Drilling Down - Learning too late the perils of gas leases

[wayiwalk]

Very interesting article. I'm aware geologists are in demand on the east coast, and we've seen a trend of people with this type experience moving to the area to capitalize on the job opporutunities (I'm in the environmental field, so there is some crossover between my work and the Marcellus Shale). But it speaks to how large an effort the energy development is.

But this story is an eye opener - in this day and age, to still see crummy practices in place:



Drilling Down

Learning Too Late of Perils in Gas Well Leases

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Jared Ely near gas wells leased on his family's land near Dimock, Pa. His father, Scott, says the leases should have been clearer.

By IAN URBINA and JO CRAVEN McGINTY

Published: December 1, 2011

After Scott Ely and his father talked with salesmen from an energy company about signing the lease allowing gas drilling on their land in northeastern Pennsylvania, he said he felt certain it required the company to leave the property as good as new.

So Mr. Ely said he was surprised several years later when the drilling company, Cabot Oil and Gas, informed them that rather than draining and hauling away the toxic drilling sludge stored in large waste ponds on the property, it would leave the waste, cover it with dirt and seed the area with grass. He knew that waste pond liners can leak, seeping contaminated waste.

“I guess our terms should have been clearer” about requiring the company to remove the waste pits after drilling, said Mr. Ely, of Dimock, Pa., who sued Cabot after his drinking water from a separate property was contaminated. “We learned that the hard way.”

Americans have signed millions of leases allowing companies to drill for oil and natural gas on their land in recent years. But some of these landowners — often in rural areas, and eager for quick payouts — are finding out too late what is, and what is not, in the fine print.

(continued....follow link)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/us/drilling-down-fighting-over-oil-and-gas-well-leases.html?hp

[don]

Re: Drilling Down - Learning too late the perils of gas leases

from no-where land . . .

[Starving Steve]

Re: Drilling Down - Learning too late the perils of gas leases

The eco-bunch told us that BP destroyed the Gulf of Mexico; I think they called it "a dead zone" or something like that... But as it worked out, in two weeks, nature had broken-down the oil slick, and life in the Gulf of Mexico was unharmed. In other words, what is toxic to the eco-frauds is not toxic to nature.

If nature is forgiving of so-called "toxic pollution", might it be that what is buried in the Earth is broken-down, too?

Richmond, California was built upon the "toxic" waste dump of San Francisco, and now, about a century later, everything in the waste dump of SF is now soil under Richmond. Nothing was harmed, and a case might be made that life under Richmond had benefited from the waste dump.

New Almaden, California was the "toxic" waste dump of the quicksilver mines there during the 1840's and 1850's. Mercury was cooked out of the cinnibar rocks found in the hills nearby, and the cinnibar tailings were simply dumped all around the smelting site.... To-day, some 160 or 170 years later, there are no ill-effects in the environment from those tailings, nor from the mercury that was poured into flasks at the site. None! It would appear that nature is very resilient.

New Almaden, California now is part of San Jose, in fact it is an exclusive residential area for high-income households of Silicon Valley. The mercury mining operation (which closed in the mid-1960's) is now part of the San Jose's New Almaden Quicksilver Mining Historic Park. The eco-frauds and their EPA have put up signs warning of "toxic" mercury in fish in the nearby Almaden Reservoir and Almaden Creek, but the fact is that no-one has been poisoned by anything toxic in the area, not in the park, not in the mine, not in the old furnace at New Almaden, and not in the old tailings dump, not in the Almaden Reservoir nor in Almaden Creek.... But let me continue---

If you follow the creek down through San Jose and northward to where it dumps into San Francisco Bay at Alviso, California--- the latter ghost town now also a part of San Jose and Silicon Valley, the eco-frauds and their EPA have also put up signs warning of "toxic mercury in fish" living in the creek and SF Bay.... To someone unfamiliar with the history of the Santa Clara Valley, it might appear that Alviso, San Jose, New Almaden, and the entire Santa Clara Valley ( Silicon Valley ) are a toxic waste dump, damaged forever by the activities of mankind.

Go visit Silver Bay, Minnesota on the north shore of Lake Superior. At Silver Bay, taconite was loaded into ore-boats and shipped out.... Well, the EPA and its eco-frauds came along in the late 1960s and created a public scare that taconite tailings dumped into the Lake at Silver Bay would poison Lake Superior water. They insisted that Lake Superior water in the water supply of all towns and cities along the shore of Lake Superior would place everyone at risk of gastro-intestinal cancer. These frauds put-up signs warning the public about taconite tailings. They wrote articles for newspapers in Duluth and Minneapolis-St.Paul. Later, the EPA closed the entire operation at Silver Bay. About 700 jobs, vital to the depressed economy of North-eastern Minnesota were destroyed..... Now more than half-a-century later, no-one ever developed GI-cancer from drinking Lake Superior water, but the EPA and its frauds continue on to this day with their lies and junk science, government controls, government money, and with the outrageous precedents set from verdicts in their frivolous lawsuits.

Does toxic waste harm the environment anywhere? More often than not, it would appear that the environment is unaffected, at least over the long-run. Some more examples where the EPA and its frauds caused public hysteria and were proven in the course of time to be 100% wrong: the North Slope of Alaska, the so-called "pollution" of the Beaufort Sea, the Valdez oil spill, uranium mining in Utah and Arizona, so-called, "ultra-deadly" plutonium traces in dust at Yucca Flats in Nevada, concern and hysteria about water pollution (mercury contamination) from paper mills in northern Minnesota and Upper Michigan, similar hysteria about water pollution from coal mines in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, hysteria about solvents used in chip manufacturing in Silicon Valley, hysteria about plutonium and other radionuclide traces at White Sands, New Mexico, hysteria about oil refining in Texas, hysteria about oil storage at Cushing, Oklahoma, hysteria about plans to explore for oil off of the East Coast of the U.S, hysteria about plans to explore for oil off of the Florida coasts, hysteria about tourist visits to Midway Island in the Pacific, and the list goes on.....

And now, as usual, the eco-frauds and their EPA are trying to stir-up hysteria about fracking shale in North Dakota, piping oil thru the Great Plains, fracking shale in New York state, in Pennsylvania and in Ohio.

Not to mention that in Canada, other eco-frauds are trying to block pipeline construction to transport upgraded oil from the tar sands project south-eastward to southern Saskatchewan and on to North Dakota. The frauds are generating hysteria about a pipeline westward from the oil sands to Prince Rupert through northern British Columbia. Even a pipeline to the Alaska panhandle from the tar sands of NE Alberta is being blocked by the same bunch of eco-frauds--- the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Federation, Greenpeace, the Union of Concerned Scientists, The Friends of the Earth, and that entire bunch. Even oil-tanker ship traffic off of the coast of British Columbia is being blocked.