A community stirs
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
By Ben Cannon
PINEDALE, Wyo. - Sally Mackey is a spry, clear-eyed octogenarian, who can remember when not much happened in this town of about 2,000 year-round residents nestled between the Wind River and Wyoming mountain ranges.
But Mackey is no stranger to the power a few inquisitive minds seeking answers can carry in a small town like this.
In the early 1970s, during the Nixon administration, an out-of-state drilling company proposed using nuclear bombs to get to vast natural gas reserves under the region’s anticline, a geological feature south of Pinedale that has uplifted a sea of natural gas within reach of drilling companies.
At the time, Mackey and others began a fact-finding committee to educate themselves and the community about the potentially catastrophic consequences if the bombs were allowed to detonate underground, just miles from the communities of Pinedale and Big Piney. Her group’s grassroots campaign to inform the public, with the help of some Wyoming politicians, put a stop to the gas company’s “Wagon Wheel” nuclear project.
Since that time, the petroleum industry has found and developed alternative - and most would say better - ways to turn the Pinedale Anticline into one of the most productive natural gas fields in the United States.
While the gas boom has power charged Sublette County’s economy - pumping millions of dollars into schools and public buildings, and invigorating local businesses - it has not come without concerns about the drilling’s environmental impacts.
Late this winter, the local field office of the Department of Environmental Quality issued a series of ground-level ozone warnings, cautioning against activities involving deep breathing and advising that the young, the elderly and those with respiratory conditions stay indoors.
The unusually high readings, which some say could be the result of emissions produced during many stages of gas exploration, has residents like the 86-year-old Mackey speaking out again, almost 40 years after demise of the Wagon Wheel project.
Motivated in part by the ozone warnings, and by other, nascent concerns for water and wildlife, several Sublette County residents created Citizens Learning Ozone’s Unhealthy Destruction, or C.L.O.U.D., an information and action group.
At a meeting last week, featuring four panelists from outside Sublette County, C.L.O.U.D. attempted to give county residents more details on the potential environmental impacts from the natural gas development occurring south of town, in the Pinedale Anticline. Some 100 people showed up to the meeting, among them local officials, gas industry representatives and worried residents, including a concerned Mackey.
“I think people are realizing the costs concerning the health of people living here,” Mackey said in a phone interview following last week’s meeting. “And I think it’s important that people are really getting involved.”
Though gas has been ‘produced’ at some level in Sublette County since before even the Second World War, the community remained, until the last few decades, largely agricultural. It continues to be a fairly conservative Wyoming town, with a lingering sense of western stoicism.
“Before this, it had been a pretty much uphill battle to get people educated and informed enough that they wanted to speak out,” said Linda Baker, a community organizer and activist with the Upper Green River Valley Coalition, a natural resource advocacy group.
If one were to have taken a roll call of outspoken environmental advocates and cautioners in Sublette County over the last few years, Baker and a handful of others would have made the short list.
“People here are pretty conservative and keep to themselves, and there has always been some animosity of the locals here toward environmental groups,” Baker said. “But in the last few months, my job has suddenly become easier, because people are becoming alarmed to the threats to our human health. That old animosity is changing.”
Gas industry officials have insisted they are committed to using clean methods of natural gas exploration and production.
Public discussions that do not include industry input are not as effective, some industry officials have said.
“EnCana understands that we have an impact as a result of producing energy,” said Randy Teeuwen, a spokesperson with the Calgary, Canada-based EnCana Corp., which operates 11 rigs on the anticline. “But we are also the solution to that impact. For a forum like that to occur and not include industry – to be able to explain what we’re doing to solve the problem – is not productive.”
Teeuwen, who attended the panel meeting, said the company is a leader in low emissions drilling and is aiming for “near zero [volatile organic compound] emissions in the very near future.”
In late April, a few dozen protesters – who ranged in age from high school students to retirees like Sally Mackey – organized a sit-in in front of the Pinedale Bureau of Land Management office, a large new building at the north end of town.
