California’s New Fracking Law Divides Environmentalists

Over the past year, legislators in Sacramento introduced a flurry of bills in an effort to study or tighten the leash on fracking in California.

Most efforts failed, but in mid-September Gov. Jerry Brown state Sen. Fran Pavley’s SB-4, which regulates two methods of extracting tightly-bound oil in California’s Monterey Shale formation — hydraulic fracturing and acidization jobs. The legislation also requires a study of the risks of both these processes.

“The purpose of SB-4 is to shine light on these practices, “ Pavley told Bay Nature. “This is a first step toward greater transparency, accountability and protection of the public and the environment.”

SB-4 is the first law in California to address fracking and other oil well stimulation methods. Oil companies are required to obtain fracking and acidization permits, notify nearby property owners in advance of any activities, and disclose a list of the chemicals they plan to use. A statewide study of fracking and acidization’s potential impact on air and water quality is also required. And the state must issue detailed regulations for permits by 2015.

In a statement, Gov. Brown said the law, which takes effect in January 2014, “establishes strong environmental protections and transparency requirements.” Yet the bill has no shortage of critics.

The critics

The oil industry says the legislation goes too far, and environmental groups are divided in their reactions to the final version of Pavley’s bill.

Catherine Reheis-Boyd, President of the Western States Petroleum Association, said that with SB-4’s passage, California has the toughest regulations of fracking and other energy production technologies in the nation.

“While SB-4’s requirements went significantly farther than the petroleum industry felt was necessary, we now have an environmental platform on which California can look toward the opportunity to responsibly develop the enormous potential energy resource contained in the Monterey Shale formation,” Reheis-Boyd said.

The American Lung Association, the Environmental Defense Center and San Francisco Baykeeper are satisfied with the legislation. But other groups — namely the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) — want nothing less than a moratorium on fracking and other unconventional oil-extraction methods.

“This bill will not protect Californians from the enormous threats of fracking pollution,” said CBD’s Kassie Siegel. “Fracking poses unacceptable risks to the air we breathe, the water we drink and our climate. We’ll keep working to end this inherently dangerous activity in our state.”

The Natural Resources Defense Council, the California League of Conservation Voters and Environmental Working Group (EWG) withdrew support following last-minute amendments to SB-4 that they argue could allow the state to approve fracking permits next year under rules that are more permissive than existing environmental laws.

“While there are some very positive aspects of the bill, EWG couldn’t support it in the end because of problematic last-minute amendments that could prevent the state from taking necessary steps to protect the public and the environment,” says Bill Allayaud, EWG’s director of governmental affairs in California.

What happened to the moratorium?

Pavley said she shares the desire for a moratorium, but couldn’t gather the votes in Sacramento.

“Originally, I wanted a moratorium,” Pavley said. “But then it came out that fracking and acidization have been going on without legislation and would still go on and we wouldn’t know anything about it, except what we read in the media.”

Pavley recalls holding hearings in which the California Department of Conservation’s Division of Oil, Gas & Geothermal Resources (DOGGR),was unable to supply a full accounting of what chemicals were being used, where waste was being stored, and which wells had been reformatted for fracking and acidization. She said disclosure requirements were paramount.

“So, we had to do that at a minimum,” Pavley said. “If fracking is already going on in California that needs to be exposed and we need to create transparency.”

She added that SB-4 was expanded, over DOGGR and the oil industry’s objections, to include acidization, a technique that may prove to hold more promise in California than hydraulic fracturing. In acidization, the chemical reaction of an acid, often a mix of hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acids, is used to dissolve minerals in the formation.

“Wells in Ventura County are already using large amounts of acid,” said Pavely, who represents Agoura Hills in Southern California.

SB-4 requires that a list of all chemicals being used be posted on a public website, beginning January 1, 2014.

“I think that’s critically important,” Pavley said. “People will say, ‘Oh, the trade secrets are still hidden,’ but not really. DOGGR will have the secret formulas, and that information will be given to state and local air and water agencies, and local municipalities. And any doctor could request, without signing any confidentiality agreements, access to full volume metric amounts, if have a patient with a disease or condition that could be related to these activities.”

Pavley adds that her legislation does not prevent local or state governments from authorizing stronger regulations.

Pavley believes SB-4 will ensure accountability, and in the event of spills, leaks or contamination, help establish who was responsible. A 30-day notice to nearby residents before any well stimulation activities occur allows for water quality monitoring before and after drilling and requires a plan for wastewater disposal.

“It was one of those things that had to be done to make sure our groundwater is not being polluted,” Pavley said.

