Original Article

The economic boon to northwest Louisiana from the Haynesville Shale played a role in Louisiana College choosing Shreveport as the site for its planned law school, Alexandria Mayor Jacques Roy said Thursday.

Roy had hoped to convince LC officials to locate the law school in Alexandria, but he said realizes financial incentives tied to putting the law school in the Shreveport area would have been hard to overcome.

On Wednesday, LC officials announced the Judge Paul Pressler School of Law will locate in the United Mercantile Building in downtown Shreveport, with an opening date of August 2012.

The building was donated to LC, a private Baptist college located in Pineville. LC considers that as a $3.1 million in-kind donation, and two donations totaling $2 million also were received.

“The Haynesville Shale took the law school from Alexandria. That’s the bottom line,” Roy said Thursday. “Everybody’s wanted me to say this to (the news media) — everybody in the private world — so I’ll go ahead and give them what they want, say it today.”

The Haynesville Shale is a huge natural gas field based in northwestern Louisiana, and selling drilling rights have made some property owners in that area overnight millionaires.

Roy said Shreveport does have other assets to offer LC in setting up its law school, but the amount of money coming into the northern Louisiana area from the natural gas industry, particularly because of the Haynesville Shale, helped fuel private donations.

Alexandria officials offered a system in which LC would pay the city back for part of its contributions to the establishment of the law school in Alexandria based on economic development, but locating in Shreveport resulted more in outright donations, Roy said. These donations could feasibly come with certain conditions, but they do not necessarily have to be paid back regardless.

“We wish them the best,” Roy said of LC officials. “You don’t have hard feelings about these things. What you have instead is the wish that maybe some other things had come together here in the private world that would have sweetened the pot for that.”

The announcement of the Shreveport location did not take the city of Alexandria by surprise, Roy said.

“You wouldn’t make an announcement in Shreveport about a law school being located in Alexandria,” Roy said. “Secondly, you wouldn’t have sent out from LC formal, wedding-style invitations to the announcement weeks and weeks before. That was a good indication.”

Yet, the city of Alexandria could not sit idly by and wait for the site decision to be final, Roy said. If anything fell through in LC’s dealings, Alexandria needed to be able and ready to step up.

The mayor stood by the deal Alexandria offered to the school — from location to finances — as the best deal the city could offer, but Shreveport had a more financially attractive offer for the school.

“We’ve got the better building and situation in our downtown,” Roy said. “What we don’t have is that better building and situation for free.”

Alexandria City Councilman Myron Lawson said finances came into play in LC’s decision.

“I’m excited for Louisiana College but disappointed that we weren’t in a position to accommodate them,” Lawson said.

“I understand that they have pockets of philanthropic support over there that we may not have in our area. It shows that we need to be even more engaging in those that may be in a position to help,” Lawson added.

At his press briefing on Thursday, Roy addressed a rumor that newly selected Alexandria Police Chief Roger Tully is somehow related to the mayor’s wife. He said the background checks into all candidates for the chief job required investigations into any possible family connections.

“As the public knows, we went to great pains to create a process that removed all politics and in fact did so,” Roy said. “My wife met Roger Tully several days after he was selected. Had never seen him before. Doesn’t know him. They’re from different areas of the country.”

Around the close of the selection process at the beginning of August, the rumor began circulating that Tully is somehow related. Roy indicated that the election season is a “convenient time … for folks to say about whatever they want.”

The rumor does not bother him for the sake of his family because they accept their role as public figures, Roy said. His main concern is the rumor’s effect on Tully and the reputation of the volunteers who served on the selection committee.

“It attacks Chief Tully and the process and citizens who volunteered their time to select that police chief,” Roy said. “That’s a very insulting thing in my estimation to do to the committee of volunteer folks that were involved with that process.”

Original Article

By Shelley DuBois

FORTUNE — Coal has always been cheap and dirty. And the dirty part was justifiable because it was so cheap. Now, gas prices are dropping, threatening coal’s dominance in the North American energy market. Which means gas could take over before coal gets a chance to clean up its act.

Natural gas dropped in price last week, trading at under $4 per million British thermal units-the unit used to measure energy output. The price is competitive with coal on a Btu basis, David L. Goldwyn of the U.S. Department of State announced last week.

Coal is still cheaper at $2.25 per million Btu in 2010, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Even so, the coal market is starting to feel the burn from gas on its heels.

