2013-05-25T16:32:49-04:00 Dimiter Kenarov http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=dimiter-kenarov Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Dimiter Kenarov Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2438135 2013-01-17T07:00:00-05:00 2013-03-19T05:12:01-04:00

Dimiter Kenarov http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dimiter-kenarov/
She doesn't have to tread silently across the forest floor or keep her voice down because her quarry, if she is lucky enough to find it, is already dead, has been dead for decades. Armed with just a digital camera and a GPS device, Laurie Barr is hunting for what few have heard of: orphaned oil and gas wells.

There are the skeletons of pumpjacks, bent down and frozen in time like prehistoric animals in a tar pit; there are wellheads, bloodied around the joints with rust and age; there are old pipes sticking out of the ground like the totem poles of a long-lost civilization; and then there are just holes, bottomless, empty holes, leading all the way down into the netherworld. When Laurie Barr finds an old well, whatever it is, she snaps a photo of it, looks up the coordinates on her GPS, uploads the image on a special Google map and files a report with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), or, in case of a leak, with the National Response Center (NRC).

It all began in 1859, when Colonel Edwin Drake drilled the United States' first commercial well near Titusville, Venango County. Since then, there have been an estimated over 325,000 oil and gas wells sunk into the hills of Pennsylvania. When a well stopped producing, it was usually abandoned by its owners, rarely plugged, wellheads and piping taken out for scrap metal but sometimes simply left behind to the ravages of time.

The DEP has records of over 120,000 wells, many of which are still in operation. The rest, about 200,000, are missing from the annals of history, unregistered, lost among trees and weeds and housing developments, their owners decaying in the same ground they used to dig so ravenously for decayed matter. It was not until 1984, with the passing of the Oil and Gas Act, setting up comprehensive legislation for the management of drilling sites, that DEP started searching for and plugging in earnest those ownerless, abandoned wells, which it decided to call "orphaned." For weren't they like naughty children, lost in the dark forest? Today, most of them are supposedly defunct and harmless, their last breath expired, but a few are known to leak, quietly gurgling oil and gas, polluting land and water and air in their final death throes.

Recently, though, the dead have been resurrected. In December, 2010 in Bradford Township, McKean County, a house exploded, injuring the residents. Two and a half months later and two and a half miles away, another house blew up, while its owner was shoveling snow in the driveway. And then, in the summer of 2012, a 30-foot geyser spouted water and gas for more than a week in Tioga County, in northeastern Pennsylvania, like a whale that had been stirred out its deep, ancient sleep. Dozens of similar cases were recorded by DEP, even if not all as dramatic. Many of them, it was determined, were related to stray gas migration from old unplugged or poorly-plugged wells, gas building up under land and houses like an invisible bomb waiting for the casual strike of the match. What, in Jesus's name, was happening to Pennsylvania?

The mystery was no mystery at all. The rush for shale gas, which started in 2005 in the Marcellus shale formation, underlying large portions of Pennsylvania, was having intended consequences. Even though the Marcellus is quite deep, between 5,000 and 8,000 feet, the extraction of shale gas through horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process that involves injecting huge amounts of chemically-laced water under high pressure to blast the rock underground, was likely displacing gas in shallower geologic layers, where old drilling holes acted as natural pathways all the way to the surface. New industrial wells were pushing gas up the rusty pipes of old wells, the hearts of the orphaned shocked into life by fracking.

"Can you believe, stepping outside to shovel snow and all of a sudden your house goes 'poof'? That's mind-blowing," Laurie Barr tells me about the time she heard of the exploding houses and started getting interested in the issue. "And then I thought, I live on an old gas field too."

Her property in Potter County had old wells and she even used to hang birdfeeders from the rusty pipes sticking out of the ground, believing they were safe. A graphic designer in her early 50s, with the high voice and enthusiasm of a child, she had long been involved in campaigns against the Marcellus drilling that was destroying the quiet of her home, but looking at the blown-up homes in Bradford she understood there was something else that needed doing. And so, she made a decision: she would go hunting for orphaned and abandoned wells -- or "lost" wells, as Laurie Barr prefers to call them -- record their locations and promote their plugging.

"There are a lot of people fighting the Marcellus, but lost wells are an issue we could work on getting fixed. We may never stop the shale gas development in the Marcellus, but we could at least reduce the risk by promoting the plugging of old wells near active drilling sites," she says.

