The Future of Water excerpt from Maude Barlow's Blue Convenant

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt of Chapter 5 in Maude Barlow's latest book, Blue Covenant. She is touring with her book across the country; see Food and Water Watch for her full schedule.

The Future of Water

The three water crises – dwindling freshwater supplies, inequitable access to water and the corporate control of water – pose the greatest threat of our time to the planet and to our survival. Together with impending climate change from fossil fuel emissions, the water crises impose some life-or-death decisions on us all. Unless we collectively change our behavior, we are heading toward a world of deepening conflict and potential wars over the dwindling supplies of freshwater – between nations, between rich and poor, between the public and the private interest, between rural and urban populations, and between the competing needs of the natural world and industrialized humans.

Water Is Becoming a Growing Source of Conflict Between Countries

Around the world, more that 215 major rivers and 300 groundwater basins and aquifers are shared by two or more countries, creating tensions over ownership and use of the precious waters they contain. Growing shortages and unequal distribution of water are causing disagreements, sometimes violent, and becoming a security risk in many regions. Britain’s former defense secretary, John Reid, warns of coming “water wars.” In a public statement on the eve of a 2006 summit on climate change, Reid predicted that violence and political conflict would become more likely as watersheds turn to deserts, glaciers melt and water supplies are poisoned. He went so far as to say that the global water crisis was becoming a global security issue and that Britain’s armed forces should be prepared to tackle conflicts, including warfare, over dwindling water sources. “Such changes make the emergence of violent conflict more, rather than less, likely,” former British prime minister Tony Blair told The Independent. “The blunt truth is that the lack of water and agricultural land is a significant contributory factor to the tragic conflict we see unfolding in Darfur. We should see this as a warning sign.”

The Independent gave several other examples of regions of potential conflict. These include Israel, Jordan and Palestine, who all rely on the Jordan River, which is controlled by Israel; Turkey and Syria, where Turkish plans to build dams on the Euphrates River brought the country to the brink of war with Syria in 1998, and where Syria now accuses Turkey of deliberately meddling with its water supply; China and India, where the Brahmaputra River has caused tension between the two countries in the past, and where China’s proposal to divert the river is re-igniting the divisions; Angola, Botswana and Namibia, where disputes over the Okavango water basin that have flared in the past are now threatening to re-ignite as Namibia is proposing to build a threehundred- kilometer pipeline that will drain the delta; Ethiopia and Egypt, where population growth is threatening conflict along the Nile; and Bangladesh and India, where flooding in the Ganges caused by melting glaciers in the Himalayas is wreaking havoc in Bangladesh, leading to a rise in illegal, and unpopular, migration to India.

While not likely to lead to armed conflict, stresses are growing along the U.S.-Canadian border over shared boundary waters. In particular, concerns are growing over the future of the Great Lakes, whose waters are becoming increasingly polluted and whose water tables are being steadily drawn down by the huge buildup of population and industry around the basin. A joint commission set up to oversee these waters was recently bypassed by the governors of the American states bordering the Great Lakes, who passed an amendment to the treaty governing the lakes that allows for water diversions to new communities off the basin on the American side. Canadian protests fell on deaf ears in Washington. In 2006, the U.S. government announced plans to have the U.S. coast guard patrol the Great Lakes using machine guns mounted on their vessels and revealed that it had created thirty-four permanent live-fire training zones along the Great Lakes from where it had already conducted a number of automatic weapons drills due to fierce opposition, firing three thousand lead bullets each time into the lakes. The Bush administration has temporarily called off these drills but is clearly asserting U.S. authority over what has in the past been considered joint waters.

Similar trouble is brewing on the U.S.-Mexican border, where a private group of U.S.–based water rights holders is using the North American Free Trade Agreement to challenge the long-term practice by Mexican farmers to divert water from the Rio Grande before it reaches the United States.

High CO2 Levels Found on Farm Near Carbon Sequestration Site

This is a blog post by Matthew Green Re posted in entirety by Elaine Cimino

January 18, 2011

A family from Canada’s Saskatchewan Province has obtained the first evidence suggesting that CO2 pumped underground to capture greenhouse gases may not be as secure as fossil fuel industries have claimed.

In 2004, Cameron and Jane Kerr, long-time residents of Weyburn, in Canada’s Saskatchewan Province, began noticing bubbling water, unusual algae growth, rising gravel mounds, and dead animals in the once-clear ponds around the farm that has been in their family for generations.

The property sits atop a huge oil field. Over the last decade, millions of tons of compressed carbon dioxide from a U.S. coal plant have been pumped underground in a nearby site in a process called enhanced oil recovery, in which the gas is used to pressure underground oil reserves into surface wells. As part of a separate billion-dollar carbon capture and storage (CCS) pilot project, the gas is then sequestered in the depleted oil field, roughly a mile below the surface.

The effort – one of the largest CCS projects in the world – has also been seen as a test case for assessing its long-term potential as a tool for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and combating climate change. The practice is a key element in the effort to develop what’s become know as “clean coal” technology.

