Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Rapidly expanding natural-gas fields in the Rockies emit millions of tons of air pollutants each year. The pollution includes more than 200 hazardous compounds such as benzene and nitrogen oxide, which form acid rain, ozone, haze and etc etc.

One of the most shocking aspects of it is, not much is being done to monitor the pollution — the crucial first step in trying to limit it. The gasfields (including coalbed methane wells) sprawl over millions of acres, so it would take thousands of monitoring stations sampling the air. Federal and state agencies have not required the energy companies to pay the costs of setting up monitoring stations.

As High Country News reported recently:

… (The air pollution comes from) tens of thousands of engines on drilling rigs, compressors and water pumps, from New Mexico to Montana. Thousands of storage tanks in gasfields vent chemical and natural gas fumes, and nobody knows how many leaks there are in the thousands of miles of gas pipes. The trucks that service the wells raise dust clouds on huge networks of dirt roads. And waste fluids and gases are often disposed of in open-air fires, called “flares.”

Other than rough estimates like the one above, which get no argument, nobody really knows much about the pollution. It’s simply one of the vague facts of life growing worse.

But now we have a report from Colorado, combining macabre humor and a breakthrough in the effort to document some of the many pollution sources.

Basically, a few wise guys in the Environmental Protection Agency got an infrared camera and drove around the gasfields northeast of Denver. According to the Rocky Mountain News, they used the heat-seeking camera:

… to see emissions that are normally invisible to the naked eye. … Aiming the camera at pipelines, valves and hatches atop storage tanks, the EPA regulators found numerous sources of “fugitive emissions” — those leaking from various areas of the facility — during a two-hour drive-by of the region last week.

In one case, an open hatch atop a storage tank was gushing such a tremendous volume of emissions into the air that one participant jokingly compared it to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius near the ancient city of Pompeii.

Even funnier and worse, many of these emissions may not even be breaking any air-pollution regs, because the regs are few and far between.

But the emissions do form ozone, which then forms the smog that clogs the air in many Western cities, including those along Colorado’s Front Range. As the News says:

Recent figures produced by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment found that the fast-growing (gas) industry northeast of Denver is expected to produce emissions of smog-forming compounds at a rate of 236 tons a day by the summer of 2007 - 90 tons a day beyond predictions of a few years ago.

That’s 236 tons per day — or 86,140 tons per year, just from the gasfields near Denver.

The EPA wise guys have drilled a tiny pinhole in the wall of de-facto secrecy around the gasfield pollution. They get Goat’s HERO OF THE MOMENT AWARD.

And yes, it’s time to reclaim the word “hero” from all the spinmasters who stole it.

High Country News also profiled another guy who drills pinholes in this particular wall of secrecy: Perry Walker. He’s a retired Air Force engineer, driving around Wyoming gasfields with a spectrometer hooked to his laptop computer, measuring emissions … A modern Lone Ranger, pushing the agencies and companies.

In times of negligent, corporate-dominated government, we make progress by individual initiative.