Albany Terminal

How quickly we change from a world in which extracting a barrel of oil from some cold distant place and shipping it via a tenuous supply chain across a continent seemed like a great deal – until the price of oil dropped below $50 a barrel, far below the cost of getting that oil from the frozen North.
So who, in these giddy days of easy oil, wants to hear any grousing about old train cars carrying precarious amounts of oil through fragile regions of the USA?

Railroad tank cars at terminal for off-loading oil onto barges

America's new-found oil prosperity has a number of causes, one of the most productive being the Bakken shale formation in the remotest part of North Dakota, near the border with Canada which has pushed the USA up to the lead of world oil producers. So much oil is being pumped there, in fact, that they don't know what to do with it. There is no infrastructure to get it out of this remote location, to the point that drillers are burning off the natural gas found with the oil just to get to the oil. The only transportation infrastructure in the region is the railroad which had been used to haul grain. Now the grain rots at the terminal because the trains are hauling oil, to the tune of 50 trains a week, and that is just on one of the many train routes out of the Bakken. This oil is unusually volatile, and these trains are fully loaded and heavy. This, and the poor state of America's rail lines combine to produce a series of accidents waiting to happen. In summer 2013, a Canadian town, Lac-Megantic, was literally blown off the map by one of these "Bomb Trains." A ludicrous number of these trains have exploded, spilled, and crashed damaging lives, property, and the environment.

Long train of tank cars on Canadian Pacific train line

There are two main rail freight routes across North America, Canadian Pacific (the old Delaware and Hudson Line) which goes north of the great lakes, through Canada, winding down a precipitous cliff above Lake Champlain as it comes back into the USA, and CSX (the old New York Central line) comes through Chicago, and on the south side of the Great Lakes, both terminating in Albany, where it is off-loaded onto barges and shipped to refineries up and down the east coast.
Between the poor maintenance of the infrastructure, the laughable safety record of the industry, the volume of product being moved, and the fragility of the ecosystems through which the network passes, the only question is when will be the next disaster, not if. But perhaps we should wait until one of these trains filled with oil derails and plunges into Lake Champlain before we protest this nonsense, or another small town gets blown off the map (who cares if a few more Canadians die anyway), or perhaps we wait until one of those barges capsizes and spills its contents into the Hudson?

Children on playground next to railroad tank cars

This discussion is about the safety and reliability of the transportation infrastructure, and leaves aside the larger question of our overall reliance on petroleum. As a society, we are ignoring both questions. As New Yorkers, we should address this question of the reckless movement of a toxic, volatile material through our neighborhoods. The geopolitical anomaly of cheap oil is temporary, and soon those trains will once again be running down the Great Lakes.

North Dakota Landscape

I'm sitting on a rise in North Dakota (it's pretty flat out here) and admiring the rolling farmland that has supplied our country with grain for so long. After the beauty of the landscape, so different from where I was raised, in the Deep South, what strikes me first is the constancy of the wind. In the three days I have been here, it is always there. From my perch, I would expect windmills as far as the eye could see. After all, who could argue with free electricity? Instead, I'm surrounded by drill rigs, each a tremendous industrial zone on its own "pad" cut out of the farmland. The traffic on this small dirt farming road is constant, most of it being tanker trucks hauling fresh water to the sites and contaminated water away, the process of "hydro-fracking" being such a thirsty one.

Discussions with local people orient mostly around the jobs the industry has brought to the community, and everyone wants prosperity for themselves and their neighbors. Then they might wistfully speak about how the town has changed from a place where no one ever locked their doors to a Wild West boom town with crime and infrastructure overload. There is a tremendous influx of people who have come here for work, from the oil field workers to the waitresses. At a point in history when our country has actively exported so many of its manufacturing jobs overseas, and gutted the middle class, leaving your family to come to ND for a well paying job seems like a good opportunity.

And we are told this is the way it must be. "Progress has its costs." But it's only this way because the people that are making the real money from these extraction industries are preventing any change. The senators who give impassioned speeches about climate change being a hoax, and decrying the conspiracy of the scientists who would impose world government on us are not stupid. They are venal.

Our economy will change. Will it happen at our behest, and evolve into an economy of sustainability, or will it happen in reaction to multiple catastrophic weather events that destroy coastal infrastructure and completely disrupt agriculture, and rising sea levels which force us away from the coasts?

Like all economic booms based on extractive industries, this one will end. The irony is that this could be a boom based on implementing a new paradigm, and that boom would not end. Windmills need constant maintenance, but they don't need water, and they don't cause climate change.

Thank God, the Ice is Melting...

