…doesn’t affect drinking water.
I wonder what the self-denominated “Party of Science” that insists on blocking it anyway has to say?
34 thoughts on “Fracking”
Comments are closed.
…doesn’t affect drinking water.
I wonder what the self-denominated “Party of Science” that insists on blocking it anyway has to say?
Comments are closed.
However, groundwater contamination is not the only possible undesirable side effect of fracking.
I live in Northwest England, one of the most geologically stable areas of the world. It so happens that fracking trials (for gas in this case) were carried out about 2 years ago, and during the trials there was a perceptible earthquake – only about 2.5, IIRC, but still the biggest earthquake in these parts for at least a century.
It seems to me that in less geologically stable areas fracking might be the cause of significant earthquakes.
And yet the government mandated fuel additive MTBE does contaminate ground water.
I believe MTBE is banned in about half of the states and the use of a much more expensive corn based additive was mandated in its place.
The fracking scare has never made any sense.
If fracking fluid is getting in your drinking water, then you were drinking water out of an oil well. The water pumped into an oil bearing strata to fracture it is heavier than the oil in the seam. If anything would be rising to mix with groundwater, it would be the oil, not the fracking fluid. But the fracking is done below the impermeable rock layers that trapped the oil in the first place, so the only route from the oil to groundwater will be the well itself, but it’s lined, and since fracking makes wells more productive you need fewer wells.
This is a case where a picture is worth a thousand words. I’ve seen video of people taking a match to their drinking water and it catching fire – a blue flame reminiscent of methane.
It *shouldn’t* happen, in that the rock trapping the gas *should* be impermeable. On the other hand, the whole point of fracking is to fracture or crack otherwise impermeable rock.
It’s probably worth some polluted well water to get natural gas, but we really ought to understand what the whole costs are.
This is a case where a picture is worth a thousand words. I’ve seen video of people taking a match to their drinking water and it catching fire – a blue flame reminiscent of methane.
So what? The picture doesn’t tell you why that is happening. A blue flame from natural gas seeping up through fracking (whether properly done according to regulation or not) looks the same as a blue flame from naturally occurring natural gas in the water table. This is just another example of your mental deficiencies. Reason is not “think by picture”.
Saying it “shouldn’t happen” doesn’t make sense without context. You have to first establish that the image above is due to human action. If it’s naturally occurring, then that right there defeats the “shouldn’t happen” argument. Ground water isn’t always nice. One doesn’t have (yet) a right to avoid the whims of the natural world.
Natural gas in the water supply has nothing to do with fracking fluids, which are liquid and denser than oil (thus sinking). It would also have nothing to do with fracking, which breaks up the rock below the impermeable rock layers that trapped the gas. Why would any energy company want to fracture the cap rock and let all the gas escape into the air instead of ending up in their gas pipelines? It doesn’t make any sense.
In a normal well the gas and oil is contained in rock that’s already porous (otherwise it wouldn’t be filled with gas and oil). But in many cases the oil and gas can’t flow very quickly into the drilled well because the rock isn’t highly porous. and attempting to pump out too much too fast can cause the oil flow to pick up particles (mud) that will clog the pores that are open. Fracking is a way to make the pores bigger so the gas and oil can flow faster, making low porosity strata as productive as high porosity strata.
I’ve seen video of people taking a match to their drinking water and it catching fire
PT Barnum made money off people like you. Listen to George, he’s trying to teach you something without making any money off you.
If you go down to Florida, out in the Everglades, you’ll be able to set fire to bubbles coming out of the water to your heart’s content. But if you dare suggest, in the presence of an enviropath that the Everglade’s be touched in any way whatsoever, you’ll be burned at the stake.
The science is settled Chris, stop being a fracking denier.
Chris, if your knowledge o everything else is as ignorant as your knowledge of hydrology, I am going ot request Rand add an ignore feature so we can save the boards time.
First of all, the shale layer may be an impermeable layer but it is multiple impermeable layers below the water table. There is not just one impermeable layer. I can see your mal-knowledge of fracking comes form watching Gasland or parroting anti-fracking talking points. Drilling a water well in an area of near surface methane pockets can cause flammible water. Thsi has zero to do with fracking other than they both involve methane. Fracking is generaly occuring thousands of feet deep and drinking water wells are typically dozens of feet deep.
There isn’t a single verified instance of fracking cross-contaminating a drinking water well with detectable levels of methane gas. None, nada, zip, zero.
