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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."
but but Regulation is bad... m'kay?
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.
Yeah, it probably is contaminating the water table, but do you have any idea how much these people get paid by the drillers to operate on their land? It's a lot of money, and in most cases it's enough that these people have their water trucked in and wont have to worry about it. Bad for the environment? Sure, but do you really thing a struggling farmer cares about the environment when his business is failing?
Free gas at the faucet !
I'd set up some kind of cool burning fountain thingie in my front yard!
I've heard of these kids before – if they get enough air time you wind up with expensive gasoline and a broken economy.
The purpose of existence is to make money.
Really sucks, and it's just run by a bunch of damn liberals anyway...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Only for you peasants. Since the drillers are under no clearly enforceable obligation to compensate anybody for their mess(and are, indeed, kindly and specifically exempted from the clean water act...), their costs remain satisfactorily low, and their production abundant.
Sure, a bunch of powerless people get to drink carcinogens; but that's an externality, and doesn't show up on their balance sheets.
The real problem here is that a bunch of people have been given alarmingly broad rights to shove costs onto others, without their consent, which has made substantially destructive practices highly cost effective. It is indefensible from basically every position between(and including) libertarian and certified green party; but since "Plutocrat" is the position actually calling the shots, we are unlikely to see much effective opposition.
They are equally entitled to clean drinking water. And the people who dont own the property in apartment complexes are not getting anything. And the locally grown produce getting sprayed with this stuff, which is then fed to kids, livestock. They arent getting paid. If they cannot mine this valuable substance without contaminating the water, then they should have to completely replace the water supply with water piped in from a clean location. Every house, every yard, every farm well replaced with free city water. Forever.
"Some of you may have noticed if you've tried to drink during the course of the last few years that your drinking water is now natural gas. That's because we've been doing invisible drilling in your area, which is turning your drinking water into natural gas. Don't worry, that just means it's working."
- Frack Johnson
It's not nice to frack with Mother Nature.
As Kevin Grandia wrote last year:
In 2005, at the urging of Vice President Cheney, fracking fluids were exempted from the Clean Water Act after the companies that own the patents on the process raised concerns about disclosing proprietary formulas - if they had to meet the Act's standards they would have to reveal the chemical composition which competitors could then steal. Fair enough, but this also exempts these companies from having to meet the strict regulations that protect the nation's freshwater supply.
Imagine if your neighbor's toilet clogged and, instead of calling a plumber, he started taking a dump over the fence on your garden.
What would you do?
A) call the police
or
B) complain about lack of a regulation on taking a dump over the fence?
There are already laws in effect stating that no one is allowed to poison their neighbor's water. However, since natural gas extraction *is* regulated, and the regulations do not prohibit fracking, then an exception is created allowing the corporations to poison the water in this manner.
The problem with regulations is that when you create them, instead of using the existing laws, something that would not normally be permitted could be allowed by the regulations by default.
From the study synopsis:
"In active gas-extraction areas (one or more gas wells within 1 km), average and maximum methane concentrations in drinking-water wells increased with proximity to the nearest gas well and were 19.2 and 64 mg CH4 L-1 (n = 26), a potential explosion hazard; in contrast, dissolved methane samples in neighboring nonextraction sites (no gas wells within 1 km) within similar geologic formations and hydrogeologic regimes averaged only 1.1 mg L-1 (P 0.05; n = 34)."
An interesting report about the practice of fracking in rural Australia. Similar stories about widespread pollution - particularly to do with the chemicals used in the process - but also about some of the battles mining companies play with land owners http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/special_eds/20110221/gas/
"Brita Faucet Fryer".
It isn't called "fracking" for nothing.
I've got the sense you where trying to be funny, but it's quite insightful.
Dude. It's published in PNAS, one of the top scientific journals (which means the peer review would have been brutal). Read the actual study - even in just the abstract, they answer some of your questions regarding the methodology. In the actual paper, they clearly explain their basic methodology and the principles behind it, as well as their conclusions.
Your concerns are unwarranted. They test a valid comparison between fracking sites and non-extraction sites. They show quite convincingly data demonstrating the origin of the methane (ie. differentiation between biogenic and thermogenic sources), and they note that many of their non-extraction sites are slated for extraction in the future, which will allow a follow up paper for a longitudinal look at fracking on levels of methane gas in water sources and as surface emissions as modified by local geology.
I'm a biochemist, not a geologist, but the paper is super easy to read, and only 5 pages to boot. Give it a go.
