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Nuking Western Colorado

Posted on December 19, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Project Plowshare, a U.S. government program was created to develop peaceful uses for nuclear detonations. The program led to three trials in rural Western Colorado designed to release natural gas from tight geologic formations that contained large amounts of natural gas. The gas was there, but was difficult to recover because it would not readily flow to wells. Nuclear fracking, in other words.

The idea was to fracture large amounts of rock releasing the gas for use. Fracking was in use in that era, but the area fractured around a well hole was fairly small, limiting the amount of gas freed. This would remain the case until horizontal well drilling was developed, resulting in a boom in natural gas production.

The use of atomic explosions somewhat larger than the one that destroyed Hiroshima would fracture a large amount of rock, liberating huge amounts of gas. There were three experiments. All three were somewhat successful, yielding gas in recoverable amounts. Big surprise, the gas was radioactive and remains so. A study indicated that the level of radioactivity released in a California home, when blended with gas from other sources, would be well below the dose we receive from background radiation. People would have none of it. No one wanted radioactive natural gas coming into their home at any level.

Western Colorado, source of much of the uranium used in nuclear bombs, had three detonations in a doomed experiment. The most casual of examinations of the proposal to liberate gas from tight strata would raise the radioactivity question. It took millions of dollars to prove the obvious: radioactive natural gas.

Some shots were done at the Nevada test site to explore using bombs to excavate. Huge amounts of radionuclides were released, affecting generations of downwinders, especially in St. George, Utah. Our nuclear tragedy started in New Mexico with the first Trinity detonation that led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It continues today, with all the radioactive spots around the planet and the people sickened and killed by fallout.

Most historians assert that President Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki ultimately saved lives. What they did do was trigger the nuclear arms race with its terrible consequences. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island have shown that nuclear power is risky as well.

My first literary effort was a story I wrote while a student at Mesa College in Grand Junction, Colorado in 1966. Project Rulison was in the works, and my story depicted an even greater failure. The blast sent radioactive oil into a previously unknown aquifer that opened into the irrigation canals that provide water to Grand Valley farms. Radioactive oil in Palisade, Grand Junction, Fruita, and the rest of the valley, rendering it uninhabitable. Pure fiction, but a fun story.

Come up to today, and fracking is still controversial. I think the legacy of Project Rulison is stalking the oil and gas industry to this day. Somehow the industry did not get it that bad practices will catch up with them, despite the API’s slick commercials.

Posted in Colorado History, Energy Policy, Environment, Geology, Memoirs, My Story, Oil and Gas Policy, Stories

Part Three, the Keystone XL Pipeline

Posted on September 29, 2014 by Bill 3 comments

Pipeline Construction

When I was growing up in Fruita, Colorado in the 1950’s, the El Paso Natural Gas Company built a 26″ natural gas pipeline from north to south through Western Colorado. In flat country, laying a pipe is fairly straightforward. To lay a pipeline, dig, lay pipe, weld, wrap, and backfill. In the Colorado Plateau, the pipeline not only goes from point to point, it goes up and down.

North of Fruita, The line had to go over Douglas Pass. As Colorado passes go, it is no big deal. Not that high, but near the top there is steep and unstable ground famous for landslides. The trenchers, welding machines, side-boom tractors handling pipe, and bulldozers; all had to be winched up and down the mountainside. That is a slow, expensive process. To us in Fruita, it meant that our little town had lots of pipeliners for several weeks.

I mostly saw the pipeliners in Hill’s Cafe, where we often had dinner. The stereotype is that pipeliners are a wild bunch, but we didn’t see it in the cafe. They were quiet, well-behaved, some prayed before eating, and I liked them. After all, if you are from Bald Knob, Arkansas, how wild can you be?

That pipeline brings gas from Wyoming, Western Colorado, and Eastern Utah to markets in Texas and the southwest, including California. To my knowledge, it has few problems and quietly does its job. I think that pipeline has shaped my thinking about pipelines in general.

