You know what will end the fracking boom? It won't be politicians. The only things that will end it are 1) running out of gas/oil 2) the method becomes too costly to be profitable 3) a much much more profitable way to extract the resources is discovered.
Groundwater Contamination May End the Gas-Fracking Boom
31–40 of 110 posts
Re: Groundwater Contamination May End the Gas-Fracking Boom
#32Nothing will stop the fraking. It's simply too profitable for Congress to do something about it (one of the few bright areas in a dismal economy), and the courts have gutted the environmental laws too much for the courts to do anything about it. It's an intrinsically attractive business: the product is something (energy) that's extremely valuable and has exploding demand, and many of the inherent costs of creating th…
> It's simply too profitable...
For something so profitable there's a lot of people losing a lot of money.
eg. http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2013/08/21/analysis-how-fracking...
Re: Groundwater Contamination May End the Gas-Fracking Boom
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would not. If you're going to watch Gasland, then you also need to read the opposing side. There are some parts of it that are incredibly misleading, such as the tap water on fire. http://energyindepth.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Debunkin... http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2011/08/01/gasla... Edit: Admittedly, these sources suck. Here's a NYTimes article that should hopefully be more palatable: http:…
When the "opposing side" (the heartland institute) also deny the existence of global warming and second-hand smoke, I think your choice of references does more to harm that viewpoint than support it.
It was a news article. I just grabbed the first relevant link pertaining to "gasland tap water fire". Because I apparently was using the wrong keywords: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasland#Negative
> In an article for Forbes magazine, Dr. Michael Economides, a professor of engineering at the University of Houston, commented on the Gasland scene of "a man lighting his faucet water on fire and making the ridiculous claim that natural gas drilling is responsible for the incident. The clip, though attention-getting, is wildly inaccurate and irresponsible. To begin with, the vertical depth separation between drinking water aquifers and reservoir targets for gas production is several thousand feet of impermeable rock. Any interchange between the two, if it were possible, would have happened already in geologic time, measured in tens of millions of years, not in recent history."
Re: Groundwater Contamination May End the Gas-Fracking Boom
#34Aside from money (which is pretty motivating), I don't understand why the gas companies simply continue to deny that there is contamination and that there are negative outcomes to the environment for doing this (let's put it this way, its almost certainly not a positive impact. Its unlikely to be a neutral impact.) Its like what cigarette companies used to do- just constantly deny what's completely obvious.
Because it will take decades for any lawsuits to make it through the courts. If they were to lose such lawsuits, by that time they'll have already pulled out enough money to cover the cost of the lawsuits with the rest just being gravy.
They will move as fast as they can to make as much money as they can. By the time something could stop it they will be so deep in the pockets of our representatives that it will be hard to make it happen.
Re: Groundwater Contamination May End the Gas-Fracking Boom
#35Nothing will stop the fraking. It's simply too profitable for Congress to do something about it (one of the few bright areas in a dismal economy), and the courts have gutted the environmental laws too much for the courts to do anything about it. It's an intrinsically attractive business: the product is something (energy) that's extremely valuable and has exploding demand, and many of the inherent costs of creating th…
This is basically what happened in the rust belt with steel. Now another "boom" is happening with fracking. The people still haven't learned. You wouldn't believe how many gas workers are driving new trucks, buying toys, etc. I bet very few are putting any of this money in savings. When the fracking leaves we'll be in the same place we were when the steel mills shut down. Just waiting for the next economic boom to co…
Prophetically, and maybe ironically, fracking service infrastructure in my hometown, Youngstown, Ohio, is being built on the same land that the steel mills sat abandoned for decades.
