Slick Water: Fracking and One Insider's Stand against the World's Most Powerful Industry

251 Pages·2014·1.57 MB·English

by  Ernst

Andrew Nikiforuk
SLICK
WATER
Fracking and One Insider’s
Stand Against the World’s
Most Powerful Industry
Vancouver/Berkeley
Doreen Docherty—my profile in courage.
Copyright © 2015 by Andrew Nikiforuk
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The
Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright license, visit
www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Greystone Books Ltd.
www.greystonebooks.com
David Suzuki Institute
219–2211 West 4th Avenue
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6K 4S2
Cataloging data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 978-1-77164-076-3 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-77164-077-0 (epub) Editing by Barbara Pulling
Cover design by Nayeli Jimenez
Cover photograph by iStockphoto.com
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia
Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the
Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
“The Orwell law of the future: any new technology that can be tried will be. Like
Adam Smith’s invisible hand (leading capitalist economies toward ever-
increasing wealth), Orwell’s Law is an empirical fact of life.”
DAVID GELERNTER, “The Second Coming: A Manifesto,” Edge, 1999
“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.”
W. H. AUDEN, “First Things First”
CONTENTS
Prologue
1 The Dress for Less Explosion
2 This Much You Should Know
3 Fracking Oildorado
4 Before Shale: Coal
5 A Revolution Under Rosebud
6 Criminal Threats
7 Banished
8 Keys to the Bank
9 Fingerprints and Liabilities
10 The Police Come Calling
11 Kafka’s Law
12 The Road of the Dishes
13 “No Duty of Care”
14 The Sisters of Jessica Ernst
Epilogue: Completions
Author’s Notes
A Note on Names and Language
Critical Sources
Index
PROLOGUE
AT THE BEGINNING of the American Civil War, the humorist Mark Twain
trekked to Nevada, where he tried his hand at mining. Like most fortune seekers,
Twain hoped to become a nabob living “flush times.” But Twain lost money and
failed miserably at getting rich. Shortly afterward, the writer coined a new
definition for mining: “a hole in the ground with a liar on top.”
Scholars now debate whether Twain made the remark. Some suggest the quote
may have originated with a man from Kansas. But the definition stuck and has
been used ever since, because it remains an apt description of mining.
This book is an unconventional true story about a new form of disruptive
mining: hydraulic fracturing.
ONE
The Dress for Less Explosion
ON THE AFTERNOON of March 24, 1985, the Ross Dress for Less clothing store
at West 3rd and Ogden in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles blew up into an
inferno. A spark from somewhere—most likely a janitor flicking a basement
switch—ignited an invasive cloud of methane with a hellish boom. The
explosion ripped up concrete slabs, blew out windows, singed cars, and cracked
walls. “Fire belching fissures” opened in the ground. The conflagration injured
twenty-three shoppers, some of whom suffered third-degree burns. It also forced
the evacuation of twenty to thirty stores along a quarter-mile commercial strip.
One witness said the sky was “raining fire.” Another compared the disaster to an
earthquake. “Out of nowhere the room exploded,” a shopper told a TV news
crew, “and I was thrown to one side.” For days, escaping plumes of methane
gases licked the foundations of buildings and sidewalk cracks. Firefighters tried
in vain to extinguish the flames.
The explosion did more than rattle the residents of Los Angeles—it
inaugurated the continent’s first debate about hydraulic fracking, horizontal
drilling, and migrating gases. The oil and gas industry blamed the explosion on
bacteria and naturally seeping gases. Scientists, however, reckoned differently.
They identified hydraulic fracturing and abandoned leaky oil wells as the chief
suspects.
Like any good detective tale, the Dress for Less story begins in an earlier
time: California’s black gold rush. In the early 1900s, wooden oil derricks
popped up so fast in Los Angeles that streets looked like a surreal forest painted
by Picasso. Some two hundred oil companies drilled more than two thousand
wells into scores of different oil fields. The frenzy turned the city into a “vibrant
oil-soaked little canyon.” Early homeowners gamely hosted wooden derricks in
their backyards and disposed of oilfield waste in their basements. Oil wells
planted in cemetery plots allowed the dead to provide income for the living, in
the form of royalty checks. The thirty-year-long boom manufactured big
fortunes for Union Oil, Getty Oil, and Atlantic Richfield. The flowing oil dollars
in turn fueled the state’s Wild West car culture and enriched evangelical
in turn fueled the state’s Wild West car culture and enriched evangelical
churches. Petrodollars supported the upstart film industry and a raft of corrupt
real estate deals. Oil turned California into an early American Kuwait.
The oil frenzy produced some memorable characters, just as the shale gas
boom would do one hundred years later. A religious piano teacher named Emma
Summers became “California’s Oil Queen” thanks to her “genius for affairs.”
She made millions selling oil to local hotels and industry. A dairy farmer, Arthur
F. Gilmore, discovered black gold in the Salt Lake Oil Field in 1902 while
looking for water. The field, which occupied an area about one mile by two
miles, soon became the highest-producing formation in California. By 1917,
more than four hundred wells had extracted an astounding 50 million barrels of
oil from the highly faulted field, where tar seeped to the surface at Rancho La
Brea. Gilmore got rich from his find and started his own oil company,
advertising, “Someday you will own a horseless carriage. Our gasoline will run
it.” Gilmore Oil later pioneered the original “gas-a-teria,” the first pump-your-
own gas station.
After Gilmore’s oil wells started to go dry in the 1930s, a farmer’s market and
a stadium arose on top of the Salt Lake Oil Field and its abandoned oil wells,
sump pits, and oil spills. The city’s restless economy planted another crop of
buildings on the site as well, including the famous CBS Television City and a
shopping center. No one dreamed of the possible consequences, because an oil-
fueled city rarely sleeps.
Nor did the oil industry abandon the city’s subterranean oil fields. During the