Today there is much oil and gas development in North Dakota and Alberta. A pipeline network exists to deliver crude oil from there to the refinery complex on the Gulf Coast. It can’t deliver all that is being produced. Proposed is a new line, the Keystone XL Pipeline that would run west of the existing line, picking up crude from the Williston Basin in North Dakota as well as the synthetic crude from the Alberta tar sands.

There is a lot of opposition for several reasons. One reason is fear of leaks. Big spills, contamination, fire, ground water contamination, and all the risks that go with moving lots of nasty stuff that burns. That Alberta synthetic crude is even nastier than regular crude. Its carbon footprint is much higher than oil from traditional sources. It is thick and has to be heated to separate it from the sand. Most of the crude oil refined here in Denver is tar sand oil.

Oil Car Train

The fact is that as long as demand for petroleum products stays high, that Alberta crude will go south, but in rail cars if the pipeline isn’t built. Here in Denver, there are many tank car trains headed south, competing with coal trains for right of way. In the upper Midwest there is so much oil traffic that farmers are having difficulty shipping their grain. Pipelines are safer than rail cars for shipping petroleum.

Some of the opposition is for environmental reasons. Tar sand crude is bad. Pipelines are bad. Fossil fuel is bad. All true. The solution is not stopping pipelines, but reducing demand. How to reduce demand? Make fossil fuels more expensive with higher taxes. Use the tax money to develop alternative energy and transportation. Build rails not freeways. Tell that to Republican legislators.

In the meantime, I think the pipeline is the best alternative until our energy policies change.

Posted in Colorado History, Energy Policy, Environment, Fear, My Story, Oil and Gas Policy, Pipelines, unjustified Fears

Three Unjustified Political Causes

Posted on September 23, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

Gas Rig in Western Colorado

There are three causes, fracking, GMO’s, and the XL pipeline that to me are spurious. There is a lot of hysteria around the issues with little critical examination taking place. People seem to be taken in by bad science, bad reporting, and demagoguery.

Fracking is an old technology that expanded when horizontal drilling along with fracking opened up huge amounts of territory to oil and gas extraction. The oil and gas was there all along, geologists knew about it, but it was trapped in what the industry calls tight strata, mostly shale.

Traditionally, oil and gas has come from fairly porous rock that allows the oil and gas to migrate to the wells. Tight strata is not porous, and the oil and gas tends to stay in place. hydraulic fracturing breaks the rock, allowing the oil and gas to move to the well. Fracking is not new technology. It was being used around my home town in the 1950’s. The big change came with horizontal drilling, hugely expanding the amount of rock that can be fractured from one drill hole.

If there is impervious rock above the area being fractured, the only route for the oil and gas to escape is up the drill hole. Done right, the oil and gas go into a pipeline or a tank with no surface contamination. The problem is that it is often not done right.

BP Spill

It’s been clear for a long time, reinforced by the big BP spill in the gulf, that drilling so often not done right. Oil companies are infamous for lying, cheating, and stealing. They get away with it in part because nobody knows what they are doing. Meters are bypassed, mineral rights owners, including the Government, are underpaid, horizontal wells go outside their boundaries, and proper drilling methods are bypassed.

The big BP spill in the gulf happened because a defective blowout preventer was put in service. No one is going to know, right? It is a mile under water. We all know and BP is going to owe billions.

The problems we are seeing with fracking, groundwater contamination, flaming water faucets, polluted water dumped into streams, all come from cheating. With fracking, drillers cheat by not properly lining the drill holes. The correct method is to pump concrete between the side of the hole and the smaller steel casing that carries the oil and gas to the surface. It requires high pressure pumps and a lot of concrete. Done right, it works just fine. But, it is a long way down that hole and you cannot stand beside the wellhead and tell what was done. What can be done is to sample ground water and air. If there is contamination, it was not done right. Incidentally, our old friend Halliburton is the big oil well service company that does much of the well lining.

Until alternate energy is much bigger than it now is, we need oil and gas, and domestic production is preferable to foreign imports. Otherwise, turn off your air conditioning, junk the furnace, and sell the car. So, let’s regulate. We need monitoring for contaminants and on-site inspectors. All that is done in construction, but the oil and gas industry has avoided most oversight.