Re: Groundwater Contamination May End the Gas-Fracking Boom
#36There's a ton of context that's not included here. For starters: 1) How common was this in PA before fracking started? 2) Are these wells unusable? 3) Is the situation getting better or worse? 4) Is the gas linked to the fracking (the only interesting question that was mentioned in the article, and the answer is "we don't know") 5) What about other places fracking is occurring? It's not like we're going to stop frack…
9. Is there something about the geology of spots where companies like to drill that causes higher methane levels?
10. Were the wells sampled chosen for proximity to drill sites? Did the sampling methodology allow for the possibility that methane levels can spike without a nearby well?
11. Was there any relationship between levels and the length of time the well has been operating? Depth of well?
I'd add that the SA headline isn't exactly a dispassionate summary of the article.
Re: Groundwater Contamination May End the Gas-Fracking Boom
#37The OP is a kind of shallow summation of the details here...first of all, the study was published in June. Second, it's not the "first step" in determining the link between fracking in the Marcellus Shale and water contamination...a previous study by Duke, which the OP references later, documented "systematic evidence" of such a link. 2013: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/06/19/1221635110.full... 2011: http://…
Yeah this is the worst kind of nerd bait. "You guys already know that the oil companies are evil and will poison people given the chance. Here's a tiny piece of evidence that you could misinterpret in multiple ways" To the author's credit, at least he pulled back and didn't do the entire ranting, hand-waving ritual. I believe that job is being left for online commenters to complete :) The funny thing is, without the…
>Medical research, for instance, is full of correlative research that never amounted to a hill of beans.
Yes like smoking being linked with cancer. I'm glad we listened to the corporate funded libertarians on that one and didn't fall prey to the wishy washy lefty propaganda and emotive narratives about evil tobacco companies wanting to make money from killing people. What a ridiculous, politically motivated caricature that was.
I'd like to point out that the Heartland Institute and Cato still deny the link between passive smoking and cancer, so it's not like that kind of lobbying is all in the distant dark past. The very same people writing lies about tobacco are writing propaganda about fracking. They also think climate change is a giant marxist conspiracy.
Re: Groundwater Contamination May End the Gas-Fracking Boom
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would not. If you're going to watch Gasland, then you also need to read the opposing side. There are some parts of it that are incredibly misleading, such as the tap water on fire. http://energyindepth.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Debunkin... http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2011/08/01/gasla... Edit: Admittedly, these sources suck. Here's a NYTimes article that should hopefully be more palatable: http:…
The 'opposing side' is the PR shills hired by the gas industry ( http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alyssa-carducci/2a/148/889 ) ( http://heartland.org/alyssa-carducci ) ( http://energyindepth.org/about/ ). "Government Relations" is a nice euphemism for propagandist. In 50 years when the Midwest is a toxic wasteland, many of those responsible might be able to move to Dubai, but our children and grandchildren are going to ha…
There's also a rebuttal to the debunking pdf:
https://1trickpony.cachefly.net/gas/pdf/Affirming_Gasland_Se...
Re: Groundwater Contamination May End the Gas-Fracking Boom
#39Samples were collected upstream of any treatment
systems and as close to the water well as possible
I guess my question would be: does it matter? If you read the article you'll see that out of the 118 homes that tested positive for methane, only 12 were above the threshold for immediate remediation.
However, if they sampled the water before it was treated, it doesn't tell you what the level of the treated water is. Even if the water is simply pumped into a holding reservoir, that can cause a lot of the methane to outgas from the water.
Re: Groundwater Contamination May End the Gas-Fracking Boom
#40There's a ton of context that's not included here. For starters: 1) How common was this in PA before fracking started? 2) Are these wells unusable? 3) Is the situation getting better or worse? 4) Is the gas linked to the fracking (the only interesting question that was mentioned in the article, and the answer is "we don't know") 5) What about other places fracking is occurring? It's not like we're going to stop frack…
1) How common was this in PA before fracking started?
The gas company's have this data. Before any activity in my area (near the PA border in Ohio) someone came and tested my well water for contaminates. I have the report somewhere but it was basically just mineral etc. Drilling hasn't really picked up yet but I will find out if it changes or not. Then again who knows if you can trust the reports when the gas companies are funding them.