Hydrofracking for natural gas in Catskills

[Raven]

I saw This Report today and wanted to add it to this thread. It would seem that fracking wastewater may be contaminated with radium. I was also disturbed by this statement:

Levels of salinity in the plant's discharge were up to 200 times higher than what is allowed under the Clean Water Act — and 10 times saltier than ocean water, Vengosh said. But fracking wastewater is exempt from that law, Vengosh said.

Why is fracking wastewater exempt? Granted, this report is about a single treatment plant, but it is concerning.

Thanks for posting. This is interesting from a water chemistry perspective. Another negative effect of fracking.

As for the SAfe Drinking Water Act, it would appear big energy is often exempted from this act which makes little sense as they can be the largest polluters of ground water. It's called the Haliburton Loophole.

http://www.edcnet.org/learn/current_cases/fracking/federal_law_loopholes.html

From the sited page: "Under this exemption, oil and gas companies can now inject anything other than diesel in association with fracking operations without having to comply with SDWA provisions intended to protect our nation’s water supplies." They inject diesel anyway.

Hexane, a known carcinogen, is one of the chemical fracking agents; it's a benzene derivative and one of the chemicals which energy companies actually will admit to using (they refuse to tell many others they are using and hide behind patents/proprietary info).

But to be clear on the law, if I (an ordinary citizen) were to dump a water bottle full of that same hexane into the local reservoir, I would likely be brought up on terrorism charges. It would be very serious and very dangerous.

My non-political opinion is that our clean water needs outweigh our energy needs in any situation and that risking our ground water is ill-advised, dangerous, and short-sighted at best. I fear we will seriously regret allowing fracking to get this far.

Thank you for posting the article.

 

[Neil]

Looks like we are so totally committed to the fossil fuel paradigm that we are ready to do no matter what including doing any kind of violence to the ecosystems upon which we depend in order to get as much of it as possible, right now, and as cheap as possible. I say we because we're all consumers.

Try and imagine if from today on you could not get in your car and drive it anymore, anywhere and that fields had to be tilled by hand with no fertilizers or pesticides, or if there was hardly any power to run our homes and businesses. Or if container shipping, trucking and rail transport stopped. The fossil fuel paradigm and way of life seems to be an unstoppable juggernaut. Unstoppable as long as supplies last that is.

If supplies did run out I would imagine that alternate energy sources would be developed and brought online a little more quickly than what we're seeing right now.

 

[RoySwkr]

Last month I spent 3 days hunting old fire tower sites in North Central PA, where there has been a robust energy boom with a 3-week course for drilling workers at the local tech college. Hikers who like things all natural had best avoid this area.

The state forest has some wide cleared swaths for dual pipelines (water in, gas out) and drill pads, and there are guard shacks at intersections on the narrow forest roads to regulate truck traffic.

Anadarko is trying to generate good PR locally by charitable work and teaching kids to make birdhouses, although the National Audubon Society is not among their admirers. Companywide, the Marcellus shale is such a minor operation that their annual report barely mentions it.

To get an idea of the money involved, a local fish and game club was given $900,000 for an option to drill on the ramshackle farm they bought for a shooting range for a fraction of that sum. They will get more money if the well is actually drilled, and a royalty on any gas produced. That will buy them plenty of bottled water.

And once you have the natural guess, who buys it?

Many heavy energy users in NH such as DHMC are switching to compressed natural gas and using trucks to haul it from the nearest pipeline, calling them "Virtual Pipelines"TM

Apparently many of the trucks look like regular semis although they have pressure vessels inside, and some of the vessels require a minimum pressure such as 100 psi to hold their shape hence contain gas even when "empty"

The Lebanon NH fire chief gave an interesting presentation on the hazards of both trucking and decompressing it
http://www.iafc.org/files/3Haz2014/hazmat14_407_VirtualPipelinesforFirstRespondersslides.pdf

 

[Tom Rankin]

The last time I spoke to Neil Woodworth (executive director of the ADK, and staunch supporter of the Catskill preserve), he indicated that fracking in the Catskills is increasingly unlikely to happen.