Three days of intense weather in Pakistan have left nearly 410 people dead as monsoonal rains have caused major flooding-submerging villages and destroying infrastructure and farmlands in what is being labeled as Pakistan’s worst flooding in almost a century, Bloomberg reports.

The northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa—especially the Nowshera, Charsadda, Peshawar, Swat and Lower Dir districts—has been the hardest hit, with more than 290 people killed, according to CBC News.

Bad weather, difficult terrain and damaged infrastructure have hindered rescue operations—as under-equipped rescue workers have struggled to reach many of the impacted towns, the Associated Press reports. The Pakistani army has taken the lead in rescue efforts and has evacuated 14,250 people from the region, Reuters reports.

Natural disasters are common for the arid Middle Eastern country. Floods in southern Pakistan killed more than 200 and affected 1.6 million people in 2007, according to the AFP. But the intensity of this year’s rainfall has been unprecedented. Khyber Paktunkhwa has been soaked by nearly 312 mm of rain over the past three days—the most it has received in more than three decades, according to Reuters.

Pakistani Kashmir has also been greatly impacted. On Thursday, 22 people were killed and 30 more were injured after rain caused houses to collapse, the AFP reports.

Part of a dam collapsed in the town of Charsadda, engulfing more than 5,000 homes and destroying crops, Al Jazeera reported. The water level of the River Swat was the highest it had been since 1929, according to the country’s National Disaster Management Authority. In Peshawar, Pakistan’s largest northwestern city, 80,000 people have been impacted as flooding washed away bridges and roads, the AFP reports.

The rushing water has taken out roads and highways, cutting off the districts of Swat, Shangla as well as Peshawar from the rest of the country, according to the AFP. Rising water has also submerged half of Nowshera, destroying hospitals and buildings, Reuters reports.

The monsoon began about one week ago, when 70 people were killed and 100,000 people were displaced by flooding in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, Bloomberg reported. Monsoon season in Pakistan typically persists well into September, and current heavy rains are forecasted to continue for the next week.

Sources: Bloomberg, CBC News, AP, Reuters, AFP, AFP, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg

For more coverage on Pakistan’s water woes, check out Circle of Blue.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is overseeing a massive cleanup of a pipeline leak that may have dumped more than one million gallons of oil into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, which flows into Lake Michigan.

EPA top administrator, Lisa Jackson, flew over the spill site with Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm Friday.

After surveying the spill, Granholm said she was confident the oil would not reach Lake Michigan, the Detroit Free Press reported. Earlier in the week, Granholm had asked for increased federal assistance to ensure containment, according to the Associated Press.

As the spill’s long-term effects are assessed, questions have been raised about the safety record of the companies whose pipe malfunctioned—Enbridge Energy Partners of Houston and its parent company, Enbridge Inc. of Calgary, Alberta.

Enbridge officials said they learned of the leak Monday morning, despite press accounts of 911 calls concerning an oily smell in the region the night before. The oil, which spilled into Talmadge Creek southwest of Marshall, Michigan, flowed into the Kalamazoo River and 35 miles west through the city of Battle Creek before being stopped at Morrow Lake just east of Kalamazoo. The lake is about 80 miles upstream from Lake Michigan.

About 30 to 50 homeowners near Marshall, Michigan were advised to evacuate their homes due to the spill. A drinking water advisory was ordered for some 100 homes within 200 feet of the river in Calhoun County, and bottled water is being made available to residents. Kellogg Co., which is based in Battle Creek, halted cereal production at its Battle Creek facility for four hours Tuesday because of the smell, the Battle Creek Enquirer reported.

While Enbridge estimated the amount of spilled oil at 19,500 barrels, or just more than 800,000 gallons, the EPA estimated the leak to be more than a million gallons. The 30-inch-diameter pipe is used to transport almost 8 million gallons of light, synthetic, heavy and medium crude oil a day from Griffith, Indiana to Sarnia, Ontario.

