ExxonMobil Got Congress to Trade Arms for Offshore Gas
By: Steve Horn and Lee Fang | February 6, 2020

In collaboration with:


MQ-9 Reaper in flight. Image Courtesy of U.S. Air Force

In a bitterly divided Congress, lawmakers still managed to come together to help ExxonMobil pass major legislation that could remake the geopolitics of the Middle East and Europe.

During the holiday season legislative blitz in December, legislators tucked an obscure provision into the omnibus spending package that lifted arms restrictions and boosted a controversial pipeline deal in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

The omnibus includes provisions from the Eastern Mediterranean Security and Energy Partnership Act, legislation introduced in the House and Senate last year. It promises a range of U.S. assistance for the development of natural gas resources off the coasts of Israel and Cyprus, including support for constructing pipelines and liquified natural gas terminals and the creation of a United States-Eastern Mediterranean Energy Center in the region run by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Cyprus, one of the smallest states in the European Union, has come under increasing pressure from Turkey, which opposes the development of new gas fields off the disputed coasts of the island state and has used its navy to threaten drilling vessels.

In response, the legislative text also repeals the prohibition of weapons transfers to Cyprus put in place in 1987, promotes greater U.S. military assistance to Greece and Cyprus, and instructs the U.S. to maintain its newly situated predator drone fleet in the region.

While the provision received scant coverage in American media, its passage prompted a flurry of activity.

On January 2, leaders of Israel, Greece, and Cyprus appeared together to sign a trilateral deal to build a new $6.7 billion pipeline to bring gas from offshore fields in Israel and Cyprus to Greece, Italy, and Bulgaria. The new EastMed pipeline could transport as much as 20 billion cubic meters of gas to those countries annually, pitched as a way to lessen Russian and Turkish energy influence in the region. Days later, Russia and Turkey announced plans for their own joint venture, the TurkStream Pipeline.

The authorization of the military assistance and pipeline support never received a single hearing, an up or down vote, or any open debate. Its inclusion in the must-pass spending package reflects the powerful lobbying coalition that came together in support of the deal.

That coalition included foreign agents tied to both Greece and Cyprus, the American Jewish Committee, and Christians United for Israel, an evangelical group with close ties to Israel. Greek-American diaspora groups also mobilized to lobby for the legislation. Hellenic American Leadership Council, one Greek American group, touted the passage of the text as the “most pro-Hellenic bill in a generation.”

But disclosure documents reviewed by The Real News and The Intercept suggest that ExxonMobil was at the center of the lobbying effort. The energy giant curried favor to win support for the gas project within the European Union, as well as in Washington, D.C.

The rapid political moves on Capitol Hill came just months after ExxonMobil announced one of the largest gas field discoveries in recent years off the coast of Cyprus in February of 2019—the latest in a series of new discoveries in the region over the past decade.

In 2013, the Hudson Institute was the first major Beltway institution to call for the U.S. to provide military assistance to Cyprus and to promote the development of the new gas discoveries in the region. The following year, the Hudson Institute published a follow-up long report on the issue, after which ExxonMobil disclosed a donation of $15,000 to the think tank. Seth Cropsey, a senior Pentagon official for the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, served as the lead author of both reports.

The new gas discoveries prompted growing coordination between Israel, Greece, and Cyprus.

“We decided to explore this in a very audacious way: to form a trilateral committee between Greece, Cyprus and Israel, to plan the possibility of a pipeline that would take our common resources of gas and export them to Europe via Greece—a pipeline from Israel, Cyprus through Greece to Europe,” Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a press conference in 2016.

Also in 2016, ExxonMobil and Qatar Petroleum formed a new venture and won a bid to explore offshore blocks near Cyprus. The contract was later inked in a 2017 ceremony in Cyprus, with officials from both companies present, alongside both the U.S. Ambassador and Qatari Ambassador to Cyprus.

“ExxonMobil and our partner, Qatar Petroleum, have a long and successful history of developing gas resources,” said Andrew Swiger, principal foreign officer for ExxonMobil, in a press release at the time of winning the bid.

Lobbying disclosures in the European Union show that ExxonMobil officials quickly went to work, scheduling meetings in March 2018 with an unnamed EU cabinet member on gas exploration near Cyprus. Just three days later, the U.S. military brought the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit to Limassol, Cyprus on the USS Iwo Jima as ExxonMobil commenced exploratory drilling in the region.
Speaking with investors later that year, the company boasted about the Cyprus gas fields as a key area of growth. Asked by analysts about where ExxonMobil sees its greatest future prospects, Neil Chapman, ExxonMobil’s senior vice president, said he “would highlight Cyprus.” Last year, in another conference call with investors, Chapman emphasized that the Cyprus fields “turned out to be a pretty nice discovery.”

