Nothing will stop the fraking. It's simply too profitable for Congress to do something about it (one of the few bright areas in a dismal economy), and the courts have gutted the environmental laws too much for the courts to do anything about it. It's an intrinsically attractive business: the product is something (energy) that's extremely valuable and has exploding demand, and many of the inherent costs of creating that product can be foisted onto people in the surrounding community that have little recourse, legal or otherwise, to do anything about it.
Fracking will end when the oil/gas is gone. In its wake it will leave behind the mess the energy and chemical industries have left all over the country: polluted, barely usable land in economically devastated regions (which is what happens after the oil is gone and the companies leave) that must be cleaned up at enormous public expense: http://www.epa.gov/superfund.[1]
Every story is some form of the same thing (plug: http://cleanupdepue.org). Company moves into little town. Residents rejoice in the new jobs. Company leaves when the land is polluted and used up. Property values plummet, and the town is left with no jobs and no ability to sell their houses and move out. The western midwest is in the first part of that story right now, hopefully they'll be smart enough and not have to see what the second part looks like 30-50 years from now.
[1] Incidentally, I think one of the great weaknesses of our country is that Congress sits in D.C., a city that is insulated from pretty much every substantial problem present in the rest of the country. In this particular context, it's a city that has never seen much industrialization and which has historically been surrounded by low-intensity agriculture in every direction (now: vast swaths of suburbia). I think we'd see a different attention to environmental issues if we relocated Congress to say the industrial New Jersey/Delaware/Pennsylvania coast...
This is basically what happened in the rust belt with steel. Now another "boom" is happening with fracking. The people still haven't learned. You wouldn't believe how many gas workers are driving new trucks, buying toys, etc. I bet very few are putting any of this money in savings. When the fracking leaves we'll be in the same place we were when the steel mills shut down. Just waiting for the next economic boom to come.
What are left of the mills are pretty much rusty wastelands but I don't think quite as much pollution (at least in the ground) as we will see from fracking.
Prophetically, and maybe ironically, fracking service infrastructure in my hometown, Youngstown, Ohio, is being built on the same land that the steel mills sat abandoned for decades.
I'm on the Ohio border near Pittsburgh. Most of our infrastructure isn't reusing steel mill but some of it is. The thing I worry about more than the ground pollution are explosions. We've already seen a few but I don't think anything like that fertilizer plant yet. I have a pipeline being put in probably 300 yards from my house and those things scare the shit out of me.
I lost any faith in these companies doing any sort of sound geological work when a company disposing of fracking water placed their injection well near a fault and caused a rash of earthquakes in the area the well was built.
I'm not inherently against the idea of increased natural gas production, including fracking, but the lack of effort put forth by the industry to recognize and mitigate the risks involved has completely turned me off the practice.
It costs money to recognize and mitigate the risks. Under the current legal regime, it costs very little money to let the negative effects happen because other people will bear the costs of those effects. I.e. it's totally rational for companies under the existing regime to fail to take adequate precautions.
... because other people will bear the costs of those effects.
Yup.
Environmental protection is an accounting problem. Convert those externalities into line items on a company's profit & loss statement, voila, no more exploitation.
Yeah, it isn't really that profitable, especially given that a large portion of US gas is effectively land-locked. Put in some transmission to ports and a few LNG terminals / ships, and US gas will reach some equilibrium with European/Asian prices.
It's inaccurate to group together hydraulic fracturing and traditional oil drilling in terms of environmental damage. The regulations and safety procedures for oil are leaps and bounds beyond those of hydraulic fracturing.
My girlfriend is in charge for assessing the environmental impacts of the Keystone XL pipeline, and she recently spent two weeks rerouting KXL because she and her team discovered beetles in the proposed pipeline corridor.
>It's inaccurate to group together hydraulic fracturing and traditional oil drilling in terms of environmental damage.