Following a series of loud blowouts that left holes in the side of a gravel pit, the Kerrs moved off their property in 2005 citing safety concerns, and have since contended that the unusual occurrences on their farm are the result of CO2 leaking to the surface from the nearby site. It’s a claim that’s been repeatedly denied by Cenovus Energy, the company that now runs the site (formerly operated by EnCana Corp.), and remains unsubstantiated by Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Energy and Resources.

On January 11, Petro-Find GeoChem, an independent testing group hired by the Kerrs and the nonprofit legal group EcoJustice to conduct geologic tests, released results showing unusually high levels of CO2 in certain locations around the property. According to the report, the highest measurement – at a spot roughly 300 meters from the Kerrs abandoned house – is more than double the level considered “immediately dangerous to life and health,” according to the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s exposure standards.

“The provenance or source of the high concentrations of CO2 in soils of the Kerr property is clearly the anthropogenic CO2 injected into the Weyburn Reservoir,” the report concludes.

The report theorizes that the gases may have leaked through fractures in the earth, or through any one of the multiple abandoned oil and gas wells. A further analysis by a research laboratory at the University of Saskatchewan indicates that the measured CO2 is not naturally occurring, and is similar in composition to that used at the storage sites, according to a statement by Ecojustice, the firm representing the Kerr family.

The findings come after years of wrangling with the oil company and the Saskatchewan Ministry of Energy and Resources. The agency eventually agreed, in 2007, to conduct an investigation. Its inquiry, however, captured on camera in the film Dirty Business, was limited to taking simple water and air samples on a single day in 2008, and did not include any testing for carbon dioxide. Contending that they found nothing alarming, the agency has since refused to conduct additional tests, according to Ecojustice. The Kerrs have indicated they intend to take legal action if Cenovus and the ministry refuse to a full public investigation of their property.

View a clip from Dirty Business, in which the Kerrs offer a tour of the areas on their farm they consider to be contaminated by carbon dioxide leakages:

“Cenovus Energy and the Saskatchewan Ministry of Energy and Resources failed to properly monitor and investigate the possibility of a CO2 leak during the last six years,” Barry Robinson, the Ecojustice lawyer advising the Kerrs, said in a prepared statement. “Furthermore, they left the Kerrs in the position of having to prove there was a problem when it was the ministry’s duty to investigate releases from oil and gas activities.”

Robinson added: “It’s clear that something is amiss here … Carbon capture and storage — especially as carried out on the Cenovus site — is not a risk-free silver bullet solution to combating greenhouse gas emissions.”

The study is not absolute proof that the gases are coming from the nearby storage site, but it does highlight the need to further investigate the issue, Robinson told the Fast Forward Weekly, a Calgary newspaper.

Cenovus has hired external consultants to review the results, but maintains that the gas was injected nearly a mile from the Kerrs property, making the likelihood of it travelling such a distance slim. A statement on the company’s website references a report by the International Energy Agency: “The report concludes that the CO2 at Weyburn, which is injected nearly 1.5 km underground and is covered by several layers of cap rock, will remain underground.”

A number of scientists from institutions in Canada and the U.S. have also questioned the study, citing multiple earlier soil analyses of the storage site that found little evidence of leakage. In one critique, Dr. Julio Friedmann, a carbon specialist at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California, argues that the occurrences on the Kerrs’ land are not anomalies at all, but the result of natural CO2 concentrations comparable to samples taken from the soil above and around the Weyburn site before the gas injection. He also notes that the fertilizer used on the Kerrs fields can change the concentration of soil carbon.

“The science of the report does not unequivocally demonstrate that Weyburn has leaked CO2. It certainly does not prove that the sealing rock failed,” said Friedmann. “Mostly I’m appalled at the rush to conclusion by some – the science in the report is equivocal at best, and appears to ignore much of the 10 years of scientific work done to monitor soil gases there.”

In the film Dirty Business, in which the Kerrs are featured, journalist Jeff Goodell explains that the CO2 buried at the Weyburn site is pumped across the border, from a North Dakota coal plant more than 200 miles away. Since 1998, he notes, Canadians have been purchasing more than 5,000 tons of compressed CO2 every day for enhanced oil recovery and storing some of the CO2 in the depleted oil fields.

“I think (the Kerrs) are guinea pigs. I think that they’re the first people who are actually living above a giant pool of CO2,” says Goodell. “This is the beginning of the shape of things to come. If we’re going to be burying a lot of CO2, we’re going to have a lot of people living above it, and we’re going to have a lot of people asking questions.

Environmental Crimes Against Water

Environmental Crimes Against Water and the People in Albuquerque NM Complaint

This is a citizens complaint against the Kirkland Air Force Base (KAFB), for “knowing endangerment” under the statutes of RCRA, CWA, SDWA and CAA; that there are violations of statutes and egregious environmental crimes committed; that both of these entities have waited seven years, until 2007, before a perfunctory mitigation was started with KAFB erroneously putting in the monitoring well that were sure to give unreliable information by positioning wells outside of the path of the migrating plume. In 2010, the data is still old and unreliable.

There is no reliable data on this problem to this date.