The EUobserver, a watchdog media outlet, obtained an email showing that ExxonMobil hosted a lunch in April 2018 with Cypriot MEPs, Cyprus’s highest EU diplomat, and EU commissioner Christos Stylianides, to discuss the company’s gas exploration of the Cyprus coast. The lunch took place at a restaurant located close to the U.S. Embassy in Brussels, Belgium.

In October 2018, the company also served as the lead sponsor of a gala held in Greece at the largest business convention in southeast Europe. In a photo published by the U.S. Embassy in Cyprus, U.S. Ambassador to Cyprus Kathleen Doherty is seen alongside ExxonMobil executives.

Ambassador Doherty with ExxonMobil Officials and Cyprus delegation members at the Gala Reception for USA Honored Nation September 7.

Left to Right: Tristan Aspray, Vice President, Europe / Russia / Caspian, ExxonMobil Exploration Company, Nicos Philippou Noricum Trade & Investments and AmCham Board Member, Michalis Michael, Chairman, Board of Directors, Invest Cyprus, U.S. Ambassador to Cyprus, Kathleen Doherty, Jay Jackson, Exploration Manager, Exxon Mobil International Ltd.

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Exxon is also active within AmCham Cyprus, a global offshoot of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that receives financial backing from the U.S. Embassy in Cyprus. The company’s office in Cyprus is located next door to the Embassy.

Varnavas Theodossiou, lead country manager for the company in Cyprus, sits on the board of directors for AmCham Cyprus. Praising ExxonMobil by name for its efforts in the region, U.S. Ambassador to Cyprus Judith Garber gave a speech to the AmCham Cyprus this past September.

“We are proud that two American companies—ExxonMobil and Noble Energy—are participating in this game-changing development,” said Garber, according to a transcript of her remarks.

As the corporation—dubbed a “private empire” by investigative journalist Steve Coll—moved to shore up EU support for the deal, the U.S. also brokered a political agreement.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, last March, convened a meeting in Jerusalem with officials from Israel, Greece, and Cyprus to “affirm their shared commitment to promoting peace, stability, security, and prosperity in the Eastern Mediterranean region.” The State Department’s press release from the event noted that the leaders at the meeting “welcomed the recent natural gas finds in the Eastern Mediterranean and its potential to contribute to energy security and diversification.”

The month after the Jerusalem meeting, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., introduced the Eastern Mediterranean Security and Energy Partnership Act. Menendez, according to Senate expense filings, traveled to Athens shortly after introducing the legislation to discuss the idea with Greek and Cypriot officials.

The public disclosures only show part of the story. Over the following months, ExxonMobil, Christians United for Israel, the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association, and American Jewish Committee mounted a sustained lobbying campaign with officials over the bill (which later became the provision included in the omnibus spending package).

The American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association spent $15,000 during the second half of 2019 lobbying for the legislation, and for another bill which would prevent the U.S. Department of Defense from sending arms to Turkey. The AJC spent $30,000 lobbying for it and two other issues during the third quarter of 2019 alone. And CUFI, for its part, spent $90,000 lobbying for the legislation and other bills during the second half of the year. The group says in its fourth quarter filing that it pushed to get the legislation inserted into the budget bill.

The coalition’s lobbying campaign called for the United States to lift the arms embargo on exports to Cyprus, which began in 1987 after a sustained lobbying campaign by the Turkish foreign agents in the United States, known as one of the most robust foreign lobbying presences in Washington. Cyprus was divided following the Turkish occupation of the island in 1974 in response to a military coup engineered by the Greek government. The Turkish government calls its occupied territory the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which is not internationally recognized.

The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus lobbied against the legislation, according to foreign agency lobbying documents, hiring the firm Prime Policy Group to act on its behalf. Prime Policy Group is the successor to Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, a firm that was the namesake of two allies of President Donald Trump, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone.

Despite that opposition, the mix of foreign, pro-Israel, and energy lobbying prevailed. Without debate over either the wisdom of lifting the arms embargo or the exclusionary development of Cyprus gas fields in the hands of a few regional governments, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.—citing the bill’s bipartisan support—signaled approval for the vast majority of it to be included in the spending bill. (The spending bill removed language denouncing Russia’s arming Turkey with an S-400 fighter missile defense system in July 2019.)

Concerns about the climate crisis and methane emissions associated with offshore gas drilling, too, went undiscussed. Methane is a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide when emitted.

Pompeo was scheduled to appear in Cyprus to celebrate the signing of the omnibus bill, which boosted the new pipeline deal and the lifted of the arms embargo. The trip, however, was canceled because of the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani.

Sen. Menendez then met with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on January 8, the day after Mitsotakis met with President Donald Trump, with Menendez presenting him with a copy of the legislation for a photo opportunity. The senator received $36,500 in defense industry political action committee campaign contributions during his successful 2018 re-election bid cycle, garnering more than $10,000 in campaign contributions from General Atomics, producer of the MQ-9 drones that will continue to be stationed at the military base in Greece under the legislation’s dictates.