Fear is the reason for the opposition to fracking. People don’t understand the technology, big oil rigs along subdivisions and water trucks on the highway are imposing. They see news reports that show flaming faucets

Flaming Faucet

without explaining the cause other than blaming fracking. Flaming railroad oil train wrecks. Pipeline leaks in California. The oil and gas industry has a public relations problem.

The biggest fracking failure was 45 years ago in Western Colorado. The government detonated a 40 kiloton nuclear bomb down a drill hole near Parachute, Colorado. Lots of natural gas was liberated, but it is radioactive. People just will not accept radioactive gas coming into their homes. I think this long ago event is what started fracking fear.

Unless you get around on horseback or bicycle, stay off the power grid and light, heat, and cool your house with renewable energy, you need oil and gas. With regulation, it can be safe. We can then put more time and energy into developing clean energy.

Parts two and three will examine GMO food and the XL Pipeline. Stay tuned.

Posted in Energy Policy, Environment, Fear

Energy

Posted on May 23, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

Solar Panels

Carol and I are concentrating on how we use energy. Watching “Cosmos” with Neil DeGrasse Tyson pointing to the sun and saying, “It’s Free!” is partly responsible. I did a lot of research for my talk on Front Range Colorado flooding. One conclusion I reached is that the climate change we are now experiencing will lead to more floods.

Releasing fossil carbon into the atmosphere is setting up a worldwide crisis of unparalleled magnitude. Drought, wildfires, floods, sea level rise, and pollution will affect millions worldwide. The environmental changes have already increased political instability. Syria and sub-Saharan Africa are cases in point.

Here in the U.S., rhetoric and denial are the most visible response to the looming disasters. Those who make money from fossil energy deny the problem and buy inaction in Congress. Public utilities seem to be much more interested in selling gas and power produced from coal and gas than switching to renewables. Wind farms are on the increase and more commercial solar power installations are being built, but the pace is fairly slow.

Germany is a leader in switching to renewables, but recent stories that over 70 percent of production is from renewables is exaggerated. The fact is that their wind and solar production is increasing, while coal use is declining. China is starting to move to renewables, but is the world leader in coal use, and coal production is increasing. In China, 66% of their power comes from coal compared to 49% in the U.S. The switch to gas from coal is on, driven by cheaper gas (from fracking) and the high cost of coal plant pollution controls. Burning gas has about half the carbon footprint of coal, but it is still burning huge amounts of carbon sequestered millions of years ago.

Worldwide people and governments are starting to respond to the dangers of fossil fuel generated climate change, but slowly. So what are we to do? Join the grassroots green energy movement. People use all this energy, so people have to use less. Less gasoline, less natural gas, less electricity, and most of all, less coal.

So what is a couple from Denver to do? We aren’t much for marching in the streets or being rabid environmentalists, but we want to do our part. Activism begins at home. In our case, home is a brick bungalow built in 1937, when builders were not concerned with energy efficiency. The main thing builders did in the 1930’s did was build smaller houses. Ours has 830 square feet on the main floor. It is a far cry from the 2400 square foot houses that are today’s norm.

We did add a 400 square foot sunroom that we can close off from the rest of the house. In the winter, it is at 40 degrees, and an exhaust fan pulls cool air from the basement in summer. We have a modern high efficiency furnace and water heater. We have increased the attic insulation twice, first to R36, then to R50. The original steel casement windows are terrible for leaking cold air in winter, and hot air in summer. We have historical designation on the house which means keeping those windows, but we installed inside storm windows that stop those wintry breezes.

Carol forces me to tolerate 68 degrees in winter and 78 degrees in summer. That mainly means either more or less clothes depending on the season. At night the programmable thermostat is set for 56 degrees, but the house seldom cools off that much. I did break down and get some fleece lined slippers instead of my beloved L.L. Bean moccasins. The basement, with my man cave, gets cold. I guiltily run an electric heater. Someday we will insulate those cold basement walls.