She said her bill will help provide information that will help the public be better informed about these activities in California.

“I think we need the data,” Pavley said. “So, I consider it a first step.”

For more on Bay Nature’s fracking series:

Check out Bay Nature Magazine’s feature story on fracking in the October 2013 issue.

Read our first story in Bay Nature’s fracking series: In condor country comes a California oil boom.

Read our second story in the series: Above the Monterey Shale, farmers worry fracking will destroy the land.

Read our third story in the series: Fracking the land of the kit fox, and it’s fellow desert natives.

Read our fourth story in the series: How the Monterey Shale came to be

Sarah Phelan is a contributor to Bay Nature and is leading our coverage on Extreme Energy in the Monterey Shale

Could fracking the Monterey Shale lead to the next Big One?

The Monterey Shale runs through some major fault lines, and that’s raised concerns in earthquake-prone California. Could high-pressure pumping under the earth to free the shale’s valuable oil deposits — known as hydraulic fracturing — trigger the next Big One?

It’s a question that seismologists get frequently as the debate heats up over fracking and other methods of extreme energy extraction. It turns out that the seismic danger is not so much linked to fracking itself, but more likely the method of disposing of the wastewater generated from the process.

As seismologist Peggy Hellweg of UC Berkeley’s seismology laboratory explains, the giant thumper trucks that create seismic waves during oil exploration create “a temporary nuisance factor” but the dangers are “relatively small.” The next step when oil is discovered — fracking — involves pumping a mixture of water, sand and chemicals at high pressure deep in the earth until the oil-bearing rocks break up and release tiny tremors.

“But they are very small and way too tiny for anyone to feel,” Hellweg said.

The tremors can register up to a Magnitude 3 earthquake, which are nearly imperceptible, and a far cry from the Magnitude 7 Loma Prieta earthquake, which rocked Northern California in 1989.

“I’m not expecting the Big One to be triggered by this kind of thing,” Hellweg said.

Instead, the underground injection of wastewater from fracking could, in fact, trigger earthquakes at the level of Magnitude 3 to 5, which would be noticeable to most people and could cause damage to poorly constructed buildings. Central California is littered with old injection wells that could become disposal sites for the toxic chemical byproducts of oil extraction.

Oil wells currently located in the upper Monterey Shale. They include exploratory wells and possible sites for injection wells. Source: California Department of Conservation.

As Hellweg explains, even if you use clean water to frack, the “produced water” that comes back out of the well is contaminated with the added chemicals. It also has been found to contain naturally occurring, but measurable amounts of radioactive elements.

“It’s horrible stuff so you can’t just let it roll down the nearest stream. You have to handle it as a hazardous waste,” Hellweg said.

It’s possible to clean this “produced water,” but it’s also expensive, so many operators dispose of it in wastewater injection wells, which are known in the industry as Class II wells that are often nearby.

“Easier than cleaning it up is to pump it down some hole you don’t need any more, and that’s injection” she explains.

Hellweg notes that although there are about 140,000 injection wells in the U.S., “very few” are associated with these larger earthquakes.

“But there are plots that show, the more strongly you inject, the more likely there are to be earthquakes.”

Bill Ellsworth of the US Geological Services (USGS) Earthquake Science Center in Menlo Park agrees quakes could be related to wastewater injection. A 5.6-magnitude quake in Oklahoma in November 2011 is the biggest suspect to date, though geologists disagree whether that was a natural event or the result of fracking-wastewater injections. Ellsworth says better reporting about disposal operations at injection wells is important, and California’s especially robust seismic monitoring systems might help too.

“It would improve our understanding of why only a few injection wells are seismic problem-children,” he said.

Ruining the water supply

Earthquakes are not the only danger created by fracking wastewater. Another pressing concern is underground contamination of water supplies. There’s nothing more sacred in California than water.

Class II wells, whereby toxic byproducts of oil extraction are pumped underground. Photo: U.S. EPA.

Michael Kiparsky, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s law school, co-authored a report in April 2013 about the the long term risks that fracking presents to the state’s water supply, particularly where developers drill through aquifers en route to the oil reserves below.

“When a hole is drilled, it creates a conduit through which oil, gas, and fracking fluids could move upwards,” Kiparsky says. “If there was a casing failure, that movement into the bottom of the aquifer could happen within hours or days, but wouldn’t necessarily be expressed at the surface, or be visible, for decades or centuries.”

Californians could be living with the effects of fracking long after the boom times end. In his report to UC Berkeley on fracking, Kiparsky warns of the risks of irreversible contamination of surface and groundwater near wells, unless the method is carefully monitored and controlled.

