Last night, as promised, I watched Gasland. It’s an excellent documentary presented in a jarringly low-key style — jarring because every place visited that had extensive fracking was a horror. There were landscapes where farmers and ranchers were trying to make a living, and everywhere you looked, there were drilling rigs and condensate tanks, clouds of toxic vapor, and the water from local wells was coming up yellow to brown to black, fizzing off flammable gasses and saturated with chemical sludge. In some cases, water wells would actually explode.
Josh Fox, the documentarian, had to struggle to get any interviews with the corporate slugs who were greedily promoting this abuse of the environment. The most honest of them said, essentially, that there were always going to be compromises and a tiny bit of pollution was the price we have to pay for our energy; the worst would flat out deny that fracking could be causing any contamination of the water. Right. They snake pipes a mile or two under the ground, and then pump many thousands of liters of water loaded with organic solvents, a witch’s brew of carcinogens and teratogens and greasy poisonous crap, into the rock under such intense pressure that it cracks the confining geology, all to tap into trapped oil and gas, and there’s no way it could possibly leech into aquifers. And they pay desperate affected individuals some small sum, tens of thousands of dollars, to shut up and accept the damage.
This map was shown several times in the movie. All the red areas are deep shale beds, natural gas reservoirs, that are likely candidates for drilling.
Do you live in any of those places? You should worry. If they aren’t drilling now, they want to soon.
We also got to meet the greatest villain of this century, Dick Cheney. He’s the architect of the legal exemption of fracking companies from the restrictions of the Clean Water Act (among all the other things Ol’ Dick has done to advance the United States of Halliburton). Our government has washed its hands of any responsibilities, and an employee of the Environmental Protection Agency came right out and said the EPA was consciously avoiding getting into dealing with the consequences of fracking.
It’s one of the most depressing movies I’ve seen in years. We’re doomed, aren’t we?
At least there were a few nods to the gallant heroes are actually doing something to try and stem the flood of oil money: the movie has an interview with Theo Colborn, who really deserves wider recognition. It also features the real hero, the planet, with lots of lovely shots of Fox’s home in a secluded bit of the Delaware River basin — a place I remember well, having taken my kids camping and on scouting trips in the lush deep woods of Pennsylvania. That’s what prompted the movie, that that area is threatened with fracking development. All it would take is one neighbor to sell out to a natural gas company, and because the government is dragging its feet on protecting the environment, everyone could enjoy a river filled with benzene and 500 other killer chemicals.
By the way, today Google is celebrating Rachel Carson’s birthday.
We haven’t learned a thing.
Fiancee shared a video about solar roadways (and driveways and parking lots) which were made of a strong, heatable material that could prevent a lot of road run-off as well as charge and generate electricity for nearby communities.
In my pessimistic response, I knew it would be for naught cause there’s no way in Hell that the oil and gas industry would let that happen – even if by some miraculous event we grew the infrastructure necessary to support these.
The oil and gas industry owns the world. They’ll drill and destroy as much as they possibly can. Keystone XL is one Republican president away from poisoning the entire midwest. The human race is a pestilence on this planet, destroying and wiping out everything in our wake. We’ll wipe ourselves out before long – if not by murdering each other, by unleashing the wrath of nature.
Here in Pitkin County we are fighting for a pristine area called Thompson Divide that is managed by the BLM. The leases were sold in with faulty environmental impact reports and have been due to expire twice in the last two years. Locals have beseeched the BLM to just let the leases expire but they have continued to extend them. This is an area that is virtually untouched and contain robust populations of high alpine flora and fauna. One of the few things that local red-people and blue-people agree on around here is that this is a unique place that should not be drilled.
There is also this from the Aspen Daily News yesterday:
I live in the Marcellus Shale fracking zone in PA. It’s become a sort of prisoner’s dilemma: frackers offer a local more money than they can imagine ($50,000/mo) and the next thing you know all the ponds and creeks are gone because the aquifers are being pumped up, mixed with goo, and forced back into the shale. So it’s not as if your wells go toxic – they go dry. Whether you’ve got fracking on your land or not.
There was also an army of carpetbaggers – excuse me – aggregators, that came through writing contracts with anyone who’d sign, so they could roll them up and sell them to the big energy companies. And, of course, local legislators are eyeing the dollars not the damage, and probably campaign contributions as well. Because this area was strip-mined (ongoing) the mineral rights are already complicated – I expect that eventually hold-outs will get notice “the crew arrives next week…”
Fucking humans, how do they work?
The fracking underground is probably the least risky bit with regards to pollution. Can’t find the article but there were at least 5 problem areas that companies (can legally) cut corners on before the gloop would be at the extraction depth which pose a considerable greater problem.
Marcus is right, that with fracking, water use is much more the issue than aquifer contamination. Here in the Eagle Ford shale, I haven’t heard much concern that drilling through aquifers will pollute them. But there is large concern over who gets to use the water. Fracking is a thirsty industry.
The pollution issue has more to do with disposal of used fluid. Of course, disposal of unwanted, dirty water is an issue with oil wells generally.
FWIW, the US has reduced its carbon emissions over the last ten years, in large part due to the shift from coal to natural gas for power generation. Measuring the benefit of that, one has to take into account the harm from additional methane emissions. And the environmentalist in me would add that coal is just about the dirtiest source of energy around, so anything looks good compared to it.
Nonsense. The oil companies have learned a lot about how to fuck people over and get away with it. True, they were already pretty good at that, but there’s always room for improvement.
I’m from Bradford County, PA, which from 2008-2012 was the heart of the Marcellus Shale boom in PA, where the motto of our county commissioners was, “It’ll be fine! Shut the fuck up and count the money.”
Beyond all the toxic effects of the drilling itself, the devastation to the quality of life for all residents was painful to watch. It used to be our joke that we were so rural that a traffic jam was four cars following a tractor. From a quiet (and yes, economically disadvantaged) rural landscape to being overrun with thousands of gas industry vehicles (from huge equipment haulers, to water tankers, to crew-cab pick-ups). Noise from traffic, noise from the drilling, destruction of land, contamination of water, dealing with an enormous influx of gas workers and all the associated impacts of skyrocketing housing costs, increased demand on emergency services (all volunteer fire/ambulance companies), increased crime and associated strain on law enforcement and the courts, right up to the changes wrought on the land. The social impacts won’t last as long as the environmental ones, but they’re not going away for at least a couple generations.
