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Utah OKs commercial oil shale mine

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Before It Starts

Original article by The Associated Press, Durango Herald

SALT LAKE CITY – A Utah company has cleared a final hurdle to develop the first commercial oil shale mine in the nation.

The Utah Division of Water Quality on Friday issued a groundwater permit to Red Leaf Resources, which plans to develop a shale mine on state land in the Uinta Basin in eastern Utah.

Red Leaf hopes to become the first company to extract oil in commercial amounts from shale that exists in abundance under Utah, Colorado and Wyoming, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.

Oil-shale deposits in the three states represent a potentially huge, unconventional energy resource, but the trick is turning it into oil. Oil shale is rock that contains kerogen, which must be subjected to high heat before it produces liquid.

Companies have been trying to figure out how to do that commercially in the U.S. with limited environmental effects.

Red Leaf CEO Adolph Lechtenberger said in a statement that its initial, small-scale demonstration project will produce more than 300,000 barrels of oil and “prove our clean oil shale technology works on a large scale.” The company has about 600 million barrels available under its Utah leasehold.

But environmentalists expressed skepticism, saying groundwater disturbance is just one of many environmental drawbacks posed by extraction of the Uinta Basin’s rich oil shale and tar sands resources.

The ore will be strip mined, environmentalists said, and developers will consume more resources to convert hydrocarbon pre-cursors kerogen and bitumen into liquid oil.

“They take the skin off the planet and are not putting it back. It’s going to be a moonscape,” said John Weisheit of Moab-based Living Rivers. “They are destroying the watershed, the near-surface aquifers. It’s a water system that makes the ecosystem what it is.”

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Hormone-Disrupting Chemicals Linked to Fracking Found in Colorado River

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The Colorado River flows through the town of Rifle in Garfield County, Colorado. Photo (taken 1972) by David Hiser,courtesy of U.S. National Archives, Flickr/Creative Commons.

The Colorado River flows through the town of Rifle in Garfield County, Colorado. Photo (taken 1972) by David Hiser, courtesy of U.S. National Archives, Flickr/Creative Commons.

Original article by Sandra Postel, National Geographic

 

This week, more evidence came in that hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) poses potentially serious risks to drinking water quality and human health.

A team of researchers from the University of Missouri found evidence of hormone-disrupting activity in water located near fracking sites – including samples taken from the Colorado River near a dense drilling region of western Colorado.

The Colorado River is a source of drinking water for more than 30 million people.

The peer-reviewed study was published this week in the journal Endocrinology.

Fracking is the controversial process of blasting water mixed with sand and chemicals deep underground at high pressure so as to fracture rock and release the oil and gas it holds. It has made previously inaccessible fossil fuel reserves economical to tap, and drilling operations have spread rapidly across the country.

The University of Missouri team found that 11 chemicals commonly used in the fracking process are “endocrine disrupters” – compounds that can affect the human hormonal system and have been linked to cancer, birth defects, and infertility.

“More than 700 chemicals are used in the fracking process, and many of them disturb hormone function,” said Dr. Susan Nagel, associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and women’s health at the University of Missouri School of Medicine and a co-author of the study, in a news release.

“With fracking on the rise, populations may face greater health risks from increased endocrine-disrupting chemical exposure.”

The research team collected samples from ground water and surface water from sites in Garfield County, Colorado, where fracking fluids had accidentally spilled, as well as from the nearby Colorado River, into which local streams and groundwater drain. They also took samples from other areas of Garfield County where little drilling has taken place, as well as from a county in Missouri where there had been no drilling at all.

They found that the samples from the spill site had moderate-to-high levels of endocrine-disrupting activity, and the Colorado River samples had moderate levels.  The other two samples, taken from areas with little or no drilling activity, showed low levels of endocrine-disrupting activity.

The new findings add urgency to calls for moratoriums on fracking until the risks have been fully assessed and regulations and monitoring put in place to safeguard water supplies and public health.

Due to the so-called “Halliburton loophole,” the oil and gas industry is exempt from important requirements under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, and states have been slow to fill the regulatory gap.

Colorado, in particular, should exercise the utmost caution.

According to a report by Ceres, a Boston-based non-profit organization that educates investors about corporate environmental risks, 92 percent of Colorado’s shale gas and oil wells are located in “extremely high” water stress regions, defined as areas in which cities, industries and farms are already using 80 percent or more of available water.

Adding contamination risks to the high volume of water fracking wells require – typically 4-6 million gallons per well – argues strongly for a precautionary approach to future development and a pause in existing production until the full range of environmental health risks can be assessed.

But Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper has said the state will sue any city that bans fracking within its borders.  Indeed, in July 2012, the state sued the front-range town of Longmont, which had issued such a ban.

A statement about the new findings of endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in waters near fracking sites issued by Concerned Health Professionals of New York, and posted here, concludes with this warning:

“These results, which are based on validated cell cultures, demonstrate that public health concerns about fracking are well-founded and extend to our hormone systems. The stakes could not be higher. Exposure to EDCs has been variously linked to breast cancer, infertility, birth defects, and learning disabilities. Scientists have identified no safe threshold of exposure for EDCs, especially for pregnant women, infants, and children.”

And environmental health expert Sandra Steingraber writes in a letter posted at the same site:

“[I]t seems to me, the ethical response on the part of the environmental health community is to reissue a call that many have made already:  hit the pause button via a national moratorium on high volume, horizontal drilling and fracking and commence a comprehensive Health Impact Assessment with full public participation.”