No it isn't, fracking is a technique that is used to increase the output of a 'traditional oil well' and actually, oil/gas drilling has been ruining surface water for a long time, too. In the past it tended to happen to people who owned the surface as well as the minerals, and who were often happy to take an additional check for their trouble (or not), to go along with their mineral check, and have some bottled water delivered, or hook up to a community water district (yay, they can afford it now). It is easier to get over the loss of a water well when you're making five or six figures a month in O&G royalties. Fracking isn't new either. The only thing new is fracking for shale gas, which is usually deeper/higher pressure, and I guess probably needs better well casings and cement. The problem being that many of these wells are only barely economical or a gamble, to start with (thanks Aubrey McClendon).
>discovered beetles in the proposed pipeline corridor.
Yeah, every now and then an EPA guy scores a win for team EPA. I'd bet that it is the exception, not the rule.
The wins, unfortunately, tend to be random, as a result of the sorry state of our environmental law. The people at the EPA don't target oil pipelines for rerouting due to beetles instead of focusing on whether fracking is polluting groundwater because they care so much about beetles, or because they've already won on everything more important. Industry takes examples like this to show "look at how out of control the EPA has gotten!" because bystanders thing: "gee, I care about the environment, but all that work to protect a few beetles is a bit much!"
But that paints a misleading picture. The EPA goes for the beetles because the Endangered Species Act is one of the few laws with bright-line rules that hasn't been watered down over the last 30-40 years. That makes it a good tactical hammer. They've got a limited budget, and they need to hit things like this that are a slam-dunk in court instead of broader issues that could get mired for years in debates between expert witnesses and thousands of reports being thrown back and forth.
I don't know about elsewhere, but in Australia CSG wells are often operated under a coal mining permit (vs oil/gas drilling permit) where the drilling operations, casing requirements, testing/audit trails etc. designed to protect aquifers (and well integrity) are nowhere near as strict as conventional oil & gas.
Hell, the crews drilling CSG don't even have basic understanding of well control theory (or enough instrumentation on the rig to detect problems) - hence the occasional uncontrolled blowouts, mitigated only by the fact that these CSG wells are slimhole vs conventional.
I'd much rather live next to a fracked conventional oil & gas well which has been cased & cemented according to the design of certified petroleum engineers, pressure-tested with all the results lodged properly with government authorities to depths far exceeding any of the local aquifers - than a dodgy CSG well cemented by amateurs who work to rough guidelines "appropriate for the area", who write more documentation on their invoicing than on any actual data collection...
Source: I worked with an oil & gas service company 2006-2008...
Here's a radical idea: in today's day and age, do we really need Congress to be in a centralized location at all?
Yes, there are practical and security obstacles to governance via permanent telepresence, but there are many upsides as well. Aside from the enourmous cost and disruption to existing practices, is there anything that makes it completely unfeasible? I imagine many representatives would much rather live in their home state than move to DC or constantly commute.
I personally think we should distribute the whole federal government. A side effect of the size of the federal government is that a ton of money flows into the Washington Metro area, which I don't think is fair.
Much of the infrastructure is already in place. The federal courts and the DOJ are already distributed. The SEC, EPA, etc, already have field offices in major cities across the country. Work could be pushed down from HQ into those field offices, giving them greater autonomy and moving jobs from DC to other parts of the country.
There's a ton of context that's not included here. For starters:
1) How common was this in PA before fracking started?
2) Are these wells unusable?
3) Is the situation getting better or worse?
4) Is the gas linked to the fracking (the only interesting question that was mentioned in the article, and the answer is "we don't know")
5) What about other places fracking is occurring? It's not like we're going to stop fracking everywhere: this is a maturing technology. It'll be used all over the planet. What's happening elsewhere?
6) Any other studies being done?
7) What's the measured impact on health in the area?
8) Let's not even start on corrleation and causation -- but it needs to be mentioned, and it's the reason all these other questions are germane.
I'm not trying to be an apologist. These are just sincere questions of import when reading about fracking news. They're germane to any reporting on the matter, and they weren't included. If "more details to come" means more random pieces of trivia that we are then supposed to knit up into our own version of a drama, filled in by whatever personal biases we have, then this isn't very useful from a scientific standpoint.
9. Is there something about the geology of spots where companies like to drill that causes higher methane levels?
10. Were the wells sampled chosen for proximity to drill sites? Did the sampling methodology allow for the possibility that methane levels can spike without a nearby well?