...otherwise, how would we get all that oil that we know lies under the Arctic? It’s a bit of a nuisance that the northeast has to suffer from such a rotten winter for it, but believe me, and ice-free North Pole will be better for everyone. Of course, we might have to fight the Russians for the mineral rights, but we’ll kick some commie butt just like we did the last time.

Our hunger for petrol and dwindling supplies are driving exploration farther afield, and the Arctic is the next on the list for extraction.

The recent spill in the Gulf Of Mexico taught the world much about oil spills and response. Fortunately, the spill happened in the spring within 200 miles of some of the most well-equipped ports in the world for offshore oil operations. In the Beaufort Sea, where Shell is preparing to drill north of Alaska, there is not a deepwater port for a thousand miles, and that one is a one-horse harbor in the middle of the ocean. The water in the area is only navigable a portion of the year, and periodic storms with “sustained winds may reach 65 to 70 knots; significant wave heights can climb to 40 to 50 feet” occur every few years.

A recent European study on Arctic weather forecasts "large increases in the potential for extreme weather events" and warns that "commercial activities in the North (e.g. fisheries, oil industry, shipping) will become increasingly vulnerable" to severe Polar low-pressure systems, described as the "Arctic Cousins" of tropical hurricanes.

Of course, as the weather gets rougher, accidents will increase and remediation becomes more difficult.

Until recent years, technology limitations and low oil prices have kept this vast repository of hydrocarbon wealth essentially out of reach of extraction. Those limiting factors are rapidly diminishing and oil companies are rushing to get a stake in the action. Logically, disasters, delays, and cost overruns would be directly proportional to severity of site conditions and distance from logistical support.

Some recent developments in Arctic petroleum exploration/extraction:

-The Norwegian national oil company Statoil has been producing gas from its Snøhvit drilling site above the Arctic Circle since September 2007. The ambitious project is completely sub-aqueous, and has been plagued with delays, overruns, and un-permitted greenhouse gas releases since the beginning. Statoil is one of the biggest players in some of the dirtiest hydrocarbon projects in the world, including the Catskills hydro-fracking controversy.

-BP has recently signed a deal with the Russian state-owned Rosneft to explore the Arctic areas off Russia’s continental shelf. Neither Russia or BP are known for their attention to the environment or safety record.

-Shell has received permits to begin exploration off the north coast of Alaska in the Beaufort Sea, and is moving equipment, including a drill ship and a newly built spill response ship into the area in anticipation. When one remembers that thousands of vessels were involved in the BP Deepwater cleanup, and one specialty disaster response ship seems inadequate. Shell has a record of environmental destruction and governmental manipulations in their projects around the world.

-Cairn Energy began drilling off the Arctic Coast of Greenland this summer, but had to stop after GreenPeace activists suspended themselves from structure of the drill rig.

If you were hoping that peak oil would arrive and provide the restraint that we seem to lack as a species, vis-a-vis our carbon addiction, think again. The dirty oil sources (like the tar sands) will allow us to continue to push up the atmospheric CO2 meter at an increasingly accelerated pace. Of course, when all of the ice has melted, the oceans will only rise 220 feet, so if you are in the mountains you’ll be fine, except for the sunburn...

Beauty and Oil Fires

I have a confession. I’m fascinated by oil fires. They have a mesmerizing beauty like nothing else. Werner Herzog did a great film called Lessons of Darkness about oil wells after the first Gulf War. Did we learn a lesson?

Flare at Plastics Plant

Today there are two big fires, one in Jaipur India, and the other in the Timor Sea, north of Australia. They hardly warrant a blip on our celebrity-obsessed media and consciousness, after all, Mark Sanford’s exploits in Argentina or Brad’s current status with Jen is much more interesting and relevant. And of course the plentiful TV programs about the nice little animals, although gently cautionary about imminent concerns, reassure us that all is well. Because if I can see the pretty polar bears, I know it will all be ok.

HUBBERTS PEAK

31 July 2009

I was talking to a farmer as he delivered his boutique organic vegetables to Angelika’s (my favorite restaurant), telling him about my tar sands trip to which he remarked that the tar sands completely blasted Hubberts peak, the concept we hoped would save the planet, out of the water. For those who don’t know it, the theory is one about the diminishing discovery, followed by production and thus scarcity of oil and the corresponding price increase and drop in consumption. Devout readers of this tome know that the tar sands extraction process is environmentally devastating on many levels, and on my recent trip I discovered that it’s profitable at about $50 a barrel (according to my source). And there is a lot of it up there under the Albertan Boreal Forest.