Questar Corporation, one of the major gas producers operating near Pinedale, donated the use of a dormant drilling site and even porta-potties for demonstrators later in the day.
“It was the first protest of its kind here in Sublette County,” said Baker, though another longtime resident, Bob McCarty, who ran unsuccessfully in the last county commissioner election, said he believed there might have been a group protest during the Vietnam War.
This was not the first year for ozone, a noxious gas and lung irritant, to exceed levels deemed acceptable by federal agencies. The first instances of ozone levels exceeding what is considered acceptable – between 60 and 70 parts per billion – occurred in winter 2005 and again the following year. The ozone levels recorded in late February and early March of this year, the highest yet at 122 parts per billion, were higher than what Denver has experienced in a decade; higher even than what Los Angeles County recorded last year, according to Jeremy Nichols, an analyst and air quality advocate with Denver-based Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action.
The phenomenon of wintertime ozone, once considered an anomaly, is on the rise in the Rocky Mountain West. Some hypothesize that the gaseous emissions from the scurry of mechanized activity associated with mineral drilling, paired with the unique circumstances of mountain weather and sunlight, create ripe conditions for high ozone levels. Ozone, sulfur, nitrogen and carbon dioxides - all byproducts of fossil fuel-burning engines - cause something not often associated with the rural Rocky Mountain West: smog.
“The two things you need [to create ozone] are emissions and sunlight,” Nichols said.
“The air becomes like a stew that reacts with the sunlight and creates the ozone.”
Nichols participated in the C.L.O.U.D.-sponsored panel discussion last week. He told the audience that the Denver metro area had experienced ozone drifting into the city from less populated areas in Colorado where oil and gas development occur.
But for Pinedale and Sublette County, things remain in a state of uncertainty. Some residents say the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the Pinedale Anticline, and the DEQ, which is responsible for measuring and enforcing certain environmental standards, have either pointed fingers at one another to avert blame for problems or have ignored public requests for both more information and action plans.
“I’m very concerned,” said Mary Lynn Worl, who is involved with C.L.O.U.D. “We need to assess the health risks associated with every stage of gas exploration and development. Not only for humans and animals, but for the plants also.”
Ozone can have detrimental effects to trees, which are even more susceptible to the gas than humans, said Dr. Theo Colburn, a specialist on toxic effects. Colburn, who has witnessed and analyzed the impacts of natural gas drilling near her Colorado ranch, sat on the C.L.O.U.D. panel last week.
“The Aspen are extremely vulnerable, and so are the conifers,” Colburn told the Pinedale audience, adding, “You knock out the trees in our forests and you’re going to see spring runoff like we’ve never seen.”
Amid the mounting environmental concern among some residents is the fact that the BLM appears close to adopting a supplemental environmental impact statement, a lengthy document outlining future management for gas development on the Pinedale Anticline.
With about 600 wells currently producing gas, the preferred plan, set for adoption around June barring any major or unexpected changes, will allow another 4,400 wells to be drilled on the Pinedale Anticline.
The BLM received more than 100,000 public comments on the plan that, if adopted as is, will remove seasonal drilling restrictions, opening up what was crucial wintering range for mule deer and is year-round home to pronghorn antelope and sage grouse.
A 10-year study conducted by the BLM revealed that nearly half the mule deer population has disappeared or been displaced, though the agency does not say a clear link exists between the decline and energy development.
The new impact statement also calls for the implementation of a pipe network that is expected to reduce truck traffic by up to 165,000 trips a year, according to Jennifer Klinesmith, a BLM spokesperson. According to Klinesmith, at least one operator, Questar, has already built such a pipeline system, which collects and moves potentially contaminated water. A field-wide pipeline network, paired with a requirement to use cleaner drill rigs by 2009, should greatly improve air quality, Klinesmith said.
“The plan is that there would be an 80 percent reduction of [nitrous oxide] emissions in 42 months,” she said.
