A Change in the Wind

Fracking in Ventura County: the next oil boom?

Great op-ed from Marianne Ratcliff in today's Star on fracking in Ventura County. How much fracking is going on, and how much more will be going on? Difficult to say. According to her research, most wells in this area have already been fracked -- but that's not to say that more couldn't be, or couldn't be hazardous. 

Fracking is such a proven method of increasing oil and gas production in the Silverthread lease in Upper Ojai that it is the rare well that has not been fracked, according to a 1975 Society of Petroleum Engineers report on the Ojai Silverthread Field.

Ambitious energy companies are reporting plans in company prospectuses and investor reports, such as the one published in March 2012 by Underground Energy Corp., reporting that Occidental Petroleum Corp.’s Vintage Production California LLC subsidiary, the largest Monterey landholder in the Ventura, Los Angeles and San Joaquin basins, has “200,000 acres and 520 drilling targets de-risked for oil-prone shale development.”

"De-risked?" For them or us? Here's a map from CNN, showing the oil formation overlaid on the state.

Will attend the meeting on Tuesday, in which the county will hear from its legal counsel on fracking locally. All but one of the supervisors want to know more...as do some of us. 

My heart knows what the wild goose knows: Roger Ebert

A personal fav from among his many entries to the New Yorker's caption contest: 

(Didn't win but doesn't matter. Roger Ebert lives on.)

Obama quails on Keystone XL: Poll shows why

Looks like Obama intends to back down and let Keystone XL bitumen pipeline go through.

From the NY Times:

SAN FRANCISCO — Appearing at the home of an outspoken critic of the Keystone XL pipeline, President Obama on Wednesday night told a group of high-dollar donors that the politics of the environment “are tough.”

Mr. Obama appears to be leaning toward the approval of the pipeline, although he did not specifically mention it to the donors. But he acknowledged that it is hard to sell aggressive environmental action — like reducing pollution from power plants — to Americans who are still struggling in a difficult economy to pay bills, buy gas and save for retirement.

“You may be concerned about the temperature of the planet, but it’s probably not rising to your No. 1 concern,” Mr. Obama said. “And if people think, well, that’s shortsighted, that’s what happens when you’re struggling to get by.”

Maybe the Prez saw this poll from Pew Research: 

And maybe it's not a coincidence that this past week James Hansen decided he had to quit his job working for the federal government, and this today argued fiercely against the pipeline:

The perspective of pipeline apologists is contrary to the laws of physics and basic economics, neither of which gives a damn about politics. [edit]

The science on climate change has been in for a quarter of a century. There are no more mixed messages, just catastrophe after catastrophe. The president stands at a fork in the road: Rejecting the pipeline will show the world we are serious and determined to be on the right side of history. Approving it will signal we are too entrenched with business-as-usual to do what's right by the people, planet and future generations.

Meanwhile atop the NY Times, a disturbing story from perhaps the second best-known of all climate scientists, Lonnie Thompson, on the rapid melting of an ice cap in Peru. 

Glacial ice in the Peruvian Andes that took at least 1,600 years to form has melted in just 25 years, scientists reported Thursday, the latest indication that the recent spike in global temperatures has thrown the natural world out of balance.

It's much more than Obama's legacy that hangs in the balance. Regrettably. 

Related articles

Billionaire vs. climate change: Thomas Steyer

Keystone XL: The Pipeline to Disaster

Keystone XL: The Science, Stakes, and Strategy Behind the Fight Over the Tar Sands Pipeline

Why Keystone XL Matters

Getting the Warm Arctic-Cold Continents concept

Occasionally on this site we have discussed the idea of "meridional flow" -- a north-sound jetstream pattern, which tends to make for colder winters on the East Coast and in Eurasia.

This appears to be the focus of a lot of new research, originating seemingly in James Overland's Warm Arctic-Cold Continents idea (described here by Jeff Masters, who saw the same talk from Overland at the AGU that I did). Yesterday the Earth Observatory/NASA put up a great post that demonstrated what that looks like this winter. Which, as Judah Cohen predicted, has turned to be a cold one. 

Here's what it looked like this winter, as compared to the past six years or so:

Earth Observatory: While a high-pressure weather system brought warmer than normal temperatures to Greenland and northern Canada in March 2013, much of North America, Europe, and Asia shivered through weeks of unseasonably cool temperatures. The contrasting temperatures are no coincidence: the same unusual pressure pattern in the upper atmosphere caused both events.

[edit]

The temperature anomaly map [above], based on data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite, shows how this affected temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere. The map displays land surface temperature anomalies between March 14–20, 2013, compared to the same dates from 2005 to 2012. Areas with above-average temperatures appear in red and orange, and areas with below-average temperatures appear in shades of blue. Much of Europe, Russia, and the eastern United States saw unusually cool temperatures, while Greenland and Nunavut Territory were surprisingly warm for the time of year.

