Disturbing.

Sara

----- Forwarded message from swil...@earthworksaction.org -----
    Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2012 16:56:03 -0500
    From: Sharon Wilson <swil...@earthworksaction.org>
Reply-To: Sharon Wilson <swil...@earthworksaction.org>
 Subject: [COG] Fracking and academic freedom
      To: c...@lists.earthworksaction.org

http://www.boulderweekly.com/article-9467-fracking-and-academic-freed...

Fired researcher paints pattern of pressure from oil and gas industryBy
Jefferson Dodge <http://www.boulderweekly.com/by-author-566-1.html>
 <http://www.boulderweekly.com/imgs/hed/art9467widea.jpg>
Geoffrey Thyne

A former researcher who says he left the Colorado School of Mines due to
pressure from the oil and gas industry has now lost his university job in
Wyoming after an industry association complained to his superiors about
comments he made about fracking.

It appears to be one of several examples of faculty around the country
experiencing blowback from the powerful oil and gas industry after
releasing research exposing the possible health hazards associated with
hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and other extraction processes.

What makes Geoffrey Thyne’s case distinctive is that he claims he and his
university employers have caught heat from the industry more than once.

Thyne, who began working at Mines as a research faculty member in 1996,
made some controversial remarks about fracking in 2005. He was reviewing
the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2004 report on hydraulic fracturing
at the request of Earthworks’ Oil and Gas Accountability Project, and he
says the EPA study’s conclusion was essentially that because there was no
data on water impacts from fracking, there was no threat of contamination.

“Absence of proof is not proof of absence,” he says.

Just as Thyne was about to begin a research project to provide some of that
data, he criticized the EPA report in interviews, and media outlets around
the country printed his quotes. Thyne says the head of the Mines institute
where he worked warned him to be careful, because his comments made it seem
like he was representing the school. It was a sensitive political climate,
Thyne says, as fracking was about to become exempted from the Clean Water
Act and as the Ward Churchill witch hunt was in full swing at the
University of Colorado.

So when another of Thyne’s controversial quotes about fracking appeared in
the media a short time later, he says “the tenor of the conversation
changed” and his boss told him he was getting “pushback” from alumni and
members of the board of trustees. Then, Thyne says, a vice president told
him to drop the fracking research project he was starting, or else his
contract would not be renewed. So he dropped the project.

He says he learned later from a Mines secretary that it was the Colorado
Oil and Gas Association (COGA), not just trustees and alumni, who had
complained to school administrators about his comments. She reportedly told
Thyne that she had scheduled the meeting between the trade group and Mines
officials, and that she was asked to verify that he had dropped his
fracking research project before the vice president would sign Thyne’s next
contract.

He took a job at the University of Wyoming the following year.

“I kind of felt unloved,” Thyne says.

He kept his appointment at Mines for a period of time, but after an
interview he did with National Public Radio angered Mines officials a third
time, he was told he wouldn’t be reappointed, according to Thyne.

Mines officials and COGA President Tisha Schuller did not respond to
requests for comment by press time. But Mines spokesperson Marsha Williams
told the *Colorado Independent *in July 2009 that Thyne was never
threatened with dismissal, but she acknowledged that the school had
received “inquiries” about Thyne’s controversial comments.

“As a result,” she said in a prepared statement, “Mines officials phoned
and emailed Dr. Thyne to inform him of the inquiries, and also to remind
him of the university policy that people must be clear in public
communications that the opinions they express are personal and do not
represent institution positions — one way or another — on issues being
discussed.”

*In hot water again
*

**Thyne says he faced similar pressure in Wyoming, where he was a senior
research scientist at the Enhanced Oil Recovery Institute (EORI) — until
his appointment was not renewed this year. According to materials on EORI’s
website, it “assists Wyoming oil producers with recovery of Wyoming’s
stranded oil” and depends at least in part on “industry collaboration and
project cofunding.” Its governing commission and advisory board include
members of the oil and gas industry.

In other words, it’s likely that when an EORI staffer says something that
upsets the industry the institute serves, it’s a problem.

This time, it was an interview with the *Wyoming Tribune Eagle *newspaper
in spring 2011 that got Thyne into trouble with the oil and gas industry.

He gave reporter Shauna Stephenson some figures on the amount of water used
during a frack job: 48 million to 70 million gallons. While Stephenson’s
May 4, 2011, article did include quotes attributed to Thyne, the newspaper
did not attribute the figures to anyone, and cited them again in an
editorial printed that day.

According to Thyne, the Petroleum Association of Wyoming (PAW) objected to
the 70 million gallon figure, saying it was way too high, and contacted the
newspaper to find out where Stephenson got her numbers. Thyne says that
when PAW traced the information back to the university and Thyne’s
institute, he got called into a meeting with a university government
affairs officer, who told him he needed to meet with PAW members.

In that meeting, Thyne told PAW representatives Jonathan Ekstrom of Noble
Energy and Jody Levin of Levin Strategic Resources how he got his figure.
He based it on a calculation of the amount of water needed to frack an
especially long well. Wells stretching horizontally for about a mile need
to be fracked in up to 40 different sections, he says, using between 1
million and 2 million gallons of water for each section. Thyne offered to
qualify his statements, but he says the PAW representatives wanted him to
“say it’s wrong in writing.”