Cleanup coordinators from the EPA said on Thursday that they had stopped the westward spread of the oil spill short of Morrow Lake, according to the Detroit Free Press. Meanwhile Enbridge reported Friday that its workers had contained the oil at the spill site. The company reported having more than 400 employees, contractors and volunteers working on the spill by Thursday, with more scheduled to arrive the following day.

Patrick Daniel, Enbridge’s chief executive officer, said Thursday that the company “will spend whatever it takes” to clean up the spill.

Embridge was using a variety of methods to capture the oil, including vacuum trucks, oil collection skimmers and containment and absorbent booms, according a website that the company set up to disseminate information on the cleanup effort. A temporary dike was built near the leak to keep any more oil from flowing into Talmadge Creek. The company reported that it had recovered 2,400 barrels of oil and isolated an additional 10,000 barrels of oil in a holding area while preparing to pump it into holding tanks.

The Free Press reported that oil was visible during a flyover 1,000 feet over the region, and a Michigan State Police captain told the newspaper that aerial photos showed an oily sheen on Morrow Lake.

Problems with the Pipeline

The Free Press also reported Thursday that federal regulators had warned Enbridge of inadequate monitoring of corrosion on the affected pipeline in January. Regulators had also issued several citations against the company in previous years. The Free Press reported Friday that earlier tests had found corrosion along the ruptured pipeline and that the company had discussed replacing sections of the pipe.

Since 2002, Enbridge and its affiliates have faced 30 enforcement actions by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipelines and Hazardous Material Safety Administration (PHMSA), according to the Associated Press.

This is not the company’s first spill—the Canadian National Energy Board has documented eight Enbridge pipeline ruptures in Canada since 1994. The most recent one, an April 2007 rupture in Saskatchewan, released more than 250,000 gallons into the environment. The largest, a 1994 rupture, spilled more than a million gallons.

Drinking Water Supplies Safe for Now

Alan Steinman, director of the Annis Water Resources Institute at Grand Valley State University, told the Free Press that the slick is a problem on the surface, but probably does not pose a threat to drinking water supplies. Local drinking water is drawn from aquifers 70 to 100 feet below the surface, and clay in the ground would make it difficult for the oil to penetrate that far, he said. The ground would filter much of the oil before it got that far down, he added.

The City of Kalamazoo provides water to about 121,000 customers in the city and surrounding communities. It uses 98 wells to generate about 18.4 million gallons of water a day, according to the city’s water quality report.

The greater, long-term ecological risk may be in the wetlands along the tributaries of the river, Steinman said.

“That’s key habitat,” he said. “The bugs are living, the fish are spawning. It’s going to last a long time.”

The Political Response

In response to the spill, U.S. Representative Mark Schauer (D-Mich.) proposed a bill that would increase fines from $100,000 to $250,000 for companies that are slow to report pipeline disasters. Companies are already required to report leaks “immediately,” or at the “earliest practicable moment.” The new bill would require that a leak be reported within an hour of the company being notified, and levy fines of up to $2.5 million against repeat offenders of the requirement.

Schauer’s bill would also enact a searchable Internet database for all reports of hazardous liquid pipelines and gas.

Recent congressional hearings have raised concerns that federal standards for controlling corrosion in oil and gas pipelines are not strong enough.

Sources: Battle Creek Enquirer, Detroit Free Press, Enbridge, Inc.

A prolonged heatwave in Russia has killed hundreds of acres of crops, burnt forests and disrupted urban life in what is thought to be the country’s worst drought in decades, reports the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.

Temperatures have topped 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) across western Russia for a few weeks straight, damaging 32 percent of land under cultivation and forcing authorities to declare a state of emergency in 23 regions.

Experts forecast that the heatwave might have a measurable impact on food prices in Russia, the world’s third-biggest wheat exporter. The Grain Producers’ Union said that grain prices might double as a result of the drought that gripped vast regions of European Russia in late June. Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank’s head of research in Moscow said that by December the country’s inflation might rise above the government’s annual forecast of less than 6.5 percent.

The scorching heat also caused a number of fires around Russia’s capital Moscow, which, earlier this week, recorded the hottest day in its 130-year history of meteorological observations. As temperatures hit 37.4 degrees Celsius for the first time, peat and forest fires were blazing around Moscow, sending a blanket of thick smog above the city and forcing the region’s authorities to request millions of dollars in emergency measures.