He recommends water quality monitoring, and public disclosure of the chemical contents of fracking fluids, as well as reporting of the location of all injection well sites.

Fracking isn’t the only “well stimulation” method being used to extract oil. Other methods include “steam jobs” and “acid jobs,” or acidization.

Steam jobs involve injecting steam into shallow wells to raise the temperature of the oil underground, thereby thinning the oil and making it easier to pump.
In acidization, the chemical action of the acid, often hydrochloric or a mix of hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acids, is used to dissolve minerals in the formation.

Much like fracking, news that acid and steam jobs are taking place in California without regulation, has raised environmental eyebrows and spurred legislators into taking additional action. As State Sen. Fran Pavley noted in August, “Reports indicate that large-scale acid treatments to modify the geologic formation itself may be used, far beyond the traditional periodic acid washing of the wellbore to remove scale.”

Preview to our next and final installment: Sacramento takes on fracking debate

Over the past year, there was a flurry of legislation to further study or tighten the leash on fracking, but most of those efforts failed. Now, State Sen. Fran Pavley has managed to pass SB4, which would regulate all forms of “well stimulation,” including fracking, acid and steam jobs.

Read our first story in Bay Nature’s fracking series: In condor country comes a California oil boom.

Read our second story in the series: Above the Monterey Shale, farmers worry fracking will destroy the land.

Read our third story in the series: Fracking the land of the kit fox, and it’s fellow desert natives.

Read our fourth story in the series: How the Monterey Shale came to be

Sarah Phelan is a contributor to Bay Nature and is leading our coverage on Extreme Energy in the Monterey Shale.

How the Monterey Shale came to be

There has been so much talk of a potential fracking boom in California. But how, exactly, did the Monterey shale formation become so valuable?

To help me understand why oil is trapped in this formation and why hydraulic fracturing and other methods of extreme energy extraction have been used to release it, UC Berkeley-trained geologist Mel Erskine meets me one day at the Tilden Botanical Gardens. He is carrying a geologic map of California showing the Monterey shale.

“It’s a formation that accumulated in deep structural basins during the mid-Miocene period,” says Erskine, an expert in the Monterey formation’s geography. “It’s very young. It’s six million years old or less.”

Geologist Mel Erskine. Photo: Sarah Phelan.

He unrolls the map, which is highly detailed and shows the Monterey Formation extending beneath central California to the coast and the Santa Barbara Channel.

Erskine explains that the Monterey formation is the source rock for a great deal of oil produced in California, which has been generated over millions of years by the conversion of tiny, dead marine organisms, known as diatoms, into hydrocarbons.

When these organisms died, they fell to the bottom of what was then an ocean and decomposed. The remaining biological sludge was covered by layers of sand and silt, and as the depth of the sediments reached 10,000 feet, pressure and heat transformed the organic compounds into crude oil. The formation doesn’t easily release the oil because the oil is sealed inside “a very tight shale.”

The purpose of fracking then is to break up the formation enough to insert a mix of chemical and coarse, well-sorted sandstone under high pressure into the new fractures. The sand sticks in cracks formed by the high pressure injection, creating fractures so that oil can flow to the wellhead. And the chemicals help to break up the shale and release the oil trapped within.

Fracking fluids often contain chemicals listed as hazardous pollutants, including benzene, lead and methanol. But because of legal trade secrets, oil companies typically do not disclose all the chemicals they use. The lack of transparency has outraged farmers, ranchers and environmentalists, who fear the contamination of water supplies.

The Monterey Formation, showing hydraulic fracturing and tiny diatoms that decompose into oil. Illustration: Emily Underwood.

Compared to more famous and heavily developed shales like North Dakota’s Bakken Formation or the Northeast’s Marcellus, the Monterey Formation is younger, with more internal folding.

“All the black lines you see on a geologic map of California are fault zones, so it’s very complex,” Erskine says.

You would think that all the tremors would make it easy to get the oil out.

But Erskine explains that the Monterey Formation is like a continually flowing subterranean creature: new fractures heal quickly as California’s active faults push and pull the rock. The process of fracking keeps the fractures open as long as is needed to extract the oil. To illustrate his point, Erskine takes me on a 5 minute drive to Grizzly Peak Road in the Berkeley Hills. He parks and grabs a small metal pick from his trunk. The roadside offers dramatic views of San Francisco Bay, but Erskine is drawn instead to a rock outcropping on the opposite side of the road.

