Workers laboring in Vaca Muerta. Although oil has allowed Argentina to become a net exporter, this has not improved living conditions in the province of Neuquén, where most of it is located. Credit: Martin Álvarez Mullaly / Opsur

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 19 2025 (IPS)

For about three years now, Argentines have been hearing almost every month that oil production is breaking new records. Looking ahead, the country is projected to become a major global supplier of what remains the most sought-after energy source. 

These developments, presented as hopeful news for an economy that has been in deep crisis for at least 12 years – with a decline in per capita GDP, worsening income distribution, and rising poverty – nonetheless raise many questions.“The Argentine oil industry has advanced over the last 15 years, regardless of the government in power. Today, the benefits are being reaped, the sector will keep growing, and could reach the goal of US$30 billion in exports before 2030”: Gerardo Rabinovich.

Critics question the distribution of economic benefits, the population’s access to energy, the expansion’s environmental and social impact, and the virtual abandonment of the country’s climate goals and commitments.

The so-called Neuquén Basin, in the country’s southwest, is the epicenter of an oil activity expansion that sectors of academia and environmental and social organizations describe as overly aggressive.

“In the last 10 years, exploration began in agricultural areas. Since 2012, 3,300 oil wells have been drilled, 440 of which were completed in 2024. Over 500 wells are planned for 2025,” researcher Agustín González told IPS.

González, an agronomist and professor at the National University of Comahue, which has campuses in Neuquén and Río Negro – two provinces in the Patagonian basin where the Vaca Muerta geological formation is located – highlighted the impact of this expansion.

This field, which sparked the hopes of Argentine politicians and businessmen in 2011 when the U.S. Energy Administration classified it as one of the world’s largest reserves of shale gas and oil, is finally beginning to yield results, sometimes at the expense of other sectors.

Shale hydrocarbons are extracted using a technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and González warns that its widespread use is causing significant impacts in a traditionally agricultural region known for its high-quality fruit production.

An oil rig in Vaca Muerta. This unconventional hydrocarbon field in Patagonia is exploited by fracking, which has a greater environmental impact than conventional extraction. Credit: Martin Álvarez Mullaly / Opsur

Impact on Local Communities

“Fracking is extremely violent. It uses 30,000 liters of water per well, mixed with over 60 chemicals and high-powered pumps to fracture the rock. It has nothing to do with conventional oil activity,” González explained.

“Fracking affects all nearby land uses. When it is done near a river, a farm, or a populated area, it puts them at risk,” added González, who is part of a joint research group on the environmental and social impact of Vaca Muerta, involving the University of Comahue and the Stockholm Environment Institute.

“The development of fracking must be balanced with the protection of natural resources, food production, and social equity, establishing a robust regulatory framework to prevent irreversible damage to ecosystems, agricultural areas, and local communities,” warns a study published last December by this group of researchers.

However, this does not seem to be the best time to discuss these issues in Argentina, where far-right President Javier Milei has downgraded the Ministry of Environment to a minor department under the Secretariat of Tourism and has completely rejected not only the climate agenda but also the strengthening of the state’s role as a regulator of productive and industrial activities.

“The government has defunded the Renewable Energy Development Fund (Foder) and outright closed the distributed energy fund,” Matías Cena Trebucq, an economist at the non-governmental Environment and Natural Resources Foundation (Farn), told IPS.

The expert added that “while previous governments had a debated focus on natural gas as a transition fuel, the Milei administration is now fully committed to fossil fuels and has eliminated any reference to a path toward clean energy.”

In 2015, the Argentine Congress passed a law setting a goal for 20% of the country’s electricity consumption to come from renewable sources by December 2025. In 2024, the sector grew due to older projects coming online, reaching 15% of generation, but it is unlikely to continue growing without state support.

A pumpjack in Vaca Muerta, the unconventional oil and gas field that has been the foundation of Argentina’s significant hydrocarbon production growth in recent years. Credit: Courtesy of FARN

Positive Balance 

Thanks to recent trends, Argentina achieved a positive energy trade balance in 2024 for the first time in 13 years, with exports exceeding imports by US$5.668 billion.

Exports of fuels and energy grew by 22.3% last year compared to the previous year, reaching $9.677 billion, accounting for 12.1% of the country’s total exports, according to official data.

The main explanation for these figures lies in the expansion of fracking in Vaca Muerta, which contributed 54.9% of all oil production and 50.1% of gas nationwide. In December alone, Vaca Muerta produced 446,900 barrels of crude oil (159 liters each), 27% more than in the same month of 2023.

Conventional oil and gas production, on the other hand, continues to decline due to the depletion of the San Jorge Gulf Basin in the Patagonian province of Chubut, which was traditionally the country’s main oil-producing region.

Total production in 2024 was 256,268,454 barrels of oil, 11% more than in 2023. This marks four consecutive years of growth, driven solely by unconventional oil from Vaca Muerta.

Due to the potential of this geological formation, various studies circulating in the sector suggest that Argentina is on track to reach US$30 billion in annual oil exports by 2030 and position itself as a global supplier.

“The Argentine oil industry has advanced over the last 15 years, regardless of the government in power,” Gerardo Rabinovich, vice president of the non-governmental Argentine Institute of Energy (IAE) General Mosconi, told IPS.

He added that “today, the benefits are being reaped, the sector will continue to grow, and it is possible that the goal of US$30 billion in exports will be reached before 2030.”

“In 2022, we had an energy trade deficit of US$4 billion, and in 2024, we achieved a surplus of over US$5 billion. That is very important for Argentina,” he added.

However, the flip side of this reality is that, due to the brutal adjustment of public accounts by the Milei government, domestic demand for gasoline and diesel fell by 6.5% and 5%, respectively, compared to 2024, according to an IAE report, said Rabinovich.

“The Milei government has proposed completely liberalizing oil activity, displacing the state, and aligning local prices with global ones,” Fernando Cabrera Christiansen, a researcher at the Southern Oil Observatory, told IPS.

Cabrera, speaking from Neuquén, where he lives, noted that the growth of Argentina’s oil production has not led to greater well-being for a predominantly impoverished population, nor has it made energy cheaper locally.

He emphasized that, while over US$40 billion in investments have flowed into Neuquén in the last decade, according to data from the provincial Undersecretariat of Energy – an amount unmatched by any other region – social indicators remain as alarming as those in the rest of the country.

“The province uses oil royalties to pay public salaries and other current expenses. It is not enough to build infrastructure or provide social benefits. And poverty levels in Neuquén are similar to the national average,” he concluded.

A view of two towers in Vaca Muerta, the field whose discovery gave Argentina huge potential in shale gas and oil. Since 2011, governments have dreamed of fully exploiting it, but have been unable to do so, so the country spends billions of dollars annually on imports of gas. CREDIT: Energy Secretariat

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Aug 29 2022 (IPS)

Argentina, which has one of the largest unconventional hydrocarbon deposits in the world, has been forced to import gas for 6.6 billion dollars so far this year.

The main reason for this paradox -which aggravated the instability of the economy of this South American country- is the lack of transportation infrastructure.

In a public ceremony on Aug. 10, President Alberto Fernández signed the delayed contracts for the construction, for more than two billion dollars to be financed by the State, of a modern gas pipeline aimed at bridging that gap.

The objective is to bring a large part of the natural gas produced in Vaca Muerta to the capital, Buenos Aires, home to nearly a third of the 47 million inhabitants of this Southern Cone country.

Vaca Muerta is a geological formation with an abundance of shale gas and oil, located in the southern region of Patagonia, more than 1,000 kilometers from Buenos Aires.

The name Vaca Muerta has been on the lips of recent Argentine presidents as a symbol of the better future that awaits a country whose economy suffers from a chronic lack of foreign exchange and a weakened local currency, resulting in a poverty rate of around 40 percent of the population.

This has been the case since 2011, when the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that Vaca Muerta makes Argentina the country with the second largest shale gas reserves, behind China, and the fourth largest oil reserves.

Vaca Muerta has reserves of 308 trillion cubic feet of gas and 16.2 billion barrels of oil, according to EIA data, confirmed by Argentina’s state-owned oil company YPF.

“With Vaca Muerta, Argentina has the potential not only to achieve energy self-sufficiency but also to export. We are missing a huge opportunity,” said Salvador Gil, director of the Energy Engineering program at the public National University of San Martín, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

Gil told IPS that Argentina could play an important role, given the crisis of rising energy prices driven up by the war in Ukraine, which threatens to drag on.

But to do so, it must solve not only its transportation problems, but also the imbalances in the economy, which for years have hindered the influx of large investments in the country.

“Today, what the world needs is energy security and Argentina has gas, which has been identified as the main fuel needed for the transition period towards clean energies, in the context of the fight against climate change,” the expert said.

Argentine President Alberto Fernández, flanked by Economy Minister Sergio Massa (left), and the governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Axel Kicillof, signed a contract for the construction of the gas pipeline that will expand the capacity to transport natural gas produced in the Vaca Muerta field to the capital. It is considered a key project for the Argentine economy. CREDIT: Casa Rosada

More foreign dependence

However, since 2011, when the EIA made public its first data on Vaca Muerta’s potential, which led politicians and experts to start dreaming that Argentina would in a few years become a kind of Saudi Arabia of South America, the country is in fact more and more dependent from the energy point of view.

A study of the period 2011-2021 released this year by a private think tank states that “the decade was characterized by an increase in Argentina’s external dependence on hydrocarbons: gas imports increased by 33.6 percent over the decade while diesel imports grew by 46 percent and gasoline expanded 996 percent.”

The document, published by the General Mosconi Energy Institute, points out that Argentina, which until the end of the 20th century enjoyed self-sufficiency in gas and oil, began to experience a considerable decrease in production in 2004.

Two years later, gas began to be imported by pipeline from Bolivia and in 2008 liquefied natural gas (LNG), brought by ship mainly from the United States and Qatar, started to be imported.

“Since then, the proportion of imported gas out of the total consumed in the country has grown. In 2009 it represented only six percent, rising to 22 percent in 2014. In 2021 it represented 17 percent of the total,” the report states.

Still far below its real potential, Vaca Muerta’s production has been growing. In June it contributed 56 percent of the 139 million cubic meters per day of natural gas produced in Argentina, according to official data.

Gas is the main fuel in the country’s energy mix, accounting for about 55 percent of the total.

With regard to oil, Vaca Muerta contributed 239,000 of the 583,000 barrels per day of national production in June.

Today, gas from Patagonia in the south is transported to Buenos Aires and other large towns and cities through three gas pipelines built in the 1980s, which do not live up to demand.

For this reason, the gas pipeline whose contract was signed this month has been described by both the political leadership and the academic world as the most urgently needed piece of infrastructure in Argentina at the moment.

Its cost was set at 1.49 billion dollars at the end of 2021, but it will probably exceed two billion dollars, due to the devaluation and inflation that are crippling the Argentine economy.

According to the government, the pipeline will be operational by June next year, at the beginning of the next southern hemisphere winter.

View of the Costanera thermal power plant, which produces electricity in Buenos Aires with natural gas. Thermal generation predominates in Argentina’s electricity mix, making up almost 60 percent of the total in 2021. The gas shortage recorded this southern hemisphere winter made it necessary to use more liquid fuels to supply the power plants. CREDIt: Enel

In search of investment

“Of course the pipeline is important, but it will not solve all of Argentina’s energy problems,” said Daniel Bouille, a researcher with a PhD in energy economics.

The expert reminded IPS that an important factor is that shale oil and gas is extracted using the hydraulic fracturing technique or fracking, which “is more costly than conventional techniques.”

“To develop Vaca Muerta´s great potential, investments of between 60 and 70 billion dollars are needed,” he explained.

Bouille said that today the conditions do not exist for these investments to take place, in a country whose economy has not been growing since 2010 and where there are exchange controls and limits on the export of foreign exchange, none of which foments confidence among international capital.

In order to combat this situation, Economy Minister Sergio Massa announced that on Sept. 9 he will visit oil giants such as Chevron, Exxon, Shell and Total at their headquarters in the U.S. city of Houston, Texas to interest them in the possibility of investing in Vaca Muerta.

Argentina does not seem to be coming up with alternatives. “For 20 years the country’s conventional oil and gas production has been steadily decreasing, because all the basins have been depleted,” said Nicolás Gadano, an economist specializing in energy at the private Di Tella University.

“It is precisely the shale hydrocarbons from Vaca Muerta that in the last five years have offset the situation to slow the fall in total production,” he added in an interview with IPS.

Gadano believes that further development of Vaca Muerta’s potential will be positive for Argentina even from an environmental point of view.

“This year in Argentina a lot of oil was used for electricity production due to the lack of gas. But when the pipeline begins to operate, liquid fuels will be replaced by gas, which is a cleaner fuel,” he said.

There are also less visible but critical voices regarding the focus on Vaca Muerta as the path that Argentina should follow in terms of energy.

“Fracking, in addition to its negative environmental and social impacts, is very expensive,” said Martín Alvarez, a researcher at Observatorio Petrolero Sur, a non-governmental organization that focuses on the environmental and social aspects of energy issues.

He noted that “Vaca Muerta hydrocarbons had no possibilities of being exported until the current global energy crisis. It wasn’t until this year’s international price increase that a market for them emerged.”

“Argentina has forgotten about renewable energies and is committed to fossil fuels, which is a step backwards and goes against international climate agreements. Seeking the development of Vaca Muerta has been the only energy policy of this country in the last 10 years,” he complained.

"I use gas", announces a minibus driving along a street in Mexico City. Natural gas is becoming increasingly widely used as fuel for public transportation in Mexico, coming mainly from the United States where it is extracted through hydraulic fracturing or fracking, a technique that requires high volumes of water and toxic chemicals. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
Mexico City, Dec 7 2020 (IPS)

In his community of small farmers and ranchers in northern Mexico, Aristeo Benavides has witnessed the damage caused by the natural gas industry, which has penetrated collectively owned landholdings, altering local communities’ way of life and forms of production.

“They leave us nothing,” the farmer told IPS over the phone. “They tell us it’s for progress, but it’s their progress. We always lose out. When they drilled gas wells, they didn’t fence in the areas, they didn’t provide maintenance, the wells aren’t well cared for. There is a lot of underground water here that can be contaminated.”

Benavides lives 500 metres from the Los Ramones II Norte gas pipeline, which runs through five states and was sold in 2017 by the state oil company Pemex to two private entities: Infraestructura Energética Nova, a subsidiary of the U.S.-based Sempra Energy, and BlackRock, a U.S. investment fund.

The community of Benavides Grande and Benavides Olivares, with an area of 65,000 hectares and some 6,000 inhabitants, covers five municipalities in the state of Nuevo León, about 750 km northeast of Mexico City.

The members of the community, whose spokesman is Benavides, have been fighting for years against what they consider harassment and invasion of their collectively owned land by the oil and gas industry, and have achieved some victories in the courts.

In the vicinity of their land, Pemex drilled two gas wells in 2013 using hydraulic fracturing or fracking, a drilling technique that requires large volumes of chemicals and water to extract natural gas embedded in deep shale.

Academics and environmental organisations opposed to fracking argue that it pollutes water tables, induces earthquakes and emits greenhouse gases responsible for global warming.

In 2019, both wells experienced gas leaks, and the community demanded that Pemex seal them. “We talked to them several times, it took them a week to repair the leaks. And they haven’t come back to examine them. Besides, people steal gas from the pipeline, and a tragic accident could happen,” Benavides said.

Despite the social conflicts and environmental consequences, Mexico has stepped up the pace of the gasification of the country, laying pipelines and building power plants, supported by cheap imports from the United States and encouraged by the energy reform of 2013 that opened the industry to private national and international capital.

This gas well drilled by means of fracking near the Benavides Grande and Benavides Olivares community in the state of Nuevo León in northeastern Mexico suffered a leak in 2019. CREDIT: Courtesy of Aristeo Benavides

In the northern state of Sonora, the Yaqui people, one of the 67 indigenous groups living in Mexico, managed to block the construction of the private El Oro-Guaymas gas pipeline since 2017, in a campaign that generated friction among native communities and left people wounded and dead, as well as causing material damage.

The construction project “was analyzed, a consultation for public input was held, the damage was assessed and work was done to repair and mitigate the effects,” Tomás Rojo, a Yaqui spokesman, told IPS by telephone from the community of Vícam. “Seven towns gave their approval, but one did not. They felt it was a risk, and I don’t think the company wants to commit violence against the people.”

In 2017, residents of the village of Loma de Bácum dug up pipes and prevented the completion of the 330-km-long mega-project, 18 of which run through that community.

In August, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador signed an agreement with the Yaquis to divert the route of the pipeline to skirt that area, making it possible to finish laying the pipeline.

Still an oil-producing country, but on the decline

Mexico is the world’s 12th largest oil producer and 17th largest natural gas producer. It ranks 20th in terms of proven oil reserves and 37th in proven natural gas deposits. But its position in the oil industry is declining due to the scarcity of easily extractable hydrocarbons.

An ad for household gas at a bus stop in Mexico City. The Mexican government promotes the exploitation, distribution and consumption of natural gas, despite the social conflicts and environmental impacts that the industry causes. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Since he took office in December 2018, left-leaning President López Obrador has been promoting fossil fuels. But domestic gas production is on the decline, from 6,401 million cubic feet per day (mpcd) in 2015 to 4,853 in September, as the emphasis has been on crude oil.

Exports fell from 2,700 mpcd in 2015 to 1,000 in September, and imports from 1,415 mpcd in 2015 to 843 in September, because the state-owned Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) is burning fuel oil again.

A network of gas pipelines, with 27 state-owned and private lines covering 18,889 km, has been deployed for distribution throughout the vast territory of this country of 130 million people.

In addition, the CFE is building a section in the southeastern state of Yucatan, and three others are planned to carry the fuel to the south and southeast, while another three have been blocked by opposition from local communities.

The gas is received by 48 thermoelectric, combined-cycle plants – which burn gas to generate steam for electricity – and turbogas units, both state-owned and private. And another 10 combined-cycle plants are under construction.

Another indication of the emphasis on natural gas is the number of permits for transporting gas granted by the government’s Energy Regulatory Commission. There are 276 gas transport permits, of which 230 are already operational, 263 for transfer by pipeline (218 active) and 13 for semi-trailers (12 in operation).

All this is reflected in the public budget for the sector. In 2020, the CFE allocated more than 2.0 billion dollars to transport gas, and for 2021 it projects a total of 2.65 billion.

The construction of gas pipelines has generated conflicts with communities opposed to these mega-projects, as well as generating methane. The image is a screenshot taken by IPS from a video of the construction of the Los Ramones gas pipeline in Tamaulipas, in northeast Mexico. CREDIT: Video by the government of Tamaulipas

Natural gas consists primarily of methane, which is 86 times more powerful as an agent of global warming over a 20-year period than carbon dioxide (CO2). The National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change calculated a natural gas emission factor for six areas of Mexico of 2.27 kg of CO2/m3, although it is lower than the emission factors for coal and fuel oil.

Atmospheric problem

With more gas being sourced and flared, the country faces a growing problem with methane. In 2019, the country vented 4.48 billion m3, the ninth largest amount in the world.

In terms of intensity, the proportion reached 7.21 m3 per barrel of oil produced, higher than the previous record of 5.39 set in 2014, according to figures from the Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership, promoted by the World Bank with the goal of eradicating routine flaring by 2030 and made up of 17 countries, 12 oil companies, the European Union and two financial institutions.

Fossil fuels are behind methane emissions. The International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organisation of the world’s largest consumers, estimated a total of 724,000 tons of methane from hydrocarbons – including 155,000 tons from gas – in 2019.

In addition, the López Obrador administration has kept fracking on its agenda, despite constant claims that it is not using the technique.

Sergio Sañudo, a professor in the biological and earth sciences departments at the private University of Southern California, told IPS that “there has been a setback under this government. Mexico continues to do the same old thing. It generates complete dependence on the United States, and when the U.S. closes the valve, what will Mexico do? Mexico ties itself to hydrocarbons and that serves as an outlet for the gas.”

The solution, he continued, lies in the United States abandoning fracking so that Mexico would not import more fuel and would promote renewable energy sources.

Benavides says his community is very aware of the climate crisis, because it has seen the changes. “There have been hailstorms, temperature changes, there is little rain,” he said. “These are things we haven’t seen before. For everything that happens, the earth will get back at us. For how many months did that gas go into the atmosphere, because of the leaks?”

Sañudo urged Mexico to distance itself from natural gas. “It is not a fuel for the energy transition to cleaner sources. It is not the panacea it was thought to be. It can no longer compete with renewables,” he argued.

The Comarsa oil waste deposit in the southwestern province of Neuquén, in Argentina, parked a social conflict due to the environmental impact, which led to a promise that it would be shut down. The one planned for the municipality of Catriel, in the neighbouring province of Río Negro, would be almost 20 times larger. Credit: Fabián Ceballos / Oil Observatory of the South

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 1 2018 (IPS)

A project to install a huge deposit of oil field waste pits has triggered a crisis in the north of Argentina’s southern Patagonia region, and brought the debate on the environmental impact of extractive industries back to the forefront in this Southern Cone country.

Catriel, in the province of Río Negro, about 1,000 km southwest of Buenos Aires, was a small town untilan oil deposit was discovered there in 1959. Since then, the population has boomed, with the town drawing people from all over the country, driving the total up to around 30,000 today.

The conflict broke out in 2016, when the city government announced a plan to set up a “special waste deposit” on 300 hectares of land, for the final disposal of waste from oil industry activity in the area.

This generated social division and resistance that ended last November, when opponents of the project were successful in their bid to obtain an amendment to the Municipal Charter – the supreme law at a local level – which declared Catriel a “protected area”, and prohibited such facilities due to the pollution."The establishment or installation of nuclear power plants, reservoirs, landfills, repositories of final or transitory disposal of contaminated material from the nuclear, chemical or oil industry, or any other polluting activity, is prohibited." -- Municipal Charter of Catriel

Mayor Carlos Johnston described the modification of the charter as “shameful” and asked the courts to overrule the amendment, arguing that those who drafted the new text overstepped their authority.

The court decision is still pending.

“At all times it was practically impossible to access information. When we went to ask, the city government gave us a document that had a map of where they want to install the plant and practically nothing else,” said Natalia Castillo, an administrative employee who is part of the Catriel Socio-Environmental Assembly, a community group that emerged to fight the project.

“We are very worried about the possible impact of the plant and we are trying to raise public awareness. The problem is that many people around here work in the oil industry and prefer not to meddle with this issue,”Castillo told IPS.

Mayor Johnston confirmed his position to IPS: “We have had environmental liabilities since 1959. It is our obligation, as the State, to address them. It would be much worse not to do it.”

“The environmental authorisation came from the provincial authorities. It may be that we have so far failed to provide enough information to society. But we value the work of environmental organisations and are ready for dialogue because this project is necessary,” he added.

Johnston said the waste that will be accepted at the plant will come from Catriel and other municipalities in the province of Río Negro.

However, environmental organisations suspect, due to the large size that is projected for the deposit, that it could receive waste from oil industry activity in the entire area and not just from the municipality.

Catriel happens to be located in the so-called Neuquén Basin, the main source of oil and gas in the country, and is very close to VacaMuerta, the unconventional oil and gas deposit in the neighbouring province of Neuquén, which fuels Argentina’s dreams of becoming a major fossil fuel producer.

The United States Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimated the recoverable reserves in the 30,000-square-km Vaca Muerta at no less than 27 billion barrels of oil and 802 trillion cubic feet of gas.

The Argentine government also places its hopes in this field to bolster its hydrocarbon production, which has been declining for 20 years, and has forced the country to import fuel to make up for the deficit.

“The problem is that ‘fracking’, which is used to extract unconventional hydrocarbons, generates waste on a much larger scale than conventional exploitation,” said Martín Álvarez, a researcher at the non-governmental interdisciplinary Oil Observatory of the South (OPSur).

He explained that with this technology, which drills rocks at great depths through large injections of water and additives, “not only do the chemicals used to carry out the drilling and hydraulic fracturing come back to the surface, but also radioactive materials of natural origin that are in the subsoil.”

“There is a saturation of oil waste in the Neuquén Basin from fracking, which is a dirty technique. Then came this new business, waste disposal, which has a huge environmental impact because contaminants can seep into the groundwater,” added the expert.

Together with the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation and Greenpeace Argentina, two of the most influential environmental organisations in the country, OPSur requested access to information from different provincial bodies in Río Negro.

