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Recent Paper Shows Fracking Chemicals In Drinking Water, Industry Attacks It
eldavojohn writes: A recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences turned up 2-Butoxyethanol from samples collected from three households in Pennsylvania. The paper's level headed conclusion is that more conservative well construction techniques should be used to avoid this in the future and that flowback should be better controlled. Rob Jackson, another scientist who reviewed the paper, stressed that the findings were an exception to normal operations. Despite that, the results angered the PR gods of the Marcellus Shale Gas industry and awoke beltway insider mouthpieces to attack the research — after all, what are they paying them for?
Profits above all else.
Hu-mans have turned into Ferengi.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Will the water companies charge extra?
Industry attacks what? Drinking water?
Its up to the companies that market the water to filter it properly
One of the authors thinks the problem may have been due to a leak at a storage tank on the surface. Emphasis on the "may".
Plus there's the concentration issue - parts per trillion doesn't make for much of a problem in any case. Even the authors didn't make this out to be a health problem....
Of course, I could be mistaken, and the companies involved could be part of a massive conspiracy to slaughter Pennsylvanians by the millions.
Yeah, on second thought, I'll have to go with the conspiracy thing. After all, everyone knows that even one part per trillion is too much, and the spill at the storage tank was probably just meant to cover up the deliberate poisoning of the water supply in three counties in rural PA....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
obviously nobodys going to do anything about it.
The oil industry wont stop until they can sell us water for $3 a gallon.
From Article:
The chemical, which is also commonly used in paint and cosmetics, is known to have caused tumors in rodents, though scientists have not determined if those carcinogenic properties translate to humans. The authors said the amount found, which was measured in parts per trillion, was within safety regulations and did not pose a health risk.
Don't worry, our "good friends" the Saudis have manipulated to oil price to drive the frackers out of business so it won't be a problem for long.
Oh wait, only the ones that cut corners will be able to afford to survive so it will be a problem.
Go tell your congressman to get off the Saudi teat and work for his own country and maybe we won't see so much of these problems.
I think any PR person, CEO, and other mouthpiece who says this stuff is perfectly safe should be forced to drink it. Daily. For a year. Their family included.
If the PR clowns are going to claim it's safe, put their money where there mouth is. If they refuse to drink it, assume they're lying and feed them to bears.
Hold these guys to some standard of truth instead of their accustomed truthiness, and see what they do.
I'm so tired of these "think tanks" who are nothing more than paid shills who spout this crap just to obfuscate the truth -- it's no different than the tobacco lobby did. It's slimy and dishonest, and should carry a huge penalty.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
but can these be fixed? is it the mistake of one company that should be penalised or is it intrinsic to the industry?
Currently live about a half mile from the epicenter of some earthquakes where there have never been earthquakes before. Grew up here. Never experienced them before. Have had several 2-3 magnitude tremors now shake my building where I live. Yesterday the Texas Legislature banned bans on fracking. And of course, the city legislatures around here have been legalizing fracking and allowing it for the past several years. I expect to hear bullshit about the frequency of earthquakes justifying them as normal soon. In a few years, I expect to hear bullshit as to why unusual organic compounds are in our ground water. Then more bullshit about why it is in the drinking water.
Industry attacks what? Drinking water?
Its up to the companies that market the water to filter it properly
Do you understand the concept of a well that provides water to a home?
What's their evidence it came from fracking and not, say Windex?
more conservative well construction techniques should be used
Ahhh, techniques that should be used.
That phrase is used quite a lot regarding anything to do human health and safety.
How often are those more conservative ways of making money used?
And people wonder why things like the FDA and OSHA exist.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The scientists involved claimed no health danger from the concentration found. Only the leftist green shills have been claiming a health danger.
Shill: Noun A person paid to endorse a product favourably, while pretending to be impartial.
Could you please explain to me who is paying these "leftist green shills"?
We can whip up a Windex frappe for you, and you can let us know how it tastes!
