Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Last night, December 15, 2016, the Mayor and City Council of Frostburg, in Allegany County, western mountain Maryland, voted unanimously to amend the city code to prohibit “the drilling and extraction of natural gas and oil, including, but not limited to, vertical, horizontal and directional drilling on and under the surface of land and hydraulic fracturing….on lands owned by the City...” and to prohibit “Bulk water sales for natural gas and oil extraction...”
I thank them for their efforts.
The passage of this ordinance caps six months of work by the citizens’ group Frack Free Frostburg (FFF) which gathered more than 700 resident signatures in favor of banning the practice here and statewide, as well as enlisting numerous businesses in the cause. In a town in which the last mayoralty election saw the winner get 430 votes, this ratio’s portent was not lost on the elected officials.
However, despite the good vote last night, the spirit in which it was passed had a grudging quality to it, with the Mayor and other council members (with one exception, Councilman Woody Getz) maintaining they were a “choir” to the cause of banning fracking, merely “tweaking” the law and codes on the book which already expressed that position.
I know that the Mayor and Council are caught in serious rip tide currents: between the anti-frackers and the Western Maryland Annapolis delegation, which is still “all in” for the process, in denial of polls which show Western Maryland voters and state-wide don’t want a new extraction regime, and refusing to accept the overwhelming head-counts against it at numerous public hearings since June of this year. (The poll here: citizenshale.org/… )
Last night FFF introduced, for the first time for the elected officials and the citizens, our maps showing the city’s sensitive reservoir, watersheds, springs and wells, and the deep encroachment of mineral rights’ leasing right up to the boundaries, with 10,000 foot radius circles depicting the reach of horizontal fracking. Those leases were in the hands of major fracking companies. With the help of GIS expertise and large map printing technology from faculty at Frostburg State University, and relying on mineral rights leasing data from Garrett County, FFF was able to pull together the image of water resources threatened, in new way, on just one map. It’s a shame that Allegany County hasn’t matched Garrett’s thoroughness — and transparency. We know from the words of a Samson Resources managing engineer for PA and MD, in a 2009 Baltimore Sun article, Samson being a major fracking company before it went into Chapter 11 in the fall of 2015, that the company bought 50,000 acres in Garrett and 20,000 in Allegany...but as show in my comments against the state-wide fracking regulations below...the public probably knows less about the various big time energy companies holdings than...well, the Chinese do. {Editors Note: Despite my best efforts over two hours, I have been unable to successfully load the images of the two maps we have...Dec. 17th...)
In Maryland, we are still waiting for an effort — and maybe this could be a Civilian Conservation Corps type effort done by law school students or trained retired personnel — a public interest project — to make mineral rights ownership as transparent as surface property rights. It will take a lot of time, and some training to dig this information out, but it is doable.
What I’m driving at is this: neither the state regulations on view at the Maryland Department of the Environment here ( www.mde.state.md.us/...) nor the City of Frostburg’s actions will protect the region from fracking, only a state-wide ban will do that, and if the City wants to clear up any ambiguities about the way they really feel, they’ll pass a resolution stating that to help us in Annapolis. That’s a real test for them, because of the adamant stance of the Delegation, and the announced position of Governor Larry Hogan...but the best indications we have is that is the way the citizens of the state feel.
And now, for some regional history, and the testimony on the state regulations:
COMMENTS OF billofrights, FROSTBURG, MD ON THE PROPOSED REGULATIONS GOVERNING “FRACKING” FOR NATURAL GAS
Part One: Three Frameworks
Introduction:
Just a few weeks ago, I was trying to find some good historical insights into Maryland’s complex, and to me, very strange laws governing subsurface mineral rights. They are hardly transparent and bear heavily on the public’s limited right to know what lurks beneath their traditional surface property rights – and obviously they have a strong bearing on what may or may not happen should Maryland unwisely allow fracking for natural gas. My search didn’t turn up what I was looking for, but it did turn up this law school paper on what life was like under coal company domination – company town powers and more – the right to use public power for private ends – power delegated to large coal and railroad corporations to ostensibly advance the public economic good: here at digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/.... It is a paper from 2015 by Joshua T. Carback entitled “Public taking by the state for private use: A Maryland Case Study in Georges Creek Coal & Iron vs. New Central Coal Company, 1871-1874.”
What troubled me as much as the delegated state powers to private commercial companies (echoed today in the powers of gas companies to use eminent domain to build their pipelines) was the description of life and politics in a company town – in this case Lonaconing, Maryland, in the last quarter of the 19th century. I doubt very much that it was what Jefferson had in mind for his strong independent “yeomanry,” and I’m very glad not to have lived through the experience.
