industries in the United States have seen better days. The main culprit, energy industry analysts say, is the low cost of domestic natural gas, coupled with carbon-reducing regulations imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the efforts of environmental groups.
Instead of paying the high costs to upgrade coal-fired plants and repair aged nuclear facilities to meet environmental regulations, power companies across the country have been making the switch to natural gas.
The Los Angeles Water and Power Company just announced a plan to go coal-free within 12 years, selling one coal-fired plant in Arizona and converting another in Utah for natural gas production. Both plants currently power roughly 40 percent of Los Angeles. Last month, in a Clean Air Act settlement, American Electric Power agreed to stop burning coal at its power plants in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky, and either make the switch to natural gas or retire the coal-fired units. Dozens of coal plants have closed in recent years under the same pressure, in large part, from cheap natural gas.
In February, Duke Energy decided it was more cost-effective to close its Crystal River nuclear plant in Florida and replace it with natural gas turbines than it would be to repair a $ 1.5 billion crack in its dome. Last year, Dominion Power opted to shutter its Kewaunee reactor in Wisconsin, citing low natural gas prices. Multiple decrepit U.S. nuclear power plants are being faced this same dilemma.
The American Electric Power settlement was celebrated by smaller grassroots organizations and national environmental groups such the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund, whose campaigns, respectively, to reduce coal use and to promote safer fracking regulations, are heavily funded by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an outspoken champion of shale gas drilling.
But while environmentalists are helping to accelerate this move away from coal, the attendant reliance on natural gas – and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to obtain it — offers a garden variety of environmental and health concerns of its own. The slowdown in domestic coal use and its related benefits in carbon reduction may also be offset by the simultaneous explosion of U.S. coal exports to Asia and Europe.
Additionally, nuclear power has glaring environmental, safety and health issues. But in relation only to carbon reduction, the switch from nuclear to natural gas – which emits about half the amount of carbon than coal – concurrent with booming coal use overseas, could leave global carbon emissions at roughly the same levels or even increase them. And that"s without considering another very problematic greenhouse gas, which is emitted during the fracking process: methane.
But what if cheap, domestic natural gas isn"t actually sustainable? What if rosy claims of fracking our way to energy independence is just an industry pitch that Washington has bought?
Two new reports reveal that the natural gas narrative may be more hype than reality and warn that putting too much of our eggs into this energy basket could be detrimental to our future economic health.
Shale Gas Boom or Bust?
Currently, natural gas remains cheap, around $ 3.50 per thousand cubic feet (Mcf). In the short-term at least, this has been good for consumers, as it has translated into lower energy bills. But in the near-term, it has been deadly for the companies drilling for shale gas and their stakeholders, who are losing their shirts.
“I"ve spent thousands of hours working through data and consulting and collaborating with very knowledgeable colleagues,” said Art Berman, an oil and gas geologist who heads Labyrinth Consulting, a Houston-based geological consulting firm. “Right now, everybody"s losing money. And the whole picture is highly tenuous.”
Berman, after digging into the true numbers of these shale gas plays a few years ago, was one of the first in the oil and gas industry to publicly question the shale gas boom narrative. What he found was exceedingly high production decline rates from the shale gas wells, which forced operators to maintain a furious drilling pace just to keep up with production targets.
His analysis turned out to be correct. The frenzied drilling eventually led to a glut, or overproduction, of shale gas, which depressed prices and made these projects losing propositions. Today, the overall U.S. gas supply is flat, which it has been for over two years now.
“It looks like an industry that"s in big trouble,” Berman said in a phone interview. “That"s what it looks like to me. You look at the balance sheets of these companies and they"re terrible. Most of them don"t have any retained earnings from their gas efforts. Giant write-downs every quarter.”
As a consequence, he noted, drilling activity has plummeted.
“If you look at plays like Haynesville, there are fewer than 30 rigs running in Haynesville,” Berman said. “At one time, there were over 200. Barnett, there are something like 30 rigs. At one time there was something like 185.”
