Ex-Mobil Executive Spills The Beans About How Big Oil Is Fracking Up The Planet

The head of the California Democratic Party's Environmental Caucus, R.L. Miller, is starting up a national Climate Hawks Vote project. She was instrumental in getting a resolution calling for a moratorium on fracking through the sometimes tepid California Democratic Party and many of us know her as an intrepid environmental blogger at Daily Kos. The other day she and I talked about how we could work together to help defend environmental champion and Climate Change realist Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI), who's being challenged by a New Dem sellout to pollution special interest lobbyists, Colleen Hanabusa. More about that soon. Earlier today Al Gore sent his supporters a message about Sen. Schatz: "Fortunately, we have a few strong leaders on climate change and clean energy in Congress, including my friend, Senator Brian Schatz from Hawaii. Fighting climate change and developing America's clean energy economy are more than just goals for Brian--they're his passion. And we're going to need Brian's strong, outspoken leadership in Congress for many more years to get the job done... [T]hanks to Brian's visionary leadership, Hawaii implemented its own groundbreaking Clean Energy Initiative. As a result, Hawaii has tripled its renewable energy production from 6% to 18%-- and is on track to reach 40% by 2030, the highest renewable energy portfolio in the nation... In my view, it is time to pick senators who not only have the right positions on climate issues, but are willing to really make solving the climate crisis a priority, and are passionate about it!"

Meanwhile, I asked R.L. to take a look at an outstanding candidate Blue America has endorsed in a Pennsylvania congressional race, state Senator Daylin Leach, who has an enviable record on environmental protection. She told me that the local politics of Pennsylvania make it nearly impossible for anyone to take strong stands against fracking and she asked me to see what Daylin feels about it. So I did. This is what he sent me:

"As the author and sponsor of two fracking moratorium bills in the Pennsylvania Senate, I have long believed that it is insane to dig in excess of 30,000 wells in the face of mounting evidence of environmental and health damage and in the wake of massive cuts to environmental enforcement funding. Sadly, Governor Corbett is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the fracking industry. Which is why we need stronger national environmental standards, which I will aggressively fight for in Congress."

Just as R.L., Daylin and I started going back and forth into the ramifications of fracking policies in Pennsylvania, Ellen Cantarow published an interview she did with Louis Allstadt, who, until he retired in 2000 and took up kayaking, was an executive vice president of Mobil Oil running that company's exploration and production operations in the western hemisphere. They didn't have fracking back when he worked for Mobil. He discovered fracking soon enough-- when it started threatening the water where he was teaching kayaking in upstate New York. Cantarow describes him as "an indispensable guide for one of the country's most powerful environmental movements, New York's grassroots anti-fracking resistance." Please hit this link to read the entire interview. Below are a few excerpts:

Louis Allstadt: The fracking that's going on right now is the real wake-up call on just what extreme lengths are required to pull oil or gas out of the ground now that most of the conventional reservoirs have been exploited-- at least those that are easy to access.

Ellen Cantarow: So could you describe the dangers of this industry?

LA: First of all you have to look at what is conventional oil and gas. That was pretty much anything that was produced until around 2000. It's basically a process of drilling down through a cap rock, an impervious rock that has trapped oil and gas beneath it-- sometimes only gas. If it's oil, there's always gas with it. And once you're into that reservoir-- which is really not a void, it's porous rock-- the natural pressure of the gas will push up the gas and oil. Typically you'll have a well that will keep going 20, 30 years before you have to do something to boost the production through a secondary recovery mechanism. That conventional process is basically what was used from the earliest wells in Pennsylvania through most of the offshore production that exists now, that started in the shallow water in the Gulf of Mexico and gradually moved down into deeper and deeper water.

Now what's happened is that the prospect of finding more of those conventional reservoirs, particularly on land and in the places that have been heavily explored like the US and Europe and the Middle East just is very, very small. And the companies have pretty much acknowledged that. All of them talk about the need to go to either non-conventional shale or tight sand drilling or to go into deeper and deeper waters or to go into really hostile Arctic regions and possibly Antarctic regions.

So when you talked about "the race for what's left," that's what's going on. Both the horizontal drilling and fracturing have been around for a long time. The industry will tell you this over and over again-- they've been around for 60 years, things like that. That is correct. What's different is the volume of fracking fluids and the volume of flow-back that occurs in these wells. It is 50 to 100 times more than what was used in the conventional wells.

The other [difference] is that the rock above the target zone is not necessarily impervious the way it was in the conventional wells. And to me that last point is at least as big as the volume. The industry will tell you that the mile or two between the zone that's being fracked is not going to let anything come up.

But there are already cases where the methane gas has made it up into the aquifers and atmosphere. Sometimes through old well bores, sometimes through natural fissures in the rock. What we don't know is just how much gas is going to come up over time. It's a point most people haven't gotten. It's not just what's happening today. We're opening up channels for the gas to creep up to the surface and into the atmosphere. And methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas in the short term-- less than 100 years-- than carbon dioxide.

...EC: So to go back to your earlier comments, what are the future consequences?

LA: 20, 30, 100 years down the road we don't know how much methane is going to be making its way up. And if you do hundreds of thousands of wells, there's a good chance you're going to have a lot of methane coming up, exacerbating global warming. … That is what Tony Ingraffea is talking about as part of the problem. [Anthony Ingraffea, Dwight C. Baum professor of engineering at Cornell University, in 2011 co-authored a landmark study on the greenhouse-gas footprint of high-volume fracking.]

What you [also] don't know [is that] when you plug that well, how much is going to find its way to the surface without going up the well bore. And there are lots of good indications that plugging the well doesn't really work long-term. There's still some pressure down there even though it's not enough pressure to be commercially produced. And sooner or later the steel casing there is going to rust out, and the cement sooner or later is going to crumble. We may have better cements now, we may have slightly better techniques of packing the cement and mud into the well bore to close it up, but even if nothing comes up through the fissures in the rock layers above, where it was fracked, those well bores will deteriorate over time. And there is at least one study showing that 100 percent of plugs installed in abandoned wells fail within 100 years and many of them much sooner.

EC: So what's the solution?

LA: I think we have wasted a lot of time that should have gone into seriously looking into and developing alternative energies. And we need to stop wasting that time and get going on it. But the difficult part is that the industry talks about, well, this is a bridge fuel [that] will carry us until alternatives [are developed] but nobody is building them. It's not a bridge unless you build the foundations for a bridge on the other side, and nobody's building it.

If you would like to contribute to Brian Schatz's and Rush Holt's Senate primary campaigns against polluter-friendly ConservaDems, you can do that on the same Act Blue page