A cross section of the Monterey shale. Photo: Sarah Phelan.

“This is the Monterey shale,” he says, pointing at a yellowish-orange outcropping that looks like the ruins of an ancient miniature city and once lay thousands of feet below the surface of the Earth, until geological activity exposed it to the elements.

The shale is very brittle, Erskine says, pointing to rows of vertical fractures that mark the outcropping’s surface. This brittleness is one reason the formation can be fracked, he adds, breaking off a small chunk with his pick. A thin dark seam of oil glistens, then fades, like jelly oozing out of a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.

“This is what we are trying to get to through hydraulic fracturing,” says Erskine, indicating the thin seam.

Could this ridge in the Berkeley Hills get fracked one day, if oil gets scarce enough? Erskine looks from the outcropping to the cliff edge, the steep drop, and the breathtaking views of the Bay, and shakes his head. The search, he says, is for areas where the formation is nearly horizontal.

“[The oil companies] can handle some dips,” Erskine says. “But basically they are going horizontally because they want to inject uniform pressure over a large area. In a steep dip like this there is no way to control the fractures.”

Erskine recalls how early on in his college career, he heard a geophysicist saying that the U.S. was close to peak oil production.

“That was 60 years ago, and the peak of oil and gas has been migrating through time,” he said. “What the development of the shales demonstrates is that you no longer need a reservoir of oil. You can make your own reservoir with these production methods.”

Erskine says his biggest concern about fracking is making sure that the process is well monitored.

“The operator has every incentive to keep the process completely under control,” he says. “Getting careless …. is a very expensive process.”

Preview of our next installment:

Are we fracking our way to the next Big One? And will methods of extreme energy extraction contaminate our water supply?

Read our first story in Bay Nature’s fracking series: In condor country comes a California oil boom.

Read our second story in the series: Above the Monterey Shale, farmers worry fracking will destroy the land.

Read our third story in the series: Fracking the land of the kit fox, and it’s fellow desert natives.

Sarah Phelan is a contributor to Bay Nature and is leading our coverage on Extreme Energy in the Monterey Shale.

Fracking the land of the kit fox, and its fellow desert natives

In late 2012, the federal Bureau of Land Management auctioned a slew of leases for oil exploration in the Monterey Shale as far north as the inner Coast Range habitat that borders the southern flank of the Bay Area.

It’s a place that’s home to a number of endangered species: the San Joaquin kit fox, the giant kangaroo rat and the blunt-nosed lizard, to name a few. The impacts of oil exploration and development on such native species is a big unknown, so much so that environmentalists sued the federal agency for not conducting an environmental impact report before auctioning off the lands. The debate remains: how does “extreme energy” extraction, such as hydraulic fracturing, affect the native species that call this land home?

In this story in the Bay Nature series on the impacts of extreme energy, we’re focusing on the species that make a home of the lands above the Monterey shale. As the California condor soars above, there are a number of endangered desert species that would be impacted by development on the land. Accustomed to thriving in scarcity, they’ve come to depend on an ecosystem managed by large grazers — namely cattle — whose presence is necessary but potentially threatened by the arrival of an oil boom.

$habitat_fracking_8-8$

In the heat of the night

To better understand what lives above the Monterey Formation, and what challenges these species face, I ended up one hot July evening on a kit fox survey. I met BLM biologist Mike Westphal at the agency’s Hollister field office as he was loading a truck with spotlights and binoculars.

The San Joaquin kit fox is the smallest fox species in North America, weighing up to 6 pounds. Photo: Greg Schechter.

It turns out summer is a bad time to survey plants, but San Joaquin kit foxes, the smallest foxes in North America, are most active at this time of the year.

We are headed for the desert badlands of the Panoche Hills in San Benito County, which has consistent populations of kit foxes and giant kangaroo rats. As we drive along Interstate 5, Westphal says the biggest threat to these species is habitat loss — namely from agriculture.

Farming is detrimental to desert species because it dramatically changes the landscape. Photo: Sarah Phelan.

“The real threat is that,” he says, pointing to almond orchards that march in green lines across the valley floor. “There’s no leopard lizards in that.”

The problem, Westphal says, is that kit foxes, giant kangaroo rats, and blunt-nosed leopard lizards are desert species.

“They only live where land is bare,” he says. “Originally, this region was covered with scattered shrubs, bare ground, and desert.”

But with development came non-native grasses, and where non-native grasses are thick, endangered species vanish, Westphal says.

Ranching is a better match for desert species, because grazing keeps grasses short and soil bare, Westphal adds. We pass bone-dry hillsides where cows are still grazing in the dying light.