The BBC reported last week that the heatwave has increased alcohol consumption in the capital, where more than 230 people have recently drowned after heavy drinking.

Meanwhile the Moscow Consumer Rights Protection Society filed a lawsuit against the capital’s subway system on charges that temperatures at underground stations and in passenger cars exceed sanitary standards.

Western Russia is not the only part of the country that is suffering from abnormally hot weather. The southern Urals and Siberia have recently baked in temperatures of up to 40 degrees Celsius.

Sources: RIA Novosti, the Moscow Times, the BBC, Reuters.

Flooding from torrential rains has washed more than 1,000 barrels of explosive chemicals into the Songhua River in northeastern China, Reuters reports. The chemicals have caused officials to shutdown water supplies to more than 4 million people, while the overflowing river has trapped nearly 30,000 people in Jilin city, the BBC reports.

This is the worst flooding China’s experienced in more than a decade as a heavier than normal monsoon season has hit the country—leaving 928 people dead, 477 missing and causing nearly $US26 billion dollars in losses, according to the latest statistics released by the State’s Office of Flood Control and Drought Relief. The Yangtze River Basin has had 15 percent more rain than normal, Duan Yihong, the director of the National Meteorological Center, told the U.K. Press Association.

Boat traffic through the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydropower plant, has been barred pending a second surge in water levels on the Yangtze that arrived early Wednesday morning, according to the BBC. The dam withstood its second test as water levels in the reservoir neared its maximum capacity of 175m because of heavy rainfall in the upper Yangtze.

The Three Gorges Dam has been built with the capacity to buffer and reduce the impact from flooding, and has, thus far, successfully contained the country’s biggest rolling rivers. Construction on Three Gorges began in 1994 and is scheduled to be officially completed in 2011. The dam experienced its first major test early last week, when the flow of the Yangtze River was at its highest level since it came online in 2009, Xinhua reports.

Last week’s peak flow rates were 70,000 cubic meters per second, while this week’s were around 56,000 cubic meters per second, Xinhua reports. In anticipation, officials increased the amount of water discharged through the dam’s spill gates—warning downstream residents of the increased stream flow.

Flooding has effected a large swath of country, with southern China battered by continual rainfall throughout the month of June. In the past two weeks, rainstorms have plagued the Shanxi, Sichuan, Hubei and Henan provinces in Central China with landslides as well as floods. These rainfall levels are the greatest Henan province has experienced in 100 years. The onslaught of storms caused a bridge to collapse in Henan over the weekend, killing at least 37, the Global Times reports.

View Widespread Disaster from Rampant Flooding in China in a larger map

More than 330 people have died since mid-July because of the rainstorms, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs. As of Tuesday, 40 million people have been effected by the damage: with 140,000 homes destroyed, 417,000 hectares of crops decimated and 3.1 million people evacuated, Xinhua reports. Losses from the recent storms were estimated at $US7.78 billion, bringing the cumulative total to nearly $US26 billion.

Rain is expected to continue to batter the southeast, southwest and northeastern parts of China through today, the UKPA reports.

Sources: Reuters, BBC, Xinhua, UKPA, BBC, the Guardian UK, Xinhua, Xinhua, the Global Times, Xinhua

Read more coverage of the devastating floods in China, on Circle of Blue.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has announced a $1.9 million study that will re-examine a controversial drilling technique used to free natural gas, the AP reports.

Cropped portion of image from USGS report showing extent of en:Marcellus Formation shale (in gray shading).

The EPA’s decision comes as corporate interest increases in the Marcellus Shale region—95,000 square miles of dense rock beneath the Pennsylvania New York, West Virginia and Ohio that contains enough natural gas to supply the East Coast for a half century.

Roughly 90 percent of the 450,000 gas wells in the U.S. use hydraulic fracturing—a process that uses large amounts of pressurized water mixed with chemicals to fracture land to extract fossil fuels located deep underground. Commonly referred to as “fracking,” it requires a mixture of water and toxic chemicals that some fear could potentially pollute water sources. Additionally, aquifer depletion concerns have cropped up given that the average frack uses 4 million gallons of water.

