Athens County to be Fracked Through the Back Door?

By Bernhard Debatin

It started out quite hopefully for those in Athens County who own land and mineral rights and are not afraid of the potential side-effects of fracking: In November 2011, the West Virginia-based company Cunningham Energy hooked up with local lawyer John Lavelle and set off a fracking frenzy, promising $2500 per leased acre and 12.5% royalties for the oil or gas. On Jan 2, 2012, the Athens News reported that the overall acreage of the initial fracking leases amounted to about 35,000 acres, representing “a total possible initial payout of more than $87 million.”

But the payout did not come. However, now it looks as if fracking is going to come through the back door. What happened?

Industrialized Landscapes

By Bernhard Debatin

The past 200 years have been a period of exponentially increasing interventions  into our natural environment. Monocultural farming, urbanization, and blacktop streets are the most visible aspect of it. Sprawling production sites is another one, often closely related to urbanization. Large areas for waste disposal are yet another related aspect. And, of course, landscapes of extraction: open pit mines, mountaintop removal mining sites, sludge ponds, waste tailings, and overburden disposal sites, to name the most obvious ones.

Fracking, too, is changing landscapes into industrialized extraction sites. Jonah Field in Western Wyoming is a good example for this new type of industrialized landscape.

Department of the Interior releases a disappointing draft rule for fracking

From: Big news today: Department of the Interior releases a disappointing draft rule for fracking | Amy Mall’s Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC.

May 4, 2012

Excerpt from the article:

Some of our concerns:

New Study Predicts Frack Fluids Can Migrate to Aquifers Within Years

by Abrahm Lustgarten
ProPublica, May 1, 2012, 4:29 p.m.

A new study has raised fresh concerns about the safety of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, concluding that fracking chemicals injected into the ground could migrate toward drinking water supplies far more quickly than experts have previously predicted.

More than 5,000 wells were drilled in the Marcellus between mid-2009 and mid-2010, according to the study, which was published in the journal Ground Water two weeks ago. Operators inject up to 4 million gallons of fluid, under more than 10,000 pounds of pressure, to drill and frack each well.

Meeting on Fracking

Nelsonville Community Meeting on Hydraulic Fracturing
When:   May 26, 2012, 1 – 3 p.m.
Where: Nelsonville Public Library, Large meeting room

Kudos to City Council for taking steps against local oil and gas development

By Alyssa Bernstein*

Athens City Council should be applauded for making efforts to protect the Athens wellhead zone (the area of the aquifer supplying our water) from possible contamination due to industrial activities such as unconventional fracking, especially given that no other governmental agency seems to be making such efforts.

Fracking, Security, and Global Warming

We’re fracking our way to a warmer and less stable world

By Bob Sheak

Oil and gas corporations, their trade associations, mass media outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Time magazine, and numerous pundits continue to report there is a new day unfolding in the energy future of the U.S. Indeed, they sometimes say it’s a revolution in the making. It’s now feasible to mine hitherto unreachable or unprofitable sources of “unconventional” oil and gas. As a result, massive, environmentally devastating mining of tar sands in Canada expands, with a proposed and controversial pipeline to carry the partly processed oil from Alberto to Texas. Drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, the Arctic, multiple off-shore locations drill ever-more deeply into the ocean floor and beneath it. As far as mining for shale gas and oil goes, the situation is described with words such as gushers, or bonanzas, or energy independence.