Caught up in fracking-phobia, environmentalists miss air pollution of oil boom

Speaking of fracking, what's with all the earthquakes?

http://www.thenation.com/blog/178449/whats-causing-huge-spike-earthquakes-oklahoma#

 

Your entire post reads like a USA Today article. What are you trying to say?

 

I think he's trying to say just because he found a Bloomberg article that was largely spearheaded by an environmentalist climate site, that he's smrter and more alert than the environmentalists whom he thinks are clueless and off target.

He's too cool to be lumped in with the tree huggers, bruhh.

 

omg...you think aquifers are not affected because the target oil is below them?

r e a l l y

Dude hydraulic fracking is WATER, used to extract oil. Fracking uses an enormous amount of water, moreso than Paper Mills ever did. The spent water has to go somewhere, just like Paper Mill water has to return someone. Guess where? The freaking, fracked aquifers. Do you think that's clean effluent water that returns back to the eco system.

You know who pollutes water the worst, now that Paper Mills have cleaned up their act...Mining Companies. Because their mining equipment operates with water.

In the business, we call that Effluent Water. Paper Mills have Treatment Plants now on site to clean their effluent water before returning back to us. Fracking companies don't.

I hope you learned a lesson in fracking today. I sure didn't.

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Since the reservoirs of interest are much deeper than aquifers, the fracture height is much smaller than the distance to the closest aquifer. The water that is pumped in to fracture stays in the fracture vicinity, it doesn't find a way up. There's no new path for it to find its way up. Now if you want to talk about the way the used water that is retrieved at the surface is then treated and discarded, that's a valid concern. Operators may find shortcuts to cleaning that water. But the fracturing water/polymer/proppants remaining in the reservoir don't disperse that much, certainly not enough to reach aquifers. The fluid pressure gradients act in the opposite direction for the water to be able to spread.

 

I am confused by your thread title as you are furthering the case for fracking phobia. Unless Invisible Fan is right and you just want to distance yourself from others who are concerned about fracking for other reasons.

 

Which is sad because a simple search would find all sorts of this information.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Fracking_studies
http://www.environmentamerica.org/reports/ame/fracking-numbers

It's fair to assume the noise is what people really stand for if one takes the time to back up and verify that assumption.

[rquoter]
Over the past decade, the oil and gas industry has fused two technologies—hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling—in a highly polluting effort to unlock oil and gas in underground rock formations across the United States.

As fracking expands rapidly across the country, there are a growing number of documented cases of drinking water contamination and illness among nearby residents. Yet it has often been difficult for the public to grasp the scale and scope of these and other fracking threats. Fracking is already underway in 17 states, with more than 80,000 wells drilled or permitted since 2005. Moreover, the oil and gas industry is aggressively seeking to expand fracking to new states—from New York to California to North Carolina—and to areas that provide drinking water to millions of Americans.

This report seeks to quantify some of the key impacts of fracking to date—including the production of toxic wastewater, water use, chemicals use, air pollution, land damage and global warming emissions.

National Environmental and Public Health Impacts of Fracking

Fracking Wells since 2005 82,000

Toxic Wastewater Produced in 2012 (billion gallons) 280
Water Used since 2005 (billion gallons) 250
Chemicals Used since 2005 (billion gallons) 2
Air Pollution in One Year (tons) 450,000
Global Warming Pollution since 2005 (million metric tons CO2-equivalent) 100
Land Directly Damaged since 2005 (acres) 360,000

Toxic wastewater: Fracking produces enormous volumes of toxic wastewater—often containing cancer-causing and even radioactive material. Once brought to the surface, this toxic waste poses hazards for drinking water, air quality and public safety:

• Fracking wells nationwide produced an estimated 280 billion gallons of wastewater in 2012.

• This toxic wastewater often contains cancer-causing and even radioactive materials, and has contaminated drinking water sources from Pennsylvania to New Mexico.
• Scientists have linked underground injection of wastewater to earthquakes.
• In New Mexico alone, waste pits from all oil and gas drilling have contaminated groundwater on more than 400 occasions.

Water use: Fracking requires huge volumes of water for each well.