MCMURRAY JUNKYARD

30 July 2009

From what I could tell at a distance, the dogs were friendly. Did that give me the liberty to traverse the junkyard completely, alone? As the total anti-materialist photographer (is that an oxymoron?), what could be more idyllic than a junkyard? But I had a flat tire and an appointment with a group of Cree first nation elders, and was in no mood to be exploring a junkyard looking for a Toyota with a particular size tire. To make the story shorter in the telling, John, the tire man, finally came to my rescue, and no Toyotas with 195-15 tires did he find either, at which point he suggested we go look through the large rows of tires that were standing at his work station, something I had opined upon arrival. The first one he found had rot around the edges (he really did know his stuff) but the second one had more tread than the tire I had cut. Yes it was my fault, the Toyota simply was not sturdy enough to jump the curb off the highway. The squeaky new factory prefab housing surrounded by grassless dirt (tar sands topsoil removed prior to strip mining the bitumen filled sand below?) was too appealing a picture. The signs with their promises of cheap schooling and easy commutes, prices the same paid in Toronto or Boston, painted a picture not dissimilar to the gold rush towns of California in the good old days. But halcyon days are back in Fort McMurray, 1600 miles north of Edmonton thanks to the tar sands. Unless you live downstream.

But let’s face it. As long as there is demand (that means us), these resources will be extracted, at whatever cost necessary. And do you really think the needs of a small minority group will be considered versus all that money to be made? I hope so.

PEACE ATHABASCA

29 July 2009

Nothing in the world can be more detestable than a mosquito, and nothing is more annoying as having one buzz in your ear when you are trying to sleep. It’s late at night on the Peace Athabasca Delta, and we are at a fishing camp belonging to the family of our hosts, Joe and George Marcel of the Dene tribe. Outside, the air is thick with mosquitoes; so many in fact, that going out to the bathroom is an act of desperation and means being eaten alive, while inside, there are so many that the buzzing in the ears is unending. They bite through the clothes, they laugh at repellants, they drive one to distraction. Sleep is impossible, as I refuse to use deet repellants, the only thing that they even notice; but as I write, fatigue immediately clouds my mind. The dark hours are few, and soon light fills the cabin, so I contemplate grabbing the camera and going out to try to shoot some of the myriad birds whose songs filter in through the few screens but the thought fo facing the vampires is daunting, even with the body nets NRDC brought.

The Peace Athabasca Delta is one of the world’s most beautiful places, under siege from effluents of the tar sands operations, and deprived of water by a large hydro-electric dam. This part of my trip has been organized by NRDC to show journalists the contrast between this “Bio Gem” and the industrial nightmare upstream (rivers flow north here). Coincidentally, they were coming up at the same time as I, and they invited me to join them on this part of the journey. They also had a tour of one of the tar sands operations, but those companies don’t like photographers and would not allow me to join (can’t understand why.) That’s why Industrial Scars remains an “eye in the sky” project.

Joe and George, a taciturn pair, are guiding us through this spectacular place, an endless wetland teeming with flora and fauna. Most of the day is spent on a motorboat going along the Athabasca River, and getting off in various places: an old family graveyard, the place where the “winter road” runs into Lake Athabasca (this area is only accessible by ground in the winter when everything freezes.) This particular road runs over a lake for this stretch. We also hike along a trail that has been in use since time immemorial through the sand hills which are characteristic of the region. We see eagles, a moose grazing by the river, birds of every description, and, did you say mosquitoes? On the way out, we stopped and Joe fried some walleye that was so fresh and tasty, even I liked it. They navigate the maze of rivers and perform these tasks with a practiced facility that can only come from a lifetime of knowledge. They are besieged with strange cancers and dwindling clean water, all as a result of our thirst for oil.

TAR SANDS - Part II

27 July 2009

Everywhere it smells like oil, a constant reminder of the force that drives this region. And the people, all polite and helpful, are defensive, because they need those jobs. How dare those environmentalists come and criticize? “What powered the car that got you here anyway?” In traveling the world, I see this over and over, fear-motivated support of environmental destruction by the populations dependent on the pillage for their jobs. My friend Larry Gibson, the David fighting the Goliath of Massey coal, holds an annual July 4th party (remember life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) at his place in WV. This year it was busted up by a gang of drunken, slovenly coal miners, threatening the women and children present. Land of the free, home of the brave. One almost feels sorry for them, because it is fear that drives this behavior. Of course, the coal companies with whom they cast their lot have repeatedly shown their willingness to enslave and abandon the workers: the stories of coal towns and indebtedness to the company stores are legendary. More recently, the mechanization of coal mining has obviated all of the jobs once provided by the mines, at a much greater environmental cost. There is a madness at work here: our heritage is being destroyed, and make no mistake, the environment is our legacy; it pervades our songs and lore. But we seem to be willing to sacrifice our children’s inheritance for trinkets and our indulgence.