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
On the other hand, no clothing at all would be bad for the profits of the fe-male clothing industry. What were those Ferengi thinking?
But if we require our wo-men to go naked, there's a huge market in body paints, peircings (and jewellery), ass-bleaching and other body-related modifications/minstrations born out of body shaming and an inability to hide. We could make billions.
Is "well water" (drill hole into water table, pump out water) always used raw and unfiltered? Has it traditionally always been safe to drink anywhere you can sink a well, or is there some history of bad wells due to natural contamination?
Every home I've ever been that had well water at least had a water softener and often had issues with high iron content. A woman I worked with who grew up on a farm said they had to buy bottled water (the giant kind of bottles you see on old school water coolers) for visitors because they had some kind of low-level bacterial contamination her family was immune to but would make guests sick.
It seems like it would be common sense anymore to have a whole-house reverse osmosis system if you had a well. If not for health then for not choking your plumbing with mineral build up and making your washing machine and dishwasher work.
That's the chemical.
They found it (a very small amount) in the water. Parts-per-trillion levels.
It's used in fracking fluids - and also in a LOT of other places, like paints, sealants, cleaning products, et bloody cetera. The shocker would be if they didn't find the stuff. Here's a partial list of chemicals that use it:
http://hpd.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/household/search?tbl=TblChemicals&queryx=111-76-2
It's used in many Simple Green products, a LOT of Rustoleum paints, and a lot of others. Minwax, Goo-Gone, Zep, Windex... the list is pretty long. And all it would take would be a home mechanic spilling a bottle of one of those products to get to that same parts-per-trillion levels in their own well water.
The paper suggests that the chemical may have come from a surface-level leak at a nearby well - and that they can't actually tie the chemical to the actual fracking chemicals used at that well.
As an oil and gas industry professional I dont see anything wrong here. What Pennsylvania is complaining about is their own hubris and greed. Friendly patrio-tastic drilling companies asked kindly if they could carefully remove oils and gasses in the fight against terrorism and to prevent the war on christmas. Once informed citizens understood both gasses and oils had to be removed from the ground in order for jesus to love them and no child to be left behind, companies reluctantly did that which was most needful at the time. It was difficult, but we removed gasses and oils, and converted them to fresh clean and definitely not unhealthy gasoline to power freedom loving americans SUV's and trucks. But after a time, Pennsylvanians became greedy.
2-Butoxyethanol...no more, no less. We promised 2 of them to help invigorate the spleen and whiten teeth. But whats next? 4? 5? god forbid 8 Butoxyethanols?! We're being squeezed to death here.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Moreover, limits on ``cruel and unusual'' should be waived and they should be required to live in the center of the destruction they have caused, and sentenced to working at fixing things until things are cleaned up.
The oil industry wont stop until they can sell us water for $3 a gallon.
That would be a discount from what people already are paying for water. People are voluntarily buying bottled tap water at $7.57 per gallon right now. Approximately 2000X what it would cost from the tap.
From the wikipedia entry on the chemical:
2-Butoxyethanol is a solvent for paints and surface coatings, as well as cleaning products and inks. Products that contain 2-butoxyethanol include acrylic resin formulations, asphalt release agents, firefighting foam, leather protectors, oil spill dispersants, degreaser applications, photographic strip solutions, whiteboard cleaners, liquid soaps, cosmetics, dry cleaning solutions, lacquers, varnishes, herbicides, latex paints, enamels, printing paste, and varnish removers, and silicone caulk. Products containing this compound are commonly found at construction sites, automobile repair shops, print shops, and facilities that produce sterilizing and cleaning products. It is the main ingredient of many home, commercial and industrial cleaning solutions. Since the molecule has both non-polar and polar ends, butoxyethanol is useful for removing both polar and non-polar substances, like grease and oils. It is also approved by the U.S. FDA to be used as direct and indirect food additives, which include antimicrobial agents, defoamers, stabilizers, and adhesives.