I moved to MN in 2011 and have watched the same mess play out (and continuing to) in western ND. With one exception: ND has a severance tax, so the state is actually making money on this as well, which is why there are now radioactive abandoned gas stations in the Bakken and the regulating bodies are all “It’s fine; don’t worry your pretty heads. They’re using it stupidly (fighting losing battles to restrict abortion instead of paying for milk for schoolchildren), but at least they have a budget surplus to waste, which PA doesn’t.
rturpin – I’d love a citation for how they figured how much of GHG emission decrease was thanks to the shift to natural gas.
I ask because there seems to be some shenanigans for accounting for the methane leakage from the drilling & transporting process of natural gas – this is something that Gasland 2 goes into in more detail. I’m glad that activists in NYS (hi neighbor Marcus!) have slowed down the process enough for people to find out more about it and maybe, just maybe, not have it happen here at all.
I do believe that it’s going to come down to people physically preventing the fossil fuels from being taken out of the ground.
The Liberal government in Quebec tried to give out fracking licenses for ludicrously cheap (like $5/acre, $20/well) in 2010/11. It was one of many issues that got them voted out (though they declared a moratorium, they had lost a lot of trust).
Unfortunately, they were replaced by a minority government that a year later decided to play xenophobic electoral politics. The Liberals are back. Fracking isn’t yet, but it might be — they new premier thinks we should get rich (by destroying the environment) and only then protect the environment.
Not just people in those areas, but people downstream of them as well. I can’t help but notice that NYC, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC are all at the end of waterways that come out of those red zones. That’s millions and millions of people who drink water every day. Two of those places are enormous economic engines of the country (and the other two ain’t bullshit, either).
I’m also curious: when we’re having such a major drought in our prime crop-producing real estate, how are these companies allowed to purchase the water to do this? Shouldn’t that water be shipped to the west coast and the southern plains states?
@1: I’ve also seen that, and I have to be a bit skeptical. Between precipitation, freeze/thaw cycling, and heavy mechanical pounding, a road surface has to be one of the most hostile environments for electronics anywhere. And they can really make a glass that will stand up to all that, for years on end? Nice idea if it could work, but….
How, kimostabe?
(I realize that just happens to read like a potentially rather insulting caricature of Amerindians. It is not intended as such.)
Sally, the EPA tracks carbon emissions:
http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/596e17d7cac720848525781f0043629e/2cb21f3348459b2c85257cbb006041a0
Politically, I think we environmentalists are far too quick to come out against particular technologies or energy sources, sometimes leaving the science behind when doing so, rather than standing up for science, oversight, and regulation. How you and I as individuals evaluate fracking is less important than how we stand on, say, the Cheney loophole. My view is that the federal government should regulate air and water emissions based on best available science, the agencies responsible should be funded adequately to do so, and the industries involved should be required to cooperate in that oversight. How feasible are chemical tracers in fracking fluid? That would be the acid test of whether a well was leaking into groundwater.
The right-wing, following the Koch brothers, demonizes everything regulatory. My view is somewhat different: we have the EPA to thank for keeping the Texas coast habitable. And it was regulatory failure that devastated the Louisiana coast.
There is a lot of economic benefit to off-shore drilling and fracking. So long as we are using fossil fuels, those might not bad sources. Provided they are well regulated.
Though I do sympathize with Marcus Ranum’s complain about how oil booms screw up small towns and regional roads. I don’t drive through Kenedy any more.
@ frog 11:
Did anyone catch the excellent Vice report from a couple weeks ago re: drought in TX? They’re literally down to praying for rain, meanwhile fracking companies are sucking up all the water.
Link: http://350.org/vice-praying-for-rain-in-a-drought-stricken-state/
Sorry, correct link to the actual full report, not just the debrief: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O2uGEokWNOA
“Do you live in any of those places? You should worry. If they aren’t drilling now, they want to soon.”
Yes, I live in an area where fracking has been going on – starting in the Horn River Basin – since 2006 or so.
The Canadian regulations seem to be a lot tougher than the US, and you will not see “clouds of toxic vapor, and the water from local wells was coming up yellow to brown to black, fizzing off flammable gasses and saturated with chemical sludge. In some cases, water wells would actually explode.”
I myself until eight years ago worked as service man for the oil industry, and even at that time this scenario was unknown – unless you had a well blowout, which is extremely rare. The cleanup after well completion is also heavily regulated and scrutinized.
In fact – we live here with NG extraction since the late fifties, and the wells that are drilled now are a hell of a lot better maintained than previously, especially since the Oil and Gas Commission was created to take and act on public complaints – they are effective. We have a gas well with a flare-stack about 1/2 mile away, and when the flare blows out and we smell sour gas – within half an hour a technician is there to fix it after I call the gas company directly. This happens maybe once every year.
Gas is one of the most efficient sources for heating purposes, and the relative cleanest. I live here with winter that lasts up to six months, and I rather have some inconveniences related to extraction of gas than trying to heat my house with wood, coal or diesel.
There is an environmental cost to any energy production we need to drive our economies – the matter is where the pollution occurs, how much of it occurs how well the industry is regulated to address environmental concerns.
Thanks, rturpin, though, I was hoping for something specific to how the tracking goes vis-a-vis the shift to natural gas and the GHG emissions. That’s all right, poring over the EPA report will be interesting.
I wonder if there were similar types of conservations going on in the Mayan world as their activities altered the weather they depended on. while the elites (ruling class) retreated into religion?
This is what we are doing in the US and Canada.
Is Fracking being used in other places around the world also?
The thinking around energy is truly amazing. We are doomed I agree. How the doom is working itself out is the only question. When I was in High School there were things like The Cuban Missile crisis and the Czar bomb and Fail-safe plus all the already advanced environmental destruction.