In addition, it issued a critical report, drawing attention to the size of the project. Covering 300 hectares, it would be almost 10 times larger than what is currently the biggest South American plant of its type, with an area of 34 hectares.

The document refers to Comarsa, an oil waste deposit that is only 135 km from Catriel, in the province of Neuquén, near the provincial capital. The installation has been questioned for years by residents, forcing the local authorities to promise to close it once and for all last November, although it has not yet happened.

The environmental organisations also complained that during the Mar. 31, 2017 public hearing where the project was discussed, many questions and objections raised by the participants were not answered.

They also questioned the approval of the environmental impact assessment conducted by the Rìo Negro Secretariat of Environment, “despite the rejection by different sectors in the community of Catriel.”

In the middle of this conflict, Catriel had to reform its Organic Charter, a task that is to be carried out every 25 years.

With the issue of the plant at the centre of the debate, the local ruling party, Juntos Somos Rio Negro (Together We Are Río Negro) won the elections with 35 percent of the vote and obtained six seats on the reform committee. But the other nine seats went to different opposition parties, which joined forces against the waste pit project.

“The establishment or installation of nuclear power plants, reservoirs, landfills, repositories of final or transitory disposal of contaminated material from the nuclear, chemical or oil industry, or any other polluting activity, is prohibited,” says Article 94 of the new Charter, which came into force on Jan. 1.

But the mayor argues that it must be revised because “it is not feasible.”

Johnston also rejected the possibility of calling a referendum on the authorisation to install the plant, as requested by the Catriel Socio-Environmental Assembly.

In a communiqué, the assembly asked: “What will happen when diseases become visible in the people who live in Catriel, due to the environmental contamination caused by the oil waste deposit?”

A fact that has not gone unnoticed is that the company that is to install the treatment plant is Crexell Environmental Solutions, which has strong political connections, to the point that its president, Nicolás Crexell, is the brother of a national senator for Neuquén, and nephew of the person who governed that province until 2015.

Two chimney stacks (left) burning gas at the Tula refinery in the state of Tulio, adjacent to Mexico City. Burning and venting gas at facilities of the state group PEMEX increases methane emissions in Mexico. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jul 8 2017 (IPS)

Mexico is in transition towards commercial exploitation of its shale gas, which is being included in two auctions of 24 hydrocarbon blocks, at a time when the country is having difficulty preventing and reducing industrial methane emissions.

Increasing atmospheric release of methane, which is far more polluting than carbon dioxide (CO2) and which is emitted along the entire chain of production, is threatening the climate goals adopted by Mexico within the Paris Agreement which aims to contain global warming.

“Shale gas is the last gas that is left to exploit after reserves that are easier to access have been used up. Its production entails higher economic, environmental and energy costs. It is practically impossible for a shale gas well to be non-polluting,” researcher Luca Ferrari, of the Geosciences Institute at the state National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) told IPS.

The state-run but autonomous National Hydrocarbons Commission (CNH) issued a resolution on Jun. 22 calling for bids for the two auctions of 24 blocks of gas and oil in five basins, located in the north, southeast and south of the country. For the first time, shale gas reserves are included. Bidding will take place on Jul. 12, and total estimated reserves of 335 million barrels are being offered.

By refraining from producing non-conventional fuels (like shale gas) itself, the government is partially opening the energy sector to participation by private enterprise to supply the country’s industrial gas needs.

Mexico’s energy reform, introduced in August 2014, opened up exploitation, refining, distribution and sales of hydrocarbons, as well as electricity generation and sales, to national and foreign private sectors.

In shale gas deposits, hydrocarbon molecules are trapped in sedimentary rocks at great depths. Large quantities of a mixture of water, sand and chemical additives, which are harmful to health and the environment, have to be injected to recover shale gas and oil.

The “fracking” technique used to free shale gas and oil leave huge volumes of liquid waste that has to be treated for recycling, as well as methane emissions that are more polluting than CO2, the greenhouse gas responsible for most global warming.

Mexico, shale superpower

An analysis of 137 deposits in 41 countries by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) puts Mexico in sixth place worldwide for technically recoverable shale gas reserves, behind China, Argentina, Algeria, the United States and Canada, with reserves of 545 trillion cubic feet. The country occupies seventh place for shale oil.

However CNH quotes more moderate estimates of probable reserves, of the order of 81 trillion cubic feet.

“Current regulations are based on best practices, but the philosophy of environmental protection has been abandoned. Exploitation is deepening inequities in a negative way, such as environmental impact. It is irresponsible to auction reserves without a proper evaluation of environmental and social impacts,” researcher Ramón Torres, of UNAM’s Development Studies Programme, told IPS.

In March, the national Agency for Industrial Safety and Environmental Protection, responsible for regulating the hydrocarbons sector, published a regulatory package on exploitation and extraction of non-conventional reserves.

The regulations identify the risks of fracking fluid leaks, heightened demand for water, pollution caused by well emissions of methane and other volatile organic compounds, pollution caused by toxic substance release and by the return of injected fluid and connate water to ground level from the drill hole.

The regulations indicate that 15 to 80 percent of fracking fluid returns to the surface, depending on the well. As for atmospheric pollutants, they mention nitrogen oxides, benzene, toluene, methane and coal.

Measures are imposed on companies, such as verifying the sealing of wells, applying procedures for preventing gas leaks, and disclosing the composition of drilling fluids. Gas venting is prohibited, and burning is restricted.

Since 2003, Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) has used hydraulic fracking – applicable not only to shale extraction – to drill at least 924 wells in six of the country’s 32 states, according to CartoCritica, a non-governmental organisation. At least 28 of these were confirmed to be of non-conventional crude.

Gas emissions

Within this context, Mexico faces problems in reducing methane emissions.

In 2013 the country emitted 126 million tonnes of methane into the atmosphere, of which 54 million were from the stock rearing sector, 31 million from oil and gas, and 27 million from waste products. The rest was from electricity generation, industry and deforestation. Use of gas for electricity generation contributed at least 0.52 million tonnes.

Mexico, Latin America’s second largest economy, emitted a total of 608 million tonnes of CO2 during the same year.

Pemex Exploration and Production, a subsidiary of the state PEMEX group, reported that in 2016 its total methane emissions were 641,517 tonnes, 38 percent higher than the previous year.

Shallow water undersea extraction contributed 578,642 tonnes, land based fields 46,592 tonnes, hydrocarbon storage and distribution 10,376 tonnes, gas fields not associated with oil fields 5,848 tonnes, and non-conventional fields 57 tonnes.

In 2016, PEMEX changed the way it reported emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHG). Previously these volumes were reported by production region, making comparative analysis difficult.

In 2015, the Northeast Marine Region comprising the Gulf of Mexico, where the largest underwater oil deposits are located, emitted 287,292 tonnes.

The emissions reduction was presumably associated with reduced fossil fuel production due to a fall in international prices and PEMEX’s own lack of financial resources.

But between 2012 and 2014 emissions increased by 329 percent, leaping from 141,622 tonnes to 465,956 tonnes, presumably because of increased venting and burning of gas (whether or not associated with crude oil wells). PEMEX lacked the technology for gas recovery.

By reducing venting and burning, PEMEX was able to reduce its emissions between 2009 and 2011, after GHG emissions grew from 2007 to 2009.

In Ferrari’s view, the problem is a technical and economic one. “The first step is to prevent venting,” but that requires investment, he said.

According to the Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership (GGFR) led by the World Bank, in 2015 Mexico burned 5 billion cubic metres of gas, putting it in eighth place in the world, the same as for venting intensity, the relation between cubic metres of gas burned to barrels of oil produced.

The aim of the GGFR is to eradicate such practices by 2030.

Mexico is one of 24 goverrnments participating in the initiative, together with French Guiana and Peru in the Latin American region. Thirty-one oil companies – not including PEMEX – and 15 multilateral financial institutions are also involved. The World Bank will publish its first report on burning and venting gas this year.

Torres and Ferrari agree that the volume of gas produced by hydraulic fracking will not be sufficient to satisfy domestic demand.

“The volume that can be exploited is small and insufficient,” said Torres. Ferrari’s calculations indicate that shale gas would only supply domestic needs for 10 months.

In May Mexico produced 5.3 billion cubic feet of gas per day, and imported 1.79 billion cubic feet. Meanwhile, it extracted 2.31 million barrels of crude per day.

In the same month, the Energy Ministry updated its Five Year Plan for Oil and Gas Exploration and Extraction 2015-2019 and set a new target to auction reserves of nearly 31 billion barrel equivalents of non-conventional fuels.

Two drilling rigs in the Loma Campana deposit, in Vaca Muerta, in the Neuquén Basin, in south-west Argentina. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, May 9 2017 (IPS)

Since a US Energy Information Administration (EIA) report announced in 2011 that Argentina had some of the world’s biggest shale oil and gas reserves, the dream of prosperity has been on the minds of many people in this South American nation where nearly a third of the population lives in poverty.

The question that hangs in the air is whether it is really possible for Argentina to become South America’s Saudi Arabia, or if it is just a fantasy.

Six years after the release of the report, although Argentina is still, like then, a net importer of oil and natural gas, the hope would appear to remain intact for centre-right President Mauricio Macri.

When Macri visited the United States on Apr. 25-27 he stopped over in Houston, Texas, described as the “Oil Capital of the World”. There, he urged the executives of the world’s top energy companies to make the huge investments that Argentina needs to exploit its reserves.“Today in Argentina there are more than 1,500 boreholes that are being exploited by the fracking method, not just in Vaca Muerta, but also in other deposits in the area. In the next years, this number is expected to multiply.” --
Diego de Rissio

“Argentina is among the countries with the greatest potential in the world. We want the best companies to come and partner with us,” Macri told oil executives at lunch in Houston on Apr. 26, before flying to Washington, where he met with his US counterpart Donald Trump at the White House.

“The delays in exploiting non-conventional fossil fuels in Argentina are inherent to the process, from a technical standpoint. The oil and gas industry operates in the long term,” said Martín Kaindl, head of the Argentine Oil and Gas Institute (IAPG), a think tank supported by oil companies in the country.

“We have to do things well for this opportunity to become a source of wealth for Argentina,” he told IPS.

So far, however, what seems to have grown more than the investments are the social movements opposed to hydraulic fracturing or fracking, in which rock is fractured by the high-pressure injection of ‘fracking fluid’ (primarily water, as well as sand and chemicals,) to release natural gas and oil from shale deposits..

This process has environmental and socioeconomic effects, according to experts quoted by environmentalists.

The greatest achievement so far by the opponents of fracking in Argentina came on Apr. 25, when the legislature of the central-eastern province of Entre Ríos banned fracking and other non-conventional methods.

It became the first province in the country to reach this decision, which was preceded by local laws in dozens of municipalities. Entre Ríos has no oil industry tradition, but it is included in the long-run exploration plans of Argentina’s state-controlled company YPF.

“Entre Ríos is a province that lives mainly off of agriculture and tourism, where there is a tradition of environmental activism”, sociologist Juan Pablo Olsson, who is part of the Argentina Free of Fracking movement, told IPS.

“We must not forget that a few years ago, there were up to 100,000 people protesting against the pulp mills on the international bridge,” he added, referring to the 2005-2010 conflict with Uruguay over the construction of two paper factories, due to the environmental impact on the Uruguay River, which separates the province of Entre Ríos from the neighbouring country.

Pear trees in blossom in a farm in Allen, a city in the province of Río Negro, located next to a shale gas deposit. Fruit producers and other traditional sectors of that province are concerned about the negative impacts of the oil and gas industry in Vaca Muerta. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

According to the latest EIA data, Argentina has recoverable shale reserves that amount to 802 trillion cubic feet of gas and 27 billion barrels of oil. It is only second to China in shale gas reserves, and in fourth position after the US, Russia and China, in shale oil.

Of these reserves, 38 per cent of the gas and 60 per cent of the oil are concentrated in the geological formation of Vaca Muerta, where commercial exploitation began in 2013, in the Loma Campana deposit, by YPF and US company Chevron in the province of Neuquén.

This 30,000-sq- km deposit is located in the area known as the Neuquén Basin (a sedimentary basin which has traditionally been the main oil-producing area in Argentina), spreading over four provinces (Neuquén, Río Negro, Mendoza and La Pampa) in the country’s southwest.

The extraordinary potential of Vaca Muerta is one of the few things in which the current president and his centre-left predecessor, Cristina Fernández (2007-2015) have agreed on, with neither having made any reference whatsoever to the environmental risks posed by fracking.

The former president did not hide her enthusiasm when talking about the deposit, which in 2013 she suggested renaming as “Vaca Viva” (living cow) , instead of “Vaca Muerta” (dead cow), since “we are now extracting oil from it.”

Macri, meanwhile, said that Vaca Muerta “is changing the country’s energy future,” since it has “abundant, cheap and exportable” resources.

This was in January, when he announced the signing of an agreement with oil industry trade unions which allows a reduction of up to 40 per cent of labour costs, to attract investments.

Later, the president decreed a minimum price for shale gas, higher than the market price, reinforcing the strategy launched by his predecessor of maintaining domestic fossil fuel prices at levels making it possible to tap into non-conventional deposits.

In addition, during his stay in Washington he announced a 35 per cent reduction in the import tariffs on used oil industry machinery, which will favour the arrival of equipment that fell into disuse in the U.S-Mexican Eagle Ford Formation, due to the fall in international prices.

The minister of Energy and Mining, Juan José Aranguren, who went to Houston with Macri, said that currently between six and eight billion dollars a year are invested in Vaca Muerta, but that the government’s goal is to reach 20 billion in 2019.

“Today in Argentina there are more than 1,500 boreholes that are being exploited by the fracking method, not just in Vaca Muerta, but also in other deposits in the area. In the next years, this number is expected to multiply,” Diego di Risio, a researcher from the Oil Observatory of the South, an organisation of professionals from different disciplines interested in the energy issue, told IPS.

“But we believe that the environmental and social impacts should be debated, since it is a fruit-producing agricultural region,” said di Risio. One of the localities engaged in the production of fruit near Vaca Muerta, where shale oil is being extracted, is Allen, in the province of Río Negro.

Juan Ponce, a fruit jam manufacturer in Allen, told IPS: “Oil production overrode fruit-producing farms. There were 35 fruit warehouses, and now there are only five left.”

He also told IPS by phone that “most people buy bottled water, because our water is not drinkable anymore, despite the fact that we have the longest river in the Patagonia region, the Rio Negro.”

“The best evidence of the pollution that is being generated by the oil and gas extraction is that the owners of surrounding farms are receiving subsidies from the companies, since they can no longer produce good quality fruit,” he added.

A gas field in Damascus, in the Fayetteville basin in the southern state of Arkansas in the U.S., the world’s biggest shale fuel producer. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas, USA , Jan 4 2017 (IPS)

Earl Hatley, a descendant of the Cherokee/Delaware tribe, has witnessed the consequences of using hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” on his native land to produce shale gas.

“Fracking is harmful to water supplies, wildlife, and property values. It has caused earthquakes where there were none. Since 2007, it began to tremble more and more near the wells. I can smell the foul emissions, which make me sick,” the founder of Local Environmental Action Demanded (L.E.A.D.), a non-governmental organisation based in Oklahoma, told IPS.

Hatley has property in Payne, Oklahoma, in the Midwest, which he says he cannot visit anymore because of the toxic emissions from the wells.“Opposition to fracking has grown in recent years, because there is more knowledge and evidence about the effects. Besides, the organisations have become more sophisticated in their analyses and more active.” -- Andrew Grinberg

“The oil and and gas industry flares their escaping gas and also do not monitor leaks, as there are no regulations in Oklahoma demanding they do. We had the opportunity to test a few wells and found all of them were bad,” he said.

In the state of Oklahoma there are about 50,000 active natural gas wells, of which some 4,000 use fracking. At least 200 of them are in Payne.

With similar scenarios in other states, the anti-fracking movement in the US is especially worried about what President-elect Donald Trump will do after he takes office on Jan. 20, since he pledged to give a boost to the fossil fuel industry, despite its impact on global warming.

The United States is the country that produces the largest quantities of shale oil and gas, which has made it the main global producer of fossil fuels, ranking first in gas extraction and third in oil.

Trump “is sending signals of the support the industry will receive, which will exacerbate the already-known impacts of fracking, such as water pollution and methane emissions,” Argentine activist Daniel Taillant, head of the non-governmental Center for Human Rights and Environment (CHRE), told IPS during a workshop on fracking in the Americas, held in Little Rock, the capital of the southern state of Arkansas.

Natural gas trapped in underground shale rock is released by the process of drilling and injecting fluid into the ground at high pressure, which fractures the rocks. Fracking requires large amounts of water and chemical additives, some of which are toxic. Drilling and horizontal fracking generate enormous quantities of waste fluid.

The waste liquid contains dissolved chemicals and other pollutants that need to be treated for recycling, and methane emissions, which pollutes more than carbon dioxide, the main culprit in global warming.

Numerous studies have confirmed the damage fracking causes to water, air and the landscape, and how it triggers seismic activity.

For the fracking industry, good times will return when Trump is sworn in. In May he launched a plan for the first 100 days of his administration, which included giving a strong boost to the sector, despite the denounced environmental, social and economic impacts.

The programme includes the removal of all barriers to energy production, including fossil fuels, natural gas, oil and “clean coal”, valued in the document at 50 trillion dollars, in what it calls an “energy revolution” destined to produce “vast new wealth”.

In addition, the president-elect promised to eliminate existing regulatory barriers on fossil fuels and promote the development of “vital energy infrastructure projects,” such as oil and gas pipelines.

A technician monitors the gas-water separators in the Charles Wood 09-13 shale gas well in Van Buren, Arkansas, in the United States, the world’s leading fossil fuel producer, thanks to the use of fracking. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) show that, of the daily US production of over nine million barrels of gas and oil equivalent, 51 per cent were extracted in 2015 by fracking, in spite of the collapse in international prices this year.

The cost of extracting a barrel of oil by fracking is at least 65 dollars. Apart from Trump’s promises, the gradual rise in prices as a consequence of the reduction in production by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) since January, has encouraged the sector to continue to extract.

The growing use of fracking has sparked lawsuits over its effects and scientific research to determine the impacts.

The fourth edition of the “Compendium of Scientific, Medical, and Media Findings Demonstrating Risks and Harms of Fracking (Unconventional Gas and Oil Extraction)” lists 685 scientific studies published between 2009-2015 that prove water pollution, polluting emissions released into the atmosphere and their impacts on human health.

The compendium, drafted by the Concerned Health Professionals of New York and Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), cites more than 900 studies in the US on the impact of fracking, which demonstrate the concern generated by the use of this technology.

Meanwhile, people affected by fracking have filed more than 100 lawsuits since 2011, according to a count carried out by Blake Watson with the School of Law of the private University of Dayton, Ohio.

In the specific case of Arkansas, a state where fewer people have been affected because the gas fields are located in sparsely populated areas, five cases have been settled out of court, three are still in progress and 10 have been thrown out of court.

Fracking has also sparked local reactions.

The states of Vermont and New York have banned the use of this technology, while in California six counties have followed suit, and in Florida 32 counties and 48 cities.

Meanwhile, the state of Maryland has imposed a two-and-a-half-year moratorium, while Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled in May to lift the bans applied by two cities, and Texas passed a law making local bans on fracking illegal.

“Opposition to fracking has grown in recent years, because there is more knowledge and evidence about the effects. Besides, the organisations have become more sophisticated in their analyses and more active,” said Andrew Grinberg, National Campaigns – Special Projects manager for the non-governmental Clean Water Action.

For economic reasons, coal has lost ground to gas. In addition to the expansion of solar and wind energy, the resurrection promised by Trump faces a complex panorama.

“Resistance against fracking is growing, especially in places where it is not yet widely practiced, because there is more knowledge about the harm it causes and that knowledge will increase. But the results of Trump’s support remain to be seen,” said Taillant, whose organisation operates in the state of Florida.

Hatley said that opposition to fracking is slowly growing due to the reported increase in seismic activity, but “people are afraid, because the industry is very powerful.”

In Oklahoma, 1,900 earthquakes have been documented since 2015, blamed on the injection of fluid byproducts from drilling operations into deep underground wells.

Grinberg told IPS there are still pending issues in relation to regulation, such as the need for more public information on the chemicals used, and for a ban on basins for disposal of liquid waste, gas storage and methane emissions, a gas much more polluting than carbon dioxide.

Añelo, a Patagonian town in southwest Argentina that experienced explosive growth because it is next to the country’s biggest shale oil and gas field, is now starting to feel the impact on the development of these resources due to the plunge in international oil prices. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
AÑELO, Argentina, Mar 19 2016 (IPS)

The dizzying growth of Añelo, a town in southwest Argentina, driven by the production of shale oil and gas in the Vaca Muerta geological reserve, has slowed down due to the plunge in global oil prices, which has put a curb on local development and is threatening investment and employment.

Vaca Muerta, a 30,000-sq-km geological reserve rich in unconventional fossil fuels in the province of Neuquén, began to be exploited in mid-2013 by the state-run oil company Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales (YPF) in a joint venture with U.S. oil giant Chevron.

“We had an interesting growth boom thanks to the strategic development plan that we were promoting, to get all of the oil services companies to set up shop in Añelo. That really boosted our growth, and helped our town to develop,” Añelo Mayor Darío Díaz told IPS.

The population of this town located 100 km from the provincial capital, Neuquén, in Argentina’s southern Patagonian region, rose twofold from 3,000 to 6,000.

And that is not counting the large number of machinists, technicians, engineers and executives of the oil companies who rotate in and out of the area, along with the truckers who haul supplies to the Loma Campana oilfield eight km from Añelo.

“There were around 10 services companies operating in Añelo; now we have about 50, and some 160 agreements signed for other companies to come here,” the mayor said.

The shale gas and oil in Vaca Muerta has made this country the second in the world after the United States in production of unconventional fossil fuels.

Loma Campana, where there are 300 active wells producing unconventional gas and oil after a total investment of three billion dollars, currently produces 50 billion barrels per day of oil, according to YPF figures.

The shale oil and gas industry has fuelled heavy public investment in Añelo and nearby towns. The population of this town is expected to reach 25,000 in the next 15 years.

“We’re building two schools and a hospital,” Díaz told IPS. “The primary and secondary schools have been expanded. We are making town squares and a new energy substation. We built a water treatment plant and have improved the sewage service. In terms of public works we have really done a great deal, keeping our eyes on our goal: growth.”

But the expansion of the town has also brought problems.

The mayor pointed out, for example, that rent for a two-bedroom housing unit has climbed from 33 dollars to 100 dollars a month, and that a plot of land that previously was worth 1,700 dollars cannot be purchased now for less than 130,000 dollars.

“Those are abrupt changes brought by the oil industry,” Díaz said. “What us old-time residents of Añelo have suffered the most is the social impact of all of this movement, of so much vehicle traffic, so many people, which brings insecurity and other things that are typical of development in general.”

New complications

People in Añelo are now worried that despite the costs they are paying for the development boom, the promised progress will not arrive.

On Mar. 4, the outgoing president of YPF, Miguel Galuccio, announced in a conference with international investors that the cutbacks in the industry in 2016 would be reflected in slower progress in Vaca Muerta.

Workers in Loma Campana, a field with 300 shale oil wells in Vaca Muerta. The decision to slow down the development of unconventional fossil fuels in Argentina has led to lay-offs in the area. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

In 2015, the company’s revenues shrank 49 percent, while investment grew less than four percent, below previous levels.

The costs of producing shale gas and oil, which requires an expensive technique known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”, are not competitive in a context where international oil prices are hovering between 30 and 40 dollars a barrel.

In Argentina, the cost of extraction in conventional wells stands at 25 to 30 dollars a barrel, and in unconventional wells at around 70 dollars a barrel, oil industry experts report.

But the internal price of a barrel in Vaca Muerta is regulated at 67.5 dollars and in the rest of the country’s oilfields at 54.9 percent – an artificial price established to shore up the oil industry’s expansion plans, especially in this part of the country, although at a slower pace now.

YPF announced that in Vaca Muerta, it would cut oil production costs by 15 percent, which has led to lay-offs.

“The situation is very complicated,” said Díaz, who estimated that there will be 1,000 more unemployed people in the province, added to those who have already lost their jobs. “A reduction in activity,” has already been seen, he said, and “people are working fewer hours” and wages have fallen, which has a social impact, he added.

Oil worker unions in Vaca Muerta say 1,000 people have been laid off so far in the industry, as well as 1,000 in other areas.