So, basically, this stuff can be found pretty much EVERYWHERE and pretty much everywhere in or around a home. But, nope, nope, nope, these samples HAD to come from fracking wells.
1) a problem with the pipe further up near the surface. When you have an oil well (even a regular old one) you get all sorts of stuff that comes up water, the gases we call "natural gas", nasty deadly gases and "oil".
2) some other source of contamination completely unrelated to drilling which given their measurement of the concentration at parts per trillion seems likely..
Even if the problem is the first one I imagine there would be nastier compounds I would be more worried about.
Every home I've ever been that had well water at least had a water softener and often had issues with high iron content. A woman I worked with who grew up on a farm said they had to buy bottled water (the giant kind of bottles you see on old school water coolers) for visitors because they had some kind of low-level bacterial contamination her family was immune to but would make guests sick.
So? What's your point? It's one thing if you know up front what the problems, if any, are. It's another when a company comes by later and fucks it up.
I lived in a house that had well water. After drilling, it went for testing and it came back incredibly clean on it's own. All we had to do was pump and use.
Now if a fracker came by and polluted my water - after having it been tested and ccleared - I would sue them and they'd deserve it.
One 4th grader calls another a "doody-head." Doody-head calls the first 4th grader a "poopy-face"
This chemical has been shown to cause liver cancer in animals and to be a probable human carcinogen. It also can cuase reproductive issues along with many other problems
Exxon Mobil CEO: No fracking near my backyard
Exxon Mobil's CEO has joined a lawsuit to stop construction of a water tower near his home that would be used to in the fracking process to drill for oil...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/02/22/exxon-mobil-tillerson-ceo-fracking/5726603/
Many of the concerns about the safety of fracking relate to the drill shaft and riser pipe that comes up from the pay dirt, through the groundwater supplies, to the surface. When the riser pipe is installed, a drill shaft is made and the pipe is inserted into it, there is a space between the pipe and the wall of the drill shaft that is supposed to be filled in with cement. If the cement flow is blocked for whatever reason, the annular space may not be filled in, you will end up with an open channel that could run for thousands of feet between the pay dirt and the groundwater supply. Since you cant really see if the cemented went okay, its many thousands of feet underground, its hard to tell if this is happening. When the high pressure drilling fluids are injected, they would easily flow right up that channel into the groundwater supply. They say in the propoganda that there is many thousands of feet of impermeable rock between the pay dirt layer and the groundwater, but this doesnt mean much as you just drilled a hole through it all.
The "inside the beltway mouthpiece" as this Slashdot article, so biasedly calls the article refuting the evidence, is full of actual, real counter arguments. The original study is horribly flawed in its conclusions. I know that the majority of Slashdotters have written off fracking as very dangerous, but this may be a new low in terms of biased reporting and abject failure of critical thinking. The original study found one chemical that is used in fracking, in extremely tiny amounts in drinking water. That same chemical is present in tons of everyday products (as others in this thread have mentioned). What is decidedly lacking from the drinking water samples is most of the other chemicals also present in fracking, which would seem to indicate that the source of contamination is not likely fracking at all.
Before reading any further, I thought it would be a good idea to see what 2-butoxyethanol was. According to wikipedia, in addition to fracking...
2-Butoxyethanol is a solvent for paints and surface coatings, as well as cleaning products and inks. Products that contain 2-butoxyethanol include acrylic resin formulations, asphalt release agents, firefighting foam, leather protectors, oil spill dispersants, degreaser applications, photographic strip solutions, whiteboard cleaners, liquid soaps, cosmetics, dry cleaning solutions, lacquers, varnishes, herbicides, latex paints, enamels, printing paste, and varnish removers, and silicone caulk. Products containing this compound are commonly found at construction sites, automobile repair shops, print shops, and facilities that produce sterilizing and cleaning products. It is the main ingredient of many home, commercial and industrial cleaning solutions. Since the molecule has both non-polar and polar ends, butoxyethanol is useful for removing both polar and non-polar substances, like grease and oils. It is also approved by the U.S. FDA to be used as direct and indirect food additives, which include antimicrobial agents, defoamers, stabilizers, and adhesives
Probably worth knowing before getting into a debate on whether it is fracking's fault, or how its poisoning us (from that last sentence: probably not).