And, in future, here's a hint: If you, a complete layperson, can come up with a number of problems to a scientific study in a few minutes, then you can bet that actual experts in the field who have dedicated their entire professional career (usually decades long) to these sorts of questions may just have thought about them too.
The problem is filtering alone isn't enough. A lot of times the chemicals in the water actually eat the filtering equipment.
They either need water trucked in or use cisterns.
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
Seeing that they are the basis for many of the rebuttals to the exaggerated claims in the Gasland movie?
This is a problem I generally have with these groups that produce movies such as Gasland (Michael Moore is similar). They love to exaggerate, misdirect, and some out right lie in their presentations, all to make their case more dire. They love to incite fear and then quickly go elsewhere when objections are raised. They are quick to dismiss any objection under the head nodding, wink wink, type claim that those who don't agree are obviously shills.
This in the end weakens their cause because they come off as crack pots. I lived on a farm as a child in North Eastern Ohio. We changed wells three times during my twelves years of growing up there because of naturally occurring contamination. They are was very high in coal. We ran a water softener and a filter system just to have drinkable water. By drinkable I mean water that didn't taste outright odd. Toilets would have iron stains in days from cleaning.
So I am quite sure someone with a chip on their shoulder who didn't like the coal industry (or NG) in my old area could gen up a good scare story without revealing the pre existing issues.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
You realize that to get to the shale you have to dig a hole down to it.
That hole then gets pressurized with whatever is down in the shale.
If that hole leaks because someone slacked on their casing cement job, then you have methane from deep origins leaking out at the level of the water table.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
My apartment is literally 100 feet from the Susquehanna, and I live right on top of the Marcellus.
Owego's water is marginal enough without adding frac fluid to the mix, thank you very much.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Well, if it's that bad that even distilling it won't fix it, then you're right - they're screwed.
Actually, it's thought that methane is safe to drink (plus, it boils out of the water pretty well). The problem is it building up in houses and suffocating people or starting fires. Running your drinking water through a filter won't fix that.
You are correct. I recall hearing anecdotes in the 1960's of gas-contaminated water in parts of Pennsylvania.
If your government cannot deliver clean drinkable water it has utterly failed. Might as well not have one if it's just going to let industry ravage the land and expect you to pay for the consequences.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The methane can also originate from old leaking well case as mentionned in the PNAS study.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Dang. So you'd need to install a ventillation system similar to what you use for Radon gas in every home.
Way to go, oil company. You know, in a way, I'll be glad when the oil runs out and they are out of a job. Because I can't think of an industry that has done more damage to the environment worldwide or led to more wars and strife.
the problem with Josh Fox's movie is that the Gas industry hired a bunch of PR flacks to shoot him down at every available opportunity. if you surf any internet forum comment thread on this issue, you will see post after post after post that use classic PR strategies, like avoiding the question, changing the subject, and personal attacks against Fox, (it almost reads like a page out of Team Themis' plans against Glen Greenwald), etc.
Another thing the PR flacks rely on is the lack of 'scientific proof'. They say there is no real evidence, everything is anecdotal, Josh Fox is not a scientist, etc etc etc. If they cannot get rid of their opposition, they at least try to slow it down and delay it as long as possible. This is actually a good strategy; the GOP took back the House of Representatives in 2010, so all of that delay from 2008-2010 actually accomplished something.
The PR flacks of course are moving to buy off their own scientific experts but if you have articles like this in reputable scientific journals, it is a major blow to the PR people. It destroys a lot of their arguments. They will have to move on from "there's no evidence" to "there is conflicting evidence" (see Global Warming) and "we need jobs". They also might have to stop personally attacking Josh Fox and performing character assassination. . . that is something that doesn't work quite as well with reputable scientists (although it can still be done).
if you would watch the movies you would understand that Josh Fox is nothing like Michael Moore. he doesn't ambush any executives in order to get a video clip of him chasing after some guy in a parking lot or elevator lobby (Moore).
the executives just flat out don't talk to him. he calls and calls and calls. who will talk to him? dozens of homeowners, a handful of scientists, and an obviously conflicted regulator. Fox's film main strength is that a lot of it is very dispassionate.