Seriously Chris, I work in the Environmental field. Not one single credible scientist believes that fracking is environmentally unsound. The critics so far all have one thing in common, a grotesquely profound ignorance of basic Geology and Hydrology.
In fact, I was talking to the recently retired head UIC Hydrologist for my states Department of Environmental Protection last week and she said “Fracking is like building microprocessors in a clean room compared to coal mining. It is God’s gift to the US and our environment.”
Meanwhile, Big Oil is suppressing innovation in the energy and transport industries. Here’s a video of a biotechnology for levitation that uses no petroleum (other than the glue that holds the bees to the laptop).
Meanwhile, corporations support an obviously better-funded denialist movement….
Why would any energy company want to fracture the cap rock and let all the gas escape into the air instead of ending up in their gas pipelines? It doesn’t make any sense.
Word.
Fracking has been around for 60 years. This is just the environmental movement moving on to their next target.
BTW, how’s that complete lack of innovation in the nuclear industry looking now?
It’s actually been around much longer than that. In the beginning, it was called “well shooting.” The first frack took place on 21 January 1865, by one Col. E.A.L. Roberts. He formed a company called the Roberts Petroleum Torpedo Company, and used his technique of exploding nitroglycerin underground to revive wells that were starting to peter out. The company later changed its name to Otto Cupler Torpedo, and it still exists deep in the woods of Pennsylvania. I’ve been there, when the company I was working for looked to find out whether they could manufacture stuff for our own fracking line of goods. That was before fracking became “controversial.”
There isn’t any controversy. The people who do this have been studying the environmental effects almost since the very beginning, and found no ill effects. But the Left has suddenly realized that this technique produces more oil and gas, so they’ve made up a bunch of shit to discredit it. The people who express “concern” here are the useful idiots of the lying Left.
Fracking shouldn’t contaminate groundwater. But then I see a recent study from Duke University saying average and maximum methane concentrations in drinking-water wells increased with proximity to the nearest gas well and were 19.2 and 64 mg CH4 L-1 (n = 26), a potential explosion hazard.
It appears to me that the science is not settled.
Oh, I’d say the science is settled. If the CH4 levels were 8000 mg/L instead of 19.2 to 64 mg/L we’d add corn sugar, flavor, caramel coloring, and sell it in bottles. The only reasons we don’t methanate soft drinks instead of carbonating them is that methane comes out of solution too quickly, and it doesn’t add that carbonic acid tang.
Very high methane levels might even be beneficial if it displaced oxygen that supports nasties like cryptosporidium, giardia, and coliform bacteria.
Methane is so benign that water filter companies (and the FDA) don’t even mention it unless levels are high enough to form an explosion hazard, as opposed to a host of elements and inorganic compounds like arsenic, cyanide, barium, copper, selenium, and several dozen organic compounds like benzene and styrene, not to mention MTBE.
We produce a lot of methane from coal beds, pumping it out mixed in water. The government thinks we’re wasting most of the remaining methane-water out West by not using it beneficially for livestock. In coal mining regions, such as where I’m from, all groundwater is naturally chock full of methane.
If methane was a health hazard then eating Mexican food would be illegal. In fact, eating would be illegal because food produces explosive levels of methane gas inside your body. You can actually ignite your farts!
But methane in well water is the only thing possibly linked to fracking, and even though we produce it in huge amounts every time we eat, and even though many regions have always had high levels of methane in well water, and even though methane is naturally in high abundance in the oceans, it’s been seized on by idiots who oppose fracking, and so it must, must be somehow very dangerous. These same idiots are probably terrified of dihydrogen monoxide levels in drinking water, which can run as high as 1,000,000 mg/L.
So now we go from “there’s no methane in well water” to “a little methane never hurt anybody.”
I would note that the link says “potential explosion hazard.”
Your study also noted that well water contains methane even without any nearby natural gas wells. In fact, water well drillers have been coping with very high (and explosive) methane levels ever since we’ve been drilling water wells. That’s why cisterns have a gooseneck vent fittings. It keeps them from exploding, a hazard with every water well in this country since Plymouth Rock was founded. Somehow we survived.
Your study also didn’t make any link to fracking, just to active gas wells. Should we ban driling holes in the ground? If we do, how are people going to get water from holes in the ground if they don’t drill any holes? With horizontal drilling and fracking the wells are spaced much farther apart, so there are much fewer actual wells. Based on this study, fracking would logically reduce methane from natural gas wells.
