Flagrant Disregard

Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe at the DRC just ran a story about the City’s lawsuit against EagleRidge. She also posted the City’s application for a restraining order against EagleRidge.

It’s gratifying to see the City take this stand on behalf of her citizens. It looks to me like the City has a very strong case. If we don’t win this suit, then I’d say we really are screwed.

To show your support for the City, please show up for the court date:
9:30 a.m., Wednesday October 30th, Denton County Courthouse, 1450 E. McKinney St. in Denton.

Here is my attempt to summarize and simplify the main points in the form of a timeline:

2001 – the City passes an ordinance that states “a gas well operator had to first obtain approval of a gas well development plat identifying proposed gas wells and a gas well permit authorizing drilling operations for each well depicted on the approved gas well development plat.”

2002 – the original operator (R.L. Adkins Corp) received a permit from the City to drill a single gas well called Bonnie Brae Well 3H. According to the RRC, this well is on the north pad site.

2002 – the original operator received a permit from the City to drill a single gas well on the south pad site. The RRC calls this Bonnie Brae Well 4H, but it is referred to in the court document as Bonnie Brae B, Well #B-1.

2010 – EagleRidge takes over the wells.

September 2013 -- EagleRidge gets permit from RRC to re-drill the “existing well” – the court document seems to refer only to 3H, but I think this must also apply to 4H (just by looking at the RRC records).

September 2013- EagleRidge also gets permits from RRC to situate two new gas wells (New Wells), called Bonnie Brae 1H and 2H, on the north pad site (their location is not stated in the document, but this is where they are shown on the RRC map).

September 2013 – EagleRidge gets a permit from the City Fire Department, but it does not get the necessary site plan or gas well permit for the New Wells to authorize drilling. One New Well is drilled and plans seem to be in place to drill the other one.

October 2013 – The City files its cease and desist order.

At issue here is the question of whether EagleRidge needed to file for new permits for each individual gas well or whether the New Wells were vested under the existing permits (obtained in 2002). If the New Wells must be permitted, then they must follow the regulations in the current ordinance, which stipulate a 1,200 foot setback distance between wells and homes.

Here is a good summary of the City’s case: “Defendants' actions constitute violation of the City's Current Gas Well Regulations, Section 35.22.4, and Denton Development Code Section 35.11.2 pertaining to non-conforming uses. To the extent that the Original Gas Well Regulations are applicable to the New Wells, Defendants' actions are also in violation of those provisions. Defendants' actions are being performed in flagrant disregard of the City's right and duty to enforce its codes and ordinances designed to provide for orderly and safe development and to preserve the public health, safety and general welfare. Without the intervention of this court, Defendants are likely to continue such illegal operations it [sic] in the immediate future.”

City Files Restraining Order: EagleRidge Drilling Without Permit

I just heard from a high-ranking Denton official that EagleRidge is drilling in the S. Bonnie/Vintage area without a City permit. The City of Denton filed a restraining order against EagleRidge today demanding them to cease and desist all drilling operations. A judge dismissed the order. Now I think it is set to go to court in the next 10-14 days. This is breaking news - stay tuned for further developments.

MORE NEWS**** Hot tip from another City Official:

"It's important to note that the judge in this case, the one who dismissed it, is also an elected official.  Even in Texas courts, this is all about politics. Here's the guy... http://dentoncounty.com/dept/main.asp?Dept=29"

The Denton Dilemma: Why We Are Fracked

EagleRidge is fracking two wells just across the street from the UNT football stadium. In an act of energy irony, the laterals from these wells travel about 8,000 feet directly below the UNT wind turbines.

 

The wells are not on university property, but UNT owns 75 of the 224 acres of minerals pooled in this lease (click on the second P-12 form here). For a University that has a mission of promoting a "sustainable future," it prompts the question:

I took some videos of the fracking operation. I can confirm what Sharon Wilson reported about the absence of masks on workers. The wind was whipping smoke, fumes, and sand all over the place and carrying it far over the fence line. I spent just a few minutes downwind of the site and felt sick for the rest of the morning – hoarse, nauseous, and light-headed. The noise was deafening – so loud that it drowned out the sound of highway traffic behind me, even though the traffic was much closer.