I thought that was bad We still have political leaders playing dangerous games for power and not content with strip mining & clear-cutting we have added mountain top removal and fracking.
uncle frogy
Shouldn’t that water be shipped to the west coast and the southern plains states?
One way might be to disallow fracking in California’s Central Valley (where I live.) And fracking is only part of the problem here–they’re planning a COAL-FIRED plant west of me. Coal brought in on trains.
I do sympathize with Marcus Ranum’s complain about how oil booms screw up small towns and regional roads. I don’t drive through Kenedy any more.
Here, it’s kind of “six or two threes” — this is also coal-mining country. So the roads either are supporting great big water tank trucks, or mining tri-axles hauling coal. If you come around a tight turn and one of those is in your space, you’re looking at hitting something more than 40 tons, so it hardly makes a difference if it’s water or coal at that point. Defensive driving is a must. But then, with the wildlife, it is anyway. The roads collapse occasionally but they’re maintained well because: money.
Extractive industry up here is pretty polished. Over the last 3 years, they stripped the top of one of the mountains across the susquehanna from my place. There were a few booms of explosives, but only one or two a week and well-muffled. The top of the mountain sort of disappeared, then slowly reappeared and was planted with pine trees. There was bare earth for a couple years but they controlled the runoff so it didn’t get to the river; they know how to do that now. You really can’t tell it was mined at all. One area’s ground-water was ruined so the mining company arranged for municipal water runs for everyone and nobody complained (because the water wasn’t so hot to begin with). I suspect there would have been hue and cry if the hunting had been disturbed but, of course, it wasn’t.
The power station at Shawville, up the road, is a huge coal-burner that sits on the river and warms it up so that it steams fog on cool nights and doesn’t freeze in the winter. The coal train and trucks always run in and out and there’s usually a mountain of coal about 400 yards on a side and 50 yards high, and it’s always going up the feed chute.
PS – I’m a bit on the fence about some of this. Part of my property includes the high wall of an old coal mine that was active in the 1930s and is now shut down. The way they did it in those days, they mounded the tailings up into big piles and just left them. So, if I walk back into my strippings and look at the water, it’s all full of oil and sulfur leaching from the tailings and oil. That goes into the ground-water, too (which is why I stopped drinking from my spring and ran a municipal water pipe 1/2 mile back to my house) Sometimes I wonder whether drinking the water around here is a good thing for the kids’ growing brains but I guess I already know the answer to that.
The UIK govenrment plans to change the law so that landowners can no longer prevent frackers from drilling horizontally under their land, and to bribe local communities not to oppose it. Despite this, opposition is growing; I expect Gasland to add to that trend.
There might possibly be something to that, if the use of fracked gas were actually displacing the use of coal, but it isn’t: American coal exports have boomed (at reduced prices) along with the rise in gas fracking. If you increase the supply of fossil fuels, prices fall and hence demand rises.
Are you even capable of comprehending that the atmosphere and aquifers don’t give a shit about our “need to drive our economies”?
Assuming they are still around, and have the energy to waste on thinking about it, I wonder how badly our descendants two or three hundred years from now will hate us? Will they see much difference between us and the Nazis? We (collectively, I know many of us do work to improve this) are blithely carrying on with activities that we know are destroying the planet for human life after us, that may well wipe out the human species, that will cause the deaths of hundreds of millions, in the long term. Yeah, most of us aren’t the ones making the political and business decisions to do the primary work of that destruction, but it’s our* demand for outsized amounts of energy that makes it profitable for them to do it.
Are we much better?
We need a frakking revolution. I recommend we do it Gandhi-style (great, now my head is playing “Gandhi Style”, and I get to see Gandhiji dancing like a horse rider). Pick leaders by lottery, for two years at a time, to a council. Rotate the chair. No more asshole Prime Ministers, or Presidents, or politicians.
I think this is something we need to start really soon. We should-
Oh, hold on, there are some nice people at my door with badges. I’ll be back.
I hope.
* I speak here of the average English-speaking and atheist-reading Internet user, who is by far most likely to come from a so-called “western
oligarchydemocracy”, and who indubitably consumes far more than 80% or more of their fellow human beings, and produces vastly more pollutants (so far, though our neighbours are understandably making efforts to catch up – the lifestyle, in their individual estimations, being worth the potential damage to the environment, just as our own parents and theirs did before we who are still doing it now).LOL:
Missed a word. I was not proposing that we are cannibalizing our fellow Earthers literally. :)
Figuratively…
Nick Gotts: There might possibly be something to that, if the use of fracked gas were actually displacing the use of coal, but it isn’t: American coal exports have boomed (at reduced prices) along with the rise in gas fracking. If you increase the supply of fossil fuels, prices fall and hence demand rises.
That’s a good point. And we’re all plugged into that. Including the Chinese, who naturally want to be richer. Like us. I would say that the way to change that is international agreements with some bite. The US could lead the way, by imposing a carbon tax, not only on fuel burned here, but also on fuel exported. I’m not optimistic. At this point, I suspect the only thing that might change the global course on CO2 is some breakthrough, non-carbon source of energy that is cheaper than coal.
rturpin: the EPA estimates are apparently quite low compared to reality.
A survey of the literature suggests fracking may be as bad as coal.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/343/6172/733.summary
Wells being drilled in PA emit 2 to 3 orders of magnitude more gas than the EPA estimates, and leakage during drilling amounts to 4-30% of all leakage.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/10/1316546111.abstract
I suspect the only thing that might change the global course on CO2
That horse has left the barn, was shot by a hunter, and now the crows are picking it clean. It’s pretty clear that humanity (led by the US, yay! USA! USA!) are simply not going to take any warnings and are operating on the short term. Even if we suddenly developed a practical fusion power system that produced more energy than it takes to ignite, tomorrow, there would be people lining up to keep extracting hydrocarbons because there’s money to be made doing it today, and it’s the people of tomorrow that will pay the costs, tomorrow.
