Authors of model fracking regulation find it’s lonely in the middle

Posted on 10/04/2012 by EnergyWire

$fracking rig$

A drilling rig in Butler County, Pennsylvania. (Photo by WCN 24/7 via Creative Commons)

By Peter Behr

Second in a three-part series. See part one here.

For more than two years, the Environmental Defense Fund has been seeking to line up state regulators and energy companies behind a model regulatory framework for shale gas and oil development that protects underground drinking water supplies and public health.

The project is still a draft. EDF senior policy adviser Scott Anderson says the organization hopes to release the model rules for well construction and fracking by the end of the year.

But EDF’s search for regulatory consensus has pulled it into scarred political terrain, where some environmental groups oppose hydraulic fracturing outright and many industry and state officials challenge any moves to standardize regulation and oversight of a game-changing energy frontier. →

‘Big Green’ groups walk a tightrope between anti-frackers, regulators

Posted on 10/04/2012 by Ken Paulman

$anti fracking sign$

An anti-fracking protester in Ohio. (Photo by Bill Baker via Creative Commons)

By Joel Kirkland

Final part in a three-part series. Read parts one and two.

On a sunny day in September, filmmaker Josh Fox and Pennsylvania’s most ardent critics of natural gas drilling ducked into a small meeting room in the back of downtown Philadelphia’s Arch Street Methodist Church.

They unfurled a banner behind a podium. “Fracking poisons our air, our water and us,” it read. A photo of a little girl standing amid milk jugs of dirty water tugged at the word “poisons.”Near the front of the room, where frustration and outrage shared a stage, handheld video cameras flanked the anti-drilling activists as they cycled up to the microphone.

Some jabbed their fingers at the sprawling Pennsylvania Conference Center across the street. From behind the center’s glass facade, representatives from companies operating in the region’s Marcellus Shale gas formation spoke in awe of how rapidly they were able to turn Pennsylvania into one of the nation’s major energy producers.

“What they’re doing across the street,” Fox told the group as they prepared for a street demonstration, “is nothing short of ensuring we won’t have water in the future that we can depend on in the way we do now, and nothing short of a hostile takeover of the state.”

Fox’s 2010 documentary “Gasland” is credited with galvanizing small grass-roots organizations behind local efforts to ban shale gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. So far, 39 communities in New York have imposed bans and nearly 100 more have passed moratoriums on the industrial process of blasting massive amounts of water, sand and chemicals more than a mile underground to release deposits of natural gas trapped in shale rock. →

Safety of shale gas wells up to states — and ‘the cement job’

Posted on 10/02/2012 by EnergyWire

$fracking pipe$

(Photo by Justin Woolford via Creative Commons)

By Peter Behr

First in a three-part series.

One Achilles’ heel of the shale gas boom is the potential failure of a vital well construction operation known simply as “the cement job.”

Every state with oil and gas operations requires drillers to pump cement into the spaces between the well hole and the outside of the steel pipe casing at a number of critical points hundreds of feet down. The cement sheaths are installed in order to form impenetrable barriers blocking methane, brackish water or drilling chemicals from migrating up the space around the drill pipe to contaminate drinking water aquifers higher up.

“The key to well integrity is a good cement job,” said Stephanie Meadows, a senior policy adviser at the American Petroleum Institute, which has developed a detailed “best practices” manual for the complex operation. →

Ohio group wants to unlock buildings’ energy secrets

Posted on 09/28/2012 by Dan Ferber

(Photo by BASF via Creative Commons)

Retrofitting buildings to improve energy efficiency typically pays off financially for owners because they save long term on heating and cooling. Yet when utilities offer efficiency programs, fewer than 0.1 percent of customers typically take them up on it.

An Ohio environmental advocacy group thinks it’s found a way to ramp up participation.

“People are scratching their heads that with all these programs and rebates and interest in getting the work done, why isn’t it happening?” said Amanda Woodrum, a researcher at Policy Matters Ohio.

The answer can be gleaned from economics 101, she said. “The basic premise of economics is that if people have the information they need, they’ll make smart choices,” Woodrum said. The solution is equally simple, at least in theory: give them the information. →

Environmental group hopes to empower communities facing fracking

Posted on 09/25/2012 by Dan Ferber

$fracking well pennsylvania$

A natural gas well in Pennsylvania. (Photo by WCN 24/7 via Creative Commons)

As hydraulic fracturing for natural gas has taken off, communities have scrambled to control fracking within their borders, while the oil and gas industry has fought in state legislatures and courts to stop communities from hampering their operations.

The Natural Resources Defense Council hopes its new legal and policy defense fund, which was announced last Friday, will boost communities in their efforts.

“It’s become clear to us that there’s a large need for a project like this,” says Henry Henderson, director of NRDC’s Midwest program. “There are communities that really need and are asking for assistance,” he said.

Most natural gas extraction these days is done by fracking, and the drilling technique has spread so rapidly that it has caused prices of natural gas to fall to historic lows. But the laws and regulations that deal with it have not always kept pace. That has led NRDC to oppose the growth of fracking until effective safeguards have been adopted. →

Q&A: How capturing wasted energy can revive the Midwest

Posted on 09/07/2012 by Dan Ferber

Dick Munson, senior vice president with Recycled Energy Development, says capturing wasted energy can help revitalize the Midwest’s manufacturing sector.

