Summer / Fall 2010

Ninth Circuit Court Hears Our Appeal — Decision Pending

by Michelle Berditschevsky and Peggy Risch

Looking into the Caldera from the Mount Hoffman Roadless Area, with Mount Shasta in the distance. Photo by Peggy Risch

Q: What do the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the geothermal issue in the Medicine Lake Highlands have in common?

A: Geothermal wells are proposed to be drilled to 9,000 feet—almost two miles! At those depths, as we saw in the Gulf, the consequences of uncontrolled releases are tragic. In the Medicine Lake Highlands, this would put the pure vital waters of the largest freshwater aquifer in California at unacceptable risks of contamination, affecting the water supply locally and statewide.

Q: “Fracking” (fracturing of shale inside deep wells using a high-volume mixture of water, sand, and proprietary chemicals to release a resource) has been increasingly in the news in relation to drilling for natural gas as causing contamination of wells and aquifers; does this have any relation to the fracking proposed for the Medicine Lake Highlands?

A: Yes! Unfortunately the Bush Administration overrode local agencies and in one geothermal well approved the use of highly toxic acids under pressure without any environmental review. Fracking is an inadmissible technology at the Medicine Lake Highlands because it would alter the actual rock formations with potential detrimental consequences on water quality and flow. While monies for schools are diminished, our tax dollars subsidize corporate fracking drilling programs by the Department of Energy and the California Energy Commission.

Decision still percolating

Drama and complex legal technicalities marked the Ninth Circuit hearing deliberating our appeal on March 10, 2010. The elegant San Francisco court room was filled to overflowing by Pit River tribal people and many environmental and indigenous allies who support keeping the sacred Medicine Lake Highlands in their near-pristine condition and free of polluting geothermal power plants, pipelines, cooling towers, and toxic dump ponds.

As our readers may recall, the Ninth Circuit court ruled in our favor in 2006, stating that Calpine Corporation “had nothing” because the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service had violated environmental and cultural preservation laws when granting a 40-year extension on the leases that we maintain expired by their own terms in 1998. Our Stanford Environmental Law Clinic legal team challenged the lower court ruling as erroneous in the March 10th appeal. The lower court judge had ruled on remand that Calpine actually still had something—the underlying leases—and all that was required was for the federal agencies to redo the environmental documents.

Obviously, the consequences of Calpine having no leases at the proposed Fourmile Hill project area is very different than if Calpine simply must redo a faulty environmental document. The March 10th hearing was brought back before the original panel of three Ninth Circuit Court judges to determine this very important discrepancy. We are awaiting a decision any day now. The actual hearing is available for audio review.

Second lawsuit in holding pattern

Our other lawsuit is on hold pending the outcome of the first case, and challenges a second proposed large industrial power plant complex known as Telephone Flat in the heart of the Medicine Lake Caldera. Originally this project was denied by local federal decision makers ten years ago, but that decision was reversed in 2002 in Washington DC under President Bush.

Our goal in progress: long-term regional protection

Lobbied by Google and others, the Obama administration has unfortunately decided to heavily fund untested geothermal “hot rock” technology that a decade ago would have been considered sci-fi material. In fact, geothermal energy production has proven more expensive and less accessible in many areas, spawning interest in untested drilling techniques that would access the extremely deep hot rocks miles below the surface. Our concerns were presented before the State Water Resource Control Board by hydrogeologist Dr. Robert Curry, and his scientific views were later validated by a 2009 Swiss government report that shut-down a geothermal deep drilling project in Basel because of seismic damage.

The Ecology Center’s spotlight on Medicine Lake Highlands and Mount Shasta, and activities of another group at the Geysers geothermal field, has caused this untested technology to be moved out of California to a geothermal area outside the Newberry Crater National Monument in Oregon. Although Medicine Lake and Mount Shasta have thus far been spared this unfortunate technology (thanks to your support and our efforts), the Obama administration will need to be educated from a non-corporate perspective, with an emphasis on long-term protection of water preserves and bioregions—the perspective from which we are currently working.