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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."
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...
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...
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
A documentary is a collection of anecdotes. A study is a presentation of systematically-gathered empirical data.
Also, a study can be new while not introducing a new idea. In fact, many or most aren't, but are instead done to test a suspicion or hypothesis based on anecdotal evidence.
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.
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...
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?
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.