High-Tech Gas Drilling Is Fouling Drinking Water 390
sciencehabit writes "Drilling for natural gas locked deep in a shale formation — a process known as fracking — has seriously contaminated shallow groundwater supplies beneath far northeastern Pennsylvania with flammable methane. That's the conclusion of a new study, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The analysis gives few clues, however, to how pervasive such contamination might be across the wide areas of the Northeast United States, Texas, and other states where drilling for shale gas has taken off in recent years."
Re:A sign of desperation (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, a bunch of powerless people get to drink carcinogens; but that's an externality, and doesn't show up on their balance sheets.
The real problem here is that a bunch of people have been given alarmingly broad rights to shove costs onto others, without their consent, which has made substantially destructive practices highly cost effective. It is indefensible from basically every position between(and including) libertarian and certified green party; but since "Plutocrat" is the position actually calling the shots, we are unlikely to see much effective opposition.
Re:but but (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:but but (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost nobody owns mineral rights beneath their own home. Since your neighbors or the person who owns your neighbors' mineral rights can still pollute your air and water, you can't even stop natural gas fracking from occurring in your neighborhood.
Natural gas fracking often lowers property values. Since polluted wastelands aren't unappealing to most people you can count on your home losing value when your neighbors consent to fracking.
Who are you supposed to sue and for what when natural gas drilling ruins your home's value? Has anyone even successful sued over home value loss due to drilling? Your neighbor who consented to it? The corporation who is following every law and regulation?
We need regulation to protect people from corporations whose only interest is profit. Otherwise people are given bottled water as a legal settlement for the wholesale pollution and destruction of their land and air.
Re:but but (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's face it, SOME aspect of the fracturing process, whether it be frac water dumping, well casing failure (gotta get that pressurized water down there somehow), or the (far less likely but not yet confirmed to be impossible) slight possibility those fractures are of much greater extent than expected, is contaminating wells on a widespread basis.
The gas companies deny it's happening and still say fracking is "safe" - whenever a water well starts producing methane the gas company claims it's naturally occuring biogenic methane. Really, do you expect ANYONE to believe that multiple wells across the country which been producing clean drinking water for decades suddenly got contaminated with methane-producing bacteria within 1-2 years of fracking operations commencing nearby?
I live on top of the Marcellus, so I've been following the situation pretty closely (and yeah, I've watched GASLAND - scary material and one of the reasons I'm pro-nuclear - that industry has a far better track record in the USA and constantly strives to improve safety. Gas companies say they're safe when they clearly are not, and refuse to make any improvements.)
Re:Basic flaw in the study as reported (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude. It's published in PNAS, one of the top scientific journals (which means the peer review would have been brutal). Read the actual study - even in just the abstract, they answer some of your questions regarding the methodology. In the actual paper, they clearly explain their basic methodology and the principles behind it, as well as their conclusions.
Your concerns are unwarranted. They test a valid comparison between fracking sites and non-extraction sites. They show quite convincingly data demonstrating the origin of the methane (ie. differentiation between biogenic and thermogenic sources), and they note that many of their non-extraction sites are slated for extraction in the future, which will allow a follow up paper for a longitudinal look at fracking on levels of methane gas in water sources and as surface emissions as modified by local geology.
I'm a biochemist, not a geologist, but the paper is super easy to read, and only 5 pages to boot. Give it a go.
And, in future, here's a hint: If you, a complete layperson, can come up with a number of problems to a scientific study in a few minutes, then you can bet that actual experts in the field who have dedicated their entire professional career (usually decades long) to these sorts of questions may just have thought about them too.
Re:but but (Score:5, Insightful)
Typical, pinning the blame on anti-regulation. When various governments are actually what is protecting these gas companies from lawsuit damages.
Just as it's difficult or impossible to attribute individual cases of lung cancer to smoking tobacco products, it's usually difficult to impossible to prove that the contamination of an individual well that provides drinking water came from fracking. When you don't know who caused a well to go bad, who do you sue? The protection that the drilling companies are receiving from government comes in the form of lack of oversight and transparency lobbied for by the drilling companies and land owners who stand to make more money if there is a less oversight and transparency. NY state has delayed issuing drilling permits for fracking pending the release of a study by the EPA. Drilling companies and land owners have been poring money into the state capital in an attempt to persuade government officials to permit drilling to start as soon as possible, regardless of the outcome of the report. Many small towns in NY state that rely on centralized wells for the entire community are surrounded by land owners who want to start drilling as soon as possible. If the community's water well goes bad, who gets sued? Is it possible to determine which land owner or drilling company among many is to blame? Best practices, based on the most up to date research and enforced by good regulation and oversight, will do more to prevent ground water contamination than any number of after the fact lawsuits.
