Environmentalists and animal advocates contend that Navy sonar testing in the ocean is harming whales and other marine wildlife and are calling on the Navy to curtail such training and testing exercises accordingly. Pictured: A Navy helicopter lowers a sonar device into the ocean.
Active sonar is a technology used on ships to aid in navigation, and the U.S. Navy tests and trains with it extensively in American territorial waters. The Navy also conducts missile and bomb testing in the same areas. But environmentalists and animal advocates contend that this is harming whales and other marine wildlife, and are calling on the Navy to curtail such training and testing exercises accordingly.
“Naval sonar systems work like acoustic floodlights, sending sound waves through ocean waters for tens or even hundreds of miles to disclose large objects in their path,” reports the non-profit Center for Biological Diversity (CBD). “But this activity entails deafening sound: even one low-frequency active sonar loudspeaker can be as loud as a twin-engine fighter jet at takeoff.”
According to CBD, sonar and other military testing can have an especially devastating effect on whales, given how dependent they are on their sense of hearing for feeding, breeding, nursing, communication and navigation. The group adds that sonar can also directly injure whales by causing hearing loss, hemorrhages and other kinds of trauma, as well as drive them rapidly to the surface or toward shore.
In 2007, a U.S. appeals court sided with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which had contended that Navy testing violated the National Environmental Policy Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act and Endangered Species Act. But within three months of this ruling, then-President George W. Bush exempted the Navy, citing national security reasons. The exemption was subsequently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court upon challenge, and the Navy released estimates that its training exercises scheduled through 2015 could kill upwards of 1,000 marine mammals and seriously injure another 5,000.
Luckily, in September 2013 a federal court in California sided with green groups in a lawsuit charging that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) failed to protect thousands of marine mammals from Navy warfare training exercises in the Northwest Training Range Complex along the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington. In the opinion, Magistrate Judge Nandor Vadas ruled that NMFS’s prior approval of the Navy’s activities there failed to use the best available science to assess the extent and duration of impacts to the marine mammals. As a result of the ruling, NMFS must reassess its permits to ensure that the Navy’s activities comply with protective measures per the Endangered Species Act.
“This is a victory for dozens of protected species of marine mammals, including critically endangered Southern Resident orcas, blue whales, humpback whales, dolphins and porpoises,” says Steve Mashuda, an attorney with the environmental law firm, Earthjustice, which represented the coalition in the lawsuit.
The recent ruling will no doubt be challenged. Also, the Navy still has the green light to use sonar and do weapons testing off the East Coast despite the risks. Concerned readers can send a message through the NRDC website calling on U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to direct the Navy to adopt safeguards to protect marine mammals during training without sacrificing national security.
CONTACTS: CBD, www.biologicaldiversity.org; NMFS, www.nmfs.noaa.gov; NRDC, www.nrdc.org; Earthjustice, www.earthjustice.org.
Hydraulic fracturing (known as “fracking”) is a method of causing fissures in underground shale rock formations to facilitate the extraction of otherwise inaccessible natural gas and oil. In a typical fracking operation, drillers inject a mixture of pressurized water and chemicals underground to fracture the rock and free up the gas and oil. Not widely employed in the U.S. until less than a decade ago, fracking has quickly become a major player in the U.S. energy scene. The resulting influx of cheap domestic natural gas-cleaner burning than the oil and coal it has replaced-is at least partly responsible for the fact that the U.S. has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions to the lowest levels since 1992.
Fracking has been good for oil companies, the economy and even our carbon footprint, but it doesn’t come without environmental cost. A typical fracking operation pumps some five million gallons of water and chemicals underground to break up the shale. About half the water is removed during the oil and gas recovery process, leaving the other half underground where it can contaminate aquifers and degrade soils.
Enterprising petroleum engineers have been hard at work trying to find ways to frack without water. One promising alternative involves using carbon dioxide (CO2) to break up the underground shale instead of water. “Fracking with carbon dioxide has a number of potential advantages,” reports Kevin Bullis in the MIT Technology Review. “Not only would it eliminate the need for millions of gallons of water per well, it would also eliminate the large amounts of wastewater produced in the process.”
He adds that CO2 may also yield more natural gas and oil than water, given the dynamics of how it works underground. Also, CO2 used in fracking can be recovered and used repeatedly. And once a well is done producing, it can be sealed up, sequestering the CO2 underground where it can’t add to global warming.
Researchers at the University of Virginia estimate that fracked sections of the Marcellus shale in the eastern U.S. could store over half of all U.S. CO2 emissions from power plants and other stationary sources over the next 20 years, with other shale formations providing significant additional storage.
Right now CO2-based fracking is uncommon, given the abundance of water in our biggest fracking regions and the logistical challenges in transporting a compressible gas to well sites safely and cheaply. But as fracking expands into politically charged areas, or arid regions where water is scarce, waterless fracking could become more common. Already, nearly half of the fracked wells drilled across the U.S. in 2011-2012 are in water-stressed areas, according to the sustainability-oriented non-profit, CERES. And a recent study from the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie concluded that many of the countries with the greatest promise for developing shale oil and gas through fracking suffer from water shortages.
Bullis says that one of the largest shale gas resources in the world is in China underneath 115,000 square miles of desert. “Piping in water would strain already tight supplies,” he says, but adds that China’s major use of coal-fired power plants means the country has plenty of CO2 it could be capturing and using.
CONTACTS: MIT Technology Review, www.technologyreview.com; “Estimating the Carbon Sequestration Capacity of Shale Formations Using Methane Production Rates,” http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es401221j.