When we increased the attic insulation the first time we also put in attic ventilation. We had rooftop vents installed and put a large vent in the north gable to introduce cooler outside air. When we re-roof we will add more vents. Prior to that, the only ventilation was a small vent over the entryway. It sure did get hot up there.

The air conditioner has a device provided by our electric utility that runs it less often during periods of high demand for power on hot days. To reduce air conditioner use we open the house up in the evening and run fans to exhaust hot air and bring in cooler outside air. Denver averages a thirty degree difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures. Texans, eat your hearts out. When we have to have a new roof in the next few years we will add an attic fan. They are noisy, but they exhaust hot air in the house and cool the attic.

The big thing we are doing now is adding solar electricity with our new garage. We have needed a garage for some time. We have never been able to park a car in the old one, designed for a 1937 Ford. My shop area, the gardening stuff, until recently my motorcycle, and the bicycles filled it up. Our block has an alley, which is a crime conduit. We have had several break-ins, and want our cars inside.

The solar panels will go on the garage and sunroom roofs. When we replace the roof on the older part of the house, we will add enough panels to produce all the power we need. We will be at about 80% with the house and sunroom panels.

So we are slowly going green. It is possible for individuals to make a difference. If more of us do it, it will pressure governments and the utility companies to get serious about energy. It will take grass roots action to make it happen. Boulder, Colorado is threatening to take over Xcel energy’s infrastructure in their city. That is a message to the utility companies that they have to get serious about renewable energy or lose their customers city by city. I am hopeful that meaningful change is going to happen. I don’t think it is enough to stop some of the climate changes we are seeing, but we are slowly starting to try living with our planet, not exploit it to our extinction.

Posted in Energy Policy, Environment, Home Improvement, My Story, Stories

More on Fracking and Clean Coal

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

Some good news and bad news in the energy business.

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper promulgated new regulations that should go a long ways toward ending pollution from oil and gas wells. Each well will have monitoring equipment that can detect any emissions from the well Here is a link.

The bad news, Duke Energy has a lot of coal ash ponds in the southeast, and one collapsed into the river. Duke is a powerful lobbyist, and has successfully avoided any strict regulation or penalties up to this point. This event may change that.

i am struck by the corporate attitude to these harmful and costly events. Lobbyists are paid, campaigns are funded, lots of false rhetoric is expended fighting regulatory oversight of mining, drilling, and processing operations. “Regulations and government intrusion kills jobs.” So little regulation goes into place until a hugely expensive disaster occurs, with cleanup costs far exceeding the costs to do the job right.

i think fighting regulation is due to the constant corporate pressure to have a good quarterly profit. Expenses that cut into short-term profit are avoided by managers who avoid or never see reports from the field warning of potential environmental problems.

In my experience, weak managers who lack foresight and the ability to sell needed projects to the higher-ups tend to focus on cost cutting. Tanks leak, ash retention ponds fail, and faulty blowout preventers fail, all in the name of quarterly profits.

Last quarter’s numbers look good, but the overall profit picture is not so good for Freedom Industries, Duke Energy, or BP Petroleum.

My favorite case in point is when Freon was banned due to ozone layer damage. The refrigeration industry fought the change until they realized that they were the ones to do the work replacing Freon.

Rather than killing jobs, environmental regulation created jobs and benefited everyone, and the consumer paid the cost, fair enough for having a cool house and car.

Coal Ash Spill

Posted in Energy Policy, Environment

Fracking

Posted on February 20, 2014 by Bill 2 comments

The United States is experiencing an energy boom. Oil and gas production is steadily growing, mostly due to new technology in use in older oil fields that were once regarded as exhausted, and development of new areas like the Williston Basin in North Dakota and the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania. Here in Colorado, the boom-bust economy of the Western Slope experienced a major boom. In the Denver Basin, mostly in Weld county, drilling has increased dramatically.