Eduardo Toledo, an agricultural technician who decided to move from Buenos Aires to Añelo and invest his savings in a restaurant, is worried about the slowdown in oil industry activity in Vaca Muerta.

“When we started, we had just one stove with three burners and an oven,” said Toledo, whose customers are truck drivers, factory workers and other oil industry employees who have been drawn to this area by the relatively high wages paid by the industry.

Like Toledo, many people invested in hotels, rental housing, shops and small-scale service businesses. “Everyone wanted to come to what was going to be the shale gas and oil capital,” he said.

But now his restaurant is working at a “mid to low level of activity.”

“If people know they’re going to lose their jobs, they don’t want to spend money,” he said.

Toledo is still confident that interest in shale gas and oil will keep things moving, despite the plummeting prices.

In Vaca Muerta, 77 percent of the proven shale reserves are gas.

Besides, “there are major gas resources that have not yet become reserves,” Ignacio Sabbatella, who holds a PhD in social sciences from the University of Buenos Aires and is the co-author of the book “History of a privatization; How and why the YPF was lost”, told IPS. (YPF was renationalised in 2012.)

But experts and local residents are taking a long-term view.

Sabbatella stressed that it is important to keep in mind that beyond the current international oil price swings, the investments in Vaca Muerta “will yield fruit in the long term” – in five to 10 years.

He pointed out that shale oil and gas production only got underway in the area in 2011, “and especially after the recovery of state control of YPF, in a joint venture with transnational corporations like Chevron.”

YPF, Argentina’s biggest company, was in private hands from 1992 to 2012, when the government of Cristina Fernández (2007-2015) decided to renationalise it.

Sabbatella said the announced cutbacks in YPF have coincided with an overall “shift in policy” since the arrival to the presidency on Dec. 10 of the centre-right Mauricio Macri, who ended a period of centre-left governments under Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) and later his wife and successor, Fernández.

“The previous government did everything possible to sustain the levels of investment, exploration and production, even in an unfavourable international context, and what we are seeing is that this government is only halfway maintaining that policy and is even pushing YPF to cut its investments,” said Sabbatella.

“The current administration believes that the best thing is to adjust domestic oil industry policy to external conditions. In a context of low prices, they believe the best idea is to not sustain domestic investment, and they have even shown some illustrations of this, by importing cheaper crude and fuel from abroad, for example,” he said.

But Toledo prefers to be optimistic, because otherwise, he said, “I have to close my restaurant.”

“I can’t afford to go somewhere else and I’m not interested anyway because it’s hard to set down roots again in a place like this.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Experts predict that in the long term, shale gas production will not be sustainable in the United States. The photo shows a shale gas well in Montrose, in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
WASHINGTON, Oct 7 2015 (IPS)

The emergence of fracking has modified the global market for fossil fuels. But the plunge in oil prices has diluted the effect, in a struggle that experts in the United States believe conventional producers could win in the next decade.

The U.S. oil industry had peaked – when the discovery of new deposits and output from existing wells begins to fall – which made the country more dependent on imports. But the equation was turned around thanks to the new technique.“The bubble won’t explode, but it will progressively deflate. At current prices, we would see a relatively quick shrinking of capital availability for the shale sector, because those companies are producing at a loss.” -- David Livingston

The innovative technology of hydraulic fracturing or fracking and the discovery of large deposits of shale gas and oil, along with massive investment flows, led to predictions that the United States would become autonomous in fossil fuels this decade. But these forecasts have been undermined by the drop in prices.

“The world is entering a new era of uncertainty in the geoeconomics of oil,” said David Livingston, an associate in the Energy and Climate Programme of the U.S. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It is far from certain that the notoriously volatile oil market will become less cyclical.”

The analyst told IPS that as a result of domestic U.S. demand, “Companies will lose spare capacity, between what they can produce and what they produce, which is important, because the market is determined by that capacity.”

After 2003 international oil prices climbed, to 140 dollars a barrel in 2008, when the global financial crisis brought them down.

This decade they rallied, to around 100 dollars a barrel. But they have fallen again since late 2014, to about 40 dollars a barrel.

That means U.S. producers, in particular shale gas producers, are facing extremely low prices, overproduction, a lack of infrastructure for storing the surplus and a credit crunch for the industry’s projects, even though prices have gone down.

In addition, China’s economic slowdown and Europe’s stagnation are hindering the recovery in demand for energy.

The development of shale oil and gas has also put the U.S. industry on a collision course with the members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), especially since one of its widely touted objectives is to reduce imports from that bloc.

A warning about the danger of methane emissions in one of the shale gas Wells in Dimock, Pennsylvania. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Since November 2014, OPEC has kept its production quotas stable, as part of a strategy imposed by the bloc’s biggest producer, Saudi Arabia, aimed at keeping prices low and discouraging the development of shale deposits, which are much more costly to tap into than the organisation’s conventional reserves.

In late 2014, the Norwegian consultancy Rystad Energy put the cost of producing a barrel of shale oil in the United States at 65 dollars a barrel, which means the industry is operating at a loss. The average cost of extracting a barrel of conventional oil in that country is 13 dollars, compared to five dollars in the Gulf.

For Miriam Grunstein, a professor at the Centre for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) in Mexico, the outlook is very uncertain.

“There are doubts for several reasons. First of all, due to the low prices,” she told IPS from Mexico, which has begun to explore its significant reserves of shale gas.

“Although it has forced many companies to improve their operating capacity, reduce investments and achieve greater efficiency, they are in an environment where they have to look for markets, in Europe or Asia. But that requires liquefaction infrastructure, which implies major investments,” she added, referring to the current situation faced by shale gas producers.

In June, the United States produced 9.3 million barrels per day of crude oil, about half of which was shale oil, according to data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

The prospects for the industry are beginning to look less promising. In its Drilling Productivity Report published in late August, the EIA projected a fall in shale gas production in September, for the first time this year, to 44.9 billion cubic feet per day.

The agency stressed that output from new wells is not enough to offset the decline in existing wells.

For Livingston, “OPEC as an institution – and Saudi Arabia, its leader – is likely to emerge from this paradigm shift stronger than before in many ways. With its new strategy – one born out of necessity – the kingdom is emphasising market share, rather than price, while also moving to delegate the burden of balancing the world oil market to the U.S. shale industry.”

The United States would become the new “swing producer”, although without achieving the same power as the Gulf producers in influencing the market.

In the long run, total U.S. oil production will tend to drop, according to EIA projections. In 2020, crude oil production is expected to stand at 10.6 million barrels per day; in 2030, 10.04; and 10 years later, 9.43.

In the case of shale gas, projections are favourable, but at higher prices. In 2020, the country should be producing 15.44 trillion cubic feet per day; 10 years later 17.85; and in 2040, 19.58.

In total, the EIA forecasts that the country will produce 28.82 trillion cubic feet per day of natural gas in 2020; 33.01 in 2030; and 35.45 in 2040.

But the average price will go up. This year, the Henry Hub reference price for U.S. natural gas has stood at 2.93 dollars per million British thermal units (Btu), the heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of water.

The price should go up to 4.88 dollars per Btu in 2020; to 5.69 in 2030; and to 7.80 in 2040.

“The bubble won’t explode, but it will progressively deflate. At current prices, we would see a relatively quick shrinking of capital availability for the shale sector, because those companies are producing at a loss,” said Livingston.

Grunstein said: “Saudi Arabia’s aim is to keep the United States from becoming a major exporter. The strong markets exert the most pressure. If demand does not recover, the demand-price ratio is awkward. Consumption is needed, and I don’t see where it would come from.”

Livingston said one option is to review the 1970s-era ban on exporting U.S. crude oil, because “If production rises, refineries can’t process it and therefore new markets are needed.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Activist Ray Kimble has turned his home in Dimock Township, Pennsylvania into a symbol of opposition to fracking. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MONTROSE, Pennsylvania, USA , Sep 17 2015 (IPS)

U.S. activist Vera Scroggins has been sued five times by the oil industry, and since October 2013 she has faced a restraining order banning her from any properties owned or leased by one of the biggest players in Pennsylvania’s natural gas rush, Cabot Oil & Gas Corporation.

“I feel like a half-citizen, because corporations can do whatever they want and citizens can’t. Corporations have broken environmental laws and keep working,” the retired real estate agent, who is a mother of three and grandmother of two, told IPS.

Since 2008 Scroggins, with the Shaleshock Media network of artists and media activists, has been fighting hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”, the technique used to produce shale gas, in the rural community of Montrose, Pennsylvania, population 1,600.

In Montrose, which is in Susquehanna County, there are some 1,100 wells in 600 gasfields, as well as 43 compressor stations, which help the transportation process of natural gas from one location to another.“There is polluted water, flow-back water, the transformation of rural areas damaged by the operation of wells. There are quite a few long-term legal and financial liabilities to ensure that that legacy is properly addressed.” -- Tyson Slocum

This infrastructure, owned by seven companies, is near homes and schools.

The Marcellus shale formation stretches across the northeastern U.S. state of Pennsylvania. It is one of the large shale gas deposits that have led to the United States being dubbed “Frackistan”.

Fracking involves the massive pumping of water, chemicals and sand at high pressure into a well, which opens and extends fractures in the shale rock deep below the surface, to release the natural gas trapped there on a massive scale. The technique is considered damaging to health and the environment.

Fracking generates enormous volumes of liquid waste that must be treated for reuse, as well as emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas that is far more potent than carbon dioxide, the most important cause of global warming.

“The wells pollute the water and the methane escapes into the air. Many people don’t know what’s going on, they don’t have information. I don’t feel safe with how fracking has been done,” said Scroggins, who lives in Montrose with her husband, a retired teacher. There is a gas well just one kilometre from their home.

Fracking, with its tall steel drilling rigs, has modified the local landscape, along with the constant traffic of trucks hauling soil, sand and water.

Activists complain that the development of industry in rural areas like Montrose is ruining the countryside, while the accumulation of methane can lead to explosions or respiratory ailments among local residents.

Shale drilling rig in Montrose, Pennsylvania. Many rural areas in this northeastern state have seen their lives disrupted by the development of shale gas and the controversial fracking technique used to produce it. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

In its Annual Energy Outlook 2015, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that about 11.34 trillion cubic feet of dry natural gas was produced directly from shale gas in the United States in 2013 – about 47 percent of total U.S. dry natural gas production that year.

And about 4.2 million barrels per day of crude oil were produced directly from shale oil or tight oil resources in the United States in 2014 – 49 percent of total U.S. crude oil production.

Oil is the main source of energy in the United States, accounting for 36 percent of the total, followed by natural gas (27 percent), and coal (19 percent).

In Pennsylvania, gas production soared from 9,757 cubic feet in 2008 to 3.05 million in 2013.

In this state, the site of the first U.S. oil boom, 9,200 wells have been drilled, and over 16,000 permits for fracking have been granted.

The United States is the country that is most heavily exploiting shale gas and oil at a commercial level.

Fracking was given a boost in 2005, when the Energy Policy Act exempted the technique from seven major federal environmental laws, ranging from protecting clean water and air to preventing the release of toxic substances and chemicals into the environment.

With that backing, the industry unleashed a flood of lawsuits seeking to dismantle local and state environmental, health and contractual regulations adverse to its interests.

In the case of Pennsylvania, the state legislature approved the Oil and Gas Act (Act 13) in September 2012, which restricted local governments’ ability to zone and regulate natural gas drilling and required municipalities to allow oil and gas development in all zoning areas.

But city councils, local residents and environmental organisations fought the law, and in 2013 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down sections of it, saying they were unconstitutional and violated citizens’ environmental rights. This allowed local communities to once again apply zoning rules in granting permits for shale gas production.

Along the side of the road, the traveller constantly sees signs reading Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful. But what is happening in rural areas does not seem to be in line with the slogan.

Ray Kimble, a 59-year-old mechanic, has experienced that contradiction in Dimock Township, where he lives. He told IPS that in his community, which is near Montrose, the water has been polluted since 2009 by drilling and fracking operations.

“They have damaged the town. We don’t want them here,” said Kimble, who added that he has a chronic cough and his ankles are swollen from contact with toxic waste while he worked for the industry as a driver.

Now he refuses to drink the tapwater and dedicates his time to carrying clean water to families affected by the contamination.

Dimock, population 1,500, was featured in the prize-winning documentary “Gasland” by U.S. filmmaker Josh Fox, which exposed the damage caused by fracking and helped spawn the first lawsuits against the shale gas industry, which were settled out of court.

Kimble’s house is just over 150 metres from a gas well.

“There are short-term profits with shale gas, but what happens when the wells dry up and the waste is left?” activist Tyson Slocum remarked to IPS.

“There is polluted water, flow-back water, the transformation of rural areas damaged by the operation of wells. There are quite a few long-term legal and financial liabilities to ensure that that legacy is properly addressed,” said Slocum, the director of the Energy Programme of Public Citizen, a consumer interest group that has provided advice to people affected by fracking.

The industry is now facing the sharp drop in international oil prices, the credit crunch, and growing public opposition to fracking.

In the last eight months, some 400 towns and cities in 28 states have adopted vetoes or moratoriums on fracking. The most far-reaching decisions were taken in the states of Vermont, the first to ban fracking, in 2012, and New York, which did so in December.

“Why don’t they build a well besides a politician’s home? Citizens don’t want them near our houses,” said Scroggins.

“I hope there won’t be a major leak, because it will be devastating. But the industry doesn’t acknowledge it has done something bad,” the activist added.

Slocum says the states have bowed to the industry’s interests. “The balance between profits and public health has been vilified, the debate on jobs and economic benefits is secondary,” he said.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A Pemex gas distribution terminal. Shale gas will account for an estimated 45 percent of Mexico’s natural gas output by 2026. Credit: Pemex

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jun 26 2015 (IPS)

“People don’t know what ‘fracking’ is and there is little concern about the issue because it’s not visible yet,” said Gabino Vicente, a delegate of one of the municipalities in southern Mexico where exploration for unconventional gas is forging ahead.

Vicente is a local representative of the community of Santa Úrsula in the municipality of San Juan Bautista Tuxtepec, some 450 km south of Mexico City in the state of Oaxaca, where – he told IPS – “fracking is sort of a hidden issue; there’s a great lack of information about it.”

Tuxtepec, population 155,000, and another Oaxaca municipality, Loma Bonita, form part of the project Papaloapan B with seven municipalities in the neighbouring state of Veracruz. The shale gas and oil exploration project was launched by Mexico’s state oil company, Pemex, in 2011.

Papaloapan B, backed by the governmental National Hydrocarbons Commission (CNH), covers 12,805 square kilometres and is seeking to tap into shale gas reserves estimated at between 166 and 379 billion barrels of oil equivalent.

The project will involve 24 geological studies and the exploratory drilling of 120 wells, for a total investment of 680 million dollars.

But people in Tuxtepec have not been informed about the project. “We don’t know a thing about it,” said Vicente, whose rural community has a population of 1,000. “Normally, companies do not provide information to the local communities; they arrange things in secret or with some owners of land by means of deceit, taking advantage of the lack of money in the area.”

Shale, a common type of sedimentary rock made up largely of compacted silt and clay, is an unconventional source of natural gas. The gas trapped in shale formations is recovered by hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

Fracking involves the massive pumping of water, chemicals and sand at high pressure into the well, a technique that opens and extends fractures in the shale rock deep below the surface, to release the natural gas on a massive scale.

The process generates large amounts of waste liquids containing dissolved chemicals and other pollutants that require treatment before disposal, environmental organisations like Greenpeace warn.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) puts Mexico in sixth place in the world for technically recoverable shale gas, behind China, Argentina, Algeria, the United States and Canada, based on the analysis of 137 deposits in 42 countries. And Mexico is in eighth position for technically recoverable shale oil reserves.

A map of the areas of current or future fracking activity in Mexico, which local communities say they have no information about. Credit: Courtesy of Cartocrítica

Fracking is quietly expanding in Mexico, unregulated and shrouded in opacity, according to the non-governmental Cartocrítica, which says at least 924 wells have been drilled in six of the country’s 32 states – including 349 in Veracruz.

But in 2010 the study “Proyecto Aceite (petróleo) Terciario del Golfo. Primera revisión y recomendaciones” by Mexico’s energy ministry and the CNH put the number of wells drilled using the fracking technique at 1,323 in Veracruz and the neighbouring state of Puebla alone.

In the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, where 100 wells have been drilled, Ruth Roux, director of the Social Research Centre of the public Autonomous University of Tamaulipas, found that farmers who have leased out land for fracking knew nothing about the technique or its effects.

“The first difficulty is that there is no information about where there are wells,” Roux told IPS. “Farmers are upset because they were not informed about what would happen to their land; they’re starting to see things changing around them, and they don’t know what shale gas or fracking are.”

While producing the study “Diagnosis and analysis of the social impact of the exploration and exploitation of shale gas/oil related to culture, legality, public services, and the participation of social actors in the states of Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas”, Roux and her team interviewed five sorghum farmers and two local representatives from four municipalities in Tamaulipas.

The researcher said the preliminary findings reflected that locals felt a sense of abandonment, lack of respect, lack of information, and uncertainty. There are 443 homes near the 42 wells drilled in the four municipalities.

The industry sees the development of shale gas as strategically necessary to keep up production levels, which in April stood at 6.2 billion cubic feet per day.

But according to Pemex figures from January 2014, proven reserves of conventional gas amounted to just over 16 trillion cubic feet, while shale gas reserves are projected to be 141 trillion cubic feet.

By 2026, according to Pemex projections, the country will be producing 11 billion cubic feet of gas, 45 percent of which would come from unconventional deposits.

The company has identified five basins rich in shale gas in 11 states.

For the second half of the year, the CNH is preparing the tender for unconventional fossil fuel exploitation, as part of the implementation of the energy reform whose legal framework was enacted in August 2014, opening up electricity generation and sales, as well as oil and gas extraction, refining, distribution and retailing, to participation by the domestic and foreign private sectors.

The historic energy industry reform of December 2013 includes nine new laws and the amendment of another 12.

The new law on fossil fuels leaves landowners no option but to reach agreement with PEMEX or the private licensed operators over the occupation of their land, or accept a court ruling if no agreement is reached.

Vicente said the law makes it difficult for communities to refuse. “We are worried that fracking will affect the water supply, because of the quantity of water required and the contamination by the chemical products used. When we finally realise what the project entails, it’ll be a little too late,” he said.

Local residents of Tuxtepec, who depend for a living on the production of sugar cane, rubber and corn, as well as livestock, fishing and trade, know what it is to fight energy industry projects. In 2011 they managed to halt a private company’s construction of the small Cerro de Oro hydroelectric dam that would have generated 14.5 MW.

The formula: community organisation. “We’re organising again,” the local representative said. “What has happened in other states can be reproduced here.”

Papaloapan B forms part of the Veracruz Basin Integral Project, which would exploit the shale gas reserves in 51 municipalities in the state of Veracruz.

Pemex has already drilled a few wells on the outer edges of Tuxtepec. But there is no data available.

Farmers in Tamaulipas, meanwhile, “complain that their land fills up with water” after fracking operations, and that “the land isn’t producing like before,” said Roux, who added that exploration for shale gas is “a source of conflict…that generates violence.”

The expert and her team of researchers have extended their study to the northern states of Nuevo León and Coahuila, where 182 and 47 wells have been drilled, respectively.

Each well requires nine to 29 million litres of water. And fracking uses 750 different chemicals, a number of which are harmful to health and the environment, according to environmental and academic organisations in the United States.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Is the G7 commitment to an energy transition that aims to gradually phase out fossil fuel emissions this century to avoid the worst of climate change just hot air? Credit: CC BY-SA 2.5

By Lucy Cadena
LONDON, Jun 11 2015 (IPS)

One of the promises made by the leaders of the world’s seven richest nations when they met at Schloss Elmau in Germany earlier this week was an energy transition over the next decades, aiming to gradually phase out fossil fuel emissions this century to avoid the worst of climate change.

Let us be clear: a target of zero fossil fuels by 2100 puts us on track for warming on an unmanageable scale. The only commitment made by the G7 this week was a commitment to climate chaos.

Putting our faith in as-yet-underdeveloped technology fixes such as ‘carbon capture and storage’ and ‘geo-engineering’ to save us in the next 85 years, while the solutions to the climate crisis – renewable technology and community energy systems – exist here and now, is senseless.“The only way to avoid the worst of climate change is to act now, with urgency and ambition. Not by 2100, nor 2050. We need real commitment to real solutions – and the best place the G7 can start is by taking its money – public money – out of dirty energy”

The only way to avoid the worst of climate change is to act now, with urgency and ambition. Not by 2100, nor 2050. We need real commitment to real solutions – and the best place the G7 can start is by taking its money – public money – out of dirty energy.

While the G7 gathered on Jun. 7 and 8, this was the message from people from around the world, who are calling for a ban on all new dirty energy projects and an end to the financing of dirty energy.

The G7’s role in upholding the current dirty energy system is not limited to the subsidies they pour into fossil fuels daily.

G7 countries also directly finance – and profit from – dirty energy projects, particularly in the global South, and in regions where poverty and limited energy access devastate families.

These include projects affecting communities deeply reliant on clean air, water, and land that is polluted and stolen from them, projects among populations most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and projects where people face harassment and human rights violations for speaking out.

France

Last week, France, host of the 30 November-11 December 2015 Paris climate summit – the U.N. gathering to set the agenda for global climate commitments in the next decades – announced that two of the summit’s key sponsors will be EDF and ENGIE (formerly GDF-Suez).

The French state holds 84 percent and 33.3 percent of shares in these companies respectively. Both are involved in the construction of several very controversial, polluting projects across the world.

EDF is currently planning the destructive Mphanda Nkuwa mega-dam on the Zambezi River in Mozambique, in the face of fierce opposition from local communities and environmental organisations.

A letter from civil society reminds French President François Hollande that these and other projects place EDF and ENGIE among the top 50 companies that contribute the most to global climate change.

With 46 coal-fired power plants between them, EDF and ENGIE are responsible for emitting 151 million tonnes of CO₂ a year – which amounts to about half the total of France’s overall emissions.

Italy

The Italian state owns a considerable number of shares – almost one-third – in oil and gas company ENI. According to a recent report by Amnesty International, last year alone ENI reported 349 oil spills in the Niger Delta from its own operations.

The figure is remarkable – almost unbelievable. Each spill triggers a human and ecological crisis. The scale of the devastation and ENI’s failure to safeguard communities and ecosystems begs the question: is this sheer incompetence, recklessness, or simply utter indifference to the welfare of local communities?

Japan

Japan, the next offender on the G7 list, is the number one public financier of coal plants globally among the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.

Japan has 24 coal-powered projects either under construction or planned, many of them in Indonesia, Vietnam and India, where the more vulnerable local populations live under the cloud of plants’ toxic emissions.

Emissions of deadly sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from coal plants are currently highest in Indonesia, where the planned Batang coal power plant is set to become the largest ever Japanese-financed plant in Southeast Asia.

United States

A report by Oil Change International indicates that the United States government alone provides 5.1 billion dollars in national subsidies to fossil fuel exploration each year – that’s 5.1 billion dollars into seeking out new sources of civilisation-destroying energy sources.

Canada

Likewise, Canada’s expanding oil sector (caused by the growth in dirty tar sands production, known as ‘the biggest industrial project on Earth’) continues to reap the benefits of massive national subsidies.

United Kingdom

The U.K. government spent 300 times more supporting dirty energy overseas than it contributed towards renewable energy projects during its last term.

The 2012-2013 annual report of UK Export Finance, the country’s export credit agency, announced spending on projects such as a 147 million pounds (228 million dollars) guarantee to support oil and gas exploration by Petrobras in Brazil and 15 million pounds (23 million dollars) in guarantees to a loan for a gas power project in the Philippines.

Domestically, the government is prioritising drilling for new oil and gas, which will require huge subsidies. Hailing carbon-emitting gas as a ‘bridge fuel’ towards a cleaner energy system, the government is delaying investment in renewables to push fracking onto a population that vehemently opposes the dash for gas.

Germany

Meanwhile, Germany – the host of the G7 meeting – has been much lauded for its ‘Energiewende’ (‘Energy Revolution’), with a rapidly increasing use of renewable energy compensating for its nuclear phase-out in recent years.

However, German euros still make their way into the dirty energy machine – through sizeable tax exemptions afforded to fossil fuel producers’ exploration activities – allowing such companies to go further and dig deeper to uncover more carbon that needs to stay in the ground.

