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Senators seek more regulations on fracking wastewater
Apr 14, 2015 | Star Herald
By Bart Schaneman
The Nebraska Legislature voted to adopt the Natural Resource committee’s confirmation report of John Rundel to the Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (NOGCC) during the legislative session on Tuesday, April 14. Rundel was appointed to the NOGCC by Gov. Pete Ricketts on March 13. During the hearing in front of the Natural Resources Committee on April 8, the committee voted unanimously to advance his nomination. All of the senators who spoke at the Tuesday session said they were confident Rundel was qualified, but many instead spoke about concerns regarding a proposal for a fracking wastewater injection well in Sioux County -
Oil and Gas Commission reverses course, will allow public to comment on wastewater well
Mar 21, 2015 | Omaha World-Herald News Service
By Bart Schaneman
The public now will be allowed to comment at a hearing Tuesday regarding an application for a fracking wastewater injection well in Sioux County. The Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission initially said it would not hear testimony from anyone living more than a half-mile from the Panhandle site where a company has applied to dispose of fracking wastewater by injecting it underground. -
Nebraska: The latest proxy battleground for the war on affordable energy
Apr 12, 2015 | Lincoln Journal Star
By David Kreutzer
Recently this proxy battle has moved to an injection well in Sioux County. In a viral video a Nebraska farmer, protesting the permit for the well, asks oil and gas commissioners if they would drink some purported fracking fluid that he claims to have mixed up himself that morning. That the beverage offered looks more like manure tea than fracking fluid is irrelevant since the disposal well in question will be taking "produced brine" from oil wells and not "fracking fluid." -
'Would you drink it?' video goes viral
Mar 31, 2015 | Lincoln Star Journal
By Nicholas Bergin
A video of an Ainsworth man asking Nebraska’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission “Would you drink it?” has gotten more than a million views on YouTube. James Osborn was first up to testify at an almost three-hour public comment session last week on a proposal by Colorado-based T-Rex Energy to open a commercial site in Sioux County to dispose of wastewater from oil and gas production, including the practice of hydraulic fracturing known as fracking. *Note: See video here https://youtu.be/m0HL4L6Pa-4 -
Foes of fracking wastewater well cry foul over speaker limits
Mar 20, 2015 | Associated Press – Lincoln, NE
At a public hearing next Tuesday, the Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission will not hear testimony from anyone living more than a half-mile from a Panhandle site where a company has applied to dispose of fracking wastewater by injecting it underground. -
Moratorium needed on fracking wastewater
Mar 19, 2015 | Lincoln Star Journal
By State Sen. Ken Haar of Malcolm
Nebraskans living any more than half a mile down the road from a proposed disposal site for wastewater from oil and gas production have been told they will not get to testify at a public hearing on the project. An out-of-state company wants to bring 80 to 100 semi-truckloads a day of potentially toxic fracking wastewater from Colorado to Nebraska and dump it into an abandoned well in western Nebraska. A lot of people think this is a bad idea. The Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (NOGCC) is holding a public hearing on this subject March 24 in Sidney, Nebraska. The NOGCC has indicated they intend to limit testimony on this proposal to people who have a property interest within one-half mile of the proposed site. Really?
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Senators seek more regulations on fracking wastewater
Apr 14, 2015 | Star Herald
By Bart Schaneman
The Nebraska Legislature voted to adopt the Natural Resource committee’s confirmation report of John Rundel to the Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (NOGCC) during the legislative session on Tuesday, April 14. Rundel was appointed to the NOGCC by Gov. Pete Ricketts on March 13.
During the hearing in front of the Natural Resources Committee on April 8, the committee voted unanimously to advance his nomination.
All of the senators who spoke at the Tuesday session said they were confident Rundel was qualified, but many instead spoke about concerns regarding a proposal for a fracking wastewater injection well in Sioux County.
Sen. Ken Haar (District 21) led the comments, calling for more research into wastewater injection and how it could affect Nebraska’s natural resources.
“In Nebraska, water is life,” Haar said. “Water is Nebraska gold. We want a gold standard for anything that affects Nebraska water.”
According to Haar, Nebraska is well behind Colorado when it comes to regulations and safety precautions.
He printed out the wastewater regulation documents from both states and estimated Colorado’s document is 300 to 400 pages long compared to Nebraska’s at 50.
He also stated that, in the event of an accident, Colorado requires a $1 million bond and Nebraska requires a $10,000 bond. “Less than the insurance on your car,” Haar said.
Haar pointed out that in Nebraska, the public doesn’t know what’s in the fracking water, adding that certain states, including California, require disclosure of the chemicals.
“We know it’s saltwater but we don’t know exactly what’s in it,” he said.
