During a recent public meeting on "fracking" at the Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»Public Library, a brief moment of irony broke the sober mood in the room. Ben Parfitt, resource policy analyst for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, was discussing B.C.'s abundant fresh water and hydroelectric power-and the shale gas industry's immense thirst for both-when a cellphone went off in the audience. The ringtone: the theme from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Sergio Leone's 1966 spaghetti western filmed in the arid region of southern Spain.
Hydraulic fracturing goes through water the way Simon Cowell goes through auditioning singers. Last year at B.C.'s Horn River Basin, "600 worth of Olympic pools of water were pressure pumped at just one multiwell site. There will be thousands such well sites developed if the industry is able to develop out the way it wants to," Parfitt told the audience.
The shale gas industry has a budget-busting thirst for energy, too. The one liquid natural gas facility approved for Kitimat involves a partnership between Encana, Apache Canada and EOG Resources. It will take eight per cent of all the power that is currently produced on our hydroelectric grid, says Parfitt.
"The premier and the energy minister have stated it as a goal having three such facilities in the province by 2020, and that translates into a quarter of all the hydroelectric power in our province by an industry that will be consuming more and more water_" Much of the natural gas will be directed to Alberta for the production of the energy-and-water-intensive Tar Sands.
Parfitt insists there's nothing carbon-neutral about shale gas operations. They're certainly not consumer-neutral. The demand for increased hydroelectricity production is coming from industry, yet residential rates are already much higher than industrial rates. In effect, British Columbians are subsidizing the oil and gas companies' hydro consumption.
The consumer may be getting the drill shaft in more ways than one. A front page New York Times report from last June, "Insiders Sound an Alarm Amid a Natural Gas Rush," cites hundreds of industry emails and internal documents to warn of another economic bubble in the making. The size of North American gas reserves have reportedly been exaggerated, and some experts see the spectre of Enron-like accounting methods in the industry's inflated projections.
In a March investigative report in Rolling Stone magazine, journalist Jeff Goodell concludes that fracking "is about producing cheap energy the same way the mortgage crisis was about helping realize the dreams of middle-class homeowners." The primary profits for one of the biggest shale gas companies, Chesapeake Energy, come not from selling the gas itself, but from buying and flipping land. The company "is now the largest leaseholder in the United States, owning the drilling rights to some 15 million acres-an area more than twice the size of Maryland," writes Goodell.
A more immediate concern is the cocktail of toxic chemicals injected deep underground during fracking operations, and the cavalier approach of some companies to the environment. In 2010, the New York Times documented how shale gas drillers were emptying millions of gallons of toxic, chemical-laden wastewater into Pennsylvania's rivers and streams. Prior to this, in the controversial 2010 film GasLand, inhabitants of the area complained about their foul-tasting, health-disrupting tap water, and indicated the mysterious deaths of wild animals and fish near their properties, which they had leased to fracking operations.
An April report in the LA Times profiles a physician, Dr. Amy Pare, who found inorganic compounds-hippuric acid, phenol, and mandelic acid-in the urine of a dozen people living a half mile from a gas well near Avella, Pennsylvania. Yet incredibly, a new state law forbids health care professionals "from warning the community of water and air pollution that may be caused by fracking, but which also forbids them from telling their own patients what the physician believes may have led to their health problems," observes author Walter Brasch. The Pennsylvania law requires fracking companies to supply information about chemicals and procedures to a state-maintained registry, but it also requires that health professionals must first sign non-disclosure agreements in requesting specific information from shale gas operators, supposedly to protect any corporate trade secrets.
It sounds to me like The Gas, the Bad and the Ugly to me.
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