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Vermont Bans Fracking
eldavojohn writes "Vermont is the first state to ban fracking (hydraulic fracturing), a process that was to revolutionize the United States' position into a major producer of natural gas. New York currently has a moratorium on fracking but it is not yet a statewide ban. Video of the signing indicates the concern over drinking water as the motivation for Vermont's measures (PDF draft of legislation). Slashdot has frequently encountered news debating the safety of such practices."
We're moving to Vermont!
"Vermont Says, "No Fracking Fracking!"
You stereotypers are all the same...
A common sense idea made law that goes against the big oil and gas industries? Maybe there is hope after all!
Its a little old, but here is a good PBS report on the subject fot the lesser informed:
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/613/index.html
Silence is a state of mime.
I hope I wasn't the only one who immediately thought of Battlestar Galactica.
From this wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shale_gas_in_the_United_States, it would appear that VT doesn't have any natural gas reserves to speak of. That makes it easy for them to ban fracking - there isn't any revenue/economy to be built on that effort anyhow. Perhaps Nebraska can outlaw fishing for Chilean Sea Bass. States with large reserves will likely have a harder time taking that leap.
Note - VT is close to a large reserve so I suppose I could be wrong about how much gas is easily accessible from that location.
A common sense idea made law that goes against the big oil and gas industries?
Were common sense involved all involve would realize how far apart gas deposits are from water tables, and never have passed such a law.
It's really sad that these days you find Slashdot filled with people so full of fear, and unwilling to look further for the truth of things.
In reality Fracking doesn't have any of the evils alarmists like you are painting it with - for example the drinking water issues you note about probably are from the region that had gas in the drinking water BEFORE fracking was involved.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No fracking will be coming here, due to our geology. But don't let that stop grandstanding politicians from doing something to solve a problem, even one that doesn't exist.
Liberty in your lifetime
The article doesn't go into much detail on what specifically is banned. We sometimes use hydraulic and/or pneumatic fracturing for environmental cleanups; of course, only water (or air/nitrogen) are used - generally pretty shallow and only trying to increase transmissivity of sediments, not break up rock. Just wondering if they actually put some thought into it, or just knee-jerk banned all hydraulic fracturing. The technology does have uses besides breaking up shale to extract natural gas.
They pump toxic chemicals into the water. Despite how deep they drill, what they pump in percolates up to the water supply. And you want more evidence? You'll never be satisfied, Denier.
Fact is, by doing what the gas companies doing they are STEALING natural gas from under other people's land and polluting other people's water. They have no right to that.
They've gotten a free ride for too long. They need to be stopped and they need to pay for the damages they have already done despite being given immunity by corrupt government officials.
As to the question of known reserves, because we don't have drilling here yet is all the more reason to ban it before it becomes a problem, they pollute our water and they steal our resources. They could find gas reserves in the future. Easier to close the gate before the horses escape.
"Cue the lawyers."
Aye, and they'll waste a lot of money on lawyers as Vermont ties them up in the courts they own. Even if they were to win in Federal court then Vermont would make their lives miserable. Entergy found that out. They "won" and then appealed their own "win" when they found out it Fskd them further. On top of that Vermont added a new $12 million dollar tax on their heads and increased other costs for them. There is more than one way to skin a Big Corp.
Actually, we pronounce it "No Frickin Frackin" here in Vermont.
To ensure that the state’s underground sources of drinking water remain free of contamination and to formalize ANR’s interpretation of the state underground injection control rules, the general assembly should prohibit the issuance of a permit for the discharge to an underground injection well for conventional or enhanced recovery of natural gas or oil.
So I would guess for environmental cleanups you might be okay but, of course, you would most likely need a discharge permit to ensure that you are compliant with laws protecting any wildlife or water surrounding the area. Hasn't that always been the case though?
My dad pushes dirt in Minnesota and he knows all the laws about reclaiming and recovering after you've just scooped a bunch of clay out of the earth and haven't replaced the topsoil. Because you are in really deep if the anyone sees that. It got so bad for one guy who had my dad do work on his property that he ended up donating the corner of his back forty where he had scooped up all the clay to a church so he could 1) write it off and 2) get that environmental catastrophe off his hands given he didn't have enough topsoil to put back.
My work here is dung.
Your breathing generates carbon dioxide which is alleged to harm every living being. Before you take another breath, the precautionary principle demands you prove your breathing causes no harm.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
WTF ? Water tables are at most 1k feet deep. Oil wells are well over 5k feet deep with a LOT of non permeable rock in between how can this fracking fluid get into the water table ?
What do you base this on? There are supply wells in my immediate area that are well over 1000 feet deep, and groundwater reaches down much much farther than that, albeit in decreasing quantities - pore space/storativity tends to decrease as pressure/depth increases. Natural gas wells are at a wide variety of depths; hydraulic fracturing is breaking up those non-permeable rocks that act as traps for oil and natural gas in order to more easily extract the oil and/or gas. Natural gas and oil wells are often cased off from relatively shallow groundwater, but these casings rarely if ever reach all the way down to bedrock (which is often naturally fractured to some extent anyway).
