A natural gas boom in the Rocky Mountain West has drilling rigs popping up in unlikely places. Near Parachute, Colo., gas companies want to drill close to where a nuclear bomb was detonated Sept. 10, 1969, a plan that has local residents worried.
Project Rulison was part of the government's Plowshare Program — developing peaceful uses for nuclear energy. The goal was to vaporize the tight sandstone and release gas trapped there. Television news reports said the ground shook like jelly and there was a muffled sound when the bomb went off 8,426 feet below ground.
The experiment worked — a lot of gas was released, but it was radioactive and couldn't be used.
You read that right - radioactive natural gas. Now, we have an Executive Branch with an unusually close relationship with the oil/natural gas industry, so you just know that a story that begins this way has little chance of ending well.
And you'd be correct.
For more than 30 years, a three-mile barrier around the site kept drilling rigs out. But in recent years, drillers have been moving closer and closer to the blast site.
The Department of Energy conducted tests and concluded that if a well were drilled just a few hundred feet from the site, there's only a 5 percent chance that radioactive pollution would leak out of the ground.
That did not reassure families living in the area. They hired attorney Luke Danielson, who says profits are trumping common sense among drillers.
"I drilled this well and no contamination showed up immediately…" Danielson said. "Well then, I can drill another well even closer …. And when I don't see any problem immediately there, well then I can drill another even closer …. That approach guarantees that you're going to hit something."
But if the DOE says it's safe, then why not tap into this rich supply of gas, asks Brian Macke, director of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.
"The Williams Fork formation is known to hold between 90 to 130 billion cubic feet of gas per section. So every square mile of land that you set aside that can't be developed is worth a huge amount of wealth," Macke said.
I want to focus on one small point: "But if the DOE says it's safe, then why not tap into this rich supply of gas. . ." The simple answer to this question is this - we are dealing here with the Bush Administration. (A) They lie the same way others breathe; (B) with their cozy relationships with the oil and natural gas industry, it might seem that they would hedge their bets (also known as politically influence scientific data to achieve a narrow partisan outcome, something else they have been known to do) in order to benefit those companies that would like to push the limit on this.
It seems to me we are dealing with something that is such a no-brainer here. Yet, as we are also dealing with the Bush Administration, we should never underestimate their capacity to do the stupid thing first. Especially if their's a buck in it for their cronies.
Again - this has disaster written all over it, if it isn't stopped.