Other than prayer or hoping for a Star Trek deus ex machina, fusion’s mankind’s only realistic hope, isn’t it? Sure, we can add additional solar and wind (the hills around where I live are sprouting windmills at an impressive rate!) but the new energy is spoken for before it comes online. It’s like Malthus was right about energy consumption, not food.
In good old Oklahoma (on the map its got a lot of red showing fracking) the usual number of magnitude 3 or higher earthquakes per year is 5 or less. THIS YEAR (not even half over) we’ve had OVER 120. Thats not 12 point )…. its 120 (I don’t remember the exact numbers so I tried to fudge very conservatively).
According to several reports aired on NPR, the rise in earthquakes may be caused by the drastic rise in fracking in this area.
And we’re in a bad drought, so water is kinda precious here.
Steve in OK
rturpin
Who’s this ‘we’ you’re talking about? Some of us are pushing for smart grids, distributed wind and solar, changes in transportation modes and built environment, assorted efficiency measures, etc. Others are calling themselves environmentalists while advocating for increased drilling of fossil fuels to maintain our current lifestyle. Which one are you?
Only for very poorly thought out and badly calculated values of economic benefit. The economic benefits that would come from refurbishing, retrofitting, and where necessary replacing our existing infrastructure so as not to need fossil fuels are vastly higher.
Gasland is rife with serious errors and misrepresentations.
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/02/24/24greenwire-groundtruthing-academy-award-nominee-gasland-33228.html?sq=gasland&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all
blf@13: The same way they haul coal, liquid nitrogen, and corn around: trucks and trains. The economies of the USA are far from localized. I’m sure a bulk purchase via tanker truck would be less expensive than, say, a truck full of bottles of Poland Spring or Deer Park.
(I have to wonder how the Deer Park folks feel about fracking. Their spring is in PA.)
Which isn’t to suggest it’s cost effective–it might not be–but at some point you have to question whether you would rather your food price goes up because of the cost of production (trucking in water) or because the supply is reduced by drought and dustbowl.
And the whole notion of using water in CA’s central valley to frack instead of irrigate farms and orchards is a little maddening to me.
I’m no expert, but there are ways of doing it that seem relatively feasible. There are multiple companies like Base Trace who are developing DNA tracers that could be injected at different points in the fracking process, and whenever you want to know whether any contamination has occurred, you simply sample the groundwater and use the polymerase chain reaction to amplify the DNA present in the sample. Then it’s just a matter of detecting the specific tracer that was used. The problem I see with this method is that it would be very difficult to prevent the DNA tracer from degrading due to the very high temperatures and pressures underground. Another method would be to use radioactive tracers, which could work similarly to the DNA tracers, except there’s the problem with the tracer being too diluted to detect.
I have to wonder how the Deer Park folks feel about fracking. Their spring is in PA
It’s down in Bellefonte; the same aquifer we all share here. The municipal water supply is the same stuff. If that aquifer gets compromised, we’re all going to be very unhappy campers indeed.
@Rturpin(#14):
Not feasible at all. The mixtures pumped into wells are considered trade secrets so the best thing people can do is guess what is in them. Further the companies doing the fracking would scream bloody murder with regards to putting anything into the mixtures that reduces efficiency.
Tracers in fracking fluid are easy: just have the fracking company list what’s in the fluid, just like, say, Coke and General Mills say what’s in the foods they sell. Right now we don’t even have that information!
My understanding is that fracking fluids are extremely unlikely to leak from the multi-thousand-foot depths of the shale up to the hundredish-foot depths of aquifers. The shale was capped by a layer of impermeable rock (otherwise it would have leaked up over the intervening hundreds of millions of years), and the aquifer rests on a layer of impermeable rock (otherwise it would leak down). To break both those impermeable layers, and everything in between, would be a lot of work. This is how pro-frackers argue that fracking can’t possibly pollute aquifers. I’m not 100% convinced this is true, but it’s at least truthy.
It’s also largely besides the point: the liquids they’re using to frack start on the surface. Up there, it’s completely trivial for them to leak accidentally (or “accidentally”), and once leaked they can quite easily find their way to water supplies. This happens — a lot.
Another fun debate tactic that pro-frackers use is to argue that fracking cannot, no way, no how, generate earthquakes. This only qualifies as true if you’re a complete pedant. The fracking itself doesn’t seem to generate much seismic activity. However, it pollutes large amounts of fluid (water + crap from underground). Said fluids are often pumped underground to dispose of them. Said disposal can lubricate faults and cause earthquakes. If you don’t dispose of them underground, you dispose of them on the surface, see above.
@31:
I remember when I first watched it there were a couple of things that stood out to me. 1. It said that these fracking companies use as much as 500 different chemicals, which is totally wrong. The fracking process is very tighly controlled. These companies have engineers and instrumentation designed to monitor the well so that they know exactly what to add at each stage. They only use the minimum amount of chemicals to get the job done quickly and efficiently. Using 500 different chemicals would be completely asinine. 2. The movie was trying to show that fracking pollutes the groundwater but it didn’t actually show any evidence of that. It showed the storage tanks that hold the produced water, and it did make a good point that these companies sometimes don’t secure their well sites good enough, but that has nothing specifically to do with fracking itself.
Thank you, caesar, for eloquently demonstrating *exactly* what I was mocking in the post right before yours.
There’s always fission.
@38:
You can mock all you want but I’m still right. If the storage is inadequate, then attemppts need to be made to improve the storage tanks to prevent any leakage. Fracking is totally separate from any storage issues.
If not for fracking, there wouldn’t be a storage issue. Hence, fracking is the cause.
caesar while it may true that fracking is not the problem in a very narrow legalistic way it is misleading at best.
it is akin to saying guns don’t kill people, people do. True but well….
I wonder who they are keeping their trade secrets from not the other drillers I am sure who are all contractors with a very fluid work force who I doubt have to go through much of a security check.
So we do not really know what is actually happening underground besides they are getting gas out.
As to how could the fracking liquid get into the water supply water table, well. They pump it through numerous holes in the impermeable rock at high pressure. to breakup the rock, What is keeping some fraction the contaminated water flowing right up the same hole the the drill went through right outside the pipe delivering it underground.