• Fracking operations have used at least 250 billion gallons of water since 2005. (See Table ES-2.)
• While most industrial uses of water return it to the water cycle for further use, fracking converts clean water into toxic wastewater, much of which must then be permanently disposed of, taking billions of gallons out of the water supply annually.
• Farmers are particularly impacted by fracking water use as they compete with the deep-pocketed oil and gas industry for water, especially in drought-stricken regions of the country.

Water Used for Fracking, Selected States
State Total Water Used since 2005 (billion gallons)
Arkansas 26
Colorado 26
New Mexico 1.3
North Dakota 12
Ohio 1.4
Pennsylvania 30
Texas 110
West Virginia 17

Chemical use: Fracking uses a wide range of chemicals, many of them toxic.

• Operators have hauled more than 2 billion gallons of chemicals to thousands of fracking sites around the country.
• In addition to other health threats, many of these chemicals have the potential to cause cancer.
• These toxics can enter drinking water supplies from leaks and spills, through well blowouts, and through the failure of disposal wells receiving fracking wastewater.

Air pollution: Fracking-related activities release thousands of tons of health-threatening air pollution.

• Nationally, fracking released 450,000 tons of pollutants into the air that can have immediate health impacts.
• Air pollution from fracking contributes to the formation of ozone “smog,” which reduces lung function among healthy people, triggers asthma attacks, and has been linked to increases in school absences, hospital visits and premature death. Other air pollutants from fracking and the fossil-fuel-fired machinery used in fracking have been linked to cancer and other serious health effects.

Global warming pollution: Fracking produces significant volumes of global warming pollution.

• Methane, which is a global warming pollutant 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, is released at multiple steps during fracking, including during hydraulic fracturing and well completion, and in the processing and transport of gas to end users.
• Global warming emissions from completion of fracking wells since 2005 total an estimated 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Damage to our natural heritage: Well pads, new access roads, pipelines and other infrastructure turn forests and rural landscapes into industrial zones.

• Infrastructure to support fracking has damaged 360,000 acres of land for drilling sites, roads and pipelines since 2005.
• Forests and farmland have been replaced by well pads, roads, pipelines and other gas infrastructure, resulting in the loss of wildlife habitat and fragmentation of remaining wild areas.
• In Colorado, fracking has already damaged 57,000 acres of land, equal to one-third of the acreage in the state’s park system.
• The oil and gas industry is seeking to bring fracking into our national forests, around several of our national parks, and in watersheds that supply drinking water to millions of Americans.

Fracking has additional impacts not quantified here—including contamination of residential water wells by fracking fluids and methane leaks; vehicle and workplace accidents, earthquakes and other public safety risks; and economic and social damage including ruined roads and damage to nearby farms.

To address the environmental and public health threats from fracking across the nation:

• States should prohibit fracking. Given the scale and severity of fracking’s myriad impacts, constructing a regulatory regime sufficient to protect the environment and public health from dirty drilling—much less enforcing such safeguards at more than 80,000 wells, plus processing and waste disposal sites across the country—seems implausible. In states where fracking is already underway, an immediate moratorium is in order. In all other states, banning fracking is the prudent and necessary course to protect the environment and public health.

• Given the drilling damage that state officials have allowed fracking to incur thus far, at a minimum, federal policymakers must step in and close the loopholes exempting fracking from key provisions of our nation’s environmental laws.

• Federal officials should also protect America’s natural heritage by keeping fracking away from our national parks, national forests, and sources of drinking water for millions of Americans.

• To ensure that the oil and gas industry—rather than taxpayers, communities or families—pays the costs of fracking damage, policymakers should require robust financial assurance from fracking operators at every well site.

• More complete data on fracking should be collected and made available to the public, enabling us to understand the full extent of the harm that fracking causes to our environment and health.

Defining “Fracking”
In this report, when we refer to the impacts of “fracking,” we include impacts resulting from all of the activities needed to bring a shale gas or oil well into production using high-volume hydraulic fracturing (fracturing operations that use at least 100,000 gallons of water), to operate that well, and to deliver the gas or oil produced from that well to market. The oil and gas industry often uses a more restrictive definition of “fracking” that includes only the actual moment in the extraction process when rock is fractured—a definition that obscures the broad changes to environmental, health and community conditions that result from the use of fracking in oil and gas extraction.[/rquoter]

 

Did I mention that the trapped water is no longer useable. You're right. We are burying water that was naturally used to replenish the aquifers.

