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Nova Scotia’s Tar Sands

“Shale gas is the fossil fuel industry’s latest suicide mission”

by Hillary Bain Lindsay

 The impacts of shale gas exploration - from clearcutting, to increased traffic, to water and air pollution - have many Nova Scotians concerned, but it's fracking in particular that has struck a nerve.  Photo: Yuill Herbert
The impacts of shale gas exploration - from clearcutting, to increased traffic, to water and air pollution - have many Nova Scotians concerned, but it's fracking in particular that has struck a nerve. Photo: Yuill Herbert

After years of learning about climate change and oil and gas development in other places, Michael Jensen was upset, but not surprised, to learn that natural gas exploration may be coming to his backyard.  

"It's indicative of a much larger pattern of environmental destruction, says Jensen.  "It's the assumption that short term profit justifies long term destruction."

In December, the Nova Scotia Department of Energy issued a call for exploration proposals for three blocks of land along the province's North Shore, from the New Brunswick border to Merigomish.  Jensen's house and small market garden fall within the 'Scotsburn Block.'  He and hundreds of others from across Nova Scotia do not trust the government’s assurance that they will “recognize the importance of the environment when considering shale gas operations,” and many have decided to fight back.    

Natural gas exploration and extraction can include drilling, seismic testing, and hydraulic fracturing or 'fracking.'  Fracking involves pumping water, chemicals and sand underground at high pressure in order to fracture the shale and release the gas.  The practice has gained notoriety over the past several months with the release of the Oscar nominated documentary Gasland and several high profile articles in the New York Times, which document the production of massive amounts of toxic wastewater, the contamination of wells and human health complaints—all as a result of fracking.  

The impacts of exploration and development - from clearcutting, to increased traffic, to water and air pollution - have many Nova Scotians concerned, but it's fracking in particular that has struck a nerve.

Tatamagouche is on the province’s North Shore and falls within the area slated for exploration. Within a week of a public screening of the movie Gasland in February, a community meeting at the Tatamagouche Centre drew 70 people, says Jensen, and since the screening there has been a slew of activity; from letter writing nights to a petition to a protest at the office of the Minister of Energy, Charlie Parker. A Rally to Stop Fracking in Nova Scotia is scheduled for Friday in front of the legislature on Hollis Street in Halifax.  

Beth Norrad would like to travel from her home in Penobsquis, New Brunswick to attend the rally, but she and her neighbours are tied up in a legal battle with Potash Corp.  “We’re all broke,” she says.  “A trip to Halifax just isn’t in the cards.”  

Norrad has 40 gas wells within a few kilometers of her home.  When asked how this has affected her quality of life, she responds, "It's ruined it."  

Norrad grew up in New Brunswick, but moved to Toronto for 25 years for work.  She moved to Penobsquis in 2007, “totally ignorant” of the development that was underway, seeking a higher quality of life.  Instead, she moved into a “sacrifice zone” of industry and would now do anything to leave - except she can’t sell her house. "The homes are worthless. There's no farms left here anymore.  You need water to farm."

The natural gas in the area was discovered by Potash Corp in 1999, when the company was using seismic testing to find the large body of water that was draining into their potash mine (also a few kilometers from Norrad's home).  Instead, the company found gas.  The first few wells went dry in 1999.  As more gas wells were drilled, and more seismic testing took place, "One home right after another [lost their water] until 60 homes lost their wells," says Norrad.  Residents believe the blasting created cracks in the ground that allowed the water that fed their wells to flow into the mine.  "For the next six years we went off water tanks."  

The town now has a municipal water supply, but Norrad believes it was put in place for Potash Corp, rather than for the 60 homes without running water.  Sixty cisterns would costs $600 000, says Norrad.  "But you can't run a mine and gas wells on a cistern.  So the federal and provincial governments, in collusion with industry, spent $10,000,000 on a water line to provide industry with water."

Norrad says her community has been destroyed.  "We basically live in an industrial park.  An industrial park with no rules."

"They lie," she warns.  "They'll tell you anything to get gas wells on your property."  

"What we have [in Cape Breton] is a company that has no real interest in what the community thinks, and a Department of Energy that cares even less," says Geoffrey May from his home in Margaree, Cape Breton, overlooking the Margaree River.  May works at the local campground and has lived in the area for 35 years.   He says fishing and tourism are two major sources of employment in the area, and both are under threat from oil and shale gas exploration and drilling.