In 2005 Congress ruled that fracking didn’t need to be regulated by the federal government.

But the EPA’s announcement comes off the heels of Pennsylvania’s decision to finalize standards that will help regulate fracking in the state. In response to fish kills, building corrosion, natural gas explosions and consumer complaints about water from natural gas drilling in the region, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection has ruled to monitor total dissolved solids (TDS) for the first time. TDS are a compilation of the organic and inorganic material found in liquids that can come from surface runoff.

Pennsylvania has implemented stricter standards on natural gas drilling because high levels of TDS, including sulfides and chlorides, were found in the wastewater left over from the drilling process. Abandoned coal mines in both Pennsylvania and West Virginia have added high levels of sulfates to the water, according to DEP spokesman, William Rathbun.

“We discovered that during low water and drought that the rivers were getting overwhelmed with high levels of salts chlorides and sulfates,” Rathbun said.

These contaminants can lead to health risks as well as higher operational and maintenance costs.

Earlier this month, cows that had allegedly consumed toxic wastewater from natural gas drilling were pulled off the food market from a farm in northern Pennsylvania, Reuters reports.

“Wastewater treatment plants were not equipped to treat for it because they had never been required to before,” Rathbun said. As a result, contamination consequences have slipped through the cracks, unmonitored.

One of the accusations has been that drilling companies do not come forth with the chemicals that are being used during fracking.

Pennsylvania state law requires that companies provide the names of chemicals they are using on site.
Other states are also calling for more public transparency. Wyoming’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission approved rules last month that require companies to make public a list of chemicals used in the fracking. Meanwhile Colorado passed a similar requirements last year, reports The Daily Sentinel.

Meanwhile the DEP has released a list of 80 chemicals that are brought to the well site where the fracking process takes place. A second list of chemicals that are actually used in the process are set to be released this month.

“It is critical that we implement a strong discharge standard for wastewater that does make it into our water supply,” Pennsylvania House Representative David Levdansky, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazzette.”

“Hydrofracking has never been conducted on such a scale and with such volumes of water in our state before,” Levdansky said.

“Drilling wastewater contains TDS levels that are thousands of times more harmful to aquatic life than discharges from other industries. Without imposing limits on this pollution, treatment costs for this wastewater are passed along to downstream industries and municipal ratepayers,” Environmental Protection Secretary John Hanger told The Empowered Municipality, A Pennsylvania based organization connecting municipal decisionmakers and suppliers.

In addition to pollution concerns, there have been recent disasters from the Marcellus Shale drilling pads.

Early last month, a drilling pad exploded in Clearfield County, a rural area of northern Pennsylvania, with gas and contaminated water shooting up to 75 feet in the air for 16 hours, according to theAP.

Four days later a natural gas explosion injured seven crew members in Moundsville, West Virginia, which sits near the state’s border with Ohio and Pennsylvania, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

There were two specific events that inspired the DEP to established, the Environmental Quality Board, the panel was established to investigate chemicals released in the fracking process. It took one year to implement the new TDS requirements.

Earlier this year the Upper Delaware River was deemed the most endangered river in the U.S. by American Rivers, a leading national conservation non-profit, because of threats from natural gas drilling. Much of the Marcellus Shale formation resides in the Delaware River Basin.

Q&A: Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson on Water, Technology and Akvo.org

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Welcome to Circle of Blue Radio’s Series, 5 in 15, where we’re asking global thought leaders 5 questions in 15 minutes, more or less. These are experts working in journalism, science, communication design and water. I’m J. Carl Ganter. Today’s program is underwritten by Traverse Internet Law, tech savvy lawyers, representing internet and technology companies.
 

Photo creative commons by Akvo.org

“Mission Rope Pump”. Designed by Vincent Wijers.

Photo creative commons by Akvo.org

Budiya, Kutch, India. December 2008.

