top stories this hour this is archie live in moscow ukraine's ex prime minister is sentenced to seven years in jail for abuse of power when signing counts contracts with russia diverted to spot violent clashes between yulia timoshenko supporters and police. going east to moscow and beijing corporation as china becomes the first country vladimir putin visits after declaring he'll run for the presidency next year. america's anti corporate protests are targeting the society's elite demonstrations planned a millionaire's march to the houses of some of the also wealthiest tycoons occupy

wall street movement against social inequality and corporate greed been going on for almost a month now. we'll have more news on those stories and other developments for us in half an hour from now in the meantime here in r.t. imagine discovering that you don't really and you live on and that you called stop an energy company's plans to drill for natural gas on your doorstep when our special report next outlines that very scenario in america's rocky mountains. we have five forty acres and nineteen ninety three and this side it will be a great place to find it over i retire. i am fifth generation my great great grandfather homesteaded here. the job was

go to gates that way was skilled with what he wanted no model no syrup warmth and more. we have three hundred head of al i come down on the high country in her out of libya. i'm a fourth generation rancher when i was men that would let me have two cows out of the herd so i could have known her. my favorite things is the red winged blackbirds that use the honey honey the red winged blackbirds are back you know he. just has been my favorite place i've ever lived in my life i say representatives it's your and your

you have called intertwined in every regulatory some senate house in the explosions of a direct comparison of the disease ridden as the brokers employ the companies are paid one hundred sixty million dollars are going to six twenty dollars a barrel not always enough to kill him for falsely. and there she is. we call it our new neighbor neighbor nine o seven. we are in a spy. the state situation where we own the surface and someone else owns the mineral rights and what happens in colorado and i think in most western states is the mineral rights. are dominant the law of mineral extraction goes back hundreds of years that says the mineral water has a right to extract that mineral and to a certain extent can extract it and impact the surface without compensation.

and we have seventy acres here and i can't convince them that they need to drill somewhere besides two hundred feet from our house. be energy policy has been to drill drill drill drill civil war era very strong industry they've got a tremendous amount of political influence and an awful lot of money. as a civil servant i spoke out. but it's difficult to get was because you feel constantly that you're risking your job and your family's future. if you're right. as i sat there and looked out my window in my backyard all i could

think was there's no way i can stay here for this i'm sitting here with all of the right resources these people need help. or any problems like this before we lose the rifle and then us are trained. that they're motivated by profits and unfortunately are motivated by short term profits they don't pay for. a couple times you come out here unless you come out here and live in my house for a week. i have no rights.

the rocky mountains are seeing and i'm pressing the boom in oil and gas drilling. montana wyoming colorado new mexico utah the boom is happening all over the country there's oil and gas operations and thirty two states right now but the rocky mountain states are really seeing the vast majority of the expansion. and it's overflowing into communities where people are seeing this right in their backyards . but i'll show you where they wanted to put this location one of the first places that they want to put it surprise you say we have three well out there you don't have in the city. split a state situation is when somebody who owns the surface of their land does not own the resources that are underneath their land for example oil and gas or other minerals a private person could own a house with land and the federal government or another private individual might on

the resources under it the person who owns the oil and gas has rights to access that oil and gas which means that whoever owns the surface probably can't control what happens on their own property just one used the middle mile for field believe this this they represent their outer boundary of. just guessing that it would be about two hundred feet from our house which is all foreclosures because we say we don't want the smell and they say well i'd rather smell like yes well. this is your crazy to think you could get sick from some ill in life you feel so helpless you know. display the state is a concept that dates back to when the english king reserved his rights to gold and silver deposits despite who owned the land as america was homesteaded the government continue the tradition of this kind of separate ownership. for one

minute that anything is off one hundred fifty feet away from your house want to have crimes of a for the barrack so falls over monitor we see this look on people's faces and they get that look at my story the minute i can't be right that's not fair that can't be but it is that's the way it is this is an active drilling rig near a small house showing just how close the two can be and how large the pad is during drilling a site can cover several acres before it is reduced to a smaller pad for the producing well. today with cries for more domestic oil and gas production energy companies have been aggressively leasing mineral rights so that they can drill beneath both private and public lands all over the rocky mountain west as industry has been expanding dramatically tens of thousands of new wells across the region in colorado alone we've had about thirty thousand wells and

we expect another thirty thousand in the next five or six years for decades the oil and gas industry has lobbied to create a regulatory climate which is pave the way for the current drilling boom that in two thousand after the bush cheney election there was a dramatic acceleration in drilling activity both had received large contributions from oil and gas interests and the vice president had been the chief executive of halliburton a major player in the drilling industry. in the days of our growing economy also means expanding our domestic production of oil and natural gas which was. i don't feel for transportation electricity in manufacturing whatever our hopes for developing alternatives or. serving energy that's part of our plan the reality is the loss of you will supply virtually one hundred percent of our transportation needs many democrats for the bush cheney energy policies they felt they were shut