G7 Must Catch Up

The G7 countries have done the most to cause climate change. According to the Climate Equity Reference Calculator, they are responsible for 70 percent of historical carbon emissions, while hosting only 10 percent of the global population.

A commitment to a phase-out of fossil fuels in eight decades’ time is not a commitment. It is an easy promise for a politician, who probably will not even be in power in the next decade, to make. It is an easy promise for a rich nation, whose citizens are not the most vulnerable, to make.

G7 societies have grown rich by exploiting the human and natural world. They owe an enormous ‘climate debt’ to developing nations – yet they can barely scrape together the money they promised to the developing world via the Green Climate Fund.

Whether it’s an oil spill in Nigeria, a mega-dam in Mozambique or a coal plant in Java, the sources of our publicly-owned dirty energy are always sites of ecological and social devastation.

Access to energy is a right, but it should not come at the cost of other people’s rights – to clean air and drinking water, to land and food sovereignty, and to sustainable societies.

The international movement for climate justice is building, and will keep up pressure on governments to take money out of dirty energy and reinvest it in democratic renewable solutions that benefit everyone.

The global shift towards a just energy transformation has long been under way. Now, it’s snowballing. People from around the world are showing the way and implementing community-owned renewable energy solutions.

There is a hunger for change, despite continued inaction from governments. G7 leaders, take note: you are trailing far behind and have a lot of catching up to do!

Edited by Phil Harris

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Hundreds of demonstrators protest against fracking in Santander, the capital of the northern Spanish region of Cantabria. Credit: Courtesy of Asamblea Contra el Fracking de Cantabria

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Jun 2 2015 (IPS)

Thousands of people in Spain have organised to protest the introduction of “fracking” – a controversial technique that involves pumping water, chemicals and sand at high pressure into shale rock to release gas and oil.

“We are all different kinds of people, local inhabitants, who love our land and want to protect its biodiversity,” activist Hipólito Delgado with the Asamblea Antifracking de Las Merindades, a county in the northern province of Burgos, told Tierramérica.

The company BNK España, a subsidiary of Canada’s BNK Petroleum, has applied for permits to drill 12 exploratory wells and is awaiting the environmental impact assessment required by law.

On May 3 some 4,000 people demonstrated in the town of Medina de Pomar in the province of Burgos, demanding that the government refuse permits for exploratory wells because of the numerous threats they claimed that hydraulic fracturing or fracking posed to the environment and health.

While no permit for fracking has been issued yet in Spain, 70 permits for exploration for shale gas have been granted and a further 62 are awaiting authorisation, according to the Ministry of Industry and Energy.

“Thanks to the fight put up by local inhabitants, “a permit for exploration in the northern region of Cantabria was cancelled in February 2014, activist Carmen González, with the Asamblea Contra el Fracking de Cantabria, an anti-fracking group mainly made up of people from rural areas in that region, told Tierramérica.

Critics of fracking say it pollutes underground water supplies with chemicals, releases methane gas – 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere, and can cause seismic activity.

“There are more and more negative reports on fracking,” geologist Julio Barea, spokesman for Greenpeace Spain, told Tierramérica. He said that in this country there is “complete social and political opposition to the technique, which no one wants.”

But Minister of Industry and Energy José Manuel Martínez Soria backs the introduction of fracking “as long as certain conditions and general requisites are fulfilled.”

A year ago, 20 political parties, including the main opposition party, the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), signed a commitment in the legislature to ban fracking when the government elected in December is sworn in, “because of its irreversible environmental impacts.”

Only four right-wing and centre-right parties, including the governing People’s Party, which is promoting unconventional shale gas development, refrained from signing the accord.

Thousands of protesters took part in a demonstration against fracking on May 3, 2015 in the northern municipality of Medina de Pomar, where 12 permits have been granted for shale gas exploration. Credit: Courtesy of Ecologistas en Acción

Fracking involves drilling a vertical well between 1,000 and 5,000 metres deep, down to gas-bearing layers of shale rock. Then the well is extended horizontally up to three km, and between 10,000 and 30,000 cubic metres of water, sand and chemicals are injected at high pressure to fracture the rock and release the oil and gas, which along with the additives is pumped up to the surface.

The companies interested in fracking in Spain downplay the dangers and stress this country’s shale gas potential, especially in Cantabria, the Basque Country and Castilla y León – where Burgos is located – in the north, although exploration permits have also been granted in other regions.

“Like any activity it involves risks, but the technological advances make it possible to minimise them,” said Daniel Alameda, director general of Shale Gas España, a lobbying group for prospectors in Spain.

In an interview with Tierramérica, Alameda said the companies “are totally aware that they have to respect the environment.”

He argued that it is “technically impossible” for fracking to pollute aquifers since the hydraulic fracturing takes place some 3,000 metres below the underground water reserves, and the wells are isolated with a protective barrier of steel and cement.

“It’s a load of eyewash to say fracking doesn’t pollute,” activist Samuel Martín-Sosa, international coordinator at Ecologistas en Acción, told Tierramérica.

He pointed out that a court sentence has already been handed down against fracking, in the U.S. state of Texas, where an oil company was ordered in 2014 to pay damages to a family who suffered numerous health problems because of the proximity of a number of natural gas wells.

Shale Gas España also denies any link between fracking and seismic activity. “We don’t cause earthquakes. We have all of the tools necessary to ensure that the activity does not pose a threat to local residents or to the companies themselves,” Alameda said.

But in a 2014 document, the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain warned that fracking could cause radioactivity in water, pollute aquifers and the atmosphere, and cause earthquakes.

Martín pointed out that most lawsuits never make it to trial because the companies reach out-of-court settlements containing confidentiality clauses that prevent those affected by the wells from speaking out.

The United States is the world’s leading producer of shale oil and gas, followed by Argentina. In July 2011 France became the first country in the world to ban fracking, and 16 other European Union countries have since followed suit, while Spain and 10 others permit the use of hydraulic fracturing, with the United Kingdom in the lead.

Alameda said shale gas would create jobs, reduce energy dependency and improve the country’s trade balance.

Spain imports around 80 percent of the energy it consumes, according to statistics from the 2011-2020 Energy Efficiency and Savings Action Plan. Those involved in the exploitation of unconventional gas estimate that their wells will make the country self-sufficient for 90 years – although that can only be proven through exploration.

But to reduce dependency, “the way forward is not the extraction of gas; we can’t allow the continued burning of fossil fuels,” said Martín-Sosa of Ecologistas en Acción.

The environmentalist criticised “the absolute promotion” of shale gas by the government, when what is needed, he said, is “a change in energy model” starting with the replacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy sources.

But clean energy “faces more hurdles than ever” from the national government, he complained.

Shale Gas España, meanwhile, asserts that “the oil and gas industry is compatible with renewable energies.”

In 2013 and 2014, four of Spain’s 17 “autonomous communities” or regions passed laws banning fracking. But the central government introduced changes in the authority over the development of fracking, which allowed the regional laws to be revoked by the Constitutional Court.

Martín-Sosa said that what is needed is a national ban on fracking, rather than attempts to regulate it.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The Loma Campana camp where YPF and Chevron produce shale oil in the southwest Argentine province of Neuquén. So far, the plunging of oil prices has not modified the costely development of this unconventional fuel. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BUENOS AIRES, Apr 10 2015 (IPS)

Despite the precipitous fall in global oil prices, Argentina has continued to follow its strategy of producing unconventional shale oil, although in the short term there could be problems attracting the foreign investment needed to exploit the Vaca Muerta shale deposit.

The uncertainty has come on the heels of the initial euphoria over the exploitation of shale oil and gas, of which Argentina has some of the world’s largest reserves.

Is the Vaca Muerta shale oil and gas field in intensive care, now that the price of a barrel of oil has plummeted from 110 dollars to under 50 in just seven months? That is the question repeated by financial and oil industry experts.

Argentina’s energy trade deficit climbed to almost seven billion dollars in 2014, partly due to the decline in the country’s conventional oil reserves.

Eliminating that deficit depends on the development of Vaca Muerta, a major shale oil and gas deposit in the Neuquén basin in southwest Argentina. At least 10 billion dollars a year in investment are needed over the next few years to tap into this source of energy.“Conventional oil production has peaked, so to meet the rise in demand it will be necessary to develop unconventional sources. And Argentina is one of the best-placed countries to do so.” -- Víctor Bronstein

“In the short term, it would be best to import, rather than exploit the shale resources,” Víctor Bronstein, the director of the Centre of Studies on Energy, Policy and Society, told IPS.

“But taking a more strategic view, investment in and development of these resources must be kept up, since oil prices are going to start climbing again in the near future and we have to have the capacity to produce our own resources when that happens,” he added.

That is how President Cristina Fernández saw things, he said, when she set a domestic price of 72 dollars a barrel – “40 percent above its international value” – among other production incentives that were adopted to shore up Vaca Muerta.

According to the state oil company Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF), Vaca Muerta multiplied Argentina’s oil reserves by a factor of 10 and its gas reserves by a factor of 40, which will enable this country not only to be self-sufficient in energy but also to become a net exporter of oil and gas.

YPF has been assigned 12,000 of the 30,000 sq km of the shale oil and gas deposit in the province of Neuquén.

The company admits that to exploit the deposit, it will need to partner with transnational corporations capable of providing capital. It has already done so with the U.S.-based Chevron in the Loma Campana deposit, where it had projected a price of 80 dollars a barrel this year.

“Who is going to invest in unconventional oil and gas at the current prices?” the vice president of the Grupo Moreno, Gustavo Calleja, commented to IPS.

“We have to hold on to Vaca Muerta and continue studying its deposits in just a few pilot wells, to see how deep they are and what kind of drilling is necessary to keep down costs and curb the environmental impacts,” said Calleja, who was the government’s undersecretary of fuel in the 1980s.

YPF technicians working on one of the shale oil drilling rigs in the Loma Campana shale gas field in Vaca Muerta in southwest Argentina. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

Hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”, the technique used to extract shale oil and gas, involves the high-pressure injection of a mix of water, sand and chemical additives into the parent-rock formations at a depth of over 2,000 metres, in order to release the trapped oil and gas which flows up to the surface through pipes.

Besides being very costly, fracking poses environmental risks, as it requires huge volumes of water, pollutes aquifers, and can cause earthquakes.

The shale boom that began in the United States in 2008 was driven, among other factors, by high oil prices, which provided a profit margin.

“At the current prices only those who have cutting-edge technology can develop their shale reserves,” said Calleja.

The cost of producing a barrel of shale oil is based on variables such as extraction, exploration, investment amortization and the payment of taxes and royalties. In the United States, the cost is calculated at between 40 and 70 dollars.

That fact, explained Bronstein, led to an over 30 percent reduction in drilling activity since prices fell, “which will bring down production over the next few months.”

In Argentina, shale development is just starting, which means costs are high “due to a question of scale and problems of logistics and infrastructure,” said the expert.

In the United States, “developing a shale well, including fracking, costs around three million dollars,” while in Argentina “it costs more than twice that,” he said.

“The cost of extracting conventional oil in Argentina ranges between 20 and 30 dollars a barrel, while it costs around 90 dollars to extract a barrel of shale oil, although that will gradually go down as Vaca Muerta is developed,” he said.

Argentina does not yet produce shale gas on a commercial scale, as it still has large reserves of conventional gas. YPF’s shale oil production represents 10 percent of the company’s total output, and between three and four percent of the oil extracted by all operating companies in the country.

Canada and China produce unconventional oil on a commercial scale. But due to their geologic and operative characteristics, the United States and Argentina are seen as having the greatest potential in terms of future production of shale oil and gas.

YPF argues that with the gradual reduction in production costs, a rise in output, and higher domestic oil prices, Vaca Muerta is still profitable.

The industry is waiting for the collapse in prices to bring down the costs of international inputs and services, thus reducing the high domestic industrial costs.

YPF has also signed agreements for the joint exploitation of shale deposits with Malaysia’s Petronas and Dow Chemical of the United States, while other transnational corporations have announced their intention to invest in Vaca Muerta.

Bronstein believes the investments will continue to flow in because they were planned with an eye to “significant production in five years.”

“This means investors don’t take the current price of crude oil into account as much as the future price. And virtually all analysts agree that oil prices will rally within a few years,” he said.

“Conventional oil production has peaked, so to meet the rise in demand it will be necessary to develop unconventional sources. And Argentina is one of the best-placed countries to do so,” Bronstein added.

Cristian Folgar, who was undersecretary of fuels last decade, said “any snapshot of the market today would be distorted because the costs of different oil industry services have not yet settled.”

“YPF will continue to forge ahead and will not slow down investments that depend on its decision because the company currently channels its entire flow of investment into Argentina,” he told IPS.

In his view, international corporations will reduce their investments at a global level, which means “YPF is not at all likely to reach new joint venture agreements with other oil companies until the situation stabilises.”

But “those who have already started to invest are not going to back out,” he added.

“Argentina continues to pay for crude and gas at the same prices as before the start of this downward price trend,” Folgar said. “Since a change of government lies just ahead, new developments will probably wait for the next government to send signals indicating what its plans are in the energy sector.”

Calleja is worried that Saudi Arabia, the world’s leading oil exporter, and the country that according to experts is pulling the strings of the current price collapse in order to – among other goals – push shale out of the market, “may drive prices even further down.”

In the face of what he describes as a global “war of interests”, he believes it is a good time to start looking to energy sources other than fossil fuels.

Calleja argues in favour of hydroelectricity and nuclear energy, which currently represent just 14 percent of Argentina’s energy mix, but have “lower economic and environmental costs.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Fracking fluid and other drilling wastes are dumped into an unlined pit located right up against the Petroleum Highway in Kern County, California. Credit: Sarah Craig/Faces of Fracking

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Dec 1 2014 (IPS)

Multinational oil and gas companies are engaged in a quiet but broad attempt to prepare the groundwork for a significant global expansion of shale gas development, according to a study released Monday.

Thus far, the hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) technologies that have upended the global gas market have been used primarily in North America and, to a lesser extent, Europe. With U.S. gas production in particular having expanded exponentially in recent years, however, countries around the world have started exploration to discern whether they, too, could cash in on this new approach.Argentina has put in place a new law guaranteeing a minimum price for fracked gas. Further, this minimum price is some 250 percent higher than the previous valuation – a sweetheart guard against the bottomed-out prices that are currently impacting on gas production in the United States.

According to an estimate published last year by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, some 90 percent of the world’s shale gas could be found outside of the United States – an incredibly lucrative potential. “It’s likely there will be a revolution,” Maria van der Hoeven, the executive director at the Paris-based International Energy Agency, has said.

Yet according to the new study, from Friends of the Earth Europe, a watchdog group, only Brazil has strengthened its regulatory regime in anticipation of this expansion. Of the nearly dozen countries the new report looks at, most are doing the opposite.

“Under pressure from the fossil fuel industry – which has deep pockets and promises employment and investment – several governments have already started to weaken their environmental legislation, alter their tax regimes and put in place industry-friendly mining licensing and production processes, in order to attract foreign investors and expertise,” the report states. “This is often at the expense of the public interest.”

In terms of production this remains a nascent industry. Nonetheless, neither governments nor companies appear to have undertaken efforts to guard against the complexities that will arise, including around the potential for social, environmental and even political tensions.

“The industry is trying to change the legislation in those places where they want to operate, to try to repeat as much as possible the favourable policies we’ve seen in U.S. energy policy,” Antoine Simon, a shale gas campaigner with Friends of the Earth Europe and lead author on the new report, told IPS.

“The key here is to ensure that the legal frameworks are as friendly for the industry as possible. That’s the first phase of this global strategy, and we’re seeing it in each country we studied.”

No safeguards

Outside of North America and Europe, Argentina has moved forward the quickest on shale gas development, and thus offers a key example on legislative action for which companies may be looking.

For instance, Argentina has put in place a new law guaranteeing a minimum price for fracked gas. Further, this minimum price is some 250 percent higher than the previous valuation – a sweetheart guard against the bottomed-out prices that are currently impacting on gas production in the United States.

Simon says this law has a telling nickname in Argentina – the “Chevron Decree”, a reference to the U.S. oil and gas company. The day after the law was passed, he notes, Argentina’s main state-backed oil and gas producer signed a long-term production deal with Chevron.

Other countries have put in place favourable new tax policies for oil and gas investors. In Morocco, for instance, producers will be exempt from corporate taxes for the first decade of operation, while Russia has created similar policies for oil production over the next 15 years.

Yet the lack of action to simultaneously put in place environmental or social safeguards in most countries runs a variety of risks, Friends of the Earth Europe and others warn. Hydraulic fracturing requires massive amounts of water, for instance – up to 26 million litres per drill site.

The new report finds that a significant proportion of shale gas reserves around the world are located in areas that are already experiencing significant water shortages and even related violence. Likewise, many of these shale basins are beneath major cross-border aquifers.

Even before these issues are addressed by national governments, then, the oil and gas industry could gain influence in setting policy on the notoriously contentious issue of freshwater use.

Alongside concerns about the local impact of shale gas development is a broader lack of clarity today on the extent to which developing countries would be able to benefit from any new gas-related revenues. Thus far, only Brazil has specifically addressed this issue.

“In our research, Brazil was the only exception in terms of passing legislation that ensured they would get some significant revenues,” Simon says. “Really that doesn’t seem to be happening in other countries, where instead we’re seeing a lot of legislation that offers state aid to push investors to come to their countries.”

Beyond a few notable exceptions in Latin America and South Africa, Simon suggests that this issue has not yet seen significant opposition by civil society. Still, advocacy groups do point to a growing trend of global understanding and mobilisation on fracking concerns.

“As more and more studies confirm the risks of air pollution, water contamination, increased earthquake activity and climate change impacts from fracking, the more people oppose this destructive and intensive process,” Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food & Water Watch, a U.S. watchdog group, told IPS.

“The movement to ban fracking has resulted in hundreds of local communities taking action to stop fracking, several states and countries instituting moratoriums, and the movement continues to grow.”

In October, Food & Water Watch organized an international day of action to ban hydraulic fracturing. Hauter notes that the event featured “over 300 actions in 34 countries, from Australia to Argentina, even Antarctica, calling for a ban on fracking”.

Food & Water Watch reports that France and Bulgaria have already banned hydraulic fracturing, while local moratoriums have also been passed by hundreds of communities across the Netherlands, Spain and Argentina.

U.S. government promotion

Meanwhile, the drivers behind fracking-related pressures are not simply multinational companies and national governments keen on investment. It was in the United States where hydraulic fracturing was invented and proved its potential, and today the U.S. government is reportedly taking a central role in promoting these techniques worldwide.

In almost all of the countries studied for the new report, researchers found the development of shale gas to be “closely linked” to a U.S. government agency, the U.S. Unconventional Gas Technical Engagement Program (UGTEP). Housed within the U.S. State Department, since 2010 the UGTEP has engaged in a wide variety of technical assistance around gas development.

“Governments often have limited capability to assess their own country’s unconventional gas resource potential or are unclear about how to develop it in a safe and environmentally sustainable manner,” UGTEP explains on its website. “The ultimate goals of UGTEP are to achieve greater energy security by supporting the development of environmentally and commercially sustainable frameworks.”

While U.S. diplomats are specifically tasked with strengthening U.S. business prospects abroad, critics say UGTEP’s activities constitute the broad promotion of hydraulic fracturing under the guise of U.S. diplomacy.

“UGTEP uses official government channels and US taxpayers’ money to promote high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing worldwide, opening doors for the main global players in the oil and gas industry,” the Friends of the Earth Europe report states.

“Through UGTEP, the US is also actively engaged in re-shaping existing foreign legal regulations to create the desired legal framework for the development of shale oil and gas in the targeted countries.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

Ranking of recoverable shale oil and gas reserves, which have revolutionised the global map of fossil fuels. Credit: ProfesionalMovil

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Nov 26 2014 (IPS)

Shale fever and the political chess among major oil producers and consumers have put OPEC in one of the most difficult junctures in its 54 years of history.

“OPEC was spoiled for several years by high prices of around 100 dollars a barrel,” Elie Habalián, a former Venezuelan OPEC (Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) governor, told IPS. “If it had had the foresight to keep prices down to around 70 dollars a barrel, shale oil would not have begun to pose such stiff competition.”

The 12-member group – made up of Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela – may agree to cut output, which would entail sacrificing markets, during its Nov. 27 ministerial meeting in Vienna – the 166th held since the organisation was founded in September 1960.

Oil prices, which climbed after 2003 to over 140 dollars a barrel in 2008, plunged as a result of the global financial crisis that broke out that year, but recovered this decade and have remained at around 100 dollars a barrel.

In the meantime, the production of unconventional oil and gas began to expand in the United States. Shale, a common type of sedimentary rock made up largely of compacted silt and clay, is an unconventional source of natural gas and oil, which is trapped in shale formations and recovered by hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”.

“Fracking” involves pumping water, chemicals and sand at high pressure into the well, a technique that opens and extends fractures in the shale rock to release the natural gas and oil on a massive scale.

With the technology and capital available in the 20th century, these unconventional resources were not recoverable.

Habalián pointed out that after the 1973 Arab oil embargo, “the West and Japan adopted a strategy to achieve a stable market under their control rather than under that of the exporting countries.”

That strategy has run into surprises. For example, 40 years ago no one foresaw that China, along with India and other emerging powers, would become a fast-growing economy with a voracious appetite for fossil fuels, which gave a boost to producers of oil and gas.

“But with the high prices, while the exporters financed geopolitical campaigns, like the conflicts in the Middle East or the influence of Venezuela in Latin America under the presidency of Hugo Chávez (1999-2013), the big corporations were investing in technology and new areas of business,” said Habalián.

The shale boom “has merely accelerated the results of that permanent strategy by the West. Shale oil is here to stay, the price will drop as the technology advances, and that will bring down the prices of, and set a cap on, OPEC’s oil,” the expert said.

Map of proven global reserves of conventional oil, where new actors have also reduced OPEC’s grip. Credit: Fastcompany.com

Fracking is a costly procedure that requires high crude prices to make it profitable. It is also criticised for its environmental effects, as it involves consumption of enormous amounts of water and the creation of cracks in the rocks deep below the surface, with consequences that have yet to be determined.

Shale oil is already a major actor in the global energy market, with daily output of 3.5 million barrels, mainly in the United States, which recently overtook Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s largest oil producer, with more than nine million barrels a day.

For decades Saudi Arabia was the biggest producer and the de facto leader of OPEC, because to its production of nearly 10 million barrels a day is added a spare production capacity of two million barrels which has enabled it to increase or reduce output in periods of market scarcity or abundance.

The market, of some 91 million barrels consumed daily, of which OPEC contributes one-third, is showing signs of being oversupplied because of the rising offer of shale oil, Europe’s fragile economic recovery, and the slowdown of emerging economies, from China to Brazil.

Crude oil is about 30 percent cheaper than one year ago. The European benchmark North Sea Brent stands at 80 dollars a barrel, compared to 110 dollars a barrel at the close of 2013. The U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate is trading at 75 dollars a barrel, and Venezuela’s dense cocktail at less than 70 dollars a barrel, down from a high of more than 100 dollars a barrel.

Saudi Arabia “appears determined to respond aggressively in defence of its market share, even if that means lower prices for a few years,” Kenneth Ramírez, a professor of geopolitics and oil at the Central University of Venezuela, told IPS.

The Saudis are thus apparently facing off with Iran, their rival in the Islamic world – and which, like Venezuela, Russia or Nigeria, needs the biggest possible influx of revenue in the short term – and would discourage, with flows of low-cost conventional oil, the development of its big future rival: shale oil.

In addition, according to analyses like those of Habalián and Ramírez, low prices and a market with a greater supply of crude would “punish” nations like Syria or its big supporter, Russia, which is clashing with the West over the conflict centred in Ukraine.

In the immediate future, OPEC could opt for the Saudi proposal of maintaining the status quo and letting oil prices slide to 70 dollars a barrel or lower, with the aim of slowing down the development of shale oil while waiting for a recovery of Europe or China and other emerging economies.

Venezuela has tried to push another option, with an intense tour by Foreign Minister Rafael Ramírez to the capitals of oil producing countries, from Mexico City to Moscow through Tehran, but conspicuously avoiding Riyadh. The idea is to cut production to shore up prices, betting that the capacity to extract shale oil will decline in a few years.

One component that contributes to a move in that direction, said Habalián, is the pressure from environmentalists, especially in the United States and Canada, who oppose the extraction of shale oil and gas because of its impact on water sources, the injection of chemicals and the fracturing of rock deep underground.

