Water...and Oil

I recently watched a documentary on television that explored a conflict between land owners and oil companies in Colorado. More than half a century ago, the oil companies began obtaining the rights to explore and extract oils and gases from beneath the land. The landowners who signed these rights away could see no harm, and potentially much profit, from doing so. What mattered a drilling rig here and there on such a vast expanse of land? Now, it seems, it matters.

Oil companies have gradually and steadily accumulated the rights to drill and extract from a huge percentage of the privately owned (and some public) lands in the western United States, and California is no exception. Over the span of years there appears to have been relatively little conflict between land owners and oil companies. Yes, there have been spills and there have been complaints, but with the presence of foreign oil at reasonable prices home reserves have been used moderately and extraction processes have involved minimal impact. For the landowner an ameliorating affect has always been the greed side of the equation; the possibility that the big strike will be on your land, when at once you become a partner with the oil company and realize the wealth that comes from oil profits. But there is less tip-toeing around the bore hole these days. On the downslope of the oil industry, resources that had been overlooked before are drawing new attention and new technologies are being applied. The mood is a bit more desperate. 

Enter 'fracking', the common term for hydraulic fracturing. Simply, the process injects pressurized fluids into bore holes to cause the rock to fracture and release the gas and oil it contains. Proppant in the fluid, usually consisting of sand or ceramic grains, keeps the fractures from closing again after the pressure is released. The instant of the fracturing of the rock has been compared to a small earthquake, a thought that makes those of us living along the San Andreas fault understandably nervous. The gas that is released makes its way to the surface, is piped to compressor stations to purify it, and is then piped on to the consumer. The fracking fluid that returns to the surface is stored by various means and/or trucked away. A portion of it is never recovered and remains under ground. 

The documentary that I viewed highlighted some problems from fracking. There was a spillover from a pool of used fracking fluid into a river, the open air burning of volatile and harmful waste gases, new bubbles of methane gas appearing in a rancher's field, and, most concerning, the contamination of water supplies. A particularly memorable film clip showed a man positioning a lighter near his open tap and the 'water' instantly igniting becoming a flaming torch. 

A reader who enjoyed my recent article "The Prophets of Doom" will remember that one of the five projected potential causes for the demise of the United States discussed in that forum was lack of potable water. Anyone who lives in the western slopes drainage area has historically been hyper aware of the need to protect our water supplies. 

So the question arises, where does the waste water that does not return to the surface after fracking go? Particularly in relationship to the aquifers upon which communities rely for their water supplies. This question, and the presence of several new drilling rigs and increased activity in the Cat Canyon oil reserve area above our own San Antonio Creek drainage area prompted me to engage in some research. 

Never a geology major, I had always imagined that an aquifer was a huge pristine lake of pure water existing in a specific location somewhere under my feet which when emptied would leave a large hole in the ground. Some aquifers are like that, I learned, but most are essentially an underground drainage system in which water is contained, seeping gradually out along a path of least resistance through fractured rock formations and gravels until it either bubbles to the surface, joins a river, or empties into the sea. The key to maintaining a successful aquifer is replenishment: it must fill at the same rate it is emptied. Replenishment can come from rivers and streams, from ice and snow melt, and from state water.

Ground water is the sole source of water supply to the San Antonio Basin, specifically deep percolation rainfall and stream seepage. There are no surface diversions and there are no deliveries of state water to the basin. A 2003 analysis by the CRCD confirmed a study begun in 1942 and updated in 1999 which estimated an average annual overdraft of 9500 AFY (Acre Feet per Year). Input to the basin is an estimated 15,000 AFY annually. You do the math. Imagine soaking in a full bathtub kept cozy by warm water from the tap and draining at the same rate that the water enters. Now imagine the drain is opened so that the outflow is increased to one and a half times the inflow. How long until you are sitting in an empty tub covered in soap? Agriculture is the heaviest user of the water supply, no surprise here, some 20,000 AFY annually. By contrast, the town of Los Alamos uses a mere 270 AFY. 

Having established the tenuous nature of the water supply in my aquifer, I turned my attention to the quality of the water. I learned that the average quality is estimated at a TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) concentration of 710mg/l (milligrams in one liter). But that's an average. As the water seeps from east to west down the Los Alamos Valley its TDS load increases. At the far western reach of the aquifer lies the Barka Slough, a wetland created by a surfacing consolidated rock formation that underlies the valley. Here the TDS is 3780 mg/l., in contrast to the extreme eastern end measured at 263 mg/l. What happens? The ground water absorbs contaminants  from agricultural return flow and the dissolution of soluble minerals which accumulate as the water moves westward under the valley floor.

There is also evidence of poor quality connate (water trapped in rock when it formed) water in fracture zones in underlying bedrock beneath the valley, an ever present but unavoidable hazard. 

Now let's return to the resurgence of oil recovery activity in the Los Alamos Valley above the San Antonio Groundwater Basin. Vencoco reports (February 2011) drilling two horizontal wells in the Santa Maria basin (the adjacent aquifer) and "awaits four-stage fracs expected in a few weeks". Their interest is in the Miocene Monterey formation, a biogenic deposit underlying the California Coast Ranges, Transverse Ranges, and adjacent basins. It is a rich petroleum preserve, newly available now that oil companies have "cracked the code" of shale oil recovery. In fact, the U.S. Energy Administration expects oil production to climb from "5.4 million b/d in 2009 to 5.7 million b/d in 2035, most from more enhanced oil recovery and oil-bearing shale plays onshore". Drill, baby, drill, indeed! 