Why this oil and gas boom when just a few years ago, oil and gas production had been declining for years. Fracking, where a well is driven down into petroleum-bearing strata once regarded as unproductive because the rock was not porous enough to allow the petroleum to flow into the well, can now become productive when the rock is hydraulic fractured by pumping water under tremendous pressure into the rock layers. The rock breaks, and the sand and chemicals hold the fractures open enough to allow the oil and gas to migrate into the drill hole.

Fracking is not new. I am from Western Colorado, and in the 1950’s the region experienced a double boom. The government needed uranium to build bombs, and oil and gas were in great demand. My paper route doubled with all the new people moving in for good-paying jobs. Fracking was in use then, but had limitations as the amount of rock broken around a vertical drill hole was limited. Today, however, that has changed because of horizontal drilling, where a well is drilled into the desired rock layer then the drill makes a 90-degree turn and drills horizontally, increasing the amount of rock in that layer that can be fractured.

The result of this technology is that the U.S. is moving toward energy independence. Our dependence on the Middle East for oil is almost gone. New jobs are being created, oil prices have stabilized, and a new energy era has dawned.

All good, right? No. There is always a cost. Fracking requires water. Millions of gallons of water are injected into the earth. Some comes back up, but it is dirty stuff that sometimes is cleaned up, sometimes not. Here in Colorado water is a scarce resource, and most of the water used in fracking is lost.

The oil rigs need roads and solid pads for the equipment. Well-developed oil fields are a maze of roads and pads that have no other use. I became aware of the damage flying over the overthrust belt in southern Wyoming. The land in that arid region will be scarred, and wildlife habitat reduced, for centuries.

The cost most people are concerned about is the pollution around the wells. Lighting the gas coming out of the water tap in the kitchen sink is the most publicized problem. Odors, toxic fluids coming out of the wells, air pollution, and an increase of respiratory illness near the wells are all of concern. The result is there is a great deal of opposition to fracking. In northern Colorado, several cities have banned fracking, with the oil and gas industry engaged in a major political battle.

All this opposition is the oil companies’ fault. There is a huge amount of money to be made from the oil and gas produced by fracking, and the drillers are working as fast as they can to make that money. In the process, they cheat. There are proven means to prevent any unwanted gasses and fluids from migrating to the surface around a well. Good well casing practices, assuring there is an impervious layer of rock above the fracture zone, and well-placed concrete between the well casing and the surrounding rock. All this casing and concrete is expensive, and in a mile-deep hole in the ground. So, cheat. Use rotten casing, less cement, and loose strata above the production layer; all lead to environmental damage at the surface when the well leaks. The damage does not have to happen.

Just as fracking technology is well-developed, the means of protecting the area around the wellhead are available. The key is requiring the drillers to use those means. It is not enough to pass laws saying don’t do it. It takes monitoring with enough inspectors on site to assure proper practices are followed. The monitoring can be funded by a tax on production. (The producers cheat at production figures as well). The result can be more jobs and safe oil and gas production.

Here in Colorado, with a Governor familiar with the oil and gas industry and a good political climate, solid regulation can happen. In Texas, however, the oil industry has controlled the state government for many years. Lots of folks stand to get sick there, and massive amounts of greenhouse gas are entering the atmosphere. With widespread public outcry about the environmental damage, the political climate may change enough to allow good governmental regulation.

The real solution to our global warming and climate change problem is to end the use of hydrocarbons we dig out of the earth. Coal, oil, and natural gas have to go. This is not going to happen soon. We can, however reduce the impact by moving from coal to natural gas as fuel in power plants. This has happened in Colorado, but huge amounts of coal still go to power plants in the south and east. More natural gas production can reduce coal consumption. The plants will still pollute, but at a lower amount. Fracking is the means. The next step is to accelerate our transition to renewal energy sources.

Fracking, if done properly with a good regulatory structure, can reduce our dependence on the Middle East for oil, and can reduce domestic coal use. There will be less environmental damage, and the economy will benefit. All we need is less hysteria and good regulation.

Here is a letter to the editor from The Denver Post 2-21-14 on fracking.

Posted in Environment, Geology