A new study by independent geologist David Hughes supports prior findings by Berman and also the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which shows operators greatly overestimating actual well production on shale plays throughout the country, from a minimum of a 100 percent to as much as 400 to 500 percent. (A “shale play” is an area of land that companies believe might be productive.)
The Hughes report, published by the Post Carbon Institute in February, performed an analysis on 60,000 shale wells and every play in the U.S. and their numbers corresponded with findings by the USGS.
While Pennsylvania State University professor Terry Engelder agrees that production has plummeted and there is a glut of natural gas, he said it"s “a bit of a red herring” to claim that the shale gas wells have vast decline rates.
Engelder, who openly admits his research at Penn State is heavily funded by the natural gas industry, said that industry economic models were always based on those decline rates.
“So everyone who went into this went in with their eyes wide open,” he said in a phone interview. “And only later on have the naysayers started then turning around the argument saying, "Look how fast the wells are declining, this is a losing situation."”
But Berman strongly disagrees.
“These wells,” said Berman, “have decline rates that are just off the charts and that was really not anticipated.”
The Coming Consumer Squeeze?
Back in 2009, when Berman started speaking publicly about the realities of the so-called shale gas boom, Deborah Rogers, a member of the advisory committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas at the time, found the irate industry response to Berman highly suspect.
“I mean the Chesapeakes and Devons of the world just went ballistic,” Rogers, a former Wall Street investment banker and a financial consultant, said in phone interview. “As a financial person at the time, back in 2009, I remember thinking this is very interesting because this reaction is just over the top.”
So she began to do some digging herself into well data from shale companies, discovered the numbers didn"t add up, and soon became one of the early industry insiders to sound the alarm about the overestimation of shale gas wells.
Further scrutiny led Rogers to realize that Wall Street, similar to its selling of toxic assets during the real estate boom, had worked behind the scenes to manipulate prices in order to facilitate better fees for themselves.
She explores both of these findings and their implications in a new report, “Shale and Wall Street: Was the Decline in Natural Gas Price Orchestrated,” which was released in February.
Rogers reveals how Wall Street drove the shale gas drilling frenzy by overestimating the amount of well returns, which resulted in prices lower than the cost of production for the operators who bought the drilling leases. Consequently, these operators borrowed millions of dollars on assets that either don"t exist or may never be commercially viable to extract. Wall Street then also profited greatly via mergers and acquisitions and other transactional fees.
Rogers, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Energy Policy Forum, and a recently appointed primary member to the U.S. Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative for the Department of the Interior, makes clear that the investment banks didn"t do anything illegal in performing these shale gas transactions.
Her issue, she said, is that there"s absolutely no way the banks didn"t realize those wells weren"t performing anywhere close to projected numbers.
“Everything they did before the mortgage-backed securities bubble was legal, too,” noted Rogers. “And we saw the consequences of that. But that"s another good argument for why we need financial reform.”
What may be most troubling to analysts like Rogers, however, is that the shale gas bubble won"t just hurt operators and their shareholders. They say American consumers are next in line.
Rogers and other energy analysts agree that the industry"s plan to export natural gas overseas to countries like China, where they can sell it for much higher prices, will inevitably drive up domestic prices.
In her report, Rogers cites financial analyst calls going back to 2007 and 2008, which reveal this was the natural gas industry"s plan all along, while it continues to sell American consumers and utility companies on becoming ever more dependent upon natural gas.
If successful, she said, “We will have affected essentially exactly the same scenario that we find ourselves in with crude oil now — much more dependent and at much higher price.”
Rogers added, “So we get squeezed, but they make off like bandits.”
Tue, 03/26/2013 – 14:52
Is Natural Gas the Next Bubble ? Has Fracking Promised More Than It Can Deliver?
Thursday, February 21, 2013
More Americans Watch Birds Than Hunt
We haven’t heard much about hunting during the ongoing debate over gun violence. Perhaps that’s because hunting is widely seen as a traditional, enjoyable, and safe pastime, even among the majority of Americans who have never donned camo and hunting orange. Or perhaps that’s because most hunters don’t need AR-15s or high-capacity magazines. Or perhaps it’s because hunters are a minority among the 80 million or so gun-owning Americans.
