welcome back here with r.t. here's a look at the top stories the u.n. is set to unleash a massive observer mission to syria the last ditch attempt to prevent all out civil war the security council is expected to approve the deployment of three hundred monitors later on saturday. this is in time in france after final appeals to voters are made by tehran presidential hopefuls the top job in a country riven by social divisions and record unemployment voters will cast their choices on sunday with incumbent president nicolas sarkozy and popular socialist leader francois hollande the main contenders. plus the chinese economic powerhouse

sets its sights on the arctic as beijing weighs in for a slice of the untapped riches the chinese premier is touring europe to see you go abberation deals on exploring arctic resources. now how a community in the u.s. hopes to safeguard their civil liberties and health as an a g companies want to drill in their own backyards our special report is next here in our team. we abide in forty acres and nineteen ninety three and decided it would be a great place to find my bella the home and retire. i am first generation my great great grandfather homesteaded here. still let's go to the gates that one was killed but he won't go

a mile. sarah wants to board. we have three hundred head of al and come down on the high country they're incredibly beautiful. on the fourth generation rancher and when i was little dad would let me have and cows out of the herd so i could have known her . for my favorite things is the red winged blackbirds that used the honey honey the red winged blackbirds are back you know. this has been my favorite place i've ever lived in my life say representatives if you are in europe you will have told interplaying for every regular hotel some senate house the white house washington a directing president goodness

a group resample companies are paid one hundred six billion dollars for his products twenty dollars a barrel dollars a month little room for thoughts. that there she is. we call it our new neighbor neighbor nine o seven. we are innocent. state situation where we are on 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. long on mineral extraction goes back hundreds of years that says the mineral older guy has a right to extract that mineral and to a certain extent can extract it impact the surface without compensation.

if we have seventy acres here and i can't convince them that they need to drill somewhere. two hundred feet from our house. to be energy policy has been to drill drill drill drill so 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 do so and because you feel constant rate you're risking your job and your family's future. and. i don't. think here on thursday as i sat there and looked out my window and my backyard all i could think was there's no way i can stay up there so i'm sitting

here with all of the right resources these people need help he put forth their problems before we do the right. training. and they're motivated by profits and unfortunately are motivated by short term profits they don't take off people. you come out here and you come over 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

montana wyoming colorado new mexico utah the boom 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 . but felt sure you were they wanted to put this location one of the first places that they wanted to put it in a 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 can 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 new stage in the middle mile for field believe this this they represent their outer boundary. of their. disgusting that would be about two hundred feet from our house which is all foreclosures because we say we don't want this mail and they say well i'd rather smell like. life's lessons you're crazy if you think it's the personal life you feel sorry for us you know. to split a 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 offered

a hundred fifty feet away from your one and half times a month of there so fall over. we see this look on people's faces and they get that look and there's always a minute there can't be right that's not fair that can't be right it is that's the way it is this is an active drilling rig near a small house showing just how close the tin can be and how large the path is curing 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 this 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 and in x.

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. that in two thousand after the bush cheney election there was a dramatic acceleration in drilling activity both had received large contributions from a boil and gas interests and the vice president had been the chief executive of. 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 are by. i will fuel for transportation electricity and manufacturing whatever our hopes for developing alternative sources and conserving energy and that's part of our plan the reality is the moslem view will supply virtually a hundred percent of our transportation needs many democrats fought the bush cheney energy policy 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 room we need a twenty first century policy you have the bush administration you have 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 in the energy companies we don't know what other provisions may have been and it is a 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 the gas and 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 it 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 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 nine hundred eighty eight i was a pharmaceutical chemist 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 island gas contacted us in the early spring of two thousand and four with a proposal that they would put wells on our land and we began negotiations 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. the 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 we first just 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 only adds three here once a year on the forester veolia and then of course 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 unoiled really big engine boom and development has expanded dramatically each year when i first came to colorado twenty seven years ago the energy production was for oil and at the time that there was this synthetic fuels corporation and it was all about oil shale natural gas they didn't have pipelines and so on they were trying to figure out what to do with all the natural gas you know there was a lot of there was no use for it at the time now natural gas was the biggest thing that's going on in less than colorado. is zero and

canada leases in veered cross roads build very corporation and over there on plane acre spacing and for me are really what you're looking for and you know how many will go on pair i bet you could see three four hundred wells. you're standing right over a pipeline right here the way. right we wish to you and we had a spill. 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 looked 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

effects chemicals hydrocarbons of various kinds we were concerned it would contaminate did. and the grasses were heavy and dry and so we just burned in writing carvings along with it so when get it over. comes the full stop or it's 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 as a simple example we do well with 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 mental canyon

