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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.
The terms "water pollution" and "risk to human health" are so very anti-business and job-killing. We prefer to say that the invisible hand is incentivizing the purchase of bottled water at the present time...
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.
Anecdotally, the first person in a given area is paid relatively well. Their neighbors are then politely reminded, off the record, that they can either accept the er, generous, offer being made, or they can end up with poisoned groundwater anyway, and the drillers will just have to wait a bit longer for the gas under their property to diffuse through the porous substrata toward the wells next door...
If pollutants respected property lines, this would be much less of a problem...
"Bottled in Scranton, Pennsylvania"
Look at the bright side, maybe you can really run your car on 'water' now
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.
"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
Thankfully, you can save money on maintenance and improve evaporation pond efficiency if you don't bother to actually make sure that the impermeable liner of the pond is impermeable... Win-Win, baby!
How do you get "nature done it" from "improper disposal"?
Really quite curious.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
Almost nobody owns mineral rights beneath their own home. Since your neighbors or the person who owns your neighbors' mineral rights can still pollute your air and water, you can't even stop natural gas fracking from occurring in your neighborhood.
Natural gas fracking often lowers property values. Since polluted wastelands aren't unappealing to most people you can count on your home losing value when your neighbors consent to fracking.
Who are you supposed to sue and for what when natural gas drilling ruins your home's value? Has anyone even successful sued over home value loss due to drilling? Your neighbor who consented to it? The corporation who is following every law and regulation?
We need regulation to protect people from corporations whose only interest is profit. Otherwise people are given bottled water as a legal settlement for the wholesale pollution and destruction of their land and air.
Let's face it, SOME aspect of the fracturing process, whether it be frac water dumping, well casing failure (gotta get that pressurized water down there somehow), or the (far less likely but not yet confirmed to be impossible) slight possibility those fractures are of much greater extent than expected, is contaminating wells on a widespread basis.
The gas companies deny it's happening and still say fracking is "safe" - whenever a water well starts producing methane the gas company claims it's naturally occuring biogenic methane. Really, do you expect ANYONE to believe that multiple wells across the country which been producing clean drinking water for decades suddenly got contaminated with methane-producing bacteria within 1-2 years of fracking operations commencing nearby?
I live on top of the Marcellus, so I've been following the situation pretty closely (and yeah, I've watched GASLAND - scary material and one of the reasons I'm pro-nuclear - that industry has a far better track record in the USA and constantly strives to improve safety. Gas companies say they're safe when they clearly are not, and refuse to make any improvements.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
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.
Typical, pinning the blame on anti-regulation. When various governments are actually what is protecting these gas companies from lawsuit damages.
Just as it's difficult or impossible to attribute individual cases of lung cancer to smoking tobacco products, it's usually difficult to impossible to prove that the contamination of an individual well that provides drinking water came from fracking. When you don't know who caused a well to go bad, who do you sue? The protection that the drilling companies are receiving from government comes in the form of lack of oversight and transparency lobbied for by the drilling companies and land owners who stand to make more money if there is a less oversight and transparency. NY state has delayed issuing drilling permits for fracking pending the release of a study by the EPA. Drilling companies and land owners have been poring money into the state capital in an attempt to persuade government officials to permit drilling to start as soon as possible, regardless of the outcome of the report. Many small towns in NY state that rely on centralized wells for the entire community are surrounded by land owners who want to start drilling as soon as possible. If the community's water well goes bad, who gets sued? Is it possible to determine which land owner or drilling company among many is to blame? Best practices, based on the most up to date research and enforced by good regulation and oversight, will do more to prevent ground water contamination than any number of after the fact lawsuits.
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
Let's face it, SOME aspect of the fracturing process, whether it be frac water dumping, well casing failure (gotta get that pressurized water down there somehow), or the (far less likely but not yet confirmed to be impossible) slight possibility those fractures are of much greater extent than expected, is contaminating wells on a widespread basis.
Actually, that is not the case. We do not know what the incidence of methane in the water was in those wells before the gas companies started fracking (at least based on both of the articles linked to in the summary). We do not even know what the incience of methane in water wells near other, non-fracking gas wells is. Until we have at least a proxy for an answer to those questions, we will be unable to evaluate the level of risk that fracking brings and if it actually is causing a problem. Additionally, with that information, we will be able to determine how to ameliorate the problem.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
It's easy enough to blame fracturing, but the process of fracturing itself is occurring deep within some producing formation.
It's also easy enough to blame the massive increase of CO2 in our atmosphere on the nearly perfectly correlated massive increase of human industry pumping CO2 into the atmosphere but that would be inconvenient for my energy stock prices so I choose not to believe it.
;-) That's a huge degree of correlation, and the chemistry of the hydrocarbons in the water match the chemistry of the gas in the nearby wells.
Did even you RTFA? (In this case I mean did you read the fracking Abstract of the scientific paper in question?
Yeah sure the fracturing does take place much deeper than the water table, they have to pump the fracturing fluids down to the shale which involves pumping them THROUGH the water table. Yes I know that the procedure involves sealing the well hole before pumping the nasty stuff down there, but when they drill hundreds of wells in a region only a few have to leak to ruin the local water table. Of course the oil/gas extraction business has such a great safety record and they have never made a mess of things before, so why should we believe science when we can believe BP? I think you should consider not drinking the water from your local well, obviously the fracking fluids are messing with your thinking process.