For his part, Sen. Rubio received $17,951 in campaign contributions from ExxonMobil during his 2016 re-election bid and another $27,900 from General Atomics during that same cycle. Neither Menendez nor Rubio responded to repeated requests for comment for this story.

Belén Balanyá, a researcher and campaigner for the group Corporate Europe Observatory, said the passage of this bill symbolizes the clout the ExxonMobil has within the European Union political process.

“ExxonMobil’s lobbying, direct and in association with other dirty fossil fuel companies and their huge web of lobby groups, has helped lock the EU into fossil-fuel dependency for another 30 years,” Balanyá said via email. “That’s why we have launched together with other groups the Fossil Free Politics campaign, where, similar to existing restrictions on tobacco industry lobbyists, we demand a firewall between decision makers and the fossil fuel lobby. Only then can we take the real action we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground.”

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Surviving the Onslaught of Fracking in Argentina

By: Nick Cunningham | February 26, 2020

LONG READ 

Marisol Sandoval, a resident of Sauzal Bonito. 

Photographer: Eduardo Carrera

AÑELO, Neuquén Province, Argentina—With each new tremor felt in the tiny village of Sauzal Bonito, the old adobe houses rattle, creating new cracks in walls and floors. Although a chronic sense of anxiety looms, Marisol Sandoval and her neighbors have grown accustomed to this frightening increase in earthquakes over the past few years. The increase correlates, according to residents and academics, with the arrival of the drilling rigs.

“The ones who are afraid are the children. They do get scared,” Sandoval said. “If it’s strong, they know that they need to get out of the house.”

The children may have learned what to do, but in the moment they panic, cry, and freeze up. Sandoval said that sometimes the earthquakes are short, other times longer. The ferocity of the shaking also varies, but when the trembling starts, they don’t know how strong the quake will be, or how long it will last.

The pile of rubble where a house once stood in the middle of the village offers a grim reminder of the danger.

A house in Sauzal Bonito, destroyed by an 

earthquake. Photographer: Nick Cunningham

People born and raised in the village say they never experienced an earthquake prior to 2015. What they say is backed up by seismic monitoring, which also shows a recent alarming increase in earthquakes. “It’s been three years of movements,” said Sandoval.

Many companies had begun initial drilling in the area. But the Argentine government, under former Presidents Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Mauricio Macri, offered heavy subsidies to oil and gas companies, triggering a fracking frenzy beginning in 2017.

Sauzal Bonito and its residents are the ones experiencing the fallout of the fracking boom.

As 2020 begins, Argentina’s new president is trying to pull his country out of an economic crisis. Like his predecessors, President Alberto Fernández has positioned fracking as pivotal to the recovery. He is preparing a new incentive package for drillers in the Vaca Muerta, Argentina’s enormous shale formation. But as President Fernández seeks to attract more foreign investment, the people living closest to the drilling rigs are already paying the price for the industry’s growth.

A drilling rig in Neuquen Province. Photographer: Nick Cunningham

Argentina’s fracking rush goes back to a 2013 deal between Chevron and YPF (the Argentine state-backed oil company) which paved the way for large-scale drilling at the Loma Camapana field in the province of Neuquén. The deal set off a protracted fight with indigenous communities that call this part of Northern Patagonia home.

Also that year, the Mapuche Confederation of Neuquén, an organization of various Mapuche communities in the province, hosted a seminar at the National University of Comahue in the city of Neuquén for indigenous peoples from all over South America. At that meeting, representatives of the Sarayaku people from Ecuador warned the gathering about Chevron, the American oil giant. Amazonian indigenous communities in Ecuador fought Chevron for years in drawn-out legal proceedings over contamination from Chevron’s oil operations.

“Here we signed a pact of brotherhood and struggle against Chevron,” said Jorge Nahuel, a coordinator and speaker for the Mapuche Confederation of Neuquén, referring to the 2013 seminar. “If Chevron now wanted to come to Argentina, it would not be allowed to come, and if it did, it would be seized and it would have to pay the appropriate fine.”

Jorge Nahuel, a coordinator and speaker for the Mapuche Confederation of Neuquén. Photographer: Eduardo Carrera

As the seminar wrapped up, the Mapuche community of Campo Maripe spoke up, and said that they had already received pamphlets from YPF and Chevron notifying residents that the companies would begin drilling. “We come to denounce what is happening in our territory,” members of Campo Maripe said at the time. The Campo Maripe’s territory just so happened to be where the Loma Campana field was located—the main target for YPF and Chevron in Argentina.

The Campo Maripe lived on their lands long before Neuquén became a province in the 1950s, and long before the arrival of the oil companies. But YPF and the provincial government have disputed that fact, citing the lack of official land titles.

Large-scale drilling required evicting the Mapuche from parts of their land. In response, in July 2013, the Mapuche staged a symbolic protest, occupying a fracking site and planting the Mapuche flag on top of a drilling rig.

