Drilling in Dallas

Today's editorial in the Morning News on Injection wells is a good one, although you'd like it to add the lack of any good waste disposal options for billions of gallons of contaminated fracking fluid to the reasons not to allow fracking at all.

At its core, the argument is whether it's fair for a city like Dallas to make a profit from gas drilling while banning the logical results of that drilling to rural areas where residents there must bear a disproportional risk of earthquakes and other hazards.

But if the Dallas City Council was looking at a short way to describe its job of writing a new gas drilling ordinance in August, this is a pretty good candidate:

"…increase setbacks of drilling operations from schools, churches, other buildings and levees, regulate the use of water during drought conditions and ensure that drilling operations don’t worsen air quality."

There were already plenty of reasons to be cautious about frackign anywhere, but it's the fact that new hazards are being "discovered" at a quickening pace that should be of equal concern.

Earthquakes from injection wells wasn't even a topic of concern two years ago and now it's becoming a scientific consensus. Silica pollution was an unknown danger until recent testing showed levels of it off the charts at fracking sites. It's all the things we don't know yet about the consequences of fracking that should give any official pause before allowing it close to people or valuable natural resources. Injection wells is just one example of that unknown.

Dallas City Hall staff met with representatives of the Army Corps of Engineers last week to get a briefing on the Corps' enforcement of its recommended 3000 foot "protective zone" between natural gas drilling sites and any dams, levees, and other water retention structures.

The Corps is engaged in an on-going study of how appropriate it is to apply that standard to North Texas geology. Originally conceived in the mid-1990's to account for structural integrity issues related to conventional horizontal drilling, the Corps has been using it for over a year in DFW, where it's become a factor in drilling around Joe Pool Lake dam and the Trinity river levees running down the middle of Dallas. According to the Corps, that study is scheduled to be complete in September – or right about the time the Dallas City Council is due to take a final vote on a new drilling ordinance that would, among other things, govern when and where drilling could take place in the city.

Most pressing for the Corps at last week's meeting was finding out if: 1) there any permits pending within 3000 feet of the levees or Joe Pool Dam?, and, 2) Were there any plans to allow injected waste wells in the city? City staff said there had been an informal moratorium on moving any permits forward since the city took up the job of re-writing its obsolete drilling ordicnance a year and a half ago and that the City's gas drilling task force had recommended allowing no injection wells into the city. Big audbile sigh from the Corps. Apparently, they're big believers in the evidence pointing to injection wells as the cause of sizable earthquakes in Texas and elsewhere.

This meeting still begs the question that citizen-activist Raymond Crawford has been trying to get answered for none months now: Did the Corps send a letter last year to Dallas at the same time it sent one to Grand Prairie asking that a moratorium be placed on any drilling permits within 3000 feet of a dam or levee, and if it did, what was Dallas City Hall's response? We still don't know the definitive answer to that but it looks increasingly academic in the face of the Corps' re-evaluation of the 3000 standard.

If 3000 feet was considered an appropriate distance for traditional vertical drilling in the mid-1990's, it's hard to believe that modern-day vertical fracking will allow that number to decrease at all. And if one considers that the standard first applied to an oil or gas well that was directly underneath the well head, i.e straight down, and then think about the explosive forces fracking employs up to a horizontal mile away from the well head, the distance requirement should probably apply to where the well ends, not just begins.

There's no question that whatever the Corps' new criteria are for fracking around places that can break open and cause problems, it will have an immediate and important impact on not just how Dallas regulates fracking, but lots of other communities in North Texas as well. What's not clear is if the Corps is doing the same kind of re-evaluation of the 3000 foot rule for local geology in the Eagle Shale in South Texas, the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania and other drilling hot spots. If it is, will those be finished by September as well. If not, how come it's only the Barnett Shale that's receiving this treatment?

Via the Fish Creek Monitor out of Arlington comes word of a Chesapeake 5-acre drilling well pad that's seemingly condemned a piece of adjacent property at a potentially lucrative intersection in that city. The entity doing the loudest complaining? The developer whose land Chesapeake is allegedly ruining.

The property is now covered with gas pipelines. It's illegal to build anything on top of gas pipelines for safety reasons. It's not illegal to use your Eminent Domain power as a gas pipeline company to take valuable real estate and make it useless for the purpose the owner intended.

We've seen this before. There's a similar gas pipeline no-man's land in DISH in Denton County that was slated to be an entire sub-division.

This is one of those little known, but hugely consequential results of not thinking through what it means to allow gas drilling in your town. You'd think that a practice that ruins perfectly good real estate from becoming the next 7-11 or Taco Bell would be anathema to the usual Powers-That-Be. It tells you something about how much things have changed in the past decade that not even developers outrank gas companies in DFW.

According to the Morning News, Assistant City Manager Jill Jordan sent a memo to staff today laying out the timeline for how the Dallas City Council will get officially "briefed" on the creation of a new gas drilling ordinance. Apparently on August 1, the council will have a kind of staged policy wrestling tag-team match between a spokesperson picked by Council member Scott "Grizzly" Griggs and one picked by Council member Sheffie "Killer" Kadane. Both spokespersons – as yet unnamed or still unchosen – will get 30 minutes to offer their best shot at what a good Dallas drilling ordinance looks like. All of this will be going on out in the open for public consumption. Then on August 15, the Council will be meeting in a closed door session to receive information from their lawyers. No word yet on public hearings that ought to be accompanying this march to a final vote as well.

