How Nuclear Power Followed Me to Colorado & Fracking Followed Me to New York (Part 2--Scarlet O'Hara Probably Didn't Own the Mineral Rights Under Tara)

My husband and I and our newly adopted Pit Bull puppy had only been living on our quiet county road in Silt, Colorado for a couple of months, when preparations for drilling a gas well began across the road from our house. It almost seemed as if the well pad and the derrick, or "rig," arrived overnight. And, as we were to learn, many things associated with gas drilling happen during the nighttime hours--the better to keep homeowners from noticing.

As mentioned in my previous post, due to "the split estate" convention, someone else can own the mineral rights under your property. You are merely the surface owner. This is a foreign concept to most Easterners--ditto for water rights. In Colorado, we were told, most of those mineral rights were snapped up by energy companies or speculators over a hundred years before.

Theoretically, unless you sign a surface lease, drilling companies can't come onto your property. Theoretically. However, if enough of your neighbors sign leases to allow drilling on their property, you may be compelled to allow drilling as well. This is called "forced pooling."

About the time the rig sprouted in a nearby field, an agent known colloquially as a "landman" appeared at our door one day. His alleged mission was to get us to sign a surface lease to allow the gas company who owned our mineral rights free access to our property. He became very angry when we took one look at his lease and told him we'd take it straight to our lawyer. Turns out he didn't even represent the company who owned our mineral rights--he was only a broker hoping to make a quick buck by selling the lease to them.

Sadly, whether you can successfully prevent drilling activity on your property actually becomes almost a moot point--if it's close to your land, that's plenty bad enough. After the neighboring rig went up, our quiet rural road turned into a raucous, industrial mudhole. The well had high-intensity lights at night. The trailers and shacks came in garish circus collars that didn't even try to blend in with the natural browns and greens of the landscape. There were lots and lots of high-frequency screeching noises and constant low-frequency thrumming that disturbed our sleep.

We could hear the rig workers hollering and swearing at all hours of the day and night. Most of them weren't natives, they were usually from Texas, Louisiana, or Oklahoma and didn't know or care about the neighbors. They brought their meth problems with them, too. The long hours and dangerous working conditions seemed to foster substance abuse. Consequently, drug crimes moved into our hollow. Our normally clear and tranquil early mornings were choked with the pungent smell of methane so bad you didn't want to be out on the porch drinking your coffee anymore, anyway.

Then one of our neighbor's wells went bad. The energy company started trucking in water for them and created a cistern. "Oh, sorry about that, folks," they said. Next a truck pulling a tanker full of toxic distillate from the well crashed, spilling the stuff all over the roadway up the hill from our house, allowing it to escape into the groundwater. Only because it was daytime did anyone notice, since the tankers usually came in the night to draw off the distillate. The ubiquitous red trucks of a certain energy services company would be lined up a dozen thick on the side road near the well, adding more noise and light pollution to the formerly quiet night, waiting to put more huge ruts in the field that used to grow wildflowers.

We knew it was only a matter of time before our well went bad, too. We'd started doing a lot of research, but it was impossible to miss stories in the local paper like the one about methane bubbling up in a local rancher's creek where his animals watered. One of those newspaper stories mentioned that the energy companies had made over three billion dollars in Garfield County--our county--the previous year. With that kind of incentive, did we really think they'd stop? We saw no choice but to find some place to live in Colorado where there were no gas deposits. We looked west.

Even with their amazing profits, the energy companies couldn't take the gas out fast enough, and that's perhaps the issue I've had one of my biggest problems with. Hydraulic fracturing, a.k.a., "fracking." Toxic liquids under pressure are forced down the well bore in order to fracture the rock and release more gas. Such fracking fluids are proprietary--read, they don't have to tell the public what's in them--but many known carcinogens have been identified in groundwater where fracking takes place--and they are exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act.

It's perfectly possible to drill for gas without using fracking. It's just more expensive. So, instead of doing things the right way, the energy companies choose the far more lucrative way. It's all fun and games with energy production until someone, say, loses reactor containment--or a town loses the safety of its entire water supply. It's tough to get along without water. Try it for a day.

Finally, we sold our nice little home in Silt, for a huge loss. So much for the theory that drilling would increase the value of a property--that was just propaganda designed to popularize granting leases. Someone from out of state bought it and last we knew, declined to live there, probably leased it to the drilling company. We'd been forced to follow the sneering advice that was briefly quoted in the paper regarding our neighboring town of Rifle: "Rifle's a gas town now. If you don't like it, get the f--- out!" Something good came out of it, at least--we moved to Grand Junction, which we loved as no place we'd lived before.

We had really tried to get along with the gas drilling industry. After all, just as with nuclear power, for the time being at least, the country needs natural gas. Oh wait, did I mention that the energy companies are saying that the market has tanked in this country? Tanked? As in, we don't need the gas anymore? If that were because alternative energy had taken up the slack, that would be wonderful. But, it's not that there's no market here any longer, it's that the market in China is far, far more lucrative for the energy companies. All the fracking destruction of our groundwater is just to keep China warm. Guess we'll have to keep buying foreign oil. But have you heard about the new oil shale drilling proposals. . . hey, it turned Parachute, CO into a ghost town in the 80s. . ..

Soon as we moved to New York for my job in 2008, we started hearing about gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale. About how there was more gas under New York and Pennsylvania than in all the West. That's when the flashbacks to Silt started for both of us. We'd been there and yes, I'd bought the T-shirt--from a conservation group opposed to fracking--should we tell our story and would anyone believe us? After all, we'd never thought about gas drilling before we moved to Colorado. Turns out, sometimes you have to see it up close and personal before you really understand--especially when disinformation comes with a multi-billion-dollar incentive for the corporations.

So, we told a few stories about gas drilling to our friends and co-workers and they listened politely, as if remotely interested--as in, "So there are problems with drilling--so what? We need the gas, don't we?" But someone was really listening. The western New Yorkers saw the horrors drilling had left in its wake in nearby gas meccas in Pennsylvania. Most of PA has become one huge drilling pad. Oh, and when they take the rig down? The land never goes back. First of all, the trucks have to return every couple of weeks to draw off the toxic distillate from the well--or it can explode. Then there's the ugly-colored compressor shack and the cows drinking from toxic puddles. . .. And the compressor stations built along the pipeline to increase the pressure--they having flaring smokestacks just like New Jersey and sometimes the whole station explodes.

Andrew Cuomo, the Governor of New York, and numerous legislators listened to people like us. A moratorium on drilling and fracking came down. Time was needed to study the practice. Turns out one of the great things about New Yorkers is that they're not easily hoodwinked. Street-smart and savvy are they. They looked at Pennsylvania and Colorado and other states where gas drilling takes place and they learned from what happened there.  I heard an executive from a foreign energy company being interviewed on a local news program say that because New York had taken so long to make up its mind about allowing fracking, his company had gone bankrupt. As they say in the cowboy movies, any of which could have been shot in a pre-gas town Rifle, Colorado, "I shore felt sorry for that pard,' truly I did!" "Not hardly," as Jude Hayes would say.

Here's today's quote from Remover of Obstacles:

“Well, A.J.’s great-grandfather most assuredly had his robber baron phase during the time of the silver boom, but his descendants have all been basically decent, hardworking, and upstanding citizens who just happen to have inherited the Midas touch."