Click here to see more of the black smog coming off this site.

 

 

 

 

Now it is one thing to put this next to the highway. But it’s another thing to put it right next to a neighborhood. Of course, that won’t happen anymore, right, because we have an ordinance that specifies a 1,200 foot setback between fracking sites and homes.

Wrong. It is about to happen. This massive, noxious industrial site is about to move on down Bonnie Brae to Vintage. Soon this same scene will be repeated less than 200 feet from homes where young families with children live. It is not right or fair. But it is legal and it is going to happen. And then it will happen again and again.

This is the Denton dilemma. We want to protect our citizens with larger setback distances, but despite our efforts we are seeing gas wells just as close to homes as they were before we even passed our first ordinance in 2002. The gas wells predate the regulations, so the regulations don’t apply. We are doomed to be haunted by the ghosts of policies past.

I went to the Denton 2030 comprehensive plan community forum tonight. There, I learned that in the next 20 years Denton is expected to grow by 94,000 people. That means about 37,000 new homes and apartments. And we learned that at least 50% of that growth is going to be west of the core where gas wells are most dense. When new homes come to existing wells, we have learned from the Vintage neighborhood example, our setback rules don’t apply. We will see more fracking very close to homes. Close to kids.

I had a conversation at the meeting tonight with a high-ranking City official. Here was our conversation:

Me: “Have you seen the Vintage situation?”

Him: “Yes. It is awful.”

Me: “Could that happen again?”

Him: “Yes”

Me: “Is it likely?”

Him: “Very.”

Me: “Why?”

Him: “It’s the perfect storm. All our growth is heading west, right into country so thickly developed with gas wells that you could stand anywhere, throw a rock and hit one. And all those wells are vested under old rules.”

So, in addition to the people here already surrounded by pad sites, we are looking at 50,000 new people who will be in the thick of it. Our ordinance does nothing for them.

Denton, we have a problem. What are we going to do?

No Permit for Frack Water Transport

Thanks to the super sleuthing of Amber Briggle, we discovered this morning that City Council had on their consent agenda a curious item (see 4DD). They were about to approve (so it would appear) a permit for EagleRidge to use City property for purposes of overland transport of water. This would be just south of Vintage road, where they are getting ready to frack one of three wells in extreme proximity to homes - see a picture below, which was snapped recently by Calvin Tillman. In short, EagleRidge wanted an easement to get frack water to and/or from the site(s).

City Council pulled the item from the consent agenda after Amber and Cathy McMullen spoke up about this in their work session today. That meant we were able to speak to the issue tonight at City Hall. The result was that they have postponed their decision. The whole thing went down in a strange way...enough to make you think something deeper is going on under the surface. But anyway, stay tuned as this issue will resurface soon.

In the meantime, here are my remarks from tonight's City Council meeting:

I am here to ask you to deny the permit to EagleRidge that would allow them to use City land.

This January with our ordinance, you decided that fracking and neighborhoods are incompatible land uses. You expressed this value – and this vision for the future of Denton – by adopting a setback distance of 1,200 feet between pad sites and protected uses like homes and schools.

We have since learned that this ordinance does not apply to most of the drilling that occurs now in Denton and that will occur in the future. The ordinance has more teeth, but it has nothing to bite, because of legal constraints imposed on the city.

Thus, we find ourselves in a situation like that at S. Bonnie Brae where three wells are being drilled and fracked within 200 feet of a neighborhood. I was there one day to watch the school busses drop off children. Right next to the bus stop was a drilling operation chugging out wave after wave of diesel fumes. And just a few hundred feet down the street was another one doing the same thing. And this went on for over a month. And then the fracking will happen and it will be another two weeks. And no one in those neighborhoods owns any minerals. They are getting the pollution but they are not going to be getting any royalty checks in the mail.