There’s just a ton of more work to do. The risk is that people are focusing so much on climate change that they forget that the biggest impact possible on climate change is actually the way we have water behaving in the environment… the hydrological cycle’s changes.

 
I spoke with Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson: at the Tällberg Rework the World Conference in Sweden.  He’s a co-founder of Akvo.org, an online platform for connecting people that work in development aid, particularly water.  To find more articles and broadcasts on water, design, policy, and related issues, be sure to tune in to Circle of Blue online at circleofblue.org.    
 
Our theme is composed by Nadev Kahn, and Circle of Blue Radio is underwritten by Traverse Legal, PLC, internet attorneys specializing in trademark infringement litigation, copyright infringement litigation, patent litigation and patent prosecution. Join us gain for Circle of Blue Radio’s 5 in 15. I’m J. Carl Ganter.

UPDATE FROM JULY 28, 2010: The United Nations General Assembly declared today that clean drinking water and sanitation are human rights.

Rights to water have been included in conventions on the rights of women, children and those with disabilities, but never as a general human right.

Of the 192 member states: 122 voted in favor of the non-binding resolution, zero against and 41 abstained, including the United States.

John F. Sammis, Deputy Representative to the Economic and Social Council, explained in a statement that the U.S. felt the resolution potentially undermines work being done by the Switzerland-based Human Rights Council to situate a right to water within the body of international law.

According to Sammis’ statement: “The United States regrets that this resolution diverts us from the serious international efforts underway to promote greater coordination and cooperation on water and sanitation issues. This resolution attempts to take a short-cut around the serious work of formulating, articulating and upholding universal rights. It was not drafted in a transparent, inclusive manner, and the legal implications of a declared right to water have not yet been carefully and fully considered in this body or in Geneva.”

The U.S. mission to the U.N. declined to elaborate on the statement.

In 2008 the High Commissioner for Human Rights appointed an independent expert, Portuguese lawyer Catarina de Albuquerque, to investigate and clarify international human rights obligations pertaining to the rights to water and sanitation and to document best practices. Submitted last year, De Albuquerque’s first report focused on sanitation.

By Brett Walton
Circle of Blue

The United Nations General Assembly will, for the first time, consider a resolution declaring water and sanitation as human rights today.

Although no human rights treaty has ever explicitly stated a right to water, many human rights experts believe it implied as a necessary condition for meeting other rights. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights mentions food, clothing, housing, medical care and necessary social services but not water. In 2002 a U.N. sub-committee on economic, social and cultural rights advanced the water-as-a-right claim by declaring it in an assessment paper.

Bolivia proposed the resolution being considered this week. An advisor to the Bolivian mission told Circle of Blue that the country wrote the first draft of the text, but the final version was a collaborative effort incorporating feedback from its 37 co-sponsors and other U.N. members.

“Bolivia felt like it was time for people to decide on water as a right,” the advisor said. “Bolivia wanted to force the issue.”

A U.N. public information officer said that a vote on Wednesday is possible.

The resolution, which would not be legally binding, declares that: “The right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of the right to life.” It also calls for countries and international organizations to help by providing “financial resources, capacity building and technology transfer.”

But, according to some experts, the resolution has pitfalls. Any attempt to codify a right to water will have to deal with implementation and obligations, said Gabriel Eckstein, a water law professor at Texas Tech University. Aside from maintaining quantity, quality, provision and responsibility, Eckstein said he has concerns about the wording used in this particular document.

“It’s a nice statement that you’d find in a resolution, but what does it mean?” said Eckstein. “The problem I have is the right to life is a negative right as opposed to economic and social rights which are positive rights.”

Positive rights require something to be provided, such as food or shelter; negative rights, like free speech, are things that can be taken from a person.

The initiative has many supporters including Maude Barlow, who chairs the Council of Canadians and Food and Water Watch. Barlow issued this statement:

“It’s time to reach consensus that the world’s poor deserve recognition of this human right without further delay or equivocation. Anything less will affirm that the world’s powerful nations are all wet when it comes to alleviating poverty and addressing the greatest human rights violation of our time. The coming storm sets up a North [against] South divide the body can ill afford.”

