Black Gold –

America’s Demon Introduction - The United States currently consumes 25% of the world’s energy, but produces less than 5 percent. Heavily dependent on foreign oil (black gold), America imports 11 million barrels each day. America is sending nearly $1 million a minute out of the country to pay for that foreign oil. Our transportation uses two-thirds of that oil, and about one-third of that is consumed by the 8 million heavy-use trucks on our highways. By switching transportation needs to a product that comes out of our own ground and not foreign soils, we’d solve much of our security and debt problems over night. Domestic natural gas production is now booming to record-high levels with the U.S. literally swimming in natural gas, and it’s all on land with absolutely no more need to make expensive and unsafe drills off shore. Besides making more land-based natural gas discoveries in the last five years than any other country in the world aided by advances in technology for extracting natural gas from shale and methane beds, America is finally posed to arrive at energy independence. But a big obstacle stands in the way of that goal – big oil and the lawmakers whose pockets are being lined by big oil interests. Natural Gas is God's cornucopia gift to America. With our abundance of natural gas, America is poised to take big oil down, but the tentacles of black gold interests have corrupted legislators selling their souls to the Black Gold Devil. The most obvious is the 2011 NatGas Act (New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions) introduced by bipartisan groups of senators and representatives in the previous two Congresses. The NatGas Act bill will give tax credits for buying natural gas vehicles (starting with heavy-use trucks) and building natural gas stations. What will the Nat Gas Act do? * The NatGas Act will jump-start the use of natural-gas-powered vehicles. * The NatGas Act will provide over a million new U.S. jobs ranging from design engineers to toolmakers to manufacturers to those who maintain the vehicles. * The NatGas Act will change the world from oil dependence to natural gas dependence, a natural resource we have 400 years worth. As for oil we have less than 2% of the world’s supply. * The NatGas Act is about U.S. energy security - plain and simple. President Barack Obama publicly endorsed the plan for natural gas vehicles on March 30, 2011 and again in his State of the Union address in Jan 2012. He said, “the potential for natural gas is enormous. … last year, more than 150 members of Congress from both sides of the aisle produced legislation providing incentives to use clean-burning natural gas in our vehicles instead of oil. And that's a big deal.” Bankrolled by big oil companies certain members of Congress have recently launched public opposition to the NatGas Act. They cloak their opposition by saying subsidies would “distort the competitive process that so capably yields affordable and viable products.” They said this despite the fact that these were the very people who passed legislation in 2004 giving heavy subsidies to the ethanol industry, something Americans have been paying for in higher food prices ever since. And more recently these are the same people who fervently continue to support outdated and unnecessary tax breaks, to the tune of $40 billion a year, for big oil companies even though these subsidies distort the same marketplace. Not surprisingly, these legislators receive significant funding from big oil. These legislators will continue handouts to a 20th century dirty technology rather than shifting to a 21st century emerging fuel that the rest of the world is rushing to adopt. In the 2011 Congressional session those that voted to continue the oil subsidies received, on average, five times more money from oil interests than those who voted against it. With 12,000,000 natural gas vehicles on the road today world-wide we have only 112,000 or less than one percent, and most of those are commercial vehicles. If congressional efforts to protect big oil are successful, it will harm our economy, our competitiveness, our security, and our environment as natural gas vehicles are about 90% cleaner than gasoline vehicles. As gridlock Congress, fueled by special interests, sits on the Nat Gas Act which would give us 100% energy independence instead of the 70% we buy offshore, America will continue to hemorrhage at the rate of $1.6 billion a day in international balance of payment (IPOB) deficits which is about equal to our purchase of foreign oil, an amount we could be selling in the form of natural gas instead of buying in the form of dirty polluting oil. This is the fastest “selling of America” we have going on, day after day! It won’t be long before China will own us lock stock and barrel! The Darth Vader of the Bush Administration. To understand who is torpedoing our chances to produce natural gas if Congress were to vote for the NatGas Act we have to first look at the process energy companies are using to extract huge quantities of natural gas. Hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) is the process of pumping millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals, thousands of feet underground to break up rocks laced with tiny pockets of natural gas. These gas wells use tons of water from fresh streams or local water sources. If clean chemical-free water were used then perhaps the debate wouldn’t be so controversial. However, a cheaper method is being used that employs the use of chemicals to more easily extract the imbedded gas. The chemical wastewater is trapped in ponds, and as it evaporates all of the chemicals and carcinogens (and even some radiation) is evaporated into the atmosphere while the extra thick stuff finds its way to landfills. And if the wellhead is not properly installed some of the natural gas and chemicals make their way into groundwater aquifers. Everyday people have gotten sick from dangerous and unsafe levels of volatile organic compounds, methane gas, and other various chemicals from improper fracking. In the Delaware River watershed people’s water has turned brown making them sick with horses and pets losing their hair, all the result of fracking as asserted in a landmark study by Duke University. Fracking could be controlled and made safe, but regulators have their hands tied thanks to the “the Halliburton Loophole,” which exempts fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act. This loophole is a result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. In 2001 President W. Bush appointed Vice President Dick Cheney to head a secret Energy Task Force to establish the energy criteria that would eventually find its way into the 2005 Energy law. In secret meetings with Dick Cheney, energy companies and their lobbyists shaped a huge give-away to the oil industry plus the ability to drill for natural gas in the cheapest way possible. Environmental concerns were frozen out of all of these lopsided meetings. What came out was one of the worst pieces of legislation to hit the American public at the expense of the health and safety of people in the fracking area and perhaps to the detriment of future natural gas production. The Black Demon Company. Founded in 1919, Halliburton is one of the world's largest providers of products and services to the petroleum and energy industries with annual revenue of about $15 billion. Halliburton has over 55,000 employees in approximately 70 countries. Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney was chairman and CEO of Halliburton Company from 1995 to 2000. He retired from the company during the 2000 U.S. presidential election campaign with a severance package worth $36 million along with generous stock options. For whatever reason Halliburton has seen fit to do work in the cheapest way hiring inexperienced scab workers at slave wages, and by overcharging government, Halliburton has reaped huge profits. Listed here are some of the most glaring results of that policy. * Feb 2011 - Halliburton and 11 other energy companies have been charged with illegally pumping over 32 million gallons of diesel fuel into the ground in 19 states between 2005 and 2009 while drilling for natural gas using hydraulic fracturing. * April 2010 - Halliburton has been accused of being responsible for the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill with a botched well head cementing job that contributed to a methane blast that sank BP's rig in the Gulf of Mexico and killed 11 people. * Sep 2009 - Dimock, PA - Up to 8,000 gallons of Halliburton-manufactured fracking fluid leaked from faulty supply pipes seeping into wetlands and a streams killing fish and wildlife. * 2003-2008 – Iraq. At least a dozen soldiers and Marines were electrocuted as a result of shoddy installation of showers by Halliburton’s subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR). * Mar 2003. In the run-up to the Iraq war, Halliburton’s subsidiary KBR was awarded a five year $7 billion sole-source contract for support facilities in Iraq. Army Corps of Engineers Principal Assistant Responsible for Contracting (PARC) Bunny Greenhouse objected to the contract’s 5-year term questioning the probability of an emergency lasting for five years, but at the urging of Vice-President Dick Chaney the contract was pushed through and Greenhouse’s reward for trying to save taxpayer money was a demotion in rank. A year later, after an audit review, KBR had to return one billion dollars in over charges. Testifying before Congress in June 2005, Greenhouse called the contract the worst case of government abuse she had ever witnessed in her 20-year career. With the help of the National Whistleblowers Center, Greenhouse filed a lawsuit challenging her demotion. In July 2011, Greenhouse reached a $970,000 settlement with the government. One would think that Halliburton would be one of the cheerleaders for natural gas as they have made hundreds of millions off fracking, but now Halliburton can't move away from natural gas fast enough. In Jan 2012 Halliburton warned that more customers will scale back gas production this year due to low prices. CEO Dave Lesar told investors that this move comes with some long-term benefits. Halliburton, which drills wells and gets them ready for production, is moving with the industry to focus on fields that hold more oil than gas. That should generate higher revenues than before since oil production tends to be a more intensive, allowing Halliburton to charge higher contract rates. The Frac Act (H.R.1084 - Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act of 2011) is a bill currently stalled in Congress that will hopefully close the Halliburton Loophole. In 2009, Congress introduced the Frac Act to remove the exemption of hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) and require disclosure of chemicals used in the fracturing process. Under heavy lobbying pressure from big oil, the Frac Act has not yet passed. Since its introduction there have been no Republican co-sponsors thus keeping it on the back burner along with the Nat Gas Act. Once again big oil has bought off Congress. Keystone. There is a current push in Congress to move forward with big oil in a way that shows the stark reality of where Congress has its priorities. This story begins in Canada where huge quantities of oil sands (tar sands) are located. These oil sands are a mixture of sand, clay, and bitumen - a highly dense and viscous tar-like form of petroleum. Extraction of these tar sands is one of the most polluting forms of any fossil fuel mining with release of greenhouse gases when about 800 million cubic feet of natural gas (approximately 10% of Canada’s total natural gas consumption) is burned daily to create heat for extraction. Coupled with this there have been at least fourteen known spills on the pipeline moving these tar sands though Canada since the start of operations in June 2010. TransCanada, a Canadian company, has made application for the extension of its pipeline, called Keystone XL, 1,700-miles from Alberta, Canada, through Nebraska and Kansas to refineries in Oklahoma and Texas. Being all about big oil, Congress has made TransCanada's construction application a hot issue. On 30 November 2011, seeking to circumvent the required environmental impact assessment, the Senate introduced legislation aimed at forcing the Obama administration to approve the Keystone XL pipeline within 60 days, unless the president declared the project not in the national interest. On 18 January 2012 he did just that not giving in to the Senate ultimatum. Obama sent a report to Congress detailing why he decided against the pipeline prior to completion of the environmental impact assessment that is ongoing and should eventually clear the way for construction in several years. Job creation would not be as high as purported. Keystone has admitted that they lied about the number of construction jobs, around 6,500 temporary jobs, not 20,000 as original claimed. This palls in comparison to one million plus permanent jobs that would be created by passage of the Nat Gas and Frac Acts. All during the W. Bush administration, U.S. oil production kept falling, but under the current administration, U.S. production of crude oil has been steadily climbing each year to its current (Feb 2012) 8-year-high despite a pause in deep water oil production caused by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill April 20, 2010. The administration lifted its post-Gulf oil spill moratorium on oil drilling in deep waters in October 2010 and starting issuing new permits in March 2011. Despite all this, big oil backed legislators are using Keystone to blame the administration for the recent run up in gas prices, a condition caused by the bipartisan Iran Threat Reduction Act (H.R. 1905) which puts severe restriction on Iranian oil exports and has oil market speculators driving up gas prices. These folks are hoping to cash in on the public’s anger over gas prices by voting out those that would harm their sweetheart relationship with their sugar daddy, big oil. In the final analysis big oil interests continue to be successful in getting legislators to make an all out push for Canadian oil while pigeon holing both the FacAct and NatGas bills, passage of which is in the vital and strategic interest of America. If only voters could see through the smoke with millions of big oil dollars being spent on lying to the American public. Then, perhaps, just maybe, we’d be able to vote the right legislators out of office.