A matte black carrying case with two heavy latches vaguely suggests something weapon-grade in the trunk of a rented Jeep. An optical gas imaging camera has been removed from the Styrofoam mold inside the case. When powered up, the camera hums and cools itself down with the sound of a loud infrared sensor, much like a surface-to-air missile. But this eager eye isn’t looking for jets. Designed to detect methane, hydrocarbons, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) leaking from fracking facilities across the state, this frosty morning near the small town of Oort, just east of Fort Collins, Colorado. Some gas wells are leaking.
Andrew Klooster, who calibrate the camera, is young, sharp-eyed and serious. He’s a thermographer at his Earthworks gas monitoring agency for the oil industry. Kloster visited more than 700 of his sites around Colorado to collect videos of potential violations and submitted them to state regulators. Kloster’s camera can see what the human eye can’t.
Methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases, is a carcinogen known to be associated with many serious health complications, along with VOCs such as toluene, butane, hexane, and benzene. It appears to the camera as a dance of colors. Colorless and beyond human perception, these plumes of hydrocarbons become visible in other ways, such as nosebleeds in children, burning eyes, upset stomachs, and even increased rates of congenital heart disease. increase. With more than 10,500 active oil and gas fields, Weld County (some locals call it “Well” County) is Colorado’s most drilled area and the fifth largest in the nation. It is a highly productive oil county. Ault is near its geographical center.
hyper normal
Kloster’s research didn’t start with one of the many drilling operations that dot the field. Instead, it begins with a visit to a one-story bungalow in Oort’s oldest district, the home of a retired English professor. Carol Hawkins, 71, lives with her dog and a collection of air purifiers consciously placed throughout her home. This house was her dream home, and where she was supposed to mourn the death of her husband when she returned to Colorado from Maine in 2000. 2017.
“I couldn’t afford to live in Denver or Fort Collins. At the same time, I loved rural America,” says Hawkins. She found a list of attractive craftsman-style residences and asked her daughter, Coloradan, to investigate. But she said nothing about fracking. Because it’s too normalized in Colorado. It just wasn’t registered. ”
Given Hawkins’ pre-existing lung condition, the prospect of living near a well was alarming, but risks such as drilling seemed distant. Over time, Orto’s vast landscape across the eastern plains was interspersed with noise barriers surrounding new excavation operations in the fields by grazing livestock.
“The year I moved here, things got personal when I got a ‘mandatory pool notice’ from a gas industry lawyer,” recalls Hawkins. This controversial practice allows oil and gas companies to effectively annex mining rights from their owners and drill under their homes, regardless of their consent. Hawkins not only turned down the offer, he wanted to fight.
The April 2017 death of Ted Poszywak at nearby Firestone cemented her resistance. Fracking Poszywak’s house filled with her gas burning violently, turning the two-story house into a crater. “I was blown away,” Hawkins says. She decided to get in touch with Wild Earth her Guardian staff attorney, Kate Her Merlin, to defend the Hawkins forced pooling case pro bono.
Hawkins began educating himself in time for a scientific panel on the risks of fracking hosted by 350 Colorado, an environmental advocacy group focused on fossil fuels. That’s where she first found Kloster. “This is what I need. Someone who can provide me with hard evidence,” she remembers thinking.
gas slit
Making formal complaints to Colorado’s Air Pollution Control Department is Klooster’s primary role at Earthworks. Less noticeable are the relationships he has developed with residents like Hawkins, whom he invites on these field trips. They tip about suspected leaks in their communities, and in return find a sense of validation that these abstract dangers can be made visible through Kloster’s cameras. “The first time I went with Andrew, it was a little traumatic,” jokes Hawkins.
One of these relationships led Klooster to the Prospected Energy facility at Fort Collins. There, residents’ pleas to state regulators failed to produce a follow-up investigation. They were eventually substantiated: The site was shut down by Public Health in August 2021 after Klooster captured multiple large shedding events near the facility, according to the Centers for Disease Control. It was discovered that people living in were exposed to dangerous concentrations of hydrogen sulfide. It is a toxic, corrosive, and flammable gas that can cause eye and respiratory irritation, insomnia, or convulsions.