Nearly 900 million people are without access to improved water sources while 2.6 billion lack adequate sanitation, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.

Several countries—including Canada, China and the United States—have been reluctant to support a right to water because of the uncertainty as to how it would be implemented. Some officials fear that if countries were obligated to provide free or low cost water, it could undermine attempts to effectively allocate and price water.

It is not clear whether declaring a right to water would provide tangible benefit to the people it is supposed to help.

For countries with a constitutional right to water, economist David Zetland looked at access rates before and after the right was enacted and compared them to countries with similar levels of economic development. Though access improved with both groups, he found no statistically significant difference between them.

Even though the merits of the resolution are uncertain and would not be binding Eckstein thinks it would send the right message: “I think it does further the cause of bringing water to people in need… Though there isn’t legal force [in a declaration], there is moral force. It gets countries thinking about how to provide access.”

Brett Walton is a Seattle-based reporter for Circle of Blue. Reach Walton at brett@circleofblue.org. Read more about water as a human right on Circle of Blue and follow our coverage of the U.N.’s decision

Photo © Heather Rousseau / Circle of Blue

One of the last wells drilled into Michigan’s Antrim Shale was completed early last week in Benzie County. A new and deeper natural gas play appears to be unfolding as developers pay record amounts for oil and gas leases and a lone Missaukee well turned out to be a prodigious gas producer. Click image to launch slideshow.

By Keith Schneider and Molly Ramsey
Circle of Blue

The aptly named Pioneer natural gas well, near Lake City in Missaukee County’s Pioneer Township, is a stack of gauges and metal piping that rises about 7 feet from a bed of crushed stone at the center of a five-acre clearing surrounded by Michigan hardwoods.

The only sound in the clearing is of songbirds hidden in the trees. The sole scent from the straight-as-a-gun-barrel well–drilled and tested last year–is the smell of money, and potentially of trouble.

Earlier this year the Pioneer well’s Canadian owner, the Calgary-based Encana Corporation, announced that during its first 30 days the well produced an average of 2.5 million cubic feet of gas a day, making it for a time the most prolific single source of natural gas in Michigan. Production has since dropped back to 800,000 cubic feet per day, said state officials, though that is still a prodigious amount for a Michigan gas well.

“The industry’s response to the first well drilled to test this formation has been overwhelming,” said Tom Wellman, Manager of the Mineral and Land Management Section of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment.

A Gas Frenzy
How overwhelming? In early May the natural gas industry saluted the import of those numbers by spending $178 million at a lease sale of nearly 120,000 acres of state-owned minerals in 22 Michigan counties. That was more than seven times the previous record for a state lease sale, and nearly equal to the $190 million Michigan has earned, in total, since it began auctioning oil and gas leases in 1929. In October, Michigan is poised to auction mineral leases on 500,000 more acres, and the natural gas industry is poised, say executives, to spend a lot of money again.

Michigan’s leasing frenzy, touched off by the promising results from a single Missaukee County well, is part of a global rush to tap the Earth’s deep gas-bearing shales for a fuel that burns much cleaner than coal or oil. Spurred by advancing technology, developers penetrate geologic layers miles beneath the surface, and then pump water mixed with chemicals into the space at such high pressure that the rock fractures, releasing the gas.

Photo © Heather Rousseau / Circle of Blue

Arnie Workman and Mike Rudolph were among the 400 people who jammed Reed City’s Church of the Nazarene for a meeting on oil and gas leasing on Friday, July 23, 2010. At the top of the list of concerns: how to lease their minerals effective and learning more about the potential environmental risks of developing Michigan’s Collingwood Shale.

Natural gas production in the United States is climbing as producers develop the deep shales in the Northeast, Texas, the Rocky Mountain states and now in Michigan. A two-year study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that shale gas reserves in the United States can provide 92 years of energy based on current natural gas consumption rates in the country.

Water Needed Big Time
But production practices, particularly the use of millions of gallons of water, and thousands of pounds of chemicals used in the “hydrofracking” process, have stirred concerns about water contamination and supply.