Biologists fear fracking may harm water supplies and make ranching less viable. Photo: Sarah Phelan.

“People used to think this land was being overgrazed, but it’s bare because it can’t support anything,” he says. “If we keep with the ranches, endangered species and the ranches win.”

Fracking is another story. Environmentalists worry that fracking could push endangered species over the edge by polluting the land and water with dangerous chemicals. Furthermore, there’s an intricate balance between kit foxes, giant kangaroo rats, and blunt-nosed leopard lizards, since kit foxes hunt kangaroo rats and leopards live in abandoned burrows. So, fracking-related impacts on any one of these species would have a domino effect on the other species.

The blunt-nosed lizard lives in abandoned mammal burrows, but has lost much of its range because of development. Photo: Sara Viernum.

But Westphal takes a more liesurely stance on oil development (he worries more about a solar plant planned for the Panoche Valley). He says some of the 2012 leases specify “no surface occupancy,” which means oil developers can’t place a well pad on the surface of the land, rendering the impact on the land, and the leases’ value arguably minimal at this stage, although all that could, of course, change at some point

“People buy the leases anyway. It’s like Monopoly money,” Westphal says, alluding to the speculative nature of an industry that has plenty to gain if investors believe the next oil bonanza will take off in California.

“We can’t tell what the future is. We do environmental assessments on what we’ve got.”

Off the beaten track

We turn off the highway and wind along bumpy roads, past ridges, canyons, and ranch lands dotted with salt brush and discarded beer bottles, until we reach a dry and mostly flat windswept plateau.

“Where it’s flat, that’s where the foxes live,” Westphal says. He stops to don goggles and a miner’s lamp—necessary equipment to see anything in the hot, dusty wind that is blowing across this mostly barren plateau.

“You want to hold the spotlight up,” he adds, as I sweep the grasslands for signs of life.

A pair of brown eyes shines back.

The endangered giant kangaroo rat bounds across the California grasslands on two legs and at speeds of up to 10 feet per second. Photo: Creative Commons.

“That’s possibly a giant kangaroo rat,” says Westphal, noting that the rat’s eyes are brown, while foxes are emerald. He points to the numerous flat mounds on the plateau’s surface, which indicate that we are in the middle of a giant kangaroo rat precinct.

Each mound marks the territorial center of individual rats, which clip plants from around their precinct and cure seedheads in the sun before storing them in their underground burrows. The rats’ seed hoarding behavior helps create favorable microhabitats for San Joaquin woolly-threads and California jewel flowers, but it may also promote non-native grasses, Westphal says.

Giant kangaroo rats are mostly nocturnal, but tonight we see very few. Westphal speculates that their absence is related to the drought: plants ripened early this year, so the rats may have finished seed gathering and have little the need to go outside, where they risk being hunted.

We drive deeper into the Panoche Valley, and as we sweep a maze of ridges and canyons, a pair of emerald eyes blinks in a dry creekbed.

“There it is!” Westphal shouts.

“There’s two of them,” he adds, as another pair of eyes blinks. “And they are too low to the ground to be coyotes.”

Classic territory of the San Joaquin kit fox is the Carrizo Plain. Photo: Randomtruth.

Westphal carries out night surveys for endangered species a couple of times a year and admits that they are not his favorite survey method (you never know if you’re seeing the same foxes each time). Instead, he prefers to hire a dog team trained to find scat that goes out in the morning when kit foxes are asleep.

“In the last 4 years, we have collected almost 1,000 scats and genotyped 100 individual foxes,” he says.

He’s also counted two “strikes” this year alone: kit foxes hit by cars. And tonight he spots a dead giant kangaroo rat in the road.

“The biggest threat is development,” he says, again.

Desert water

Despite the late hour, it’s still hot. As I take a swig from my water bottle, Westphal offers that a decline in water quantity and quality aren’t immediate issues for foxes and other desert species. But water issues could have a secondary effect on these natives if fracking drives out ranchers.

The endangered San Joaquin woolly threads may depend on species like the giant kangaroo rat for plant growth and seed germination. Photo: Creative Commons.

“Kit foxes don’t drink, at least not in their natural habitat, and they eat animals that don’t drink and that partake of drought-tolerant plants,” he says. “But if the water impact of fracking meant you couldn’t water cattle, and that drove the cattle off the land, then you wouldn’t be able to graze the grasslands any more, and that would impact the native species.”

