High-Tech Gas Drilling Is Fouling Drinking Water

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:How much are they getting paid though?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Anecdotally, the first person in a given area is paid relatively well. Their neighbors are then politely reminded, off the record, that they can either accept the er, generous, offer being made, or they can end up with poisoned groundwater anyway, and the drillers will just have to wait a bit longer for the gas under their property to diffuse through the porous substrata toward the wells next door...

If pollutants respected property lines, this would be much less of a problem...

Fracking exempted from Clean Water Act

[wombatmobile]

As Kevin Grandia wrote [huffingtonpost.com] last year:

In 2005, at the urging of Vice President Cheney, fracking fluids were exempted from the Clean Water Act after the companies that own the patents on the process raised concerns about disclosing proprietary formulas - if they had to meet the Act's standards they would have to reveal the chemical composition which competitors could then steal. Fair enough, but this also exempts these companies from having to meet the strict regulations that protect the nation's freshwater supply.

Laws are good, regulations are bad

[mangu]

Imagine if your neighbor's toilet clogged and, instead of calling a plumber, he started taking a dump over the fence on your garden.

What would you do?

A) call the police

or

B) complain about lack of a regulation on taking a dump over the fence?

There are already laws in effect stating that no one is allowed to poison their neighbor's water. However, since natural gas extraction *is* regulated, and the regulations do not prohibit fracking, then an exception is created allowing the corporations to poison the water in this manner.

The problem with regulations is that when you create them, instead of using the existing laws, something that would not normally be permitted could be allowed by the regulations by default.

Re:Fracking exempted from Clean Water Act

[rabun_bike]

Yes. And those formulas contain a special combination of some of nasty chemicals such as benzine, toluene and naphthalene. The chemicals are needed to dissolve the shale rock and release the trapped gas. But even more alarming is the millions of gallons of water (a finite resource) intentionally polluted in the process. This polluted water has to be deposed of and currently some gas companies are injected the polluted water into deep wells in Arkansas. Even Fox News is reporting that the drilling and injecting of this polluted water in Arkansas might be causing thousands of earthquakes. There really is nothing "green" about the whole fracking process except in some ways the actual methane that is extracted when you compare to taking off the tops of the mountain in West Virginia and Kentucky.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/03/01/fracking-earthquakes-arkansas-man-experts-warn/

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:but but

[ukemike]

It's easy enough to blame fracturing, but the process of fracturing itself is occurring deep within some producing formation.

It's also easy enough to blame the massive increase of CO2 in our atmosphere on the nearly perfectly correlated massive increase of human industry pumping CO2 into the atmosphere but that would be inconvenient for my energy stock prices so I choose not to believe it.

Did even you RTFA? (In this case I mean did you read the fracking Abstract of the scientific paper in question? ;-) That's a huge degree of correlation, and the chemistry of the hydrocarbons in the water match the chemistry of the gas in the nearby wells.

Yeah sure the fracturing does take place much deeper than the water table, they have to pump the fracturing fluids down to the shale which involves pumping them THROUGH the water table. Yes I know that the procedure involves sealing the well hole before pumping the nasty stuff down there, but when they drill hundreds of wells in a region only a few have to leak to ruin the local water table. Of course the oil/gas extraction business has such a great safety record and they have never made a mess of things before, so why should we believe science when we can believe BP? I think you should consider not drinking the water from your local well, obviously the fracking fluids are messing with your thinking process.

Oh and by the way, those fracturing fluids, as revealed in the very interesting movie Gasland, are comprised of over 500 chemicals including several known human carcinogens and many suspected human carcinogens. So it is not like this is some academic question. Water tables all over the nation are turning foul with this stuff.
BR Here is another thing to ponder. Until very recently this technique for extracting gas was very rare. Towards the end of the Bush administration, this particular industry was exempted from compliance withe clean water act. Right after that fracking becomes the most important new development in energy extraction. Correlation or causation? It seems pretty clear to me that someone was afraid that they would be unable to comply with clean water regulations so they didn't bother until they made sure that their ass was covered.

Re:How much are they getting paid though?

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

Anecdotally = Pulled it out of your ass.

Well, he *is* talking about methane...

I live an an area where drillers have recently bought (and continue to buy) drilling leases. The parent is right! That is EXACTLY what happens.

All of the drilling in my area is of the horizontal variety. The gas company buys a drilling lease on one small plot of land (a couple acres). They drill straight down for a little then they turn their drill so that it runs horizontally. They then drill horizontally for UP TO SIX MILES so it doesn't really matter who leases the land they park their drilling rig on. All it takes is one greedy asshole every few miles and your community is fucked. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_drilling [wikipedia.org]

The nature of the gas deposits in the Marcellus Shale Formation requires that every well has a massive horizontal component and that is fracked to hell and back. It's completely uneconomical to drill regular vertical unfracked wells in Marcellus shale. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcellus_Formation#Fossil_fuel [wikipedia.org]

Re:but but

[avgjoe62]

Ah, yes, it's not like people have been living in the area and using well water for a couple hundred years. Yet now, they can light their tap water on fire [youtube.com] and somehow this study does not count because no one tested the water beforehand.

Would there have been a reason to test the water BEFORE you could light it on fire? And what might be the cause now [huffingtonpost.com], after a hundred years of prior use, that the water is flammable?

This is not something confined to the PA-NY border; [discovermagazine.com] it happens wherever fracking goes on, yet we are supposed to believe that this particular case is confined to one bad operator? The gas industry needs to seriously review the precautions they are supposed to be taking and see if they are truly being responsible corporate citizens.