And the more I am learning about the fracking gas rush in Western Maryland in the years 2007-2012 , when in Garrett County alone fracking leases came to total 126, 961 acres, - 41, 320 of which were on or under the Savage River State Forest – most in the name of some of the most powerful energy companies in the U.S. – and the world, and a managing engineer for Samson Resources told a Baltimore Sun reporter that the company “owns about 50,000 acres of land in Garrett County east of Accident, and 20,000 acres in Allegany County, west of Cumberland…” the more I worry.
I worry because despite the dramatic impact that the drop in oil and natural gas prices has had on this earlier frenzy of leasing, and which drove Samson to Chapter 11, it is very difficult to find out who owns what these days from that very large total of leased acres that marked the peak of fracking interest. And I can detect no slackening of the zeal to frack in the Western Maryland Annapolis delegation. They simply refuse to recognize the degree of public opposition to what they so clearly want to happen, and are apparently not deterred by what has happened in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, which reminds me so much, at far too many levels, of what I have just read life was like in Lonaconing, Maryland under the coal regime of the last quarter of the 19th century. Here’s an example of what I am afraid of: public-accountability.org/...
Company towns, then in the 1870’s: is Western Maryland to become a gas company “region” in the 21st century? My comments are intended to say no to fracking and any such future for Allegany and Cumberland Counties.
Overview:
This citizen wants to avoid being drawn into a micro-analysis of the proposed regulations, at least initially, because there are three important broader contexts which must first be addressed to understand why these regulations, or any regulations, will not protect the citizens and the environment of Maryland, and why the struggle over them has become largely irrelevant to the larger environmental picture surrounding fracking for gas, and the fight against global warming, where gas had once been positioned as the cleaner bridge fuel to the non-carbon based alternatives, but no longer is.
The only sure protection for both citizens and the environment lies in a legislative ban against the practice and a turn away from natural gas as the mid-term “salvation” carbon fuel.
First, it is very strange, and ideologically incongruous, that Republican Governor Larry Hogan, elected in a surprise victory in November of 2014, should be suddenly the champion of environmental regulations for our Maryland, what he has deemed the state “of Middle Temperament.” As I noted in my November 16, 2016 comments to the Western Maryland Annapolis delegation gathered at Allegany College (and where no supporters of fracking testified), fracking is no middle temperament process: it is a violent, explosive water-boarding of nature which deliberately fractures the deep gas containing shale layer, with the damage spreading to an unknown, and perhaps unknowable extent – in all directions. I mention the fracturing because we still haven’t discovered all the faults and fractures in Western, Maryland, a missing piece of what we should know before we set out to explode existing arrangements. I will have more to say on that later. Fracking also forces down the throat of geologic and hydrologic nature a high pressure deluge of water and toxic chemicals which we, mere citizens, don’t have a right to know the composition of until we are sickened and in the hands of medical professionals - and then the corporate recipe secrets for the waterboarding are disclosed in a grudging and deeply hedged manner, where clearly corporations have a higher legal and civic standing than mere voting citizens – and we can thank the “revolving door” of our political economy for that. And just as in the tax codes, these graced citizens with the “Inc.” after their names also enjoy special exemptions from the nation’s environmental laws which govern what is or isn’t “toxic.” Thank you Dick Chaney and all your industry pals.
For once, I’m going to take the value proclamations of a political leader at face value, although that runs great risks these days, and declare that Governor Larry Hogan is only the latest in a long line of conservative Republican anti-government, anti-regulatory and anti-environment elected officials, and let’s date that from Reagan’s election in 1980. In that little November “speech” I gave to our Western Maryland delegation, I said that “the idea that the government of Larry Hogan, who said in his Inaugural Speech on January 21, 2015, that ‘we must get the state government off our backs, and out of our pockets, so that we can grow the private sector,’ is going to be a tough regulator of one of the most powerful private sector industries in the world is unbelievable; no more believable than the state of Maryland’s historically futile gestures to control the chicken manure from Purdue and other big chicken processors, despite everyone’s professed love for the Chesapeake Bay.”
