| Tweeti Blancett and her husband Linn are sixth generation ranchers who no longer have a working ranch because of coal bed methane development on their land.
"In the last 15 years our ranch has been destroyed," says Blancett.
"We no longer run cattle on our land because of contaminated water and lack of forage."
The Blancetts live near Aztec, New Mexico, in the San Juan Basin, which is the most highly developed coal bed methane field in the world.
Blancett says some of their cattle have died after drinking water contaminated by coal bed methane wells and they’ve been killed in collisions with oil and gas company vehicles.
Meanwhile their land has been overrun with roads, pipelines, compressor stations and numerous well sites.
The development has also brought noxious weeds onto the land.
"It breaks your heart and makes you very angry," says Blancett.
"Coal bed methane is a nasty, nasty product."
Blancett has some advice for Albertans now that the province is forging ahead with coal bed methane development. She recommends that landowners in Alberta visit New Mexico or other areas of the U.S. that have been ravaged by coal bed methane development to see for themselves what damage the industry can cause.
Blancett says even strict regulations won’t ensure that environmental devastation doesn’t occur. She’s become cynical from personal experience.
"There’s tonnes and tonnes of regulations to protect that surface and the air and the water but if they aren’t enforced it doesn’t matter how good they are," says Blancett of the situation in New Mexico.
"If you think your government will protect you from the big oil and gas companies, you’re wrong."
She recommends that Albertans form strong citizens’ groups to monitor the situation and to ensure regulations are being followed.
And she says there needs to be good, non-partisan science completed to determine the impact of coal bed methane development on the province’s water and soil.
"It’s not fun but at least maybe you can be ahead of the curve," says Blancett.
Jill Morrison, community organizer for the Powder River Basin Council in Wyoming, another area of the U.S. with widespread coal bed methane development, says the Wyoming experience hasn’t been any better.
She says landowners have lost their water wells due to coal bed methane development. The industry is pumping out water at a rate of over a million barrels of water a day, she says. Water, either saline or fresh depending on the formation, often has to be extracted from coal seams before natural gas can be released.
In Wyoming, companies have just dumped the saline water they’ve extracted onto the ground, destroying the clay surface, says Morrison. As well, landowners have to contend with numerous wells within a small area and noisy compressor stations in rural areas that were once extremely quiet.
Many landowners are spending a lot of money on lawyers in order to fight for compensation, she adds.
"Albertans would be wise to learn from the mistakes of the Powder River Basin – full-bore with no pilot projects or special rules and regulations," says Morrison. "The industry is probably going to go for another 10 or 15 years and then they’re going to be gone and we’ll have a big mess. They’re going to cut and run."
Meanwhile, Mike Ekelund, assistant deputy minister of Alberta Energy, says coal bed methane development in Alberta will have fewer negative consequences because the coal formations where the natural gas is trapped in are different.
Ekelund says of the 1,000 experimental wells that have been drilled in the province, 80 per cent of them didn’t encounter any water.
Even if water has to be extracted from future wells, Ekelund says Alberta has much stricter regulations governing disposal of saline water and extraction of fresh water than in the U.S. Ekelund says the industry will likely target the dry coal seams first because it’ll be cheaper for them not to have to deal with extracting water.
There are currently 400 commercial coal bed methane wells in Alberta. Public consultation sessions on development have been taking place across the province and a multi-stakeholder advisory committee has been established to come up with recommendations to regulate the industry.
Currently coal bed methane is governed under the same regulations as conventional natural gas development. Landowner groups and environmentalists don’t believe that’s appropriate because of the differences between the two types of resource extraction.
Ekelund says there’s an estimated 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas within coal formations in the province.
"How much we can get out of the ground economically and environmentally we don’t know yet," he says. |
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