Fracking and Injection Wells Still with Us

After the Committee to Ban Fracking in Michigan’s court cases came to an end last year, four individual signers took up the charge and filed a separate lawsuit. The plaintiffs in Graziano et al v Director of Elections, seek to have their signatures count–and all signers like them–in a challenge of the signature-gathering law restricting signature gathering to just 180-days. Like in the Committee to Ban Fracking’s cases, no court yet has ruled on the merits of the case: that the law restricting signatures for statutory initiatives is unconstitutional. The Graziano case is now in the Michigan Court of Appeals.

Michigan’s over 1,400 injection wells are still under the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency, after the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) applied for “primacy” from the EPA. A year ago in April, the ban fracking organizations called on MCWC members to write comments to the EPA opposing primacy–the shifting of primary control of Class II injection wells (for oil, gas and fracking wastes) from the EPA to EGLE. EGLE’s hopes were to quash the holding of any public hearings on any injection wells. After 80 public comments were submitted, EPA withdrew the federal Rule, and Michigan’s application is in limbo.

The State’s primacy application omitted any information about how EGLE dealt with violations, the history of contaminations, well casing failures, citizen complaints, and other required information. At the same time as the public comments, a key employee in the oil and gas division, Joseph Pettit, was charged by the Michigan Attorney General with embezzlement. Pettit was the guy in charge of taking the oil and gas companies’ bond money to make sure they complied with state law, and was the key compliance officer. Clearly EGLE has an oil and gas injection well problem that has not been sorted out.

EPA continued holding public hearings on a few new injection wells. However, even these hearings do not go very well, and EPA almost always permits the applications. The Riverside injection wells in Antrim County were approved despite comments in opposition. These “enhanced gas recovery” wells are to pump CO2 downhole, just to continue to produce more “natural” gas (methane), which in turn produces more CO2. There’s no “clean energy” going on here.

Ellis Boal, of Ban Michigan Fracking, participated in the Governor’s Council on Climate Solutions, and proposed two recommendations. One would adopt one of the measures of the Committee to Ban Fracking’s ballot initiative — that the Michigan statutory language requiring EGLE regulators to “foster” the oil-gas industry “favorably” and “maximize” oil-gas production — be repealed.

The other takes aim at a common practice in Michigan’s naturally-fractured “Antrim Shale” which arcs across the northern counties of the Lower Peninsula. When operators extract natural gas, for this particular type of rock, CO2 also comes up with it. The operators pipe the natural gas away for sale, but they vent the CO2 freely to the atmosphere. The vented CO2 sums to a million tons a year, according to one analyst. But under current law, CO2 is “waste,” and the law absolutely prohibits venting of waste. This proposal simply asks the governor to tell EGLE to start enforcing existing law.

The Climate Council is still in the process of accepting proposals from the public. That period will end on March 14. For now, the two proposals are still in the hopper. No one on the Council has spoken publicly against them, not even the oil-gas industry. March 14 is when the real fight will begin.

— Ellis Boal & LuAnne Kozma