May I remind the regulators at the Maryland Department of the Environment and other relevant agencies that also present on the Inaugural platform introducing Governor Hogan in January of 2015 was none other than his good friend Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, whose record on the environment is notoriously bad – certified from former environmental colleagues of mine in the once Garden State, including a lifetime Republican. Gov. Christie did not dismantle NJ’s tough environmental legacy – which once was far tougher than the laughably pro-industry regimes in West Virginia and Pennsylvania which Gov. Hogan’s “regulators” held up to us as their model. No, it wasn’t a frontal assault: Christie did it rather by appointing industry friendly personnel to the top posts such as the NJ DEP and the Pinelands Commission, backed up by his thuggish informal skills at “enforcing” not environmental laws, but his own political ego’s dictates, as amply demonstrated by the punishment dished out by the massive traffic jams during the famous Bridgegate Days incident. So brutal a governor and so damaged a leader that even the bare-knuckled President-elect eventually saw him as a liability.
Wrong signal, Governor Hogan, right out of the gate.
There is something else that goes along with a traditional Republican Right anti-government and anti-regulatory program and it is part of their core value code, consistent with the broader movement in the West under Neoliberalism: and that is called “starve the beast” – government, that is - of its social democratic and environmental institutions: cut their staffs, and cut their budgets, and/or “privatize” their services. I have seen no indication that the environmental agencies under Governor Hogan have had the funding or staff increases necessary to even begin to deal with the fracking he supports. And who among the existing personnel has the actual drilling experiences to enforce what the MDE has laid out in these regulations for our consideration, with its vain hopes that steel and concrete can survive the geologic and climatic rigors of Western, Maryland – forever should be the standard, actually.
What’s that you say, “look at the track record of Secretary Grumbles, don’t you have confidence in him?” No I don’t, because if he were a tough environmental regulator he wouldn’t keep getting hired by conservative Republicans starting with George W. Bush, then the conservative governor of Arizona, and now Larry Hogan, Hogan being a de-regulatory and anti-tax crusader – with a middle temperament, of course.
This citizen isn’t buying the act. And besides, even if one were to set aside the ideological character of the leaders hiring Mr. Grumbles, and gave him every benefit of the doubt, the final “call” on so much of what happens at federal EPA or its state equivalent, is made not in the environmental chair but in the Executive’s chair, be that the President’s or Governor’s.
Once again, the governing values that Larry Hogan brings to this attempt to regulate fracking seem at odds directly with what it might take to do the job, and that is momentarily, for the sake of argument, giving the nod to the notion that fracking can, by its nature, be safely regulated. Unfortunately, it can’t.
The second broad perspective on fracking, is that based on what we have seen of its actual record, the nature of its explosions, fires, spills (pipeline and containment pond breaches) and yes now, earthquakes, no regulatory process – and certainly not the anemically staffed and funded ones presented so far in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas, and now pending, in Maryland, is going to prevent a replay of what has already been documented in those states. That is why I started out to collect reported instances of major incidents from our neighboring states, incidents which ranged in chronology from 2008 right up through my publication of the report, in the early summer of 2014, and which I have attached for the Departments use: The Unwanted Fruits of Fracking: Fires, Explosions, Pipeline and Containment Breaches – and Earthquakes. (To be clear, as of 2014, the earthquake linkages were limited to injection wells disposing of the unwanted fracking fluids; since then there has been a growing body of links to milder earthquakes generated by the common practice of fracking well drilling and exploitation, but I’m going to leave that to other testimony submitters to expound upon.)
Here was the conclusion from my 2014 research, which can be found here at the Daily Kos, from Aug. of 2016 www.dailykos.com/… : :
There is no completely safe way to frack for gas; every stage of the process is subject to explosions and fires from blowback from gas, and from pipeline failures and breaches of containment structures from liquid blowback (and flowback.) In the incidents documented, fires and explosions occurred in the very beginnings of well drilling, at the end of the process, and as the main well was being hooked up to existing or transfer lines for production. There were mechanical failures of parts as well as human failures such as not having gas meters and detectors on the site of the production rigs and on the workers themselves. This must be made mandatory by the federal government and/or the states involved.
Fracking is a capital and labor intensive process, both to construct the wells and supporting infrastructure, and to maintain the operation around-the-clock. Fracking operations put many thousands of heavy duty trucks on the local and regional roads 24/7. That means accident statistics go up and lives are lost and there are serious injuries. This is not carelessness, although that happens too. This is built into the process and must be factored into the price we pay for the purported benefits. Local and state governments must prepare for these unpleasant and expensive ramifications of the fracking process…Texas’ experience with both oil and gas fracking, the longest and most extensive in the nation, covering some 250,00 wells, 7,000 of which were completed in 2011 alone, says to expect ‘one major blowout for every one thousand wells.’
