You wouldn't want your dog to eat food found anywhere near here
Bloomberg News is reporting on a study by the
Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) that West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Colorado gas and oil companies were cited
4,600 times between 2009 and 2013. Citations include pipeline ruptures, wastewater spills, and well leaks.
“It’s extremely difficult for the public to get this kind of information,” said Amy Mall, an author of the report for the New York-based environmental advocate. “The companies are violating the law too often, and we need policy solutions to increase transparency and to change the consequences for not complying” with the rules, she said.
Our own Meteor Blades covered the NRDC's
report over here.
However, I'm going to go into exactly how Bloomberg covered this. A total of 4,600 over four years is just terrifying. That isn't regulation at all. It's chaos. These are the cases that are public and cited by regulators. Which, if recent history is to be believed, is just the tip of the iceberg.
The NRDC report tabulated citations issued by inspectors for breaching rules adopted to make sure wells are constructed soundly and the wastewater is handled safely. Because of the way inspectors categorize the violations, it’s difficult to tell if any one issue was tied directly to fracking, Mall said.
The vast majority of violations -- about 4,000 -- were in Pennsylvania. West Virginia and Colorado combined had about 600.
Pennsylvania recently unveiled
243 cases of fracking-related water contamination. And that's what they chose to
make public!
But don't you worry, says spokesman for the Coloradans for Responsible Energy Development (CRED) Jon Haubert:
“People in Colorado have an assurance, because we have such tight regulation and enforcement,” Haubert said. “In Colorado you aren’t seeing an increase in spills, you are seeing an increase in the reporting of spills, and I would argue that’s a good thing.”
Bloomberg points out that CRED is an
industry-backed organization. Bloomberg forgets to point out that
Jon Haubert, spokesman for CRED (an organization of reportedly three people, as in 1 + 1 + 1 people including the aforementioned Mr. Haubert),
is used to be:
CRED spokesman Jon Haubert is also Manager of Communications for the Western Energy Alliance (WEA), an oil and gas trade association.
Remember the Western Energy Alliance?
I do. Let's learn all about these people who the traditional news is citing below the fold.
The company executives, Mr. Berman said in his speech, must be willing to exploit emotions like fear, greed and anger and turn them against the environmental groups. And major corporations secretly financing such a campaign should not worry about offending the general public because “you can either win ugly or lose pretty,” he said.
“Think of this as an endless war,” Mr. Berman told the crowd at the June event in Colorado Springs, sponsored by the Western Energy Alliance, a group whose members include Devon Energy, Halliburton and Anadarko Petroleum, which specialize in extracting oil and gas through hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. “And you have to budget for it.”
[emphasis mine]
So, that thing that Jon Haubert said about this being good news? That means nothing, or more likely, less than nothing. It means that the big number—the 4,600—is exactly as bad as you think it is.
Bloomberg's piece then takes a quote from Energy in Depth spokesman Steve Everley. That link on his name will take you to a diary about Steve Everley being name checked as a big part of Koch Industry-related, legislation-writing collusion. So, I won't bother you with Mr. Everley's quote about the numbers being inflated by "paper-work."
Finally, the second most violations in the report after Chesapeake Energy Corp (a company that pays its CEO more than it pays in taxes to the U.S. government), was Cabot Oil & Gas Corp.
Cabot should “be judged on its strong and clear record of industry-leading water recycling efforts, use of its own gas to help power its operations and fleet of vehicles and our long list of contributions to the community partners,” Cabot spokesman George Stark said in an e-mail. The report is “vague innuendo put out by anti-industry groups.”
John Gotti gave out turkeys every Thanksgiving. Cabot Oil & Gas Corp.:
2009—Shut down in Pennsylvania after three large chemical spills.
2010—Ordered to plug three wells after contaminating them.
Today’s action follows Cabot’s failure to abide by the terms of a November 2009 consent order and agreement with DEP.
“Cabot had every opportunity to correct these violations, but failed to do so. Instead, it chose to ignore its responsibility to safeguard the citizens of this community and to protect the natural resources there,” said Hanger. “I have ordered that all of Cabot’s permit applications for further drilling in any region of the state be put on-hold, indefinitely, until the region’s homeowners receive their new water treatment systems, the fines are paid, and the wells are plugged.
Why are they even interviewed?
Tue Apr 07, 2015 at 12:14 PM PT: UPDATE: My assertion that Jon Haubert was actively working for Western Energy Alliance was incorrect. He stopped working for the WEA at the end of 2013.