To that end, Laurie Barr, along with a couple of associates, set up a website, Save Our Streams PA, and started a state-wide campaign called "Scavenger Hunt PA: The Hunt for the Orphaned, Abandoned, Plugged and Un-Plugged Oil and Gas Wells in Pennsylvania." The concept is simple, very much like an adventure game for adults. Everything a participant needs is a digital camera, a GPS and a printout of the unplugged orphaned and abandoned wells already discovered -- about 8,500 on the DEP's site.

To help popularize their cause, the well scavengers teamed up with some geocachers, the recreational outdoor treasure hunters, who play at tracking down hidden containers with GPS devices. Laurie Barr even made badges for members of her organization, a block-lettered "LOST" printed in the center, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the TV series Lost. All in all, they have found so far around 100 orphaned wells.

The main problem is that even when an orphaned well is tracked down and reported, the DEP rarely has enough money to plug it. The restoration cost for a 3,000-foot hole is on average $60,000, but could sometimes exceed $100,000, according to recent analysis at the Carnegie Mellon University. Shale gas companies, which frack in the vicinity of old wells, could have them plugged, but that's just a voluntary procedure. And so, with its minimal operating budget, DEP's Abandoned and Orphaned Well Program manages to take care only of a small percentage, the most critical ones that leak near waterways, fragile habitats or residential areas. The rest are just left alone, spewing methane, a greenhouse gas a hundred times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

"These orphaned wells are probably contributing a lot to climate change as they're pouring a lot of methane into the atmosphere. We try to raise awareness of that, if addition to the health and safety issues," Laurie Barr tells me.

It is what she does, when not hunting for wells: traveling around the state and beyond with a large bag full of photographs, maps and official documents, giving presentations to communities, setting up information campaigns. There are still about 200,000 undiscovered wells in Pennsylvania and, with tens of thousands of shale gas fracking operations planned in the next couple of years, the situation is bound to get worse. The resurrection -- the second coming -- of Pennsylvania's orphaned wells is just beginning.

Reporting for this article was funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and Calkins Media.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2411664 2013-01-04T16:00:08-05:00 2013-03-06T05:12:01-05:00

Dimiter Kenarov http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dimiter-kenarov/
I nodded.

"Shale gas is very important for Poland", he quickly added, as if in a hurry to impress the words. "It's very important for our independence."

Today Poland is independent of course, fiercely so, but nobody quite seems to believe it. The Polish white-and-red flag flies over government buildings in Warsaw, but there is another flag - white-blue-red - that still rises menacingly in the east. It is Russia's and that extra blue stripe signifies only one thing these days: natural gas.

Gazprom pipelines, which supply almost two-thirds of Polish gas, are the final link in the long chain of oppression, many Poles believe. It is the reason why the mood all over Poland was euphoric when the U.S. Energy Information Administration announced that Poland may hold up to 5.3 trillion cubic meters of shale gas, enough to make the country "a second Norway" (in the words of the Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski), energy independent pretty much for perpetuity.

"After years of dependence on our large neighbor, today we can say that my generation will see the day when we will be independent in the area of natural gas and we will be setting terms," the prime minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, told the media in 2011. Even when, later, the Polish Geological Institute, in collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey, lowered those mindboggling numbers by as much as 90%, the euphoria did not dissipate. Poland was going to be independent from Russia at all costs, if only for a couple of decades.

To understand the importance of shale gas in Poland is to understand that it is an emotional issue at its core, steeped in ideological rhetoric. Russia (initially the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union) has been Poland's archrival and oppressor for centuries and the resentment runs deep through all layers of Polish society. In the minds of many Polish politicians and the majority of the public, shale gas is not so much an economic windfall, or a new industry promising employment, or an alternative source of fossil fuels, but a mythological weapon against a mythological enemy, a gargantuan pepper spray against the bad Russian bear.

In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising why shale gas enjoys such enormous popularity in Poland, both in government circles and among the people (73% support it), and why exploration licenses have already been given for 90,000 square kilometers, or 29% of the country's territory. It seems that Poland has spearheaded shale gas development in Europe not so much because of dire needs - gas is just 13% of its current energy mix, and nearly 90% of the country's electricity is produced from locally mined coal - but because of particular historical anxieties over national identity and geopolitical security, as well as very close diplomatic ties to the United States - a global advocate of fracking.