The communities are just following the stupidity of the political view points.
Can we frack in your community? Sure... However we want our water quality (including well water, checked once a month at your expense, for as long as the pumps are active and 10 years after. (This is relatively inexpensive demand). If there is a problem with water quality that has changed sense fracking. Then you need to supply us with clean water for 150 year or until the water quality returns.
If your method is as safe and clean as you state, then you shouldn't have to worry about it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Its a food additive, too, so that may actually not be too bad.
Got to love how many people took the "media hysterics" bait, though.
Why doesn't the industry just charge those people for the addition of chemicals to their water? Those people are getting those chemicals for free right now, and chemicals don't cost nothing! The industry should be billing everyone in that town for the chemicals they're currently getting for free!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
2BE is considered quite safe, otherwise it wouldn't be used in cosmetics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...
There seems to be very little that's toxic in fracking fluid, in particular compared to what it is being pumped into. It's highly dilute too. A bigger concern should be drinking well contamination from hydrocarbons.
You don't have an automatic right to have a functioning drinking water well on your property; numerous natural contaminants, water rights, mineral rights, utility regulations, etc. can all restrict that anyway.
The "water" was found to consist of nearly 100% of the fracking material, dihydrogen monoxide.
Odds are you will see this report used in some anti-fracking publication as a reason to completely ban fracking.
So, extremism goes both ways.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
What's their evidence it came from fracking and not, say Windex?
Interesting list of uses from wkpda;
2-Butoxyethanol is a solvent for paints and surface coatings, as well as cleaning products and inks. Products that contain 2-butoxyethanol include acrylic resin formulations, asphalt release agents, firefighting foam, leather protectors, oil spill dispersants, degreaser applications, photographic strip solutions, whiteboard cleaners, liquid soaps, cosmetics, dry cleaning solutions, lacquers, varnishes, herbicides, latex paints, enamels, printing paste, and varnish removers, and silicone caulk. Products containing this compound are commonly found at construction sites, automobile repair shops, print shops, and facilities that produce sterilizing and cleaning products. It is the main ingredient of many home, commercial and industrial cleaning solutions. Since the molecule has both non-polar and polar ends, butoxyethanol is useful for removing both polar and non-polar substances, like grease and oils. It is also approved by the U.S. FDA to be used as direct and indirect food additives, which include antimicrobial agents, defoamers, stabilizers, and adhesives.[6]
And the environmental impact;
2-Butoxyethanol usually decomposes in the presence of air within a few days by reacting with oxygen radicals.[12] It has not been identified as a major environmental contaminant, nor is it known to bio-accumulate.[13] 2-Butoxyethanol biodegrades in soils and water, with a half life of 1–4 weeks in aquatic environments.[6]
Judge should decree that. If it is safe, then they will have no problems doing it.
You're right, so I hope you personally don't put any of those nasty chemicals down the drain. Otherwise you're just as bad as they are! How dare you clean your toilet!
I wouldn't worry about it. We have need of oil and gas.
According to source in post and cross-referencing with member lists from the Marcellus Shale Coalition, five of the funders of Energy In Depth are board members on MSC while two others are associate members. That's an undeniable 7 of the listed 15 funders. Also, there is undoubtedly a large overlap and many relationships built amongst the funding companies through the even just the executive board of MSC, let alone the companies at large.
How come the water plants aren't able to filter these fracking chemicals out of the water before sending it to the homes like they filter out everything else?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
A standout scene from Breaking Bad was when Walt writes out his first (huge) check/cheque for his chemo. This single scene from so many memorable ones across that incredible series summed up what is wrong with contemporary society. We are powerless ants subservient to corporations with as much compassion and sense of right and wrong as a hungry wolf. To solve all this, we need to completely disconnect from the grid. Make our own electricity (with help from Tesla Energy), collect our own water from rain - and filter it, and use architectural concepts that ensure natural cooling and warming, with clever use of large windows and airflow. Google 'Earthships' to see some amazing sustainable living homes of this type in the USA. The number one way to destroy an evil industry legally is to starve it of money, so don't spend money on energy you don't make yourself!