Coal stocks are down, across the board. Bloomberg recently reportedthat the largest U.S. coal producer, Peabody Energy Corp., fell 5.2 %, to $40.96. The second biggest producer, Arch Coal Inc., fell 5.9 % to $21.08. Massey Energy Co., the largest Central Appalachia coal producer, plunged $1.40, or 4.6 percent, to $28.75.

So if natural gas is accessible, cheap, clean, and getting cleaner, should the government keep spending billions on clean coal?

So far, the government has tried to spearhead projects to demonstrate that coal plants capturing carbon can compete with traditional plants. But the flagship federal clean coal project, FutureGen, has mutated since it started in 2003, and had to be completely resuscitated after being scrapped in 2008.

The latest holdup with FutureGen 2.0 is that the project will retrofit a current coal plant as opposed to building a new one, and it will be in a different location than previously planned. The project was going to cost $1.1 billion under the latest plan, but could change depending on a recent quirk in finding a location to store the captured carbon.

The government established the Clean Coal Power Initiative in 2002 to try to partner with industry and push clean coal technology. So far, the intiative has completed 3 of the 18 total projects, 7 of which have been terminated. The choppy, drawn-out start to FutureGen hasn’t helped the U.S. clean coal industry either.

These projects need to kick into gear fast, if coal is going to compete with gas. Gas is especially threatening to coal because it’s a local fuel — it’s not economical to transport it over vast distances in large pipelines like oil. But natural gas could provide energy relatively close to power plants, just like coal does now.

TVA replacing coal with gas

In both new projects and business expansions, power producers have also already started choosing gas over coal. A company called American Municipal Power Inc. planned to build a coal-fired plant on the Ohio River last year. In early August, the company announced that it would build a 600-megawatt gas-fired plant in that location instead. NRG Energy (NRG,Fortune 500) signed a $1.9 billion deal to buy five power plants in California from the Blackstone Group. Four out of the five plants will burn gas.

Also, the Tennessee Valley Authority announced last week that it was going to idle nine coal-fired generating units at three plants, starting in 2011. The TVA plans to build natural gas generators to replace several of the coal-fired units.

As dirty as coal is, people do have reservations about the environmental impacts of producing more gas, especially from shale sources. Namely, there’s concern that extracting gas from shale could contaminate groundwater with drilling fluids.

But if regulators snap into place to oversee the United State’s copious shale gas reserves, then coal will really be in trouble. Coal won’t just be able to rely on being cheap anymore, it will have to be clean too. And yet, if natural gas stays cheap, it will still become increasingly difficult to make the economic or political case to keep throwing clean money after dirty coal.

Original Article

In an Aug. 26 story (“Oozing profits: ‘GasLand’ exposes nation’s energy industry”), Josh Fox — director of the film Gasland — continues to perpetuate a host of blatantly false claims about American’s natural gas industry, particularly the use of hydraulic fracturing technology.

Your readers should understand that hydraulic fracturing has been safely used nationwide over 1.1 million times since it first came into commercial use in 1949. It’s a technology that has never contaminated groundwater, a fact reinforced by top EPA officials as recently as this year. Colorado’s top oil and gas regulator, David Neslin, also confirms “there has been no verified instance of harm to groundwater caused by hydraulic fracturing in Colorado.”

And while Fox claims that “a huge array of chemicals” are used in the fracturing process, the truth is these fluids are composed almost entirely of water and sand — with a small portion of additives (0.05 percent of the mix) used to kill bacteria and reduce friction. These additives can be commonly found in one’s kitchen cupboard and in every day food products, and a list of these are required by federal law to be available at every well site in the nation. And in Colorado, state regulations mandate that operators maintain a precise chemical inventory for each and every well.

How about that flaming faucet in Fort Lupton? COGCC experts gathered the data on that one, and determined that “dissolved methane in well water appears to be biogenic [naturally occurring] in origin,” adding “there are no indications of oil and gas related impacts to water well.”

The top environmental regulator in Pennsylvania has called Josh Fox a “propagandist,” saying the film is “fundamentally dishonest” and “a deliberately false presentation for dramatic effect.” And a longtime New York Times editor called the film “one-sided,” “flawed,” and “in the Michael Moore mode.” But you don’t have to take their word for it. Download our point-by-point rebuttal of the film at Energyindepth.org.

Lee Fuller

Energy In Depth

Washington, DC