The dangers of fracking have been blown somewhat out of proportion, but anyone familiar with it should recognize the very real risks. If the exploration companies came to the table and tried to work out some rules there probably wouldn't be an issue; instead they insist that they shouldn't have to reveal what they are injecting, and continue to pretend that there are no risks when all the evidence (and basic understanding of the process) says otherwise.
Some years back a drilling company drilled some dry holes in the Lake Champlain Valley ...
His point is that there is no evidences that any of t is getting into the water table.
Well, there have been cases where the stuff that is taken out does find its way into the drinking water but the common argument is that it was mishandled. The way I see this, in a very unscientific way, is that we're doing something similar to when we dumped mountains of garbage into the Pacific Ocean because, hey let's face it, there's nothing out there and nobody's ever going to be able to find it, right? And now we just sit there and stare at it wondering if anyone's going to do anything about it saying stupid shit like "Well, it doesn't matter if we stop, Japan will keep dumping out there."
And, you know, this fracking stuff just sounds like more of the same mentality and I feel like it could bite our ass in the future when all of Pennsylvania has pockets of water underneath it that, by themselves pose no risk but added up eventually cause us some discomfort. And yet, all the comments on Slashdot assure me I'm just a fear monger so what are you to do? People seem to get upset when I try to place the burden of proof that this will not harm us in anyway on the companies that are going to make billions of dollars off it and the people that still own mineral rights are telling me to shut the hell up at all costs. These natural gas companies sound like really unsavory types.
DO you even know what chemicals are in there?
Now that's a funny question if you're in PA (and I don't mean "ha-ha" funny).
My work here is dung.
It only has to be as safe as any other resource extraction - coal, oil, metals, lumber, etc.
Hell, just the burning of coal, through the release of mercury and radiation, makes more people sick than fracking could ever hope to.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The problem is that the laws against and about fraccing will do nothing to stop shoddy cement jobs, which, by the way, is just as possible on a well that flows naturally. If you want to stop shoddy cement jobs, you'd do a much better job of it by, I don't know, regulating cementing better? Crazy, I know.
Casings crack and leak ALL THE FREAKING TIME. If you think they are some magical seal that always works you are ignoring the reality in the field. Oil/gase companies experiment with new casing techniques all the time because cracking/leaking happens a lot, and they are still looking for solutions to the problem. Claming casings seal off the hole is grand ignorance of reality.
Compositions of many of the fluids are freely available because of complaints about the issue.
Here's one source of information:
http://fracfocus.org/chemical-use/what-chemicals-are-used
In a surprise move, Vermont also banned toasters, leaving people baffled.
The CO2 that comes from our breathing is already a part of the Carbon Cycle and therefore does not "add" to the total CO2.
The CO2 trapped in oil and coal has not been a part of the Carbon Cycle for millions of years. It has been sequestered. Or rather, it was sequestered...and now all that CO2 is being released at least four orders of magnitude faster than it was captured.
:(){
Again, there are two groups of people at work here. Irresponsible hit and run artists looking to take the money and run leaving a new superfund site every place they go, and real business men and women who are both responsible to society and their share holders. The problem isn't fracking. The problem is a pervasive lack of regulation and responsible businesses performing the process. As with everything else, you can't expect any more than the lowest common denominator if you don't hold people and their political systems to account.
Can you try not being an innumerate dumbass? Relative to electrical production and transportation, the amount of CO2 produced by human breathing is a blip. People are not arguing about 300 vs 301ppm CO2; they're arguing about how nice it would be to back off to 350 and stay there, versus hitting 400, 500, or 600ppm.
Yeah, I'll stand by my statement. Fracking tends to occur in areas with low populations. Even if has some hidden cancer risk that isn't apparent for many years, the number of people affected is pretty small.
Coal gets blamed for 1 million deaths per year just from the air pollution. There is also the increased cancer risk from the radioactive material released and of course the mercury that gets into our fish. This guy even made a table where you can see the relative deadliness of coal vs natural gas. Even if frack water is as big a hidden danger as, say, asbestos, it would be a long shot for gas to match coal in deaths.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'm very pessimistic about anyone's ability to stop mankind from harvesting all of the fossil fuels. I hope I'm wrong.
That said, even if you totally ignore carbon, coal is not the greatest choice. You can scrub out the mercury, but you are still sending radioactive material into the air and the mining of coal presents some serious environmental and aesthetic challenges. Oil comes with the obvious baggage of war and the outflow of $300 billion in wealth each year. There are also some environmental consequences like spills and the nasty air pollution associated with refineries. Natural gas has a relatively good safety record, is reasonably clean-burning with little refining, and is found in large deposits domestically. Does the extraction create some environmental challenges? Sure. Do I think they are as serious as coal or oil? Not IMHO.
By the way, I also like nuclear, though the way we just stockpile the waste is unacceptable (and solvable... solved, actually).
Solar is great but nowhere near ready for the scale of nuclear or coal... the largest solar plant in the world is about 500MW, which is the output of a single small nuclear reactor - and you can't put those everywhere and they don't work at night. Wind is somewhat more promising... the largest farms already produce as much as a full-sized nuclear reactor and it looks like we might get as much as 20% of our power from wind in the next 20 years. Hydro is pretty much tapped out in the US.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.