"This is heavy industrial mining. That's what it is," concludes Arlington resident Elizabeth Lane, who lives next door to a natural gas well and is quoted in a new story on North Texas fracking by Shelley Hawes Pate in this month's edition of Dallas Child (p. 26). "DRILLING FOR DOLLARS" is one of the best stories about local fracking you'll read lately because it takes the debate away from the abstractions of academia and government and puts it squarely in the experience of people on the ground. People who were not Sierra Club members before they started feeling sick or their lives disrupted by gas mining. People who have absolutely no motive to go after big business or polluters just for the fun of it. Go out right now and buy a copy and share it with friends. Then put it in an envelope and mail it to one or more members of the Dallas City Council.

The Dallas Morning News finally decided to ask the Army Corps of Engineers about Dallas' plans to drill for natural gas in the Trinity River floodplain, some five years after the City leased land for that very purpose, and three months after the City's gas drilling task force voted to allow such drilling.

The Corps's response?  We're sticking with our 3000 foot buffer zone we've already failed to enforce at Joe Pool Lake! For the most part, the DMN story doesn't present any new information about the hazards posed by drilling too close to dams. But there is one piece of news. A nationwide team of Corps members is "searching for what’s known and unknown about possible risks from mineral extraction near dams.The goal is to create a system that will let corps managers set a site-specific buffer zone around a dam or other structure, said Anita Branch, a geotechnical engineering specialist with the corps’ Fort Worth district. 

The distance between a dam and drilling in different places might be bigger or smaller depending on local geology, geography and other factors, she said. Although the corps is looking first at its own operations, any local government would be able to use the system to make its own decisions on safety zones around non-corps dams and levees, Branch said. 

Until such a system is in place, the corps’ Southwestern division, which includes Texas and surrounding states, is keeping a 3,000-foot buffer around its dams and levees.'The 3,000 feet was based largely on geology in the Southwestern district,' Branch said." In other words, don't look for this number to change any time soon since it originated in the Barnett Shale.

Unfortunately, the Corp can only enforce the 3000 buffer zone on land it owns. Otherwise, it can only "advise" and "recommend" that local governments don't act like idiots by putting active wells where they shouldn't be any. But of course in Dallas' case, they have the additional leverage of overseeing the Trinity River levees that must not only protect Dallas from flooding, but will also have to hold up to the impacts of the proposed Trinity toll road going by or through them.

So Dallas might be more interested in listening to the Corps' advice. What's the larger story missing from this one? That in 2007, without any public hearings or debate the City of Dallas decided to sell off a huge chunk of open space that also serves as flood control for gas drilling. And then, citing the "undesirable uses" already occurring in the flood plain the city's own drilling task force decided those same floodplains would be a great place for drilling – and left themselves the out that any such drilling would have to be done with the Corps' permission. Only it doesn't. It can only recommend when it comes to the city-owned property that's already been leased. So it will have to be up to the Dallas City Council if it wants to be sure no drilling takes place in the Trinity River floodplain. They'll have to make the Corp's recommendation official policy. 

Are there at least eight council members who will take the Corp's advice? Don't take it for granted. And one more thing. If 3000 feet is the appropriate structural buffer zones for dams, what's the appropriate structural buffer zone for underground pipelines, bridge supports, and even home foundations?

(Cross-posted from the Dallas Resident at Risk website) The last time the Dallas Gas Drilling Task Force met in February, they voted on recommendations so bad—like fracking inside city parklands and within 500 feet of neighborhoods—they actually needed police protection during the deliberations. As the Task Force finally presented those recommendations to Mayor Rawlings and the City Council today, the only thing that changed was the crowd: What had been a small handful of activists became a filled-to-capacity hearing room with more people lined up outside than sitting down inside. Several organizers were forcibly removed yet again as they vocalized their disagreement with the idea that drilling all along the Trinity River floodplain and even inside the levees is somehow “safe and reasonable.” As it turns out, stating the obvious can get you kicked out of City Hall very quickly.Lots of coverage! CBS – NBC – KERA – Dallas Morning News – Dallas ObserverTo their credit, several City Council members pushed back against the worst proposals and even started using some independent thought to come up with better ideas in a few minutes than the Task Force had conceived of in 8 months. Unfortunately, some of the other Council Members fantasized about drilling royalties replacing billions of dollars of tax revenue and improving quality of life in Dallas—as if you can just go out and buy that at the mall. Some seemed convinced that fracking is perfectly safe and that it is going to be allowed in Dallas, regardless of what the pesky residents want. But neighborhood groups representing close to 180 homeowners associations all over the city have endorsed our “five protections” position. The gas-masked protesters were the lead story on the 6 o’clock news tonight. Democracy is on the march, and the police can’t evict us from the streets.Mayor Rawlings announced that there will be two more briefings before the City Council takes any votes, so we’ll see you all at City Hall again in the near future. You’ll get the schedule as soon as we do. Stay tuned for more interruptions of your normally scheduled programming