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.

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

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

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

The blue and white Saltire flag of Scotland flutters next to the Union Jack during the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Credit: Vicky Brock/cc by 2.0

By Phil Harris
ROME, Sep 16 2014 (IPS)

After a two-year referendum campaign, Scots are finally voting Thursday on whether their country will regain its independence after more than 300 years of “marriage” with England.

It is still uncertain whether those in favour will win the day, but whichever way the wind blows, things are unlikely to be the same – and not just in terms of political relations between London and Edinburgh.If an independent Scotland were actually to abolish nuclear weapons from its territory, the government of what remains of today’s United Kingdom would be forced to look elsewhere for places in which to host its sea-based nuclear warheads – and this will be no easy task.

One bone of contention between Scots and their “cousins” to the south of Hadrian’s Wall – built by the Romans to protect their conquests in what is now England and, according to Emperor Hadrian’s biographer, “to separate the Romans from the barbarians” to the north – is the presence on Scottish territory of part of the United Kingdom’s nuclear arsenal.

The Scottish National Party (SNP), which supports an independent and non-nuclear Scotland, wants Scotland to become a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the European Union, but rejects nuclear weapons.

The United Kingdom currently has four Vanguard class submarines armed with nuclear-tipped Trident missiles based at Gare Loch on the west coast of Scotland, ostensibly there for the purpose of deterrence – but that was back in the days of the Cold War.

If an independent Scotland were actually to abolish nuclear weapons from its territory, the government of what remains of today’s United Kingdom would be forced to look elsewhere for places in which to host its sea-based nuclear warheads – and this will be no easy task.

The search would be on for another deep-water port or ports, and the UK government has already said that other potential locations in England are unacceptable because they are too close to populated areas – although that has not stopped it from placing some of its nuclear submarines and their deadly cargo  not far from Glasgow since 1969.

In any case, if those in favour of Scottish independence win, just the possibility that Scotland might even begin to consider the abolition of nuclear arms would oblige the UK government to give the nature of its commitment to nuclear weapons a major rethink.

The same would be true even if those in favour of remaining part of the United Kingdom win because there would still be a not insignificant number of Scots against nuclear weapons.

Either scenario indicates that Scotland could come to play a significant role in discussions on nuclear disarmament although, clearly, this role would be all the more important as an independent nation participating in NATO, following in the footsteps of NATO member countries like Canada, Lithuania and Norway which do not allow nuclear weapons on their territory.

And what could come of NATO initiatives such as that taken at its summit in Wales earlier this month to create a new 4,000 strong rapid reaction force for initial deployment in the Baltics?

As Nobel Peace Laureate Maired Maguire has said, that “is a dangerous path for us all to be forced down, and could well lead to a third world war if not stopped. What is needed now are cool heads and people of wisdom and not more guns, more weapons, more war.”

An independent Scotland could raise its voice in favour of prohibiting nuclear weapons at the global level and add to the lobby against the threats posed by the irresponsible arms brandishing of NATO.

Representatives of the SNP have said that they are ready to take an active part in humanitarian initiatives on nuclear weapons and support negotiations on an international treaty to prohibit – and not just limit the proliferation of – nuclear weapons, even without the participation of states in possession of such weapons.

What justification would then remain for these states?

Meanwhile, as Scots go to vote in their independence referendum, there is another aspect of the nuclear issue that the UK government still has to come to terms with – nuclear energy.

Scotland used to be home to six nuclear power stations. Four were closed between 1990 and 2004, but two still remain – the Hunterston B power station in North Ayrshire and the Torness power station in East Lothian – both of which are run by EDF Energy, a company with its headquarters in London.

A YouGov public opinion poll in 2013 showed that Scots are twice as likely to favour wind power over nuclear or shale gas. Over six in 10 (62 percent) people in Scotland said they would support large-scale wind projects in their local area, well more than double the number who said they would be in favour of shale gas (24 percent) and almost twice as many as for nuclear facilities (32 percent).

Hydropower was the most popular energy source for large-scale projects in Scotland, with an overwhelming majority (80 percent) in favour.

So, with a strong current among Scots in favour of ‘non-nuclear’, whatever the outcome of Thursday’s referendum, London would be well-advised that the “barbarians” to its north could teach a lesson or two in a civilised approach to 21^st century coexistence.