PetroWorth Resources Inc. has secured the exploration and development rights to 383,000 acres of land in Cape Breton.  Nova Scotia's largest lake, Lake Ainslie, is in the middle of the block of land, which is connected to the Margaree River, known for its natural beauty and salmon pools.  The ‘Margaree-Lake Ainslie Heritage River’ is a designated protected area in Nova Scotia.   

"They're proposing drilling through the water table right next to Lake Ainslie," says May.  "This is a poster child for inappropriate development."    

“The province has received a number of letters from Nova Scotians about fracking, most of which concern protection of water,” noted an April 4 press release from the departments of Energy and Envronment.  As a result of public pressure, it was announced that “The province will review environmental issues associated with hydraulic fracturing.”

But for May, even a ban on fracking does not go far enough.  "I want to see the leases [for oil and gas exploration] withdrawn."   

He says drilling for more oil and gas is not the answer to Canada's rising energy needs.  "In Canada we're currently wasting half the energy we produce, says May.  "What we need to increase is our conservation, not our energy supply."

"Shale gas is not a transitional fuel," he says. "It's the fossil fuel industry's latest suicide mission."

Elizabeth Marshall is also resisting Petroworth's drilling.  "Destroying water is like destroying life.  For what?  A few dollars?  For someone else to get rich?  It's insane.  Once you destroy the environmental infrastructure, you destroy the community."

Marshall is Mi'kmaq, and says her people's connection to the land is not for sale.

"The big oil companies are driven by profit.  How many will lay down our lives for a dollar or 10 dollars?" asks Marshall.  "But where I come from, people like me, we're wiling to give up our lives for something that's sacred to us.  That's the difference between a multinational company and my community. For us, it's a matter of life and death.  For them, it's a matter of profit."

Marshall says Petroworth better be ready for a fight.  "We know we have title and sovereignty.  We'll do what we can to exercise it," she says.  " It's not a hobby.  It's all connected to our life…When I'm long gone, my children and grandchildren will be continuing this struggle and hope."

“Where do we go once our water is destroyed?” she asks.  “We have to protect it with everything we have.”
 


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Commentaires

Fracking shale gas in Nova Scotia mythology

Every responsible person cares about the environment, but are you sure the fracking shale gas campaign isn't doing more harm than good in Nova Scotia?

In April 2010, in response to interest from the industry, Nova Scotia's department of Energy issued Calls for Proposals for Coal Gas exploration and development in the coalfields of Inverness and in the Tompkinsville Block in Cape Breton stretching from downtown Sydney to Glace Bay. In September 2010 the world's leading expert gave a presentation at CBU about the environmental risks, the CBC interviewed him, and the company involved issued a report on the environmental risks of fracking underground Coal Gas (UCG aka spontaneous combustion), all publicly available on the world wide web and the links sent to the province's environmental groups who show no interest or concern to this day.

Around this same time a national NGO showed up in towns across Nova Scotia giving screenings of Gasland and the province's environmentalists all jumped on the fracking shale gas bandwagon without doing even a simple web search about what is actually happening in the onshore Oil and Gas industry in Nova Scotia for several years now. There is nothing new about Petroworth's exploration and plan to drill a conventional oil well at Lake Ainslie as even all the CBC coverage about the seismic testing in 2009 goes to show. The only connection to fracking shale gas is that the company does it in New Brunswick and that was the farfetched basis for Nova Scotia's fracking campaign. It took several months and a researcher to do a simple web search before anyone mentioned information about what's been going in Windsor for several years now that's also been publicly available all along but of no concern.

Thanks to all the people who watched Gasland and jumped on the fracking shale gas bandwagon the good people trying to protect Lake Ainslie are left with no credibility about what is actually going on in the area, where in addition to a conventional oil well there's a company with the rights to strip mine barrite and a call for proposals for coal gasification, old coal mine sites filling with toxic mine water etc., etc., but no plan for fracking shale gas and there never was. Doesn't even make much commen sense when you're sitting on a motherload of coal and methane gas.

No wonder Nova Scotia's Minister of Energy and Natural Resources is happy to oblige and focus the environmentalists' attention on a shale gas review while he finalizes the province's new Minerals strategy etc. without any fear of any informed public discussion about what's actually going on at Lake Ainslie and other communities across the province that threaten our water supply etc.

