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Oil-and-gas wells produce radioactive waste

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Re: Oil-and-gas wells produce radioactive waste

#101

Post by paulie_a »

waffle_ss wrote: post #99
paulie_a wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is the myth of the small time farmer and hero status given to them. Outside of destroying the environment over the last 100 years. The local farm hardly exists anymore. I still do not understand why politics are so heavily placating this age of Billy, overweight in his coveralls chewing on a a bit of grain.

Farms are "placated" by politics because people don't like starving to death. Which is what happens if you let your food supply be freely buffeted by the boom and bust cycle of the market. That will remain true even after urbanites get their wish to live in pods and drink soy-roach slurry - somebody will still have to grow the soy and roach food. Farming - growing crops and animal husbandry - are what kickstarted hum…

The small time farmer is a myth in this era. It's industrial farms. There is no need for politicians to deep throat the .05 percent of the economy that is made up of small farmers

Re: Oil-and-gas wells produce radioactive waste

#102

Post by TheCoelacanth »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #10

Technically speaking they released concentrated naturally-occurring radioactive materials (NORMs). I only emphasize this because most people don't know how much radioactive stuff is natural. Doesn't mean it's not a hazard in concentration, of course.

In the same way that oil wells don't produce oil.

The headline is fine. Many definitions of "produce" fit what they are doing[1]. For example, "to compose, create, or bring out by intellectual or physical effort" or "to cause to accrue".

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/produce

Re: Oil-and-gas wells produce radioactive waste

#103

Post by jiofih »

carapace wrote: post #82
jiofih wrote: post #42

> There are over 1 million active oil-and-gas wells across 33 states This is insane. One well per 300 inhabitants of the USA. How is that even economically viable?

> How is that even economically viable? Are you kidding? It's like drilling up geysers of money. The ten most profitable companies in the world are nine oil companies and Apple. Count the cars and trucks and planes and generators and leaf-blowers and chainsaws and every piece of plastic ever and thousands of chemical byproducts... oil is everywhere .

I was thinking of the overhead of equipment, personnel and so on. Saudi Arabia produces as much oil with 100x less wells. All I can imagine is that US oil is massively subsidized, to the point of market forces or efficiency not mattering at all.

Re: Oil-and-gas wells produce radioactive waste

#104

Post by cptskippy »

rayiner wrote: post #98
cptskippy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually up to the Army Core of Engineers to determine if a wetland is under the CWA. They aren't blanket included or excluded.

The Army Corps of Engineers makes decisions on individual wetlands, but they have to follow the statutory definition in the Clean Water Act. (And the Clean Water Act can only be interpreted in a way consistent with the Constitutional limits on Congress’s power to regulate intra-state activity.)

So what exactly are you arguing? The CWA stipulates what is covered and the Army Core of Engineers is responsible for interpretation.

My point was that the rules rollback wasn't about farmers wanting to pollute or regulation of water ways, but rather about eliminating restrictions and regulations that inhibit land development on wetlands.

Nothing you have said challenges that assertion, you just seem to be hung up on whether or not the Fed has the right to regulate something.

Re: Oil-and-gas wells produce radioactive waste

#105

Post by Turing_Machine »

makomk wrote: post #72
capableweb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you're trying to correct something that is already correct in the article, as soon as in paragraph 4. > The Earth’s crust is in fact peppered with radioactive elements that concentrate deep underground in oil-and-gas-bearing layers. This radioactivity is often pulled to the surface when oil and gas is extracted — carried largely in the brine.

No, the article is misleading. Those radioactive elements aren't just deep underground - they're literally everywhere. The soil is naturally full of them. They've got this damning-sounding quote from an internal report that “almost all materials of interest and use to the petroleum industry contain measurable quantities of radionuclides”, but again, that's true of ordinary soil and all kinds of things. What the oil i…

> that's true of ordinary soil and all kinds of things.

Sure. If I remember right, someone who lives in Denver gets about double the average radiation dose because a) there are a lot of radionuclides in the Rocky Mountains (relative to other places) and b) Denver's altitude means that more cosmic rays reach ground level because there's less atmosphere to form a shield.

