Cousin David and the Great Environmental Conspiracy

My cousin David is a forester who lives on a farm near Salem, in Doddridge County, West Virginia. He has hammered out a good life working the wooded hills in the north central region of the Mountain State. As might be expected, he has a great love for nature and the outdoors, thus his leanings are toward environmental causes. West Virginia, generally and Doddridge County, particularly, falls within the Marcellus Shale region that spans four eastern states (New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio are the other states) – and Marcellus Shale means abundant, largely untapped, natural gas deposits a mile and a half below the surface. The gas can be accessed economically using the new horizontal drilling techniques developed for reaching deep shale deposits in combination with an older technique known as hydraulic fracturing, which involves the use of high pressure water to increase the gas well’s output. The combined new process is being called “fracking” by the drilling trade.

Now Cousin David is a “have-not” in that he does not own the mineral rights to the shale deposits or the methane under his land (a common condition among landowners in coal country). As a result he is sensitive to the harangue that spews from the grand conspiracy that is the Environmental Movement in America. He does own and benefits financially from an old shallow vertical gas well on his property which may have something to do with his present conundrum (stay tuned). His problem is that he can no longer drink from his water well at the farm. He has been convinced by the numerous enviro-organizations operating in West Virginia, such as the operator of the "Frack Check WV" site depicted above, that the new shale gas wells have caused his water contamination and that his only recourse is to force the drillers to buy his now useless homestead, where he has lived for more than 40 years.  It would do little good to tell David that new studies show that well "fracking" water complete with special additives do not contaminate well water because of the mile of impervious rock crust that separates the fluids; however a new study this year shows that water wells within 3,000 feet of gas wellheads have been found to have methane contamination due to leaks in the gas well pipe (could that mean any gas well pipe?).  Further, surface spills of fracking water, whether accidental or deliberate can contaminate streams and water wells.  One such incident occurred in Doddridge County.

Note that the Frack Check WV site references FracTracker  which is financed by The Heinz Endowments and Teresa Heinz Kerry -- who is further linked to the Tides Foundation, organized and run by none other than George Soros, the world's most influential and maniacal Marxist.  Using his Earthjustice organization to constantly litigate matters of the environment, Soros has escalated immensely the cost of holding off unwanted and unneeded environmental activism.

But Cousin David and other concerned "West Virginia Hillbillies"  will continue to consult with lawyers, attend numerous town hall meetings and government hearings on gas wells -- and continue to demand unneeded additional government regulations.  President Obama is gradually shutting America's electric generating plants powered by coal through the authority that he personally granted to the EPA, which will potentially shut West Virginia's economy.  Natural gas, on the other hand, provides new jobs and new extractive tax income to the Mountain State without government subsidy -- provided the environmentalists can be controlled. As for the politicians --  they are terrified of the green ninnies.

Natural gas severance-tax collections in West Virginia totaled $52.8 million for fiscal 2011, according to Mark Muchow, deputy secretary for the state’s revenue department.

West Virginia’s acting governor, Earl Ray Tomblin​, last week signed an executive order that directs the Department of Environmental Protection to issue emergency rules largely focused on fracking, in an attempt to clarify the regulatory process for industry and environmental groups in the state.

“Drilling operations in the shale play have increased the amount of state tax collections received from the industry but have also raised new policy questions,” a University of West Virginia report said in December.