He says his boss at the institute told him to write a letter to the
newspaper’s editor making it clear he was not speaking on behalf of the
university, which he did, without retracting his number.

“This will continue to happen as long as you speak out on a subject like
this,” Thyne says of the pressure he’s experienced. “Industry handled this
about as badly as they possibly could have. This is totally my opinion, but
I think they handed this off to PR people at some point, and they’ve chosen
a strategy that’s going to fail. It has to fail.”

He describes it as a strategy to deny, cover up, avoid responsibility and
discount industry critics.

Thyne says he knows of no other staffer whose contract has not been renewed
in his six years at the institute, and when he asked why his was not, he
says his boss told him, “We don’t have to tell you.”

He says, however, that university officials have acknowledged to him that
“we get a lot of money from these guys.”

[image: News_art_A_8_16.jpg]

*EORI responds *

EORI Director David Mohrbacher counters the perception that Thyne’s
dismissal was related to pressure from industry.

“The reason for not renewing his contract was not related to his
participation with the press,” he told *Boulder Weekly. *"It was not
related to that. It was based on EORI achieving their technical, strategic
objectives. We chose a different way to go, and really that’s all I can
say. … The input that I got regarding the direction of our research program
came from many sources, our technical advisory board, our commission, and
it wasn’t related to any of Geoff ’s public statements.”

Mohrbacher also downplayed the extent to which EORI is controlled by the
oil and gas industry, saying the institute is funded primarily by the
state, and that the “minor” amount contributed by oil and gas interests is
used primarily for conferences.

“Usually, the harder questions come from special interest groups,
environmental groups,” he says.

Finally, he says he worked with Thyne to answer questions about whether he
used “the best data he could have to identify how much water is required
for hydraulic fracturing. The way I helped was we looked at his literature
search, which was fairly limited, and we looked at what others within the
state have estimated, and Geoff was able to explain to the stakeholders
that came foward why his numbers were representative. I mean, it was his
work, not mine. I understood his method and I supported him in providing
explanations.”

But he added that the “lesson learned” was that “when you do a literature
search, you do a complete search and you’re able to explain the basis of
your numbers and how they apply. So he used data from other regions, and
how does that regional data apply in Wyoming?”

PAW’s Ekstrom, who attended the meeting with Thyne, says the 70 million
gallon figure “seemed like a lot higher than what members of our committee
had heard internally, and figures that we discuss, so we tracked down who
that was. So we were asked to get to the bottom of it, and eventually we
were able to track that figure back to Dr. Thyne, so we went and met with
him and talked about it.”

When asked if they were putting pressure on Thyne and the institute to
retract the figure, Ekstrom says, “No, I mean, we were having a
conversation about it, and we felt like that was potentially misleading.”**

John Robitaille, vice president of PAW, told *BW *that one concern with
having an overly high water estimate in the paper was that area well owners
who are considering selling their water to oil and gas companies (instead
of for agriculture) might get the wrong impression of how much water the
industry is buying.

“We didn’t want those figures to go out,” he says, “[because] when a
landowner says, ‘Oh you’re going to buy 50 million gallons of my water for
this well,’ the operator would say, ‘No, that’s a tremendous amount more
than I need.’”

Robitaille says even the state engineer was perturbed by the figure because
he monitors state water use.

“When we see numbers like this, he starts to panic a bit, and rightfully
so,” Robitaille says. “These are gigantic numbers and grossly
misinterpreted, so we felt it was necessary to correct those figures, which
never happened.”

Robitaille explains that the newspaper never issued a correction and never
printed Thyne’s letter.

He acknowledges initially contacting the editor who wrote the editorial,
who referred him to the reporter, who referred him to the university
institute.

“It was somewhat of a goose chase to find this,” Robitaille says. “But if
the university is going to issue credible information, they should do so.
That’s what we went to discuss. These figures are not correct, not
credible, but they’re in a source that makes them credible. We can’t have a
university like that, we can’t have those numbers just float out of the
air, where it would send a rancher believing he’s going to sell 10 times
more than he possibly can.”

Robitaille denies that anyone from PAW demanded that Thyne write the letter
to the newspaper.

“Apparently he took it upon himself to write a letter to the paper
detailing that fact,” he says. “That’s my understanding. I didn’t ask
him
to do that, and that was never published, either. … We never saw anything,
and we just went about our business.”

Robitaille acknowledges asking the paper to correct the figure if it went
forward with plans to reprint the reporter’s oil and gas series for
distribution at Cheyenne’s Frontier Days, but he doesn’t think the paper
ended up publishing the special issue.

“They could have handed out whatever they want, but it seems a little bit
more responsible to report the correct information,” he says.

*Tribune Eagle *representatives did not respond to *BW’s *questions by
press time.

Robitaille denied having anything to do with the fact that Thyne is no
longer employed at the university.

