Posted on 05/15/2015 10:22:31 AM PDT by thackney
The creator of the award-winning film ‘Gasland’ was just arrested at a protest in rural New York. Here’s the mini-documentary he made on the eve of his arrest. Award-winning documentary filmmaker Josh Fox, who wrote and directed the acclaimed fracking film Gasland, was arrested this afternoon while engaging in a human barricade at a natural-gas storage facility in the Finger Lakes.
“People need to see what’s happening at Seneca Lake, and also understand that this isn’t isolated, it is happening everywhere,” Fox told The Daily Beast before the protest. “We need to educate people that our dependency on fossil fuels has got to change, and it has to change now.”
Working through the night prior to his arrest, Fox put together a new short documentary, exclusively premiered below, on what he says are the facts behind the situation in Seneca Lake.
Located in the rural central-western part of the state, Seneca is the largest and deepest of the Finger Lakes, providing water to over 100,000 residents. Its long, thin, 38-mile expanse is sandwiched between the towns of Watkins Glen and Geneva, and it is the keystone to an ecosystem that fuels sustainable agriculture, eco-tourism, and world-class wineries. It’s a picture-perfect location, with one exception—Crestwood Midstream, a firm that many in the region claim is a bad neighbor, one that bullied its way in after quietly buying up five miles of pristine shoreline in order to install one of the largest natural gas distribution centers in the country. The gas is produced out of state—by, surprise, fracking.
Fracking is illegal in New York, thanks to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s landmark decision to ban it statewide. But storing and transporting massive quantities of methane right on the shores of not just a public water supply, but the heart of the iconic Finger Lakes, and a few miles from Watkins Glen? Totally fine, at least according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which last September, casually and without explanation, brushed aside all regional and outside scientific concerns and allowed the project to move forward.
A second phase of the Crestwood development that would add liquid petroleum gas storage falls under the auspices of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, which is still mulling the proposal over.
It’s not just where Crestwood wants to build this distribution center that has locals and environmentalists in an uproar, but how. Located a half-mile beneath the land Crestwood owns are 120-year-old abandoned salt caverns, and it’s within these that they will be storing their product. And that, experts like geophysicist H.C. Clark warn, is not a good idea.
First, Cark claims there are structural issues. In the 1960s, a 400,000-ton hunk of rock fell from one of the ceilings, and now rests on the floor of the cavern, leaving behind a potentially unstable irregular hole the size of a football field. And while salt caverns are nearly impervious to gas, when you have irregularities, they can cause leaks, or, worse, collapse.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
In 2102 in Louisiana, the Bayou Corne sinkhole occurred when an underground salt cavern, which was being used to store crude oil, collapsed, creating a still-expanding 26-acre sinkhole and leading to the potentially permanent evacuation of more than 350 residents. More shocking is the Lake Peigneur incident, in which an oil rig accidently drilled into a salt mine under the lake and drained the lake into the maze of underground chambers, sucking down the drilling platform and eleven barges in the process. And in January, 2001, in Hutchinson, Kansas, 143 million cubic feet of natural gas leaked from a salt cavern facility, creating 15 gas blowholes as much as a mile away and leading to explosions that destroyed businesses and killed two people.
Second, there is the issue of salinity.
Should there be a leak, the increased pressure in the caverns would force salty brine —which currently fills the chambers and is pumped out to specially lined pits when the gas is forced in—into Lake Seneca, driving the lake’s already high salinity past the point of human consumption. In 1995, a study found that Seneca Lake contained chloride (salt) levels at “2-10 times higher than the other Finger Lakes.” Protestors also say negative impacts on Seneca Lake tourism and the burgeoning local wine industry are concerns.
But the locals of the Finger Lakes are not ones to take being bullied by a federal agency, especially not one with a reputation as a “rubber stamp” agency for oil concerns. And so they have mounted an ongoing civil disobedience campaign against the Crestwood project, organizing to block construction vehicles from reaching the site. Thus far, there have been dozens of these blockades, and, subsequently, hundreds of arrests.
Acclaimed author and biologist Sandra Steingraber is one of the driving forces behind the protests, which happen under the collective auspices of a group calling itself We Are Seneca Lake. She says there has been a change to the way the district attorney has been handling the arrests. While many people find themselves simply released by a judge—a recent group of 42 had their charges “released in the interest of justice”—some, including Steingraber, have found themselves sentenced to the maximum of 15 days in jail after refusing on philosophical grounds to pay a fine. Perhaps wising up to the group’s willingness to spend some time behind bars, a new penalty has arisen—a judgment lien. This can result in bad credit, loan refusal, inability to register a car or renew a drivers license, seized wages or property, and, in extreme cases of failure to pay, even contempt of court charges.
“Our civil disobedience is always done politely, and in as much cooperation with police as possible,” Steingraber explained. “We don’t want to make their jobs harder. After all, if a disaster were to happen here, they’d be the first repsonders.”