People in civilized places don't need to. What comes out of the tap is cleaner than bottled water.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
if the PR flacks are paying you based on how many anonymous bullshit 'rebuttals' you spray all over the internet.
considering the tens of thousands of farmers who depend on underground aquefers for the water they use on their crops and to water their cattle, i just dont understand your post, at all.
the gasland film even has a rancher on it whose cattle are suffering becasue of contamination.
the fluid the pump down into the ground is a cocktail of chemicals dreamed up in a lab to better crack rocks apart. the levels of chemicals were even kept secret from the public for a long time.
you can get more information about the chemicals in a big mac than about what the gas companies are pumping into your water supply.
You failed to read the article. They explicitly tested wells up to 5 km from the closest fracking site, and they also tested for the source of the methane. The methane measured at far distances (1-5km from the closest site) was coming from naturally occuring bacteria, and averaged 1 mg / L, while methane measured closer to the sites ( 1km ) ranged from 19mg/L to 64 mg/L, and the type of methane was the same as obtained from extraction from the shale, being hydrocarbon rich. They also pointed that a few further sites had more methane than expected, but they also said they could not get the information about how far the wells went horizontally, which could have helped them a bit more.
Anyway, take a look at the article. It`s really well done.
clearly "Attila Dimedici (1036002) ", has not actually read the article before responding to it.
but that doesn't matter. they KNOW they are right.
Shell recently started a tender processes to obtain the privileges necessary to do fracking in the Karoo (a vast semi-desert) in South Africa. The area of concern produces most of South Africa's meat produce through sheep farming, and many towns and farmers depend on the groundwater supply in the area for survival.
So, there's a reasonably strong movement among farmers and concerned environmentalists in SA to stop Shell from using this process in the Karoo - it's just too risky. Of course, Shell promises that nothing will go wrong, and it will have no effect on the water supply. But the process requires several megaliters of water, which basically amounts to all the groundwater available in the Karoo.
There are other known cases where this process also didn't turn out well, but perhaps this case will help make the farmers' and concerned parties' case.
Unfortunately, this being South Africa and politicians being who they are, the government is leaning strongly towards allowing Shell to mine the Karoo for natural gas. "Thousands of job opportunities" is the catchphrase they love to use in this regard. So if you ask me, it's going to happen, no matter what the risk. But at least now, with it going wrong in several other places, the environmentalists may have solid grounds to take this matter to the courts.
For the foreseeable future, America's LNG seems to be the way to free ourselves from the energy racketeering, exercised by hostile Asian countries. I hear that Gasprom is already suffering financially largely due to the diversification of Europe's gas import. The USA's LNG hurts them. And that is wonderful.
It's not enough to pursue fossil fuels to the point of destroying the environment on a global scale, but what really, really pisses me off is that the 10 motherf@#$ in control of the world's supply are so crazed with insatiable greed that they can, and will, continue to as they wish with no regard for anything. They are unstoppable becuase they own the lawmakers.
I'm looking at you especially, Walker; you kochsucker.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Instead of condemning fracking as a public health risk due to methane release in the ground water, why don't we come up with a simple separator that could be connected to people's wells that would siphon off the methane and either store it or use it to heat the home or generate electricity?
but it is, IME, pretty solid evidence when you can chart the level of methane in the well water against the distance from the fracking site.
Or perhaps, it is just the distance from a site that was optimal to drill a well that would use the fracking technology. The logic you use is very similar to the logic used by people who were convinced that vaccines caused autism. This does not mean that fracking is not a problem. It just means that you need to actually determine quantitatively what the problem is.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
How difficult/expensive is it to pull methane out of the water in a treatment plant?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They specifically tested over the same `underground profile`, and that`s also why they didn`t go to 50km away. Beside, validating the methane profile in the surrounding really makes the point valid. Please take some time to read the article itself, it`s freely available from http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/02/1100682108.full.pdf and should answer most of your questions.
S11E08 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI:_Crime_Scene_Investigation_(season_11)
distilling != filtering
Distilling is a lot more expensive than filtering. It would be cheaper to truck in water from outside the affected region than to distill.
Of course it SAYS socialism all over the place; that means it really really IS about socialism - just like 'Obama is a socialist' and 'regulating business is socialist'. Right?
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
I don't have time to read the paper this morning. Does it only discuss sites using hydraulic fracturing for natural gas production and non-extraction sites (which I take to mean sites where natural gas is not being drilled for or produced)? If so, then it misses the possibility (which the commenter you addressed as "Dude" pointed out) of natural gas wells in the same area that do not use hydraulic fracturing. In other words, the suggestion was that they failed to isolate the variable of hydraulic fracturing. But, as I said, I don't have time to read the paper at this time so it's possible that they did account for that. Your response, however, does not indicate they did.