If the 2010 International Mine Water Association's annual week long symposium had been held in Halifax instead of Sydney last September would the province's environmentalists have listened to a word 300 of the world's leading experts from over 30 countries said in their numerous presentations about what's happening in Nova Scotia and the reason it was held here?  Here's just one of the many hair raising presentations about Nova Scotia being ignored by the province's Gasland bandwagon and the government's shale gas review:

http://www.gov.ns.ca/news/details.asp?id=20100414005 - Call for Proposals
http://www.imwa.info/docs/imwa_2010/IMWA2010_Younger_378.pdf - Paul Younger at CBU
http://www.cbc.ca/informationmorningcb/2010/09/coal-gasification.html - CBC interview
http://laurusenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Laurus-final1.pdf - Laurus Energy report

For information about the other onshore Oil and Gas projects happening in Nova Scotia that the province's Gasland bandwagon also fails to mention check out the list at 
http://www.gov.ns.ca/energy/oil-gas/onshore/current-activity/ and the fact sheets at
http://www.gov.ns.ca/energy/oil-gas/explore-invest/fact-sheets.asp !!!

Are you sure the fracking shale gas campaign isn't doing more harm than good in Nova Scotia, and maintaining the silence about what is actually going on from Point Aconi to Yarmouth is giving the government and industry the message that there's no concerns or problems with extraction of other mineral or energy resources happening across the province, and undermines all the people in Nova Scotia who are being adversely affected by them, even driven out of their homes and off their land for the sake of high mercury, high sulphur coal to generate electricity at Nova Scotia's power plants as we speek?

 

The Fracking Facts about Nova Scotia

Petroworth has no plan to frack shale gas at Lake Ainslie and never did, they're just drilling a conventional oil well. The fact of the matter is, in April 2010 Nova Scotia's department of Energy issued a Call for Proposals for COAL GAS exploration in the Inverness and Tompkinsville Blocks of Cape Breton.  Nova Scotians would be well advised to check out the facts about what is actually happening in Nova Scotia but never, ever mentioned by the fracking shale gas bandwagon to this day, and ask why not?:

- 2009 ECBC call to mine the energy not the coal
http://www.capebretonpost.com/Letters-to-the-Editor/2009-05-07/article-784058/We-need-to-mine-the-energy-not-the-coal/1

- 2010 NS govt Call for Proposals for Coal Gas exploration and development
http://www.gov.ns.ca/news/details.asp?id=20100414005

- 2010 Paul Younger presentation at CBU
http://www.imwa.info/docs/imwa_2010/IMWA2010_Younger_378.pdf

- 2010 CBC interview with Paul Younger
http://www.cbc.ca/informationmorningcb/2010/09/coal-gasification.html

 - Environmental risks of coal gasification report by the company involved
http://laurusenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Laurus-final1.pdf

 - List of oil and gas projects in NS
http://www.gov.ns.ca/energy/oil-gas/onshore/current-activity/

 - NS govt Fact Sheets
http://www.gov.ns.ca/energy/oil-gas/explore-invest/fact-sheets.asp

At the most basic level, Underground Coal Gasification projects are developed by drilling two wells into the underground coal  seam and creating a connection between them. One of the wells injects oxygen or air while the  other extracts the gas. A connection between the injector and extractor is normally created by  hydrofracturing, where high pressure water (hydro) is used to break up (fracture) the rock. Once the  two wells are connected, the operator ignites the coal and then controls its gasification by varying  the amount of air let in and the amount of gas that exits. The gasification process creates a number of compounds in the coal seam, including phenols and  polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, benzene, carbon dioxide, ammonia and sulphide. These  compounds can migrate from the gasification zone and contaminate surrounding ground water. UCG is much more difficult to control than conventional gasification as many of the variables (rate of  water influx,  distribution of reactants in the gasification zone, growth rate of cavity) cannot be  controlled. When asked how a catastrophic failure may occur and what form it may take, one of the interviewees noted that the most likely scenarios have already take place — catastrophic  groundwater contamination at Hoe Creek (Wyoming) and an underground explosion at a European  trial site (Spain).
 

Those concerned about protecting Lake Ainslie from what is actually happenng in the area would be well advised to also check out the facts about plans to strip mine for barrite around the lake, and plans to use toxic mine water from the old coal mines for geothermal energy, etc. which along with coal gasification is apparently of no concern to the province's environmentalists riding on the Gasland bandwagon.

 

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