Note that the effect is much stronger on the East Coast, even Florida, than the West Coast. That's because (Overland said) we are influenced more by the Pacific than the Arctic. Here's another way of looking at it, through the lens of the Arctic Oscillation. 

Either way, it just looks cold, cold, cold. 

Related articles

Arctic Melting Stacked Weather Deck in Favor of Superstorm Sandy

Record Arctic Sea Ice Loss Linked to Extreme Weather: Why Spring has Not Yet Sprung

Scientists link harsh winters to dramatic decline in Arctic ice

Huge patches of warm air over the Arctic

The Wind from Nowhere: the first natural disaster novel?

J.G. Ballard, although slotted as a science-fiction writer, is in some senses a writer who has lost all faith, in God or man. Perhaps it's natural, then, that he was one of the first (perhaps the first) to write a novel about a natural disaster that overtakes the world: The Wind from Nowhere. 

What's fascinating is that, as the title hints, there is really no reason given for this wind that comes, reaches hurricane speeds...and continues to increase to unimaginable strengths. The will of the author comes out in the determination to see his premise carried through, plausible or not, because it's what he wants to express. (As Spielberg showed in Empire of the Sun, Ballard had lost all innocence long before.)

What's fascinating/horrifying to me is the drama of people seeing their belief systems torn away. It's not pretty, but it's not forgettable, either. 

"On the whole, people had shown less resourcefulness and flexibility, less foresight, than a wild bird or animal would. Their basic survival insticts had been so dulled, so overlaid by mechanisms deisgned to serve secondary appetites, that they were totally unable to protect themselves...they were the helpless victims of a deep-rooted optimism about their right to survival, their dominance of the natural order which would guarantee them against everything but their own folly, that they had made gross assumptions about their own superiority.

Now they were paying the price for this, in truth reaping the whirlwind!"

Ballard later called his first novel "just a piece of hackwork." The exclamation mark above does have that ring, but the book itself is more original that he dare admit. The characters are just okay, but the plot refuses to quit, which brings on a kind of terror. 

Earthquakes and fracking well issue brewing in Upper Ojai

As discussed in this piece from Scientific American, there is good reason to think disposal wells for fracking fluids can cause earthquakes. To wit:

Earthquakes have become more than 10 times more common in normally quiescent parts of the U.S., such as Ohio and Oklahoma, in the past few years. Given the simultaneous uptick in fracking—an oil and gas drilling technique that involves fracturing shale rock deep underground with the use of a high pressure water cocktail—it’s common to suspect a link. There might be one, but the real culprit behind the largest earthquake in Oklahoma’s recorded history is not what goes down but what comes up with the oil: wastewater.

Oklahoma has long benefited from a robust oil industry. One of the side effects of oil production is that a lot of water flows back to the surface with the petroleum. That flowback water must be disposed of, because it is laced with all kinds of contaminants the liquid solvent has picked up during its long residence deep underground, ranging from trace amounts of radioactive elements to lots of salt.

In Oklahoma and in much of the rest of the country, the most common burial ground for such wastewater—whether we’re talking oil or gas—is a disposal well back underground. Oil producers in central Oklahoma had been using this approach for 18 years when a swarm of powerful earthquakes rumbled across the countryside starting on November 5, 2011. The biggest temblor, a magnitude 5.7 felt as far away as Milwaukee, was linked to pumping yet more wastewater down old oil wells in the vicinity. (The wastewater pumping there continues despite the quakes.)

According to a new study published online March 26 in Geology, the earthquake was indeed caused by filling up the old oil cavities with water until there was simply too much pressure on the surrounding rock. Records showed that after years of requiring little pressure to dump the wastewater, oil operators recently have had to actively pump the water down the old wells to overcome a more than 10-fold increase in underground pressure, which peaked at 3.6 megapascals, or 525 pounds-per-square-inch. That’s because the volume of wastewater pumped down had exceeded the volume of oil extracted, suggests the team of researchers from the University of Oklahoma, Columbia University and the U.S. Geological Survey. That increased pressure then caused the rock to jump along a pre-existing fault, known as the Wilzetta Fault.

Which makes me wonder about the advisability of allowing a new disposal well field for fracking fluids in this active earthquake zone, and near a college, no less.

From the Ojai Valley News, dated March 7. 2013:

By Kimberly Rivers

"A new oilfield waste disposal facility, including an underground injection well for storing oilfield fluids (and potentially fracking fluids) could become a reality in Ojai’s backyard in the very near future.

Pending before county planners is a proposal from Anterra Waste for a new Class II oilfield waste disposal facility, near the Santa Clara River in Santa Paula. “Class II fluids are waste streams associated with oil and natural gas production operations,” according to the notice on the county’s website.