When Haar blanked on the word that corporations cite to protect their trade secrets, Sen. Ernie Chambers (District 11) offered some help, asking if the word he was looking for was “proprietary.”
“‘Proprietary’ has no place whatsoever when we’re talking about the safety and welfare of the people of this state,” Chambers said.
He said clean up crews and respondents to accidents won’t know what’s in the chemicals and whether or not they could cause health problems.
Chambers also asked Sen. David Schnoor (District 15) if he could describe what a latrine is, based on Schnoor’s military experience. The two agreed it’s similar to an outhouse, “a place for the collection and gathering of human waste,” Chambers said.
“I don’t want Nebraska to become the latrine of the Midwest,” he added.
Haar doubled down on that statement, saying that right now “we’re not even charging a quarter to use the latrine.”
The majority of the speakers supported Sen. John Stinner (District 48) in calling for a delay on wastewater injection until more research could be done. Stinner, calling it “produced water,” said that when the application for the Sioux County site first came to light he had his staff look into how other states handle fracking wastewater.
They compared North Dakota and Pennsylvania and decided they would propose a bill, 512, that would tax out-of-state wastewater to the tune of $.20 for each barrel that is disposed. He said the NOGCC was in favor of the bill.
Stinner said since then the issue has obviously morphed into something more and has requested a study over the summer to bring everything together.
Colorado and Wyoming have a rigorous process that can take a project like this years to complete, but it might only take six months in Nebraska.
“Clean water is the key issue,” Stinner said. “That’s the resource we have to protect.”
Sen. Bob Krist (District 10) said during his work with the Army Corps of Engineers he has “seen fracking at its worst and its best” and finds it extremely alarming that the state of Nebraska has less regulation than other states.
“Colorado’s a big state,” he said. “They should find someplace to dump their own dirty water. Let’s slow down and do this right.”
Haar also presented a few issues that were raised at the March 24 NOGCC hearing in Sidney over this Sioux County injection well. The NOGCC deemed that day’s public comment period not part of the public record and Haar wanted some of those issues to be recorded, including public concerns about truck traffic past schools as well as environmental concerns.
Haar called on the new commissioner Rundel to give the legislature a chance to have a summer hearing “so we can look at these rules and ask questions.”
But he didn’t show much confidence in the NOGCC.
“The NOGCC doesn’t seem to know its rules and seems to make up its rules on the go,” he said.
This comes after the Sierra Club and Bold Nebraska filed a complaint with the Attorney General’s Office against the NOGCC on April 7 alleging that the NOGCC violated open meeting laws at the March 24 hearing. The Attorney General’s Office has since appointed a special investigator to look into the matter.
The NOGCC has 30 days from March 24 to make a decision on the application for the Sioux County well.
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Oil and Gas Commission reverses course, will allow public to comment on wastewater well
Mar 21, 2015 | Omaha World-Herald News Service
By Bart Schaneman
The public now will be allowed to comment at a hearing Tuesday regarding an application for a fracking wastewater injection well in Sioux County.
The Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission initially said it would not hear testimony from anyone living more than a half-mile from the Panhandle site where a company has applied to dispose of fracking wastewater by injecting it underground.
But because of public interest, the commission decided to allow public comment from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tuesday, the commission posted on its website Thursday.
After the comment period, the commission will recess before reconvening to consider the application.
“We just wanted to clarify that we’ve always allowed public comment,” Deputy Director Stan Belieu said.
Space constraints at the commission’s office in Sidney had raised concerns, he said.
The office can accommodate 25 people. If participants exceed that, commenters will have to leave after speaking so that others can be seated.
Terex Energy Corp., a subsidiary of T-Rex Energy, based in Bloomfield, Colorado, has applied to convert an unused oil well about 20 miles northwest of Scottsbluff into an injection well. Saltwater left over from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, would be pumped undergound to dispose of it.
Opponents worry about the effects a spill might have on ground and surface water and about increased traffic on roads to the site — about 80 trucks a day, Terex’s application says.
This report includes material from the Associated Press.
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Nebraska: The latest proxy battleground for the war on affordable energy
Apr 12, 2015 | Lincoln Journal Star
By David Kreutzer
I had the privilege of serving as mayor in the small, Shenandoah Valley town where my wife and I raised our children. So, I am keenly aware of concerns about powerful out-of-state or out-of-area interests trying to take advantage of a rural population.
The Nebraskan battles over the KXL Pipeline and the Terex injection well may be cases of the private-jet set using those in a “flyover” state, but who is using whom, and how they are doing it, may not be so obvious.