Everyone would not have to fail in that way to still cause a problem.
The bottom line the water used on the surface is getting contaminated regardless of the PR from the producers about how good they are. And there is no objective investigation allowed!
uncle frogy
@41:
Fracking is not the direct cause of any water contamination issues, storage is. Therefore, the storage is the issue that needs to be dealt with.
frog:
NYC gets its water primarily from aquifers in/around the Catskills. There is a fracking ban surrounding those water sources.
The rest of the state can go screw, though. Some towns have tried to preemptively (we don’t have fracking yet) ban either fracking itself or change their local codes to prevent multi-ton trucks on town roads, etc. These efforts have resulted in several small towns being sued because of course we can’t tolerate people standing up for themselves and their rights.
Sorry, citation sorely needed. Pressurized chemicals equals leaks to anybody with a working brain, or a non-presuppositional outlook
Caesar @43: Perhaps there is a future method of extracting this natural gas without the groundwater contamination issues, without air quality issues, without earthquakes, without leakage, without consuming large amounts of water, and without emitting the CO2 from burning the gas. Perhaps in the future that method will be called fracking.
That is not the fracking which we are discussing today.
I’m from the province of New Brunswick originally, and there’s been so much pushback from locals against fracking, to no effect, as the government there is worse than useless. Protesters from the First Nation most targeted (Elsipogtog) have been brutalized for opposing fracking on their land.
Yeah, not to mention the Chernobal level radiation levels from “used filters” from fracking, containing idiot levels of radium in them… Do I get to glow in the dark before dying of cancer, what do you think? And, just to be clear, that issue doesn’t go away, nor to earth quakes, ground fracturing, contamination from just plain stuff that wasn’t *in* the wells before, without even adding the fracking compounds, etc., none of which goes away if you find some way to do with without those chemicals.
caesar @ 43
Without fracking there is nothing in need of storage, adequate or otherwise. You’re being deliberately obtuse.
@42:
The fact remains that fracking has only been proven to be a proximate cause at best for any groundwater contamination due to inadequate storage tanks and monitoring. Even if we were drilling for oil without fracking, we would still have the same issue with water coming to the surface from the formation containing who knows what. This water would have to be stored somewhere, and there would still be the same risk of contamination. I only work with the manufacturing of the fracking chemical, so I can’t prove that fracking doesn’t directly cause contamination, but based on what I know about fracking, the storage issues are the only proven ultimate cause.
OSHA requires the gas companies to keep MSDS’s available for anybody who wants to know what they’re being exposed to. Also, the processes and chemicals involved in fracking really aren’t that much of a secret. There’s the Oilfield Wiki, which you could call the Wikipedia of the oilfield, except it’s edited by actual experts. I use it myself. Google Scholar also has tons of patents available for anyone who wants to read more about fracking. The main thing kept secret is the exact formulations used. You’ll never get access to that kind of info because that’s how these companies make their money.
They make their money because the rulers of our oligarchies sell the ‘rights’ to extract the irreplaceable and intensely polluting materials and to so sloppily use and pollute our water systems for a grotesquely undervalued amount, meaning the companies can make obscene levels of profit for their highly concentrated owners. Which they plough back into our politics to make sure they continue to have the ‘right’ to grotesquely undervalued resources, and to using up and making undrinkable the water we need to live in doing it.
Because, hey, capitalism. They can pay more for the water, right, so they must be free to use it all in whatever way they want. Freedom!
If they are able to sell gasoline for less by volume than the cost of retail bottled tap water (and they do, at a dollar for a 500mL bottle of water, making it cheaper than gas/petrol in North America), then our system is sincerely out of whack.
Caesar, what we are seeing here is something that goes clear back to the same lies, and misinformation, and hiding the truth, and even, yeah, coverups and culpability by agencies that either are denied the right to do anything, or test anything properly, or actually check the facts, as gave rise to movies like Erin Brockovich, Fire Down Below, and others. None of this stuff was pulled out of people’s asses, they where based on crap that actually take place all too often, when companies are allowed to get by with it. Are you honestly so clueless as to ignore the evidence that, when rich asses have enough political pull, they can, have, and do, screw with the very protections, and agencies, that are supposed to check these things? So clueless that you know of no cases, at all, where the EPA, or OSHA, later changed rules, but only decades after it was already obvious, to everyone, that there was real problem? So blind as to fail to see that, right now, the people doing this stuff are practically buying elections, and that if they can do that, and push for laws to prevent private citizens, especially groups of them, even being allowed to bring lawsuits against them, that they can get by with damn near anything at all, including possibly keeping the EPA, or OSHA from acting?
Oh, and that is above and beyond the shear gall of claiming that because OSHA says something may be safe for the “workers” on site, within the limits of what is allowed for hazards like that, using proper protective equipment, that **that** agency has any say, at all, in whether or not its safe from someone 5 miles down stream, who is not a worker for the company, nor using the same protective equipment. They are not the EPA. Its not their job to protect people “off site”, just the ones “on the job site”, and in my experience, there is enough pressure from our precious “job creators” out there that they, never the less, only manage to do the **absolutely bare minimum**, lest they find some senator, or special interest group whining about how, “That can’t possibly be as bad as you say, how dare you undermine the economic growth of the nation!”
No, I am sure, if you have a “legitimate” grounds for certain information (where they get to define “legitimate”), you might be able to dig up a lot of stuff on the chemicals. No guarantee that what is being actually used now is what you will get data on, of course, but.. As for test data.. right.. all from the same people paid to “test” whether or not global warming is problem, by these same companies, perhaps? How certain are we of there “testing”, when there is no third party corroboration of any of it, at all, just companies working for them, and nothing “long term”, or, and this is the stupidest thing, on the scale they are actually using it now? See, that is the major problem. There is pretty much no safe place, or conditions, to test any of it “large scale”, on the magnitude of what is actually being used in the real world, so, the fracking that is happening “now”, based on this small scale data, ***is*** the large scale test. And, what do we see? Contamination they didn’t expect, problems with disposal of some of their materials, ground water contamination, which they claim just “happened” to, by pure chance, happen at the same time. There “small scale” tests didn’t do this, so how dare you claim that scaling it up to 1,000 times that size, would cause unexpected, or unpredicted results? Bah… How long do we wait before, once again, there is no f-ing possible way any more for them to deny that its happening, and they are causing it? When is the next Fire Down Below movie coming out, with fracking as the culprit, and all the lies exposed?