A third option, said Ramírez, would be to ratify OPEC’s production ceiling of 30 million barrels a day, which would remove a small portion of the partners’ current excess supply “and although it would have a small impact on prices, it would send a signal that the organisation is not on the ropes.”

But in the medium to long term, Habalián observed, a new energy architecture in line with the market stability sought by the West continues to be bolstered, in the face of an OPEC strained by political and budgetary urgencies.

Editedo by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Technicians discuss their work near two drill rigs at the Vaca Muerta oil field in Loma Campana, in southern Argentina. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
NEUQUÉN, Argentina, Oct 27 2014 (IPS)

In Argentina they call it “yeil”, the hispanicised version of “shale”. But while these unconventional gas and oil reserves are seen by many as offering a means to development and a route towards energy self-sufficiency, others believe the term should fall into disuse because the global trend is towards clean, renewable sources of energy.

Wearing an oil-soaked uniform, the drilling supervisor in the state oil company YPF, Claudio Rueda, feels like he is playing a part in an important story that is unfolding in southern Argentina.

“Availability of energy is key in our country,” he told IPS. “It’s an essential element in Argentina’s development and future, and we are part of that process.”

The first chapter of the story is being written in the Vaca Muerta shale oil and gas field in Loma Campana in the province of Neuquén, which forms part of Argentina’s southern Patagonia region, where rich unconventional reserves of gas and oil are hidden in rocky structures 2,500 to 3,000 metres below the surface.

According to YPF, reserves of 802 trillion cubic feet of reserves put Argentina second in the world in shale gas deposits, after China, with 1,115 trillion cubic feet.

And in shale oil reserves, Argentina is now in fourth place, with 27 billion barrels, after Russia, the United States and China.“Staking our bets on fracking means reinforcing the current energy mix based on fossil fuels, and as a result, it spells out a major setback in terms of alternative scenarios or the transition to clean, renewable energy sources.” -- Maristella Svampa

According to projections, Argentina’s conventional oil and gas reserves will run out in eight or 10 years and production is declining, so the government considers the development of Vaca Muerta, a 30,000-sq-km geological formation, strategic.

“Nearly 30 percent of the country’s energy is imported, in different ways – a huge drain on the country’s hard currency reserves,” Rubén Etcheverry, coauthor of the book “Yeil, las nuevas reservas” (Yeil, the new reserves) and former Neuquén provincial energy secretary, said in an interview with IPS.

“We have been in intensive therapy for the last five years, with respect to the trade balance and the energy balance,” he said in Neuquén, the provincial capital.

“We went from exporting nearly five billion dollars a year in fuel, 10 years ago, to spending 15 billion dollars on imports; in other words, the balance has shifted by 20 billion dollars a year – an enormous change for any economy of this size,” Etcheverry said.

Imports include electricity and liquefied gas, natural gas and other fuels.

Diego Pérez Santiesteban, president of Argentina’s Chamber of Importers, said that at the start of the year, energy purchases represented 15 percent of all imports, compared to just five percent a year earlier.

Since 2009, accumulated imported energy has surpassed the Central Bank’s foreign reserves of 28.4 billion dollars.

Etcheverry sees Vaca Muerta as key to turning that tendency around, because the reserves found deep under the surface would be “enough to make us self-sufficient, and would even allow us to export.”

According to the expert, Argentina could follow in the footsteps of the United States, which thanks to its shale deposits “could become the world’s leading producer of gas and oil in less than 10 years.”

Shale gas and oil are extracted by means of a process known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking, which involves pumping water, chemicals and sand at high pressure into the well, and opening and extending fractures deep under the surface in the shale rock to release the fossil fuels.

But there is a growing outcry around the world against the pollution caused by fracking in the water table and other environmental impacts in wide areas around the deposits.

And in Argentina many voices have also been raised against the energy mix that has been chosen.

“This is an environmental point of view that goes beyond Vaca Muerta. The option that they are trying to impose in Argentina, as a solution to the energy crisis…has no future prospects,” said ecologist Silvia Leanza of the Ecosur Foundation.

“We’re basing all of our economic expansion on one asset here – but how many years will it last?” she asked.

Fossil fuels make up nearly 90 percent of Argentina’s energy mix. The rest is based on nuclear and hydroelectric sources, and just one percent renewable.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concluded that the burning of fossil fuels to generate energy is the main cause of climate change.

“This situation, along with the greater availability of renewable sources, indicates the end of the era of dirty energy sources,” Mauro Fernández, head of Greenpeace Argentina’s energy campaign, said in a report.

This country’s dependence on fossil fuels has made carbon dioxide emissions per capita among the highest in the region: 4.4 tons in 2009, according to the World Bank.

Fernández said unconventional fossil fuels are not only risky because of fracking, but are also “a bad alternative from a climate and energy point of view.”

“Unconventional deposits look like a new frontier for doing more of the same, fueling the motor of climate change,” he complained.

Argentina has set a target for at least eight percent of the country’s electricity to come from renewable sources by 2016.

“Staking our bets on fracking means reinforcing the current energy mix based on fossil fuels, and as a result, it spells out a major setback in terms of alternative scenarios or the transition to clean, renewable energy sources,” said sociologist Maristella Svampa, an independent researcher with the National Scientific and Technical Research Council.

“In the last decade, fracking has certainly transformed the energy outlook in the United States, making it less dependent on imports. But it has also made it the place where the real impacts can be seen: pollution of groundwater, damage to the health of people and animals, earthquakes, greater emissions of methane gas, among others,” she said.

Carolina García with the Multisectoral Group against Hydraulic Fracturing said that because of its rich natural resources, Argentina has other alternatives that should be tapped before exploiting fossil fuels “to the last drop.”

“We finish extracting everything in the Neuquén basin and what do we have left?” she commented to IPS.

Etcheverry mentioned the possibility of using solar energy in the north, wind energy in Patagonia and along the Atlantic shoreline, geothermic energy in the Andes, and tidal and wave energy along the coast.

But the author said that for now the costs were “much higher” than those of fossil fuels, because of technological reasons, transportation aspects and energy intensity.

He also said oil and gas are still necessary as energy sources and raw materials for everyday products.

For that reason, Etcheverry said, the transition from the fossil fuels era “is not simple.” First it is necessary to improve energy savings and efficiency, in order to later shift to less polluting fossil fuels, he added.

“In the first stage it would be a question of moving from the most polluting fossil fuels like coal and oil towards others that are less polluting, like natural gas. And from there, creating incentives for everything that has to do with clean or renewable energies,” he said.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Stop Elektrownia Północ campaigners trying to stop investment in Europe’s biggest new coal power plant. Credit: C. Kowalski/350.org

By Diana Maciaga
WARSAW, Oct 27 2014 (IPS)

Pomerania in northern Poland is famous for its unpolluted environment, fertile soils and historic heritage. So far, these valuable farmlands have been free from heavy industry but that situation might change as a shadow looms over the lives of Pomeranians.

Its name is Elektrownia Północ, also known as the North Power Plant and, ever since we learned about it, we have been determined to stop Elektrownia Pólnoc.

If built, this coal-fired power plant would contribute to the climate crisis with 3.7 million tons of coal burnt annually, and lock Poland into coal dependency for decades.

It threatens to pollute the Vistula River, Poland’s largest river, with a rich ecosystem that is home to many rare and endangered species.“The [Polish] government’s energy scenario, ironically labelled as sustainable, is based on coal and nuclear power. It promotes business as usual and hinders any development of renewable energy”

The threat of soil degradation and inevitable drainage keeps local farmers awake at night, not to mention the air pollution from the plant that will be a major health hazard, making the situation in Poland – already the most polluted country in Europe with more people dying from air pollution than from car accidents – even worse.

But this is not just about stopping one of a dozen fossil fuel projects currently under development. This is part of a much broader struggle.

While unemployment soars, the Polish government fails to stimulate green jobs and dismisses renewable energy as too expensive. At the same time, it is pumping billions into the coal industry. Unprofitable and un-modern, it thrives thanks to hidden subsidies that in the past 22 years added up to a mammoth sum equal to the country’s annual GDP.

The government’s energy scenario, ironically labelled as sustainable, is based on coal and nuclear power. It promotes business as usual and hinders any development of renewable energy.

The current government continues to block European Union climate policy, without which we can forget about a meaningful climate treaty being achieved in Paris next year.

All this takes place while we face the greatest environmental crisis in history and leaves us hopelessly unprepared for everything it brings about.

But Poland’s infamous coal dependence is all but given and the policy that granted our country the infamous nickname “Coal-land” is strikingly incompatible with the will of the Polish people. All around the country people are fighting coal plants, new mines and opposing fracking. We want Poland to be a modern country that embraces climate justice.

I went to New York to be part of the People’s Climate March, observe the U.N. Climate Summit and bring this very message from hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens whose voices had been ignored on domestic grounds to the international stage. Yet what I had not expected was how powerful an experience it would be.

With 400,000 people in the streets and thousands more all over the world, New York witnessed not only the largest climate march in history on Sep. 21 but a true change of tide: a beautiful, unstoppable wave of half a million representing hundreds of millions more – the stories unfolding, forming an epic tale not of loss or despair but of resilience, strength, responsibility and readiness to do what it takes to save this world.

For decades world leaders have been failing us, justifying their inaction with the supposed lack of people’s support, their talks poisoned by a ‘you move first’ approach.

The voices of those who marched echoing in the street and in the media, impossible to be ignored, left their mark on the Summit and resounded in many speeches given by world leaders. The march showed it more clearly than ever how strong the mandate for taking action is and, even more importantly, where the leadership truly lies.

Opening the Summit, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appealed to politicians to take action to ensure a low-carbon, climate resilient and better future. “There is only one thing in the way,” he said, “Us”.

The march proved that there is a counter-movement challenging this stagnation. From individuals to communities, from cities to neighbourhoods and families, millions are working to make a better world a reality. Against all adversities, people around the world embrace the urgency of action and lead where the supposed leaders have failed.

For me this is the single most important message and a source of hope to take back home. A new chapter of climate protection has opened written by the diverse, powerful stream which flooded the streets in New York and beyond – not to witness but to make history.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

* Diana Maciaga works with the Polish NGO Workshop for All Beings (Pracownia na rzecz Wszystkich Istot), which specialises in protection of the wildest treasures of Poland. She has participated in Global Power Shift and Power Shift Central & Eastern Europe and is sharing her experience through campaigns and coordinating a training for local Polish leaders – “Guardians of Climate”. She is currently one of the organisers of the Stop Elektrowni Północ (Stop the ‘North Power Plant’) campaign against a new coal-fired facility in Poland.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Pear trees in bloom on a farm in Allen, in the Argentine province of Río Negro, across from a “tight gas” deposit. Pear growers are worried about their future, now that the production of unconventional fossil fuels is expanding in the area. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
AÑELO, Argentina, Oct 8 2014 (IPS)

Unconventional oil and gas reserves in Vaca Muerta in southwest Argentina hold out the promise of energy self-sufficiency and development for the country. But the fracking technique used to extract this treasure from underground rocks could be used at a huge cost.

The landscape begins to change when you get about 100 km from Neuquén, the capital of the province of the same name, in southwest Argentina. In this area, dubbed “the Saudi Arabia of Patagonia”, fruit trees are in bloom and vineyards stretch out green towards the horizon, in the early southern hemisphere springtime.

But along the roads, where there is intense traffic of trucks hauling water, sand, chemicals and metallic structures, oil derricks and pump stations have begun to replace the neat rows of poplars which form windbreaks protecting crops in the southern region of Patagonia.

“Now there’s money, there’s work – we’re better off,” truck driver Jorge Maldonado told Tierramérica. On a daily basis he transports drill pipes to Loma Campana, the shale oil and gas field that has become the second-largest producer in Argentina in just three years.“That water is not left in the same condition as it was when it was removed from the rivers; the hydrologic cycle is changed. They are minimising a problem that requires a more in-depth analysis.” -- Carolina García

It is located in Vaca Muerta, a geological formation in the Neuquén basin which is spread out over the provinces of Neuquén, Río Negro and Mendoza. Of the 30,000 sq km area, the state-run YPF oil company has been assigned 12,000 sq km in concession, including some 300 sq km operated together with U.S. oil giant Chevron.

Vaca Muerta has some of the world’s biggest reserves of shale oil and gas, found at depths of up to 3,000 metres.

A new well is drilled here every three days, and the demand for labour power, equipment, inputs, transportation and services is growing fast, changing life in the surrounding towns, the closest of which is Añelo, eight km away.

“Now I can provide better for my children, and pay for my wife’s studies,” said forklift operator Walter Troncoso.

According to YPF, Vaca Muerta increased Argentina’s oil reserves ten-fold and its gas reserves forty-fold, which means this country will become a net exporter of fossil fuels.

But tapping into unconventional shale oil and gas deposits requires the use of a technique known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” – which YPF prefers to refer to as “hydraulic stimulation”.

According to the company, the technique involves the high-pressure injection of a mix of water, sand and “a small quantity of additives” into the parent-rock formations at a depth of over 2,000 metres, in order to release the trapped oil and gas which flows up to the surface through pipes.

The extraction of unconventional fossil fuels at the YPF deposit in Loma Campana has already begun to irrevocably affect life in the surrounding areas. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

Víctor Bravo, an engineer, says in a study published by the Third Millennium Patagonia Foundation, that some 15 fractures are made in each well, with 20,000 cubic metres of water and some 400 tons of diluted chemicals.

The formula is a trade secret, but the estimate is that it involves “some 500 chemical substances, 17 of which are toxic to aquatic organisms, 38 of which have acute toxic effects, and eight of which are proven to be carcinogenic,” he writes. He adds that fracking fluids and the gas itself can contaminate aquifers.

Neuquén province lawmaker Raúl Dobrusin of the opposition Popular Union bloc told Tierrámerica: “The effect of this contamination won’t be seen now, but in 15 or 20 years.”

During Tierramérica’s visit to Loma Campana, Pablo Bizzotto, YPF’s regional manager of unconventional resources, played down these fears, saying the parent-rock formations are 3,000 metres below the surface while the groundwater is 200 to 300 metres down.

“The water would have to leak thousands of metres up. It can’t do that,” he said.

Besides, the “flowback water”, which is separated from the oil or gas, is reused in further “hydraulic stimulation” operations, while the rest is dumped into “perfectly isolated sink wells,” he argued. “The aquifers do not run any risk at all,” he said.

But Dobrusin asked “What will they do with the water once the well is full? No one mentions that.”

According to Bizzotto, the seismic intensity of the hydraulic stimulation does not compromise the aquifers either, because the fissures are produced deep down in the earth. Furthermore, he said, the wells are layered with several coatings of cement and steel.

“We want to draw investment, generate work, but while safeguarding nature at the same time,” Neuquén’s secretary of the environment, Ricardo Esquivel, told Tierramérica.

In his view, “there are many myths” surrounding fracking, such as the claim that so much water is needed that water levels in the rivers would go down.

Neuquén, he said, uses five percent of the water in its rivers for irrigation, human consumption and industry, while the rest flows to the sea. Even if 500 wells a year were drilled, only one percent more of the water would be used, he maintained.

But activist Carolina García with the Multisectorial contra el Fracking group told Tierrámerica: “That water is not left in the same condition as it was when it was removed from the rivers; the hydrologic cycle is changed. They are minimising a problem that requires a more in-depth analysis.”

She pointed out that fracking is questioned in the European Union and that in August Germany adopted an eight-year moratorium on fracking for shale gas while it studies the risks posed by the technique.

YPF argues that these concerns do not apply to Vaca Muerta because it is a relatively uninhabited area.

“The theory that this is a desert and can be sacrificed because no one’s here is false,” said Silvia Leanza with the Ecosur Foundation.

“There are people, the water runs, and there is air flowing here,” she commented to Tierramérica. “The emissions of gases and suspended dust particles can reach up to 200 km away.”

Nor does the “desert theory” ring true for Allen, a town of 25,000 people in the neighbouring province of Río Negro, which is suffering the effects of the extraction of another form of unconventional gas, tight gas sands, which refers to low permeability sandstone reservoirs that produce primarily dry natural gas.

In that fruit-growing area, 20 km from the provincial capital, the fruit harvest is shrinking as the number of gas wells grows, drilled by the U.S.-based oil company Apache, whose local operations in Argentina were acquired by YPF in March.

Apache leases farms to drill on, the Permanent Comahue Assembly for Water (APCA) complained.

“Going around the farms it’s easy to see how the wells are occupying what was fruit-growing land until just a few years ago. Allen is known as the ‘pear capital’, but now it is losing that status,” lamented Gabriela Sepúlveda, of APCA Allen-Neuquén.

A well exploded in March, shaking the nearby houses. It wasn’t the first time, and it’s not the only problem the locals have had, Rubén Ibáñez, who takes care of a greenhouse next to the well, told Tierramérica. “Since the wells were drilled, people started feeling dizzy and having sore throats, stomach aches, breathing problems, and nausea,” he said.

“They periodically drill wells, a process that lasts around a month, and then they do open-air flaring. I’m no expert, but I feel sick,” he said. “I wouldn’t drink this water even if I was dying of thirst….when I used it to water the plants in the greenhouse they would die.”

The provincial government says there are constant inspections of the gas and oil deposits.

“In 300 wells we did not find any environmental impact that had created a reason for sanctions,” environment secretary Esquivel said.

“We have a clear objective: for Loma Campana, as the first place that unconventional fossil fuels are being developed in Argentina, to be the model to imitate, not only in terms of cost, production and technique, but in environmental questions as well,” Bizzotto said.

“All technology has uncertain consequences,” Leanza said. “Why deny it? Let’s put it up for debate.”

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A YPF driling derrick at the Vaca Muerta shale oil and gas field in Loma Campana in the Neuquén basin in southwest Argentina. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
LOMA CAMPANA, Argentina , Oct 1 2014 (IPS)

Production here has skyrocketed so fast that for now the installations of the YPF oil company at the Loma Campana deposit in southwest Argentina are a jumble of interconnected shipping containers.

Argentina is staking its bets on unconventional oil and gas resources, and the race to achieve energy self-sufficiency and surplus fuel for export can’t wait for the comfort of a real office.

“The camp here is our temporary offices,” Pablo Bizzotto, regional manager of unconventional resources of the state-run YPF, told a group of foreign correspondents during a visit to this oilfield in the southwestern province of Neuquén. “I apologise. But this is what we were able to set up quickly when we began the operations.”

Since last year, Loma Campana, some 100 km from the city of Neuquén, has been the Argentine oil company’s operating base, where 15 to 20 wells are drilled every month in the Vaca Muerta shale oil and gas field in the Neuquén basin.

There are currently more than 300 wells producing unconventional gas and oil here and in other oil camps in this part of Argentina’s southern Patagonia region. Some 250 are operated by YPF and the rest by foreign oil companies.

The final installations, with offices and a control and remote operation room, will be ready by mid-2015. But work at the wells is moving ahead at a different pace.

From January 2013 to mid-2014, daily oil output climbed from 3,000 to 12,000 barrels per day, before jumping to 21,000 in September.

“Loma Campana is the only large-scale commercial development [of shale oil and gas] outside of the United States. The rest are just trials,” said Bizzotto, explaining the magnitude of the operations in Vaca Muerta, which contains shale oil and gas reserves at depths of up to 3,000 metres.

Unlike conventional oil and gas extracted from deposits where they have been trapped for millions of years, shale oil and gas are removed from deep parent-rock formations.

According to YPF, which has been assigned 12,000 sq km of the 30,000 sq km in Vaca Muerta, the recoverable potential is 802 trillion cubic feet of gas and 27 billion barrels of oil.

A worker walking near pipes used to extract shale oil and gas at YPF’s Loma Campana oilfield in the southwest Argentine province of Neuquén. The shipping containers used as temporary offices can be seen in the background. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

With that potential, the country now has 30 times more unconventional gas and nine times more unconventional oil than traditional reserves. Thanks to recoverable shale resources, Argentina now has the world’s second largest gas reserves, after China, and the fourth largest of oil, after Russia, the United States and China, according to YPF figures.

Bizzotto said that in terms of both quantity and quality, as measured by variables of organic matter, thickness and reservoir pressure, the reserves are comparable to the best wells in the Eagle Ford Shale in the U.S. state of Texas.

Rubén Etcheverry, former president of the Gas y Petróleo de Neuquén, a public company, said the reserves open up “a new possibility for development and self-sufficiency from here to five or ten years from now.”

This is encouraging for a country like Argentina, whose reserves and production had declined to the point where over 15 billion dollars in fuel had to be imported.

“The possibility of converting these resources into reserves means that Argentina could have gas and oil for more than 100 years,” Etcheverry, who is also a former Neuquén energy secretary, told IPS.

But the challenge is just that: turning the shale resources into actual reserves.

Since 2013, YPF has invested some two billion dollars in Vaca Muerta.
But because of the magnitude of the resources and the country’s difficulties in obtaining financing from abroad, Etcheverry said “new actors are needed” in order to achieve the required volumes of investment, which he estimates at 100 billion dollars over the next five or six years.

YPF, which was renationalised in 2012, when it was expropriated from Spain’s Repsol oil company that controlled it since 1999, is now looking for foreign partners – a strategy that some political and social sectors see as undermining national sovereignty.

In Loma Campana, YPF operates one portion with the U.S. oil giant Chevron and is developing another shale gas field with the U.S. Dow Chemical.

Other companies involved in the area are Petronas from Malaysia, France’s Total, the U.S.-based ExxonMobil, the British-Dutch Shell, and Germany’s Wintershall, while negotiations are underway with companies from other countries, including China and Russia.

According to provincial lawmaker Raúl Dobrusín of the opposition Unión Popular party of Neuquén, the oil companies are waiting for the Senate to approve a controversial new law on hydrocarbons.

The legislation would grant 35-year concessions, reduce the tariffs the companies pay for imports, and allow them to transfer 20 percent of the profits abroad, and if they do not do so they would be paid locally at international values and without tax withholding, Dobrusín said.

The development of unconventional fossil fuels has also run into criticism from environmentalists.

Hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” is the technique used for large-scale extraction of unonventional fossil fuels trapped in rocks, like shale gas. To release the natural gas and oil, huge volumes of water containing toxic chemicals are pumped underground at high pressure, fracturing the shale. The process generates large amounts of waste liquids containing dissolved chemicals and other pollutants that require treatment before disposal.

Environmentalists say fracking pollutes aquifers and releases more toxic gases than the extraction of conventional fossil fuels.

“There is no doubt that it causes pollution. Wells are abandoned without being cleaned up. Here in Plottier the water contains heavy metals and isn’t potable in most places, and we blame that on conventional production that has polluted the groundwater,” Darío Torchio, who has a business in Plottier, a city of 32,000 located 15 km from Neuquén, told IPS.

“Oil is a heavy inheritance for our descendants, which ruins everything, while the wealth goes to the companies,” said Torchio, a member of the Permanent Comahue Assembly for Water.

Silvia Leanza, with the environmental Ecosur Foundation, said Argentina is opting for a development model based on “neoextractivism”.

These plans, she told IPS, are “designed in the central countries as part of the neoliberal economic development and globalisation package, where we are suppliers of raw materials.”

“The focus is on the exploitation of a non-renewable resource, fossil fuels, which also has an economic impact, because that money could go towards clean energy sources that could also be developed in Patagonia,” Carolina García, an activist with the Multisectorial contra el Fracking group, told IPS.

“This is an alarm signal,” Etcheverry said. “The timeframe is very short. We had reserves for the next eight or 10 years.”

But the government of Cristina Fernández has no doubts about the model of development being followed.

“When unconventional gas and oil production in Vaca Muerta reaches 1,000 wells, the gross geographical product will tend to grow between 75 and 100 percent in the province of Neuquén. That will have a three to four percent impact on the country’s gross domestic product,” argued the head of the cabinet, Jorge Capitanich.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A cocktail of polluting chemicals is used in hydraulic fracturing, the method used to extract shale gas, for example at this fracking well in the U.S. state of Texas, on the border with Mexico. Credit: United States Government

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jun 28 2014 (IPS)

The new legal framework for Mexico’s oil industry has not placed controls on the use of harmful chemicals in the extraction of unconventional fossil fuels, and environmentalists and experts fear their consumption will increase in an industry that is opening up to private capital.

The energy reform “will exacerbate the use of chemicals. The new laws do not address this problem. We need to know what is used, because otherwise we cannot know the consequences. That’s why we want a ban on ‘fracking’ (hydraulic fracturing),” activist Claudia Campero, of Canada’s Blue Planet Project, told IPS.