Phil Harris is Chief, IPS World Desk (English service). He can be contacted at pharris@ips.org

Canada has been leading the world in forest loss since 2000, accounting for 21 percent of global forest loss. Credit: Crustmania/ CC by 2.0

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Sep 5 2014 (IPS)

The world’s last remaining forest wilderness is rapidly being lost – and much of this is taking place in Canada, not in Brazil or Indonesia where deforestation has so far made the headlines.

A new satellite study reveals that since 2000 more than 104 million hectares of forests – an area three times the size of Germany – have been destroyed or degraded.Since 2000 more than 104 million hectares of forests – an area three times the size of Germany – have been destroyed or degraded

“Every four seconds, an area of the size of a football (soccer) field is lost,” said Christoph Thies of Greenpeace International.

The extent of this forest loss, which is clearly visible in satellite images taken in 2000 and 2013, is “absolutely appalling” and has a global impact, Thies told IPS, because forests play a crucial in regulating the climate.

The current level of deforestation is putting more CO₂ into the atmosphere than all the world’s cars, trucks, ships and planes together, he said, adding that “governments must take urgent action” to protect intact forests by creating more protected areas, strengthening the rights of forest communities and other measures, including convincing lumber, furniture manufacturers and others to refuse to use products from virgin forests.

Greenpeace is one of several partners in the Intact Forest Landscapes initiative, along with the University of Maryland, World Resources Institute and WWF-Russia among others, that uses satellite imagery technology to determine the location and extent of the world’s last large undisturbed forests.

The new study found that half of forest loss from deforestation and degradation occurred in just three countries: Canada, Russia and Brazil. These countries are also home to about 65 percent of world’s remaining forest wilderness.

However, despite all the media attention on deforestation in the Amazon forest and the forests of Indonesia, it is Canada that has been leading the world in forest loss since 2000, accounting for 21 percent of global forest loss. By contrast, the much-better known deforestation in Indonesia has accounted for only four percent.

Brazil’s Amazon forest – 2000. Credit: Courtesy of Global Forest Watch

Brazil’s Amazon forest – 2013. Credit: Courtesy of Global Forest Watch

Massive increases in oil sands and shale gas developments, as well as logging and road building, are the major cause of Canada’s forest loss, said Peter Lee of Global Forest Watch Canada, an independent Canadian NGO.

A big increase in forest fires is another cause of forest loss. Climate change has rapidly warmed northern Canada, drying out the boreal forests and bogs and making them more vulnerable to fires.

In Canada’s northern Alberta’s oil sands region, more than 12.5 million hectares of forest have been crisscrossed by roads, pipelines, power transmission lines and other infrastructure, Lee told IPS.

Canada’s oil sands and shale gas developments are expected to double and possibly triple in the next decade and “there’s little interest at the federal or provincial political level in conserving intact forest landscapes,” Lee added.

The world’s last remaining large undisturbed forests are where most of the planet’s remaining wild animals, birds, plants and other species live, Nigel Sizer, Global Director of the Forest Programme at the World Resources Institute, told a press conference.

Animals like Siberian tigers, orangutans and woodland caribou require large areas of forest wilderness, Sizer noted, and “losing these top species leads to a decline of entire forest ecosystems in subtle ways that are hard to measure.”

While forests can re-grow, this takes many decades, and in northern forests more than 100 years. However, if species go extinct or there are too few individuals left, it will take longer for a full forest ecosystem to recover – if ever.

Trees, plants and all the creatures that make up a healthy forest ecosystem provide humanity with a range of vital services including storing and cleaning water, cleaning air, soaking up CO₂ and producing oxygen, as well as being sources of food and wood. These ‘free’ services are often irreplaceable and generally worth far more than the value of lumber or when converted to cattle pasture, said Sizer.

In just 13 years, South America’s Paraguay converted an incredible 78 percent of its remaining forest wilderness mainly into large-scale soybean farms and rough pasture, the study found. Satellite images and maps on the new Global Forest Watch website offer see-it-with-your-own eyes images of Paraguay’s forests vanishing over time.

The images and data collected for the study are accessible via various tools on the website. They reveal that 25 percent of Europe’s largest remaining forest, located 900 km north of Moscow, has been chopped down to feed industrial logging operations. In the Congo, home of the world’s second largest tropical forest, 17 percent has been lost to logging, mining and road building. The Global Forest Watch website also shows details of huge areas of Congo forest licensed for future logging.