For that matter, how long will some people make useless excuses of coincidence, of prefect knowledge, or precognition, or what ever the F people like you Mr. Caesar seem to think these companies have, which keeps any of it from being their fault, or their responsibility? How can you possible claim that companies that already lie about plenty of things, including global warming, solar adoption, and you name it, are not lying about this, on some level above the pay grade of the people telling you its all OK. What possible reason, given their past behaviors, do you have for thinking that this isn’t another case of a tobacco lobby, or the NRA, where the people near the top know damn well there is a problem, but their “solution” is to run more and more adds claiming, “There isn’t a problem, really, its all in those paranoid people’s imaginations! Drill baby, drill!”
cesar –
Storage and monitoring are not the main causes of problems associated with fracking. Unless of course you mean that regulatory agencies should be providing much closer monitoring of construction and operation. Well casing defects and other construction problems are thought to be the primary cause for many groundwater contamination issues. PNAS published evidence of methane migration from wells in the Marcellus shale already. There is also evidence that brine from the Marcellus shale formation is migrating into upper rock layers with the potential for facking fluids to follow. The more important questions you need to ask yourself is that if storage and monitoring are the main problems, why does fracking need to be exempt from the clean water act and why do children need to be put under lifetime gag orders when they are poisoned by fracking operations?
Seven of Mine#49
Caesar, like all libertarians, doesn’t beleive in context. Every person, situation, and problem are totally atomised and in no way connected to any other person, situation, or problem and must be considered in a total vacuum and evaluated according to the Holy Book of Rand as interpreted by Her Prophet Friedman.
frog
No, shipping water all the hell over is a bad idea, not least because of the amount of energy it consumes, which has to come from somewhere.
Also, what CaitieCat said @51
Dalillama:
Of course I’m sure caesar will inform us-yet again-that he’s not a libertarian. He just happens to believe a lot of the same shit that libertarians do.
Oh, really. Then why are they demanding confidentiality agreements from everyone involved. Why is there such a huge push to keep anyone from finding out what is in that chemical mixture? What little anyone can get out of them is bad enough, but they are fighting tooth and nail to prevent anyone from finding out anything else. If it’s all so damned non-controversial so damned harmless, then WHY?
Tony @55
I doubt caesar is much of a libertarian. He sounds like a shill to me. Either that or incredibly gullible. I wonder which.
otrame:
I disagree, but I’ll leave it at that for the moment.
@53:
I never said they were the main problems. I work in the fracking industry so I’m well aware of what problems can occur. My point was that it’s incorrect to blame fracking for issues with storage and monitoring because those are separate from each other.
I have no idea. You would have to ask the EPA and whatever other regulatory agencies in charge to explain that one.
@54:
To all concerned, please disregard the above post as the crazed ranting of a person who’s in dire need of a reality check, as his/her post doesn’t resemble me in the slightest.
@55:
I’m sorry that I have defied your attempts to pigeon hole me into this libertarian category. Yes, I agree with them on a couple of things, but the posters here just feel the need to force me in the libertarian category so they can make an easier target out of me I guess.
@56:
I was saying they the “general” processes and chemicals used in fracking are relatively easy to find. For example, you can check Halliburton or Schlumberger’s website to find out what kinds of chemicals they use, and what they’re for. As far as specifics, of course they’re gonna fight tooth and nail to keep people from knowing their trade secrets! A lot of these chemicals are patented because they give the owner of that patent an edge when it comes to separating the chemical companies from each other, and I don’t begrudge these companies for being difficult.
To those familiar with the severe engineering problems associated with any given workable fusion reactor, those two often don’t seem terribly different.
Lots more nuclear power (i.e. fission) could, in principle, be a very good short term fix while we convert to more renewable energy. Of course, that falls victim to exactly the same regulatory capture that fracking does, and given that the people running it would be just as malevolent as fracking/oil companies, I doubt it’s even worth trying in the current political environment.
so they can make an easier target out of me I guess
Don’t be so modest!
You’re doing that excellently well without any help at all. Gold star! Participation trophy! Cheque from the Koch Brothers – oh, crap, is this thing still on?
@otrame,Tony:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” ~ Upton Sinclair
shockna writes:
One could make the argument that this applies also to renewables (in fact, it would not be a stretched to suggest that this is, in fact, what is happening already with biofuels in the form of ethanol policy). Presumably, the correct action (which avoids regulatory capture) would be to do nothing (and to use more coal, of course –just like that poster boy country for renewable adoption, Germany). ◔̯◔
Actually no, since they are part of the same process. Quit lying to yourself, then you can quit lying to us. BTW, I work in the chemical industry, and recognize bullshit like that.
It resembles you in the mostest. You are like on the radicals back during my college days. They all got incensed if one not up on the latest radical cliques made mistakes indentifying their bullshit. But they all sounded the same to us middle of the roaders. You sound like a liberturd, even if you aren’t one. If you aren’t one, describe with detail what you are. So we can laugh at the pitifully small difference….
caesar wrote:
Oh, well, as long as there’s an MSDS, everything must be fine. It’s certainly not like anyone takes shortcuts on those and just throws standard boilerplate text at the probable outcomes of being exposed to a particular chemical soup.
Um, Hi, delurking here. I don’t usually comment, but this is a subject I know something about – I am a Canadian filmmaker and I did a one hour doc on fracking for CBC up here in Canada that aired last year.