Encana Corporation, which said in May that it had gained mineral leases to 250,000 acres in Michigan, was fined $370,000 in 2006 by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission for flawed drilling practices that residents say caused methane and benzene contamination of Divide Creek in Colorado. Alan Boras, the company’s spokesman, said in an interview with Circle of Blue that the leak was “a rare circumstance” caused by flaws in the cement that holds the well casing in place.

“Within less than a week of being alerted, the problem was rectified,” Boras said.

Meanwhile New York has instituted a moratorium on shale gas development pending research by state authorities on the risk to water resources and public health. Communities in Wyoming and Pennsylvania have reported incidences of water contamination and methane mixed with drinking water in regions where shale gas development is occurring. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is completing a study of the risks of fracking.

Two years ago, in a study that has been criticized for political interference by the energy industry, the EPA conducted its first assessment of fracking, calling it safe and exempting drillers from water quality standards under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Authorities in Michigan said in interviews that they are aware of the reports of problems involved in hydrofracking the deep shales. They said that the state is well-prepared to deal with the Collingwood development and the potential consequences it will have on the land, public health and Michigan’s fresh water reserves. Hal Fitch, the director of the Geological Survey Office, a unit of the state Department of Natural Resources and Environment, explained in an interview that Michigan has some of the toughest regulations in the country for overseeing oil and gas development, and that his office is well-staffed to enforce them.

Michigan Prepares
Fitch said the state is close to issuing new permit conditions that space the Collingwood wells at least a mile apart, which will reduce the number of well pads cut into the forest. But he acknowledged that each of the well pads will encompass five acres or more–five times larger than the typical natural gas and oil well pad.

He also acknowledged that because completing each of the Collingwood wells involves using millions of gallons of water to fracture the shale and open spaces for the gas to flow, the state may need to better understand the risks.

Photo © Heather Rousseau / Circle of Blue

The Pioneer well in Missaukee County reaches down 9,685 feet to tap what may be a motherlode of natural gas. Developing the well took 5.5 million gallons of water and thousands of pounds of chemicals pumped at high pressure to fracture the Collingwood Shale and release a torrent of gas.

“There is a concern about the volume of water used,” said Fitch. ”While drilling and use of water is a one time deal for each site, it requires a lot of water. DNRE looks at the effect of water withdrawal on immediate surroundings, if it’s near a wetland or lake or adjacent public water supplies. ” They make sure the activity is not depleting the aquifer at that site. But they do not look at cumulative effects of water withdrawals, the watershed-scale effects of withdrawals.

Big Play State
Northern Michigan is no stranger to big plays in oil and gas development. In the 1970s energy producers drilled thousands of wells into the Niagaran formation 5,000 feet below the surface along a narrow band that extended from Manistee County along the coast of Lake Michigan inland through Montmorency County. It was the largest oil and gas drilling zone on the continent until development opened on Alaska’s North Slope. In the 1990s, developers drilled thousands more wells in the Antrim Shale formation that were about 1,000 to 1,200 feet deep. The companies built an infrastructure of 9,700 well pads, thousands of miles of pipeline and roads, hundreds of compressing stations, and a number of big processing plants that produced considerable damage to streams and forests, but also yielded billions of dollars worth of natural gas.

Pioneer, the township where the well is located, is part of a rural farmland landscape known for its corn, dairy livestock, and Christmas tree farms, as well as a recreational inland lake popular with fishers and boaters in Lake City. The massive hydraulic fracturing of the Pioneer well required 5.5 million gallons of water. Some of the water was supplied by a freshwater aquifer at the site, while another portion was hauled to the site by trucks, said Joel Fox, a representative for Petoskey Exploration, Inc., the company that organized the drilling of the well for Encana, which they evenutally contracted out to Superior Gas.

The Collingwood Shale could be the source of Michigan’s third major hydrocarbon development era of the last 40 years, according to Encana. The company, Canada’s largest natural gas producer, spent an estimated $7 million to $9 million to drill and hydrofrack the well, making it among the most expensive wells ever developed in the state. It bored a hole nearly 10,000 feet deep into the Earth: one of the deepest ever drilled in Michigan.