Deforestation starts with road building, often linked to logging and extractive industries, said Thies. In some countries, like Brazil and Paraguay, the prime reason is conversion to large-scale agriculture, usually for crops that will be exported.

The new data could help companies with sustainability commitments in determining which areas to avoid when sourcing commodities like timber, palm oil, beef and soy. Market-led efforts need to gain further support given the lax governance and enforcement in many of these forest regions, Thies said.

He called on the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) – a voluntary certification programme that sets standards for forest management – to “also play a stronger role” and to improve those standards in order to better protect wilderness forests.

Without urgent action to curb deforestation, it is doubtful that any large-scale wild forest will remain by the end of this century, concluded Sizer.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

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)

Aerial view of the Mejillones Liquefied Natural Gas (GNLM) regasification terminal in northern Chile, the biggest of its kind in Latin America and one of the biggest in the world. Credit: Courtesy of GNLM

By Marianela Jarroud
MEJILLONES, Chile , Jun 16 2014 (IPS)

In April 2004, Argentina began to steadily cut natural gas exports to neighbouring Chile, triggering a major energy crisis and revealing structural problems in this vital sector.

Ten years later, a regasification plant which converts liquefied natural gas (LNG) back to natural gas in the port of Mejillones, 1,400 km north of Santiago, apparently goes a long way towards solving the energy problems in the north of the country, where water is scarce and where the mining industry is concentrated.

President Michelle Bachelet has expressed confidence that, along with renewable energies, natural gas will contribute to the diversification of Chile’s energy mix, and emphasised that “what we do or fail to do now will have consequences in the future.”

On May 14, Bachelet inaugurated an onshore storage tank at the Mejillones Liquefied Natural Gas (GNLM) regasification terminal, the biggest in Latin America and one of the biggest in the world.

French-Belgian power company GDF Suez holds a 63 percent share in the terminal and the rest is owned by the state-owned Corporación del Cobre de Chile (Codelco).

It was Bachelet , during her first term (2006-2010), who laid the first stone for the plant. And in February 2010 she was present to welcome the arrival of the first methane tanker.

Bachelet now inaugurated the huge storage tank with a gross capacity of 187,000 m3. It is a full containment tank with a nickel steel inner tank inside a pre-stressed concrete outer tank.

The CEO of GDF Suez, Gerard Mestrallet, said it was built to the highest safety standards, to withstand seismic activity and tsunamis.

The tank’s 501 elastomeric isolators enable it to withstand the stresses caused by a major earthquake, as well as sophisticated seismic monitoring and protection systems.

The expansion of GNLM involved an additional 200 million dollars, on top of the initial investment of 550 million dollars.

For four years, in the first stage of the project, the BW GDF Suez Brussels was moored on one side of the jetty in the bay and used as a floating storage unit when gas shipments came in.

The land tank’s capacity is equivalent to approximately 110 million m3 of standard natural gas after the regasification process. This is transported to clients, mainly mining companies, through the Nor Andino and GasAtacama pipelines.

It is the company’s clients that pay for importing the gas. The corporations that have signed contracts so far are the Anglo-Australian multinational BHP Billiton, Codelco and Generadora E-CL, a Chilean power company controlled by GDF Suez.

The natural gas storage tank inaugurated by President Michelle Bachelet May 14, to complete the natural gas terminal at Mejillones. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

On May 15, Bachelet – who took office in March – presented her government’s energy agenda, which focuses heavily on clean energy sources as well as the use of LNG to replace diesel fuel and for industrial and household use as well.

The agenda proposes short-term measures to maximise the use of the country’s current electric power generation infrastructure and LNG terminals.

It also includes medium to long-term initiatives aimed at boosting LNG capacity and installing new combined cycle plants fueled with natural gas, “as far as possible with new actors.”

Besides Mejillones, Chile has another LNG terminal, in Quintero bay 154 km north of Santiago, which is owned by London-based BG Group PLC and Chile’s state oil and gas company Empresa Nacional del Petroleo (ENAP).

But the head of the Latin American Observatory on Environmental Conflicts (OLCA), Lucia Cuenca, said the government’s proposal should be looked at with a critical eye.