Related to that proposal, Anterra is pursuing a lease for county land — about a half mile from proposed facility — to drill and operate a Class II injection well that would inject waste from oil and natural gas production deep into the earth for disposal and storage.

Mirada Petroleum also has applied to the county of Ventura to expand an existing conditional use permit for oil leases in Upper Ojai behind St. Thomas Aquinas College, paving the way for eight new oil wells."

Okay. Now. If the injection of fracking fluids into a disposal field set off an earthquake, that damaged the college or its cathedral, wouldn't regulators be potentially liable for approving it, knowing the risks?

Portlandia mocks aggregated "journalism" today

From a real honest-to-God pitchboard (for journalists) on a national site: 

"Proposal: Daily series of trending news rewrites 
Publisher: Newsmax Media 
Fee: $160 
Urgent?: No

Description: Seeking writers for the section of our website that aggregates and rewrites trending news. Posts on average should take 25-40 minutes, be 300-350 words and we expect eight stories a day in a 6a-3p window (to be expanded soon). We are flexible to shorten days and willing to work with a writer for as few as 4 posts a day (reducing the rate proportionately). Good for writers who want steady work and can commit to 2-3 days per week minimum. Examples of content: newsmax.com/thewire"

My reaction is one of horror. But the incredibly imaginative Portlandia had a better idea -- mockery. They really went to town with the ridiculousness of aggregator sites, coining a wonderful/awful new word for a purveyor of such. Not a journalist, a "linkalist." To wit:

"On last Friday’s episode of“Portlandia”, the Portland Tribune was sold to LinxPDX — “a very successful online blog” — and editor George Heely was demoted to “linkalist.”

New owners Trudy (Carrie Brownstein) and Craig (Fred Armisen) meet with the staff and tell them about the paper’s new direction (“we’re just going to lose the whole print thing”).

Trudy: “People don’t need articles anymore, and we don’t want to provide things that people don’t care about.”
Craig: “They probably read about every fifth word, so just make it those five words.”

George (played by George Wendt) wants to keep doing real journalism, but he’s told to change his ways.

Trudy: “The site is called LinxPDX; we don’t actually have articles. We have links to other articles.”
Craig: “Think of yourself less of a journalist and more of a linkalist.”
George: “But we can still write stories.”
Trudy: “In your free time you can write all the stories you want.”

 

The tweet that got “70 million hits.”

In the end, George becomes the newsroom hero as his tweet — “Charlize Theron NSFW” — sets a LinxPDX record with “70 million hits.” When a colleague looks at him in disgust, George barks at the guy: “Get off my back, will ya? It’s the future!”

I asked the real Portland Tribune newsroom boss what he thought of the episode and how his newspaper was portrayed.

“I thought it was pretty funny,” says Tribune executive editor Kevin Harden. “And, given the state of the industry, I cringed just a bit because it tickled the truth.'"

[from veteran journalism watcher Romenesko]

Fracking in Upper Ojai: the latest

Fracking -- which as you all no doubt know is the injection of water and chemicals below ground at pressure, to break up rock formations and release natural gas and/or oil -- has come to rural Upper Ojai and Ventura County.

In truth, fracking turns out to have been going on in this area for a long time -- decades. How long in this neighborhood is a little unclear. I have been told by neighbors that "all the wells in Upper Ojai" have been fracked. I also have been told that oil companies have applied to drill hundreds of new wells in Ventura County and the backcountry. I have heard that fracking is not a danger to our water supply because the oil wells being fracked are so far below the surface they can't possible contaminate surface waters. I am skeptical, after reading the latest on fracking from ProPublica. 

At the same time, I am aware that oil production is what first brought white people like me to this area, beginning in 1867, so perhaps I am complicit, in a sense, and should be a little more open-minded. 

The irony is that there is so little regulation on fracking in California that oil companies wishing to frack have to jump through more hoops to drill in the National Forest backcountry, where no one lives, and on which wells have stood for decades, than in neighborhoods such as ours. 

Here are some links to the latest: 

Chevron offers public tours of fracking site: Ventura County Star. 

“The most dangerous thing you will do today is climb in and out of the vans, so please watch your step,” said Leslie Klinchuch, Chevron’s project manager for what’s officially known as the Pacific Coast Pipeline Superfund site.

The point was that the site, despite being contaminated with a known cancer-causing substance and other pollutants, is safe to visit. It’s also safe to live near, according to decades of testing by Chevron and the EPA. Hundreds of Fillmore residents do live nearby, separated from the refinery site by the Pole Creek concrete drainage channel, and a few of them were on Tuesday’s tour to see the property for themselves.