It’s almost 1 a.m. as we arrive back in Hollister. I ask Westphal about the studies underway to determine the distribution and genetic differences of different populations of legless lizards in the San Joaquin Valley—a discovery that could add to BLM’s list of species of concern. Westphal smiles.

“If legless lizards are given a higher level of species protection, we will survey the bejeezus out of these lands.”

Critical habitat for vulnerable and endangered species in the Monterey Shale. Note: Click on areas to view species’ profiles.

Preview of our next installment: The riches beneath the soil.

Why is the Monterey Shale potentially so valuable? How did the riches of the land in the form of creatures the size of a pinhead get locked down over the millennia to form oil? We explore the natural history of the landscape with geologist Mel Erskine.

Read our first story in Bay Nature’s fracking series: In condor country comes a California oil boom.

Read our second story in the series: Above the Monterey Shale, farmers worry fracking will destroy the land.

Sarah Phelan is a contributor to Bay Nature and is leading our coverage on Extreme Energy in the Monterey Shale.

Above the Monterey Shale, farmers worry fracking will destroy the land

Often missing from discussions about the potential Monterey Shale oil rush is a sense of the landscape that sits above the shale, a complex and tightly folded geological formation that underlies 1,750 square miles from Southern California to Monterey through Alameda County and north to Mendocino County.

Much of the extraction is taking place in pre-existing oil fields in the Central Valley. But some leases are close to rural communities, causing environmentalists and farmers to fret about the wisdom of using large volumes of water to fracture subterranean rock. The activity generates wastewater, which then must be stored underground elsewhere, in this earthquake-prone, water-starved region where native wildlife has already been marginalized, primarily through loss of habitat.

In this story in the Bay Nature series on the impacts of extreme energy, we’re focusing on Lockwood in southern Monterey County; Aromas, which lies at the intersection of Monterey and San Benito counties; and Paicines in San Benito County. These communities have witnessed seismic survey trucks and well-drilling crews pull into town, putting them potentially at risk for oil drilling operations.

The grapes of Lockwood

Paula Getzelman and her husband own Tre Gatti Vineyards, a small grape-growing operation in Lockwood, in south Monterey County and just a stone’s throw from Lake San Antonio, a major tourist magnet.

Ranching in Lockwood's golden hills. Photo: Sarah Phelan. — Ranching in Lockwood’s golden hills. Photo: Sarah Phelan.

Rolling hills dotted with scrub oak and pines, and grasses that turn golden in summer and lush green in winter surround this community of ranchers and, more recently, grape and olive growers.

“It’s land you’d expect to see cattle grazing on,” Getzelman says.

From her living room, she can see San Antonio Lake, at least in non-drought years. It was once a river that emptied out of the Coastal Range and drained into the Salinas River, which runs north to Monterey and the Pacific Ocean. But San Antonio has been turned into a reservoir that farmers rely on to irrigate their crops.

Condors, golden eagles, red-tailed hawks and owls sweep the skies. And badgers, coyotes, deer, elk, kit foxes, and squirrels cross the land.

“You can see their trails down to the lake,” Getzelman says.

She started educating herself about fracking two years ago, when an exploratory oil well was drilled ten miles from her place, and like most of the farmers here, she is concerned about water.

“Oil is important, energy is important, but once you’ve ruined the environment you are done,” Getzelman says. “In an area where agriculture drives the economy, that’s a harsh reality.”

She said that Monterey County planners seem more concerned about seismic issues related to injecting wastewater underground after wells are fracked, than water depletion and contamination. The extreme energy debate is mired in complexity.

“What’s missing from the conversation is an integration of all these separate facets,” she says. “ It’s like Chinese water torture.”

Fields of gold

Pat Lerman lives in Aromas, a small unincorporated community at the intersection of Monterey and San Benito County, close to Santa Cruz and Santa Clara county lines.

A dilapidated barn punctuates the hills around Aromas. Photo: Rob Ryan.

“It’s a hamlet in a valley, surrounded by soft rolling hills that turn golden in the summer,” she says.

The Pajaro River flows through town, which is surrounded by fields of artichokes, raspberries and strawberries.

“Up here in the northwest corner of the county, it’s berries and row crops like lettuces, spinach, and bell peppers, and apples and apricots,” Lerman says.

Thumper trucks roll down Highway 129, north of Aromas, during a seismological survey in 2012. Photo: Polly Goldman.

She’s the spokesperson for Aromas Cares for our Environment (ACE), a watchdog group that formed in June 2012, after “thumper” trucks rolled into town and started to simulate earthquakes and collect data showing underground locations of oil. So far, the seismic survey data has not translated into applications to permit oil drilling, but the community nevertheless began to organize.

