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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.
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?
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
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.
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.
My understanding is that modern household water wells generally use reverse osmosis systems. Water quality from drinking wells varies widely depending on the location and quality of the well. But (1) they aren't 100% effective, nor can they be against unanticipated chemicals that weren't being pumped into the ground en masse at the time the well was designed, and (2) I shouldn't have to pay to upgrade my drinking water well filter to handle chemicals used in fracking. Fracking companies should be not contaminating my drinking water.
First of all people have been drinking water out of wells for several thousand years prior to the invention of reverse osmosis systems. In general it's completely safe, in specific areas it could be unwise.
Second of all there's a difference between: is it safe to drink water from an arbitrary well, and why does this well that used to be safe to drink now contain fracking byproducts.
If in fact the well had been perfectly fine to drink until recently and is now contaminated with fracking byproducts then I think it's reasonable to ask the drilling companies to stop and fix their system.
One 4th grader calls another a "doody-head." Doody-head calls the first 4th grader a "poopy-face"
It is highly dependent on the region and how deep the well is. The point here is that wells which were appropriate for the area are now showing signs of chemicals that would not be there otherwise.
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/
The problem there is that when the well is contaminated, it's WAY too late to do anything. Even if the responsible company immediately stops fracking completely, the well will continue to provide polluted water until the aquifer gets cleaned out somehow. That may be anytime from years to millenia.
I think it's more reasonable for the landowner to be able to force the fracking company to "fix what they broke" and to ensure the landowner has a supply of clean water equal to their current well production available to them for free until the well runs clean again. Or the frackers pay for all the land at pre-fracking market value.
Yeah, I'm a dreamer.
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
My understanding is that modern household water wells generally use reverse osmosis systems.
Your understanding is incorrect. There is no standard template for a modern household water well. Modern household water wells generally use one or more mesh filters in the pump house, and usually one big carbon filter inside the house, commonly followed by a water softener. There may be an RO filter involved for drinking water, but there often is not.
Most people don't use RO because of the high amount of waste water. If you don't have a grey water system, that's just additional cycling your pump has to do for no benefit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Depends on the water quality. Just a particulate filter and softener are pretty common in my area. A softener will remove small amounts of iron, but there are systems ("iron filters") which will remove higher levels. But none of the above will remove organic chemicals or biologicals.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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).
Nope. if your water is hard you use a water softner.. the cheapest way to implement that is use an softener that uses aeration. For taste a good old charcoal/sand filtration system works fine. If the water isn't hard the natural filtration through the rocks and sand is plenty good enough, that's where the best tasting water comes from. That's why we get pissed at companies that frack or have land fills near aquifers. Water that is filtered naturally taste bests. Don't forget water is a renewable resource...
And people have been dying from drinking contaminated water for several thousand years as well.
From a UK perspective so much angst about contaminated water wells is odd, because practically nobody here has them, and frankly if it where a problem if/when fracky starts in the UK then a simply solution would be to put in proper mains water for the handful of properties effected.
To be fair it's not at all clear that in this particular case the contamination came from fracking or is in fact even a health problem. Never the less the philosophical point still stands, the onus should be on the contaminator to stop, not the effected party to accommodate it.
Um. Have you ever heard of "natural spring water?" Mostly a marketing ploy, but it's based on the idea that water filtered down through hundreds of feet of rock is amazingly pure and good. I have been living on well water for the past four years, and it's the best water I've ever had. There is no need to filter it, because mother nature already took care of that. The idea that I could be obligated to add expensive post-processing to my well in order to render unsafe water safe is deeply offensive. You are proposing that it should be okay for some corporation to come in and fuck something that was really great, and then I have to pay to unfuck it to the point where it is not great, but merely not as toxic.
Where I come from we call that shitting where you eat, and we consider people who do it lower than a snake's belly.
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.
Your understanding is wrong. Reverse osmosis is used in places where the well water isn't safe to drink, but that's the exception, not the rule. Ever heard of the phrase "poisoning the well?" Used to be one of the worst war crimes there was.
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?
My understanding is that modern household water wells generally use reverse osmosis systems.
Nope. Reverse osmosis is highly inefficient.
The "water" was found to consist of nearly 100% of the fracking material, dihydrogen monoxide.
The resistance to fracking in the UK isn't about wells specifically, if at all, it's about pollution and contamination in general. You can argue all you like that this contamination is harmless and/or could be easily worked around, but the more fundamental issue is that this kind of contamination is exactly the kind of thing that the public were told categorically and unequivocally couldn't happen. What other unexpected contamination will there be, and what unforeseen (or suppressed) consequences are there?
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.