I must add now a qualification about the labor intensive nature of the fracking operation: that is still true for the initial and early phases of the operation, but once the wells have been stabilized and after they have been capped, the fracking operations and facilities I saw on an all-day field trip to West Virginia in May of 2015, looking at nearly the full range of operations after the wells have been drilled, showed very few workers, almost a fully automated set of operations: Ghost towns.
There is another very disturbing aspect to this second broad perspective, and that is that the ability to form judgements has been constricted at best, and deeply compromised, at worst, by the inhibitions on collecting accurate data on pollution incidents of various types. I place the blame for these inhibitions on the industry, it’s positioning as a powerful modern instance of “regulatory capture” of the government, and its ability to inhibit line and inspection personnel from full and fair data collection about what has happened. As proof I cite the following examples:
First, this story from the beginning of 2016: www.ecowatch.com/... The title says it all: “Pennsylvania Fracking Water Contamination Much Higher than Reported.” Here’s what an investigative reporter team found when they finally gained access to state environmental “records,” including many complaints that had never been logged:
Based on 2,309 previously unreported fracking complaints unearthed by the non-profit Public Herald, the public can now peek into 1,275 fracking water complaints from 17 of 40 fracking counties. However, Pennsylvania's official tally of water contamination is only 271 for all 40 counties. Contrary to the EPA fracking study's conclusion, the prevalence of drinking water contamination appears to be much higher than previously reported. Accurate drinking water complaint data is vital to know as Maryland drafts new fracking regulations to potentially welcome the natural gas industry into Western Maryland in 2017.
When these missing complaints were logged and converted into a complaint per well pad basis rather than on a total wells drilled comparison, the percentage of impaired wells to operations rises to 44%. That’s something that MDE and the public should be aware of.
Another investigative journalism report published on August 4, 2014, by Sean D. Hamill of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, whose title tells the findings: “Drillers did not report half of spills that led to fines.” Here at: powersource.post-gazette.com/...
This story began to press a little closer to home because it documented a large spill, unreported, that happened in Somerset County, PA, where about one-third of the city of Frostburg, MD’s hydrologic watershed is located, and where the city is dependent for protection upon the enforcement efficacy of state and county regulators in another state. That is also a county which, while it does not have a high density of shale gas drilling activity, has a high ratio for that part of the state in terms of violations per number of wells drilled. Samson Resources, of Houston Texas, drilled two wells in that county with water they purchased from the city of Frostburg, water transactions which took place between April-October of 2009. Samson, it turns out, had 8 documented violations in Somerset County and was fined a total of $35,000, the numbers being collated by citizens from the State’s own – for what they are worth – records. Two of the violations were on the sites for which Frostburg sold its water. Samson has since gone through Chapter 11 bankruptcy, in late 2015, their business model having been destroyed by the dramatic drop in oil and gas prices. (Here are the sources for this information on Samson Resources in PA:
And finally, from the April 4, 2016 edition of Scientific America, an article about the persistence of a former EPA scientist, Dominic Di Guilo, to defend his conclusion that an aquifer in Wyoming had indeed been polluted by fracking, and do so against corporate pressure, EPA reluctance, state regulator denial, and lab tests which were initially not calibrated to detect the fracking chemicals and by-products at issue.
The third broad perspective that should shape the fracking debate today is the dramatic upheaval that has taken place within the scientific community on how much methane escapes during the entire natural gas development process, from drilling through pipelines to shipping export abroad. Not only have we vastly underestimated how much escapes, the heat reflecting properties of methane in the atmosphere also have been underestimated as well as its longevity there. These revisions have been strong enough to change the consensus within the environmental community against natural gas as the bridge fuel until we reach the alternative energy promised land. The dynamics within the Sierra Club are a good illustration of this dramatic change.
Of course, for most of the leaders of the Republican Party, it does not matter, such as for the President-elect and most of his key appointees so far. I strongly suspect it doesn’t matter, either this re-appraisal of the role of natural gas or the need to combat global warming, for our Western Maryland delegation. They seem to be deniers of global warming as well as the realities that more than half their constituents oppose fracking. And they have had far too much company from Democrats like Martin O’Malley and Hillary Clinton.
It should matter, though, to the government employees reading this testimony. Here are two articles which explain why this shift has occurred:
The first is by Bill McKibben, the second by Robert Howarth of Cornell University, entitled “A Bridge to nowhere: Methane Emissions and the Greenhouse gas Footprint of Methane Gas.