1960s, many companies reentered the Salt Lake field with horizontal wells or
long wells drilled on a slant. To this day, industry extracts 28 million barrels of
crude a year from LA’s petroleum basement. Land owned by the Archdiocese of
Los Angeles sports scores of oil and gas wells, as do several movie lots. Industry
disguised the Cardiff pumping station as a synagogue. In a 2010 exhibit on
“urban crude,” LA’s Center for Land Use Interpretation revealed that thousands
of wells puncture the city “like tree roots,” extracting “the living essence of the
ground, fueling this city of the car.” Moreover, the exhibit added, industry drains
the “progenerative substrate” by operating “in cracks, corners, and edges, hidden
behind fences, and camouflaged into architecture, pulling oil out from under our
feet.”
Three days after the Dress for Less explosion, the city struck a task force to
determine the cause. The investigating body included representatives from Los
Angeles’s Department of Building and Safety as well as the Division of Oil and
Gas (the state’s energy regulator) and the Southern California Gas Company.
Task force investigators consulted experts in geophysics and performed a
chemical analysis on the methane that had set the block ablaze. Meanwhile, an
emergency crew drilled an eighty-foot-long well under the parking lot of the
Ross Building, where the store had been. They found a pocket of highly
pressurized gas, which they vented and flared off.
Three months later, the task force issued a lengthy report that blamed Mother
Nature. The report explained that a “pressured incursion of naturally-occurring,
almost-pure methane gas” had seeped through small openings between the floor
slab and the foundation into the store. The probable source “was not from an oil
well but from decomposing organic matter nearer the surface.” The report
suggested the methane gas was “formed from the decomposition of buried plant
materials at no deeper than 100 to 200 feet below ground level.” Higher-than-
average rainfall had raised the groundwater, it explained. Elevated water levels
had pushed pockets of methane made by bacteria into the “path of least
resistance,” which just happened to be the store. Furthermore, this random
movement of gas to the surface had been taking place for tens of thousands of
years and would, “in all likelihood, continue to occur indefinitely into the
future.” To reduce the risk of another incident, the city needed to take steps “to
help prevent gas from entering into a building or, if the gas does enter a building,
detecting it before an explosive gas level is reached.” The report recommended
“the venting of significant paved parking areas,” too. In response, throughout the
Fairfax District, the city installed basement gas detectors and a variety of pipes
to vent methane.
Incredibly, the task force said little about the most likely suspect in the
explosion. Even the Southern California Gas Company had initially admitted
that “the flames were fueled by gas from a long-abandoned oil field in the
vicinity.” But the task force regarded the fact that the Salt Lake field lay under
the store as incidental geography. The report considered it an aside that
approximately 500 abandoned oil and gas wells punctured the neighborhood
over 1,200 acres, and that another forty active wells still pumped oil, water, and
gas out of the ground. The abandoned wells, which lay 6 to 10 feet below
buildings, yards, and streets, had been improperly plugged, with redwood fence
posts or debris. Most, if not all, leaked methane. But they weren’t the issue,
assured the report. Their existence was simply an unhappy coincidence.
A year after the Task Force on the March 24, 1985 Methane Gas Explosion
and Fire in the Fairfax Area exonerated the oil and gas industry, its members
quietly tabled two commissioned yet contradictory methane fingerprint studies.
One, by GeoScience Analytical, took fingerprints of gas from eight different
areas in Los Angeles with a history of seepage and abandoned wellbores.
Although the samples all came from hilly locations, the study said most of the
methane appeared to have originated in swamps. It supported the task force’s
blame-it-on-bacteria conclusion. But the other study, which the task force never
published, offered a radically different conclusion. That study looked at the
chemical makeup of gases found licking sidewalks outside the Dress for Less
store. Those fingerprints didn’t look anything like swamp gas. But they did
match deep gas from the oil reservoir being pumped nearby. The samples also
contained ethane and propane, clear markers of gas originating in a deep oil
deposit.
Nobody saw the second study except the lawyers and technical consultants
representing citizens in a class action lawsuit. Shortly after the Dress for Less
explosion made national news, one of the badly burned casualties, a CBS
employee, contacted Matthew Biren, a personal injury lawyer. Biren didn’t
know anything about the oil and gas business, but he recognized a clear case of
negligence. He signed up twenty-one of the shoppers hurt by the blast and
eventually launched two class action suits: one against the city of Los Angeles
and, later, one against McFarland Energy.
Biren warned the victims, as he instructed all of his clients, that life wasn’t
fair, and that such lawsuits rarely succeeded. Nonetheless, he recruited an
incredible team of technical experts. They included Richard Meehan, a Stanford
University expert in fluid migration, and Douglas Hamilton, a prominent civil
engineer, along with the University of Southern California’s George
Chilingarian, one of the world’s most famous petroleum geologists.
Chilingarian, a polymath who started university at the age of twelve, had located
many of the world’s most productive petroleum oil fields, and he edited a variety
of key oil journals. His father had served as physician to the shah of Iran.
“Chilingarian had written about forty books and knew everybody in the
business,” Biren later recalled. With Chilingarian’s contacts, Biren recruited a
gas storage and migration expert from Paris, as well as Denis Coleman and
Martin Schoell, U.S. geochemists who were pioneers in gas fingerprinting.
Coleman had just formed Isotech Inc., a firm that specialized in tracking down
different sources of methane. Biren also hired Bernard Endres, a brilliant
systems safety engineer and lawyer.
Meehan, an experienced industry troubleshooter, knew a thing or two about
the idiosyncratic behavior of aging oil fields, and none of the facts for the Ross