Confusion and misrepresentation are symptomatic of the energy debate. Opinion polls regularly show that climate falls near the bottom of lists of issues concerning Americans, while water quality ranks near the top of environmental concerns. So, swapping “water quality” for “climate” in energy debates can be a winning strategy for those that want to hobble oil and gas production. It’s a strategy that appears to be working in Nebraska, a state that has become a proxy battleground for the war on affordable energy.
Recently this proxy battle has moved to an injection well in Sioux County. In a viral video a Nebraska farmer, protesting the permit for the well, asks oil and gas commissioners if they would drink some purported fracking fluid that he claims to have mixed up himself that morning. That the beverage offered looks more like manure tea than fracking fluid is irrelevant since the disposal well in question will be taking "produced brine" from oil wells and not "fracking fluid."
What’s not irrelevant is the Nebraska Oil and Gas Commission’s perfect record with injection wells. There have been no leaks from any of the injection wells since they took regulatory control 30 years ago.
What may or may not be relevant is out-of-state funding for activists opposing the well and the KXL pipeline.
For example, a story in The New York Times about Bold Nebraska (an influential group opposing that KXL pipeline and the Sioux County well) describes how the founder “was in the middle of a fund-raising call with progressive donors, including the California billionaire Tom Steyer, who were interested in rural organizing and fighting climate change.” Organizing to fight climate change does not mean Bold Nebraska and its founder are not also interested in water quality. Nor does the fact that Tom Steyer’s billions came from hedge funds that used to invest in fossil-fuel corporations mean he isn’t sincere about restricting carbon emissions now.
But the fact that the debate over water quality so often moves to talk about global warming, as it did in my debate on The Ed Show with the founder of Bold Nebraska, might be reason for Nebraskans to look into the arguments against KXL and the Sioux County well with a little skepticism.
The fracking revolution has so flipped the script on resource availability that low prices and surpluses are now the big concerns for oil and gas markets. The low natural gas prices are bringing manufacturers back to the U.S. along with their investment and jobs.
The surge in oil production has undercut the political leverage of Russia and OPEC while effectively adding hundreds of billions of dollars per year to consumer pocketbooks. Because the poor spend a larger fraction of their incomes on energy, these cuts are especially helpful to them.
Without a doubt, Nebraskans should care about water quality and land use. And I fully understand if they discount the opinions of an economist who now works in Washington, D.C. But they ought to give at least as fair hearing to a project that will sequester brine 5,000 feet below the aquifer using an existing well regulated by a Nebraskan commission with a decades-long perfect no-leak record as they give to groups funded by out-of-state billionaires whose over-arching concern is cutting conventional energy production.
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'Would you drink it?' video goes viral
Mar 31, 2015 | Lincoln Star Journal
By Nicholas Bergin
A video of an Ainsworth man asking Nebraska’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission “Would you drink it?” has gotten more than a million views on YouTube.
James Osborn was first up to testify at an almost three-hour public comment session last week on a proposal by Colorado-based T-Rex Energy to open a commercial site in Sioux County to dispose of wastewater from oil and gas production, including the practice of hydraulic fracturing known as fracking.
Osborn poured out three glasses of clear water, explaining that Nebraska relies on clean groundwater for farming, livestock and drinking. He then topped each glass off with a brown sludge and demanded to know, “Would you drink it?”
“My answer would be no," he said. "I would not drink this. So I don’t want this in the water.”
Osborn said he mixed the brackish water that morning and wouldn't divulge the ingredients because they were his trade secret. Businesses are not required to reveal chemicals used to break up shale for oil and gas exploration.
Advocacy group Bold Nebraska recorded the session and posted it online.
T-Rex wants to convert a dry oil well and inject the salty, sometimes chemical-laden water that is a byproduct of oil exploration and production more than 6,000 feet underground below impermeable layers of rock. The brine water would be filtered at the site.
Opponents fear the well could leak or a truck hauling liquid could spill.
“I actually have a little bit of experience in the oil and gas fields," Osborn told the three-member commission in Sidney last week. "I’ve helped build pipelines all over the country. And I’m on the wire about this thing.”
In its application to convert the oil well and inject the oil brine, T-Rex says it plans to build double-lane roads to handle as many as 80 trucks a day hauling 10,000 barrels of liquid from oil wells in Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming.
At a commission hearing for the project that took place after the public comment session on March 24, company officials backed off those figures saying they have no contracts in place and don’t know how many trucks would actually visit the site to dispose of fluid.
See the full hearing at http://boldnebraska.org/fracking-hearing
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Foes of fracking wastewater well cry foul over speaker limits
Mar 20, 2015 | Associated Press – Lincoln, NE
At a public hearing next Tuesday, the Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission will not hear testimony from anyone living more than a half-mile from a Panhandle site where a company has applied to dispose of fracking wastewater by injecting it underground.
