Oil Watchdog

08-14-08 by dugan

It doesn’t sound like a lot–Exxon pleads guilty in federal court to killing 85 birds over 5 years, pays $600,000 in fines and fees. It’s a drop in the bucket for Exxon, and what’s a few birds? Yet Exxon rarely admits guilt to anything–consider its nearly two decades of court battles over the Exxon Valdez oil spill. And the 85 dead birds at Exxon sites in five states are just the found evidence of open, deadly pollution that went known and uncorrected for years.

In the current frenzy of high-pressure "fracture’ drilling for domestic natural gas, it’s also more than birds that are being harmed. Groundwater and drinking water contamination are being reported in scores of places where new high-pressure wells are being drilled, particularly in Texas and Pennsylvania.

But first, the bird story. From the LA Times:

Most of the birds died after exposure to hydrocarbons in uncovered
natural gas pits, oil tanks and waste water facilities at ExxonMobil
drilling and production plants in Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma
and Texas, court documents stated.

Open pits and tanks often attract waterfowl and other birds, which may
land in the chemicals and attempt to feed, according to the documents.

…

Bird deaths at ExxonMobil facilities date back to 2003, when employees
found two dead mallards in the water near a production plant in
Colorado. At the time, an agent of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
warned ExxonMobil that it would continue to kill birds if it did not
create barriers to natural gas pits and wells containing toxic
chemicals, court documents stated.

"There are thousands of such wells across the West and thousands more
since the Bush administration opened it all up," said Kert Davies,
research director for Greenpeace USA. "How many dead birds go
undetected?"

The deaths for which Exxon was fined were just the ones that were reported by Exxon itself. The company was warned to cover the toxic pits at its natural gas wells back in 2003. But it was cheaper to leave them open. Caught red-handed, it paid a comparative pittance (the company reported $4 billion in profits just for the last quarter, in a deep recession) and promised to do better.

But what today’s stories don’t explore is what else is happening at natural gas wells. That enormous project is being handled not by the New York Times or CBS or, heaven forbid, Fox News, but by the small nonprofit Propublica.org and its dogged investigative reporter Abrahm Lustgarten.

Companies like Exxon depend on remoteness in the West and poverty in the East to cloak the effect of drilling on nearby land, wildlife and humans.

Water wells explosively contaminated with methane in Pennsylvania and Ohio are in struggling communities, where residents grasped at promised royalties from natural gas wells to pay the mortgage, only to find that the price was the loss of their water source. In some cases drillers pay to truck water to affected residents, but explicitly deny that it’s their fault.

Exxon is gung-ho on the new high-pressure drilling techniques that appear to be causing much of the water contamination–and are also likely to draw off substantial water from the drought-stricken Colorado River. So the birds aren’t just birds. They’re signals that what looks like "cleaner" domestic energy come with a load of downside.