But that national - even nationalistic - fervor has started to undermine the very foundations of Polish democracy. Any criticism of shale gas or fracking these days is often a subject to suspicion, even if it comes from official European channels. When, in early September 2012, the European Commission published an extensive report on the environmental risks of shale gas, designating industrial-scale fracking "a high risk" operation in a number of areas, Poland's treasury minister Mikołaj Budzanowski, who supervises the country's state-owned oil and gas enterprises, lambasted it as "misleading the public", while others directly accused the authors of the report, AEA Technology, of close ties to Gazprom. The recent withdrawal of Exxon Mobile from two concessions in Poland, because of poor shale gas showings, has been interpreted by some as another ploy by Russia, aiming to undermine confidence in the Polish shale gas market and scare off future investors.

The full brunt of this ideological warfare, however, has been borne by Polish environmentalists and the few individuals from local communities, who dare to demand a debate on fracking. To oppose shale gas in Poland sometimes amounts to nothing less than to oppose Polish independence and Polish national interests. To be against fracking is to be branded a national traitor, a fundamentalist, an extremist, or, worse, an agent of Gazprom.

"There is a risk [to be accused of supporting Russia] attached to criticizing shale gas", Urszula Stefanowicz, project coordinator of The Climate Coalition, an umbrella group uniting 22 environmental and civic non-government organizations in Poland, recently told me. "It's automatic for the media and some politicians. Shale gas looks really good to them because it can free us from dependence from Russia. If you're doing something to criticize shale gas or to make the exploitation of shale gas more difficult, then you're automatically on the side of Gazprom. Directly or indirectly [you're accused of being a traitor]."

"Essentially", she adds, "it's difficult to tell the politicians, the media, the public, that we are not against the prosperity of society, but we are against the mindless abuse of the environment that will result in lack of prosperity for society in the long term."

The ironic fact that Gazprom, hardly a company with green credentials, has come out against fracking in an obvious strategy to preserve its dominance over conventional gas markets in Eastern Europe has truly hurt authentic environmental groups in Poland and has given powerful ammunition to industry lobbies. Few can doubt that Gazprom, an arm of Russian foreign policy, is behind some kind of public relations campaign to prevent competition of shale gas and sustain its high-priced imports, but in Poland that suspicion has been blown out of proportion and has degenerated into a witch-hunt.

"We must be watching very carefully all false prophets, people who are trying to use arguments related to ecology and environmental protection", Piotr Naimski, an MP from the Law and Justice Party (PiS) and once a dissident himself against the Polish communist government told the Sunday Catholic Weekly in late September. "It is very often a hypocritical argumentation and the source of their actions comes from... Moscow, as well as from Germany or France, where opposition to the new gas mining industry is strong."

Such opinions are so widespread that very few people, most of them from communities where shale gas exploration is taking place in their backyards, find the courage to openly debate the value of the projects - in fact, there is hardly any debate, as many companies move in to drill without notifying local residents in advance and organizing public hearings only after the fact.

"There is no tradition of public debate in Poland. The government has this way of thinking that we can just skip over society," Robert Biedron, an MP from the oppositional party Palikot's Movement and one of the few politicians who questions the viability of shale gas in Poland, told me. Recently, because of his views, Biedron himself became the victim of a smear campaign in the mainstream Polish media, which tried to paint him as a Gazprom lobbyist. "I'm not against shale gas", he told me, "but I have a lot of doubts about the technology of fracking. In Canada there are doubts, in America there are doubts, and I want this to be discussed in Poland as well. I want debate and there's no debate, there wasn't any debate about that."

The situation has deteriorated even further. In October Dziennik Gazeta Prawna [Daily Legal Gazette] broke the story of an anti-fracking group from Pomerania, in northern Poland, whose meetings had been spied on by a company agent. The secret report included details of conversations and personal sketches of the participants, and was later forwarded to several Polish ministries, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which subsequently passed on the information to the Internal Security Agency (ABW) and the police.

