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What We Need
So what we need to do is buy all the gear, get our dedicated and all-volunteer team out to Williston, ND, assemble the sensor rig, get the helium we need for the balloons, launch the rig, collect the data and make a fun-filled video of the whole thing. Then we come back to Shepherdstown to crunch the data, publish our data, edit the mission video and congratulate ourselves on a job well done, while we figure out which jacket to put our stupendous new mission patches on.
What we're asking you to help with is the cost of transportation for our team of 5 volunteers and the equipment we need to buy for the mission.
- $1,000 for out of pocket travel costs (we're carpooling on the road trip out there, living in tents, and we don't eat much)
- $1,500 for equipment (balloons, helium, electronics for the sensors, cameras)
All told we need $2,500 to cover the base cost of the mission
But... if we can raise an additional $4,000 then we can get this super cool FLIR e40 infrared camera that will help us tell the difference between flaring and rig lights, as well as helping us look for methane releases.
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And if we raise even more than that, we can do another mission! Next time maybe over the Athabascan Tar Sands in Canada, mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia, or maybe just somewhere tropical...
What's the Point?
At SkyTruth, our motto is "If you can see it, you can change it" By
making the impacts of oil and gas drilling more visible and more
measurable, we believe that we (that's we the concerned public) can change them. Most of the wasteful flaring and venting can be dramatically reduced by obligating operators to capture the gas and related liquids and turn them in to useful products, thereby offsetting new natural gas drilling elsewhere in the country. Or they can generate electricity on site with it. Actually there are loads of good alternatives available, it's just that flaring off the gas is the cheapest (and dirtiest).
How Can I Help?
Please support our passionate and talented engineers as they devote their skills, time and energy to making the world a better place. You can make a donation by selecting your contribution level on the right. We are a 501c3 nonprofit, so if you live in the United States your entire contribution is tax deductible, except for the cash value of the mission patch, which we will have for you by the time we ship them.
If you're totally jazzed and want to help, but you just don't have the cash, we total understand. You can still help out. Share this page with as many people as you can. Read the recent Washington Post coverage of SkyTruth and share that. And if you want to try a little skytruthing yourself, you can contribute a little bit of your time and energy to our FrackFinder project.
Mission Patch
The Limited Edition Mission Patch will look something like this . So ok - it's just a doodle on a whiteboard, but we have a real volunteer designer working on it, we promise. It's going to be totally awesome.
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The SkyTruth Team, left to right: David Manthos, Teri Beibel, Paul Woods, and founder John Amos.
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Space for All team and volunteers, launching a balloon rig
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