 

 

 

Our Land, Our Life – Two Western Shoshone elders struggle to protect land from mines

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The Film Our Land, Our Life presents the struggle of Carrie and Mary Dann, two Western Shoshone elders, to address the threat mining development poses to the sacred and environmentally sensitive lands of Crescent Valley, Nevada.

From film transcript:

Now you may ask yourself why the US government would come in and raid a ranch that is owned and operated by two Western Shoshone grandmothers who have lived there on this land since time immemorial? Well, as it turns out, the ranch in Crescent Valley sits on top of one of the largest gold finds in the history of the United States.

Just two or three months after the horse roundup in February of 2003, Cortez Gold…was claiming that it had found one of the most significant deposit of gold. Where? Right there where those animals had been removed.

If you want to look at degradation of the range, go look over the top of this mountain down into those roads that the mine has been putting in to do their exploration, or go look into one of these pits, or go look at all the water they’ve been pumping. And yet, that is not considered degradation of the range?

Shoshone land right now is the second largest gold producing area in the world. This microscopic gold is underneath the water table, so they are having to pump the water out to get to the earth underneath. The mines are pumping anywhere from 20,000 gallons of water per minute to 70,000 gallons of water per minute, for one mine alone, every day, 365 days a year.

…they are killing the earth.

Feds Move to Protect Northern Az Wildflower, Cite Mining Threats

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Photo credit: Lee Hughes/Bureau of Land Management

Original post by Evan Bell, Cronkite News Service

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the Gierisch mallow endangered Tuesday, and proposed more than 12,000 acres in Arizona and Utah as critical habitat for the desert wildflower.

The orange perennial flower is found only in Mohave County, Arizona, and Washington County, Utah, and can only grow in “gypsum soil” found in those counties.

But that soil is also the source of gypsum used to produce construction materials such as drywall. As construction picks up, increased gypsum mining could threaten the endangered flower‘s habitat, the government said, along with recreational activities on public lands and unauthorized use of off-road vehicles.

In addition to creating critical habitat for the plant, other measures called for in the government’s action include seed management, creating “managed plant reserves” and “limiting disturbances.”

All of the land involved belongs to either the U.S. Bureau of Land Management or the Arizona State Land Department.

“The ruling should not impact any legal authorized activity” on the land, said Brian Wooldridge, a biologist for the Fish and Wildlife’s Arizona Ecological Services.

But Washington County Commissioner Alan Gardner called the decision “very unfortunate.”

“BLM actually said the wildflower was doing fine or better,” Gardner said. He called it just an attempt by Fish and Wildlife to “shut the gypsum mining down.”

But environmental groups, which have been calling for years for the mallow’s protection, welcomed the news.

“We’re hopeful that this is going to save the plant from extinction,” said Taylor Jones, an endangered species advocate for the WildEarth Guardians. The advocacy group has been lobbying the government since 2007 to list the wildflower as an endangered species.

“We think that this is going to be the only way to protect this very small population from threats in the area,” Jones said.

The Federal Register notice announcing the decision concluded that, with an improving housing market, gypsum mining will make a return. There are two gypsum mines in the critical habitat area, one in operation and one that is currently shut down.

The government said such mining poses a “significant threat” to the species that could wipe out “46 percent” of the mallow’s habitat.

BLM has authorized expansion of the one operating mine, the Black Rock Gypsum Mine, into the flower’s habitat, but it could take years for that expansion to occur, the notice said.

“We work with land management agencies to determine if the project will have an adverse effect on the species and its habitat,” Wooldridge said.

But Jones said the Endangered Species Act is often too “flexible,” often blocking only about “1 percent” of activity to protect a listed species. The prospect of mining and other activity in the flower’s habitat concerns activists.

“When you have a really small population that is being hemmed in, bounded and under pressure, the more likely it is that an event will wipe it out,” Jones said.

The Gierisch mallow, which is found only in Mohave County, Arizona, and Washington County, Utah, has been declared endangered by federal officials, who want to designate 12,000 acres as critical habitat for the desert flower. Mallow facts Details on the endangered Gierisch mallow from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: - Description: A flowering perennial of the mallow family. Multiple flowers are orange on dark-red or purple woody stems that grow 1.4 to 3.4 feet tall. - Habitat: Found only on gypsum outcrops in northern Mohave County, Arizona, and adjacent Washington County, Utah, at elevations of about 3,500 feet. - Reasons for decline: Mining operations and unauthorized off-roading have damaged habitat; additionally, trash dumping and illegal target shooting have had an impact.

The Gierisch mallow, which is found only in Mohave County, Arizona, and Washington County, Utah, has been declared endangered by federal officials, who want to designate 12,000 acres as critical habitat for the desert flower.Details on the endangered Gierisch mallow from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service:

– Description: A flowering perennial of the mallow family. Multiple flowers are orange on dark-red or purple woody stems that grow 1.4 to 3.4 feet tall.

– Habitat: Found only on gypsum outcrops in northern Mohave County, Arizona, and adjacent Washington County, Utah, at elevations of about 3,500 feet.

– Reasons for decline: Mining operations and unauthorized off-roading have damaged habitat; additionally, trash dumping and illegal target shooting have had an impact.