The controversial practice allows oil and gas companies to effectively annex mineral rights from property owners and drill beneath their homes regardless of their consent. “Things got personal when I received a ‘forced pooling notice’ from a gas industry lawyer the year I moved here,” Hawkins recalls. Over time, Ault’s expansive views across the eastern plains were studded by noise barriers surrounding new drilling operations in fields by grazing livestock. With Hawkins’ pre-existing lung condition, the prospect of living by wells was alarming, but the risks, like the drilling, seemed distant. She found a listing for a charming craftsman-style residence and sent her daughter, a Coloradan, to investigate: “I remember her saying, ‘Mom, this house is perfect!’ But she didn’t say anything about the fracking (wells), because in Colorado it’s become too normalized. At the same time, I loved rural America,” Hawkins says. “I couldn’t afford to live in Denver or Fort Collins. Carol Hawkins, 71, lives alone with her dog and a collection of air-purifiers placed consciously throughout the house, what was supposed to be a dream home and a place to mourn the passing of her husband when she moved back to Colorado from Maine in 2017.Īult, Colorado, resident Carol Hawkins received a “forced pooling notice” from a gas industry lawyer the year she moved into her home. Instead, it starts with a visit to a one-story bungalow in Ault’s oldest neighborhood, the home of a retired English professor. Klooster’s survey doesn’t begin at one of the many drilling operations dotting the farmland. With more than 10,500 actively producing oil and gas sites, Weld County - or “Well” county as some locals call it - is one of those places: the most heavily drilled region in Colorado and the fifth most productive oil county in the country. Colorless and otherwise beyond human perception, these plumes of hydrocarbons make themselves visible in other ways, in the bleeding noses of children, burning eyes, upset stomachs and, further down the line, elevated rates of congenital heart defects where exposure is chronic. Methane, among the most potent greenhouse gasses - along with VOCs like toluene, butane, hexane, and benzene, a known carcinogen linked to a host of serious health complications - show up as a dance of color to the infrared camera. Klooster’s camera can see what the human eye can’t.Īndrew Klooster is a gas imaging thermographer for Earthworks, a petroleum industry watchdog. Klooster has traveled to more than 700 sites around Colorado collecting videos of possible violations, which are then submitted to state regulators. He’s a gas imaging thermographer for Earthworks, a petroleum industry watchdog. It’s designed to detect methane, hydrocarbons and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) leaking from fracking facilities across the state, and on this frosty morning, a handful of gas wells around the small town of Ault, Colorado, just east of Fort Collins.Īndrew Klooster, the man calibrating the camera, is young, sharp-eyed, serious. But this heat-seeking eye won’t be searching for jet aircraft. When powered up, the camera emits a hum, the sound of a large infrared sensor cooling itself in the same way surface-to-air missiles do.

An optical gas-imaging camera is removed from the case’s interior styrofoam mold. A matte-black carrying case with two heavy latches suggests something vaguely weapons-grade in the trunk of the rented Jeep.

Invisible touch steve shaw