11. Was there any relationship between levels and the length of time the well has been operating? Depth of well?
I'd add that the SA headline isn't exactly a dispassionate summary of the article.
hacker news is a community of highly technical and/or scientifically inclined people. Certainly a Scientific American article that discusses ongoing research, and is very specific in noting the preliminary nature of it, is something the community is capable of ingesting and discussing in a reasonable way. I found the article interesting because I recall just a couple of years ago, discussing the idea that fracking could ever have any relationship to the groundwater whatsoever was considered patently ridiculous and you'd get sent right off to pseudoscience reeducation camp just for suggesting it (which is really because: in the absence of reputable research having been done, all opinions were essentially political).
Now if we were talking about an article that's discussing philosophy, religion, or other subjects within the humanities, there's a much higher chance the HN community will totally misinterpret and butcher the crap out of that, sure.
My wife subscribed to Scientific American for a while, and I thought their political articles were actually pretty crappy and unscientific. Admittedly, it was just a quick glance here and there, but there was some stuff that struck me as very simplistic.
As an interesting aside, coal is none too healthy either. There's a town in PA that's been burning for something like 50 years:
1) How common was this in PA before fracking started?
The gas company's have this data. Before any activity in my area (near the PA border in Ohio) someone came and tested my well water for contaminates. I have the report somewhere but it was basically just mineral etc. Drilling hasn't really picked up yet but I will find out if it changes or not. Then again who knows if you can trust the reports when the gas companies are funding them.
But methane isn't harmful. Also the article doesn't mention the quantities, but another does. [1] It seems that the most that's been found is about 70mg/L, which is not a lot.
The article does mention the levels, the highest one was 70 mg/L also.
Methane is a pretty inert molecule. It's only a hazard in really high concentrations where it acts as an asphyxiant. I don't know of any metabolic toxicity (but maybe there is).
The DOE also studied what Robert Jackson 'plans' to do. That is using injections to trace leaks. This is not proof of leaks, it is proof that houses near methane deposits have more methane in their drinking water.
http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=7243166e-0322-...
Obviously, this study needs to be repeated many more times and more regulations need to be put on fracking, but the technology is getting better already.
I would be curious about the any early studies before fracking in Penn. For a bit of history, google Thomas Payne, George Washington, and the story of their experiments in the area.
First, some of them do,clearly, get into the water. See the documentary Gasland. Second, the companies that pump these chemicals into the ground have made it very difficult to do actual science on the situation. Also, see Gasland for lots of examples of that.
EDIT: also, since many of the chemicals are liquids and they are injected into an aquifer that feeds wells, the only thing we really need to know is: are any of the chemicals lighter than water. Even if they are not, once the water is pumped out, the remaining liquids will certainly be next.
There's obviously something nefarious going on. Why else would all of these natural gas companies be paying people off and making them sign confidentially agreements?
Side-note: Before today I didn't realize how lax the laws on natural gas companies are. The New York Times has a great graphic on the subject.
"The natural gas industry has exemptions or exclusions from key parts of at least 7 of the 15 major federal environmental laws designed to protect air and water from radioactive and hazardous chemicals. Below are the seven laws listed in the order they were passed."
Methane is a natural contaminant of groundwater and is commonplace in water wells. A simple solution is to run the well water into a holding tank; the methane readily comes out of solution.
Venting methane from well water is less a problem than Joe Mulroy's farts at a beer-soused Friday night card game. Either will produce a flare if a match is put to them.
The OP is a kind of shallow summation of the details here...first of all, the study was published in June. Second, it's not the "first step" in determining the link between fracking in the Marcellus Shale and water contamination...a previous study by Duke, which the OP references later, documented "systematic evidence" of such a link.
I bring this up not to be pedantic, but to point out that the OP comes off as that this is new conclusive evidence...it is not. Opponents of fracking would argue that there are several other studies showing similar data, and they'd argue that politics/industry has shelved other planned studies. In other words, it's not just amount or existence of evidence that comes into play in this debate.