Fracking has been going on in the nearby National Forest for decades, and four wells were fracked int he last couple of years. An investigatory report: 

The ForestWatch investigation revealed that at least four wells were fracked in the Sespe Oil Field in 2011, and at least three additional wells were fracked in 2012. The fracking occurred on private land owned by Seneca Resources Corporation, a Texas-based oil company that operates the vast majority of wells in the Sespe Oil Field. The company relies on slant drilling to reach oil deposits on federal leases beneath the Los Padres National Forest. The chemicals, supplies and equipment were provided by Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oil field service companies with revenues of $24.8 billion in 2011 and also headquartered in Texas.

The recent fracking operations were approved without any public notice or environmental review. This is because fracking is unregulated in the State of California, and is typically rubber-stamped by the California Department of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources (“DOGGR”), the agency charged with regulating oil and gas extraction throughout the state. In one of the recent Los Padres fracking operations, DOGGR officials received a Notice of Intention to Rework Well 48-33 on the White Star lease on June 22, 2012, and three days later issued a one-page Permit to Conduct Well Operations authorizing the fracking. According to records submitted by Seneca Resources Corporation, the fracking operation was completed a few days later on July 5, 2012.

Fracking consumes millions of gallons of water a year in Ventura County (Ojai Valley News)

According to the voluntary reporting site www.fracfocus.org, 13 wells have been fracked in Ventura County since January 2011. Based on the water volume listed for those wells, 3,679,879 gallons of water were used during the franking process. According to the site, that total could include fresh water, produced water and/or recycled water.

Produced water comes up during drilling and has to be separated from the oil or gas. Fracfocus reports that 99.2 percent of the mixture injected underground during fracking is water; the remaining .79 percent is chemicals. That means 29,071 gallons of chemicals, gellants and other components were used in the 13 wells that were voluntarily reported.

Aera Energy — the largest oil producer in Ventura County, according to its website — did not respond by press-time to requests for information about its water sourcing and the quantity of fresh water it has used in drilling operations.

James Hines of the Sierra Club of Ventura County claims industry sources have disclosed that “60 wells have been fracked in Ventura County alone, along the Ventura River and Rincon. Those areas drain to the ocean. And along Sespe Creek,” said Hines. “With the new permits in Upper Ojai and old wells which can be re-drilled, there is nothing to stop them from fracking (in the valley),” he said. “There are plugged and covered wells in the Casitas watershed area.”

Yikes! My thought is to try and learn how to identify a fracked well by sight, for my own knowledge, and potentially to get neighbors involved. But is that even possible? 

I think we are inside a flower, under a pollen of stars

Love this one, called Kauai, via the almost always worthy Poetry Daily: 

We’ve come back to the site of   her
conception. She calls it why

and cries all night,
sleepless, wild.

It seems the way is always
floating and the goal —

to live so the ghosts we were
don’t trail us and echo.

I think we are inside a flower,
under a pollen of stars vast as scattered sand.

The air pulses with perfume,
flowers calling to flowers and the ferrying air.

But my eyes are thin and elsewhere.
I am thinking, maybe

even coming into the soul
is a difficult birth, squeezed by the body’s vise.

My bent legs like pincers
or the vegetable petals of some tropical flower.

Even my mind gripped by the folds
of   the flesh, how the cells keep twinning

themselves out toward complexity.
The tulip trees of   the valley

spread their bone canopies into slick green leaves
and fire flowers deep as cups.

Their cups fill with rain, rain
drinks the leaves drinking rain.

I can’t begin to explain.
How on this porous peak of stone in the sea

our daughter came into me.
Little flick of a fish I could not see.

I was just learning to be human
and upright among all that life.

And what was real was stranger
than night with its dust of unnamed suns.

It was the beyond in us. And she was.

Rachel Jamison Webster

Poetry
March 2013

Love as a force of nature: Jeanette Winterson

From an untitled post at Soaked in Soul:

"I used to be a hopeless romantic. I am still a hopeless romantic. I used to believe that love was the highest value. I still believe that love is the highest value. I don’t expect to be happy. I don’t imagine that I will find love, whatever that means, or that if I do find it, it will make me happy. I don’t think of love as the answer or the solution. I think of love as a force of nature - as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is live-giving. And when it burns out, the planet dies. My little orbit of life circles love. I dare not get any closer. I’m not a mystic seeking final communion. I don’t go out without SPF 15. I protect myself. But today, when the sun is everywhere, and everything solid is nothing but its own shadow, I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love - all love - love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a café. Myself, even, which is the hardest thing of all to love, because love and selfishness are not the same thing. It is easy to be selfish. It is hard to love who I am. No wonder I am surprised if you do." -Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

Haven't read this book. Review in the Guardian makes it sound far stranger than the quote. Pic references the lighthouse keeper in the book, and comes from Jeffrey Sullivan. It's of the Walton lighthouse in Santa Cruz, lit for Christmas.