The EPA is uncertain enough of the dangers that they have launched a study "to understand the relationship between hydraulic fracturing and drinking water resources". The study is expected to be completed by 2014. We can't know exactly which chemicals are injected into bore holes to cause fractures because each company has its own formula and guards it carefully, in much the same way your grandmother guards her famous brownie recipe. Oil companies are exempted from revealing the precise formulas. The bill that would reverse this secrecy, the Frac Act, has sat in committee in Congress for two years.    

In the Southern Los Alamos Valley oil fields the Monterey formation has been tapped at depths of 1400 feet to 4000 feet. Safety from water contamination is in depth: Marcellus shale fracking in Pennsylvania is done at depths of 8000 feet, creating substantial separation from groundwater aquifers. Now, four miles north of Los Alamos, within a few hundred yards of San Antonio Creek, another drilling operation is underway. Nitrogen trucks, a curtained site between the creek and the drilling operation, and many large container trucks are on site.  Nitrogen has many uses in oil production and one of them is using its high pressure characteristics in hydraulic fracturing. And a frac job involves as much as a million gallons of surface derived water, water that is already in overdraft in the Los Alamos valley.

I have taken my own advice and made myself aware of the water supply facts in my own community. The facts are disconcerting. But no more so than the tenuous water futures around the state, the country, and the world. And I can't help wondering how we can justify the risk to diminishing water supplies in order to obtain an energy source that by its use must necessarily contribute to Global Warming and thus continue the cycle that is diminishing our water supply. Without water, the benefits offered by this energy source do me very little good.

The Prophets of Doom

Recently I viewed a TV program called Prophets of Doom. The format was an informal gathering of individuals in a studio set, five or six leaders in their various fields, who via discussion format were challenged to predict the one disaster among the many currently looming which they believed would most likely be the one to spell the downfall of the United States. The participants demonstrated great intensity in the expression of their individual views on this subject and shared a sincere, albeit alarming consensus that the United States is indeed on the brink of downfall, if not from those specific individual causes that each championed, then most certainly from a combination of several of them.  Our demise was projected to come from economic collapse, water loss, an accelerated disfunction resulting from the downslope of peak oil, nuclear terrorism, and/or the dominance of machines. No, this was not a movie, but a serious discussion among knowledgeable, highly trained professionals with the facts at their disposal. The time frame for this demise was determined to be within the next two decades. The elephant not in the room, surprisingly, was climate change. It was never mentioned, not once. But the scenarios presented during the two hour presentation were dramatic, catastrophic, frightening. A term, cognitive dissonance, was introduced to describe what we humans do in the face of  possibilities on a scale beyond our emotional capacity to deal with them: which is to pretend that they do not exist. This tactic seems to have been employed by the these very prophets in terms of global warming. I would put that concern before the worry of my robot dismissing me as non-essential function (if I had a robot!). Regardless, the program re-introduced the dark underside of our lives, the realities which in our 'cognitive dissonance' we ignore, fail to see, or chose not to believe. It showed the Rome that is burning as we fiddle. But unlike many such documentaries, actual solutions were introduced. And these solutions make sense. 

Centralized government with its centralized programs was a clumsy proposition at the best of times. But even as we watched the waste grow and the inefficiencies mount and the inequalities increase over the centuries we continued to support it because, well hey! it was ours and it worked after a fashion and we enjoyed propping it up against those other governments out there…good old America, the land of the free! Along with cognitive dissonance, Americans also suffer from 'momentum sickness', the effect of the Newton law that says its better not to change those things that seem to be working. It is momentum sickness that allows us to continue to support the oil industry, to continue to pay taxes to a central government for services many of us will never receive, to allow politics to trump the needs of the people in the halls of congress. But the problem with momentum sickness is that this malady makes it difficult to tell when things have actually stopped working. Because of momentum sickness leading to cognitive dissonance Americans are allowing a failed debt-ridden unresponsive central government to soothe us with the false reassurance that because it has always been there for us after a fashion, it always will. Remember New Orleans and FEMA? What about public education? Where once a central government actually worked, in the face of the growing needs of an ever increasing population it no longer can. Which is why the solutions offered by the Prophets of Doom make sense.

Localize! That's it, in a nutshell. That was the consensus of the group. Bring everything down to a scale that will work. Allow individual localities to determine and respond to their own needs, in the way best suited to their local environment. Institute local water plans that will work for that neighborhood, that town, that population. Reverse outsourcing to insourcing. Buy local. Grow local. Establish a local economy that is not reliant upon remote conditions. Establish a local currency for that economy. Get off the grid. Find ways to produce electric locally, individually. What about a local health plan? Or a local retirement plan? Its time to go back to the future.

Localizing does not require a major government overhaul. It will never be accomplished through endless debate among congressmen attended by influential lobbyists and concerned corporations. It can only be done from the bottom up. The very bottom up: you, and I. A small group of neighbors with a proposal, a plan. A Saturday activity, a project. 

Yes, laws will need to be changed and responsibilities shifted and systems restructured eventually but that will happen in due course if each individual American subscribes to this course of action. I intend to start right away. My first step is simple: on my small balcony, in prepared containers, I will grow vegetables to eat. I can grow tomatoes and perhaps a squash and lettuce variety. My other foods I will purchase at farmers markets or otherwise be sure that they are local. And I will make myself more aware of how I consume: aware of my water quality and source, aware of the cost and source of the electric I use, aware of  the disposition of my waste water. I will study ways that my community could potentially utilize solar and wind on a very local basis. These are very small steps, but they are positive steps. We need to learn to walk before we can run.