A month later, the provincial government in Neuquén prepared to approve the YPF-Chevron deal. The Mapuche staged a major protest in front of the legislature, and environmental groups, students, academics, progressive political parties, and others worried about the impacts of fracking joined them.

In response, the police violently cracked down, shooting rubber bullets and tear gas.

Hours later, the legislature approved the deal. “It was very clear that they didn’t care about legislating against their own people,” Nahuel said. “So that’s how the relationship between the Mapuche community and Vaca Muerta began: with bullets.”

Since then, the various Mapuche communities, especially Campo Maripe, have tried to resist, occasionally blocking roads to drilling operations. But the provincial government and the oil companies have pressed on. “The main problem for Campo Maripe is not fracking, it is land ownership,” Nahuel said. He argues that the Argentine government slow-walks negotiations over land in order to keep the Mapuche in a permanent state of “legal insecurity.”

The battle for control over land is decades old, but the Argentine state’s desire to ramp up fracking in the area has magnified this conflict. “The land problem has never been resolved,” Nahuel said.

Convoys of trucks moving between drilling sites. Photographer:

 Eduardo Carrera

Earthquakes Rattle Neuquén

The fallout from fracking is not isolated to Mapuche lands. With each passing year, the drilling has intensified—and so have the earthquakes in Sauzal Bonito.

In 2018, Marisol Sandoval and a group of neighbors took their complaints in person to YPF in Neuquén, a two-hour drive away. Hoping for some sort of response to the earthquakes, they instead got the runaround, Sandoval said. A YPF representative told them that the relevant staff person at the company was not there, but would follow up with a visit. A year passed, but nobody from YPF ever came or offered any response.

“It feels bad because we’re, I don’t know, in an oil zone and we wanted at least a chat with the town so that they could give us a little peace,” Sandoval said.

She hoped YPF would reassure her that the drilling was unrelated to the earthquakes. The silence has only fed anxiety and suspicion. YPF did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.

“There’s no other record in the country of activation of a sector like this, like Sauzal Bonito,” said Javier Grosso, a geographer at the National University of Comahue in Neuquén. Seismic monitoring in Argentina registered one earthquake in 2015, but that number shot up to 30 in 2019. More sophisticated seismic monitoring in Chile registered 80 earthquakes in the area around Sauzal Bonito for 2019.

A 10-minute drive away, the Mapuche community of Lof Wirkalew has had a similar experience. Cracks stretch across the floors and walls of several of their homes like spiderwebs, and thick black smoke from a gas flare across the Neuquén River is visible from their farm.

Cracked floors in the house of the Lof Wirkalew 

Mapuche community from an earthquake. Photographer: Eduardo Carrera

A gas flare as scene from the farm of the

 Lof Wirkalew Mapuche community. 

Photographer: Eduardo Carrera

Making a definitive link between the arrival of the oil and gas industry and the emergence of powerful earthquakes is tricky, but the correlation is hard to ignore.

“This isn’t a theoretical supposition but is something that is obviously happening,” Grosso said, pointing to the cracks in the walls of a house in Sauzal Bonito. In the future, “They’re not going to remember these years as the years when the earth was calm.”

Javier Grosso, a geographer at the National 

University of Comahue, shows seismic maps

 to Marisol Sandoval. Photographer: Eduardo Carrera

The experience of earthquakes and fracking echoes peoples’ experiences in the United States. Oklahoma had a long-term average of less than 25 earthquakes with a magnitude of 3.0 or greater per year. That changed when the drilling began to accelerate in the 2010s. The state experienced more than 1,000 such earthquakes in 2015. But fracking itself is not causing the earthquakes. After a well is fracked, enormous volumes of water come back up out of the ground, and drillers reinject that water into much deeper ‘disposal wells.’ It is these wells that increase the likelihood that fault lines ‘slip,’ triggering an earthquake.

As the number of fracked wells in Vaca Muerta multiplies, so does the rate of wastewater injection. The volume of water injected into disposal wells has surged tenfold, from around 18,000 cubic meters in 2013 to more than 180,000 cubic meters in 2018, according to data from the government of Neuquén.

The lack of response from the oil companies, as well as provincial authorities, frustrates the residents of Sauzal Bonito. The Argentine government considers fracking in the Vaca Muerta as a national priority, a source of economic salvation at a time of crisis. The companies themselves are powerful, but government officials at both the provincial and national level also have a lot at stake in accelerating the fracking industry’s growth.

“Every time that we want to ask something about Vaca Muerta, nobody has any information, so something must be going on,” Grosso said.

Living in the Industry’s Shadow

Argentina has the fourth largest shale oil reserves in the world and the second largest shale gas reserves, according to the US Energy Information Administration. The Vaca Muerta is the only shale formation outside of North America that “has already made the transition from exploration to full-scale development,” according to Rystad Energy, a Norwegian data firm.