Yeah this is the worst kind of nerd bait. "You guys already know that the oil companies are evil and will poison people given the chance. Here's a tiny piece of evidence that you could misinterpret in multiple ways"
To the author's credit, at least he pulled back and didn't do the entire ranting, hand-waving ritual. I believe that job is being left for online commenters to complete :)
The funny thing is, without the overriding emotional narrative many people have, if you just explained what the study says using other terms, most folks would realize how tenuous and superficial the reporting is. Correlative research is great, but geesh, it's a tiny, almost minuscule part of actually accomplishing anything. Most of the time, it's a waste of time. Medical research, for instance, is full of correlative research that never amounted to a hill of beans.
>Medical research, for instance, is full of correlative research that never amounted to a hill of beans.
Yes like smoking being linked with cancer. I'm glad we listened to the corporate funded libertarians on that one and didn't fall prey to the wishy washy lefty propaganda and emotive narratives about evil tobacco companies wanting to make money from killing people. What a ridiculous, politically motivated caricature that was.
I'd like to point out that the Heartland Institute and Cato still deny the link between passive smoking and cancer, so it's not like that kind of lobbying is all in the distant dark past. The very same people writing lies about tobacco are writing propaganda about fracking. They also think climate change is a giant marxist conspiracy.
I'd like to point out that the Heartland Institute and Cato still deny the link between passive smoking and cancer,
Honestly, that's because the science is a joke.
It's arguably sufficient to cite the obnoxious nature of secondhand smoke to outlaw it in public places. If it's constitutional for governments to pass laws that keep people from blaring their car stereos at 3 AM, then it's constitutional to pass laws that keep people from polluting the air that other people have to breathe.
Samples were collected upstream of any treatment
systems and as close to the water well as possible
I guess my question would be: does it matter? If you read the article you'll see that out of the 118 homes that tested positive for methane, only 12 were above the threshold for immediate remediation.
However, if they sampled the water before it was treated, it doesn't tell you what the level of the treated water is. Even if the water is simply pumped into a holding reservoir, that can cause a lot of the methane to outgas from the water.
I have mixed feelings about fracking. It almost certainly pollutes areas, but lots of areas in not-United States get polluted currently from the oil industry:
So it's okay to use oil when it pollutes somewhere else?
I live in the northeast and I find it very interesting when someone has an anti-fracking bumper sticker on his or her car. It essentially says "oil is okay as long as there are no problems near me"
You have a fair point, Rayiner. Peoples' attention is due to their local affairs before others. But I think the parent meant in a more idealistic sense, in which case, we really should care, we should care about both, just prioritize one.
Aside from money (which is pretty motivating), I don't understand why the gas companies simply continue to deny that there is contamination and that there are negative outcomes to the environment for doing this (let's put it this way, its almost certainly not a positive impact. Its unlikely to be a neutral impact.)
Its like what cigarette companies used to do- just constantly deny what's completely obvious.
(Hi David!) Well, yes it's money, but the complication is that fracking has that effect only in some places. The contamination is much more a function of the geology than the fracking process itself. Pennsylvania has been hit heavily with contamination. Most wells drilled are safe: http://mitei.mit.edu/publications/reports-studies/future-nat...
There is an annoying combination of legal and commercial pressures that prevent the companies from going "actually it's more dangerous than we previously said" without it seeming like "it was a lie all along this is TERRIBLE".
The crucial take-away is that there is a bunch of additional geologic due diligence that the gas companies could be doing that would actually enable them to continue fracking. But the boom is driven in part by the utter dirt cheapness of it now and they're afraid of hopping off the wave.
I don't have a source handy, but I remember reading something to effect that when you figured in all the transportation costs for the fracking fluid and gas production, it really wasn't so clean.
Because it will take decades for any lawsuits to make it through the courts. If they were to lose such lawsuits,
by that time they'll have already pulled out enough money to cover the cost of the lawsuits with the rest just being gravy.
They will move as fast as they can to make as much money as they can. By the time something could stop it they will be so deep in the pockets of our representatives that it will be hard to make it happen.
The other thing to consider is that simply not getting natural gas at all is also a terrible idea.
A lot of the power infrastructure that handles peaks in demand (and averts rolling blackouts) uses natural gas. The question we need to be asking ourselves is which is the least bad alternative, because they're all bad.
This "new" evidence of contamination will not end it. People will be paid in quiet settlements, sell their houses at a fraction of what they paid for them, and move somewhere else. This will probably continue until the oil/bitumen/gas is gone.