There is a sense of mistrust of federal agencies by some, who question the data used in the BLM’s impact statement and say that the agency and the DEQ do not always enforce their own guidelines.
“I think there’s more wells than what is stated,” said Susie Kramer, a C.L.O.U.D. member. “It was the wildlife that for the longest time was suffering, but now we’re learning there’s much more to it.”
Currently, county officials are working to put together a health impact assessment, to study the risks of possible air, surface water and groundwater pollution and assess what contaminants may have already been introduced in unintended ways.
“We need baseline data,” said John Linn, a Sublette County Commissioner and a third generation Sublette County resident. “We need to know if we’ve got air coming in from out of county or if we’re polluting from local sources. At this point we can’t say.”
Currently there are four air-monitoring stations around the county, but Linn said he wants more to record what might be coming in from outside.
He said commissioners are exploring funding for the multi-year study, looking even to industry operators to contribute. Further, the county has to better figure out what tools are at its disposal and what courses of action it can take depending on a number of outcomes.
“Maybe we have some control, maybe we don’t have any control,” Linn said, “the thing is, Sublette County is not in the enforcement business.”
While Linn lauded the C.L.O.U.D. goal to inform itself, he cautioned that the panel “used some scare tactics,” to drive home a reactionary message. More than one critic of the meeting, in which the audience had the opportunity to submit written questions, pointed out that the four panel members had come in for the day from outside of Sublette County and could not really understand the particularities and trends of the situation.
“I’ve been out to those locations there,” said Linn, who has a fencing business that works around the county. “Occasionally, there’s a small valve leak but that’s about all I’ve seen. And my house is closer to the Pinedale Anticline than 75 percent of Sublette County.”
Roger McClellan is a toxicologist and human health risk analyst who recently came to observe and advise on Shell’s development activities on the anticline.
“Ozone is sort of the play of the day but you have to back up and look at the whole air quality issue,” McClellan said in a phone interview. “A pretty darn intensive set of monitors is needed in this area because, yes, you do have a mini-wintertime ozone season. But, overall, the air quality here is quite good.”
He added, “I think there are aggressive plans here in terms of [reducing] emissions. And I think the operators here, by and large, are committed to using quality procedures. In other places you see some pretty sloppy development. But not here, I think, because this is a pretty substantial resource.”
A small group of C.L.O.U.D. members gathered Sunday evening near the lunch counter at Ridley’s general store. The place was known forever as Faler’s, until it sold to a chain that then put more products on the shelves. There was weariness among the group, and an irritability stemming from a long day.
Some of them had been out during the day investigating and taking samples of what they thought appeared to be hydrocarbons - found naturally in crude oil - along the surface of the New Fork River. There is a suspicion that, on occasion, some truck operators illegally dump their potentially toxic, liquid cargo. That fear is based, in part, on mistrust of agency oversight and the feeling that some operators, including independent contractors, cut corners to save time and money.
Elaine Crumpley, a recently retired science teacher who sent an impressive number of students on to win and place high in the National Science Fair, was among the group.
“This is polarizing the community,” said Crumpley, reflecting on a sense that C.L.O.U.D. participants and their sympathizers have been pitted against the many prosperous livelihoods centered around the Pinedale Anticline.
Crumpley said she was given a bizarre runaround by an agency worker earlier in the day when she tried to report what she believes was an illegal dumping of drilling-related fluids.
But, without knowing exactly the full range of chemicals being used to produce natural gas on the anticline - a major grievance of the group - it is difficult to test for what the substance, which was described as a shimmering rainbow on the water’s surface, actually was.
Crumpley said she remained optimistic. “There’s no way I’m giving up on this,” she said. “And now that I’m un-muzzled [as a retired teacher], I don’t have to worry,” she added, smiling.
Photo by SAMUEL FITZIn booming Sublette County, a mounting sense of urgency.PERMALINK:
A community stirs | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories
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