No Fracking Way

By Susan Cooper Eastman

Tallahassee, FL — On August 24, state senators Darren Soto (D-Orlando) and Dwight Bullard (D-Miami) filed legislation to ban fracking in Florida.  House Bill 19 will  be heard in the upcoming legislative session and would create a state statute banning fracking.

“We don’t want fracking to get a start in Florida,” said Merrillee Malwitz-Jipson, president of Save Our Suwannee and an executive committee member of Floridians Against Fracking.

Fracking opponents have asked Florida counties and municipalities to pass resolutions asking the legislature and Gov. Scott to ban it statewide.  To date, 36 municipalities have passed bans, including Fernandina Beach and St. Augustine.  The group has met with public officials in Atlantic Beach, Neptune Beach, and Nassau County.  St. Johns County Commissioners will vote September 1.

During the last legislative session ending in May, bills both for and against fracking were proposed.  Two bills supporting fracking that were introduced by Republican legislators in both the state House and Senate were model legislation crafted for the oil and gas industry by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization that supports free market enterprise and limited government regulation. ALEC has created model legislation for initiatives covering everything from healthcare to privatizing schools and prisons to fracking. Critics said the ALEC legislation gave cover to companies that would inject dangerous chemicals underground by keeping information on the chemicals used in fracking from the public.

The first bill required companies to list the chemicals used in their oil extraction operations on an industry paid for and maintained site, FracFocus.

But what was described as a way to monitor chemical use allowed a murky loophole in reporting for trade secrets. A study of the site by Harvard University Law School concluded it produced delays in disclosure and allowed companies to assert disclosure exemptions without a consistent standard defining a trade secret.  The study can be found here: http://bit.ly/1UmoX22

The second bill ALEC recommended exempted companies from disclosing chemicals used in their oil extraction techniques under Florida public records laws as trade secrets.

Both bills faltered when the session ended early, but are expected to be brought back in next year’s session.

Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) spokesperson Dee Ann Miller said the regulatory agency allows fracking as a technique to increase production of an existing well.  Companies are required to notify the agency who will review the plans.

History

The Humble Oil and Refining Company struck oil in Florida in a well in Collier County in 1943. The company won a $50,000 prize offered by the Florida Legislature in 1941. Since then, thousands of wells have been drilled in Florida. Indeed, a map on the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s website of permitted wells seems to cover every inch of Florida like in sheath of polka dots. Most of the oil produced in the state has been drawn from an ancient reef system that is more than 100 million years old in South Florida from the Big Cypress Swamp to the edges of the Everglades National Park. The other major oil pocket was discovered in 1970 that’s part of an ancient tidal shoal Northwest Florida in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties that dates to the Jurassic era.

Production in wells in those two regions peaked in 1978 when 47 million barrels a day was extracted from the wells. By 1988, production had declined sharply to just 7.7 million barrels a day.

Newer oil extraction methods might reinvigorate Florida’s oil and gas industry. Although the FDEP says Florida does not have the right geology for hydraulic fracturing, it was used twice in Northwest Florida in 2003. And in 2013, a Texas oil company used acid fracturing in a well in Collier County.

In hydraulic fracturing, a mix of water, sand and chemicals is shot into fissures in tightly packed sand and shale underground to force out the oil deposits there. In acid fracturing, corrosive chemicals are used to erode and crumble up limestone and other carbonate rocks to suck out oil and gas deposits.

The industry claims fracking chemicals are kept well away from drinking water, but opponents fear the chemicals can leak from faulty pipes or can migrate through the porous limestone and leach into the water supply.

“We know that elected officials from urban and rural, conservative and liberal, as well as small and big cities have already expressed great concerns about the harmful consequences that fracking would have in the Sunshine State,” said Jorge Aguilar, southern regional director of Food & Water Watch and a member of Floridians Against Fracking, in a press statement during the last session. “State legislators need to address this issue head on by supporting a ban on fracking altogether.”

Legislators have already begun drafting bills for the next session and will hold committee meetings throughout the fall.  The next legislative session is in March and April of 2016.

 

Susan Cooper Eastman has covered the environment, criminal justice and other stories in Northeast Florida for 10 years.  Prior to that, she wrote longform enterprise and investigative stories for alternative newspapers in South Florida and in the Tampa Bay area.  Eastman was recently awarded 1st Place in Investigative Reporting and 2nd Place in Longform News by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.