That means about two dozen people and corporations may testify, the Lincoln Journal Star reports.
The three-member commission is merely following “the rule of law,” said Director Bill Sydow. “This hearing is about the technical merits and engineering merits. ... It is not about policy, because policy is set on this at the federal level.”
Opponents of the project accuse the state commission of muzzling them.
“They are trying to shut off the opposition,” said Ronda Rabe Hasenauer of Harrison, Nebraska.
Terex Energy Corp., a subsidiary of T-Rex Energy, based in Bloomfield, Colorado, has applied to convert an unused oil well about 20 miles northwest of Scottsbluff into an injection well. Saltwater left over from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, would be pumped undergound to dispose of it.
Opponents worry about the effects a spill might have on ground and surface water and about increased traffic on roads to the site — about 80 trucks a day, Terex’s application says.
“It’s a disgrace for a public entity of our state to consider a potentially toxic proposal for our water to not allow the public to comment,” said Jane Kleeb, director of the advocacy group Bold Nebraska. “We have open-meeting laws for a reason. We have public hearings for a reason: so the public can give their input.”
Terex’s application says it expects 80 trucks a day — or 10,000 barrels of brine — at the site, but T-Rex CEO Don Walford said the slowdown in the industry means the traffic probably would be less.
“Oil drilling is down considerably, as you probably know. There probably won’t be that much business around. ... Twenty or 30 trucks — I’d be excited to get that in a day.”
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Moratorium needed on fracking wastewater
Mar 19, 2015 | Lincoln Star Journal
By State Sen. Ken Haar of Malcolm
An out-of-state company wants to bring 80 to 100 semi-truckloads a day of potentially toxic fracking wastewater from Colorado to Nebraska and dump it into an abandoned well in western Nebraska. A lot of people think this is a bad idea.
The Nebraska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (NOGCC) is holding a public hearing on this subject March 24 in Sidney, Nebraska. The NOGCC has indicated they intend to limit testimony on this proposal to people who have a property interest within one-half mile of the proposed site. Really?
Limiting testimony like this violates several fundamental Nebraska principles and supports the conclusion that we need a moratorium on importation of fracking waste until appropriate legal protections are established.
Nebraska public policies require agencies to establish clear and understandable rules and follow them. The NOGCC’s rules are a muddled mess. Nowhere do their rules state that their public hearings are limited to persons who have a property interest within one-half mile of the site. The rules provide for several definitions of “interested parties,” but they are found within sections that define specific kinds of applications, not the conduct of public hearings.
On the contrary, Rule 007.10 states: “All persons who wish to speak for the record at any public hearing before the Commission or its examiners shall register their appearance at the door on a form to be provided by the Commission.” This implies that persons who wish to speak at a public hearing only need to sign in at the door. Section 57-903, which defines terms for the NOGCC, defines “person” broadly and has no definition of interested party.
Nebraska public policies support the right of people to be heard. We have extensive public meeting and public records laws which affirmatively state the right of people to be heard at meetings of public bodies. Although the NOGCC claims this is a quasi-judicial proceeding, commissioners need to establish clear rules that govern that process rather than point to rules that have nothing to do with the conduct of public hearings.
Nebraskans have both the right and obligation to protect their interests. Eighty to 100 semi-trucks of waste material per day would do significant damage to Nebraska highways, yet there is no provision to recover the cost of repairing them. These trucks would run past homes and schools, yet there are no provisions to pay for crossing guards or traffic lights to protect children who may need to cross the roads. These trucks could have accidents that would cause unknown chemicals to spill onto streets and into water supplies, but there are no financial assurance requirements to pay for the cost of cleanup. Everyone who may have to pay these costs is an interested party who has the right to be heard. Yet the NOGCC says that these interests will not be heard.
Nebraska public policies support protection of natural resources. Water is protected by both the Nebraska Constitution and several statutes. “The water of every natural stream ..., is hereby declared to be the property of the public and is dedicated to the use of the people of the state” (Section 46-202). Because these trucks will cross several streams, every Nebraskan has a stake in the outcome of this proceeding. The importance of natural resources cannot be overemphasized, because of our reliance on agriculture as an economic driver. Water is life; its value will only increase as the world grapples with climate change.
Nebraskans need to know why this company wants to use our state for the proposed dump site for fracking waste material. Is it because Colorado and Wyoming have more extensive rules on financial assurance and environmental protection?
All of this leads to the conclusion that we need a timeout before the NOGCC makes a decision on this proposed fracking disposal process. I call on the people of Nebraska to demand a moratorium on importation of fracking wastewater until we have adequate standards to protect our people and our natural resources
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