Re:So we can dismiss Colorado's DNR as well? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:but but (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's face it, SOME aspect of the fracturing process, whether it be frac water dumping, well casing failure (gotta get that pressurized water down there somehow), or the (far less likely but not yet confirmed to be impossible) slight possibility those fractures are of much greater extent than expected, is contaminating wells on a widespread basis.
Actually, that is not the case. We do not know what the incidence of methane in the water was in those wells before the gas companies started fracking (at least based on both of the articles linked to in the summary). We do not even know what the incience of methane in water wells near other, non-fracking gas wells is. Until we have at least a proxy for an answer to those questions, we will be unable to evaluate the level of risk that fracking brings and if it actually is causing a problem. Additionally, with that information, we will be able to determine how to ameliorate the problem.
Re:but but (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's face it, SOME aspect of the fracturing process... is contaminating wells on a widespread basis.
The cited research doesn't actually demonstrate this. It demonstrates that wells near fracking sites have much higher methane levels that wells that are more than 1 km from fracking sites.
However, there is a reason why fracking sites are where they are: it's where there is the highest concentration of gas in the ground, or where it's easier to extract, or it's where there is some aspect of the surface access situation that makes it easier to drill there, or... So there is the potential for a selection effect to come into play here: it may be that wells drilled in the vicinity of localities that are good candidates for fracking have higher levels of methane than those that do not.
Fracking is certainly the most plausible causal candidate, but there does need to be follow-up research on these less-plausible, but not insane, alternatives.
In the meantime, states should require that all wells within 1 km of proposed fracking sites be tested for methane levels on a yearly basis, and corporations engaged in fracking should be on the hook for the costs of these tests as well as supplying the homeowners with water if there is an increase in methane levels due to deep-methane leakage of the kind reported in this paper. Only by capturing the before-and-after picture will the situation become unequivocal.
Of course, this is the United States, with the most dysfunctional, inefficient and ineffective governments in the developed world (which is why so many Americans think 'government is bad'... because their governments are). So while my proposal would be sensible in any other country, in the US the state governments are almost certainly incompetent to execute such a simple plan. Americans just aren't able to do the things that other people in other countries manage all the time, without any fuss or bother.
Re:but but (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, if you read the abstract, you'll see that they found no evidence of fraccing brines ending up in the water itself -- only the gas. Curious, eh? This, combined with the incredible depth of the reservoirs being fracced vs. the aquifers and the number of layers of cap rock between the fracced reservoirs and the aquifers leads me to the hypothesis that it's not the fracced reservoir itself that's leaking; it's the recovery wells. This could be some combination of poor cementing, poor steel casing/attachments, better gas permeability in the conditions present than anticipated, gas developing its own channel to the surface just outside the well through the weak points in the strata created by the well, etc. Thoughts?
This hypothesis could be tested. In some wells you could inject a tracer gas into the reservoir after fraccing but before production begins, while in others you could inject it into the recovery wells just below the point of the aquifer. You could then draw the following conclusions:
Reservoir: Yes, Well: Yes: Either there are multiple paths for the gas to reach the surface, or more likely, the gas is leaking up through or around the casing of the non-producing well.
Reservoir: No, Well: Yes: Gas is leaking out from the production well, but no significant amount is able to move up through/around the casing from the reservoir.
Reservoir: Yes, Well: No: No: Gas is leaking up directly from the fracced reservoir, independent of the well.
Reservoir: No, Well: No: This would throw this study into doubt.
Re:but but (Score:4, Insightful)
If there's enough methane in the air to asphyxiate you, it must mean that you're in a facility with Ex-proof equipment and are taking proper precautions. If it's a regular household, it will blow up way before it gets to a concentration where you get any respiratory symptoms. Unless you're Amish and also happen not to have any flames around, and the humidity is like in your subterranean cold room. IOW: get a sense of scale...