this is our headline clashes between protesters and police and finally get the attention of the international community demonstrators. coincide with the formula one race. for the glamorous sporting event. while in egypt square once again filled with voices of discontent people disillusioned with the outcome of the revolution. protesting against the military rule in one of the biggest rallies since hosni

mubarak's down. as the country's prime minister seeking support for beijing's membership. of the fight for the energy resources has a nation bordering beyond. the rocky mountains. we have five forty acres and nineteen ninety three and this side it will be a great place to find them build a home and retire. i am

fifty generation my great great grandfather homesteaded here. let's go let's go to gates that way was killed or do you want to go a mile. sarah launched into north. we have three hundred head about it come down on the high country there and her out of libya. i'm a fourth generation rancher when i was little dad wouldn't let me have two cows out of the herd so i can moan heard. my favorite things is the red winged blackbirds that use the honey honey the red winged blackbirds are back you know. this has been my favorite place i've ever lived in my life a stranger everything in its use is the one you're. called intertwined every

regular some senate house in the explosion city direct from president bush's winners of group resampled countries that claimed were thirty six billion dollars were going to travel on the twenty dollars a barrel dollars a month let's hold them for three seats and. there she is. we call it our new neighbor neighbor nine o seven. we are in a spy. the state situation where we on the surface and someone else on some mineral rights and what happens in colorado and i think in most western states is the mineral rights. are dominant the law on mineral extraction goes back hundreds of years that says the mineral owner has a right to extract that mineral. and to a certain extent can extract it and impact the surface without compensation to.

the. seventy acres here and i can't convince them that they need to drill somewhere besides two hundred feet from our house. with. the energy policy has been to drill drill drill drill some more 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 do this from because you feel constantly that you're risking your job and your family's future. i don't know. if you're right. as i sat there and looked out my window into my

backyard all i could think was there's no way i can stay i have to say i'm sitting here with all of the right resources and these people need help. for problems because we've been running for. change. and they're motivated by profits and unfortunately are motivated by short term profits they don't take long for. you can load here and whatever you come here and live in my house for a week. i have no rights.

the rocky mountains are seeing an unprecedented boom in oil and gas drilling. mines here wyoming colorado new mexico utah the dream is happening all over the country there's oil and gas operations in 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 . oh sure you were they wanted to put this location one of the first places that they want to put it surprise you and say we have three well out there you don't have nice indeed. split estate situation it is when somebody who owns the surface of their land does not own their resources their 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 well and gas which means that whoever owns the surface probably can't control what happens on their own property but always just one middle mile fell field i believe this this they represent their outer boundary. of they're. just guessing that it would be about two hundred feet from our house which is awful close because we say we don't want the smell and they say well i'd rather smell like yes well. this is you're crazy to think you could get sick from smelling 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 there anything is often one hundred fifty feet away from your house or half times the length of their sofa fall over monitor when you see the look on people's faces and they get that look and i say wait a minute that 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 chain can be and how large the path 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 the 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 the 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. back in two thousand after the bush cheney election and there was a dramatic excel aeration and 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. and its ever growing economy also means expanding our domestic production of oil and natural gas which are by. idle fuels for transportation electricity and manufacturing whatever are developing alternative sources and conserving energy and that's part of our plan the reality is the nozzle mule supply virtually one hundred percent of our transportation needs

are many democrats fought 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 darcey you have the bush administration you know to all meet 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 are 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 the casson 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 through 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 began here for us twenty five years ago when my husband moved here then i moved here eighteen years ago arlen and i were married in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight i was a pharmaceutical calloused 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 to go she had a surface use agreement with them and we negotiated for nine months and the bulldozers 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 onto the land and drill anyway that's what happened to the bells. when we first just i asked the seller about the mineral rights and he

said he didn't have them 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 all sort of here when she get on the forest or be away on the course of the government garfield county located high in the colorado rockies was always a quiet rural area for its residents. but in the one nine hundred ninety s. things started to change. gas and 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 the time that there was the synthetic fuels corporation and it was all about oil shale natural gas they didn't have high points part 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 it and confirm now natural gas was the biggest thing that's going on in western colorado. there's no in canada leases in here crossroad is very corp and over there on ten acre spacing for me are really what you were looking for and you knew how many wells were on there that i bet you could see three four hundred wells. you're standing right over abide by in right here by the way. all. right we wish pan and we had a spill. and you see over my head here we've got the neighbors wells that are all three forum over there and that stack closest to the blue one day it look like old faithful had over there the separator spewed paraffin