Fracking is exempted from EPA regulation of the substances they pump into the ground - you be surprised what they're pumping down there. It's likely that much of the contamination is not from the release of the gas, but from the stuff directly injected into the ground. This methane issue does suggest that both are a problem though.
clearly "Attila Dimedici (1036002) ", has not actually read the article
As I understand it, Slashdot comment system culture expects articles in scholarly journals to be paywalled and generally does not expect users to read paywalled articles. This journal article, on the other hand, is an exception: "Free via Open Access".
Are...you...a troll? Forgive the AC accusing...but...
Your response to complaints of contamination is to ask why someone isn't using a separate filter? Really? That's...fucked up. Really inconceivably, unbelievably, ridiculously fucked up.
I mean, it's bad enough I have to use a filter on my city water because it is quite literally contaminated with jet fuel.
And all my personal issues with fluoridated water aside--I'd rather *not* filter private well water (as long as it isn't sour or too hard). Believe it or not, some of us drank unchlorinated water for centuries and came out okay as long as it came from a deep well. And it...tastes good with a bit of calcium, magnesium, and other minerals in it that filters tend to strip out... There's a reason people pay through the roof for 'mineral water.' Want some? Just drill down 50 feet in the right places.
Hell, I used to drink from a well my grandfather had dug himself with a shovel. Indoor plumbing was installed in the 50's.
Maybe instead of you insisting we "catch up with the times", you should stop polluting our world. Too hard? Then keep your contaminants on your side of the property line and pay in perpetuity for total remediation when the VOCs you inject cross into my water.
The fact that people will pay $3 a bottle for something that covers 75% of the planet only shows how absurd your argument is--your pollution has managed to make the most plentiful resource on the planet...scarce enough that the market bears $3 a bottle. Even if you argue it's salt water, it's still 1% of that (1% of 5e9 km^2)... I'll let you subtract the 2 to figure out how plentiful that still is...
Take some responsibility for yourself and your neighbors...it's bad enough much of that useable freshwater is no longer safe to drink without distillation and osmosis filtering...
It is true there was no comparison done on that specific area before the fracking but they did compare it to a wide are (60 miles around the drilling site) and found that the elevated methane levels were only found in wells within 1 km of the site. Additionally, according to the article, the methane bears a signature that they can use to determine it comes from deep shale. Even though more study is suggested this seems to be enough to start taking action on this issue. The problem is clearly evident so the EPA should start work on determining the source and correcting it. If the drilling is the issue then it should be dealt with and the company compensate the injured parties / pay for the cleanup. Rather simple actually. Not anti-progress at all merely problem solving and responsible citizenship by the drilling company if they are the cause.
Wow. I knew people here would not RTFA, but that`s quite bad. They tested the type of methane found, to distinguish the naturally occuring methane from the one obtained from drilling. Guess what ? What they found in the wells nearby drilling station was not naturally occuring methane, but rather, deep underground high in hydrocarbons type of methane.
Thinks that this is more important than funding higher education.
Yep, they thought of that. How about you try and find time to read the paper before talking about the contents of the paper?
Is 1563649 a prime number?
I don't know ... I tend to trust the Italian merchant royalty.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
If you dig that hole you are in any deeper, you might hit gas yourself. They compared it to water distant from fracking sites, but in similar geological formations.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Even with all that gas to power the distillation equipment?
*chuckle*
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
Which will become more rare in the US of A: privacy or potable water?
Where do you live?
Actually, that's pretty good news. We can get everyone in to sample the wells now and say "this is the level of methane and diesel without fracking". Then we see what happens when they start.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Restraining people from doing bad things is called policing. Restraining corporations from doing bad things is called regulating.
How'd we get this schism in thinking that says policing is good but regulating is bad? Solely by having different terminology? If regulation is bad, then we ought to shut down all our police departments. Save a bundle of money. Let people police themselves. Give everyone weapon permits.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Last I checked, the majority of the places in Texas where they are doing fracking get their drinking water from lakes, which come from rivers and rainfall. There are some rural communities that use groundwater. I guess this could be a concern for a few thousand people at most, but even a majority of the rural areas buy their water from the major cities. I am racking my brains trying to think if any of the areas around here that they are drilling at use ground water for their drinking water, and I don't think they do (although I could be wrong). The majority of the drilling is being done in Fort Worth and areas to the south, and pretty sure that by the time you get to areas that have pumps and water-wells, you are outside of the shale.