And what about places that have always had high levels of methane in their groundwater? After happily using such high-methane water supplies for centuries, why is this now suddenly a problem, even a terrible danger to the public safety?
As your link says, the maximum levels recorded were 64 mg CH4/L, or 0.004 moles per liter of water. To ignite, methane needs to reach at least 5% concentration in air, so if you boiled the methane out of the water you’d have enough to form an explosive mixture only if limited to 0.08 liters of air. Of course you might be boiling the methane out of the water on a stove fueled with 100% methane, in your kitchen, the holy of holies regarding food safety, where you prepare your food by burning methane right underneath it.
Holy smokes. What if some of that methane got into the water you were using to make tea and you drank it? What if it sat in your tummy, on top of the burrito that’s pumping methane out of your intestines, bubbling up through the tea like you’d shoved the stove’s natural gas line up your butt and turned it on high?! I suspect you’d burp! You might even be able to light it and post it on Youtube. And thankfully, you don’t even have to move to within a few blocks of a fracking site to expose yourself to this extra 0.01% of methane, just eat one extra bean from the burrito and you’re there. 🙂
That’s how silly this anti-fracking movement is. They are morons being played as useful idiots by radicals who are opposed to energy production and modernity. The methane worries they’re stoking up are stupider than living in fear of tree spirits, angry sasquatch rampages, and voodoo curses.
Everybody on this site keeps telling me what is supposed to happen in theory. That’s all well and good, but if what’s supposed to happen isn’t in fact happening, then there is a problem.
And we need to know what is actually happening, so that property owners are compensated (if appropriate) or oil companies are protected from junk lawsuits (if needed).
So, please stop telling me what you believe is happening and let’s figure out what is actually happening.
(I’m reminded of a saying one of my ship’s commanders used to say when somebody told them they “believed” something to be true. “I believe I should be a millionaire,” he’d say. “Now tell me what you know.”
But we know the ground is full of methane pockets, and we know the ground leaks because of natural porosity, cracking, and faulting. We don’t know where all these cracks and faults are, so we can’t predict with complete accuracy where methane could leak into groundwater.
The only safe thing to do is to drill horizontally into all potential methane fields, frack them, and try to relieve the pressure and reduce the threat by pumping out all the methane. We then should burn it off safely in Brayton cycle turbines so that it’s completely destroyed, never able to harm anyone ever again, no longer lurking under the Earth to spring up unexpectedl in somebody’s well. The only way to know the threat is gone is to run all the potential fields completely empty.
It’s what we must do to eliminate the current uncertainty about methane contamination. It’s what we must do to protect the children from an invisible threat. It’s the only way to be sure.
but if what’s supposed to happen isn’t in fact happening, then there is a problem.
What’s supposed to happen is fracking fluids don’t get into drinking water. Your Duke study states “We found no evidence for contamination of drinking-water samples with deep saline brines or fracturing fluids.” I’ll ask you: Do you think they were looking for those fluids? And if they’d found them, do you think the word “Methane” would have appeared anywhere in that study report?
That’s all well and good, but if what’s supposed to happen isn’t in fact happening, then there is a problem.
“If”. Looks like you got your work cut out for you. Show there’s a problem first.
So, please stop telling me what you believe is happening and let’s figure out what is actually happening.
Excellent, you’ve figured this part out. Now get to it.
So, please stop telling me what you believe is happening and let’s figure out what is actually happening.
Ok, here:
Laboratory analysis confirmed that the Markham and McClure wells contained biogenic methane typical of gas that is naturally found in the coals of the Laramie–Fox Hills Aquifer. This determination was based on a stable isotope analysis, which effectively “finger-printed” the gas as biogenic, as well as a gas composition analysis, which indicated that heavier hydrocarbons associated with thermogenic gas were absent. In addition, water samples from the wells were analyzed for benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes (BTEX), which are constituents of the hydrocarbons produced by oil and gas wells in the area. The absence of any BTEX compounds in these water samples provided additional evidence that oil and gas activity did not contaminate the Markham and McClure wells.
That’s a study done by the State of Colorado in response to your Gasland video of a flaming water.
I’m telling you, Gerrib; George is being very nice to you and is trying to help you understand.
By the way, your Duke study and similar studies are also badly flawed. They show that methane levels in groundwater were higher near well sites, but they say nothing about whether the well caused the higher methane levels.