I would not. If you're going to watch Gasland, then you also need to read the opposing side. There are some parts of it that are incredibly misleading, such as the tap water on fire.
"Government Relations" is a nice euphemism for propagandist.
In 50 years when the Midwest is a toxic wasteland, many of those responsible might be able to move to Dubai, but our children and grandchildren are going to have to somehow live in it.
Extremely loaded question. There's a documented increase in pollution, but trying to tie specific deaths to the increase is extremely difficult. We're talking about macro effects, not micro effects; so e.g. cancer deaths might increase by 20% or so, but cancer existed before the increase and will continue exist if fracking is stopped.
When the "opposing side" (the heartland institute) also deny the existence of global warming and second-hand smoke, I think your choice of references does more to harm that viewpoint than support it.
It was a news article. I just grabbed the first relevant link pertaining to "gasland tap water fire". Because I apparently was using the wrong keywords: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasland#Negative
> In an article for Forbes magazine, Dr. Michael Economides, a professor of engineering at the University of Houston, commented on the Gasland scene of "a man lighting his faucet water on fire and making the ridiculous claim that natural gas drilling is responsible for the incident. The clip, though attention-getting, is wildly inaccurate and irresponsible. To begin with, the vertical depth separation between drinking water aquifers and reservoir targets for gas production is several thousand feet of impermeable rock. Any interchange between the two, if it were possible, would have happened already in geologic time, measured in tens of millions of years, not in recent history."
> To begin with, the vertical depth separation between drinking water aquifers and reservoir targets for gas production is several thousand feet of impermeable rock.
Impermeable except for, you know, the several thousand foot long shafts that are drilled through that rock in the process of fraking.
>To begin with, the vertical depth separation between drinking water aquifers and reservoir targets for gas production is several thousand feet of impermeable rock. Any interchange between the two, if it were possible, would have happened already in geologic time, measured in tens of millions of years, not in recent history
It is true that drink wells are ~100 feet and these fracking wells are thousands of feet deep but I'm not sure that completely rules out the possibility of gas escaping a well and making it into drinking water.
Without having seen Gasland, my impression is that if it's the "opposing side" of those websites, it must be a work of genius. If JimmaDaRustia wept for humanity after seeing Gasland, well, I do the same when I see how easily people are manipulated by really dumb political lobbying materials.
It's worth pointing out that the author of that New York Times article, Mike Soraghan, has in his Twitter bio "Frac(k)ing is my life" and that he links to the same articles you linked to.
This was on TV one day, I had no intention of watching anything that day. 2 hours later...I'm sitting there weeping for humanity. Not literally, but I definitely recommend this movie to those interested. I can't make any recommendation to credibility, but I assure you that you won't come away with any positive outlook on fracking.
A friend lived in Italy for awhile and they had all sorts of earthquakes on non fault zones. They thought it had to do with fracking. I haven't really read up much on this....but something else worthy to consider.
What is even worse is that the extracted methane is burnt for heating houses that would need less to no heating at all with the proper thermal insulation. Insulation is passive and is put there once for all.
It will be tricky to explain to further generations that we ruined our land while extracting fossil energy to waste it right away.
Same thing applies to Fukushima.
I don't think it's cynical to suggest that groundwater contamination is a non-issue as far as the gas fracking boom is concerned. We've already seen that demonstrable contamination in the form of oil spills is legally and financially viable for energy companies, why would natural gas be any different?
You know what will end the fracking boom? It won't be politicians. The only things that will end it are 1) running out of gas/oil 2) the method becomes too costly to be profitable 3) a much much more profitable way to extract the resources is discovered.
To clarify, the problem discussed here is methane contamination of water rather than contamination from the process itself (though that's been an issue in some places). Methane is the gas extracted. The fracturing process tends to exacerbate existing fractures in addition to the one intended allowing more of that gas to enter groundwater.
This is interesting because the gas industry defends the fluid as harmless. A quick look at the ingredients and it doesn't seem that harmless.