A package of nine initiatives, including eight new laws and modifications to 12 others on fossil fuels, water, electricity and oil funds, came before the senate in the last week of June, after being debated since Jun. 10 by the Energy Commission.

On Dec. 11, 2013, Congress reformed articles 25, 27 and 28 of the Mexican constitution, opening up exploration, extraction, refining, transport, distribution and sales of hydrocarbons to private, local and foreign investors.

This reform dismantled the foundations of the 1938 nationalisation of the oil industry.

“Many chemicals have not been tested, and new ones are being developed all the time. Companies use trade secrets as an excuse to withhold information." -- Claudia Campero, of Canada’s Blue Planet Project
Analysis of the projects of state oil giant Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), as well as reports from the U.S. Congress and the local oil industry, give an idea of the amount of chemicals used to extract shale gas.

Natural gas trapped in underground shale rock is released by the process of drilling and injecting fluid into the ground at high pressure, which fractures the rocks. The method is known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”

The gas extraction and recovery process requires large amounts of water and chemical additives, some of which are toxic. Drilling and horizontal fracking generate enormous quantities of waste fluid.

The waste liquid contains dissolved chemicals and other pollutants that need to be treated before they are disposed of, and even afterwards, according to experts and environmental organisations like Greenpeace.

PEMEX’s enviromental impact study for the 2007-2027 Regional Project in Cuenca de Sabinas Piedras Negras, in the northern states of Coahuila and Nuevo León, says that “the liquid wastes generated will be sludges.”

The document says that drilling and fracking will require harmful chemicals like bentonite, lime, calcium carbonate, sodium chloride, caustic soda, additives, emulsifiers and soaps. These substances can damage skin, lungs, liver and eyes.

The project would allocate 34,000 hectares out of the total of 4.5 million hectares in the Sabinas Piedras Negras basin for gas exploration and exploitation. Gas extraction would take place on an area of 21,270 hectares, within which 8,035 hectares would be reserved for drilling.

The Poza Rica Altamira y Aceite Terciario del Golfo 2013-2035 regional oil project, in the states of Veracruz (southeast), Hidalgo (centre) and Puebla (south), is planning to use similar chemicals.

In March, PEMEX presented the environmental impact study for this project to the environment ministry, but withdrew it in May because it would have affected natural protected areas in Puebla. It is expected to reintroduce the project on a more limited geographic scale.

The state-owned company has drilled 18 shale gas wells, five of which are about to complete their exploratory phase, in Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas and Veracruz. PEMEX plans to operate a total of 6,500 commercial wells over the next 50 years, but shale gas exploitation may end up in private hands because of the energy reform.

PEMEX has identified five regions with potential shale gas reserves, from Veracruz to Chihuahua, on the border with the United States.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) ranks Mexico sixth in the world for technically recoverable shale gas resources, after China, Argentina, Algeria, the United States and Canada, in an analysis of 137 reserves in 41 countries.

PEMEX had no information on how the levels of chemical substances they use compare to Immediately Dangerous to Life or Health (IDLH) concentrations.

According to Greenpeace, the fracking fluids used during the life of one well require 380,000 litres of additives.

The Endocrine Disruption Exchange, a U.S. organisation that compiles and disseminates scientific information about health and environmental problems caused by exposure to chemicals that interfere with hormone actions, identified 944 products containing 632 chemical substances, many of which are potential endocrine disruptors, that are used in hydraulic fracturing.

The U.S. national hydraulic fracturing chemical registry, FracFocus, reports over 72,000 fracking wells in the country and lists 59 chemicals, consistent with those injected by PEMEX in its wells, including methanol, isopropanol, carbonates and acids.

Mexico’s National Hydrocarbons Commission (CNH) has drafted regulations for shale gas operations, but IPS ascertained that these contain no limits on the use of chemicals.

“The problem with the chemicals is the leftover waste, which must be removed from contact with persons and treated to prevent harm to people and the environment. We are going to specify that it must be treated,” Néstor Martínez, a member of the CNH, told IPS.

The CNH draft regulations cover water use and pollution, use of dangerous chemicals and production of earth tremors. They seek to reduce work accidents, prevent pollution by waste fluids and chemicals, and reduce the environmental footprint.

The regulations refer to types of drilling slurries, the quality of well sealing, hydraulic fracking methods and the discharge of fluids and solids.

PEMEX’s contractors will have to present the CNH with a good management plan that includes specifications to be complied with in those areas.

“Many chemicals have not been tested, and new ones are being developed all the time. Companies use trade secrets as an excuse to withhold information,” Blue Planet’s Campero said.

The Environment ministry is due to begin reviewing the regulations for drilling wells and discharging waste in October.

(END)

Map of seismic activity from October 2013 to March 2014 in the state of Nuevo León in northeast Mexico. Credit: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Apr 3 2014 (IPS)

Scientists warn that large-scale fracking for shale gas planned by Mexico’s oil company Pemex will cause a surge in seismic activity in northern Mexico, an area already prone to quakes.

Experts link a 2013 swarm of earthquakes in the northern states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo León to hydraulic fracturing or fracking in the Burgos and Eagle Ford shale deposits – the latter of which is shared with the U.S. state of Texas.

Researcher Ruperto de la Garza found a link between seismic activity and fracking, a technique that involves pumping water, chemicals and sand at high pressure into the well, opening and extending fractures in the shale rock to release the natural gas.

“The final result is the dislocation of the geological structure which, when it is pulverised, allows the trapped gas to escape,” the expert with the environmental and risk consultancy Gestoría Ambiental y de Riesgos told IPS from Saltillo, the capital of the northern state of Coahuila.

When the chemicals are injected “and the lutite particles [sedimentary rock] break down, the earth shifts,” he said. “It’s not surprising that the earth has been settling.”

De la Garza drew up an exhaustive map of the seismic movements in 2013 and the gas-producing areas.

His findings, published on Mar. 22, indicated a correlation between the seismic activity and fracking.

Statistics from Mexico’s National Seismological Service show an increase in intensity and frequency of seismic activity in Nuevo León, where at least 31 quakes between 3.1 and 4.3 on the Richter scale were registered.

Most of the quakes occurred in 2013. Of the ones registered this year, the highest intensity took place on Mar. 2-3, according to official records.

De la Garza said the number of quakes in that state increased in 2013 and the first few months of this year.

The Burgos basin, which extends through the northern states of Nuevo León, Tamaulipas and Coahuila, holds huge reserves of conventional gas, which began to be tapped in the past decade.

Since 2011, PEMEX has drilled at least six wells for shale gas in the states of Nuevo León and Coahuila. It is also preparing for further exploration in the southeastern state of Veracruz.

The company has identified five regions with potential unconventional gas resources from the north of Veracruz to Chihuahua, on the U.S. border.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) ranks Mexico sixth in the world for technically recoverable gas, behind China, Argentina, Algeria, the United States and Canada, based on examination of 137 deposits in 42 countries.

The recovery of shale gas requires enormous quantities of water and a broad range of chemicals. The process generates large amounts of waste fluids, which contain dissolved chemicals and other contaminants that require treatment before recycling or disposal, according to the environmental watchdog Greenpeace.

The study “Sismicidad en el estado de Nuevo León”, published in January on seismic activity in that state, concluded that the quakes in northeast Mexico are associated with both natural structures and human actions that modify the rock layer and the pressure in the fluids near the surface.

The report, by academics at the Civil Engineering Faculty of the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, attributes several earthquakes that have occurred since 2004 to activities such as the extraction of unconventional natural gas in the Burgos basin.

Other factors mentioned by the study are the overexploitation of aquifers by potato producers along the border between Coahuila and Nuevo León and barite mining in Nuevo León.

The total number of water wells drilled in the basin has risen from just under 5,000 in 2004 to 7,000 today.

A study on the environmental impact of the Poza Rica Altamira y Aceite Terciario del Golfo 2013-2035 regional oil project, which extends across the states of Veracruz, Hidalgo (in the centre) and Puebla (in the south), anticipates a rise in demand for water for fracking in the north of the country, where water is scarce.

The 844-page document, to which IPS had access, was sent by Pemex to the environment ministry for approval on Mar. 10, and enumerates projected works like the construction of roads and installation of large steel water storage tanks.

The study states that over 12,700 cubic metres of water are needed for every 10 multi-stage fracking jobs.

It also estimates that Mexico’s natural gas production will reach 11.47 billion cubic feet a day by 2026, which would come from the higher levels of shale gas production at the Eagle Ford and La Casita deposits stretching across Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas.

By 2026, non-associated natural gas will represent 55 percent of total gas production. The rest will come from unconventional deposits in the north of the country, whose production is projected to grow at a rate of 8.6 percent per year up to then.

Production of unconventional gas is expected to be in the hands of private companies, since the energy reform approved in December opened up the oil and electric industry to foreign investment.

Studies carried out in the United States have also attributed earthquakes in that country to fracking-linked wastewater injection

U.S. Geological Survey scientists have found that in some areas, an increase in seismic activity has coincided with the injection of wastewater in deep disposal wells.

“Earthquakes will increase as a result of the higher-scale shale gas production. The government is misguided. Fracking should be banned,” de la Garza argued.

A gas drilling installation on the Marcellus Shale. It extends deep underground from Ohio and West Virginia northeast into Pennsylvania and southern New York. Credit: Bigstock

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jan 21 2014 (IPS)

A controversial new certification process that could cover a significant portion of the U.S. oil-and-gas “fracking” industry began accepting applications on Tuesday, indicating the formal start of an initiative that has the backing of some key industry players and some environmentalists – but by no means all of either.

In recent years, the Centre for Sustainable Shale Development (CSSD), a non-profit based in Philadelphia, has been meeting with green groups, regulators and philanthropic foundations, as well as with major oil and gas producers with interests in a major petroleum-rich rock formation in the eastern part of the United States, known as the Marcellus Shale or Appalachian Basin."You can’t just say we’re giving in to the industry, and you can’t say the industry is ducking its responsibilities." -- Davitt Woodwell

The new certification process revolves around 15 performance standards aimed at mitigating against air and water pollution from the use of new technologies – known broadly as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” – that have upturned the U.S. energy market. While this has resulted particularly in a glut of natural gas, it has also led to a spectrum of environmental and health concerns.

Yet these technologies have proven so adept at obtaining previously hard-to-access gas formations that other countries are now moving quickly to use them.

“One of the most surprising and enjoyable parts of this launch has been the interest outside of the basin this has received,” Andrew Place, the CSSD’s interim executive director, told IPS during a press call Tuesday.

“While we were careful to build this process around the Appalachian Basin, the model, its collaborative nature, the certification and the robust assurance of its standards are scalable across other basins in North America and globally.”

Place says his office has already received calls from around the world expressing interest in the new CSSD certification process, from Brazil, China, Kazakhstan, Europe and other countries.

“They’re all interested in the diverse voices that built this collaborative effort, and are looking at this as a model for other basins and globally,” he says.

“The public conversation has been maturing in such a way as to get away from the polarisation and sensitivity that this issue has [taken on]. It’s absolutely fundamental that you need to have broad social discourse on these questions.”

Sustainable extraction

Founding members of the CSSD include major industry players (Shell, Chevron and others), a prominent green group (the Environmental Defense Fund), as well as local groups. While four oil and gas companies have signed onto the new protocol, many others have thus far declined, though Place says conversations with other companies are progressing.

For now, those that are a part of the initiative are expected to be among the first to start the certification process, which is slated to take about six months and will be overseen by an external auditor. Any companies that fail to pass the full certification process will be given a timeframe within which they will need to come into compliance, and all auditing processes are intended to result in significant documentation available to the public.

“We look forward to entering into the CSSD verification and certification process,” Paul Goodfellow, a vice president for Shell, told IPS.

“As a founding member of CSSD, we are proud of the achievements of this new organisation and look forward to other operators in the region seeing value in this approach and we hope our experience will encourage other operators to seek CSSD certification as well.”

Meanwhile much criticism remains around the industry’s response to fracking concerns. Local communities have complained of significant health impacts from hydraulic fracturing in their vicinities, particularly due to contaminated water tables.

Yet thus far major companies have downplayed or rejected outright such allegations. Even while fracking techniques involve the injecting of a cocktail of chemicals into deep underground rock formations, U.S. law does not require that these chemicals are disclosed to the public.

In some areas, the fracking boom has led to divisive fights within communities, as well as between communities and companies. In December, the Supreme Court in the state of Pennsylvania – a key area of the Marcellus Shale – struck down what was widely seen as an industry-friendly law allowing oil companies to engage in hydraulic fracturing even if local communities didn’t want them there.

“Our position all along has been that there are costs and benefits to this energy development. Because we all want to use energy, as it goes forward you have to push the envelope,” Davitt Woodwell, executive vice-president with the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, a coordinating organisation working on green issues in the state and a founding member of the CSSD, told IPS.

“In my view the resulting process is one that should be considered in other areas – the process of developing these standards and the certification is very defensible. You can’t just say we’re giving in to the industry, and you can’t say the industry is ducking its responsibilities, because all of this is meant to go beyond what they’re currently required to be doing.”

Yet others continue to question whether hydraulic fracturing – or any fossil fuel extraction – can ever be “sustainable”. Critics also question how much good any voluntary certification process can do, even one, like the CSSD, that imposes stricter requirements than either current state or federal regulations.

“While voluntary programmes like that of the Centre for Sustainable Shale Development have the potential to help raise standards for companies that participate, they do not eliminate the dire need for legally binding, enforceable federal and state rules that apply to every oil and gas company engaged in fracking, across the board,” Kate Kiely, a spokesperson for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), told IPS.

“If the oil and gas industry wants to get serious about protecting people and communities, it must stop fighting these at every turn.”

Kiely also noted that much will depend on the broader reaction among the oil and gas industry.

“We’ll be watching companies to see if they step up and participate,” she says. “And we’ll continue encouraging the oil and gas industry to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to best practices like these, and not only adhere to them voluntarily but support getting them on the books so that everyone has to play by the same rules.”

Bird covered with oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Credit: Susan Keith/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Dec 31 2013 (IPS)

The Terra 123 oil and gas well in the southeastern Mexican state of Tabasco was in flames since late October, just 1.5 km from a community of 1,500 Oxiacaque indigenous villagers, who were never evacuated.

The gas leak, which Pemex only managed to get under control on Dec. 21, caused irreversible damage, said Hugo Ireta, an activist with the Santo Tomás Ecological Association, dedicated to working with local populations in Tabasco that have suffered environmental, health and economic impacts of the state-run oil company’s operations.

The reform of articles 25, 27 and 28 of the constitution, approved by Congress in December, paved the way for private national and foreign investment in the oil industry.

The government will now be able to grant private companies permits for prospecting and drilling – a mechanism used in several countries of Latin America, such as Argentina, Ecuador and Peru, where conflicts with local communities are frequent.

“If it has been difficult with Pemex, with the private companies it’s going to be sheer anarchy; the companies are going to be in paradise. Nigeria has serious problems, and the same thing is going to happen to us,” Ireta told IPS, alluding to the armed groups that siphon oil from pipelines to sell on the black market in that West African country.

The Association and local populations affected in Tabasco will file legal charges against Pemex for damage to property in 2014.

An analysis of samples taken in May, August and September for the future lawsuit found lead, cadmium and aluminium in the water at the Chilapa drinking water plant, which operates in the Tabasco municipality of Centla and serves 21 communities.

Residents of the villages of Cunduacán and Huimanguillo brought a collective lawsuit against Pemex in June.

There is oil activity in 13 of the 17 Tabasco municipalities, where daily output amounts to 500,000 barrels per day.

The number of oil spills has been on the rise since 2008. Between 2000 and 2012 more than 26,000 barrels of oil were spilled in Veracruz, and more than 28,000 in Tabasco, according to the government’s National Hydrocarbons Commission.
Hidalgo in the east and Puebla in the southeast, as well as the roads leading to Mexico City, are also vulnerable to damage caused by the oil industry.

The industry releases into the environment heavy metals, ozone, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, volatile organic compounds, hydrogen, hydrogen sulfide, salts, ammonium, cadmium and acids.

“The communities have fought for reparations and Pemex says there has been no damage, even though the impact has been documented,” Ireta said. “The environmental problems generate social problems, and the authorities aren’t responding to society’s demand for a healthy environment.”

Now that Mexico has opened up its oil industry to private foreign capital, there is a risk that these kinds of problems will mushroom, while pressure on water, large amounts of which are needed to extract shale gas, will mount.

“The government does not have the technical or human capacity to stand up to transnational corporations,” said Waldo Carrillo, a veterinarian who raises livestock and hunts white-tail deer on his ranch in Piedras Negras, in the northern state of Coahuila. “The populace has no idea about what shale gas is or the impacts of extracting it.”

In that area lies the Cuenca de Burgos, a gas deposit that also extends to the states of Nuevo León and Tamaulipas, and which includes shale gas.

“What we want is to inform society from another perspective. We want to warn people of the risks,” said Carrillo, one of the founders of the environmental organisation Amigos del Río San Rodrigo, which is fighting to preserve the ecosystem of the San Rodrigo river.

“The government talks about jobs, investment and growth, but it isn’t seeing things from that other side. It basically has an optimistic discourse,” he said.

The state-run Mexican Petroleum Institute acknowledges that the public has a negative image of shale gas, which it attributes to “limited or poorly handled information.”

Since 2011, PEMEX has drilled at least six wells for shale gas in the northern states of Nuevo León and Coahuila. And it is preparing for further exploration in the southeastern state of Veracruz. It also plans to drill 20 wells by 2016, with an investment of over two billion dollars. Foreign oil companies have their eyes on the new wells.

Enormous quantities of water and a broad range of chemicals are required in the hydraulic fracturing or fracking process used to extract shale gas.

In Coahuila, water is not abundant. In 2010 the state suffered an intense drought. The groundwater recharge volume is 1.6 billion cubic metres per year, but groundwater consumption is 1.9 billion cubic metres per year, according to the state government.

In nine of the 28 aquifers in Coahuila extraction exceeds recharge, the National Water Commission reported.

“People need more information,” said Carrillo, whose organisation is preparing an intense awareness-raising campaign on shale gas and fracking for 2014.

Fifty Greenpeace activists were arrested on Dec. 9 during a symbolic action of "digging for gold" in front of the Romanian parliament. Credit: Courtesy of Greenpeace Romania

By Claudia Ciobanu
BUCHAREST, Dec 10 2013 (IPS)

Authorities in Romania have been attempting to bulldoze through public opposition to push through controversial extractive projects such as gold mining at Rosia Montana and shale gas drilling at Pungesti.

However, amendments to the national mining law, which would have given Rosia Montana Gold Corporation extraordinary powers to implement its project to build Europe’s biggest gold mine in the Apuseni mountains, failed to be passed by the Romanian parliament Dec. 10 mainly because of a lack of quorum.

Tuesday’s vote was part of a long-term strategy by the Romanian government to give the project a green light despite public opposition and legal objections.

While the parliament voted, hundreds of protesters occupied the headquarters of the ombudsman in Bucharest and camped outside the offices of political parties in the western city of Cluj.

If the law had been adopted, projects involving the extraction and processing of mineral resources could have been declared “of exceptional public interest” allowing project promoters to receive extraordinary powers, such as the right to conduct expropriations, skip permitting procedures for working on archaeological sites, and be reissued permits within 60 days if they were cancelled by courts.

The new law represented a means for the authorities to push the Rosia Montana project – and potentially others like it – in a less than transparent manner after a previous attempt to give special powers to Gold Corporation had been dropped due to public pressure.

In August, the Romanian government led by Social Democratic Prime Minister Victor Ponta proposed a draft law that declared the Rosia Montana gold project one “of national interest” and gave Gold Corporation extraordinary powers – expropriations, automatic reissuing of permits, etc.

The draft law sparked massive protests in Romania starting Sept. 1, with tens of thousands taking to the streets for weeks in a row across the country.

Faced with such discontent, the special parliamentary commission analysing the Rosia Montana law rejected the text in November, arguing that the project would be illegal on multiple counts.

In appearance, the decision by the special commission meant the project had been rejected.

Yet as the commission announced its conclusions, the Romanian parliament – dominated by Ponta’s party – was preparing amendments to the mining law which meant potentially giving all mining companies the same controversial extraordinary powers intended to be granted to Gold Corporation.

The political bet was that the amended mining law would be passed under the radar, as the text did not single out Rosia Montana and some of the public thought the project dead with the rejection of the first law.

It was only on Monday Dec. 9 that the public learned that the mining law would be voted on by parliament the next day. The full text of the new law was not available to the public at the time of the Tuesday Dec. 10 vote.

On Monday, the mining law was debated by parliamentary commissions. According to Stefania Simion, a lawyer who has been working for years on the Rosia Montana case and who observed the proceedings, most of the parliamentarians did not have a chance to study the amendments and there was virtually no debate.

In the Rosia Montana case, Romanian authorities are using secrecy and legal artifice to try to push through a project facing significant public opposition.

In the case of drilling for shale gas at Pungesti, in the eastern county of Vaslui, they are relying instead on policing.

During the months of battle over Rosia Montana, at the other end of the country a new campaign was born: in October, as U.S. energy giant Chevron was preparing to start exploratory works for shale gas in Pungesti, locals mobilised to stop the company’s operations. They set up a camp next to the land where Chevron was preparing to install exploratory drills and tried to block access by machinery to the site.

The villagers, mostly farmers, were worried about the impacts that fracking – hydraulic fracturing, the technique used to extract natural gas from shale – on a perimeter inside their village could have on their lands and water. Some told the Romanian media they had seen movies about the negative effects of fracking in U.S. communities.

Opposition to shale gas exploration – albeit not massive – has grown gradually in Romania over the past two years as successive governments gave exploration permits to several companies; rejecting fracking was one of the themes brought up by protesters during the January 2012 anti-austerity protests and this year’s Rosia Montana demonstrations.

When locals in Pungesti started protesting against Chevron in October, anti-Rosia Montana activists were already mobilised in major cities and ready to offer some support.

The villagers’ attempts to block Chevron operations and the police response were broadcast live on the internet from the early days. The national media also reported on Pungesti, after being criticised for failing to properly cover the anti-Rosia Montana mobilisation.

In their turn having learned from the Rosia Montana case, Romanian authorities responded decisively from the start to prevent the opposition from escalating. For weeks now, the hundreds of villagers protesting at Pungesti are outnumbered by military police deployed on the ground. Tens of people have been arrested. Protesters complain of police brutality and systematic harassment.

“As I camped at Pungesti last Friday, I saw the police attacking people, I witnessed at least four people who had to be saved by the crowds from police abuse,” retired engineer Gherghina Vladescu told IPS.

Responding to the accusations of police brutality in Pungesti, Romania’s minister of interior, Radu Stroe, told the national media Dec. 8: “Others were violent too, they broke down fences…Everyone is free to protest in this country as long as they do it peacefully.”

The minister was referring to the protesters’ tearing down Dec. 7 of a wire fence protecting the area for which Chevron was granted the exploration permit.

In November, villagers from Pungesti submitted an official complaint to the National Anti-Corruption Agency in which they accuse the mayor of Pungesti, who leased land to Chevron, of obtaining property rights over it through an illegal land exchange.

Since protests began at Pungesti, Chevron has suspended operations repeatedly saying that it “is committed to having constructive and positive relations with communities where it conducts operations”. Each time, it resumed works; this month, it filed criminal complaints against villagers for destruction of property.

On Dec. 8., Romanian authorities declared Pungesti “a special public safety zone”. This was needed to justify the ongoing police practices of checking all cars coming into Pungesti, keeping guard outside homes, ID-ing people at will and removing protesters from the site.

Claudiu Craciun, one of the prominent figures in the Rosia Montana and shale gas protest movements, said the situation in Pungesti brought to mind a dystopian future: “Imagine for a second a country where hundreds of industrial perimeters are permanently guarded by tens of thousands of police and private contractors.”

Resistance will continue, he said, adding, “The more the government tries to appear in charge of things, the weaker it is. Legitimacy and the use of force are in an inverse proportionality relation to one another.”

Quiet Karoo towns could be changed forever should gas exploration go ahead. Credit: Gavin du Venage/IPS

By Gavin du Venage
KAROO, South Africa, Nov 25 2013 (IPS)

To the casual passer-by, Petrus Kabaliso and his wife Cynthia present a disarmingly rustic sight, seated as they are under the shade of a date palm at a truck stop in the scorching Karoo desert, in South Africa’s Northern Cape province, a battered umbrella held jauntily over their heads.