out of the process of developing the nation's approach to energy this administration is a gas and oil administration frankly and so they're they're wedded to an old policy they're wedded to a twentieth century policy where we need a twenty first century policy you have the bush administration you know to a woman at the very top and they aren't sympathetic they're making very serious mistakes because they talk to themselves and the energy companies and only themselves and the energy companies we don't know what other provisions may have been and it is the special interest provisions that that are easy to add in when you're writing one of these bills in secret in two thousand and five the administration's energy bill passed with support from members of both political parties it provided to gas an oil industry. of dollars in subsidies tax breaks and research money sixty five percent of the current subsidies go to gas and

oil and you have this imbalance we ought to have sixty five percent or more eighty percent ought to be going to alternative renewable technology to energy efficiency the energy bill makes practical reforms to the oil and gas permitting process to encourage new exploration after years of debate and division. congress passed a good bill. it all they gathered here for us twenty five years ago when my husband moved here and then i moved here between years ago. arlen and i were married in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight i was a pharmaceutical chemists for many years. my husband is a civil engineer with

a specialty in water and he is retired a few years ago we ran into some real problems with the oil and gas industry because they have begun drilling here in canada and gas contacted us in the early spring of two thousand and four with the proposal that they would put wells on our land and we began negotiating a surface use agreement with them and we negotiated for nine months and the bulldozer showed up one day and began ripping and tearing before we had signed a surface use agreement. regulations require that oil and gas companies consult with landowners before drilling if the landowner doesn't agree to the terms the company proposes it can post a bond with the state go on to the land and drill anyway that's what happened to the bells. when one furthest i asked the seller about the mineral rights and he

said he didn't have to sell eighty five percent of landowners in colorado do not own the rights to the minerals under their land until you get on the federal property i think it is private interests that all human rights are through here once a year on the forest or veolia course if the government garfield county located high in the colorado rockies was always a quiet rural area for its residents. but in the ninety nine days things started to change. cason oil drilling began to boom and development has expanded dramatically each year when i first came to colorado are twenty seven years ago the energy production was for oil and at the time that there was the synthetic fuels corporation. and it was all about. natural gas they didn't have pipelines for it and so they were trying to figure out what to do with all the natural gas they knew there was a lot of there was no use for

a nickel dime more oil natural gas was the biggest thing that's going on in less than colorado. there's no in canada leases in here crossroads bilberry corp and over there they were on ten acre spacing for me or if you knew what you were looking for and you knew how many wells were impaired it i bet you could see three four hundred wells there standing right over a pipeline right here by the way. really we're span and we had a spill. you see over my head here we've got the neighbors wells three four of them over there and that stack closest to the blue one day it look like old faithful had over there the separator spewed paraffin out all over the pad and on over into

a good number of acres of our parish church and that paraffin was laced with anthrax chemicals hydrocarbons of various kinds we were concerned it would contaminate and did. in the grasses were heavy and dry and. burned a did writing carvings along with it so when get it detroit or. the philips operates about ten thousand wells here in the basin which is. an incredible number of wells to try and manage on a daily basis and so it as a simple example we do well over the years and look at what our wells should be delivering if we spend five minutes per well. it takes about nine months

to go through that process everything below us down here is our mentor and you. if you get up on the big hair is make the benches those bankers are just littered with wells approximately five hundred all told. and now with the new wells based in that the approved will go from about five hundred two. hundred within the next twenty years we drill that averages about three hundred fifty new wells per year when you take colorado side and include that we think the consul philips has probably another ten thousand wells there where you will drill in the basin over the next forty years. to sharply increase drilling on gilbert our mentors ranch is typical of what has happened to vast expanses of northern new mexico land. a satellite image shows the crisscrossing patterns of access roads and wells

extending for hundreds of miles across some one county and north west new mexico. the land third has been so bad that i can't recognize it from the first on. the ranch lands of san juan county are the only areas inundated by drilling rigs. in the towns near gilbert are meant as land there are a wells everywhere in neighborhoods and near schools. gas industry has been here for fifteen plus years and we do drill in populated areas you can go out here. a couple hundred yards from his office and find a pretty simple conoco phillips is the largest producer in the san juan basin and you look at the total between our workforce directly and indirectly they're working

for us it's about eight percent of the local population so we're a very large employer in the basin. industry has brought jobs and money to fix. but for gilbert our men to the prices been much too high. this gate will be the gate to enter into my property the old company had me completely locked out for two and a half years the only way they would give me a key. is if i agreed to keep the gate locked at all times. in the street has the mentality that. it's all theirs and don't belong to nobody else. so they tell us when they come to drill here on our land. it's all right. you're in norway. we distinct a good neighbor program is something that was somewhat elementary and it's just respect because if you don't two things will happen first is the government will