Steingraber also alleges that Crestwood hasn’t been entirely honest with the region about their intentions for the facility, which it has boasted to stakeholders would transform the Finger Lakes into a “gas storage and transportation hub” for much of the northeastern United States and parts of Canada. Protesters claim that the company overstated the potential jobs and other benefits it would provide.
Many of the ongoing barricade protests have take on themes—there were mothers for Mother’s Day, and recently a group of birdwatchers gathered to halt trucks while searching the skies. In December, a group of activists dressed as Santa Claus were arrested. Until today, however, the actions have been mostly local.
That just changed with Fox’s arrest.
I currently work projects at one of the largest salt cavern storage facilities in the US for Nat Gas and Nat Gas Liquids. So I am likely a little biased in the other direction.
Ping!
The Basics of Underground Natural Gas Storage
http://www.eia.gov/pub/oil_gas/natural_gas/analysis_publications/storagebasics/storagebasics.html
Salt caverns provide very high withdrawal and injection rates relative to their working gas capacity. Base gas requirements are relatively low. The large majority of salt cavern storage facilities have been developed in salt dome formations located in the Gulf Coast states. Salt caverns have also been leached from bedded salt formations in Northeastern, Midwestern, and Southwestern states. Cavern construction is more costly than depleted field conversions when measured on the basis of dollars per thousand cubic feet of working gas capacity, but the ability to perform several withdrawal and injection cycles each year reduces the per-unit cost of each thousand cubic feet of gas injected and withdrawn.
Much more info at the link
There are some very sick people out there...
Ha!
But we can burn wood either. What energy shall we use to support the production of goods and services that will provide the funding we need to support solar and wind energy to use for the production of goods and services? See, solar and wind won't sustain themselves financially. We are no longer allowed to use nuclear or hydroelectric energy either.
Simply put, we need fossil fuel energy so that we can earn revenue and pay taxes to pay for Solar and Wind energy.
This circular logic can cause symptoms of stupidity. You've been warned.
I’d be glad to cut off natural gas supplies to New York State, if that’s what would make the residents there happy.
Yep.... ;-)
It bubbles right through it like a ghost, then leaves H2O behind, and creepily disappears into the atmosphere.
Very tricky stuff.
This Josh Fox is clearly a genius.
Yeah, I was right across the street when the Sheriffs hauled these dingalings off for trespassing. These nitwits along with the Socialist / Marxist governor have been preventing New York State from reaping the financial benefits that Pennsylvania has from fracking for years now. One note of humor for me was that the dipsticks being arrested weren't even handcuffed but held their hands behind their backs for the camera to give the impression that they were. The actual FACTS are that this facility will produce virtually ZERO risks and provide enormous financial benefit to the entire region. Leave it to Water Mellon Socialists to screw up a wet dream!
I think Fox has a right to protest but not to block public roads to thru traffic or go on private property.
I gotta wonder if this guy walks to these protests.
Gasland... Isn’t that the liar who faked the flaming hoses?
And from my brief studies natural gas has been NATURALLY seeping in to water tables long before fracking.
BUT of course. We have to surrender our dollars, our futures, and freedom to government officials immediately. It’s all for the children
If there was a physical connection between Lake Seneca and the salt down, the salt dome would be dissolved until the lake reached maximum salt saturation. It would be far saltier than the dead sea.
We use water to create the caverns in the salt dome. Once the water nears salt saturation the water has to be replaced to keep growing them. Handling the fresh and the brine water is a major portion of the operations at the facility I work at.
I agree, but then he wouldn't get the publicity with the news cameras. That is why he does it.
It’s more like a slow seepage from below. The lake is being constantly supplied with fresh water from the runoff from the surrounding hills. There are even numerous water falls leading into it.
“Anti-Fracking Filmmaker Fox Fingered In Finger Lakes Fracas.”
Fixed it. (Sorry, couldn’t resist)
Not from the salt dome itself, or it would look be like the Lake Peigneur incident.
https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2007AM/finalprogram/abstract_131360.htm
Seneca Lake is more saline than the other glacially excavated Finger Lakes (e.g., Cl at 140 ppm vs. 40 ppm). Wing et al. (1995) suggested that Seneca, and to a lesser extent Cayuga Lake, has an additional groundwater source of saline water to compliment typical fluvial sources because they are deep enough to intersect the Silurian beds of commercial grade rock salt located ~450-600 m below the surface.
Mass-balance arguments by Halfman et al. (2006) indicated that sodium is stoichiometrically consistent with chloride. Finally, Jolly (2006) showed that the chloride concentration has not been constant over the past century.
Chloride concentrations were ~40 ppm in 1900, rose to ~170 ppm by the 1960’s, and subsequently decreased since 1980 to the present day concentration of ~120 ppm. Here we focus on the decrease in concentration over the past decade.
...A reduction of road salt use, salt mining activities or closure of salt pathways through the sediment column are the probable causes in the annual scale salinity decrease but more work is required to determine the exact cause.
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