The country is making the mistake, she told Tierramérica, of not thinking about the high quality natural gas that Bolivia or Argentina could provide, but only about unconventional sources of natural gas. She was referring, for example, to shale gas, which is extracted from underground rocks by hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

“ Chile is preparing to incorporate this kind of gas and that has to be evaluated in a much broader manner,” Cuenca said.

Chile currently imports gas mainly from Trinidad and Tobago and Qatar. But the government will reportedly negotiate supplies of shale gas from the United States.

Cuenca added that, even though LNG emits fewer greenhouse gas emissions, “it’s still a fossil fuel, which means it does produce emissions.”

“LNG is considered a transitional fuel; in other words, it is a little better than coal, but it is not exactly the best option from the standpoint of clean energy,” he added.

In Chile, thermoelectric plants are run on three kinds of fuel: diesel, the most expensive and dirtiest; coal, which is also highly polluting, but abundant and cheap; and gas, which is the least polluting, but costs around 30 percent more than coal.

In 1991, a year after this country returned to democracy after the 1973-1990 military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, the governments of Argentina and Chile signed an economic agreement that established the foundations for gas interconnection between the two countries.

But the late Néstor Kirchner, when he took office as president of Argentina in 2003, prioritised domestic supplies in the face of internal shortages of natural gas, which at the time only covered national demand.

The cuts in exports had a tremendous economic impact on Chile, because power companies were forced to use oil instead, whose international market price had soared.

At the time Argentina cut its gas exports, nearly 90 percent of industries in Santiago were using natural gas from Argentina, which also supplied much of the country’s natural gas pipeline network that serves households.

“The decision reached by Kirchner (2003-2007) was in line with Argentina’s political approach, which will always favour national interests; regardless of who is governing, they are prepared to assume the costs from the standpoint of the international cooperation agenda,” political scientist Francisca Quiroga told Tierramérica.

She said that after Argentina reduced its gas exports to Chile, a debate broke out in which many argued that Chile should not trust Argentina because it was a country that did not live up to its promises. But the political dividends Kirchner reaped outweighed any criticism from abroad, she added.

Quiroga said the question of energy “is a very touchy ideological and strategic issue and is important in debates on domestic policy.”

And in the current regional context, she added, “is it one of the most important issues on the multilateral agenda to address in terms of the challenges of the 21st century.”

In the meantime, Chile is planning the construction of a third LNG terminal in the south-central part of the country, with the participation of the state energy company ENAP.

Cuenca said it is a strategy that serves the large mining corporations that need cheap, abundant energy, because the aim is to offer lower prices on the domestic market.

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.”

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.

Villagers from Zurawlow protesting in Warsaw. The banner says "Shale gas = the death of farming". Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS.

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Jul 24 2013 (IPS)

Since Jun. 3, inhabitants of the village Zurawlow in Grabowiec district in southeastern Poland have been occupying a field in their locality where the U.S. company Chevron plans to drill for shale gas. The farmers’ resistance is just the latest blow to shale gas proponents in the country.

Chevron, one of the world’s top five publicly owned oil and gas companies (the so-called “Big Oil”), owns four out of the 108 concessions for exploration for unconventional gas currently awarded by Poland (data from Jul. 1, 2013).

Over the past years, Poland has been perceived as one of Europe’s most promising locations for shale exploration. The U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration estimated two years ago that the country holds 187 trillion cubic feet shale gas resources, 44 trillion of which are in the Lubin Basin where Zurawlow lies. This year, the body revised those estimates downwards, to 148 trillion cubic feet for the country and nine trillion for the Lubin region, after applying tighter methodology.“If they go ahead with drilling thousands of metres underground, our water will be affected and there will be no more life in our fields." -- villager Stefan Jablonski

Given Poland’s annual gas consumption (currently over 600 billion cubic feet annually), the original EIA estimate has been translated to mean that shale gas resources would be enough to meet the country’s needs for 300 years, a figure often quoted by media and politicians.

The Polish centre-right government headed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk has been depicting shale gas as a way to both reduce Poland’s dependency on Russian gas imports (two-thirds of Polish gas demand is covered from Russian imports) and to make a transition away from dirty coal, which at the moment covers 60 percent of energy demand in the country.