Looking back at the history of Poland, with its heroic struggles against Russian occupation over the centuries, with its celebrated Solidarity movement against the Communist regime in the early 1980s, with its current support for political refugees from Belarus, the demonisation of environmental groups and regular Polish citizens, who venture to freely voice their disagreement, seems like a sad reversal of roles. Once upon a time political dissidents were accused of being 'enemies of the people' and today those accusations have resurfaced in another form. At this point, it is not even a matter of whether one supports shale gas development or not - there are arguments on both sides that need to be considered - but about the health of Polish democracy.

Yet, maybe, each period requires its dissidents to define their own idea of independence.

"Now we have a situation just like under communism", Marek Kryda, an environmentalist from Gdansk, told me. "Local mayors are afraid. It's incredible that the same tricks can be used once more. The only way to really do something about it is to speak out, to expose what is happening."

Reporting for this article was funded by The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and Calkins Media]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2198182 2012-11-27T11:12:36-05:00 2013-01-27T05:12:01-05:00

Dimiter Kenarov http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dimiter-kenarov/
On the afternoon of 13 June, 2012, about a thousand people gathered at the Eagles' Bridge, a busy intersection in downtown Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, bringing the traffic to a standstill.

"Sorry for the inconvenience, but we're trying to save what's left of Bulgaria," read one of the protesters' signs. A group of young men and women sat in the street, while others sang, danced or rode bicycles between honking cars and buses. "We want nature, not concrete," was the recurring chant.

The flash mob had been organized on Facebook in protest against the National Assembly's decision to change the country's forestry law. The amended law would have eased the expansion of ski resorts into state-owned forests.

The police arrested a few people, but efforts to contain the rallies proved futile. The next day, the number of protesters had doubled.

Bulgaria's Prime Minister, Boyko Borisov, stood firm, insisting that nothing could stop investment in winter tourism. Much of the government-friendly media dismissed the protesters as "ecologists".

On the third day, there were over 4,000 people at the Eagles' Bridge. "We are not ecologists, but citizens," the new signs read.

Facing political contagion from the spiraling protests, the newly-elected president, Rosen Plevneliev, vetoed the Forestry Law and returned it to the National Assembly for another round of negotiations.

The law was revised and officially ratified in early August, in accordance with the protesters' demands. It was a significant victory for Bulgaria's eco-conscious citizens - but it was not the first one.

Over the last few years, civic movements have mushroomed in the country, dedicated to resisting what they regard as threats to the environment.

Some have opposed unbridled construction on the Black Sea coast. Others have fought against the cultivation of genetically-modified crops, or campaigned against gold mines and the extraction of natural gas through hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking.

Together, they have provided an antidote to widespread disillusionment with the democratic process, and have made institutions more responsive to public pressure. For many observers and participants, environmentalism has resurrected long lost hopes of a robust civil society in Bulgaria, one of the poorest states in the European Union.

"There is a break in the system," says Vasil Garnizov, an associate professor of anthropology at the New Bulgarian University who has studied the environmental movements.

"Whether it is permanent, or whether it will truly reconfigure the situation, remains to be seen," he says. Garnizov, who is also a former deputy minister of regional development and public works, believes the new activism has encouraged Bulgarians to ask who runs their country.

"The most important question has been put on the table - who makes the decisions: citizens or oligarchs?"

Children of the transition

The period after 1989 - the "transition" from communism to capitalism - has not been kind to Bulgarian nature.

Ironically, the economic collapse of the country initially allowed some natural habitats to regenerate. Wildlife flourished as heavy industry, until then reliant on the Soviet Union's cheap raw materials and export markets, began to shut down. Market liberalization and the plunder of public resources by political and business elites, however, soon reversed the gains.

The real-estate and construction boom that preceded Bulgaria's accession into the EU devastated many protected areas in the mountains and along the sandy beaches of the Black Sea coast. Studies by the Bulgarian Biodiversity Foundation indicate that in the period between 2002 and 2007, the country lost more biodiversity than in all the preceding 20 years.

The environmental movements emerged in response to the rampant destruction of nature. A powerful coalition, For the Nature, uniting 21 non-governmental and civic organizations, was established in 2007, giving rise to a series of campaigns, many of which have so far proved successful.

In 2009, for instance, a motley alliance of environmentalists, beekeepers, chefs, and parental organizations fought against attempts by the government and corporate lobbyists to introduce genetically-modified crops. Their efforts resulted in a highly restrictive law that virtually banned the crops.

The green movement also pushed for the expansion of Natura 2000, the European Union's network of protected areas, to include 34 per cent of Bulgaria's territory. The initial government proposal had included only five per cent.