About Gaslands – I’m a little torn about this film. I think the intentions are good, but Fox has made what I call an “advocacy film”. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad film or all wrong, just that he doesn’t really deal with information that conflicts with his view. Michael Moore will often do the same thing. Anyway, he wasn’t an experienced doc maker when he did the project and he went about trying to get interviews from the other side in a way that almost guaranteed that they wouldn’t talk to him. So it’s really skewed to one viewpoint.
My real issue with Gaslands is that a lot of his facts aren’t accurate. While it’s true that there are cases of well bore failure – leakage from the cement well casing – you get the impression that most wells leak or fail. In truth, it’s at a rate of 1.9%, which in engineering terms is actually pretty good. The problem isn’t with the frequency, it’s that there are so, so many wells. So 1.9% can add up.
There also wasn’t much evidence that groundwater was being contaminated when we made the film. Believe me, I looked. Talked to all kinds of water experts. There may be new information out there, though, so I won’t swear it’s an impossibility, but Fox treated a hypothetical as something inevitable.
Worse, though, was that Fox missed the most terrifying thing of all. The quantity of water that is being used and permanently lost in the fracking process is incredible. Like, millions of litres. I noticed some arguing about storage above – the gas companies haven’t been using storage and evaporation pits for years now. No, they pump in deep underground.
So there’s all this water, it’s so polluted you can’t reclaim it, and you can’t store it, and you can’t use evap pits because it leaves the ground toxic. So you use deep injection wells that are so far down that the water literally cannot come back up and rejoin the water cycle. It’s gone. Forever.
And they’re doing it in Texas, where they are experiencing record drought. It’s causing earthquakes in Oklahoma and northern British Columbia (not near the coast, inland where earthquakes are uncommon) by lubricated faults deep underground.
Fox took the easy controversy – you see people who are directly affected and you relate to them. But he stopped there. The problem is much bigger than well water.
PS – Who was it thought we had tougher regs up here? We don’t. We actually have almost no regulation at all, and our current federal government really likes it that way.
I have actually only watched Gasland 2, and I get the impression that the quality of information there is better than the first one.
If I have to choose between a coal electricity generating plant and a natural gas one, I’ll choose coal, but those aren’t our only options. Natural gas doesn’t seem to be as good a “bridge” to renewables as has been claimed, mostly because of the methane leakage mentioned above. In the end, it’s simply time to stop digging stuff out of the ground and burning it to get energy. We could transition to a renewable fuel economy right now. It would be difficult and expensive but less so than dealing with the unchecked effects of climate change. And we have the technology and resources to do it, right now.
Given that the current energy lobbyists have managed to get laws for levies passed to people who install solar cells on their house, I think this “bridge” talk is probably entirely nonsense. Keeping their current gravy train going seems more likely.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls writes:
This is an invalid and unfair criticism. It’s really not that hard to understand. It’s like saying that the processes to make clothing in use by the textile industry (looms, sewing machines, etc) are bad because child labor is bad. Even if it were true that the child industry uses child labor, this has no relevance to whether the technologies in use by the textile industry are bad (at least as long as there’s nothing inherent in the way that a sewing machine has to be designed which requires that a child operate it).
In fact, given the comments of 24fps it would seem like pits are not even commonly used.
augustpamplona@69: you seem to be trying to use reductio ad absurdum. But what’s absurd about criticizing the textiles industry for using child labour? Who cares that the machines *can* be operated safely by well-paid and well-treated adults — what matters is the actual practices.
There seems to be an attempt to define fracking as the part of the process that has no issues, and to define all the problematic parts as non-fracking. That’s where I (and various others here) call bullshit.
to just get out the obvious…
citation please.
No, it isn’t hard to understand. From the time chemicals appear on site for the fracking process, until the finished product is finally moved off-site, it is part of the total process, and is therefore part of fracking….
As I said, I’ve worked as an industrial chemist for 25+ years, and I even worked for an enormous chemical company when they doing initial work on fracking. The chemicals used are not on the GRAS list. Information in the form of SDS should be given to anybody living in the area who might be effected. But then, expecting ethical behavior by overly greedy fracking companies is not to be expected based on their performances so far.
So let me see if I have this straight…
…person above who makes money from fracking assures everyone that fracking is safe?
Well damn – case closed, I guess.
1.9%….
I looked up what the industry ITSELF reports leakage rates to be…
5%
then I looked up what independents studies show…
as high as 60%.
http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/01/09/Leaky-Fracked-Wells/
hmm.
And that would be why Harper has spent so much effort muzzling government funded scientists…
I work in the aircraft industry, so I don’t know much about the technical details of fracking. However, if commercial airlines had a 5% failure rate (or even something like it that could potentially cause public harm), I don’t think there would be a lot of pushback against trying to regulate it better to make it safer.
As a matter of fact, the airlines and aircraft industry are a good example of how regulations actually do make things safer.
@ ichthyc #71 – Dr Anthony Ingraffea, interview with us in spring of 2012. Also fact checked (standard procedure for the science documentary strand I was working with, and not something Josh Fox does with any rigour) but I don’t have time to chase down the sources for you right now – I have filed it all away, so it’s in a box in my office archive. Dr Ingraffea is a professor at Cornell and not even remotely in favour of cracking as a practice, although he did develop some of the techniques used in the process.
PS – adding to #77 – my partner tells me that I may be in error – 1.9% is the industry! Ingraffea says 4-5%. What can I say, it was two projects ago, not all details stay with you perfectly. Still “good” in engineering terms, but again, the number of wells is enormous, so that means a large number of localized failures. It’s a rate most people find unacceptable, and we’ll they should. However, these failures do not contaminate groundwater or aquifers. It’s the smaller picture. The loss of fresh water from the water cycle is something that is far more likely to adversely affect a much larger number of people.
Fargo is safe from water contamination. There’s a nice, convenient continental divide or two between us and the Bakken.
Instead, we’re bound to blow up eventually. We already almost did once. Which thrills me immensely, as someone who lives a mere 2 blocks from the rail tracks.