“That was our warning, even though it turned out to be a false alarm,” Lerman says.

ACE fears Aromas could become an industrial zone, with roads clogged by trucks carrying heavy equipment and steel pipes for drilling.

“We learned that extraction would require ‘enhanced recovery’ methods, including fracking,” Lerman says. “It’s a stimulation technique. Now you can get oil you couldn’t get before. It’s like leaving pennies or, in this case, silver dollars, in the couch.”

Where the cattle roam

Kathy Spencer’s family raises cattle on a ranch in Paicines, a rural community in the Gavilan Mountains in San Benito County, 6 miles south of Pinnacles National Park on the foraging path of the condor.

An osprey rests at the Paicines Reservoir. Photo: William McCarey.

“The land has been in the family since 1880,” says Spencer, who sees wild turkeys and feral pigs in the golden grass, oaks and black chamise brush that surround her family’s three ranches.

Spencer used to see condors drinking from cattle troughs and scavenging for carrion on her family’s land.

“But now they feed them at Pinnacles,” she says.

Spencer has been tracking proposals to construct test wells that use “cyclic steam,” or “huff and puff” methodology–steam is periodically injected into wells to heat up and help oil flow –just one mile from one of her family’s three cattle ranches in Paicenes on a neighbor’s property.

“Some people are thinking that [oil exploration] will save our culture,” Spencer says. “We’re not necessarily against people getting money, we just want them to do so it will be a safe environment. Water is really precious to us in this arid part of the country.”

She also worries that oil development will increase truck traffic on Highway 25 towards King City or Hollister.

“It’s a twisty two-lane road,” Spencer said, noting that the road currently sees trucks full of grapes and vegetables. “They beat up the road to pieces.”

[slideshow exclude= 87424]

Preview of our next installment: Fox, rat, lizard.

As farmers and ranchers worry that extreme energy extraction could compromise open working landscapes that are essential to rural traditions, economic stability and food production, environmentalists fret about the impacts of unfettered fracking on a long list of species of concern.

Read our first story in Bay Nature’s fracking series: In condor country comes a California oil boom.

Sarah Phelan is a contributor to Bay Nature and is leading our coverage on Extreme Energy in the Monterey Shale.

In condor country comes a California oil boom

It’s a good bet that journeys that begin on the solstice and involve California condors will be epic. And a recent trip to the Big Sur backcountry to understand how a new Central California oil boom could impact these awesome birds, and other vulnerable species, generated an epic set of questions.

We think of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” as mostly an East Coast or North Dakota affair, but Central California might soon produce a whole lot of oil, with the potential for a host of environmental consequences that are still somewhat unknown.

At the heart of this story is the Monterey Shale, which stretches from northern Monterey County to Bakersfield, underpinning the inner Coast Range habitat that California condors glide over in their endless search for carrion.

The Monterey Shale contains an estimated 15.4 million barrels of oil, making it the nation’s largest domestic source of recoverable oil. But you don’t just stick a straw in and get the oil, which is tightly bound in rock. To get it out, there will be fracking, “acid jobs,” steam, and perhaps other methods that fit under the umbrella of “extreme energy.”

A veil of fog drifts in off the Pacific Ocean, providing moisture to the wildflowers, grasses and trees that dot this intensely angular terrain. Photo: Sarah Phelan.

How far are we willing to go to slake our thirst for oil? As the oil boom unfolds, the condors will be watching.

And as Sacramento battles how it’s going to regulate fracking, what’s clear is that this relatively undeveloped and unpopulated land, the land of the condors, is at risk.

We here at Bay Nature have been pondering what’s out there and why we should care. If you do pull off Highway 101 as it leaves the congestion of Silicon Valley, skimming past Pinnacles National Park (site of the California Condor Recovery Program since 2003), the first impression is of flat valleys surrounded by a series of arid hills with the Santa Lucia mountains in the distance. It’s a place that few visit, but its quiet and stark beauty is the key to a landscape that could dramatically change if oil companies unlock the riches below the soil.

This is the first in a series of Bay Nature online pieces that will culminate in a feature story in the October issue of Bay Nature magazine.

Ground Zero: Monterey and San Benito counties

My journey began at 3 a.m. from the Bay Area, when I scrambled into a rented four-wheel-drive to explore the Ventana wilderness, a federally designated wilderness area in the Santa Lucia mountains along California’s Central Coast. As I cruised down Interstate 880, I pondered the irony of driving a gas-guzzler to better understand fracking’s effect on California wildlife.