The Loma Campana field is the flagship project for the Vaca Muerta, and has quickly become one of the country’s most important oil operations. But, in addition to earthquakes, living in the industry’s shadow carries an array of risks. A few miles outside of the boomtown of Añelo, where dust and trucks clog the main street, the Mapuche community of Campo Maripe carries on, weathering the onslaught of drilling. As of late 2019, several drilling rigs sit a short drive up a hill from their farm.

Celinda Campo Maripe said her community has suffered from a variety of new health ailments, including allergies, skin rashes, and respiratory problems.

“And the treatments are very expensive, and health insurance doesn’t cover it. It’s expensive to just do the allergy tests. It can cost 4,000 pesos to do the test where they prick your arm,” she said. The Campo Maripe say their farm animals were born with deformities and they can no longer graze them in open fields. Unusual cases of cancer have also cropped up.

They stopped drinking water from the tap, and are forced to buy bottled water at great expense. “We used it to bathe ourselves and other things, but we all buy mineral water to drink,” said Lorena Bravo, another member of Campo Maripe.

Members of the Campo Maripe community 

on their farm. Photographer: Eduardo Carrera

The Mapuche have long fought against conventional oil and gas drilling, making the latest chapter especially demoralizing for them. Oil extraction in the province of Neuquén dates back to the early 20th century, but old conventional fields began declining in the early 2000s.

“We used to say, ‘Okay, we have a decade of struggle left and the oil will be gone, and we’ll see how we can get these criminals to pay for or repair all the damage they have caused,’” said Jorge Nahuel of the Mapuche Confederation. “When fracking appeared, it was like an extra twist to everything that had happened before.”

Along with the proliferation of drilling rigs, security and surveillance has also increased. Private security checkpoints have sprung up around fracking operations—not just on the drilling sites themselves, but also on public roads nearby. Cameras monitor the well pads. If someone approaches a site, they are immediately questioned by security guards.

“These are all intimidation actions so that we do not get involved with the issue,” said Lorena Riffo, a researcher and teacher in the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences at the National University of Comahue.

Over the course of several days in the heart of the Vaca Muerta last November, I passed through several checkpoints manned by private security guards hired by oil companies. Fortunately, I was with an activist from Neuquén who was very familiar with the area. We passed through without incident. However, I also traveled with a photographer, who at one point was stopped by security guards after taking pictures of a drilling rig from a public road. They aggressively questioned him for 20 minutes before letting him go.

In September 2019, the attack on the Saudi oil facility in Abqaiq rattled global oil markets. In response, the Argentine government used the event as a justification to expand the jurisdiction of the National Gendarmerie to cover the Vaca Muerta shale. Ostensibly, the expansion of the military police’s purview was intended to protect the “vital economic interest” of drilling operations against potential threats.

However, some saw a creeping securitization of the Vaca Muerta. The head of the oil workers union suspected the federal government wanted to suppress labor conflicts. But the Mapuche see ulterior motives as well.

The decision to extend the reach of the military police “is a way to intimidate the Mapuche people who are claiming for ancestral rights to the lands that are part of the Vaca Muerta formation. In this way, [the government] considers a demand for indigenous territories to be a security problem,” Lorena Riffo said. “In recent years, social, environmental, human rights have been eroded, but in a subtle way. You can only recognize them when you connect the different isolated events.” The Mapuche are routinely depicted as violent, lawless criminals in the Argentine press because of their opposition to fracking and because of their broader fight for recognition.

But the conflict is not exactly new. “What is happening with Vaca Muerta today is a long-standing project. What is the role of Patagonia in the economic development of Argentina?” Riffo continued.

Neuquén has supplied raw materials for the rest of the country since the foundation of the province, and ultimately since the Argentine state conquered the territory in the 19th century. The role of resource extraction continues today, but Neuquén is increasingly orienting its shipments to international markets. The whole premise of fracking in Argentina is to export oil and gas abroad, with a particular eye on Asia. Local communities in Neuquén, such as the Mapuche and the residents of Sauzal Bonito, do not stand to benefit.

In 2018, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recommended that Argentina “reconsider” its large-scale fracking campaign in the Vaca Muerta, citing concerns about climate change and human rights violations, including the eviction of indigenous communities from their ancestral lands.

“Vaca Muerta is a symbol of violence, because when the land is polluted, Mapuche community life is polluted and broken,” Jorge Nahuel said. “There is no doubt that Vaca Muerta is a real death threat.”

This reporting was made possible in part by funding from Periodistas por el Planeta.

Nick Cunningham is an independent journalist covering the oil and gas industry, climate change and international politics. He has been featured in Oilprice.com, DeSmog, The Fuse, YaleE360 and NACLA.

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https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/03/argentinas-fracking-boom-is-creating.html

Argentina’s Fracking Boom Is Creating Climate Justice Concerns

Big Oil hopes Argentina’s shale oil and gas boom can rival the United States’. Backed by US dollar diplomacy, the boom has come at the cost of climate change, ecological damage, and encroachment on indigenous land.

