past the hour here in moscow this is on t.v. here are your headlines the u.n. observer mission in syria prepares for massive reinforcement in a group or truce violations by both the rebels and government troops the security council is poised to vote on a resolution later on saturday and a last ditch attempt is for friends and all out civil war. there's a media blackout in france so just ahead of sunday's presidential poll ten candidates including being. fight it out for the top job in a country hit by social divisions and record unemployment.

and energy hungry china works to secure a slice of the arctic riches the chinese now want to tour of the nordic states hoping to win support for beijing in order to tap into the mineral resources hidden beyond the are some. we report on the citizens of america's rocky mountain west who found themselves helpless against a massive natural gas company drilling right underneath their very own feet and watching out. we are by forty acres and nineteen ninety three and decided it would be a great place to find my build a home and retire. i am fifty generations 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 below zero one board. we have three hundred in a valley and come down on the high country there and current of lincoln you know. i'm a 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. 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 representatives is the one your you have

called interplay for every regular senate house of the legislation so they directing the president this is good news and great present world countries are paid one thirty six billion dollars for your trouble one hundred twenty dollars a barrel no it was not the sole comfortable seats but there she is. we call in our new neighbor neighbor nine o seven. we are in a spy. the 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 gone and the law 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 any impact the surface without compensation.

we have seventy acres there and i can't convince them that they need to drill some more sides two hundred feet from our. policy has been to drill drill drill drill drill 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 constantly that you're risking your job or your family's future. i don't. see here today as i sat there and look out my window and i go back yard

all i could think was there is no way i can stay out of this i'm sitting here with all of the right resources these people need help this is before any problems before even the right. change. and they're motivated by profits and unfortunately are motivated by short term profits they don't take off easy. the tribe has it you can load here unless you come out 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 is 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 i'll show you her they wanted to put this location one of the first places that they wanted to put it right from the surprise you say we have to put it well out there you don't have in city. a splitter state situation is when somebody who the surface of their land does not own the resources that are underneath it really 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 that oil and gas has rights to access at oil and gas which means that whoever owns the surface probably can't control what happens on their own property just one little mile fell for your old believe this this they represent their outer boundary. of their. first guess in the would be about two hundred feet from our house which is all foreclosures because we so we don't want the smell and they say well i'd rather smell like. life this is you're crazy if you think you can't get sick or similar life you feel so helpless you know . display the state is a concept it 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 if anything is often one hundred fifty feet away from your house or halftimes of rainfall there so fall over winter we see the look on people's faces and they get that look i saw in a minute there can't be right that's not fair that can't be what 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 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 this industry has been expanding dramatically tens of thousands of

new wells across the region in colorado alone we've got 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 has paved 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 oil and gas interests and the vice president had been the chief executive of hell 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 don't feel for transportation electricity and manufacturing whatever are hopefully going to develop in alternative source and conserving energy and that's part of our plan the reality is the nozzle buel supply virtually one hundred percent of our transportation needs and many democrats fought the bush cheney energy policy they

felt they were shut out of the process of developing nations approach to energy there's a ministration is a gas and oil administration frightfully 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 have to mean 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 slaven 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 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 and 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 oil and 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 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 having to sell eighty five percent of land owners 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 through here once you're on the forest are b.l.m. and 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. johnson oil drilling big engine boom and development has expanded dramatically each year when i first came to colorado twenty seven years ago we energy production was for all the time that there was this and that it fuels corporation and it was all about oil sell natural gas and they didn't have pipelines for it and so they were trying to figure out what to do with all the natural gas i mean there was a lot more there was no use for local time now natural gas is the biggest thing

that's going on unless from colorado. there's no in canada leases in here across the road to build very corporation and over there on cane acre spacing for me are really what you're looking for and you knew how many wells were on pared it i bet you could see three four hundred wells. you're standing right over a pipeline right here by the way. right where we're staying and we had a spill. be you see over my head here we've got the neighbors wells i don't know three four i'm over there and that's stacked closest to the blue one day it looked like old faithful had over there the separator spewed paraffin out over the pad and on over into good

a number of acres of our parish church and that paraffin was laced with the tax chemicals hydrocarbons of various kinds we were concerned it would contaminate and did. and the grasses were heavy and dry and whatnot so we burned a did in writing carvings along with it so we wouldn't get it. because the fields operate about ten thousand wells here in the basin which is. an incredible number of wells to climb mountains on a daily basis and so 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 i it takes about nine months

to go through that process everything below us down here is our mentor and you see if you get up on the big here is make the benches those dangers are just littered with wells approximately five hundred all told. and now with the new wells basin that they approved will go from about five hundred to about one hundred within the next twenty years we drill that averages about three hundred fifty new wells per year when you take the colorado side include that we think that conoco phillips has probably another ten thousand wells there where you will the real meaning of a snow over the next forty years. has sharply increased drilling on gilbert or 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

wells extending for hundreds of miles across san juan county and north west new mexico. the land surface has been scoured up so bad that 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 there are wells 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 it pretty simple conoco phillips is the largest producer in the san juan basin and when you look at the total when our workforce directly and indirectly 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 is much too high. so a gate will be the gate through entering from our property the old company had me completely locked out for two and a half years the only one that would give me a key. is if i agreed to keep the gate log at all times. in the city has the mentality that. it's all theirs and belong to nobody else. and that's what they tell us when they come on the grill here on our land that it's all of us and you're in our way. we just think the good neighbor program was something that was somewhat elementary benefits respect because if you don't cook

things will happen first is the government will regulate and a lot of times regulates the 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 that well a gas industry doesn't want that but 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 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 the bird in one thousand 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 goes 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 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 reserves it's here don't just see you colborne is one of the world's leading authorities on endor 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 with that e.p.a. pretty gather it certainly was uncovered heads that we know really found out very rapidly that it was no small list they don't tell you everything it'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 care. for oil 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 wells in our floors are not toxic and we did a lot of that as well. mis understanding of what is actually in the fluids i have fracking fluid taken right out of a fracking 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 and ask them what they have been trained in to find out who's paying their salary and third actually hand them a real class full of something that you have taken from an admiration for

and ask them to drink it. i think it's just so far people understand that we live here and love it also so i would be messin around asked if. he and harold hoffmeister live across the road from the belle farm surrounded by an ever increasing number of natural gas wells or 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 well i'm a 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 but ordered for more through the burn yeah phone growth of the. so i think they were there basically for our

hollands you know if they caught fire or something you know one of our structures. and just real accidents and spills are common in these communities between two thousand and three and two thousand and eight it is estimated that there were one files and 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 which is why that's why we see this when you see it wasn't happening now 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 that was first discovered. 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. they could come look at it and he said this is not normal we all involve them at water affairs very large little first your own body. that's all there after all. isn't 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 grown 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 seat was received 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 got 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 ted the langurs line and. so what they're trying to do is contain everything they can come in a full right in a certain area here if there's benzene to reign in there and nobody knows how long it's going to three or if ever. we really you know everything is going to be cleared up. according to a statement provided by the encounter corporation nothing that and counted 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 an 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 called matters so call rodent's we will with gas we'll see truly what is making the recent spike in oil and gas drilling in colorado is have a good it's there's new information about the effect it will truly off your health .

all. there hasn't been anything good on t.v. . used to get the maximum political impact. before source material is what helps keep journalism honest we.