Fort McMurray, the support town for the tar sands operations, has the gold-rush feel pervading everything: hotel rooms and real estate cost more than prime cosmopolitan areas, labor is scarce, so service suffers, fortunes are made (and lost) overnight, and everyone is rushing to get theirs. Meanwhile, the people downstream (the Athabasca River looks like chocolate milk) are suffering myriad cancers and birth defects, but can’t get anyone to pay attention.

TAR SANDS - Part I

25 July 2009

Like all industrial extraction processes, the culpable actors don’t want publicity. I'm driving along next to the Albian sands project, a joint venture of Shell and Chevron/Texaco, which happened to be one of the most interesting excavation projects from the air, and the “Access Interdit” signs abound, as if one could actually do damage to this ravaged landscape. Of course the only damage is to reputation: no one is more dangerous than the photographer. Meanwhile, as I drive, I listen to the local radio station, which is full of the news of a recent study commissioned by the Alberta provincial government (which is very supportive of tar sands development) asserting (for the benefit of dubious USA lawmakers (who are always on the side of the environment)) that oil from tar sands has only ten percent more global warming footprint than traditional crude. Driving through Fort MacKay, a First Nation community which, unlike many others, has embraced tar sand development, I’m impressed with the new roads and community center and school, all in a village of 450 people. Of course, given the rate of cancers and other mysterious diseases I’ve read about, one wonders who will be around to enjoy it all. Must jobs always come at the cost of environmental devastation? A resounding NO.

Meanwhile, I’m in northern Canada and the weather feels like Florida. Can we realize the problem before it’s too late?

EDMONTON

21 July 2009

The tasks somehow increase in monumentality, due to the exactitude required and the preparation, let alone the execution. Production takes more and more time, and is increasingly difficult: a clear vision of the road between concept and product would almost certainly discourage the attempt. Nonetheless I find myself rushing to Newark airport on the Pulaski Skyway (love this road) with the monumental Hudson power plant off to the right, and the series of rusted bridges over the River, with that feeling of anxiety - based on the fear of unpreparedness. It always leaves once I am in motion (and realize what I forgot, in this case the spare battery for the video camera.)

But inevitably when flying commercially, one joins the rank of “the problem,” which I spend so much energy avoiding: the carbon footprint, massive use of petrol, the tremendous waste… I devote my life to learning and documenting the hidden cost to our environment of that soda can; to then see them thrown in the rubbish as the airlines tend to do makes me crazy. And the food, or what passes for it, makes me cringe. Watching those overweight kids drink soda after soda and eat hamburgers that have such a staggering impact on the planet makes me want to grab those sodas and burgers from them and ask incredulously: “do you know what you’re doing?” But of course, that is the least effective method of persuasion, so I control myself with a beer (time for a life-cycle analysis of that, I guess.) And I hope that the images I make will educate these same people about their unwitting involvement in the desecration of our world.

But for the time being, I am part of the problem, emitting carbon and eating factory food and hoping for change.

TAR SANDS - press release

June 30, 2009

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Described as a “Provocateur” by MSNBC’s Anne Thompson, photographer J Henry Fair never fails to inspire viewers with his horrifically beautiful imagery of environmental trauma. Whether his subject is the mountain-top removal mining practices of the coal industry, or the inhumane treatment of animals on factory farms, Fair’s message is clear: we are all complicit in the destruction of our planet, and to repair the damage we have done means cooperation en masse.

Fair recently collaborated with Columbia University’s Earth Institute and OSI to document the gas drilling practice known as “hydro-fracing,” which will severely affect the Catskills and have a major impact on the New York City water supply if allowed to continue. This project has received significant press attention and will subsequently be published as a book. Fair now sets his sights on our Northern neighbor: the Tar Sands of Alberta, Canada. The Tar or Oil Sands are a large deposit of bitumen, a tarry hydrocarbon, trapped in the earth, and has been called “The Most Destructive Project on Earth” by Environmental Defense.

In July, Fair will make his way up to Northern Alberta, so that he can capture this atrocity from his signature bird’s eye view. Working with key leaders in the Tar Sands cause, Fair’s photographs will become the centerpiece of a touring symposium which will endeavor to educate the public on this little known disaster. Set to debut this fall at Green Mountain College in Vermont, the tour will then continue on to a host of colleges, universities, and other organizations in the US and abroad.


For additional information or images, contact Katherine H. Womer Benjamin, 617.448.0007 or khwb.photog@gmail.com.