I spoke with several young mothers who live in that neighborhood. One of them told me she is keeping her children indoors to try to avoid the pollution. She thought the fracking was almost over and was dismayed to learn it had not even yet begun. The other woman has a three year old son whose immune system is compromised and has been to the hospital twice since the rigs came to the area. Another woman told me she can watch the fumes come right into her yard. Both her and her children have been sick the whole time the rigs have been there. All of them were angry about the lack of notice and scared about the impacts. They talked about wanting to sell their homes, and about how they would not have moved there had they known this would happen.

One woman wrote an e-mail to me saying, “I would have thought that before these wells were even permitted, that there would have been some communication with the homeowners to allow us some type of say in what is being done in such close proximity to our homes.”

Another woman writes, “I am currently home during the day due to illness and I can neither sleep during the morning much less at night due to the constant drilling noises. This is very disturbing and it is literally impossible to get any rest. We moved here because it was a peacefully quiet neighborhood, now it is not.”

Another woman writes, “I am almost due with our first baby [which] makes me even more upset with the situation. Not thrilled at the thought of bringing our baby home to this.”

A man writes, “I have seen over and over the damage this truck are doing to the road and the sides of the roads…No one was notified ahead of schedule of the events that took place. No Environmental Impact study was done to ensure the safety of the environment prior to allowing the permit to be granted. There is no set warning notification process to residents if there is an accident. We were told the “danger” ring is 1000 ft around a site. This basically means the entire sub-division is as risk with no set notification process.”

You need to deny this permit so that you are not complicit in all these injustices. The people of Denton can see that although you do not agree with drilling so close to homes, there was nothing you could do about these gas wells. But if you let them transport their water over our land you give the appearance that you actually consent to the project as a whole. Could you possibly be legally compelled to give them this permit? They are asking and you are free to just say no. Let them get their right of way through someone else’s land.

Where Denton Dumps its Fracking Waste

To hydraulically fracture a gas well around here you need about three to five million gallons of water laced with fracking chemicals. When the well starts to produce, some of that toxic water stays below. But some of it comes back up, carrying not only the fracking chemicals but also naturally occurring radioactive materials. The stuff that comes back up is called “produced water.”

Now, in Pennsylvania they often try to treat this produced water, but it doesn’t work too well. Around here on the Barnett in Texas, operators contract with trucking companies to haul produced water to salt water disposal (SWD) wells also known as injection wells. ProPublica’s Abram Lustgarten has a great series on these wells, showing how they are under-regulated and based on sketchy assumptions about what happens to the wastewater once it is pumped down the hole.  

Across the country, there are over 680,000 of these wells (52,000 in Texas), and they have shot about 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquids deep into the earth. Here’s a blurb from one of his articles that should get you concerned about this issue:

"In 10 to 100 years we are going to find out that most of our groundwater is polluted," said Mario Salazar, an engineer who worked for 25 years as a technical expert with the EPA's underground injection program in Washington. "A lot of people are going to get sick, and a lot of people may die."

The nearest injection well to us is the Casto SWD well [API #121-32954] permitted and drilled in 2007 by Chief Operating, LLC. This well is currently operated by Bridgeport Tank Trucks, L.L.C. The well was permitted by the Railroad Commission to accept up to 25,000 barrels of water per day. Tanker trucks unload their produced water into one of about eight huge tanks on site where sediments settle out. They then pour the water down the hole, where the Ellenburger sandstone formation (below the Barnett) wicks it up like a sponge. The disposal range is between 8,600 and 12,750 feet.

Here's a picture of the tanks - you can see a couple of tanker trucks (white cabs) behind the yellow construction vehicle.

Here is a GIS picture. The well is in the red circle. Robson Ranch is in the green square. Ponder is up there at the blue triangle:  
 

I can't find the figure for how much produced water has been dumped down this well. But I can do an estimate. They claim in the permit that they expect to average about 15,000 barrels per day. The well was validated in late 2007, so let's say it started accepting waste in 2008. That would mean that about 22 million barrels of toxic liquids have been pumped down this hole.