“We find it very hard to live here,” Petrus, 59, tells IPS. “We find old metal, and sometimes the trucks that stop here leave bottles in the rubbish. We can change this for money, and buy pap [maize meal porridge] and sugar.”

Colesburg is more prosperous than many little Karoo towns. Trucks and cars ferrying people from up country to the coast make regular use of it as a stopover. Bed-and-breakfasts line the streets, with vacancy signs on display. But its wealth is relative: like most towns in the Karoo, the very lack of economic prospects is what has kept it away from the attention of developers.

But all this could change. There are plans to exploit potentially vast shale gas reserves under the earth here through hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

According to a study by financial research organisation Econometrix on behalf of energy multinational Shell, up to 480 trillion cubic feet of gas is available. To put this into context, Mossgas – the gas-to-liquids refinery situated on South Africa’s south coast – has provided five percent of the country’s fuel needs over the last 20 years using only one trillion cubic feet over this time, according to PetroSA, the refinery’s operators.

According to Econometrix, to exploit just 10 percent of the gas will create 700,000 new jobs.

But it has generated substantial controversy, with much of the debate focussing on how it will alter the Karoo landscape, some 400,000 square kilometres in central South Africa, which many believe should be left unspoiled.

“It will be better for all of us,” Ricardo Josephs, a petrol pump attendant in the picturesque town of Graaf Reinette, two hours from Colesburg, tells IPS. “Creating new jobs will mean my friends and family can come home. Everybody here is losing people who move to Cape Town or Jo’burg looking for work. Our people are all over and they don’t come back.”

Josephs concedes that the industrialisation of the Karoo may change its nature. “It will be a problem for the rich guys, the farm guys. They don’t want it to change. But for me, and the guys in the street, it will mean more jobs and better pay.”

Around 63 percent of the people in the Karoo live on or below the poverty line, Professor Anthony Leiman, an environmental economist at the University of Cape Town, tells IPS. “The finding of gas is like the discovery of gold all over again. It will profoundly change the future of the country.”

He notes that such large resources will inevitably disrupt life in the Karoo. In North Dakota, a sparsely-populated state of the United States, the discovery of large-scale gas reservoirs has turned life in many small towns upside down. The flood of male gas workers has seen towns swell to 10 times their population, and a rise in social problems from drug abuse to prostitution.

So far, much of the criticism has focused on possible environmental contamination, particularly of the Karoo’s scarce groundwater. The fracking process involves pumping thousands of litres into fissures kilometres below the ground. This fractures the rock, allowing gas to seep into a central well that carries it to the surface. In the U.S., incidents of badly prepared wells have led to groundwater contamination.

But Leiman dismisses this as a significant threat. “Poverty is a far greater hazard to the environment than fracking.”

Not so, counters the Treasure the Karoo Action Group (TKAG), the main lobbyist organisation campaigning against the extraction of shale gas. The organisation claims the long-term consequences, particularly water pollution, will fall hardest on the poor.

Up to 20 million litres of water are needed per well in the fracturing process, says TKAG, which will put the gas companies in competition with locals for an already scarce resource.

A bigger issue, say opponents of the process, is possible pollution of the water table. The water injected into underground wells is laced with chemicals to aid the process. This, say critics of the technology, risks contaminating existing ground water reserves. Elsewhere in the world contamination has led to illnesses in humans and cattle, especially due to BTEX chemicals – a group of chemicals derived from petroleum – known for causing endocrine disruption and cancer, says TKAG.

In September, South Africa’s Minister of Water and Environmental Affairs Edna Molewa declared fracking a “controlled activity”, effectively compelling gas companies to obtain a separate licence from her department. This will go some way to controlling water use by companies in the area, but critics are unlikely to be satisfied with this.

The TKAG also takes issue with the social disruption gas extraction will bring. Jeannie le Roux, the TKAG’s director of operations, tells IPS the experience in shale gas rich areas in the U.S. has been severe social disruption, a point Leiman agrees with.

Alcoholism, drug abuse, prostitution and social vices are quick to follow where young men with money, and not a whole lot to spend it on, are found.

“The social impact on a boom town brings lots of problems,” Le Roux says. “And the advantages it brings don’t last. Mining is a boom-bust activity. When the boom ends, the area is left with surplus labour.”

Although jobs will doubtlessly be created, Le Roux questions the benefits to affected communities. “History shows that the riches of mining seldom reach the people on the ground. Instead they end up with companies, and when the resource runs out, they depart, leaving the environmental degradation that local communities have to live with.”

It need not be this way, says Chris Nissen, chairman of the Karoo Shale Gas Community Forum, set up to represent the region’s poor in the fracking debate. The organisation was established a year ago to counter what he calls the “voice of the wealthy” who are fighting development of the region, Nissan tells IPS.

Nissen believes that vigorous enforcement of South Africa’s environmental laws can protect the landscape; and proper planning for the influx of migrant workers that could swamp small towns would ensure many potential problems could be averted.

“The Karoo is beautiful, but it is also a very sad place. In winter, you see children walking to school bare without shoes, through the frost.”

Satellite image of the Gulf of San Jorge in Argentina's Patagonia region, rich in shale gas and part of the world's second largest reserve after China, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Credit: IPS/Photostock

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Aug 18 2013 (IPS)

Non-governmental organisations are putting pressure on multilateral financial institutions not to finance production of shale gas by hydraulic fracturing or fracking because of the high environmental costs they say are associated with this method.

“I think it’s terrible: fracking is one of the techniques posing the highest risk to availability of drinking water in the country,” Nathalie Seguin, the coordinator of the Freshwater Action Network in Mexico (FANMEX), which works for water sustainability, told IPS. “These plans make no sense and must be thwarted.”

“Sound scientific research in several parts of the world has clearly shown a high risk of leaching from vertical wells into water tables,” she said.

Fracking is the technique used for large-scale extraction of non-conventional fossil fuels trapped in rocks, like shale gas.

To release the natural gas, huge volumes of water containing toxic chemicals are pumped underground at high pressure, fracturing the shale. The process generates large amounts of waste liquids containing dissolved chemicals and other pollutants that require treatment before disposal.

Timothé Feodoroff, with the Agrarian Justice Programme of the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute (TNI), said “Some international institutions are keen to finance fracking. It’s a real risk” that they will invest in the method.

Feodoroff is a co-author, together with Jennifer Franco and Ana María Rey, of a report published in January titled “Old Story, New Threat: Fracking and the global land grab”, which reveals that “behind the scenes in the worldwide scramble for unconventional gas exploration and extraction are a wide range of public and private transnational, national and institutional actors.”

The actors include technology providers, oil and financial companies, governments, lobbying firms and even academic institutions.

TNI will publish another report in September addressing the financial bubble surrounding shale gas fuelled by banks and private investment firms.

“We found that the money was given by Wall Street firms; there is a lot of speculation around fracking. In the 2007 subprime crisis they did the same. There are a lot of investment banks involved, the speculation isn’t over,” Feodoroff told IPS.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector lending arm of the World Bank, assured IPS it had no plans to grant any loans for hydraulic fracturing.

However, the IFC owns 10 percent of the Agiba Petroleum Company, made up of Egypt’s General Petroleum Corporation, Italy’s Eni SpA and Russia’s Lukoil, which carries out fracking in the “Falak” and “Dorra” fields in the Egyptian desert.

The Inter-American Development Bank, which did not reply to IPS’ request for information about its plans to finance fracking, published a report in December by David Mares titled “The New Energy Landscape: Shale Gas in Latin America”, which is not available to the public.

But another report, “Shale Gas in Latin America: Opportunities and Challenges“, by the same expert, analyses the outlook for shale gas in the region.

“The main issues that will determine which Latin American countries become part of the shale gas revolution revolve around the needs of investors, the state of the environmental debate, and the ability of the state to provide security for exploration and production operations,” says the report, published in July by Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank.

Mares says that development of shale gas resources will vary from country to country, and that financing may come from local sources, foreign direct investment, investment portfolios, and state investment and loans.

Mexico’s state oil company PEMEX has drilled at least six wells in shale rock in this country since 2011 in the northern states of Nuevo León and Coahuila, and the state Mexican Institute of Petroleum (IMP) is preparing for 18 months of geological exploration in the southeastern state of Veracruz at a cost of 245 million dollars.

IMP plans to drill 20 wells by 2016, with an investment of over two billion dollars, and in the next 50 years plans to have 6,500 wells in commercial operation.

The United States’ Energy Information Administration (EIA) ranks Mexico sixth in the world for technically recoverable gas, behind China, Argentina, Algeria, the United States and Canada, based on examination of 137 deposits in 42 countries. Mexico is in eighth position for technically recoverable oil reserves.

NGOs are considering launching an international campaign against the financing of fracking, and are preparing worldwide actions for Global Frackdown Day, to be held Oct. 19.

Seguin said, “The problem is the heavy pressure from private companies and governments for financing these activities.

“It is in the interests of the multilateral financial institutions to lend money. They support infrastructure mega-projects because it is the easiest way to trap countries into debt and to maintain themselves. This financing runs counter to their own environmental and social standards. Why should we exploit shale gas, when it is a major threat?” she asked.

Six organisations have joined together to create the Mexican Alliance Against Fracking, which has not yet decided whether to call for a moratorium or an outright ban on the method in a forthcoming report on the energetic, economic, social and environmental aspects of shale gas.

Feodoroff said, “It’s possible that big banks influence the multilateral agencies. We are warning about corporate power” over their decisions.

The Dutch Rabobank Group, a sustainability-oriented cooperative financial services company specialising in agricultural products and commodities, announced that it would not lend funds for exploration and production of shale gas, a move that experts hope will be imitated by other private institutions.

In his analysis, Mares says “the development of Latin America’s shale gas potential faces significant challenges, and it is not clear that the region will address them successfully.” He warns that Mexico, Argentina and Brazil may face serious problems over shale gas exploitation.

Map depicting United States groundwater aquifers that intersect known shale gas extraction areas (as of May 2011). Credit: Brylie Oxley/cc by 3.0

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 2013 (IPS)

New signs have emerged in recent days which indicate that extreme measures are being taken in order to suppress evidence of the pernicious effects of the energy extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”.

At the beginning of this month, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette revealed that, in 2011, a Pennsylvania family reached an unprecedented settlement with an energy company fracking near their property. It included gag orders on the family’s two children, ages seven and 10 at the time of the settlement, which prohibit them from, at any point in their lives, discussing their experiences living near a fracking site.“Advertising and lobbying are deployed by the energy companies to confuse the public, and meanwhile anyone who has suffered from their practices gets a muzzle.” -- Steve Horn of DeSmog Blog

This revelation came only days after the Los Angeles Times reported that it had obtained a set of government-censored Powerpoint slides related to a study by the Environmental Protection Agency. The slides conclude that fracking was indeed polluting the aquifer in question.

Critics of the controversial extraction method note that these examples are part of an overall cover-up strategy being employed by the oil and gas industry.

“The industry uses its influence in DC to shut down studies by the EPA, while simultaneously using the legal system as a weapon to silence its victims,” Brendan Demelle, executive director of DeSmog Blog, the organisation which obtained the Powerpoint slides and made them public, told IPS.

The concluding slide states that “[m]ethane is is at significantly higher concentrations in the aquifers after gas drilling.” Further, it asserts this methane, along with other gases released during extraction “apparently cause[s] significant damage to the water quality” of surrounding aquifers.

Dispersed methane is the most notorious pollutant associated with fracking. It is a colourless and odourless gas which, when concentrated highly enough, can spoil water sources, and in some cases make them flammable.

Sowing confusion

According to critics, the pernicious effects of fracking are being obfuscated by powerful companies who profit from popular ignorance.

“Advertising and lobbying are deployed by the energy companies to confuse the public, and meanwhile anyone who has suffered from their practices gets a muzzle,” Steve Horn, a research fellow at DeSmog Blog, told IPS.

“They use every avenue of our broken democracy to their advantage,” Horn added, referring to the energy companies.

The DeSmog Blog activists agree that power and wealth allow the fossil fuel industry to “call the shots” when it comes to fracking.

They note that because of this advantage companies can afford “endless legal fees”, a luxury which is out of reach for ordinary citizens who may want to challenge them in court.

“It is rare for cases to reach the stage of a full-blown trial. Normally families and individuals wind up settling for less than what they want, because the alternative would be much worse for them,” says DeMelle.

In the case of the Hallowich family, whose children are prohibited for the rest of their lives from uttering certain “illegal words” related to fracking, the sum of the settlement was 750,000 dollars.

Psychological warfare

For anti-fracking activists, the Hallowich case is only “the tip of the iceberg”.

“The muzzling of a seven-year-old is just an egregious example of the systematic corruption which the oil industry has spent years orchestrating,” Horn told IPS.

Fossil fuel companies, according to DeSmog Blog, have gone as far as to hire military specialists with expertise in psychological warfare to deal with residents who try to resist nearby fracking.

Horn says he attended a conference in Texas where one energy company spokesperson admitted to this, saying “we are dealing with an insurgency” and recommending industry members read the U.S. Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency.

“Rather than taking responsible steps to address community concerns about the inherent risks of fracking,” says DeMelle, “the industry is taking an adversarial approach, treating concerned citizens as an ‘insurgency’ and using military warfare tactics and personnel to intimidate U.S. citizens in their own backyards.

“It’s unethical, despicable behaviour, and Congress should investigate whether the oil industry is in violation of federal law,” he added in a statement given to IPS.

Other cases of the industry suppressing government studies of fracking effects include one which took place in a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas. There, an emergency order was issued by the EPA after a man complained of his water supply bubbling, only to be rescinded a year later after the oil company involved threatened the agency.

In the end, no government action was taken, and the man who complained was left to pay a thousand dollars per month to have access to clean water.

Another EPA study conducted in Wyoming connected fracking to water contamination, but again industry manipulation led to no further action being taken, despite some of the contamination being carcinogenic.

The EPA was originally slated to release a comprehensive study on the effects of hydraulic fracturing in 2014. The deadline for that report, however, has been pushed back to 2016.

Natural gas extraction methods are extremely controversial in the United States. Above, a shale gas drilling site. Credit: Bigstock

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Jun 14 2013 (IPS)

Energy specialists say that advancements in fossil fuel extraction technologies have sparked a “revolution” in U.S. energy production, especially given radical recent changes in the global energy market and the U.S. role within it.

New extraction methods, such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), have allowed producers to access natural gas and oil (known as “tight” or “unconventional” oil) in recent years that was once inaccessible.

Such access, brought about by technologies developed and still used primarily in the United States, have already changed the country’s approach to producing and consuming energy.

“The tight oil boom holds the potential to free [the United States] from spending literally trillions of dollars to buy petroleum products from the politically unstable areas of the world,” Pete Domenici, a former senator and currently a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Centre (BPC), a Washington think tank that hosted a discussion on energy Wednesday.

“Tight oil has truly been an unexpected gift to our nation and to our hemisphere.”

Propelled by the boom in U.S. production, North America is today the fastest-growing region in the world in terms of fossil fuel production. As Daniel Yergin, an energy scholar, pointed out during Wednesday’s conference, the United States produces 43 percent more oil than it did in 2008 – the equivalent, he said, of having another major producing country enter the market.

A recent study by CitiGroup indicates if this growth continues, real gross domestic product (GDP) in the United States could increase by 3 percent, a bump that analysts say would help lower the country’s deficit and create jobs."The exploitation of these new, extreme sources of carbon-based energy is moving us in the wrong direction."
-- Jamie Henn

It would also give the United States more flexibility in dealing more harshly with oil-producing adversaries, such as Iran.

A new role in the global energy market

Yet while many had hoped that increased U.S. production would significantly reduce prices both in the United States and internationally, others believe it will have the opposite result.

Participants in Wednesday’s discussion generally agreed that the United States will likely become an exporter of both liquefied natural gas (LNG) and even crude oil in the near future. Like other exporters, it will prefer higher world energy prices.

“The U.S. no longer looks at prices purely from a consumer’s perspective,” Katherine Spector, head of commodities strategy at CIBC World Markets, said Thursday. Instead, she suggested that the country now looks for “goldilocks” prices: those that are neither too high nor too low.

Her statement corroborates analysis, such as that of Public Citizen‘s Energy Program, a non-profit public advocacy group, which concluded that “because oil prices are priced globally, the domestic oil boom can’t – and won’t – provide relief for consumers”.

Opponents of U.S. LNG exports have sought to prevent them, but in recent months two deals were reached with the Obama administration to allow U.S. companies to liquefy and export gas.

Along with what Domenici called a formerly “heretical” notion that the United States may export light crude oil, the deals represent a drastic shift from the country’s current model, under which its fossil fuel-related exports are almost exclusively finished petroleum products.

Holding back alternatives

Meanwhile, environmentalists are increasingly warning that the new technologies could worsen global warming, despite widespread suggestions that natural gas burns more cleanly than coal, for example.

“We are already seeing the devastating effects of global warming due to an overuse of fossil fuels,” Jamie Henn, communications director for the environmental advocacy group 350.org, told IPS. “The idea should be to de-carbonise the economy, but the exploitation of these new, extreme sources of carbon-based energy is moving us in the wrong direction.”

Henn also pointed to an additional danger of non-U.S. companies, with less advanced technologies, trying to replicate these extraction methods and potentially leading to environmental disaster. Leaking methane from fracking operations is one of the most potent climate change-causing greenhouse gases.

While Henn would like to see the global energy market transition away from fossil fuels and towards alternative energy sources, he said the primary obstacle is money.

“We already have access to cleaner, renewable energy sources,” he says. “But the transition to these sources is being held back because more profit can be made by exploiting these new, extreme sources of fossil fuels.”

In order for the North American production boom to continue, experts who spoke Wednesday said investments in controversial infrastructure projects, such as the Canada-United States Keystone XL pipeline and LNG export terminal facilities, will have to be realised.

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was one of the speakers in favour of these investments.

The senator pointed to Canada’s “abundant” supply of heavy crude oil, which she said is well-suited for the Gulf of Mexico refineries, and a problem of “too much oil and too few pipelines”, thus advocating for the controversial Keystone pipeline, which is currently pending U.S government approval.

She also stated her support for investment in U.S. capabilities to liquefy and export its natural gas surplus, saying it could lead to a “golden age of gas”.

Objections to the Keystone project have come to define the environmental movement in Washington over the past year, but the proposed LNG export terminal facilities also raise important environmental concerns.

Without strong government policies regulating emissions from natural gas production and use, the likely results of U.S. LNG exports would be “an increase in domestic greenhouse gas emissions, and questionable, if any, benefits to the global climate”, James Bradbury, a senior associate on climate and energy issues at the World Resource Institute, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

Furthermore, facilities that liquefy natural gas consume substantial electricity, while public debate has barely begun here on how energy prices would change once significant U.S. natural gas becomes available on the global market.

“Any amount of LNG exports would put upward pressure on U.S. natural gas prices,” Bradbury says. “This would make natural gas less competitive in U.S. electricity markets, likely causing a shift toward greater coal-fired power generation. This would cause an increase in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.”

Satellite image of San Jorge Gulf, in the Patagonia region of Argentina, where there are huge reserves of shale gas. Credit: IPS/Photostock

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Apr 30 2013 (IPS)

The enthusiasm of the government and oil and gas companies over Argentina’s unconventional fuel potential has come up against fierce opposition from communities living near the country’s shale gas reserves and environmental organisations.

Indigenous communities, other nearby residents, academics and environmentalists are deeply concerned about the risks of disastrous environmental damage entailed by the hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” required to extract the country’s significant reserves of shale gas.

Unlike the gas and oil that can be obtained by merely extracting them from deposits where they are found in a more or less pure state, the gas and oil trapped in shale, slate and tar sands, among other formations, require more costly and contaminating techniques.

To extract the gas, the shale rock is fractured by injecting huge amounts of water and chemicals at extremely high pressure through horizontal perforations up to several kilometres in length.

Fracking is a highly controversial issue in the United States and Canada and has been banned in France and Bulgaria, but is moving forward in Argentina, which is believed to offer enormous shale gas potential.

Diego di Risio of the Oil Observatory of the South told Tierramérica* that “the environmental impact of unconventional technologies is far greater than that of traditional technologies,” for reasons that include the large areas affected and the massive volumes of water used.

Other organisations, such as the Ecosur Foundation and Plataforma 2012, warn of the danger of the expansion of this type of oil and gas drilling without serious debate regarding its risks.

Last year, the Oil Observatory published a study, “Fractura expuesta. Yacimientos no convencionales en Argentina” (Fracture Exposed: Unconventional deposits in Argentina), which describes the use of chemical products during the fracking process that could contaminate groundwater and aquifers.

Moreover, the exploitation of unconventional reserves contributes to further postponing debate on “the need for the diversification of the energy mix” in Argentina, which currently depends on oil and gas for almost 90 percent of its energy needs, and is expanding the hydrocarbon frontier into agricultural areas, the study warns.

The 2013-2017 Strategic Management Plan of YPF, the oil and gas company fully nationalised in 2012 by the government of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, states that Argentina is the country with the third greatest potential for unconventional gas, after China and the United States.

In fact, the first multi-fracture horizontal well in South America was drilled in 2008 in the territory of a Mapuche indigenous community in the southern Argentine province of Neuquén, without the consent of the local inhabitants.

The company heading up the operation is Apache, a U.S.-based corporation that has acquired huge tracts of land in the area. The community of Gelay Ko (“without water”, in the Mapuche language) is located over the Zapala aquifer and is made up of around 40 families. Their homes are surrounded by wells drilled by Apache for shale gas extraction.

In 2012, after filing a legal suit over the company’s failure to consult with the community and prepare an environmental impact assessment, a group of community members occupied Apache’s installations, but their protest was quashed and they were slapped with a countersuit.

The protest was headed up by 30-year-old lonko (traditional chief) Cristina Lincopán, who died a month ago from pulmonary hypertension, reported Leftraru Nawel of the Neuquén Mapuche Confederation.

“On top of the death of animals, which was already happening when there was only conventional drilling, now we are seeing impacts on the health of the population, because they burn gas there, very close to the people’s homes,” Nawel told Tierramérica.

In Gelay Ko as in other Mapuche communities in Neuquén, water is becoming increasingly scarce and saline, to the point where the authorities are now distributing bottled water, he explained. But Apache uses millions of litres of the vital resource for fracking.

“People are worried about the contamination of the Zapala aquifer, which has been declared a natural reserve by the municipality, because the possible extent of contamination is still not known,” said Nawel.

“The problem is not just the amount of water they use – and we don’t know where they get it from. They add chemical products and no one knows what they are because that information is protected under patent,” he said.

“No one knows what they do with the waste water, either. In the United States they re-inject it into inactive wells, without sealing them or anything. In Neuquén there is no technology for the treatment of this type of waste,” he added.

Apache’s operations are located in the vast shale field of Vaca Muerta, which covers two thirds of Neuquén and part of neighbouring provinces, and is considered to contain Argentina’s largest unconventional gas reserves.

In the last two years, fracking technology has also advanced in other regions of the country. In February, the president inaugurated new exploration activities in the southern province of Chubut.

In this province of scarce water resources, attorney Silvia de los Santos, on behalf of local indigenous communities, filed for an injunction against exploration in Aguada Bandera, located 200 kilometres from the city of Comodoro Rivadavia, and in D-129, on the coast of San Jorge Gulf.

De los Santos filed for the injunction on the eve of the initiation of these exploration activities, on the grounds of irregularities in the permit application and environmental impact assessment. But she did not succeed in stopping them.

YPF president Miguel Galuccio announced that San Jorge could represent the most important source of shale gas after Vaca Muerta. In both cases, these are conventional gas fields that also contain unconventional reserves.

In the meantime, areas where there has been no oil and gas industry activity until now are also being eyed as potential sites for exploration and extraction, such as Los Monos in the northwestern province of Salta and another field in the northeastern province of Entre Ríos.

Beneath the soil of Entre Ríos and other provinces on the Argentine coast, as well as part of Uruguay, Paraguay and southern Brazil, lies the Guaraní aquifer, an enormous freshwater reserve that supplies drinking water to a large number of cities in the region.

“Entre Ríos did not form part of Argentina’s oil and gas map, but with this new technology there has been a shift towards this area, and now environmental organisations are calling for some kind of moratorium or prohibition on fracking there,” said Di Risio.

In the southern province of Río Negro, environmentalists and local residents have been meeting to exchange information and take action against the expansion of fracking in the region of Allen, where Apache is also operating.