You see, what geologists do before drilling a well is go around sampling the groundwater for hydrocarbon levels, along with using sniffers to detect traces of methane, ethane, or propane coming up from below. Almost all US oil and gas wells are drilled on sites detected from surface leakage. The wells are not randomly distributed, they’re centered on areas of detectable surface leakage. Any study like Duke’s would be predicted to produce the results it did, even if they study compared sites that were only proposed as potential drill sites compared to sites that weren’t.
They’ve shown no change in groundwater provably related to either drilling or fracking. In fact, since the inactive drill sites used as their baseline show low methane levels (yet probably had high environmental methane levels initially, or they would never have been drilled in the first place) shows that pumping a well until it no longer produces reduced the amount of methane leakage into groundwater.
To do a proper study they’d have to compare groundwater methane levels prior to drilling versus groundwater levels during production, and then follow up by comparing groundwater levels after a well has been run dry. They didn’t do any of that. They just showed what any geologist would’ve predicted based on where we drill wells, and why we drill them where we do.
It’s junk science intended to scare people and support a political position, an easy way to throw crap on a page and get donations, grants, citations, and tenure.
They show that methane levels in groundwater were higher near well sites, but they say nothing about whether the well caused the higher methane levels.
I thought about making the same point, but the abstract throws in a line about the “similar geologic formations and hydrogeologic regimes” to suggest they did apples to apples with water reservoirs. Of course, they never did as the study says, since some of those apples were near large natural gas deposits and some not. Still the simple concept of “correlation doesn’t equal causation” seems to have gotten lost among some that claim a title of “scientist”.
I laugh when I see the same people poo pooing fracking then turn around and champion “green” energy sources like geothermal. It’s not about the fracking, its the fact that we still using petroleum as an energy source.
I think it’s just guilt that people have as to how easy they have it. Or a misplaced fear that causes people to wildly over blow the magnitude to any problems associated with it. Germany is a perfect example following the Fukushima disaster and their knee-jerk decision to shut down all their nuclear power. Then they go 6 weeks without direct sunlight and they see their oh so wonderfully expensive solar industry isn’t oh so wonderful. “So where do we get our power now?” they say, “Oh, we’ll just turn on this 50 year old gas turbine generator that we stopped using because it pollutes so badly”. They quickly learned that there is not a 100% problem free solution to any of our energy needs.
Well, there is one reason I support geothermal above all other energy sources — availability. We’re at least 10,000 years from “peak geothermal”! You can’t say that about coal, oil, natural gas, uranium nuclear, or thorium nuclear (or even solar / hydro / wind, if you take acreage into account.)
Chris, if I held your position and had the great information present herein it would totally change my mind.
Do you have any idea why it hasn’t changed yours? It’s not stubbornness. I’m about a hundred times more than you. So what is it? I think this is really important to understand and hope you will give some thought to a response.
His silence indicates that Talking Points Memo ran out of talking points.
Sometimes my silence indicates that I have a day job which doesn’t involve arguing on blog sites. Sometimes my silence indicates that I’m tired of talking about an issue, or that I’ve decided it’s not worth the effort to try and have the last word.
I don’t have an opinion on fracking. I have questions. Since I haven’t seen “Gasland” I don’t know what evidence was presented there. I did see a “60 Minutes” piece, which as I recalled talked about Pennsylvania, not Colorado, well and surface water pollution.
At any rate, somebody telling me all the precautions taken to prevent a well from leaking is like somebody telling me all the precautions taken to prevent the Titanic from sinking. Just because something is supposed to work doesn’t mean it in fact worked.
At any rate, somebody telling me all the precautions taken to prevent a well from leaking is like somebody telling me all the precautions taken to prevent the Titanic from sinking. Just because something is supposed to work doesn’t mean it in fact worked.
The fact that after 65 years, it has never been verifiably shown that fracking contaminates the water supply is pretty strong empirical evidence that fracking does work and doesn’t contaminate ground water. It sure as hell suggests additional regulation is completely unnecessary.
What needs to be regulated is your source of information: “60 minutes”, home of “fake but accurate”.
And just what is the big risk in an oil leak, since early oil wells leaked like sieves in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and California? Prior to that the oil just leaked straight into rivers and streams, like Oil Creek in Pennsylvania that flowed into the Allegheny. Indians there and in California used to use the natural seeps as a handy source of tar.
The Los Angeles City and Beverly Hills oil fields had early, crude drill rigs all over them, and I’m pretty sure those places still retain at least some real-estate value.