- hydrochloric acid: Concentrated hydrochloric acid (fuming hydrochloric acid) forms acidic mists. Both the mist and the solution have a corrosive effect on human tissue, with the potential to damage respiratory organs, eyes, skin, and intestines irreversibly. Upon mixing hydrochloric acid with common oxidizing chemicals, such as sodium hypochlorite (bleach, NaClO) or potassium permanganate (KMnO4), the toxic gas chlorine is produced.
- polyacrylamide: Concerns have been raised that polyacrylamide used in agriculture may contaminate food with the nerve toxin acrylamide.
- Ethylene glycol (the stuff in antifreeze): Ethylene glycol is moderately toxic with an oral LDLO = 786 mg/kg for humans.[8] The major danger is due to its sweet taste. Because of that, children and animals are more inclined to consume large quantities of it than of other poisons. Upon ingestion, ethylene glycol is oxidized to glycolic acid which is, in turn, oxidized to oxalic acid, which is toxic. It and its toxic byproducts first affect the central nervous system, then the heart, and finally the kidneys. Ingestion of sufficient amounts can be fatal if untreated.
- glutaraldehyde: As a strong disinfectant, glutaraldehyde is toxic and a strong irritant
- Isopropyl alcohol (I think this stuff is in aerosol deodorant and hairspray): Isopropyl alcohol and its metabolite, acetone, act as central nervous system (CNS) depressants. Symptoms of isopropyl alcohol poisoning include flushing, headache, dizziness, CNS depression, nausea, vomiting, anesthesia, and coma.
I am not familiar with all of those, but hydrochloric acid, ethylene glycol, and isopropyl alcohol will decompose to basic elements within days if not hours.
The are only dangerous if you actually ate the concentrated solution. Put them in the ground, and they'll be harmless within days - really, days - hours even for some of them.
I looked up the other two.
Polyacrylamide is used in water treatment. Yes, the water you drink, and it's used in soft contact lenses, and mixed into soil on farms. The concern is from the potential 0.05% contamination, and in the small amounts used, plus the dilution underground 0.05% is nothing.
Oh, and on top of that acrylamide decomposes rapidly in soil so there will be none left by the time it reaches the surface.
I looked up glutaraldehyde and it decomposes within 48 hours in the presence of oxygen, and 24 hours to a week without oxygen.
I guess I should thank you for posting this, because if this is the extent of the worrisome chemicals used then there is nothing to worry about - all them are completely harmless within days. For some reason I thought they were using dangerous chemicals, but I guess not.
Hydrochloric acid is HCl. You write that it "decompose[s] to basic elements". Are you saying that HCl turns into H_2 and Cl_2, i.e. hydrogen gas and chlorine gas? Can you explain this reaction?
I believe they need to use a fluid that is viscous enough to stay in place after being pumped into the rock, so that the fissures do not immediately close when pressure is released.
I'm not particularly interested in fracking one way or the other, I'm just answering his question.
They apparently don't just use water, like some people might expect they could, because it doesn't work. Many people are concerned about contamination from the fracking fluid, correctly or not.
I'm more concerned with contamination from fracking fluid than I am with gases. This article didn't tackle fluid or the disposal of it. There are wells drill specifically to store fracking fluid.
Fracking will end when the oil/gas is gone. In its wake it will leave behind the mess the energy and chemical industries have left all over the country: polluted, barely usable land in economically devastated regions (which is what happens after the oil is gone and the companies leave) that must be cleaned up at enormous public expense: http://www.epa.gov/superfund.[1]
Every story is some form of the same thing (plug: http://cleanupdepue.org). Company moves into little town. Residents rejoice in the new jobs. Company leaves when the land is polluted and used up. Property values plummet, and the town is left with no jobs and no ability to sell their houses and move out. The western midwest is in the first part of that story right now, hopefully they'll be smart enough and not have to see what the second part looks like 30-50 years from now.
[1] Incidentally, I think one of the great weaknesses of our country is that Congress sits in D.C., a city that is insulated from pretty much every substantial problem present in the rest of the country. In this particular context, it's a city that has never seen much industrialization and which has historically been surrounded by low-intensity agriculture in every direction (now: vast swaths of suburbia). I think we'd see a different attention to environmental issues if we relocated Congress to say the industrial New Jersey/Delaware/Pennsylvania coast...