The drilling is being done very close to fruit tree orchards, say local farmers, who are concerned over the impacts and the lack of control over the disposal of the liquid waste generated by these operations.

In the Río Negro municipality of Cinco Saltos, an ordinance was passed to ban fracking, but this was vetoed a short time later by the municipal government, and the legislative assembly subsequently upheld the veto.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

Shale gas well in U.S. state of Pennsylvania Credit: Jeremy Buckingham MLC/CC BY 2.0

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Apr 18 2013 (IPS)

Mexico plans to expand shale gas exploration this year, but it could run into a shortage of water, which is essential to hydraulic fracturing or fracking, the method used to capture natural gas from shale rocks.

“In Mexico there isn’t enough water. Where are they going to get it to extract shale gas?” Professor Miriam Grunstein at the Centre for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) remarked in an interview with IPS.

She is opposed to the involvement of PEMEX, Mexico’s state-run oil company, in fracking, and recommends that it instead focus on higher priority sectors.

In 2012, a lengthy drought especially affected a large part of central and northern Mexico, with a heavy impact on agriculture and livestock, and on living conditions in dozens of rural villages.

And the forecast for this year is not much different.

Since 2011, PEMEX has drilled at least six wells for shale gas in the northern states of Nuevo León and Coahuila. And it is preparing for further exploration in the southeastern state of Veracruz, at a cost of 245 million dollars over the space of 18 months, in conjunction with the Mexican Petroleum Institute (IMP), a state institution.

To obtain shale gas, high pressure is applied in order to pump vast quantities of chemical sludge into layers of shale rock located deep in the earth. This results in the fracturing of the shale and the release of natural gas trapped in the rocks.

Enormous quantities of water and a broad range of chemicals are required. And the process generates large amounts of waste fluids, which contain dissolved chemicals and other contaminants that need treatment before recycling or disposal.

“The environmental impact has to be factored in,” Professor David Enríquez at the private Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM) told IPS. “It is an extremely touchy question, especially when you take into account the lack of water and the environmental problems in this country. Technical studies of all kinds have to be carried out, and the environment should be included in them as the key variable.”

“If that doesn’t happen, shale gas projects should not move ahead,” said Enríquez, who specialises in energy issues.

In a 2011 report, “World Shale Gas Resources: An Initial Assessment of 14 Regions Outside the United States”, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) assessed 48 shale gas basins in 32 countries, including Mexico, and estimated that there were 6,622 trillion cubic feet of shale gas in the United States and the other 32 countries studied.

The study went on to say that “To put this shale gas resource estimate in some perspective, world proven reserves of natural gas as of Jan. 1, 2010 are about 6,609 trillion cubic feet, and world technically recoverable gas resources are roughly 16,000 trillion cubic feet, largely excluding shale gas.”

For Mexico, it calculated 681 TCF – the fourth largest reserves in the world

But PEMEX estimates the country’s shale gas potential at a more conservative 297 TCF.

“The best available practices and technology have to be incorporated to achieve a good profit margin, minimise the use of water, and comply with environmental regulations,” Francisco Barnés, a member of Mexico’s Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE), told IPS. “The environment is fundamental; it doesn’t matter whether or not the project is profitable.”

According to statistics from the regulatory agency, fracking takes 7.5 million to 30 million litres of water per well to release the gas, while a field of 10 wells would need between 25 million and 40 million litres of water.

In deposits like Chicontepec in Veracruz, the biggest oilfield in Mexico, which was discovered in the mid-1970s, PEMEX has used recycled water.

But in its shale gas wells, the company has not clarified where the water comes from or what is being done with the waste.

The National Hydrocarbons Commission (CNH), in charge of technical permits for PEMEX projects, will analyse and approve regulations for fracking this year.

Mexico’s oil giant plans to drill 20 wells by 2016, with a total investment of over two billion dollars. It projects operating 6,500 commercial wells over the next 50 years.

“If there is an environmental impact, why isn’t development curbed?” Grunstein said. “When it comes to large-scale drilling, there is no confidence in the state. It implies a ridiculously high opportunity cost.”

In response to the criticism, some cite the experience of the Center for Sustainable Shale Development (CSSD), an alliance of environmental organisations, academics and oil companies established this year in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, where extensive shale gas development has taken place.

The Center adopted 15 voluntary performance standards for the protection of air quality, water and the climate, a format that could be replicated in Mexico. The scheme includes an independent, third-party evaluation process to certify companies that achieve and maintain these standards

The standards cover aspects such as maximising water recycling, developing groundwater protection plans, closed loop drilling, groundwater monitoring, wastewater disposal, and reducing the toxicity of fracturing fluid.

“There should be an environmental certificate by national and international bodies that evaluate the model used and carry out monitoring,” Enríquez said. “Technical, analytical criticism is needed to tell us, depending on the characteristics of the environment and the market, whether or not it is the moment to develop it in a given area and with specific technology.”

“But I haven’t seen this level of debate happening,” he said.

Barnés proposed fomenting water recycling and desalination of seawater, a costly technique that is plagued by environmental concerns, such as where the residue ends up after the extraction of salt.

“This is what we have to resolve, with heavy environmental regulation,” the official said.

There are 435 desalination plants operating in Mexico. The largest is in the northwest state of Baja California Sur, and has a capacity of 200 litres per second, according to the Mexican Institute of Water Technology (IMTA).

Environmentalists and others here are reacting with concern to a surprise announcement on Monday of a major deal that would see U.S. natural gas exported to the United Kingdom, marking the first time that such sales have been permitted.

The agreement, between the UK energy company Centrica and the U.S.-based Cheniere Energy Partners, would see more than 1.7 million metric tonnes of liquefied natural gas (LNG) per year shipped to the United Kingdom, starting in 2018. The U.K.’s gas supply has been extremely tight this winter, and the new sales would satisfy requirements for around 1.8 million British homes.Increasing demand via exports for a dirty, dangerous process is not something we think is a good idea.

The deal would mark the first time that the U.S. government has allowed any of the country’s booming natural gas production to be sold to state that does not have a free trade agreement with Washington. While 19 other permits have been allowed to countries with such agreements, only one, South Korea, has engaged in any significant U.S. gas imports.

Critics warn that the industry in the U.S. remains too unregulated and that exports will cause a spike in domestic gas prices. In recent months, the debate over exports has become highly divisive.

“We cannot guarantee that drilling occurs safely in the United States, because there is neither the science to justify nor do states enforce what regulations do exist,” Alan Septoff, the Washington-based director of communications for Earthworks, an advocacy group, told IPS. “Increasing demand via exports for a dirty, dangerous process is not something we think is a good idea.”

The Centrica deal comes after the U.S. Department of Energy published a commissioned study that found, among other things, that the negative economic impact of LNG exports on the United States would be negligible. Yet critics say the study failed to look at either environmental or health impacts, while downplaying the effect on poor and middle-class communities.

“We have problems with this study and have called on the Department of Energy to conduct another study that incorporates environmental and health assessments,” Jenny Chang, a campaigner with the Sierra Club, an advocacy group, told IPS.

She notes that some 200,000 people wrote the Department of Energy to criticise the report (the Sierra Club has published an exhaustive study here).

“But now that the department has finished its part of the bargain, there’s nothing stopping them from issuing more permits,” she continues, “even though doing so may not be in the public’s interest.”

Pressing decisions

Centrica is cautioning that the contract still hinges on Cheniere receiving “necessary regulatory approvals”. But according to a statement put out by the company on Monday, British Prime Minister David Cameron is already extending his “warm welcome” to the new deal, stating, “Future gas supplies from the U.S. will help diversify our energy mix and provide British consumers with a new long-term, secure and affordable source of fuel.”

Indeed, although the Centrica deal would be the largest agreement of its kind so far, it is also almost certainly only the beginning of a massive exports push. The Department of Energy reportedly has 21 pending LNG-export permit requests, constituting around 45 percent of the country’s gas production.

Of course, all of this is taking place in the context of a massively altered energy landscape in the United States, which is thought to have more extensive gas resources than any other country. Over the past five years, powered by new extraction techniques known as hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”), U.S. engineers have been able to extricate previously unreachable natural gas, much of it trapped in shale and other geologic formations.

From 2007 to 2012, gas production in the U.S. increased by 25 percent, with dramatic domestic effects. The cost of energy in the country has fallen, with some experts suggesting this helped stabilise the country’s economy following the 2008 international economic crisis.

More controversially, natural gas – which burns cleaner than coal and other petroleum products – has been touted as a “greener” energy solution, helping in part to bring U.S. greenhouse gas emissions down to 1990s-era levels.

Yet critics point to mounting evidence of environmental and public health issues cropping up in local communities near the thousands of wells that have gone into production over the past half-decade. In addition, the methane that tends to seep out of these wells during production is particularly potent in causing climate change.

As the United States has thus far refused to allow any major sales of its new gas reserves, however, the international ramifications of this sea change are only now starting to be understood.

Opponents of the push for exports highlight two main concerns: economics and environmental impact. First, if significant U.S. gas reserves were to enter the international market, the domestic price would almost certainly increase in response.

Second, the hydraulic fracturing industry here remains unusually unregulated, largely because politicians have yet to agree on how to deal with what remains a new – but extremely lucrative – technology. Critics say that politicians still don’t have a handle on either the impact of hydraulic fracturing on groundwater or on the extent that the technique is resulting in increased methane emissions.

In an open letter sent in mid-March to President Barack Obama, Earthworks and the Sierra Club joined with other groups to call for an “open and informed national conversation to test whether [gas exports] are actually in the public interest.” They also stated that, “Deciding whether and how to move forward with LNG exports is among the most pressing environmental and energy policy decisions facing the nation.”

Regulatory progress

In recent days, both regulatory and political processes on this issue have progressed.

On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced the formation of a new advisory council, made up of 31 external experts, that will now formally look into the effects of fracking on drinking water. And on Friday, Senator Ron Wyden announced he was starting work on a new legislative bill that would aim to find common ground on natural gas exports and hydraulic fracturing.

Finally, in a major but polarising new initiative, last week also saw the opening of a new institute that has brought together some environmental groups and some major oil producers, including Chevron and Shell.

The Center for Sustainable Shale Development says it has already established “15 initial performance standards designed to ensure safe and environmentally responsible development” of shale gas, which will be used to offer “independent, third-party certification” of gas wells, including ensuring the use of certain methane-trapping technologies and techniques.

By Kumi Naidoo
LONDON, Mar 11 2013 (IPS)

When the environment changes, smart creatures adapt. And, in the face of a changing climate and changing economics, smart people are backing green energy. In 2011 almost a third of new electricity came from renewable sources. But, just as the first mammals had to contend with a world of dinosaurs, the pioneers of green energy have to contend with a world based on an obsolete carbon-based energy system that refuses to upgrade.

Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace International.
Credit: Courtesy Greenpeace.

Although burning the world’s proven fossil fuel reserves will damage our climate beyond repair the dinosaur corporations who profit from carbon pollution are determined to find more. Shell’s 2012 annual report claims the company is doing its part in “building a better energy future”, but highlights developing oil fields, exploring for oil and gas, and mining oil sands as key activities. That means finding more fossil fuels that we can’t afford to burn, and trying to sell them to customers who, in reality, have or should have better options.

As easily extracted fossil fuels become scarce and global consumption of fossil fuels grows, the dirty energy industry is turning to more and more extreme methods of extraction.

The latest madness is “fracking”: a technique of drilling for gas in which a high pressure cocktail of water and toxic chemicals is used to split open rock formations far below the ground. The unconventional fuel expansion is, in fact, a delaying tactic. Fracking, deepwater drilling and tar sands extraction are dangerous fossil fuel fantasies in which we are supposed to think we can postpone the energy revolution and not move firmly in the direction of renewable energy. This delaying tactic has a massive price associated with it.

Fracking requires huge quantities of water. It also threatens to poison nearby water reserves and cause small earthquakes. It also releases unknown quantities of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

In my own country, South Africa, Shell has been given a licence to explore the possibility of fracking in Karoo, threatening to turn a semi-desert into a total desert. Shell promises jobs and enough energy to power South Africa for years. These are the same promises extractive industries make everywhere they go.

Everywhere they go they do more than extract raw materials. They extract wealth and hope. Just ask the people of Nigeria. Or Venezuela. Or even Canada, where indigenous peoples have seen their rivers poisoned and traditional ways of life destroyed.

If South Africa wants jobs and energy it should withdraw the licence today, and remove all grey area around grid tie-in legislation, beginning with a clear net metering programme that allows for the inclusion of the small to medium renewable energy power producers. A nation blessed with enough sun, wind and waves to power itself has no need to sell its future. Nor to rupture its land for gas!

Fossil fuel companies claim fracking is clean, because burning gas emits less carbon than burning coal. Well, assault isn’t murder, but it’s still a crime. The world doesn’t need more gas to burn. There’s no need to lock emerging economies into nineteenth century technologies. Modern energy supplies are cleaner, cheaper and lack the destructive side effects of ripping up the ground in order to set it on fire.

The push for new extreme dirty energy forms is happening at a time when global carbon dioxide emission growth has been exceeding even the most pessimistic forecasts, and the impacts of climate change are already being felt. Pouring money into new fossil fuel production seems absurd in these conditions. At the same time, the amazing progress in renewable energy that has been achieved in recent years makes it abundantly clear that these destructive projects can be made redundant. We just don’t need dirty energy expansion.

Just as fixed line telephony has been passed over in favour of mobile phones, fossil fueled energy needs to be passed over in favour of modern renewable energy. The kind of domestic electrification needed to end fuel poverty can be delivered to a home by a few solar panels in hours, compared with the wait for a reliable national grid that in many countries has already been going on for decades.

In the absence of a global agreement on greenhouse gas emission reductions, it falls on every government – national and local — and business to implement clean and safe energy solutions, instead of scouring the ends of the earth for more dirty fuel.

And, it falls on every citizen to demand the extinction of the carbon dinosaurs.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

Peter “Pete” Seeger is a 93-year old U.S. folk legend who resides near Wappingers Falls in southern New York. He can be spotted occasionally on the traffic-heavy Route 9, flanked by world peace signs and armed with a banjo.

Activists behind a New York Police Department vehicle at an anti-fracking demonstration in Manhattan, New York City organized by CREDO Action and New Yorkers Against Fracking. The demonstration was aimed at New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who was holding a policy summit in the New York Sheraton across the street. Credit: Adam Welz for CREDO Action/cc by 2.0

Seeger is famous for his protest songs – which tackle topics ranging from U.S. wars abroad to environmental degradation at home.

Last month, Seeger signed a letter – along with hundreds of health professionals and local organisations – addressed to Governor Andrew Cuomo, encouraging him to take into account “any and all public health impacts before deciding whether or not to allow fracking in New York”.

The letter – released to the public on Feb. 27 by Concerned Health Professionals of NY – warned of “public health consequences” that have emerged in neighbouring Pennsylvania, where fracking is allowed.

Formally termed “high pressure hydraulic fracturing”, fracking is a method used to capture natural gas from shale rocks. It requires horizontal drilling deep beneath the earth’s surface, then pressurising fluid to fracture shale rocks, which allows natural gas to escape.

According to the letter, health risks associated with fracking include hazardous air pollutants; improper disposal of radioactive wastewater; and climate-altering methane emissions.

“What they’re finding in Pennsylvania are people with rashes, nosebleeds, people with serious abdominal pain and so on,” said Sandra Steingraber, a distinguished scholar in residence at Ithaca College and founder of Concerned Health Professionals of NY.

“In general, we need better data on all this, and the problem is that fracking got rolled out across the landscape without any advanced health studies being done,” she told IPS.

On Mar. 6, the New York State Assembly voted to extend the moratorium on fracking until 2015, which would delay drilling for two more years and make way for new health assessments to be conducted.

The legislation must now pass through the state Senate and be approved by Cuomo if it is to take hold.

“This is the first time in my knowledge that the oil and gas industry (may be) stopped in its tracks because of unanswered questions about health,” said Steingraber.

U.S. energy trends

The decision in New York came at a time when natural gas is abundant in the U.S., at unprecedented levels, largely due to fracking.

But with increasing awareness of fracking’s potential side effects and the lack of regulations over the industry, a national opposition is growing as well.

“There are a couple of other states that have moratoriums: New Jersey has one, Maryland has one – and North Carolina is developing new rules on fracking,” said Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

“Companies that aren’t highly regulated don’t have to prove anything, and therefore, data is not collected. So we don’t have the type of data (on fracking) that we might for another industry, because it has been so severely under-regulated,” she told IPS.

Part of the reason fracking rolled out with little oversight was due to the influence of powerful oil and gas industries in politics.

Michael T. Klare, director of the Five College Programme in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, told IPS, “The experience in Pennsylvania and elsewhere is that local people just get steamrollered by the oil companies and their lawyers and lobbyists.”

He said, “The biggest (player) is ExxonMobil, because they bought XTO (Energy), which was the biggest natural gas company using fracking… and they’ve been pushing (fracking) very hard. And other giant companies are in on the act.”

The U.S. energy mix

Proponents of fracking argue that natural gas is cleaner than coal, and could act as a bridge between fossil fuels and renewable energy.

However, “When you say bridge, people use it to mean different things. For example, how long a bridge, how wide a bridge, how high a bridge… it’s just a term that doesn’t have a lot of details,” said Mall of NRDC.

Klare, a defence correspondent at The Nation, warned, “Companies and utilities that might invest in renewable sources of energy are all rushing to convert their electricity generation to natural gas.

“These facilities will be in operation for decades to come, so there’s no sign that the country’s moving in the direction of renewable energy… It’s unclear where this bridge is leading to, except more gas,” he told IPS.

David G. Victor, a professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, noted that renewable technologies are currently unreliable, in terms of “keeping the lights on”.

“There’s a world of difference between some engineer thinking about a clever solution that works in the laboratory under ideal conditions, and then (using it in) actual power grids,” he said, arguing that they exist in small markets and depend too heavily on subsidies.

When asked about renewable energy, Klare agreed that they were in infant stages.

“Renewable energy is a much younger, newer kind of energy. Naturally, at this stage of its development, it’s less efficient and more expensive than oil and natural gas,” he said.

However, Klare argued that renewable energy deserves more government support, saying that this would be good for the U.S. in the long term.

“After all, oil has been around for 150 years, and natural gas has been around for 50 years or so. They’ve had more time; they’ve had a lot of government subsidies along the way and they still get government subsidies,” said Klare.

Mall of NRDC added that there is also a middle ground: “As long as we do need natural gas… There are much better ways to produce it, with much stronger protections and much cleaner methods than the industry is using now,” she said.

Mall cited ways to capture air pollutants, encase wastewater in steel tanks, use less toxic chemicals in fluids and keep fracking away from watersheds.

Health and community

Mall said, “Because of (U.S.) property laws, a lot of (homeowners) don’t own the oil and gas rights beneath their property. Therefore, they can’t stop (fracking) on their own land, and they’re not (fully) compensated for the damage to their own land.”

Steingraber, author of “Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment” (2010), added, “There are potential avenues of (chemical) exposure to people who didn’t consent to any of this.”

She noted that health problems associated with chemical exposure from fracking are expensive ones.

“We’re talking about preterm birth, which is the leading cause of infant mortality and the leading cause of disability (in the U.S.),” she said.

“Before we decide that fracking is this bonanza economically, providing royalty money and so on, we really need a full picture of the costs and benefits,” she argued.

“The job of government (is) to protect people from harm… whether that’s protecting us from some invading foreign army, or against chemicals others are putting into environments that get into our bodies,” she said.

People at Labor Square in Gulshan-e-Maymar, Karachi, Pakistan wait for food aid after the 2010 floods. Forced migration and the displacement of vulnerable communities are issues of concern to U.S. national security experts. Credit: M Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

By Walter García and Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Feb 27 2013 (IPS)

More than three dozen national security officials, members of Congress and military leaders are warning of the threat climate change poses to U.S. national security, the latest in an indicator that U.S. intelligence and national security circles are increasingly worried about a warming planet.

In a new bipartisan open letter, they stress the need for urgent action and call on both public and private support to address issues that included forced migration and the displacement of vulnerable communities, as well as the dangers related to food production during extreme weather events.

“We tried to accomplish two things: First, to make a call to action on the whole issue of climate change,” Lee Hamilton, a former member of Congress and a founder of the Partnership for a Secure America (PSA), a bipartisan Washington group that organised the letter, told IPS.It’s very weird we’re getting ‘100-year floods' every five years.

“Many people are frustrated that the political system doesn’t seem to be able to deal with question of climate change. It’s not on the agenda – the president has mentioned it, politicians have mentioned it, but we really have no action taking place.”

Hamilton continued, “The second thing we did was put it in a national security context, which I think was a unique way to frame it, and hopefully it will provide an additional stimulus for action.”

Signatories to the letter include former secretaries of state (George Schultz and Madeleine Albright), secretaries of defence and homeland security (William Cohen and Tom Ridge), a former director of central intelligence (R. James Woolsey), several generals (Gen. Anthony Zinni, Gen. Wesley Clark) and others.

They join the State Department, Defence Department, National Intelligence Council and a growing number of other security voices here in emphasising the national security implications of climate change.

“Even if you’re sceptical about any single part of climate change, it’s hard to get away from the … combination of feedback loops together with population growth and increasing consumption, which lead to a number of national security concerns,” Woolsey said here Tuesday, referring to “millions upon millions of hungry, thirsty neighbours to the south [of the United States], looking for somewhere to go.”

Unless precautionary steps are taken, the letter warns that “climate change impacts abroad could spur mass migrations, influence civil conflict and ultimately lead to a more unpredictable world.” And “protecting U.S. interests under these conditions would progressively exhaust American military, diplomatic and development resources as we struggle to meet growing demands for emergency international engagement.”

The new letter also comes against the backdrop of unfulfilled promises of action from the White House and a highly polarised Congress on the issue.

The national security aspect of climate change for the United States was given high prominence in December, when a major report from the National Intelligence Council (NIC), a high-level body coordinating all of the country’s intelligence agencies, listed climate change as one of four “megatrends” that will shape the world over the next two decades.

Other megatrends included factors relating to greater empowerment and prosperity of the individual, the growing political and economic power of developing countries, and dramatic changes in demographic patterns like rapid urbanisation.

The “Global Trends” report emphasised that climate change will severely impair the ability of food producers to meet a growing global demand for food, water and energy, each of which is forecast to increase by between 35 and 50 percent. Adding to this strain are the expanding consumer demands of a swelling worldwide middle class.

Most exposed

All of these issues will be exacerbated by the disrupted weather patterns associated with global climate change.

Scientists predict that the severity of existing weather patterns will intensify, with wet areas getting wetter, and arid areas becoming drier. Much of the decline in precipitation is expected to occur in the Middle East and North Africa as well as western Central Asia, southern Europe, southern Africa and the U.S. southwest.

“We are going to be see evidence of climate change beyond rising temperatures,” Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, said during an analysis of the Global Trends 2030 report Tuesday here in Washington.

“But as more thermal energy is put into the climate as a system, we will see more extreme events like the snowfalls across the country over the past couple of weeks, the floods in Thailand, floods in Pakistan, fires around Moscow … It’s very weird we’re getting ‘100-year floods’ every five years.”

Even as members of the U.S. Congress fail to arrive at any consensus on how or whether to overhaul the country’s energy sector, the Global Trends report notes that the United States is indeed moving towards “energy independence” – albeit not on the backs of renewable sources as pushed by environmentalists and others.

In fact, the U.S. recently regained its position as the world’s largest gas producer, largely due to its introduction of new “hydraulic fracturing” (or “fracking”) technologies. Experts now say U.S. reserves will be able to continue producing for the next century.

“It seems we are going to be stuck in an oil and gas world for quite some time, and we will see the impacts accumulate along with the temperature,” Goldstone said. “The poorer countries are precisely the ones left most exposed and vulnerable to climate change, and we need saleable, efficient, cost-effective solutions – and we need to keep vulnerable cities viable.”

Despite the expanding middle class and swelling urban populations and the resulting pressures on critical resources like food and water, the scientists point out that shortages are not inevitable, particularly through the effective management of natural resources.

Here in Washington, the close timing of the new letter and the report indicate a clear and growing recognition of the climate change threat as a national security issue. Yet whether this growing consensus can influence members of Congress has yet to be seen.

“It is quite clear that our national security establishment, especially over the past couple of years, has been keenly aware of the threat of climate change – but now its time to act,” Hamilton said.