If you told most people that (insert some activity) was going to double their radiation dose, they would freak, yet no one panics over the idea of living in Denver.

Re: Oil-and-gas wells produce radioactive waste

#106

Post by willj »

I'm glad they wrote about this, but it's certainly not breaking news or anything. Back in 2016, EPA released a report [1] that was years in the making, which covered the history, science, and effects of hydraulic fracturing in the U.S. The executive summary [2] says that produced water can contain "naturally-occurring organic compounds, including benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylenes (BTEX); and oil and grease; radioactive materials, including radium; and hydraulic fracturing chemicals and their chemical transformation products." It also discusses spills from evaporation ponds (e.g., a 2.9 million gallon spill in North Dakota in 2015 that flowed into Blacktail Creek), as well as exacerbation of local droughts due to groundwater withdrawal for fracking.

Unfortunately, as happens these days, when the draft report was released in 2015, conservative news outlets [3][4][5][6][7] grabbed hold of a single statement in the executive summary reflecting the usual statements of uncertainty in any scientific report, and they used that to imply there was no evidence of any consequences of hydrofracking on the environment or human health. The draft report's statement that they took hold of was: "We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States". However, the very next paragraph explains "This finding could reflect a rarity of effects on drinking water resources, but may also be due to other limiting factors. These factors include: insufficient pre- and post-fracturing data on the quality of drinking water resources; the paucity of long-term systematic studies; the presence of other sources of contamination precluding a definitive link between hydraulic fracturing activities and an impact; and the inaccessibility of some information on hydraulic fracturing activities and potential impacts."

Even in 2016, when the final report was released, a WSJ article [8] insisted EPA had "political scientists" who rewrote the report to cast doubt on the safety of hydraulic fracturing. (The rewritten statement was: "However, significant data gaps and uncertainties in the available data prevented us from calculating or estimating the national frequency of impacts on drinking water resources from activities in the hydraulic fracturing water cycle. The data gaps and uncertainties described in this report also precluded a full characterization of the severity of impacts.").

[1] https://cfpub.epa.gov/ncea/hfstudy/recordisplay.cfm?deid=332...

[2] http://ofmpub.epa.gov/eims/eimscomm.getfile?p_download_id=53...

[3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/fracking-has-had-no-widespread-...

[4] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/report-epa-finds-...

[5] https://www.txoga.org/eid-long-awaited-epa-study-finds-frack...

[6] https://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/washingtonbureau/201...

[7] https://www.texastribune.org/2015/06/04/epa-fracking-no-wide...

[8] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-epas-science-deniers-148209...

Re: Oil-and-gas wells produce radioactive waste

#107

Post by carapace »

jiofih wrote: post #103
carapace wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is that even economically viable? Are you kidding? It's like drilling up geysers of money. The ten most profitable companies in the world are nine oil companies and Apple. Count the cars and trucks and planes and generators and leaf-blowers and chainsaws and every piece of plastic ever and thousands of chemical byproducts... oil is everywhere .

I was thinking of the overhead of equipment, personnel and so on. Saudi Arabia produces as much oil with 100x less wells. All I can imagine is that US oil is massively subsidized, to the point of market forces or efficiency not mattering at all.

Ah, yeah, I don't know, I'm not that knowledgeable about it. Maybe Texas is less efficient than the Saudis, maybe the tech is older or something, but they're not losing money on those fields.

Oil is black gold.

FWIW, oil is massively subsidized: war isn't cheap, eh?

Re: Oil-and-gas wells produce radioactive waste

#109

Post by alach11 »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #97
alach11 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of wells are old vertical wells, not shale wells. For example, in the Permian basin there are around 18,000 horizontal shale wells but over 300,000 vertical conventional wells.

Does that hold for the Bakken in ND also? See [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/01/16/169511949/a...

Great question. For the Williston Basin, the numbers are 31,905 horizontals vs. 28,330 verticals. It definitely speaks to the difference in when these basins were developed.
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