RTFA: "However, confidentiality requirements dictated by legal investigations, combined with the expedited rate of development and the limited funding for research, are substantial impediments to peer-reviewed research into environmental impacts." They are calling for a better understanding of the waste water management fo fracking fluids. Hardly fear mongering. But hey why don't drink the fracking fluids and tell us how safe it is. Moron.
depends on the well and where you live. new wells are often tested when dug, especially if an area is known for said microbial problems. but rock is a pretty good filter, and most wells are pretty safe in my own experience. my grandparents well has been in operation for close to 45 years, and it just runs right to the house, pure as....water. no softening or filters needed. tastes pretty good too. but that's the norm where they live.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
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]
It IS a marketing ploy. There is no a priori reason for 'natural spring water' to be particularly clean or pure. It depends on WHAT rocks the water went through, whether there were heavy metals leaching through the water table, whether there are bacteria from nearby sources that are leaking though and a host of other things.
"Natural spring water" makes as much health sense as 'Naturally radioactive'.
Sorry if you're deeply offended. The world is like that sometimes.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Depends where you live. Some geology produces awful tasting well water. CA northern central valley comes to mind. I walked away from houses that are served by well water. Always taste the water before you buy a house.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The problem there is that when the well is contaminated, it's WAY too late to do anything. Even if the responsible company immediately stops fracking completely, the well will continue to provide polluted water until the aquifer gets cleaned out somehow. That may be anytime from years to millenia.
Might want to check on the particular chemical in question;
2-Butoxyethanol biodegrades in soils and water, with a half life of 1–4 weeks in aquatic environments.[6]
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.
2BE is considered quite safe, otherwise it wouldn't be used in cosmetics:
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this. I guess the question is, are you getting paid to tell this lie? Cosmetics are full of known toxics, just like perfumes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yeah, I'm a dreamer.
But you're not the only one...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
The US is far less developed than the UK. Do your farms have city water or wells? The houses discussed in this article are very likely farms as PA has lots of farms.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I'm not offended. I'm just correcting what swb said. The reality is that most well water doesn't have to be filtered for safety. In some places you need a radon bubbler to get the radon out of it, but for the most part the stuff is fine. When I was on well water in southeastern Arizona, we definitely filtered it, because it had a high sulfur content and didn't taste very good, but it was fine to drink.
"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."
You are correct that many things can affect your property rights. That said if you own property and have not sold or leased any of those rights then you certainly do have grounds to hold someone else liable for damaging your property, and a well can be part of that property. It isn't like this is untested legal ground here, do some reading about Davey Compressor Co. v. City of Delray Beach or Wood v. Picillo.
Second of all there's a difference between: is it safe to drink water from an arbitrary well, and why does this well that used to be safe to drink now contain fracking byproducts.
Did you read TFA? (This is Slashdot, why did I waste electrons asking?) It says the chemical concentration is well below safety limits. There is no reason to believe the water is unsafe.
If you put that aside, I do tend to agree, if the water used to be safe and now it's not and it is reasonably clear the drilling had something to do with it, the drillers have an ethical responsibility to make the well owners right.
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.
If you can find a house in CA that has water, you'll be doing well.
I do have a RO filter, which comes after a spin down, a mesh, and a carbon mesh.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Groundwater in NATURAL GAS formations was contaminated by mother nature millions of years before fracking. In the case of Marcellus Shale there's also naturally radioactive rock just above the Marcellus Shale. No one is drinking water sourced from anywhere near a gas formation. So, the idea that frack fluids, which are 99% clean sand and potable water mind you, are contaminating that groundwater is fundamentally flawed.
(1) That is why I said numerous natural contaminants, water rights, mineral rights, utility regulations, etc. can all restrict that anyway.
(2) In this case, the presence of miniscule amounts of a substance that is harmless in much higher concentrations cannot be construed as "damage", in particular since its origin can't even be tied to the fracking.
(3) Many of the people who scream bloody murder over this kind of contamination have absolutely no problem "destroying" my well by mandating that I buy water from the city, so there is a great deal of hypocrisy in all of this.
Why don't you just read the f*cking article? You know, the blue underlined thingy in the message you responded to? It's called a "hyperlink". Have you heard of it?
"We can't show that there is anything wrong. And there are no plausible health effects. But, hey, if you give us a lot more money to study is, maybe we can find something"
People have already done it: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
The fracking fluid injected into the ground is already pretty harmless, and the miniscule dilutions that may reach the water table have no effect at all.
Hint: your personal signature goes below the double line.
Why don't you just read the f*cking article? You know, the blue underlined thingy in the message you responded to? It's called a "hyperlink". Have you heard of it?
Yeah, that's how I found out that this stuff is a known carcinogen. Maybe you should try using google, have you heard of it? Because when you just swallow the first story you read, you're kind of a fucking moron. Do you fellate every corporation that promises you a better tomorrow?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Clearly the FDA are shills to, as is Wikipedia for noting that this chemical is everywhere. Shills! Shills! Everywhere!
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.
The people I know in the hills have water in the wells, just not enough to keep their crops wet. They can afford water trucks, unless the price of 'medicine' crashes.
N Cal central valley wells are still mostly wet. S Cal on the other hand is dry as hell. Which is the unspoken part of the CA water crisis. S Cal expects N Cal to suffer with them (and give them all our water). The only reason my water is even metered is LA threw a tantrum.
Nobody actually cares about the delta smelt, they are minnows. But it's the only way to prevent S Cal from voting themselves all our water.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Companies don't frack when the natural gas can contaminate the ground water, because they can get the natural gas cheaper with conventional means. They frack when there's impermeable rock above the natural gas, which normally keeps the gas away from the aquifer. As far as the 99% potable water goes, are you willing to drink a glass of anything that's 99% pure water? You're sure that about two grams of contaminant can do no harm?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
FWIW, I am an environmental consultant, a geologist, I live in Pennsylvania, I do not work for any oil and gas companies, so I have no conflict of interest (you'll have to trust me there), but I am interested in the subject and have done quite a bit of my own research.
Companies don't frack when the natural gas can contaminate the ground water, because they can get the natural gas cheaper with conventional means. They frack when there's impermeable rock above the natural gas, which normally keeps the gas away from the aquifer.
This is an incorrect understanding of fracking and geology in general. "Impenetrable rock" above the shale is irrelevant, because fracking anything other than the gas-bearing shale formation would be a huge waste of time/money. In gas-bearing shale formations the gas is locked up in the matrix of the shale and cannot easily flow into a gas well. The fracking targets the gas-bearing shale formation to artificially increase the inter-connections so that gas can flow within and out of the formation. Or another way to think of is by surface area...a well in an unfractured formation only has the exposed surface area immediately around the well borehole to gather gas from, but when you fracture the surrounding rock the effective surface area of exposed rock is exponentially increased by cumulative surface area of the fractures.
As far as the 99% potable water goes, are you willing to drink a glass of anything that's 99% pure water? You're sure that about two grams of contaminant can do no harm?
Again this is a misunderstanding of reality. Frack water is 99% potable water and clean sand, the remaining 1% is are lubricants and biocides, many of which are actually food-grade, so in reality much less than 1% is anything that could be considered a "hazardous chemical". Immediately after a well is fracked the vast majority of the injected water flows back out of the well, so a fraction of that 1% is actually left in the ground. Mind you this is into a GAS formation that was unfit for human consumption before any fracking.
If that's not enough, consider also that shale gas formations are typically between 2,000 to 14,000 feet below ground, and drinking water wells are typically 50 to 500 feet deep. Fracking is powerfull, but it's not powerful to open up fractures through, literally, miles through solid rock, So, the fraction of a fraction of "hazardous chemicals" remaining in the ground after a frack would have to travel vertically thousands of feet of rock while resisting dispersion/dilution with the surrounding water to reach a well. Assuming the gas well is properly constructed and the frack wastes are properly handled it's basically impossible for frack water make it's way to a drinking well.
Before you call me a shill for the evil energy companies, there are issues with fracking we should be concerned about, but the public concern is currently misguided. We should be concerned about how the recovered contaminated frack water is being handled and disposed. We should be concerned that gas wells are properly constructed and sealed. Those are real problems, but, thankfully, can be solved with the correct regulations, oversight, and strict penalties. The problem is the public hysteria is directed at the wrong issues, and it's making it harder to address the real ones.
Yes, it's a known carcinogen in rodents and at high concentrations. This may be of concern for you, given your mouse brain, but it doesn't apply to humans: "OSHA does not regulate 2-butoxyethanol as a carcinogen."
I fellate whoever I want, and that's none of your business. Are you just a homophobic jerk that you have a problem with that?
As for corporations, I like cheap energy, energy independence, and low carbon emissions, all of which fracking helps with.
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? ...
Usually used raw, even now. No it has not always been safe, but much better these days.
You have hit most of the points, but there is one thing. Before WWI wells were often down to the water table, like the stone wells with the bucket and crank handle. But more recently most water wells are much deeper, usually below a layer of rock, so that they are protected from surface contamination. I think the wells around here go down 500 to 1000 feet. (?)
Mineral content tasts bad and makes build-up on things, but is not usually harmful. See "Artesian Well". Bacteria, which can be harmful, is not usual that deep. And it can be harder to remove from the water, unless you boil it. I think Reverse Osmosis is to remove minerals, not bacteria. (But maybe both?)