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 wells bases that they approved will go from about five hundred two of them 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 conoco phillips 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 r. mentions 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 rails extending for hundreds of miles across san juan county and north west new

mexico. the land surface has been stored up for bad. i can't recognize it from the first time i saw it. the ranch lands of san juan county aren't the only areas inundated by drilling rigs . in the towns near gilbert are meant as land general 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 conoco phillips is the largest producer in the san juan basin and you look at the total twenty our workforce directly and indirectly supporting forest it's about eight percent the local population so we're a very large employer in the place and. industry has brought jobs and money to the

county but for gilbert our men to the price is much too high. a 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 city has the mentality that. it's all winners and will go along with the nobody else. and that's what they tell us when they come out the grill here on our land it's all us you're in norway. we just think the good neighbor program was something that was somewhat irrelevant to the very fist respect because if you don't two things will happen first is the government will regulation and a lot of times regulation out of business and second is the mexico becomes an

unfriendly business environment and oil and gas industries go elsewhere i don't think the state wants their 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. in the old forty eight on shore the boom that is crude going on is driven a lot by technology are going to lot of technological advances was horizontal drilling with thought 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 the bird in one nine hundred forty nine times in with very high powered water and sand and a slightly soapy mixture and all it does is it goes in 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 of the people's home. 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. when 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 ending korean disrupting chemicals in the environment and their impact on humans here the threats 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 documenting their effects basically our first list of the chemicals that were being used was this very very short and uninteresting west that e.p.a. put together it certainly was uncovered heads that we know found out very rapidly that it was no small list they don't tell you everything it's 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. the island gas deposits below ground contain toxic compounds that are brought to the surface tiring 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 in our floors are not toxic and we did a lot of that as well. a mis understanding of what is actually in the fluids i have fracking fluid taken right out of a 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's paying their salary and third actually hand them a real glass full of something that you have taken from an evaporation time and ask them to drink it. i think it's all part of it understand it we live here

and love it also so i would be a messenger and asked. if. she and harold hoffmeister live across the road from the belle farm surrounded by an ever increasing number of natural gas wells where and dad actually sleeping and. we heard this pop and then our son called he said that the well is on fire and my husband wanted to try to go outside and it was too hot on the deck so he couldn't remove them lawyer right now and wait are all and then the fire trucks came but they waited way down because there was nothing they could do put away for more for the burn oh yeah alright for the yeah. so i think they were there basically for our homes and if they caught fire or something you know so on our structures. and

just real accidents and spills are common in these communities between two thousand and three and two thousand and eight is estimated that there were one thousand four hundred and thirty five spills in colorado. nearly a quarter of these schools are believed to have contaminated either ground or surface water in the state. every time we are that's why that's why we see this when you see it and it's a hot topic but 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 beth karas first discover. who 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 this is not normal

he always involved over my water or a pair of those large little first your album. that's all there after all. on 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. by. water samples taken from the ground water in the divide creek see the 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 it went away and pappy's place on leggers it the medicine if it get leaked 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 land. so what they're trying to do is contain everything they come from in a full right in a certain area here if there's no benzene to in there and nobody knows how long it's going to three or even ever. o'rielly you know everything is going to be fired up. according to a statement provided by the end can a corporation nothing that and can a 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 sea 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. since colorado matters so coloradans who live near the oil and gas wells say drilling is making the serious and spike in oil and gas drilling in colorado as having a clue get said that there is new information about the effect it will truly off you would help.

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