Oh and by the way, those fracturing fluids, as revealed in the very interesting movie Gasland, are comprised of over 500 chemicals including several known human carcinogens and many suspected human carcinogens. So it is not like this is some academic question. Water tables all over the nation are turning foul with this stuff.
BR Here is another thing to ponder. Until very recently this technique for extracting gas was very rare. Towards the end of the Bush administration, this particular industry was exempted from compliance withe clean water act. Right after that fracking becomes the most important new development in energy extraction. Correlation or causation? It seems pretty clear to me that someone was afraid that they would be unable to comply with clean water regulations so they didn't bother until they made sure that their ass was covered.
-- QED
Let's face it, SOME aspect of the fracturing process... is contaminating wells on a widespread basis.
The cited research doesn't actually demonstrate this. It demonstrates that wells near fracking sites have much higher methane levels that wells that are more than 1 km from fracking sites.
However, there is a reason why fracking sites are where they are: it's where there is the highest concentration of gas in the ground, or where it's easier to extract, or it's where there is some aspect of the surface access situation that makes it easier to drill there, or... So there is the potential for a selection effect to come into play here: it may be that wells drilled in the vicinity of localities that are good candidates for fracking have higher levels of methane than those that do not.
Fracking is certainly the most plausible causal candidate, but there does need to be follow-up research on these less-plausible, but not insane, alternatives.
In the meantime, states should require that all wells within 1 km of proposed fracking sites be tested for methane levels on a yearly basis, and corporations engaged in fracking should be on the hook for the costs of these tests as well as supplying the homeowners with water if there is an increase in methane levels due to deep-methane leakage of the kind reported in this paper. Only by capturing the before-and-after picture will the situation become unequivocal.
Of course, this is the United States, with the most dysfunctional, inefficient and ineffective governments in the developed world (which is why so many Americans think 'government is bad'... because their governments are). So while my proposal would be sensible in any other country, in the US the state governments are almost certainly incompetent to execute such a simple plan. Americans just aren't able to do the things that other people in other countries manage all the time, without any fuss or bother.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Anecdotally = Pulled it out of your ass.
Well, he *is* talking about methane...
I live an an area where drillers have recently bought (and continue to buy) drilling leases. The parent is right! That is EXACTLY what happens.
All of the drilling in my area is of the horizontal variety. The gas company buys a drilling lease on one small plot of land (a couple acres). They drill straight down for a little then they turn their drill so that it runs horizontally. They then drill horizontally for UP TO SIX MILES so it doesn't really matter who leases the land they park their drilling rig on. All it takes is one greedy asshole every few miles and your community is fucked. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_drilling
The nature of the gas deposits in the Marcellus Shale Formation requires that every well has a massive horizontal component and that is fracked to hell and back. It's completely uneconomical to drill regular vertical unfracked wells in Marcellus shale. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcellus_Formation#Fossil_fuel
"Liechtenstein is the world's largest producer of sausage casings, potassium storage units, and false teeth."
Ah, yes, it's not like people have been living in the area and using well water for a couple hundred years. Yet now, they can light their tap water on fire and somehow this study does not count because no one tested the water beforehand.
Would there have been a reason to test the water BEFORE you could light it on fire? And what might be the cause now, after a hundred years of prior use, that the water is flammable?
This is not something confined to the PA-NY border; it happens wherever fracking goes on, yet we are supposed to believe that this particular case is confined to one bad operator? The gas industry needs to seriously review the precautions they are supposed to be taking and see if they are truly being responsible corporate citizens.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
And the amusing thing is that you probably call liberals and progressives idealists whose beliefs would never work out in the real world.
Your solution is that every homeowner can go up against an energy company in the court of law, and that the courts will always resolve things correctly. That suggestion might be funny if it weren't so fucking stupid.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
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.
Actually, if you read the abstract, you'll see that they found no evidence of fraccing brines ending up in the water itself -- only the gas. Curious, eh? This, combined with the incredible depth of the reservoirs being fracced vs. the aquifers and the number of layers of cap rock between the fracced reservoirs and the aquifers leads me to the hypothesis that it's not the fracced reservoir itself that's leaking; it's the recovery wells. This could be some combination of poor cementing, poor steel casing/attachments, better gas permeability in the conditions present than anticipated, gas developing its own channel to the surface just outside the well through the weak points in the strata created by the well, etc. Thoughts?
This hypothesis could be tested. In some wells you could inject a tracer gas into the reservoir after fraccing but before production begins, while in others you could inject it into the recovery wells just below the point of the aquifer. You could then draw the following conclusions:
Reservoir: Yes, Well: Yes: Either there are multiple paths for the gas to reach the surface, or more likely, the gas is leaking up through or around the casing of the non-producing well.
Reservoir: No, Well: Yes: Gas is leaking out from the production well, but no significant amount is able to move up through/around the casing from the reservoir.
Reservoir: Yes, Well: No: No: Gas is leaking up directly from the fracced reservoir, independent of the well.
Reservoir: No, Well: No: This would throw this study into doubt.
That last paragraph contained spoilers, so if you don't want spoilers go back and don't have read it.
If there's enough methane in the air to asphyxiate you, it must mean that you're in a facility with Ex-proof equipment and are taking proper precautions. If it's a regular household, it will blow up way before it gets to a concentration where you get any respiratory symptoms. Unless you're Amish and also happen not to have any flames around, and the humidity is like in your subterranean cold room. IOW: get a sense of scale...
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.