How many hunters are there? In 2011, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service (PDF), 15.7 million Americans older than 6 went hunting. That’s nearly 29 million less than went fishing, and 3 million less than went out to watch birds. Back in 1955, about 10 percent of Americans hunted; today it’s around 6 percent. Overall, the number of hunters began to dip in the ’90s but has slowly increased in the past few years.
Who hunts? The FWS’s latest survey finds that hunters are 89 percent male and 94 percent white. More than half are 45 or older. Nearly 60 percent live in small metropolitan areas or rural areas. Similarly, about 80 percent of all gun owners are men, and they have been getting older as their numbers have fallen. (Around 35 percent of Americans say they own a gun.) A recent National Rifle Association (NRA) survey of its members found that nearly half identify as hunters and that they, like hunters in general, are largely from small towns and rural areas.
What do they hunt? More than 80 percent of hunters go after big game such as deer and elk. About 4.5 million hunt small game such as squirrels; 2.6 million hunt ducks and other birds, and 2.2 million go after other animals like feral pigs.
What do they shoot? Ninety-three percent of hunters use rifles or shotguns. In 2011, they spent more than $ 4.3 billion on firearms and ammunition. That makes them a significant part of the nearly $ 12 billion US firearms market, but they’re not driving it. A 2010 survey by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) found that most Americans buy guns for protection; less than a 30 percent of those who recently bought a gun got it for hunting. Which may explain why the NRA has been focusing less on hunting and more on protecting the market for lucrative assault rifles and handguns. Just six percent of semiautomatic rifle owners told the NSSF that they were primarily used for hunting.
How do non-hunters see hunting? In a 2011 NSSF survey, 73 percent of respondents said they had no interest in ever going hunting. Yet even if they don’t do it themselves, most Americans have a positive view of hunting: 74 percent said they approve of it. But hunting isn’t America’s most popular wildlife-related recreational activity: It’s fishing, which 98 percent of Americans have no problem with.
More Americans Watch Birds Than Hunt
Obama"s Immigration Plan Is Far Harsher Than Reagan"s
Draft immigration legislation being hammered out by the White House was leaked to USA Today over the weekend, and the paper had no trouble finding Republicans who balked at the president’s plan. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), one of the members of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” who recently cooperated on a proposal for comprehensive immigration reform, called the White House draft “dead on arrival.”
Opponents of immigration reform however, see the exchange as theater—”the point of leaking the bill is to enable Rubio to say that his amnesty plan is waaay different from the dastardly Obama plan,” wrote the Center for Immigration Studies’ Mark Krikorian at National Review. As a policy matter, Krikorian isn’t entirely wrong: Rubio’s hometown paper, the Miami Herald, also got ahold of the White House’s drafts and concluded that they “closely resemble many of the reforms advanced in 2011 by Obama and, more recently, by Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.” (If you’ve been reading Mother Jones, that’s hardly surprising.)
What may be surprising however, is that Obama’s bill sets out a very long road to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. As Suzy Khimm writes at the Washington Post, under Obama’s proposal, those undocumented immigrants who are eligible for legalization would likely have to wait around 13 years for full citizenship—eight years of temporary legal status before acquiring a green card, then, as is standard under US law, about another five for citizenship. (If a backlog of existing visa applications is cleared before that initial eight years, the total wait could be shorter.) Lynn Tramonte, deputy director of the pro-reform group America’s Voice, tells Khimm that Obama’s proposal would “delay citizenship another generation.”
Compare that with the Immigration Control and Reform Act of 1986 that was signed by President Ronald Reagan, which allowedundocumented immigrants to apply for green cards after a temporary legal status of just 18 months. Add in the standard five years green-card holders have to wait before seeking citizenship, and under the bill Reagan signed the path to citizenship was half as long as Obama’s would be.
So if you‘re looking for an indication of where America’s immigration debate stands in 2013, note that Obama’s liberal proposal would be significantly harsher than the law put in place by the patron saint of American conservatism more than 25 years ago.
Obama"s Immigration Plan Is Far Harsher Than Reagan"s