And as you said, there is water that comes back up with the oil. These are not pools of oil where water can separate so you can strategically suck only the oil layer up. These are tight shale layers where water won't separate from the oil that much

We both lose water and extract dirty water

 

left is trying to do to fracking what they did to nuclear power, scare the crap out of everyone

 

Meanwhile...

Worst Spill in 6 Months Is Reported at Fukushima
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/world/asia/worst-spill-in-6-months-at-fukushima.html?_r=0

TOKYO — About 100 tons of highly radioactive water leaked from one of the hundreds of storage tanks at the devastated Fukushima nuclear plant, its operator said Thursday, calling the leak the worst spill at the plant in six months.

The operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, said the leak, discovered on Wednesday and stopped on Thursday, happened far enough from the plant’s waterfront that none of the radioactive water was likely to reach the Pacific Ocean, as has happened during some previous spills. Still, the leak was an uncomfortable reminder of the many mishaps that have plagued the containment and cleanup efforts at the plant, as well as the hundreds of tons of contaminated groundwater that still flow unchecked into the Pacific every day.

The company, known as Tepco, said it had traced the latest leak to a pair of valves that were left open by mistake.

The leaked water was among the most severely contaminated that Tepco has reported in the aftermath of the March 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, when damage caused by an earthquake and a tsunami led to meltdowns in three of the plant’s reactors. Each liter of the water contained, on average, 230 million becquerels of particles giving off beta radiation, the company said. About half of the particles were likely to be strontium 90, which is readily taken up by the human body in the same way that calcium is, and can cause bone cancer and leukemia.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company said it had traced the latest leak to a pair of valves that were left open by mistake. Tokyo Electric Power Co., via Associated Press

That means the water was about 3.8 million times as contaminated with strontium 90 as the maximum allowed under Japan’s safety standards for drinking water. It also showed levels much more radioactive than a worrisome groundwater reading that Tepco announced earlier this month. That reading — five million becquerels of strontium 90 per liter — which was detected at a location closer to the ocean than the latest spill, prompted criticism of Tepco because the company waited five months to report it publicly.

Critics have assailed the company since the accident, saying that it has been slow to acknowledge problems at the stricken plant and that it has disclosed too little information about the conditions inside. Even so, the government has left the company largely in charge of the cleanup work there.

Tepco has struggled to deal with the hundreds of tons of groundwater seeping each day into the plant’s damaged reactor buildings, where it is contaminated by the melted nuclear reactor cores. To keep the radioactive water from running into the Pacific, the company must pump it out of the reactor buildings and store it in rows of huge tanks it has erected on the plant’s grounds.

So far, Tepco said, about 340,000 tons of water have accumulated in the tanks, enough to fill more than 135 Olympic-size swimming pools. A ton of water is equivalent to about 240 gallons.

 

weird corollary.

Comparing nuclear power to the oil industry is pretty much contradictory.

Did you really think up that comment, or did someone supply that for you.

The left did not attacd nuclear power. The oil industry did.

next

 

How is it fear mongering when there are billions of gallons of industrial waste that needs to be cleaned up?

Your charge would be stronger if fracking companies ponied up adequate funding for cleanup costs rather than targeting broke and needy states that'll bend over with the regulations and lube up with whatever oil that pours out.

 

Except when you consider that every experienced field tech or flow controller has pictures and a good story, because every processing plant and pipeline in this country has bottle-necked, ruptured or exploded at one time or another.

 

and yet we're still here

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What you're saying is true (with a little exaggeration) and one of the only informed arguments in this thread.

But, do you realize it has absolutely nothing to do with hydraulic fracturing?

That, and most of the discussions around frac'ing come from issues that can occur because of poor drilling practices with or without a frac job.

 

You guys may want to compare the oil and gas exploration and production pollution to other industries before just throwing numbers out there without any perspective. With regards to fracking, it is new and there is very little evidence to really convincingly make one argument or another.

Off topic a little but its funny how environmentalists are all crazy about the XL pipeline when rail is more risky, they don't say crap about that. Oh no a pipeline that will help further produce heavy oil. It's going to be sold no matter what, this planet does not have any more new reserves for cheap oil.

 

fracking is not new

 

I don't understand comments like yours. There aren't any "hippies" today to speak of. The only real hippies around now are people like me who, starting back in 1966, was an actual hippie, and probably before you were born. Just wanted to clear that up. Carry on.