out over the pad and on over into a good number of acres of our parish church and that paraffin was laced with effects chemicals hydrocarbons of various kinds we were concerned it would contaminate in good. air in the grasses were heavy and dry and whatnot so we used the burn the did shin right carbons along with it so when get it if water. comes the philips operates about ten thousand wells. here in the basin which is. an incredible number of wells to try nine times on a daily basis and so as a simple example we do well over the years and look at what our well should be delivering and if we spend five minutes per well. it takes about nine months

to go through that process everything below us down here is our main thing and you need to get up on the big here is make the benches those bankers are just littered with wells approximately five hundred all told. and now with the new well space in that they have proved will go for mobile five hundred two thousand five 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 that congo phillips has probably another ten thousand wells there where you will grill in the basin over the next forty years. to sharply increase drilling on gilbert are meant as 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 pond county and northwest new mexico. the land service has been so bad that i can't recognize it from the first. 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 wills everywhere in neighborhoods and near schools. gas industry has been here for fifty plus years and we do drill in populated areas you can go out here. a couple hundred yards from this office and find a pretty decent well kind of phillips is the largest producer in the sun one basin and when you look at the total between our workforce directly and indirectly the

board in forest it's about a person the local population so we're a very large employer in the basin. industry has brought jobs and money to the county but for gilbert our mentor the price has been much too high. gate will be the gate to entering from. my property and your 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 history has the mentality that. it's all theirs and them belong to nobody else. and that's what they tell us when they come out the grill here on our land it's ours during our way. we distinct a good neighbor program was something that was somewhat all that good fist respect

because if you don't two things will happen first is the government will regulate and a lot of times regulate out of business and second is the next go 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 about being a good neighbor about talking to people about doing the things that you would do in your neighborhood with your next door neighbor. in the u.s. from the old forty eight on shore the boom that is cruel going on is driven a lot by technology or a lot of technological advances was horizontal drilling with fracture stimulation one of the key elements to finding and getting that resource out of very tight sand or hard rock is a practical process fracking is just

a short word for fracturing hydraulic fracturing or fracking as it's commonly called this is drilling technique first commercialised my house in one thousand nine hundred forty nine it 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 a little tiny fractures in the rock and then sand goes into those fractures and allows that gas to escape. and then the gas goes in to the pipe up to the surface and that he goes all the. hydraulic fracturing is largely responsible for the domestic drilling boom because of its high cost it was not widely used until recently in the one nine hundred ninety s. and the price of natural gas shot up high enough to make it affordable this is here in the reserve it's here to see you colborne is one of the world's leading authorities on endor cringes trucking chemicals in the environment and their impact

on humans here the trucks are coming all the way which is thirty miles to here she has been studying the chemicals used by the industry for drilling and extraction and document 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 that we know we found out very rapidly but it was no small list they don't tell you everything that's in a 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. boil and 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's anything harmful in the fracking fluids that are used to fracture the well there are flaws are not toxic and we did a lot of it as well. 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 fine for people who are telling you that these products are safe first ask them what they have been trained in to find out who's paying their salary and third actually hand them a real glass full of something because you have taken from an evacuation time

and ask them to drink it. i think it's all part of the going to stand that we live here you know that also calamity mass announced that. she and harold hoffmeister 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 went to try to go outside and it was too hot on the deck so he couldn't remember when lloyd wright and wade are old 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 over us the roof. so i think they were there basically for

our homes and if they caught fire 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 has estimated that there were one thousand four hundred and thirty five spills in colorado. nearly a quarter of the spills are believed to have contaminated either ground or surface water and stage every time we get supply it's like we see this when you see the islands and the thing happens 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 backwards first discover. i 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 if you come look at it and he said that's not normal he always vote over my water up there bomb proof like little first you're going. retro here 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 can 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 bubbling was not occurring naturally lisa and her family demonstrated that the gas would ignite. and say. if your fire. water samples taken from the ground water in the divide creek c.p. area showed two 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 received old after they were mediated the well evidence of the sea largely disappeared here it went away and pepys place on leg or is it the medicine if it really 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 seams main exit point on pepe langer's line and. so what they're trying to do is contain everything they can probably in a full plate in a certain area here if there's a frenzy in true in there and nobody knows our long it's going to free or if ever. we're really you know everything is going to be freed up. according to a statement provided by the encounter corporation nothing that and canada 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 with the oil and gas wells see trilling is making the series spike in oil and gas drilling in colorado is having its there's new information about the effect it will actually off your health.

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