Not saying that its okay to pollute ground water, just that saying that fracking is polluting DRINKING water is a bit of an overstatement.
For anybody who imagines that this issue is confined to a few farmers and their wells, please skim:
http://www.hazenandsawyer.com/uploads/files/The_Threat_From_Hydrofracking.pdf
The article was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Waterworks Association, by Paul Rush from the NYC bureau of water supply. He reviews the issues (typical well injects 50,000 gal of water and chemicals, times thousands of wells in the NYC watershed), and mainly points out the sheer LACK of regulation of the industry.
If the watershed is contaminated by this process, it will be a long time before all the chemicals come out of the deep rocks and the water can be trusted again. The gas will be sucked out, sold and burned in a matter of years; the contaminations could last for decades. This is not some anecdotal, enviro-nut issue. Some of the most respected scientists in the water industry are deeply concerned by it.
...to come out and suggest that tainted drinking water is just natural, and that it has absolutely nothing to do with all of the activity going on that *directly* generates the materials contaminating the water. And even if, somehow, this actually *does* have something to do with these drilling companies (very unlikely, since they're corporatist saints, and behave completely ethically), then it's obviously the free market telling these homeowners that their contaminated water is the result of not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps hard enough.
This is the kind of batcrazy bullshit that makes everyone think that Libertarians are so retarded. I think the best solution to this problem is to round up all of the people who support the gas drilling industry, make them live in the middle of these troubled areas, and make them drink and bathe in this 'perfectly safe' water until they die of poisoning. Then we can dispose of their worthless bodies by setting them on fire -- they'll be *really* flammable by then anyway.
It requires all goods and services to be luxuries. example: supply and demand goes out the window when life is on the line.
It requires infinite markets. example: the job market. In order to subscribe to libertarian dogma, you must always be able to 'just go out and get another job'.
It requires immortality so that the market will have time to adjust/equalize.
It requires one to ignore that government regulation can be the result of market abuse in even nominally democratic governments like ours.
It requires one to forget that the closer we've gotten to free markets in history, the worse things have been for the bulk of the people.
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
I don't see the "alarmist" tag?
Oh yeah, this is unrelated to the spreading of radionucliotide contamination. So ingesting these substances are dangerous to human health, and life, in general, as opposed to big heaping spoonfuls of cesium-137 and strontium-90, which are safe, and can be used as flavorings in gourmet cooking.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Likewise, for any such story, there will be a certain cast of recurring characters who will jump to attack. You can almost hear their thoughts, "How dare these groups place the needs of many before the needs of a few individuals?" It is a knee-jerk attack on cooperation.
So tell me, did you miss the part of science where you need a control group with the exact same circumstances, or at least control measurements from before the experiment takes place? Science has not been satisfied. But science doesn't matter to you, does it? The only thing that matters is that the "individuals" are fighting against the evil collaborations, in the grand tradition of "one man vs. the world".
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
of studying before you will finally admit the truth that we already know? I would imaging it's close the the number of decades that fracking will continue to be profitable. Then once the truth is even more undeniable, all your friends have to do is declare bankruptcy and make their victims live with the results.
That your uninformed corporate whoring rant is worthy of anything other than his style of response? when my young children make such outlandish statements as you then I don't bother with a fully detailed summary of why they are wrong, I simply tell them to sit down, shut up and stop wasting the grownup's time. so please, sit down, shut up and stop wasting the grownup's time.
From the study:
"We found no evidence for contamination of drinking-water samples with deep saline brines or fracturing fluids."
and:
" we found no evidence for contamination of the shallow wells near active drilling sites from deep brines and/or fracturing fluids"
and:
" In sum, the geochemical and isotopic features for water we measured in the shallow wells from both active and nonactive areas are consistent with historical data and inconsistent with contamination from mixing Marcellus Shale
formation water or saline fracturing fluids (Table 2)"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Again with gasland?
Does it even bother you that it makes several factually incorrect statements? That it butchered the data?
That they found no evidence of contamination in the drinking water? or any any active drilling site? that what they found is consistent with historical records?
What next? you going to refer to what the bleep to '
prove' that physics is wrong?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
No, the cooperative collaborative folks are fighting against the legal structures known as corporations which are nothing more than feudal fiefdoms of the ultra wealthy. I'm not talking mom and pop businesses. I'm not talking about medium sized businesses, either. I'm not talking collectives, credit unions, or cooperatives, the real collaborations of individuals. I'm talking about mega corporations which only care about the interests of the executive officers, the board, and maybe the wealthiest shareholders. These corporations act like sociopathic monsters who do not care who they hurt.