regulate and a lot of times regulates the business and second is mexico becomes an unfriendly business environment and oil and gas industries go elsewhere i don't think the state wants that the oil and gas industry doesn't want that we have a very large emphasis with our three hundred twenty five member companies being a good neighbor about talking to people about doing the things. thank you would do in your neighborhood with your next door neighbor. in the us in the lower forty eight on shore the boom that is currently going on is driven a lot by technology are going to lot of technological advances was horizontal drilling with fracture stimulation one of the key elements to finding and getting the resource out of very tight sand or hard rock is a fracking process fracking is just a short word for fracturing hydraulic fracturing or fracking as it's commonly

called is a drilling technique first commercialised by how labor in one nine hundred forty nine comes in with very high powered water and sand and a slightly soapy mixture and all it does is it goes down and it just fractures little tiny fractures in the rock and then sand goes into those fractures and allows that gas to escape. and then the gas flows in to the pipe up to the surface and the peoples all. hydraulic fracturing is largely responsible for the domestic drilling boom because of its high cost that was not widely used until recently in the one nine hundred ninety s. when the price of natural gas shot up high enough to make it affordable this is here in the reserves it's here to see you colborne is one of the world's leading authorities on endor cringes rocketing chemicals in the environment and their

impact on humans year the threats are coming all the way which is thirty miles year she has been studying the chemicals used by the industry for drilling and extraction and documenting their effects basically our first list of the chemicals that were being used was this very very short and an interesting west that a.p.a. put together it certainly was uncovered heads and we know we found out very rapidly that it was no small list they don't tell you everything it's their product you may only get five percent of what's in that product and the rest of it is proprietary or they just don't get it they don't have to. orland gas deposits below ground contain toxic compounds that are brought to the surface during drilling these compounds pollute the environment and can cause health problems but the impacts of drilling are made even worse by the chemical products that are injected

during the process dr colborne has documented over two hundred products used in colorado drilling over ninety percent contained chemicals with adverse health effects. there is not only prove that there is anything harmful in the fracking fluids that are used to fracture the out there are those are not toxic than we did a lot of because. a mis understanding of what is actually in the fluids i have fracking fluid taken right out of the tracking truck in my office i've had it in my mouth it tasted it and i'm just five for people who are telling you that these products are safe first ask them what they have been trained in to find out who is paying their salary and third actually hand them a real class full of something that you have taken from in a beverage and time and ask them to drink it. i think it's all part of people

understand it will it handle that also calamity messner nast. deal and harold hofmeister live across the road from the belle farm surrounded by an ever increasing number of natural gas wells and we're in bad actually sleeping and. we heard this pop and then our son called and said that the well is on fire and my husband wanted to try to go outside and it was too hot on my back so he couldn't remove it lloyd wright outweighed our all and then the fire trucks came but they waited way down because there was nothing they could do right away for more for the burn yeah folder of the room. so i think they were there basically for

our homes and if they caught fire is something you know one of our structures. industrial accidents and spills are common in these communities between two thousand and three and two thousand and eight is estimated that there were one files and four hundred and thirty five spills in colorado. nearly a quarter of these spills are believed to have contaminated either ground or surface water in stage every time we get supply lines we see as we see it and it's a good thing that you know. a little farther down dry hollow road is the divide creek. ok here we go that's where lisa bracken and her family live. this is back was first discovered. we got a call one day april first from a neighbor steve thompson and said you know i found some stuff down here on my

place it doesn't look right. i think you can look at it and he said this is not normal you're always involved over the water up there bob flies a little first you're all going. yes that's all there are from. both is in our properties there was a the evidence of bubbling in the creek we didn't know what it was it looked like a pepsi and there was just an eruption of bubbles fizzing all over the place in the reeds in the water in an effort to convince authorities that the billing was not occurring naturally lisa and her family demonstrated that the gas would ignite. if your. water samples taken from the ground water in the divide creek c.p. area showed levels of the carcinogen benzene forty eight times government standards gas was released into the creek for fifty five days before the well believed to

have caused the seep was resealed after they were mediated the well evidence of the sea largely disappeared here and went away and pepys place on langer's that the met a significant leak and there's still some evidence of it there but it's the only lingering presence. to this day gas continues to bubble up at the seeps main exit point on pepe langer's land. so what they're trying to do is contain everything that come from the nation right in this earth. if there's no friends in to live in and nobody knows our long it's going to three or if ever. gloria lee you know everything is going to be cleared up. according to a statement provided by the encounter corporation nothing that and kana did was out of compliance with the regulations in place at that time extensive monitoring

following the incident indicates there was no contamination of residential water sources as a result of the seat and air convection system is in place to remove benzene from the groundwater in the plume area spills and groundwater contamination can occur anywhere there is drilling industry representatives often try to downplay their environmental impact this is colorado matters so coloradans who if you will with gas will see truly what is making the series spike in oil and gas drilling in colorado is having it will get so if there is new information about the effect it will truly on your health.

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