Story Transcript
This is a rush transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Greg Wolpert: It’s The Real News Network and I’m Greg Wolpert in Baltimore. 

The government of Argentina together with major transnational oil companies is working on a plan to double its production of oil and natural gas via hydraulic fracturing or fracking as it’s commonly known. The plan though has been running into trouble recently. This week on Wednesday, workers at a fracking sand production mine went on strike demanding a doubling of their wages. Also, the recently elected government of Alberta Fernandez introduced price freezes for fuel to help bring inflation under control, but this has affected investment in the fracking sector. Still, the project moves forward as the world’s second most important fracking effort after the United States. Argentina’s fracked oil and gas production raises series issues however, about the effect it will have on climate change and indigenous land just as it does in the United States. The Vaca Muerta Shale has attracted trans-national oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Francis, Total, Shell, and Chevron. Also, the Trump administration is supporting this project recently providing a $450 million loan via the US International Development Finance Corporation.

Joining me now to discuss Argentina’s fracking boom is Nick Cunningham. He’s a Portland, Oregon based independent reporter who recently returned from a week long reporting trip to Argentina. His investigation resulted in a series of articles, the third installment of which was written for The Real News Network and is titled Surviving the Onsite of Fracking in Argentina. Good to have you on Nick.

Nick Cunningham: Thanks for having me.

Greg Wolpert: So let’s start with some of the basic background information. Where is the Vaca Muerta Shale located in Argentina, and why has it emerged as a second most important commercially viable country in the world for fracking?

Nick Cunningham: Yeah, so the Vaca Muerta Shale formation, which is part of the Neuquén Basin, is located in sort of central Argentina, a little bit East of the Andes in a dry part of the country. It’s an arid step in northern Patagonia. And the reason it’s important is because the USEIA estimates that it has the second largest shale gas reserves in the world and the fourth largest shale oil reserves in the world. So after the United States, actually in terms of gas, it’s estimated to have more gas reserve than the United States. So the geologic potential is massive and the Argentine government wants to take advantage of that. And unlike some other countries, say China, which also has a lot of estimated shale reserves, the Argentine government is very actively courting multinational oil companies to come in and then to develop this. So it’s a little bit slow going, but in the last few years it’s sort of picked up momentum.

Greg Wolpert: Now, president Alberto Fernandez, who came to office in December specifically aimed to reverse many of the Neo liberal policies of his predecessor Mauricio Macri. Now, how does the Fernandez administration view this shale project and fracking as a policy matter?

Nick Cunningham: This is a good question, and in a lot of ways there’s continuity. Last year during the campaign, after Alberto Fernandez won in their version of a primary in August, and he was sort of the presumed president in waiting, there was big questions over what he was going to do with Vaca Muerta. And the industry was concerned that he was going to re intervene in the market which would sort of be bad for them. But he didn’t say much in the next few months. He made a couple of big statements about the state needed more control, but he didn’t say much. And as time went on and he won the presidency and he assumed office, it became clear that he very much wants this to happen. There’s going to be some nuance and some tweaking of the policy. But the Argentine government, now under Alberta Fernando still wants to develop fracking.

And so this is kind of interesting because in the English speaking press and English language press, it’s often framed as as the [inaudible 00:04:22] are sort of anti-market and Macri was very pro-market. But while there’s differences, and Alberto Fernandez wants a little bit more of a state role, they still promote extractive industries, and it’s just a little bit more of a state led approach. And so now he enters 2020 in the midst of an economic crisis and he’s positioning Vaca Muerta as a key part of the country’s economic revival.

Greg Wolpert: Now, your article for us focuses on the impact that fracking is having within indigenous communities in Argentina. Those include both the human rights impacts and also the potential impacts on drinking water as well as earthquakes. Tell us about that and also about who you talked to while you were there.

Nick Cunningham: Yeah, so the flagship oil field for Vaca Muerta and one of the most important oil fields at this point in South America is called Loma Campana. And it’s in the province of Neuquen, and it is a joint venture between YPF, which is the state-owned oil company, partially state-owned, and Chevron, the American oil giant. And so this Loma Campana field is located on ancestral lands for the Mapuche indigenous communities, particularly one community called Campo Maripe. They’ve lived there for decades, at least a century, but the state and the province dispute that fact saying that they don’t have land title. But obviously they were there before Neuquen was even a province.

Nevertheless, the Argentine states permitted this and approved it and YPF and Chevron proceeded and that required evicting Mapuche communities from this land. Now they still live, they’ve kind of been pushed to the side from this field and they live below the plateau, kind of in the industry shadow and there’s a lot of, a lot of negative outcomes from this.