You don't really need a control group to determine whether or not these wells are contaminated before or after the fracking, they were used for hundreds of years without contamination, and then suddenly, they are contaminated by gasses that have been molecularly analyzed and found the same as what is being pumped out.
Basically, you can come to the conclusion that these well, dug before the fracking, somehow all chose pre-contaminated sites that, coincidentally, would someday be located within a few miles of fracking operations, OR, you can rightly conclude the operations caused the contamination.
Please don't pretend you are on the side of the many. You aren't. You are a fascist, corporatist tool who thinks that perhaps if he kisses Master's ass enough, Master will let him play with the nice toys. You are letting yourself get raped and asking yourself, "How can I pay for this delightful service?"
Corporations, and people like you, are tools of the sociopaths who call themselves individualists, while I and people like me are fighting for the right to real collaboration unmarred by coercion and the threat of force.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Palin may have said "Drill, Baby drill", but it was Obama that greases the wheels so BP could "Drill, Baby drill" in the gulf of mexico and we saw how that turned out.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Which is why a scientific STUDY published in an established *peer-reviewed* journal is worth more than a hundred documentaries.
You're right that "documentaries" are often carefully crafted propagandist BS. Which is why I watched Gasland with a very skeptical eye. The problem with Gasland is it is *mostly* a collection of anecdotes, and anecdotes don't prove anything in a meaningful way, although they do raise awareness that perhaps there *might* be a problem and the issue should be further studied by academics and scientists.
This *study* provides a more damming assessment of the problems.
The other point is, and this is well-established fact - the Gas Drillers get an exemption to the clean air and water acts? If they're not polluting, why do they need an exemption? If they're not polluting, why do they actively oppose repealing that exemption?
Where is the "before" data on all of the wells? To date, nobody has compared "before fracking" and "after fracking" data. There are plenty of claims about well problems after the fact (Gasland) but there has not been a single study of any kind that compares drinking water pre-fracking and post-fracking. Some of that is because the data may not be available. However, basic scientific method requires a control. Where is the control in all of this? I've seen someone on this thread spout claims something along the lines of "we've had these wells for 100's of years and they've always produced clean water". Great -- show us the data and let's study before and after.
Without that basic comparison, it is difficult to determine culpability. The fact that there is methane in the water is not an indication that fracking is responsible. There are other possible explanations that need consideration.
It may very well end up that fracking is a problem. I am simply saying the data is not there to say that yet. There are some indications, yes....but we've been wrong about "obvious" things before.
Not at all biased, are you?
they were used for hundreds of years without contamination
[citation needed]
How are you sure they weren't contaminated before? There's no measurement. Oh, yes, people drank from the wells for hundreds of years with no ill effects... just as they can do now! There's no clear link between methane in water and health problems, so before the current paranoia over fracking, would anybody have bothered to check for (or care about) methane?
OR, you can rightly conclude the operations caused the contamination.
or, I can conclude that there isn't enough evidence to blame anybody just yet, and instead just push for regulation to stop things that are blatantly bad, like dumping wastewater into nearby streams. An attack on fracking in general simply isn't supported by the studies performed to date. The study inspiring this story concludes by recommending more long-term monitoring, and finds only a correlation between well sites and contaminated water.
fascist, corporatist tool... of the sociopaths
That's quite an opinion after only a few paragraphs of discussion. I bet it'd shock you to know that I've actually helped organize protests against corporations, and voted repeatedly to raise corporate taxes in my area. That's okay. You go on and jump to your conclusions, and I'll just be content watching facts as they are discovered through proper science.
... unmarred by coercion and the threat of force
...and the scientific method, and concept of innocence, apparently.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I live here in gas heaven, and this study is NONSENSE!
People would know if they could light their water on fire. Paint me a scenario where people were drinking flammable water for hundreds of years and not noticing.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
What makes you think they didn't notice?
I grew up drinking flamable well water, and that was long before fracking, 1965-1973.
I was talking about the contents of the post I was responding to, which only distinguished between sites using hydraulic fracturing and sites without any wells, yet claimed to be authoritative. I never once claimed that the paper did or did not say something, only that the person I was responding to fell short of demonstrating his own point. Maybe the AC should also have read the paper before writing about it (which is what that person actually did).