But perhaps the biggest success came in January this year, when Facebook campaigns helped bring thousands onto the streets of Sofia and another 15 towns to protest against the controversial practice of fracking. The National Assembly responded by imposing a moratorium on fracking, the only such measure in eastern Europe.

"Beyond the green movement, I haven't seen anyone in Bulgaria use the instruments of civic activism so effortlessly," says Svilen Ovcharov, a lawyer who has played a key role in environmental legal battles that have proved to be an important, if less visible, counterpart to street action.

Some have called the phenomenon "green civil society" and a "new Bulgarian uprising", drawing parallels with the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements in western Europe and the United States. Others have made comparisons to Ecoglasnost, a Bulgarian ecological organization founded in 1989, which developed into the first dissident movement to openly oppose the Communist Party.

Environmental law 'too strict'

Not everybody is pleased, of course. Critics argue that too much focus on the environment slows down Bulgaria's economy, especially in the poorer regions.

"Environmental regulations in Bulgaria are way too strict and present a serious burden for businesses and investors," says Philip Tzanov, a businessman and president of Nature for People and Regions, an association that promotes ski development and says it represent the interests of regional communities.

After the Eagles' Bridge events, Tzanov's association helped to organize a counter-protest in defense of regional development, bussing hundreds of residents from small mountain towns to Sofia.

Many of them were elderly and impoverished and carried their own signs: "Jobs, business and investment are not dirty words"; "Give a green light to tourism"; "Don't give in to ecological racketeering".

The counter-protest in Sofia may have lacked the spontaneity of the environmental events, but it brought home an important point: the vast majority of people in Bulgaria are still mired in poverty and see environmentalism - rightly or wrongly - as an additional obstacle to their own economic recovery.

Yet, there are signs that the green movement is spreading beyond the middle-classes in the capital.

In the small town of Krumovgrad, in the Rhodope Mountains, the vast majority of residents have spoken out against a proposal to build an open-pit gold mine nearby.

Inspired by the events in Sofia, mass rallies were held in early July in Varna, a town on the Black Sea coast, to protest at plans for private construction in the largest public park. As public pressure mounted, the town council reversed its decision.

"I certainly think the recent events created something like a community," says Radosveta Krastanova, an expert on the country's green movements. "I'm not sure what to call it exactly: maybe environmental communities, in the broadest sense of the word. People who share a common vision and common values."

'Party' Is a Dirty Word

Despite the success of the green movements in Bulgaria, the popular enthusiasm has so far failed to translate into votes. The utter disillusionment with electoral politics, which Bulgarians see as inherently broken and corrupt, has alienated many voters, especially the young.

It is one of the reasons why political parties have had virtually no representation at environmental rallies - and why any hint of political campaigning has been met with outright hostility by participants.

"The rejection of political parties and politics in general is overwhelming," says Toma Belev, a forest engineer and perhaps the most recognizable face of the Bulgarian environmental movement.

This deep distrust of politics has, in turn, presented a challenge for new reformist parties which hope to lure younger voters. The Greens, an environmentalist party founded in 2007, has been active in the public sphere, generating fresh ideas and policies on a range of issues from environmental protection and sustainable agriculture to alternative energy, eco-tourism and LGBT rights.

However, in the 2009 parliamentary elections they garnered only 0.52 per cent of the vote.

"The problem in Bulgaria is that 'party' is a dirty word. We understand that and have often had to hide our role in campaigns, so that we don't drive away participants who dislike political parties," says Borislav Sandov, co-chair of the Greens.

Nonetheless, Sandov strongly believes in the need for political representation. In his view, independent civil society groups and political parties could cooperate in pushing through reforms by working from both outside and inside the system.

Whether green parties can attract a bigger following in Bulgaria still remains uncertain, but one fact is beyond doubt now: a new generation of Bulgarians has finally found its voice after years of social collapse and the loss of common values.

"The fight for the air, water, and forests has proven to be the only viable form of solidarity," says Garnizov, from the New Bulgarian University. "All other forms of solidarity - social and national - seem to have failed."

Dimiter Kenarov is a Bulgarian journalist. This article was edited by Neil Arun. It was produced as part of the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, an initiative of the Robert Bosch Stiftung and ERSTE Foundation, in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.]]>