Past the political rhetoric, facts on the ground are less rosy. Despite around 40 wells being drilled in the country since 2010 (including by Halliburton contracted by Polish state company PGNiG S.A.), no company has to date announced that it can extract gas for commercial purposes.

Over the past year, ExxonMobil and two other companies, Marathon Oil and Talisman, announced they would withdraw from Poland, doubting the gains they could make. The government appears to be in damage control mode, telling international media that Exxon still holds on to one out of six concessions and that Marathon has not yet submitted official requests to pull out.

Tusk’s team is also working on legislative changes to make the companies’ lives easier: in addition to tax breaks until 2020, firms would have the possibility to turn exploration licences into production licences automatically as well as to increase the depth of drilling without extra permits.

Yet the shale gas lobby thinks changes do not go far enough. According to the Polish Exploration and Production Industry Organisation (OPPPW), clearer wording is needed to ensure those who explore can automatically exploit (without the fields being put up for tender if gas is discovered), longer exploration permits are necessary, and too big a role is envisaged for a state company which is planned by Poland to have a stake in all exploitations.

“OPPPW members all wish to progress their projects in Poland,” Marcin Zieba, the industry group’s executive director told IPS. “But, as demonstrated by ExxonMobil, Talisman and Marathon stopping their operations. they can change their minds. We have yet to see a project in Poland that has demonstrated commercial flow rates – so this activity remains high risk, with no guarantee of success.”

Meanwhile, local opposition to fracking (pumping water and chemicals into the underground to release gas from rocks) is posing unexpectedly strong obstacles.

In 2012 already, Chevron had to stop operations in Zurawlow because locals successfully argued in courts that the company’s operations at the time were breaching the EU Birds Directive.

The occupation this year started when the company renewed attempts to begin work, beginning with trying to fence off one area. Protesters say that Chevron is treating the concession like private property while according to them “the concession was awarded for public purposes – searching for hydrocarbons – and activities in the area must be conducted with the knowledge and acceptance of society.”

In a controversy that might be telling of the murkiness of the Polish legislative framework, villagers argue that while Chevron has the concession, it has not received supplementary approvals from local authorities to do anything more than seismic testing in the region. Chevron retorts that they do have all necessary approvals.

In a response to protesters, the ministry of environment says the right to build (including wells) on the concession land must be further regulated by state authorities and does not derive automatically from the concession.

The legalistic battle, however, is just a facet of the fundamental conflict between villagers and Chevron: in the predominantly farming area of Zurawlow, people fear fracking will forever destroy their water and lands, endangering their livelihoods.

“If they go ahead with drilling thousands of metres underground, our water will be affected and there will be no more life in our fields,” villager Stefan Jablonski told IPS during a protest in Warsaw last week. “Not to mention that we might end up with no gas and no water too.”

Villagers complain that an assessment of environmental impacts for shale exploration has not been conducted for Zurawlow. According to Polish legislation, state authorities can decide on a case by case basis if such an assessment is required.

Asked to respond to the claims of the protesters by IPS during a press conference Jul. 15, Polish Minister of Environment Marcin Korolec said: “Shale gas constitutes an enormous opportunity for Poland. The majority of environmental issues are extremely emotional, as we see with the people of Zurawlow, but we have to keep our route and realise our policy.”

“Unfortunately, our ministry of environment is behaving like a representative of companies,” Agnieszka Grzybek from the Polish Green Party told IPS. “In the legislative pack discussed at the moment, there is a proposal that says that new NGOs cannot send comments and engage in the debate unless they have existed for more than a year. This would effectively exclude groups like the farmers from Zurawlow from having a say on shale gas.”

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).

Shale gas extraction is putting some U.S. communities at risk of health issues, new research released here Thursday warns.

Close to 70 percent of participants in a new study reported an increase in throat irritation, and almost 80 percent stated they have had more sinus problems after being exposed to natural gas extraction in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania.

“For too long, the oil and gas industry and state regulators have dismissed community members’ health complaints as ‘false’ or ‘anecdotal’,” said Nadia Steinzor, the project’s lead author. “With this research, they cannot credibly ignore communities any longer.”

The report, by Earthworks’ Oil & Gas Accountability Project, a non-profit environmental organisation, surveyed 108 residents in 14 Pennsylvania counties in addition to conducting air and water tests.