And on a different but related note: oil/gas companies are trolling liberal media now, e.g. by showing ads for shale oil online during a segment where the creator of Gasland is being interviewed: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BeZuI-KCcAAi4Or.png
you really did a poor job researching this.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/groundwater-contamination-may-end-the-gas-fracking-boom/
http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/05/28/leaked-epa-draft-fracking-wastewater-guidance-shows-closer-scrutiny-treatment-plants
…though I would add that the direction you went with, that of there ALSO being a problem with wasting large amounts of water in this process, period, is a good one and one I had not seen considered much before.
considering that part of ND is supposed to be farming country while also being very dry, the water use is considered locally quite regularly in the forms of battles over water allotment.
of course, which is all the more reason it surprises me none of the popular films or media coverage tend to expound on that.
It’s not much of an issue in PA since there’s lots of water there, but I have heard of the issue being raised in CA which is in drought — that fracking during a historic drought is perhaps not entirely advisable.
BTW, a longer report that goes on and on about various problems with fracking; rather instructive. I wonder how many worse things have come out since this came out three years ago:
http://www.desmogblog.com/fracking-the-future/desmog-fracking-the-future.pdf
@ ichthyc #80 – Actually, Jackson was one of our contributors, our main water expert. We were on site with him while he was at the tail end of gathering and analyzing the data for the study referenced in your link.
If you read the article carefully (which you really did a poor job of), you will see that Jackson isn’t testing groundwater, he’s testing well water. The article isn’t especially clear on that, I’ll grant you, but it’s not quite the same thing. It’s actually a much more complex problem. There’s also the problem that Jackson didn’t have much in the way of baseline testing prior to the fracking nearby. His study is a good start, but it isn’t by any means conclusive, and he made that very clear to us.
Also, I noted above that we made the film in 2012 and it aired in early 2013. Your article is later than that. I am happy to be proven incorrect by new information – in this case, that information isn’t new.
well water often draws from groundwater… you knew that, right?
it’s why the article is titled the way it is.
fuck me, but no, it isn’t.
the article shows definitely that you CAN get methane leakage from the pockets where fracking is occuring, as it shatters the containing rock.
you CAN get increased methane in well water.. which wouldn’t be possible, if as you said earlier, the issue was only relevant to very deep fracking wells with no contact to groundwater.
WHERE THE FUCK DO YOU THINK THE METHANE CAME FROM?
who is us, kimosabe?
EPA is saying the same thing, btw:
http://science.time.com/2011/12/09/contaminated-epa-says-fracking-likely-polluted-groundwater/
so they must be “mistaken” too, right, since their conclusion was:
…look, I’ll buy the argument that some of this info was not public knowlege when you did your “report”… but really?
any geologist could have at least showed you how it was plausible, and even likely, that fracking could cause fracturing, thus leakage.
this would NOT have been new information, not even 10 years ago.
I get the idea that somehow, someone convinced you that all fracking is done in extremely deep pockets…
there lies your problem.
“well water often draws from groundwater… you knew that, right?”
Often is not always. The question is just how localized or not any methane seepage from wells is. They’re working on that, but they don’t have all the answers yet. It’s not a slam dunk. And the gas people sure as heck aren’t going to help with better information, are they?
“Fuck me, but no, it isn’t.
the article shows definitely that you CAN get methane leakage from the pockets where fracking is occuring, as it shatters the containing rock.
you CAN get increased methane in well water.. which wouldn’t be possible, if as you said earlier, the issue was only relevant to very deep fracking wells with no contact to groundwater.
WHERE THE FUCK DO YOU THINK THE METHANE CAME FROM?”
First of all, take a pill, rude boy, you’re getting overheated.
It may be possible, but it is not yet fully conclusive that fracking is the cause. It might be. But without baseline testing, it will be difficult for this to be fully conclusive. There may be some natural mechanism for this as well – that is something that is also possible. You do know, don’t you, that naturally occurring methane seepage from shale in water is quite common in Pennsylvania, right? It’s common in a lot of places where the shale deposits are fairly shallow. Happens in southern Alberta and Quebec, too. So the methane may well have come from shale, the complexity comes in the number of processes that exist and conclusively showing which one took place.
The problem with your position and Fox’s film is that you’re both willing to jump in with the big AHA! when there are still a lot of variables and things we don’t yet know.
“who is us, kimosabe?”
Us = me, the director (I’m writer/producer) and the rest of the crew who did the on camera interview, sunshine.
You will also notice that the EPA is saying “likely”, and not “totally for sure”, yes? As I pointed out above, they’re only starting to understand this. The industry is moving faster than the studies can be done. Ie: not a slam dunk.
which is irrelevant to whether fracking can, and has, contaminated groundwater.
which, of course, is why i had to ask you such an obvious question.
it’s so totally not for sure they released a report detailing it.
uh huh.
you just keep convincing yourself, dude.
I often get overheated when people like you try to feed people bullshit.
it’s a habit.
“…look, I’ll buy the argument that some of this info was not public knowlege when you did your “report”… but really?
any geologist could have at least showed you how it was plausible, and even likely, that fracking could cause fracturing, thus leakage.
this would NOT have been new information, not even 10 years ago.”
It was not a report, it was a one hour documentary for a national public broadcaster. Stop being such a condescending tit.
Anthony Ingraffea was kind enough to explain how both fracking and natural fissures may cause methane migration. I’m well versed, thanks very much.
No, not all fracking is deep, but it tends to be in Pennsylvania as opposed to shallow fracks in Alberta. And yes, it’s possible and plausible that fracking can cause leakage, but possible and plausible do not equal “totally for sure that is indisputably the cause”. And you know what? It might be. But it is not yet, from the sources you’re referencing, entirely conclusive.
It’s okay to not have all the answers yet. I’m under the impression that’s what science is about. I look forward to seeing answers soon. But they haven’t been confirmed yet.
But hey, who am I to argue? You’ve got 5 paragraphs from Sci Am and google. Bravo.
“First of all, take a pill, rude boy, you’re getting overheated.
I often get overheated when people like you try to feed people bullshit.
it’s a habit.”
People like me? Who would that be, exactly? Anyone who disagrees with you? Or does this only happen when your facile understanding is challenged?
Grow up.