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High-Tech Gas Drilling Is Fouling Drinking Water
sciencehabit writes "Drilling for natural gas locked deep in a shale formation — a process known as fracking — has seriously contaminated shallow groundwater supplies beneath far northeastern Pennsylvania with flammable methane. That's the conclusion of a new study, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The analysis gives few clues, however, to how pervasive such contamination might be across the wide areas of the Northeast United States, Texas, and other states where drilling for shale gas has taken off in recent years."
New study? Ever seen 'Gasland'?
Gasland:
http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/
You know fracking is bad when you can put a lighter up to a running facet in your kitchen and a fireball erupts.
It's easy enough to blame fracturing, but the process of fracturing itself is occurring deep within some producing formation. The Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania is a mile underneath the surface. If there's natural gas in the water table then it's the improper disposal of recovered fluids that is causing it, not the fracturing process. This water is supposed to be pumped back into some deep reservoir or trucked off to evaporation ponds.
How do you get "nature done it" from "improper disposal"?
Really quite curious.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Natural gas fracking is specifically exempted from the clean air act and clean water act.
We can thank George W Bush and Republican majority for that...
Please don't forget which political party enacted a law which legalizes the poisoning of neighborhoods and entire regions.
Therein lies many problems. The earth's crust is not one nice consistent pancake. It has many different layers of rock and caverns as well as underwater rivers and lakes. To get to the shale you have to drill through all the other stuff. And you don't even know what you are drilling through in the first place. You just make a guess and then hope your "cement job" keeps the other layers of the earth from interaction with your dill hole. And there isn't just one hole. They drill hundreds of holes. There is no precision to this and methane gas knows no boundaries if it can find a way up the other layers of earth. What everyone is terrified of is a blow out since these drilling fluids are under intense heat and pressure and then a contamination of the aquifer with drilling fluids and potentially gas, brine, drilling fluid and even oil.
The Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act (H.R. 2766), (S. 1215) - dubbed the FRAC Act - was introduced to both houses of the 111th United States Congress on June 9, 2009, and aims to repeal the exemption for hydraulic fracturing in the Safe Drinking Water Act. It would require the energy industry to disclose the chemicals it mixes with the water and sand it pumps underground in the hydraulic fracturing process (also known as fracking), information that has largely been protected as trade secrets. Controversy surrounds the practice of hydraulic fracturing as a threat to drinking water supplies.[1] The gas industry opposes the legislation.[2]
The House bill was introduced by representatives Diana DeGette, D-Colo., Maurice Hinchey D-N.Y., and Jared Polis, D-Colo.
The Senate version was introduced by senators Bob Casey, D-Pa., and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
citation provided
I wonder if the same Republicans that exempted fracking from the clean air and clean water act blocked this bill...
That's not exactly correct. The "gas" and oil is locked in the shale. In contrast to conventional reservoirs, it is not a gas until the fracturing of the rock and extraction with the magical fluids that Cheney made sure do not need EPA approval. It is entirely possible (though not demonstrated) that the fracking process that releases the gas allows the gas to seep up through the rocks into the groundwater above. (typical gas reservoirs rely on impermeable rock structures above that have trapped the gas. Shales can be underneath porous rock without losing the hydrocarbons they contain.)
However, the study did analyze water from sites at various distances from the gas extraction wells and found that the closest ones had more methane and had a composition matching fossil fuel, while those sites farther from the gas production had much less methane and had markers for recent biological origin. The underlying shale formations do not change drastically over the horizontal distances involved in the measurements. So it seems pretty obvious, if not absolutely proven, that the methane in the water comes from the operations of the extraction companies.