“Twenty-two households reported that pets and livestock began to have symptoms (such as seizures or losing hair) or suddenly fell ill and died after gas development began nearby,” Earthworks reported.

This report focused specifically on Marcellus Shale in central New York and Pennsylvania and the small communities affected by the extraction process.

“Though the areas studied in Pennsylvania are very rural and small, the process for all shale gas extraction is very similar and so it has the same potential impacts on any community,” Wilma Subra, the president of Subra Company, an environmental consulting firm, told IPS.

According to researchers, the results from the surveys constituted an obvious pattern of negative health symptoms due to the communities’ proximity to gas facilities.

This study compared domestic water samples from two counties to control groups by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. The results showed a higher concentration ethylbenzene and xylene, volatile compounds found in petroleum hydrocarbons, at the households than the control site.

Overall, the participants reported a total of 24 health symptoms with a higher concentration and severity of symptoms closer to the gas development plants.

“For example, when facilities were 1500-4000 feet away, 27 percent reported throat irritation; this increased to 63 percent at 501-1500 feet, and 74 percent at less than 500 feet,” writes Steinzor.

Sixty-two percent of participants in the survey reported an increased sense of fatigue. The other highest percentage reported symptoms including sinus and respiratory problems (58 percent), and the survey also found a high level of behavioural and mood changes.

“The clear association between gas development and public health impacts revealed by this research demands that states stop ignoring the problem and start developing the standards necessary to protect the public,” Subra told IPS.

Shale gas, a natural gas trapped within shale formations, has been hailed by some as a potential solution to reconcile the issue of climate change and the growing need for energy resources.

It is widely believed that shale gas releases fewer greenhouse gas emissions then other fossil fuels, yet new technology has only recently provided the tools to begin extracting shale gas, led by U.S. companies.

“Broad development of shale gas resources — with proper ecological safeguards — could be the best way to achieve the quick cuts in carbon dioxide emissions that we need to maintain a habitable environment on Earth,” Alan Riley, a professor of energy law at City University London, wrote in August 2012.

Shale gas has become an important source of natural gas for the United States over the past decade, creating international interest in this new source of energy.

In 2010, shale gas provided over 20 percent of the United States’ natural gas production. By 2035, this figure is estimated to increase to 46 percent, according to the official figures.

Yet concerns about health problems – particularly extraction-related chemicals seeping into groundwater sources – have continued to increase, though these allegations have long been denied by the industry. Meanwhile, shale gas formations in other parts of the country are receiving increased attention for exploration.

The world’s largest and fastest growing economies are no strangers to the need for more energy sources. India and China each rely heavily on a constant supply of energy to fuel their booming economies.

China is estimated to have the world’s largest shale gas reserves, thought to be more than the U.S. and Canada combined.

“Both policy pronouncements and emerging investments into North American shale basins suggest that Chinese and Indian interests in exploring the potential of their shale gas resources are real,” wrote Jane Nakano in a recent report for the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank.

Neither China nor India has yet begun to extract shale gas, but if they do the health impacts on the communities could be far worse those than the Pennsylvania data suggests. The counties surveyed in Pennsylvania are all in rural areas, but the majority of India and China’s shale gas reserves are very close to densely populated areas.

“The Chinese government notes that gas-rich regions in China are highly populated, rendering exploration there complex,” reports Nakano.

This immediacy to urban areas would inevitably increase the potential health effects that extracting shale gas could have.

“In fact, urban drilling would likely have a larger impact because with urban drilling you are basically in people’s backyards. As shown in the study, the closer you are to the process, the more impacts you will suffer,” Subra told IPS.

The U.S. State Department has launched a Global Shale Gas Initiative to transfer technical skills to other countries.

But, Subra points out, as long as the extraction process remains the same, then so do the potential consequences.

Mariana Matranga outside the School of Engineering at the University of Buenos Aires. Credit: Juan Moseinco/IPS

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 3 2012 (IPS)

The recovery of state control over the oil company YPF was a strategic move for Argentina, which is highly dependent on fossil fuels. But the country needs to incorporate cleaner sources of energy, and this will take time, says energy expert Mariana Matranga in this interview.Today, 90 percent of the country’s energy needs are met with fossil fuels, and this is a reality that cannot be ignored, Matranga said in an interview with Tierramérica *.

