It seems these days that we are being bombarded from every direction with differing information on the oil and gas industry. It has gotten to the point that there is simply no way to know what is or isn’t the truth. The industry marches to the steady drumbeat of “everything is OK,” while the environmental community wonders if it is as safe as they say. How are we to know?
I recently went on an energy tour hosted by Eco Flight and Colorado Environmental Coalition. The first part of the day, we flew in a small airplane over the Roan Plateau. I could see what seemed like small areas of industrial activities scattered across the landscape. After the short flight, we loaded up into a vehicle to drive to some of the sites we had seen from the air. We were fortunate enough to have an inspector for a major energy company along on the tour with a working knowledge of the industry. I drive by these facilities all of the time, and have no idea what I am looking at.
We drove to a site that was described as a “freeze wall.” A wall of frozen earth is created around the target shale formation then, like in a microwave, the formation is heated and the oil is extracted. I have to say, it was quite an impressive facility. The thing that I found strange was the facility staff behaving as though we had just tried to enter Area 51. A nondescript white pickup raced toward us, driver obviously displeased, asking us who we were and why we were there, followed by the loudest alarm I had every heard. Was this for us? According to my tour guides, the freeze wall experiment is a success. Why then aren’t they showing it off?
We also had the opportunity to look through the fence at the Enterprise gas processing plant that had seemed so small and unassuming from the air. It was equally impressive with its massive shiny towers and maze of pipelines, and the behavior of the staff was equally as strange.
What scares me? It seems as if the largest, most powerful industry in the world doesn’t want us to know what they are really doing.
The bread factory doesn’t sound off alarms and send security teams, they offer tours. They also print their ingredients right on the side of the bag.