“The ability to give community members additional insight, the ability to give them the ammunition of their fight to hold this industry accountable, is the really important part of all of this, and probably the most important part. says Klooster. “The typical first reaction to seeing these plumes is shock.”
The power is in full force when Hawkins steps onto the gravel road that leads from the Jeep to the Ruby 7-J well pad. This site is operated by Bayswater, a Denver-based oil and gas company. Kloster pulls away from the tripod and Hawkins crouches down on his LCD display. “complaints,” she muttered. “That’s incredible”
An infrared sensor shows ominous orange clouds billowing from behind the sound barrier. Kloster is more cautious. He’s not sure what we’re looking at because we can’t see the source clearly. “Those noise walls you have to watch out for. It could be hydraulic fluid from the mud pumped out of the borehole, or it could be dust from the truck,” Kloster said. I will explain. “[State regulators] Dismiss this if you don’t see the source. ”
Travel south of Ault’s main drag to investigate the PDC California well pad, which is in the active drilling phase. Hawkins pointed anxiously to the nearby houses. “My grandson just bought his first home there,” she says. Two months ago, his partner gave birth to a girl, Clover. “I’m scared to death for her,” says Hawkins, whose new Eton High School is less than half a mile (0.5 miles) from her, but there are countless suburban developments in the distance.
Our final stop was at the newly built Bayswater facility, home to 12 new homes and a few runchettes. Krooster beckoned Hawkins to his perch by the barbed wire fence, and the camera turned to a line of seemingly harmless tawny tanks. The viewfinder reveals something else instead: a huge plume fluorescing across the LCD screen. It sits like a blanket over some houses.
Klooster says: This is bad. This is really bad. The hydrocarbons are just flowing out of it. As he said this, an older man exited a small weathered cottage by a parked jeep and approached our group anxiously. He introduces himself as Mike and says he has lived and lived there for 50 years. Klooster calmly explains why we are roaming this remote and dusty road and informs Mike about a major leak across the field.
Mike stands by the camera, capturing the news. “I don’t know if that’s all good or bad, but it is,” Mike finally says. Shock and fear are common reactions of residents who see water leaks first hand. “So is fatalism,” he says. “They don’t feel like they have a lot of power over the situation. These are big companies.”
Kloster filed a formal complaint with the Colorado Department of Air Pollution Control. As of December 16, Bayswater has denied any rule violations.
New risks, phantom pain
A 2019 Colorado Department of Public Health and Environmental Studies modeled the effects of acute VOC exposure within 2,000 feet of a well, and found short-term health effects such as nosebleeds and nausea to be real. It is concluded that there are Ignoring the short-term impact that is the focus of research, industry representatives have found another way to interpret the findings. John Haley, president of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, said at a press conference, “There are no long-term health effects associated with oil and gas development. Mounting evidence may suggest otherwise. there is.
CU Anschutz Professor Lisa McKenzie is a public health epidemiologist who specializes in air pollution from fracking. She was frustrated by many of the conclusions drawn from the 2019 study. “Studies had shown that there may be an increased risk of short-term health effects,” Mackenzie says. But that doesn’t mean there are no health consequences, because first of all they didn’t have the data, and it wasn’t what they were looking for.”
Her recent research focuses on the health outcomes of children, such as Hawkins’ grandchildren and newborn daughter, who live at least a kilometer from the well. Mackenzie described a range of complications potentially associated with fracking exposure. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia. A child who grew up near high-density fracking was four times more likely to develop blood cancer than she was.
For Klooster, this is nothing new. “For a long time, people weren’t even aware of the possible health effects of extracting oil and gas, so the industry has gotten away with a lot.” he says. And as they do, when concerns surfaced, it was easy for industry operators to say they had nothing to see.
Then Kloster’s camera is also a mirror. That reflection can be described in scientific terms such as emissivity, electromagnetic radiation, and temperature gradients. For residents trying to understand their relationship to the abstract landscape, the story told by this infrared sensor needs little explanation. The same facility that we have seen many times, but only now with new details. clouds overhead.