“We all like to travel by car, get places quickly, turn on the air conditioning. There are increasingly more things that you can’t do without using batteries… What’s important is that the public realizes that our way of life has a cost,” stressed the chemical engineer and researcher at the University of Buenos Aires, who has worked in the hydrocarbons sector in Argentina, Bolivia, Canada and Norway.

Q: What do you think about the decision to nationalize YPF?

A: I agree with it. It was necessary. It will give the state a very effective tool to act on an energy mix which, whether we like it or not, is currently dominated by fossil fuels.

Q: Do you think this greater state participation will be strategic?

A: Yes, because it affects all aspects of life. Energy consumption is not an end itself, it is a means. This decision wasn’t made thinking about the profits to be made from a commodity, but rather about the common good. Energy is what keeps the economy functioning. That means the whole sector is strategic. Today Argentina depends on fossil fuels for 90 percent of its energy needs. I don’t want fossil fuels to be strategic, I would love it if they weren’t, but the reality is that they are.

Q: And what can be done to change that reality?

A: It’s a reality that has to be corrected while it continues functioning. Changing the energy mix entails engineering works that take time and money. The energy mix is an inertial system. It is very difficult to change it. The way to work on it is through a strategic long-term plan.

Q: Is this something a government can do?

A: A government has to deal with the present situation. It has to keep the machine running and at the same time work on a plan to modify this situation. It’s not simple, and it can’t be done overnight. We have machines from the 1970s that are still within their useful life spans and with good maintenance they can continue to be used in thermal power plants. An investment in energy is for 40 or 50 years.

Q: What do you think about the debate on energy use that was triggered in Argentina by the nationalization of YPF?

A: What’s important is that the public realizes that our way of life has a cost. Even the cleanest energy has an impact. A wind farm in the middle of the route of migratory birds has an impact.

We all like to travel by car, get places quickly, turn on the air conditioning. There are increasingly more things that you can’t do without using batteries. We demand increasingly more energy. Nobody likes to be told that they have to consume less energy or lower their standard of living to make it more environmentally friendly. Since man discovered fire there have been impacts, and these impacts will be greater if there is a growth in demand.

Q: So how can more alternative energy sources be incorporated?

A: The technologies with the least impact are the ones that require the greatest initial investment, which means that compromise solutions have to be adopted. If you ask me, I’d love it if all energy were renewable. But I don’t think that’s possible. Governments try to maintain a balance and make compromise decisions.

Q: Do you think the planned exploitation of unconventional gas and oil will increase dependence on fossil fuels even more?

A: Fossil fuels are not renewable, and their production is likely to decline within a short time. Unconventional fuels will begin to be seen in five years. So this doesn’t necessarily imply an expansion in fossil fuel use, but rather the maintenance of the current proportion.

Q: And the environmental cost of unconventional fuels?

A: It depends on how it’s done. Unconventional technology has only been in use for a short time in the world. It uses a significant amount of water, and while 90 percent goes up in steam, the whole watershed needs to be monitored very carefully. It can be done well or it can be done badly. A lot depends on how much is invested.

Q: Are there international studies on the impacts of this type of exploitation?

A: It’s banned in France. But they have an energy mix dominated by nuclear energy, which can’t easily be changed. It’s in the United States and Canada, where there are significant potential reserves for unconventional extraction, where most of the concerns have been raised.

In Texas and Pennsylvania they are exploiting reserves that are in agricultural areas and are densely populated. On the other hand, in New York, they placed a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for shale gas until its impacts could be determined. This shows how new all of this is and how little is known. In the United States, the results of an impact assessment will be released in September.

Q: Do you think that there are major risks involved in this area?

A: The final disposal of the treated water is an important factor. It contains the chemicals used in the fracturing as well as those that are washed up from the reserves. But treating this water has its costs. It can be done well, but it is expensive. That’s why regulation is so important. The more that is invested, the lower the risk.

But the risk is always there. You have to decide whether or not you want to take it. These are political decisions. I don’t think it would be very intelligent if this is the only thing we do. In Argentina, unconventional fuel exploitation might be sensible in the short or medium term. But in the long run, we have to increase consumption of other energies and reduce the weight of hydrocarbons.

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