I met with them and they said that they’ve had various health problems, respiratory problems, skin rashes, some cancers. There was one case of a kid, a child getting cancer. They had drinking water problems. They now have to buy water, which is a really hard, a big hardship for a community that doesn’t have a lot of money. Their animals have been sick, some are born with deformities and they can’t graze them as much anymore. And so moving in the industry shadow is very negative for them.

Now, a little bit further down the main highway, there’s another town called Sauzal Bonito. And this is a very small village and it’s sort of in the epicenter of a sudden wave of earthquakes. And I spoke with a geographer from the university there in Neuquen who said that there’s no precedent for earthquakes in this area. Since the onset of fracking, there has been a huge spike in earthquakes and particularly in the past year. And it’s not fracking per se that causes the earthquakes, it’s these disposal wells. When all this water comes out of the ground, they have to reinject that water back into the ground in deeper wells, and it’s these disposal wells that are thought to be causing some earthquakes.

And in this small town, some houses had some severe damage from earthquakes. I saw and took pictures of cracks in walls. And there’s one house that fell to the ground and I spoke with a woman who described living in fear because of this happenings. They wake up in the middle of their night and their children are crying and, and there are earthquakes rattling their houses. They’re old adobe houses, so she’s scared that they’re going to fall down, and one did. So the earthquakes is another problem in this area.

Greg Wolpert: Now, the second article in your series also highlighted the infrared camera shots that showed methane emissions in the Vaca Muerta Shale. What exactly are the risks that are associated with that and with climate change, especially considering that they’re ramping up drilling in this field? And what does the movement against this drilling in Argentina look like?

Nick Cunningham: The important context is that all the oil majors have sort of committed to the Paris Climate Agreement, at least extensively, I’m putting that in quotes, they’ve committed to the principles of the Paris Climate Agreement. Nevertheless, in the past two years, they spent at least $50 billion on new projects that are out of alignment with [inaudible 00:09:20] and that data comes from Carbon Tracker. And they have another trillion and a half dollars in the works on new oil and gas projects. So what does that mean? That means that they’re actively betting against or they’re assuming and betting against that the world would get serious about climate change. They’re very much invested in the world blowing past climate targets. Now, Argentina is one of these places that they are investing in. And Argentina, by all accounts is at the very early stages of this is fracking story.

The U S has been doing this for a decade and a half, and Argentina has been doing a lot of pilot projects and they’re only in the early stages of ramping up. So the oil majors involved in Argentina have no plans of slowing down. They plan to be there for decades and they plan to drill thousands of wells and essentially do what they did in the US. So this is a big climate problem because we already have… Some research suggests that all of the existing production is… We’ll use up the carbon budget and we essentially can’t be developing new frontiers for oil. And some of the activists that I spoke with referred to this as a carbon bomb. The amount of carbon that’s in the ground in Argentina. One study suggested that it’s equivalent to about 11% of the remaining carbon budget. And so the climate impacts are profound, but the story is not written yet. This is still early stages.

As far as the resistance to what’s going on there, it’s pretty weak to be honest. The national government, as I mentioned, is very much in support. The provincial government is very much in support. And Buenos Aires, which is very far from… They’re hundreds of miles away from where the joint is taking place. The press reports on Vaca Muerta in almost uniformly positive ways. And so there isn’t a big resistance in Buenos Aires where most of the population lives. So the resistance is really on the ground in Neuquen and Rio Negro provinces. It’s small, but it’s actually pretty interesting. Indigenous communities and [inaudible 00:11:47]communities work with environmentalists. They work with academics in the city of Neuquen, and there’s a lot of information sharing. I met a geographer who was in a town where all of those earthquakes were, explaining to the residents about the risks. So there is a small but a sort of a cross community movement to slow the industry’s advancement.

Greg Wolpert: Well, I certainly hope we can get your stories out, not only internationally, but also within Argentina, and maybe they can be translated so that people become more informed about this project. Because as you said, it seems like there’s very little information about this. But we’re going to leave it there for now and I encourage people to read your articles both in the DeSmogBlog and also on our website. I was speaking to Nick Cunningham, freelance journalist and author of the TRNN article, surviving the on start of fracking in Argentina. Thanks again, Nick for having joined us today.

Nick Cunningham: Thanks for having me.

Greg Wolpert: And thank you for joining The Real News Network.

EU Gives 32 Gas Permits as Study Says Methane Undercounted by 40%

Cheniere’s Sabine Pass LNG export facility in Cameron, LA. Roy Luck/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

By: Steve Horn | February 26, 2020

On Feb. 12, the European Parliament voted to provide what could amount to over $26 billion in financing to 32 different natural gas projects, a decision one climate advocacy group called “climate hypocrisy.” The decision came just a week before a new study published in the journal Nature concluded that accounting for global methane emissions from oil and gas drilling has been underestimated by a whopping 25-40%.

The list of natural gas projects is known as Projects of Common Interest (PCI), with many proposals set to import gas obtained from hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in the United States and move it to European Union markets. The Parliament weighed in 443 to 169 in favor of the plan, with 36 abstaining.

Energy projects on the PCI list are eligible to receive up to 50% of their financing from the Connecting Europe Facility.

“This climate hypocrisy has to end,” Colin Roche, an activist with Friends of the Earth Europe, said in a press release. “Following unprecedented disasters like Australia’s wildfires, history will look unkindly on those who today backed building more fossil fuel pipelines and terminals.”

Roche also called the prospect of the 32 new projects “incompatible” with the European Parliament’s Green New Deal. That Green New Deal however, explicitly includes natural gas as a bridge toward renewable energy.

Further, Roche called for a moratorium on EU taxpayer money going toward gas infrastructure. While the Parliament’s vote to approve the plan angered climate activists, the gas industry celebrated.

“The projects in question aim at completing the missing links in the regional infrastructure of Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe,” James Watson, Secretary General of the European Gas Industry Association, said in a press release. “These regions are the least developed when it comes to interconnecting the energy infrastructure of the EU Member States… This is an opportunity one should embrace with open arms.”

The vote came just two days after the U.S. Department of Energy authorized permits for four new Gulf of Mexico-based liquefied natural gas terminals set to export gas to the global market. The Trump Administration even pointed to the European markets as the destiny for the LNG in a press release announcing the permits.

“The Trump Administration recognizes the importance and increasing role U.S. natural gas has in the global energy landscape,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette said. “The export capacity of these four projects alone is enough LNG to supply over half of Europe’s LNG import demand. With today’s authorizations, we are paving the way for more U.S. natural gas exports to bring energy security and prosperity to our allies around the world.”

In December, Congress also tucked a provision into the budget bill to give $1 billion in subsidies for projects on the PCI list.

The European Commission PCI list approval comes two days after European Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly concluded that the environmental and climate assessment done by the European Commission on the PCI list was inadequate. O’Reilly, called for further study of the issues in response to a complaint made by an activist with the organization Food and Water Europe and asked for a response by the end of March.

That same day, the outlet EURACTIV also reported that the European Commission may soon launch “a strategy to curb methane emissions” through the office of Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson. That strategic plan may come out later this year, an anonymous source within the Energy Commissioner’s office told EURACTIV.

Methane is a greenhouse gas 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere, the key time period during which scientists say radical action must be taken on the climate crisis.

A January investigation by the business publication Bloomberg, doing an analysis of LNG projects approved during the tenure of President Donald Trump, concluded that the facilities could emit greenhouse gases equivalent to that of 24 coal-fired power plants per year. That’s more than the entire state of Kentucky’s coal power plant fleet.

“The emissions from these projects can’t be squared with the sorts of drastic, drastic reductions we need in order to avoid catastrophic climate change,” says Nathan Matthews, a senior Sierra Club attorney, told the publication.

Bloomberg’s reporting team does not account for the greenhouse gas costs of transporting the fracked gas from point A, the wellhead, and point Z, the LNG import facility somewhere on the other side of the world. The numbers also only accounted for 11 of the “freedom gas” terminals approved by Trump, with the tally now up to 15 after the Feb. 10 decision.


One project on the PCI list in particular, Shannon LNG, has attracted global attention from the likes of actor Mark Ruffalo, Pope Francis, and the singer Cher.

Shannon LNG is a subsidiary of New Fortress Energy, which is owned by Wes Edens, the owner of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team, USA Today and a major donor to the Democratic National Committee. Edens also sits on the Host Committee for the forthcoming Democratic National Committee in Milwaukee, where the victory of the party’s presidential primary race will receive the crown as the party’s nominee to occupy the White House.

The terminal aims to intake gas obtained from fracking in fields such as Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale basin. And much of that gas will be moved to its export terminal by rail on trains owned by Edens, which itself has attracted opposition among local activists.


On Feb. 5, Ruffalo spoke out against the PCI list before the European Parliament.

“It is going to be fracked gas taken from my community, it’s going to poison our people and it is the antithesis of moving forward with the European Green Deal,” Ruffalo told the Parliament. “And what I’m asking you to do…is to dump those projects, scrap them, and put that money into real renewable energy and clean energy projects.”

The PCI list also includes the EastMed Pipeline, slated to vacuum up gas drilled offshore from the eastern Mediterranean Sea and move it to Cyprus, through Greece and into Italy.

Climate advocates have expressed similar concerns about methane leakage for tapping into that offshore gas. One of the main companies which has lobbied in the United States and European Union for more access to the offshore reservoir is ExxonMobil.



Steve Horn is a San Diego, CA-based climate reporter and producer for The Real News Network. He has worked as a staff investigative reporter for the publications Prison Legal News and Criminal Legal News and works as the Escondido reporter for The Coast News Group’s Inland Edition in northern San Diego County. He worked from 2011-2018 as an investigative reporter for the…