“That’s a decision the university clearly made,” he says. “We have not
had
contact with the university nor with Dr. Thyne since that initial meeting.
Whatever their decision is is their decision. We don’t have any reason to
get into any of their personnel issues down there.”

When asked whether this incident may have had something to do with Thyne’s
dismissal, Robitaille says, “I really don’t know, I’m not going to
speculate on that.”

And in response to a question about what kind of sway the oil and gas
industry has at the university, he says, “That’s strictly University of
Wyoming policy, whatever they do, they do. That’s their decision, it’s how
they choose to operate.”

If a major donor or funding source asked someone at the university to stop
doing something, couldn’t that have a trickle-down effect?

“I don’t believe so,” Robitaille replies.

*Other cases*

Thyne says he’s not the only one who’s been subjected to undue pressure
from the oil and gas industry. He says he knows of faculty around the
nation who have been targeted as well, including an engineer at Cornell
University who called for an outright fracking ban in his state.

“Industry did a bunch of nasty pieces on him, trying to make him look like
a wild-eyed, pistol-waving lunatic,” Thyne says.

There was even one woman from the tiny town of Raton, N.M., who claimed she
was being followed and harassed after complaining about her water well
being contaminated by nearby drilling operations.

“This ain’t shit,” Thyne says of his own situation. “I’ve talked to
people
who’ve been shot at. … It’s a real sticky situation, because there are
some
people getting jobs in the community, because of the development, and
they’re good-paying jobs, and this is changing our economy, so it’s all
positive, and then you say, ‘Yeah, well, so-and-so screwed up my well, and
they won’t compensate me for it, so I’m going to take them to court, or
I’m
going to make waves.’ And you’ve got your neighbors mad at you.”

In addition, taking a big oil or gas company to court isn’t a walk in the
park.

“You’ve got to have really deep pockets, you’ve got to go to court for a
couple of years,” Thyne says. “They’re going to push it back and push it
back and push it back, and then they’re going to wait until the last
second, literally, and they’re going to settle. And they’re probably going
to simply buy your land for what you paid for it, and get you to sign a
nondisclosure [agreement] and say bye bye.”

Thyne, who has worked in the field for three decades, including on an
offshore platform in California, says this industry will eventually be
forced to undergo closer regulatory scrutiny, like other industries have
done.

“It’s a huge industry, and it’s not regulated, except by the states, and
that’s kind of humorous,” he says, adding that at the very least there need
to be stiffer monetary penalties for companies that don’t self-report
spills and other mishaps. “Add another zero or two.”

Thyne has a three-part solution that would rein in Colorado’s oil and gas
industry and address related health and safety concerns:

• Put all data online, as is now done in Wyoming.

• Put tracers in fracking fluid and other liquids used so that we can find
out where it ends up.

• Create more accountability for companies by levying steep fines and
making them clean up the messes they make.

Thyne says changes in the industry may take time, but at least the media
has raised awareness about the issue.

“It’s definitely happened because of stories in the press,” he says.

As for his own ousters, perhaps shining light on the industry’s modus
operandi for going after its critics will help as well.

“They don’t call you, they don’t call your boss,” Thyne says of their
method. “They go as high up the food chain as they can get. It sounds like
dirty pool to me.”

Luckily, Thyne says, he’s gotten a couple of job offers, so he won’t be
unemployed for long.

But he says he’s not likely to work for a university again.

“Academia is not a good fit for any kind of involvement in this stuff,” he
says.

*Respond: lett...@boulderweekly.com*

--
=== EARTHWORKS:  Protecting Communities and the Environment

Sharon Wilson, Organizer
EARTHWORKS' Oil and Gas Accountability Project
940-389-1622
swil...@earthworksaction.org
skype:txsharonwilson
twitter: earthworksrocks, txsharon
blog: http://www.texassharon.com/ <http://txsharon.blogspot.com/>

*FLOWBACK: How the Texas Natural Gas Boom Affects Health and
Safety<http://www.earthworksaction.org/FLOWBACK-TXOGAP-HealthReport-lowres.pdf>
*
*
7.28.12 Join us in DC to Stop The Frack
Attack<http://www.stopthefrackattack.org/>
*

DID YOU JUST GET A NEW CELL PHONE? RECYCLE YOUR OLD ONE WITH US:
http://recyclemycellphone.org/recycle.cfm

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to
c...@earthworksaction.org.

To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
cog+unsubscr...@earthworksaction.org

This list is administered by Lauren Pagel (lpa...@earthworksaction.org).  To
request an addition to the list, please contact her via email.

For more options, including the list archive, visit this group at
http://cog.earthworksaction.org

For archives prior to April 2012, contact the list admin.

----- End forwarded message -----

http://www.boulderweekly.com/article-9467-fracking-and-academic-freedom.html

Fired researcher paints pattern of pressure from oil and gas industry

By Jefferson Dodge

--

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to cog@earthworksaction.org.
 
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
cog+unsubscribe@earthworksaction.org
 
This list is administered by Lauren Pagel (lpagel@earthworksaction.org). To request an addition to the list, please contact her via email.
 
For more options, including the list archive, visit this group at
http://cog.earthworksaction.org
 
For archives prior to April 2012, contact the list admin.