(Editor’s Note: 12 Aug 2023) See also: Max Brantley. Live, it’s Saturday night. 30 Mar 2013. Arkansas Times.
The line is open. Finishing up, I start above with a fine bit of Facebooking by the Greers Ferry Lake Natural Gas Watch, which is concerned about the potential that fracking could affect Greers Ferry Lake. It shows Sen. Jason Rapert looking all concerned at the oil pipeline spill in Mayflower yesterday (classified as “major” by the EPA, Fox 16 reports). We gotta drill for oil and we gotta move the product, but there ARE potential downsides, certainly more than Sen. Rapert and U.S. Rep. Tim “XL Pipeline” Griffin like to let on. And be sure to check this photo that shows how the ruptured pipeline runs down from Mayflower through the Lake Maumelle watershed, as I mentioned yesterday.
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All members of the International Brotherhood of Magicians “and gas drillers” agree to:
1) Oppose the willful exposure to the public of any principles of the Art of Magic, or the methods employed in any magic effect or illusion.
First rule in the magicians code. Never reveal your secrets.
Last week there was sort of a vote at AOGC on something they called Rule B19. Arkansas joined Wyoming in becoming one of 2 states that required full disclosure of what frac fluid contains. It was in all the papers. Hooray!
Closer examination revealed that it really wasn’t a rule at all, but instead a really a clever bit of slight of hand. It was a magic trick by AOGC to allow the companies to say they were doing something, without really having to do anything at all.
Rule B19 was supposed to cause the companies involved in hydraulic fracturing to completely disclose every chemical involved in the process. We were told by AOGC director Larry Bengal:
“We will tell you what’s in the cake, but not teach you how to bake the cake.”
The Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission has voted unanimously to ban disposal wells for unconventional gas drilling wastes in a region that has been inundated with earthquakes. The decision requires the immediate closure of one disposal well and prohibits the construction of new wells in a 1,150 square-mile radius. Operators have also closed an additional three disposal wells on their own initiative, the Associated Press reports.
Earthquakes have become unusually common in some areas of Arkansas where increased unconventional gas related drilling is taking place. Residents insist that there is a correlation between the quakes and the area’s wastewater disposal wells. After monitoring hundreds of earthquakes, the largest a magnitude-4.7 in February, investigators began confirming the connection.
The Oil and Gas Commission discovered that four disposal wells were situated on a fault line responsible for dozens of earthquakes this year alone.