Fracking involves injecting large amounts of water and a mix of sand and chemicals at high pressure underground to fracture underlying rocks and release the oil trapped within.

The areas the industry would be operating in include the oak woodlands of interior Monterey County, the few last remnants of habitat for species that once inhabited the broad expanse of the Central Valley. This is Steinbeck country: prime inner Coast Range habitat that features a mosaic of vegetation, including chaparral, oak and foothill pine woodland.

It’s not just condors out there. The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), which sued the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for failing to adequately assess the risks of fracking before granting new oil and gas leases in the area last December, warns that a number of vulnerable species are at risk: the San Joaquin kit fox, the blunt-nosed leopard lizard, and threatened South Central Coast steelhead, and more.

“Many of the areas proposed for oil development in California are some of our last, best public lands,” said Brendan Cummings, attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD).”They were never farmed, they were never turned into subdivisions.”

Oil spokespeople say fracking has long been safely used in California, and they say it could create thousands of jobs and bring billions in tax revenues. But environmentalists worry that traditional methods of fracking plus horizontal drilling could deplete and contaminate water supplies, trigger earthquakes, pollute air, and harm wildlife.

Deep in condor country

I was headed in the direction of Jolon, a tiny, unincorporated town that was the fictional setting for John Steinbeck’s novel To a God Unknown, which explores the relationship of man to his land. I took a right turn that led me towards the Fort Hunter Liggett military base and from there to the Los Padres National Forest.

Actor Timothy Bottoms does dead-on spoofs of President G.W. Bush, in between advocating for condors and the environment. Photo: Sarah Phelan.

I was paying a visit to actor Timothy Bottoms, who does dead-on spoofs of former President G.W. Bush and in his time off-stage lives on a ranch in the Ventana Wilderness. He sees condors regularly near his property.

Much of the land in the area is part of the Los Padres National Forest and Fort Hunter Liggett army base. As the road wound up to Bottoms’ ranch, the terrain transitioned to angular hills that only mountain lions, boar, deer and condors traverse with ease.

“The condor is the bird of life,” Bottoms said, as he led me across his property to a telescope trained on a nearby ridgeline.

The object of his fascination was a female bird that the Pinnacles program released in 2007 and that showed up near his ranch this spring. Bottoms believed this female had been uprooted from her nest by military helicopters, just one of the threats to condor existence in the area. The Ventana Wildlife Society (VWS) had sent up a biologist to track down the bird, and found an egg, but on a return trip that day failed to find a hatchling or a nest.

Bottoms worries that the region is prime for oil development, even as oil extraction has been a fact of life in California for decades.

“Now we’re at the end of the resource and they’re trying to get the last drops,” Bush said. “It’s an assault on earth. They pump chemicals into the ground to extract the oil.”

Some local conservationists, who have long battled the immediate threats of low-flying military aircraft and leaded bullets from hunters, don’t see fracking as the main danger to the condor’s existence.

“There may be other issues to be worried about but at first glance, it doesn’t seem to be a threat to condors in the wild,” Kelly Sorenson, executive director of VWS, wrote in an email.

But others worry about the cumulative impacts of road building, water use, wastewater disposal, and other environmental tolls on the landscape — in short, the entire infrastructure that would be needed to support oil extraction.

Rachel Wolstenholme, Pinnacles’ condor program manager, points to fracking’s impacts on quality and quantity of local water sources, which could in turn affect the viability of local ranches and the wildlife populations they have come to support.

“We rely on ranching and hunting to feed these birds,” she said. “If those activities disappeared because of the indirect impact of fracking on water, that would hurt the birds and the ranchers themselves.”

[slideshow]

Preview of next installment: Above the Shale

Missing from discussions about extreme methods of energy extraction in the Monterey Shale is a sense of the landscape that sits above this geological formation, which extends from Southern California to Monterey County, with smaller outcroppings as far north as the Berkeley Hills.

In our next installment, Above the Shale, we focus on three towns at the intersection of the fracking boom: Aromas, a small town at the intersection of Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito counties; Lockwood in southern Monterey County; and Paicenes, a ranch town in San Benito County.

These three communities have either experienced seismic surveying for oil or are near leases that have been auctioned for oil exploration, or both. Some locals fear that fracking, acid jobs, and steam technology will deplete and contaminate their water, harm wildlife, and turn their backyards into industrial wastelands.

Want more background on fracking? Check out a recent National Geographic feature on fracking, including this video with animation about the Bakken Shale oil rush in North Dakota: