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Cynics & Charlatans

Tag Archives: waste water

Fracking for the love of money!

15 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by Jim Johnson in Environment

≈ Comments Off on Fracking for the love of money!

Tags

accidents, contamination, fracking, illegal dumping, methane, waste water

For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.  –  1 Timothy 6:10

By definition, it is cynical to say that money corrupts, but even the Bible must be said to be cynical if that is so in all cases. What delivers those who make such assertions is evidence of money’s corrupting influence, and the controversy over fracking is rife with evidence. The supporters of fracking are fond of pointing out the debunking of the hundreds of claims that fracking has harmed them, but base it on inconclusive and even fraudulent information from the worst sort of charlatans—those who put personal financial gain ahead of the welfare of others.

The controversy over the claims by those who say their water was degraded by fracking in Dimock, Pennsylvania, is one such example. This he said/she said debate between Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection [DEP], the US Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] and research done by a team from Duke University, a peer reviewed study that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on one side, and Cabot Oil’s “hired guns,” Lisa J. Molofsky, John A. Connor (no relation to the fictional character from the Terminator movies) and Shahla K. Farhat.

This controversy was reported in Bloomberg, but the article, “Cabot’s Methodology Links Tainted Water Wells to Gas Fracking,” was a bit ambiguous, and inconclusive in its assessment of the argument presented by Molofsky et al. In the end, the concluding remarks fell upon Fred Baldassare’s statement,“It’s doing more damage than good to keep denying” that connection, he said: “Let’s get past that.”

The Bloomberg article had fallen short of revealing that statements in the report by Molofsky et al had twice admitted that some of the methane fit the isotropic profile of fracked gas. In one instance, the report admits that “Two of the nine wells exhibited an isotopic signature consistent with biogenic gas that may have undergone oxidation or potentially mixed with small amounts of thermogenic gas,”, and later that the “Pennsylvania DEP also analyzed groundwater samples . . . which were determined to be consistent with either Upper/Middle Devonian gasses.” These are precisely the points that the report also goes to significant length to refute.

These points could not be entirely ignored in this Cabot Oil sponsored report, because EPA documentation and Duke study had brought the facts into the open. In the end, the report by Molofsky et al rests on the declaration that there is of “no statistically significant difference” in the gases tested. In their assessment, neither the increased incidence of well water contamination since fracking began, nor the evidence of that contamination by frack gas they had conceded was statistically relevant to their conclusion that fracking had anything to do with it.

Simple logic suggests that the only sound approach to the issue of fracking is to err on the side of caution, and “get past that,” as Fred Baldassare said. Logic would also consider a statement made by Radisav D. Vidic,  PhD, PE, Professor of Environmental Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, when he declared there was “no way” fracking was not penetrating strata other than the 150′ to 200′ deep Marcellus shale.

If methane is getting into the water table, and up to 70 percent of the toxin laced water used in the fracking process remains in the wells, it will be just a matter of time before that danger is finally recognized. Between the fact that only those who live in close proximity to fracking operations have discovered lethal levels of toxins in their water, and the enormous effort made by the oil and gas industry to conceal and obfuscate the issue, taking a sane approach to the threats has also been delayed by the many others who deny the potential danger for financial considerations.

Many of these charlatans can readily be seen making baseless denials of the evidence and resorting to ad hominem attack when their arguments are debunked in the FrackNation Facebook page. In example, the administrators of the page challenged a post that listed 884 victims, demanding that “fairness” dictated the need to list those who benefited from fracking. Aside from some unsubstantiated denials of the incidents on the list, one launched into an attack on hemp cultivation as a counterpoint to the post.

The fact is that gas wells leak, and the myriad threats fracking poses increased exponentially with the volume of toxic fracking solution needed to employ the technique in exploiting shale beds with the added feature of horizontal drilling since 2004. The exponential threat is not just related to the technique though. It is also because the shale deposits being fracked, like the Marcellus shale in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and West Virginia, are are in more densely settled areas.

Is the love of money the root of all evil? Do corporations deliberately endanger the public for the sake of profit? Incidents of illegal dumping suggest that there is the temptation. Did Ford Motor Company deliberately calculate the cost of litigation when their Pinto was discovered to be a Molotov cocktail on wheels, and continue to sell them without any design modification that may have made them safer? Of course they did. Did the tobacco industry fight science that had found cigarettes to be harmful, and even manipulated the nicotine content to make the product more addictive? Of course they did, and still do!

Considering the money involved, can the industry be trusted? It would help make their trustworthiness believable if they revealed what their fracking compounds contained. It would help more if they released those with whom they settled form their nondisclosure agreements.

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Illegal Dumping of Fracking Waste Water

15 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by Jim Johnson in Environment

≈ Comments Off on Illegal Dumping of Fracking Waste Water

Tags

fracking, illegal dumping, waste water

It seems reasonable to assume that the majority of those who are involved with disposing of waste water from fracking operations go about it legally, but some do not—and have been caught red-handed. By the same token, it is also reasonable to assume that many more instances of illegal dumping are not caught.

Any comprehensive regulation to prevent such dumping should require that fracking waste water be accounted for down to the last drop from the time it is injected until it has been disposed of in a manner prescribed by law.

03/14/2013

Cleanup continues at fracking wastewater dump site

In opposition to Kinder Morgan’s construction of Tennessee Gas Pipeline Northeast Upgrade Loop 323 through their public and private lands, residents of Cummins Hill Road and their supporters chanted in unison, “Poison the water, poison the air, their killing us and they don’t care.”

02/15/2013

Is Fracking Wastewater Being Dumped into Coal Mines in Western Pennsylvania?

The rusty water is a highly acidic coal mine discharge flowing from the abandoned Clyde Mine directly into Ten Mile Creek in East Bethlehem Township in Washington County, Pennsylvania.

02/15/2013

Feds Charge Man in Fracking Wastewater Dumping Case

According to News Channel 5, Lupo owns Hardrock Excavating LLC. He faces up to three years in prison, a $250,000 fine and a year of supervised release if convicted. Authorities allege Lupo directed an employee to illegally discharge the drilling mud and brine into a storm sewer that empties into the Mahoning River watershed on Jan. 31.

11/15/2012

Trio charged with illegal frack water dumping

MUNCY – The owner of an area trucking company, along with two of his employees, has been charged with dumping thousands of gallons of gas drilling waste water onto the company’s grounds without first getting the required state permits, according to the state attorney general’s office.

08/15/2012

Toxic Wastewater Dumped in Streets and Rivers at Night: Gas Profiteers Getting Away With Shocking Environmental Crimes

On March 17, 2011 Greene County resident Robert Allan Shipman and his company, Allan’s Waste Water Service Inc., were charged with illegally dumping millions of gallons of natural gas drilling wastewater, along with restaurant grease and sewer sludge across six counties in Pennsylvania from 2003-2009.

07/07/2012

North Dakota’s Oil Boom Brings Damage Along With Prosperity

But Keller, a natural resource manager for the Army Corps of Engineers, has seen a more ominous effect of the boom, too: Oil companies are spilling and dumping drilling waste onto the region’s land and into its waterways with increasing regularity.

01/26/2012

Let’s talk about that foaming fracking water runoff from Magnablend

Illegal dumping happens all the time. Add to that the spills and the runoff and…

01/07/2012

Fracking causes health effects in Oklahoma

The final photo shows them apply liquid waste to the land.

27/06/2012

11 million litres of #CSG toxic waste water being dumped into NZ rivers by Halliburton

But over the 21 months it was active, more than 11 million litres of waste water – including fracking chemicals and potentially carcinogenic coal residue – was dumped in the stream.

07/17/2011

Ex-ADEQ chief faces pollution reports

Would it surprise you to learn that the company under investigation, Poseidon Energy Services, is a subsidiary of a company owned and run by Marcus Devine, the Huckabee-era director of the Arkansas Department of Environmental Qualiity? Welcome to the Natural State.

This isn’t the first pollution rodeo for Devine’s company, by the way. Here’s another.

03/17/2011

MarcellusGasInfo Re: “Hauler accused of dumping wastewater all over region”

09/26/2010

Dumping Waste Water on Public Road?

The above picture is of a Hawg Hauler tanker truck dumping waste water on Blake Ridge. The license number of the truck is AF65647 and the truck number is 125. We have seen many incidents of this type in the past, but this is the first time we were able to get a picture. You can see dark stains on the road and in the ditch from this type of activity. The picture was taken on September 27, 2010.

The bottom line on fracking is despicable

07 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by Jim Johnson in Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on The bottom line on fracking is despicable

Tags

accidents, contamination, earthquakes, fracking, hydraulic fracturing, methane, radium, unconventional drilling, waste water, water supply

In the end, the only sound argument in support of fracking—injection of millions of gallons of toxic chemical laced water into shale deposits to release the methane trapped within it—is the economic argument. The argument is of course valid only as far as it goes though, and stops short at the question of just how much damage is acceptable for the sake of the jobs, the royalties paid to land owners, and the profits reaped by the businesses involved.

Methane jetting from a gas well

Methane jetting from a gas well

The argument is a cynical charlatan’s argument. An article in Slate, “‘They’re the Birthers of Fracking.'” A Conversation with Josh Fox,” that was posted to the FrackNation Facebook page in an ad hominem attack on Josh Fox, the producer of the award winning documentary, Gasland, led to a variant of the argument by another proponent of fracking. The comment proffered a rhetorical argument, “This is about risk management vs. Risk avoidance,” which suggests that the risk can be eliminated. Another comment stated that the technology in the industry was state of the art, suggesting there was no risk.

While the argument for finding agreement based on doing what is necessary to overcome the risk is a good rhetorical argument, it overlooks the fact that the only way to manage the risk is to avoid it in this instance. The technology for extracting the gas may be state of the art, but the safeguards are not. Nor does it seem likely that even technological developments that avert the risk is possible.

Methane jets out of the ground near a Shell drilling site in Tioga County, Pennsylvania.

The fact is that five percent of well casings fail within the first year, and over 50 percent fail after 30 years. Also, wells drilled near abandoned wells can cause the methane to jet out of the abandoned well. Gas drilling thus vents huge quantities of methane into the atmosphere—and methane is 105 times as damaging a GHG as CO2.

In addition to the chemicals, shale gas contains high levels of radon gas, and the waste water contains dissolved radium peroxide. The gas then will cause an increase in lung cancer deaths, because radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer. Governments from local to state level across the country have laws to protect us from second-hand smoke, but none to protect us from the radon in gas.

While regulation that would require storage of the gas until the radon has decayed, a time-frame of 3.8 days, can mitigate the harm done, the 1400 year half-life of radium means contamination will be there virtually forever. In addition to the potential for ongoing harm to be done, much environmental damage has already been done.

Waste water was used for deicing roadways in upstate New York and elsewhere until someone realized the water also contained radioactive material in 2011. While it is no longer used for deicing, a failed casing will cause some of the 10% of fracking fluid that is not recovered to be forced through and into the aquifer, and all the way to the surface where it can become airborne.

Accidents happen too, and they are not rare, isolated incidents. Spills occur, over, and over, and over, and over, and over again, and again for an array of reasons—and often enough repeatedly by the same drilling company. Just as are the evil hordes spoken of in Revelations legion, so too are the incidents. But just the number of incidents is only part of the concern.

A recent accident caused thousands of gallons to jet out of the wellhead. Most of it was contained by the pit around the well, and the gas company removed the contaminated soil to a depth of 18 inches. The potential danger in this is that some of the soil became airborne during the excavation, and followed the airborne atomized waste water created by the accident downwind. Of course, the waste water seeped much further into the soil than 18 inches, but replacing the overburden with 18 inches of uncontaminated soil is considered safe remediation. There is of course no way to measure the contaminated soil that became airborne during transport to the dump facility.

Illegal dumpingin Columbus, Ohio

Illegal dumping in Columbus, Ohio

The most difficult thing to do will be to safely regulate disposal of the waste water. State after state now bans disposal in municipal treatment facilities, due both to the level of bromides and radiological contaminants in the waste water. But that is only since 2011, so a lot of damage has already been done.

What they do now is truck the millions of gallons of waste water from each well to injection wells, where it is pumped at high pressure deep into the ground. This has proven to create new problems with frightening potential for disaster. The wells are causing earthquakes from Dallas, Texas, to Columbus, Ohio.

The potential disaster related to these earthquakes lies in the fact that they are displacements of fault lines, and the pressurized injection could hasten the migration of the contaminated water into nearby aquifers. While we know that fracking at the well site has at least the potential to cause fairly rapid contamination of an aquifer, the rate at which the contaminated waste water migrates through fissures and soils is so slow that it could be decades before measurable levels of wide-spread contamination even become detectable.

seepage

Seepage from coal mine used for dumping waste water from fracking operations

Even supposing that the issues related to casing failures—and even failures due to flawed materials and human error in joining of the tubing—can be resolved, disposal of the waste water will have another dimension to it that likely cannot be resolved. It is and has been dumped into abandoned coal mines, and seeped into waterways. It has, and will continue to be dumped illegally into storm drains. Disposal is expensive, and no criminal expects to be caught. But more critically, the fines are often not commensurate with the violation.

Stated bluntly, whether state or federal, there is little will on the part of government to effectively regulate the industry. Because the laws and those who administer them are either toothless or subverted and subordinated to political and financial considerations, it can actually be less costly to “accidentally” allow impound pits to spill than to ship and pay for it to be disposed of in injection wells. One operator had five such accidents, and was fined only $38,000, in example.

Fracking is all about blood money

Among the tragedies that will affect those now enjoying the economic boom of fracking is the ephemeral nature of the business. Once the wells are in, the jobs and money spent by those who get work in the fracking fields will move down the road to the next community. Well depletion and other factors assure that only land owners receiving payment for mineral rights, and the gas companies and their investors will realize a sustainable economic boom. Unlike the ghost towns left in the wake of mining in the Southwest, the communities will likely continue to get by on the agricultural business that sustained them before fracking, but the boom days will be only distant memories for the merchants who prospered while the roughnecks were busy putting in the wells.

So, let’s ask again. How much water must be contaminated and rendered unusable for thousands of generations to come? How many lives must be put at risk? And are the profits to the dozens of oil and gas companies, royalties paid to thousands of land owners, and the wages paid to the hundreds of thousand people working on the wells worth the sacrifice made by millions? If you answered yes, even the word charlatan fails to describe the kind of scoundrel you are.

Fracking, the facts, and the unanswered questions: leaks

02 Saturday Mar 2013

Posted by Jim Johnson in Environment

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

fracking, hydraulic fracturing, methane, radium, unconventional drilling, waste water, water supply

Questions, it is amazing how many unanswered questions there are about unconventional gas drilling, hydraulic fracturing. Also known as fracking, this effort to extract natural gas is a process wherein enormous volumes of toxic chemical laden water and sand is forced under pressure into shale rock strata deep within the Earth to release the methane gas that is trapped in the sedimentary rock. It has, as it’s proponents like to point out, been employed for decades without any recorded incidence of contamination of the water table through which the well must first pass.

Really, no incidents, or are there simply none on record? When looking objectively at the evidence, a reasoning person would have to conclude either that there has been incidence of water contamination, or that much more investigation is needed before coming to any conclusion—because, as clearly comes out in the following “Reason TV” video, there have been recorded incident of methane contamination of drinking water associated with gas exploration and development.


Keep in mind that the video was produced to allay concerns about the effect of fracking, not conventional gas drilling. The truth that comes out of this is that the debate really just rests in the semantic difference between conventional and unconventional drilling. Aside from the injection of enormous quantities of toxic chemical laced water at high pressure, no other real difference exists.

As mentioned in the video, failure of the cement casing has been related to methane contamination due to drilling. But there are other causes, and the problem of leaking gases was even covered in a 2003 article in Oil Field Review, a publication of Schlumberger—which happens to be “the world’s leading supplier of technology, integrated project management and information solutions to customers working in the oil and gas industry,” according to their Web site.

The fact is gas wells leak, and the longer they are in operation, the more they leak:

Moreover industry studies clearly show that five to seven per cent of all new oil and gas wells leak. As wells age, the percentage of leakers can increase to a startling 30 or 50 per cent. But the worst leakers remain “deviated” or horizontal wells commonly used for hydraulic fracturing.

And the Oil Field Review article reveals that they leak for many more reasons than just the failure of the casing. As illustrated below, the casing is just a concrete barrier injected around the tubing to prevent the gas from escaping around the tubing, and venting at the well head. The fact that the casing fails not only allows the gas to contaminate the water table through which the well passes, but allows it to escape into the atmosphere, where it wrecks havoc on the ozone layer—because methane is 105 times more damaging than CO2.

Stop Fracking

So, there have been recorded incidents of water supplies being contaminated by methane gas. They have just not been verified for fracking—and for several reasons. First, and most importantly, no comprehensive investigation has been made into either the chemical contamination or radiological contamination from dissolved radium peroxide in the fracking waste water. There are also reasonable concerns that even the EPA report due out in 2014 will not go far enough to investigate the radiological contamination that has already occurred, or address the issue of potential airborne radium peroxide from fracking operations.

The anecdotal evidence, claims by people that their water has been contaminated, has either been swept under the rug by state regulators, the claimants have been compensated under the condition of signing a nondisclosure agreement, or pummeled by wealthy drilling operations in efforts to keep their dirty secrets secret.

Even very authoritative research is often brought into question in a he said – she said debate over the issue. In example, a Duke University study performed in 2011, “Methane Levels 17 Times Higher in Water Wells Near Hydrofracking Sites,” which was subsequently challenged by a University of Texas study, before being reconfirmed by a Duke researcher with evidence that is was worse than first reported.

There is no question that methane leaks from gas drilling operations, none. Evidence shows that those nearest the drilling operation are the ones most at risk that methane will create a hazardous potential for explosion. The nature of methane is however not likely to pose an aquifer-wide problem, because it very readily rises through the strata with little lateral dispersal. In the case of fracking, those who draw their water immediately above and adjacent to the lateral section of the drilling operation may also be at greater risk though.

What we do not yet know is whether the fracking operations have opened into natural fissures in the shale through which the chemical and radiological contaminants can migrate into permeable strata and underground water supplies. Nor do we know with any certainty that there are no faults already in place. We do however know it will take a long time (PDF), much longer than it takes the methane to migrate.

wells

Wells within a 25 sq. mi.area between Dimock and Springville, Pennsylvania
Source: The Nature Conservancy, Pennsylvania Energy Impacts Assessment

It’s possible, fracking advocates argue, that the contaminants in the 10 percent of the fracking waste water that does not return to the surface may be diluted to safe levels at water wells far removed from the site of the drilling operation. The 29 wells in operation and 19 permitted wells depicted in the 5 mile section between Dimock and Springville, Pensylvania, show however that the equivalent of nearly five times the millions of gallons per well of toxic chemical and radium laden water will remain under that 25 sections of land.

In the end, there are really just two questions: “How bad is it?” and; “How much worse is it likely to get?”

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