For 10 years and after repeated requests to the US Air Force at KAFB, NNMENV failed to follow through with enforcement procedures. They failed to file the appropriate charges against the US Air Force for these egregious environmental crimes of contaminating the drinking water of the citizens and residents of Albuquerque New Mexico, in which over 80% of the drinking comes from groundwater with several thousand people receiving water from the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Utility Water Authority (ABCUWA) distribution system. Only after seven years did NMNV file for a consent order.

Both KAFB and NMENV knowingly endangered the general public by not acting in the best interest of the people and not following the correct procedures by allowing 7 years to elapse, that they hoped that the contaminants would naturally attenuate. They put the public drinking water in eminent danger by not monitoring, testing, sampling and issuing the proper warnings to the public regarding the condition of the aquifer and possible pollutants in the water or issuing the possible health warnings, knowing that 8 M gallons of jet fuel has permanently damaged the aquifer and caused great harm to the people of the State of New Mexico. This is close to the size of the Exxon Valdez Spill and equivalent to 17 olympic-size swimming pools filled with jet fuel.

Recently water a soil samples have tested positive for EDB which put lead in gasoline. This means that the seepage has been going on since 1970's.

In 2000, it was found that jet fuel that seeped into the aquifer. Currently, it is believed that the plume has migrated under the homes of people living within a 1 mile of the base. There has been inadequate testing in this area.

The problem is impacted by the pumping of the ABCUWA drinking water system, which a cone of depression that may be drawing contaminants into these wells. The County, while only recently started drawing water from the Rio Grande, it depends on ground water wells for the over 70% of the drinking water sent to ratepayers from the Ridge Crest Wells. ABCUWA has cut production of the Ridge Crest Well field in half, down to 5100 afy. Thus, the NMENV and KAFB is shifting the economic burden of clean up on to the public and serious health effects onto the unborn, children, elderly and women that are pregnant from NMENV intending to only require that KAFB treat water only to the MCL’s, if they can, which are known to be problematic for this sector of the population.

There was no formal investigation that determined the spill as being accidental, after the fact that possibly over 8 million gallons of jet fuel is floating the aquifer this very day nor has it been investigated. The current jet fuel storage tanks are scheduled to be torn out so far 3 leaks have been found; KAFB virtually did nothing, knowingly.

There has not been a proper independent investigation of this issue outside of the US Air Force investigating itself, which is the polluter in this case. It is an ethical and moral violation that taints the perception of integrity for the KAFB or government contractors to be in charge of sampling their own contaminants. This does not evoke public trust in this situation. There should be an independent lab processing that should be taking water samples and NMED should be able to mandate KAFB to pay for this testing.

During the past 10 years the United States Air Force has dragged its feet.

Evading mitigation by only doing what it felt like doing about the clean up. Any type of mitigation that was offered was not enough to aggressively monitor and protect the general public from ground water/drinking water pollution or polluting the ground drinking water source. It was not until 2007 that the Air Force put in a water-monitoring well. This well has unreliable data and was not in the direct path of the pollution migration. This was done so it would not show liability of KAFB.

There were other jet fuel source points, which no entity has taken the proper steps to mitigate the pollution flowing from the Base to provide adequate protection the population of the Albuquerque. Even requests to KAFB from NMENV have gone unanswered.

Furthermore, the mitigation steps that have been taken, such as SVE, have air emissions that are not being tested, and are adding to the emission of GHG’s and other toxins. Nor has there been any mitigation of the Pump and Treat injection plume into the aquifer that would further exacerbate the jet fuel by mixing through turbulence, dispersing the fuel to a wider area and further impacting the baseline of the water quality.

The US Federal Prosecutor should be called in to demonstrate that the defendant(s) was aware of the leaks and spills for over 10 years, was knowingly a repetitive offender and that KAFB had been given and should have been given mandatory deadlines and sued to pay fines for their egregious crimes against the people in both civil and criminal court.

The aquifer is permanently damaged by Kirkland Air Force Base; that 25 years of mitigation will not be able to clean up this egregious crime.

The US Air Force has a behavioral M.O. of “hit and run” it is what they do best and the new performance based contract has elements of that, with Shaw Environmental (a new government contractor for the US Air Force) will have a tendency to cut corners on the plan and cut proper clean up of the area in order to cash in on incentives “to get the job done.” Furthermore, there is no independent oversight that the monitoring wells screens will be installed correctly or that Shaw will tear down old storage tanks before proper they can be investigated that that samples of soil and ground water underneath them can be tested independently. They should not be allowed to test themselves it is unethical and immoral when considering the magnitude of the crime that has been committed.

In order to assure that the people will not be further impacted by a botched investigation and egregious crimes against the right nature, to clean water and the human right to clean water. We, the citizens, grassroots groups and NGO’s undersigned, request that Environmental Protection Agency request that the US Department of Justice and Albuquerque Federal Prosecutor investigate the allegations of the crimes of KAFB that have been laid before the agency and prosecute them to the full extent of the law. Kirkland Air Force Base should not be allowed to operate as they proved to be a criminal in their intent to the people of New Mexico.

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Elaine Cimino Thirsty for Change blog gives insights into water issues inthe face of climate change.