“It’s too early to know the economic potential of this new Collingwood Shale play, but we plan to drill additional exploration wells this year that will help determine the play’s ultimate potential,” said Randy Eresman, Encana’s president and chief executive in a statement.

Keith Schneider is senior editor and producer at Circle of Blue. Molly Ramsey is a Circle of Blue reporter. Reach them at keith@circleofblue.org and mollyr@circleofblue.org. Read more about hydrofracking on Circle of Blue.

Photo credit mediamolecule

Click to enlarge photo.

The PlayPump–a water-storing device fueled by children playing on a merry-go-round that forces water into a tank–has fallen out of favor within the international aid community.

Across Africa, many PlayPumps are in need of repair while others have been removed and hand pumps have been re-installed.

Several international aid organizations, including WaterAid and UNICEF, as well as the Mozambique government, have openly criticized the device; calling it too expensive, difficult to repair, and unsustainable.

Save the Children, which was responsible for the installation of dozens of pumps in Mozambique, has been blamed for placing the devices in unsuitable sites and failing to respond to repair requests–at times leaving communities without access to water sources for six months. A report by Mozambique’s government indicates that Save the Children failed to test the water quality of many of the sites in which PlayPumps were installed.

According to figures by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), a global organization that conducts research on sustainable development, $US215 to 360 million in investment in water aid is wasted because of poor planning and implementation.

The PlayPump failed, in part, because it was implemented before stakeholders properly discussed the appropriateness and viability of the technology. Additionally, the communities in which a PlayPump was installed were rarely consulted on whether they wanted the technology.

“I think the haste to get pumps in the ground in order to fulfill an ambitious and arbitrary goal from Washington, likely contributed to instances of poor site selection and/or lack of community support for the device,” said journalist Amy Costello during her PBS Frontline World report, Troubled Water in June.

Ironically, Costello’s 2005 report on the device had ignited international attention and investment in the project.

One year later, the Clinton Global Initiative Conference raised US$16.4 million for the installation of PlayPumps. Eventually, Trevor Field, the South African entrepreneur who invented PlayPumps, teamed up with the Case Foundation to create the PlayPumps International (PPI) non-profit. The PlayPumps Alliance, comprised of PPI, the Case Foundation, USAID and other private sector partners sought to raise US$60 million by 2010 to provide 10 million people in 10 sub-Saharan African nations with access to clean and safe drinking water through the installation of over 4,000 PlayPumps.

Due to the uncertainty of the technology’s sustainability, the Case Foundation stopped installing the pumps. A blog post issued by the Case Foundation in May publicly acknowledged the challenges of the campaign, and by the month they conceded that, despite millions of dollars invested, PPI had fallen short.

PPI granted Water for People the remaining PlayPump inventory. Water for People plans to incorporate it as an option for aid work.

According to Costello, PlayPump’s supporters saw it as a versatile solution—one that could work in a variety of locations.

“Various parties have told me that they learned that the best approach for bringing clean drinking water to Africa is to offer not just one solution like the PlayPump. Instead, all parties are now moving to offer an array of water solutions and technologies tailored to the individual needs and circumstances of different villages,” Costello said.

Clarissa Brocklehurst, the chief of water, sanitation and hygiene at UNICEF, concurs with Costello’s observations, and expanded on the lessons learned from the PlayPump in an interview for Troubled Water.

“You need a multitude of solutions involving a multitude of agencies. We need to look at the most local solution possible and bring the power of people. Our solutions have to be based in local capacities–what the capacity of the local private sector is, what people can afford. We have to use our heads and our imaginations. And we’ve got to think less about what is the magic bullet and what is the best technology, and more about how to come up with a tailor-made solution that suits the capacity of the people we’re trying to help,” Brocklehurst said.

Sources: Water for People, International Institute for Environment and Development, WaterAid, PBS FrontlineWorld 2005, Public Radio International, Rethinking- Hydrophilantropy-Ned Breslin, PBS Frontline World Troubled Water, Water Matters-The Earth Institute, Columbia University, PRNNewswire, UNICEF, government of Mozambique and The Case Foundation