The permit notes that there are no wells within a ½ mile that go that deep and “thus there are no avenues for the vertical migration of fluids (zonal isolation).” Of course, the well casing may lose integrity (Lustgarten notes that one well integrity violation was issued for every six injection wells inspected). But also note there are several wells surrounding this site that go over 8,000 feet (sometimes 8,400 feet) deep. That’s pretty close to the disposal zone.

This is where most of the produced water from Denton's wells is dumped (we don't allow injection wells within the city limits). It's worth wondering what is actually happening to all that toxic waste. Will it come back to haunt our kids?

Municipal Authority

Here is something you won't hear from our city attorneys....but it is from the pen of Timothy Riley, a UNT-grad, former JAG, and now attorney for the oil and gas industry: …As evidenced above, nearly a hundred years of Texas common law jurisprudence supports municipal authority to regulate oil and gas activities to avoid exposing communities to potentially dangerous nuisances. Although the Texas Supreme Court has not directly ruled on this issue, there is more than sufficient lower court authority to assert that such regulations constitute a well-rooted background principle of state nuisance law. As such, a municipality should be able to defend against even a categorical takings challenge if the oil and gas ordinance was promulgated to address serious and injurious risks to the community. These risks can include public safety, environmental protection (like protecting water quality), and potentially even concerns related to nonconformity with existing zoning or comprehensive-plan ordinances.

Frack to the Future: Why Are Drilling Rigs so Close to Homes in Denton?

Denton’s new drilling ordinance established a 1,200 foot setback between gas wells and protected uses like homes. But the future of fracking in Denton is going to be a story about gas wells much, much closer to homes than that.

We first got a glimpse of our future in April, just a few months after the ordinance was passed, when a development was approved that would put homes less than 250 feet from gas wells.

Now the picture is becoming even clearer. EagleRidge is drilling two wells simultaneously off of Vintage and S. Bonnie Brae. There are some homes just 100 feet from the pad sites. Many more homes are just 500 feet, or less, away. The diesel engines on site are pumping out black smoke.

 

I took this picture down there as the school bus was dropping off children. You can see one of the wells (south side)  – there was another one, even closer, behind me as I took the picture. The future of fracking in Denton is going to look like this: polluting industries plopped right next to houses. And all the activity we are seeing now is just the appetizer for the rush that is going to happen when we really start exporting natural gas and prices spike.

Here is the Railroad Commission GIS image for the wells.

  

And just tonight, the Planning and Zoning Commission approved another project that will bring homes 100 feet from a gas well.

You might wonder how this could be when the new ordinance seems to make this illegal. The answer is that the 1,200 foot setback in the ordinance does not apply to situations where new homes are built around existing gas well pad sites. I don’t quite know why this is. It has something to do with vested rights…but it also just seems to be a terrible oversight in the ordinance. DAG recommended fixing this problem. But that idea didn’t get any play.

Most of the pad sites that will ever be in Denton are already platted and at least partly developed. And most of them are south and west of town where lots of our population growth is likely to occur. So, we are going to see more and more situations where homes are in very close proximity to pad sites where new wells will be added and old wells will be reworked and refracked for years to come. And none of this will be covered by our so-called current ordinance.

We have learned that fracking and neighborhoods do not mix. But we are going to keep on mixing them.

Some will say that this is acceptable, because those homebuyers are making an informed decision to move next to a gas well. But they are not. They don’t know it is coming. I have heard from several folks in the neighborhood where I took this picture, and they tell me that this came as a surprise. Some say they wouldn’t have bought homes there if they knew this was going to happen.

Oh, and readers of this blog won’t be shocked to learn that the people in this neighborhood do not own any of the mineral rights and, thus, are not making a dime from the drilling. Records from the Denton Central Appraisal District show that the mineral ownership of these wells is split between five owners in Dallas, Austin, Abilene, and Lewisville.