The summary conflates two papers, a review paper in Science which summarizes the state of knowledge about fracking the Marcellus Shale (Vidic et al. 2013), and a study of an individual incident published this month in PNAS in which researcher purport to have found a single instance of minor contamination from a fracking well (Llewellyn et al. 2015). Neither paper is particularly damning or inflammatory, so at first blush it's not immediately obvious why the fracking PR flacks have gone to DEFCON 3 on this. The key is to read the review paper first. This is almost always the best way to start because review papers are supposed to give a full and balanced overview of the current state of scientific knowledge on a topic. TL;DR, I know, but stick with me for a few paragraphs and I think I can make the problem clear.
Vidic paints a rather favorable picture of the fracking industry's response to problems that have arisen during the fracking boom in the Marcellus shale. It absolves them of any responsibility for the infamous "burning tapwater" we've all seen in Youtube videos. It states they have been quick to respond to wastewater leaks and well blowouts before contamination could spread. It says the industry has redesigned wells in response to concerns that they might leak fracking water as they pass through the aquifer. And it says that fracking water that returns to the surface ("flowback") is treated and re-used for more fracking -- an expensive environmental "best practice".
Vidic does raise some important concerns, however, and the most important is this. At present recycling flowback into more fracking water is practical because production is booming. But at some point production will level off and begin to decline, and when that happens the industry will be producing more flowback than it can use economically. In Texas, where fracking was pioneered, flowback was disposed of in deep wells -- a process not without its drawbacks, but better than leaving the contaminated water on the surface. Pennsylvania doesn't have enough disposal capacity to handle today's flowback, which helps make recycling fracking water attractive at the present time.
We now have enough context to understand Llewellyn, and why Llewellyn is so upsetting to the industry. Llewellyn's paper documents a single instance of minor contamination which matched the chemical fingerprint of flowback from a nearby well. This contamination was well below a level that would be cause for any concern. Llewellyn concludes the most likely cause was a small spill from the flowback holding pit, although it can't rule out the possibility that the contamination occurred inside the well. Taken with the picture Vidic paints of an industry that is generally on top of stuff like this, the occurrence of a single mishap with negligible consequences is hardly damning. So why has the fracking industry unleashed its flying PR monkeys on this?
Because the fracking industry apparently has made no plans for when the day comes it can no longer recycle all the flowback it uses, and it doesn't want the public to think about that.
It would be sensible for them to prepare for the flowback problem now on the upswing of the boom, for the same reason the industry has been able to be so responsive to date: these are good times for the industry in the Marcellus Shale. They're flush. Although preparing for the problem now would be expensive, it wouldn't slow the boom appreciably, and it would add jobs. But... if the industry can kick the flowback can far enough down the road, we'll have to ask it to fix the problem while production and probably the regional economy is in decline. Doing something about the problem then will cost jobs and require money nobody will have.
So if the industry isn't forced to do something about the looming problem soon, it will become politically if not financially impossible to make them do that ever. That's why the industry is allergic to the very mention that surfa
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Many of the concerns about the safety of fracking relate to the drill shaft and riser pipe that comes up from the pay dirt, through the groundwater supplies, to the surface. When the riser pipe is installed, a drill shaft is made and the pipe is inserted into it, there is a space between the pipe and the wall of the drill shaft that is supposed to be filled in with cement. If the cement flow is blocked for whatever reason, the annular space may not be filled in, you will end up with an open channel that could run for thousands of feet between the pay dirt and the groundwater supply. Since you cant really see if the cemented went okay, its many thousands of feet underground, its hard to tell if this is happening. When the high pressure drilling fluids are injected, they would easily flow right up that channel into the groundwater supply. They say in the propoganda that there is many thousands of feet of impermeable rock between the pay dirt layer and the groundwater, but this doesnt mean much as you just drilled a hole through it all.
They know the outer diameter of the hole they drilled, correct? They know the inner diameter of the pipe they are placing in the hole, correct? So they should know exactly how much cement is required to fill the hole, correct? Therefore, they should not need to be able to see into the hole at all. They just need to know whether or not the amount of cement poured matches their expectation +/- some margin of error.
I doubt that traces of this compound in tap water is as harmful as ordinary consumption of ethanol. But I would not want pregnant women consuming alcohol...or that tap water.
The Toxicity of 2-butoxyethanol is very low, and it biodegrades. Trace amounts simply are not hazardous. The material is commonly used in paints and it is considered a danger, but only because of its shipping flammability. It is not considered toxic. I just added the Saftey datasheet information to our database last week. It simply is not a danger, and it has a huge number of other possible sources rather than fracking. Someone illegally disposing water base paint for instance.
I wonder how many Marcellus Shale Gas industry shills are around here.
Advocates of responsible business are very different from "the voices of greed and avarice" that currently dominate our legislative branch. If he was one of them he'd say something like "regulation would just ruin everything." But he did not.
Until nuclear fusion becomes available, there is no ideal source of energy. Legislating some responsibility in the pursuit of "improved but still not optimal" energy sources seems pretty reasonable.
I'm not an apologist for the oil industry and I wouldn't want to have any of these wells near my place but I did grow up in it. It seems to me extremely more likely that the issue isn't the process of fracking but ...2) some other source of contamination completely unrelated to drilling which given their measurement of the concentration at parts per trillion seems likely..
If you read the rebuttal article that the Slashdot summary calls "beltway inside mouthpieces" that's exactly what it is. The rebuttal might be unnecessarily combative, but the points it makes are still valid.
At the bottom in small writing there is a conflict of interest statement.
"Conflict of interest statement: G.T.L. and Appalachia Consulting provided litigation support and environmental consulting services to the impacted households. "
So the authors are blowing it out of proportion to help there clients.
The part's per trillion means it's not harmful.
Way to get fooled by media drumming up eco-loon crap!!!!
Actually, there is technology for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement_bond_log
Since there is an economic incentive for the petroleum company to apply all that pressure and frac fluids ($$$ to the tune of 1/4 to 2/3 of the total cost of drilling the well) only to the hopefully-producing zone and nowhere else, you can rely on the cementing operations to be ordinarily done right, and then verified prior to frac-ing. Which isn't to say that things don't sometimes go wrong with cementing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill
Note that in that well, I doubt that fracturing was even contemplated, since the reservoir was clearly capable of significant production without aid.
"Dirt" isn't the best choice of words to describe a rock formation which requires fracturing to liberate economic amounts of hydrocarbons. But, that said, we clearly know that ground water eventually seeps down to a certain depth when it encounters something that stops it and allows it to accumulate. The reverse is true of the natural gas trapped down below. It wants to escape upward. Something stops it. So the rock itself clearly is impermeable. During drilling, the fluid (drilling mud) is designed to be viscous and heavy enough to move the rock cuttings back to the surface and protect the rock formation itself. Again, there is an economic incentive to get this right, as you don't want to either have a blowout during drilling, if the mud is too light, or for the mud to be so heavy that it forces itself out into the formations you're drilling through, causing loss of circulation of the cuttings. Best practices require drilling an oversize hole with just water as the fluid down below the bottom of potential fresh water aquifer, then setting an initial "surface casing" and cementing that alone in order to protect the fresh water, before proceeding drilling within that casing down to the (much) deeper productive zones. Incidentally, that surface casing is also what gives you the opportunity to place a "blowout preventer (BOP)" in case something goes badly wrong during drilling. If you didn't have the surface casing, you'd have nothing to attach the BOP to--nothing to allow you to seal off the well in case of major problems.