Correction appended

Today, as much as 12 percent of the electricity in the United States is generated by recovering heat that would otherwise go to waste.

This energy is produced in power plants but also in factories, hotels, hospitals and universities that use combined heat and power generation (CHP). But 12 percent is a far cry from the 30 percent of capacity that CHP supplies in other parts of the world like Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands.

So last week President Obama signed an executive order challenging the nation to ramp up CHP by 50 percent within the decade. Obama called for installing 40 GW of new CHP—the equivalent of 80 mid-sized coal plants—in the United States by 2020. He also directed four federal agencies—the EPA and the Energy, Commerce and Agriculture departments—to work together to make that happen.

That much new CHP capacity would save the equivalent of 1 percent of the nation’s energy use and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by the equivalent of 25 million cars, according to a Department of Energy report [PDF] released the same day. And it would save money and create new manufacturing jobs as well. Energy users would save $10 billion, and $40-$80 billion in new capital investments would flow into manufacturing and other U.S. facilities over the next decade, according to the report. →

Report: Prairie State coal plant power costs nearly double

Posted on 08/30/2012 by Dan Ferber

(Photo via Prairie State Energy Campus)

Power costs from a controversial Illinois coal plant are soaring, creating a major financial burden for towns and utilities that invested in the project, according to a new report.

Electricity from the Prairie State Energy Campus now costs between 40 and 100 percent more than Peabody Energy originally promised, raising electric bills for 2.5 million ratepayers and costing hundreds of Midwestern towns millions of dollars apiece, according to a detailed financial analysis [PDF] released Wednesday by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a small organization that works to reduce the nation’s dependence on coal and other non-renewable energy resources.

“What today’s report shows is that the Prairie State coal plant is turning out to be the financial nightmare that many of us feared when it was first proposed,” said Sandy Buchanan, executive director of Ohio Citizen Action, a ratepayer- and environmental-advocacy group. →

With right permit, treated fracking wastewater can go into Ohio rivers

Posted on 07/10/2012 by EnergyWire

By Ellen M. Gilmer

A recent decision from an Ohio review board has drawn attention to how the shale-packed state handles wastewater from hydraulic fracturing.

In Ohio, most fracking flowback from local and out-of-state production is sent to injection wells that store the fluid underground. But another option exercised by at least one company, Patriot Water Treatment LLC, involves diluting the brine and passing it along to a city for disposal in the Mahoning River.

The Ohio EPA eventually stepped in to prohibit the practice — which was taking place about 20 miles from the Pennsylvania border in Warren, Ohio — but was told last week that it doesn’t have authority to do so. →

Ohio towns have buyer’s remorse over Prairie State Energy Campus

Posted on 07/09/2012 by Kari Lydersen

The Prairie State Energy Campus under construction in November, 2010. (Photo by Eco-Justice Collaborative, used with permission)

You can see how it might have seemed like a good idea at the time.

When 60 towns and cities in Ohio committed to buy power from a new 1600 MW coal plant about five years ago, demand for electricity was high, growing municipalities were worried about securing affordable power for the future and coal was still seen as the bedrock of the nation’s energy mix.

A lot has changed since then.

Now construction costs for power plants have skyrocketed, cheap and abundant natural gas has made coal-fired power uncompetitive, and the recession has meant energy demand is not what had been projected.

So municipalities that committed to take-or-pay contracts to buy power from and finance construction of the massive Prairie State Energy Campus and adjacent coal mine in southern Illinois are realizing that instead of securing a stable and relatively clean energy supply, they are saddled with paying above-market amounts for power they don’t need from a project plagued by cost overruns and other troubles.

At least that’s the way Prairie State critics see it — and there are many, including consumer and environmental groups in Ohio, Indiana and other states. Non-profit public utilities covering eight states — Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, West Virginia and Virginia — signed contracts to buy power from Prairie State.

“The project was presented as a way for communities to own a generation unit and have more control, predictability, and stability for meeting the power and capacity needs of ratepayers,” said Lisa Anne Hamilton, a financial regulatory consultant advising Ohio Citizen Action. “By owning the unit they could hedge against volatility in wholesale market power and variability in coal supplies and with the mine right next door, eliminate the (coal) transportation costs that in many projects represent 60 percent of the cost. So there were all these very attractive incentives presented to the public power entities as a way to lock in low-cost stable power by participating in this project.”
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How an old Ohio coal town stays cool and saves money

Posted on 07/06/2012 by ClimateWire

By Lacey Johnson

MURRAY CITY, Ohio — Retired coal miner John Campbell has lived up the same hollow in this rural town for 70 years. Tarnished clocks, glass oil lamps, mining gear from the 1800s and other antique knickknacks fill his two-bedroom home. He guesses his tin-roofed house, like many of his possessions, is at least 100 years old.

Until last spring, Campbell and his wife, Judy, relied on a wood-burning stove to keep warm in the winter. The couple had an old furnace, but it was so inefficient that they couldn’t afford the $200 gas bills. Poor insulation made the home especially difficult to heat and cool, and they sat near two window air conditioners for relief during hot summer months.

Everything changed about a year and a half ago, when the Campbells heard their town was selected for an experimental weatherization program. With financial support from the federal government and local utilities, a regional nonprofit was on a mission to retrofit every home in the 450-person community.

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