It wasn't the first time that Bill Barrett Corp had erred at Nine Mile Creek, either.
In 2004, Utah water quality officials said Barrett Corp failed to obtain permits to replace portions of its old natural-gas pipeline across Nine Mile Creek in at least two locations not authorized by environmental regulators.
Nine Mile Creek is a tributary of the Green River, home to four endangered fish species.
Pressure from a coalition of historic conservation and preservation groups recently led the Bureau of Land Management to agree to limit its use of the egregious "categorical exclusions" loophole that allowed companies to drill multiple wells after a single environmental impact statement, just one of the Bush administration's gifts to the fossil fuel industry in the 2005 Energy Policy Act.
In a recent legal settlement, BLM agreed to limit its use of this loophole to grant approvals for natural gas wells in areas of historic, cultural and ecological importance, including Utah's Nine Mile Canyon and West Tavaputs Plateau, without a full evaluation of potential harm to environmental, cultural or historic resources.
This important BLM move does not bode well for Bill Barrett Corporation, which has plans to drill 800 gas wells on the West Tavaputs Plateau and is awaiting the outcome of BLM's environmental impact study of its plans, due out this summer.
The Salt Lake Tribune reported in 2004 that Bill Barrett Corp uses "helicopters, explosives and thumper trucks to pinpoint deposits of natural gas more than 10,000 feet below the surface in a 57,500-acre swath of public land on the West Tavaputs Plateau."
The 40-mile dirt road that Barrett's trucks travel through Nine Mile canyon to the West Tavaputs Plateau gas field contains more than 10,000 archaeological sites, including walls of pictographs and petroglyphs that are sacred to the Hopi nation. Barrett has over 100 oil wells in current production on the plateau, with plans to add 700 more. The pictographs and artifacts, some of which date back thousands of years, are already threatened with corrosion by the dust stirred up by Barrett's current traffic. The increase of industrial traffic from Barrett's expansion poses an even greater threat to the sacred rock art, not to mention the implications for the area's water quality from so much fracking activity.
The situation is even more grim in Colorado, where Barrett Corp has said it may drill 3,000 wells on the Roan Plateau in the next couple decades, far more than the 800 wells it envisions in Utah's West Tavuputs. The top of the Roan Plateau is one of the four most biologically rich areas in the State of Colorado. The other three areas have already been protected as part of the National Park System, but not the Roan, despite the Colorado Natural Heritage Program (CNHP) observation that although the Roan "is clearly of comparable biological significance," providing a home to genetically pure Colorado River Cutthroat Trout and some of North America's rarest plants. It also provides habitat for prize herds of elk and deer.
Despite the BLM decision to close the "categorical exclusions" loophole, Barrett Corp. continues to enjoy the fact that hydraulic fracturing is exempt from scrutiny under the Safe Drinking Water Act, thanks to the Halliburton loophole, an even larger and more blatant industry giveaway also inserted into the 2005 energy bill at the behest of Vice President Cheney, Halliburton's former CEO. Halliburton pioneered the fracing technique in the 1950s, and reportedly now earns about $1.5 Billion annually from hydraulic fracturing.
But now that Congress and regulatory agencies are taking a closer look at the implications of hydraulic fracturing, the Halliburton loophole protecting frackers is beginning to get the scrutiny it deserves.
The EPA has been investigating whether fracking caused groundwater
contamination in the Pavillion area in central Wyoming, and a final
report is expected in May. Initial results from EPA indicate that fracking was the cause
Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal pressured a Halliburton attorney at a hearing
earlier this month, asking the company to disclose the ingredients in
its fracking fluid, a tightly guarded secret among manufacturers. of the
contamination.
The Halliburton attorney shrugged off the inquiry, stating that "When you talk about a complete list of ingredients, you're getting fairly deep into the proprietary formula itself."
Halliburton further argued that "fracking chemicals, once they're put into service within well bores, are heavily diluted by water and sand," according to Associated Press coverage.
Ah, yes, the good ole excuse so often used by industry and co-opted regulatory agencies - "the solution to pollution is dilution" - a mantra that allowed decades of dumping everything from PCBs to dioxin to perfluorinated chemicals fine and dandy as long as there's enough water around in the environment to dilute the toxic stuff to the point where it falls below certain thresholds (often set arbitrarily based on economics and not science). It doesn't work very well with fracking fluids.
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