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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?
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
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)."
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.
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.
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!
Yeah all that sounds real nice, except that I grew up in NE PA and in that area it used to be people used the same wells and springs for generations. The well house on my grandparents' property has been continuously functional for longer than the USA has had independence from England. In light of that, what you're saying just doesn't seem applicable, fair, or even sincere, frankly.
Caveat Utilitor
I've invented a car that runs on water, but that water needs to come from the taps in PA.
clearly "Attila Dimedici (1036002) ", has not actually read the article before responding to it.
but that doesn't matter. they KNOW they are right.
There are several reasons why this idea doesn't work. First the quantities of contaminants needed to ruin the water for consumption are much smaller than the quantitites needed to generate any useful amount of energy. Along with methane there are several other chemicals that contaminate the water and if they are dissolved in the water, it is not always easy to separate them and some of them can be very nasty.
Caveat Utilitor
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!
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