Nothing 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 that product can be foisted onto people in the surrounding community that have little recourse, legal or otherwise, to do anything about it.
Fracking will end when the oil/gas is gone. In its wake it will leave behind the mess the energy and chemical industries have left all over the country: polluted, barely usable land in economically devastated regions (which is what happens after the oil is gone and the companies leave) that must be cleaned up at enormous public expense: http://www.epa.gov/superfund.[1]
Every story is some form of the same thing (plug: http://cleanupdepue.org). Company moves into little town. Residents rejoice in the new jobs. Company leaves when the land is polluted and used up. Property values plummet, and the town is left with no jobs and no ability to sell their houses and move out. The western midwest is in the first part of that story right now, hopefully they'll be smart enough and not have to see what the second part looks like 30-50 years from now.
[1] Incidentally, I think one of the great weaknesses of our country is that Congress sits in D.C., a city that is insulated from pretty much every substantial problem present in the rest of the country. In this particular context, it's a city that has never seen much industrialization and which has historically been surrounded by low-intensity agriculture in every direction (now: vast swaths of suburbia). I think we'd see a different attention to environmental issues if we relocated Congress to say the industrial New Jersey/Delaware/Pennsylvania coast...
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 come.
What are left of the mills are pretty much rusty wastelands but I don't think quite as much pollution (at least in the ground) as we will see from fracking.
It's inaccurate to group together hydraulic fracturing and traditional oil drilling in terms of environmental damage. The regulations and safety procedures for oil are leaps and bounds beyond those of hydraulic fracturing.
My girlfriend is in charge for assessing the environmental impacts of the Keystone XL pipeline, and she recently spent two weeks rerouting KXL because she and her team discovered beetles in the proposed pipeline corridor.
Here's a radical idea: in today's day and age, do we really need Congress to be in a centralized location at all?
Yes, there are practical and security obstacles to governance via permanent telepresence, but there are many upsides as well. Aside from the enourmous cost and disruption to existing practices, is there anything that makes it completely unfeasible? I imagine many representatives would much rather live in their home state than move to DC or constantly commute.
There'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 fracking everywhere: this is a maturing technology. It'll be used all over the planet. What's happening elsewhere?
6) Any other studies being done?
7) What's the measured impact on health in the area?
8) Let's not even start on corrleation and causation -- but it needs to be mentioned, and it's the reason all these other questions are germane.
I'm not trying to be an apologist. These are just sincere questions of import when reading about fracking news. They're germane to any reporting on the matter, and they weren't included. If "more details to come" means more random pieces of trivia that we are then supposed to knit up into our own version of a drama, filled in by whatever personal biases we have, then this isn't very useful from a scientific standpoint.
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.
hacker news is a community of highly technical and/or scientifically inclined people. Certainly a Scientific American article that discusses ongoing research, and is very specific in noting the preliminary nature of it, is something the community is capable of ingesting and discussing in a reasonable way. I found the article interesting because I recall just a couple of years ago, discussing the idea that fracking could ever have any relationship to the groundwater whatsoever was considered patently ridiculous and you'd get sent right off to pseudoscience reeducation camp just for suggesting it (which is really because: in the absence of reputable research having been done, all opinions were essentially political).
Now if we were talking about an article that's discussing philosophy, religion, or other subjects within the humanities, there's a much higher chance the HN community will totally misinterpret and butcher the crap out of that, sure.
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.
But methane isn't harmful. Also the article doesn't mention the quantities, but another does. [1] It seems that the most that's been found is about 70mg/L, which is not a lot.
The article does mention the levels, the highest one was 70 mg/L also.
Methane is a pretty inert molecule. It's only a hazard in really high concentrations where it acts as an asphyxiant. I don't know of any metabolic toxicity (but maybe there is).
The DOE also studied what Robert Jackson 'plans' to do. That is using injections to trace leaks. This is not proof of leaks, it is proof that houses near methane deposits have more methane in their drinking water.
http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=7243166e-0322-...
Obviously, this study needs to be repeated many more times and more regulations need to be put on fracking, but the technology is getting better already.
I would be curious about the any early studies before fracking in Penn. For a bit of history, google Thomas Payne, George Washington, and the story of their experiments in the area.
There's obviously something nefarious going on. Why else would all of these natural gas companies be paying people off and making them sign confidentially agreements?
Side-note: Before today I didn't realize how lax the laws on natural gas companies are. The New York Times has a great graphic on the subject.
"The natural gas industry has exemptions or exclusions from key parts of at least 7 of the 15 major federal environmental laws designed to protect air and water from radioactive and hazardous chemicals. Below are the seven laws listed in the order they were passed."
Methane is a natural contaminant of groundwater and is commonplace in water wells. A simple solution is to run the well water into a holding tank; the methane readily comes out of solution.
Venting methane from well water is less a problem than Joe Mulroy's farts at a beer-soused Friday night card game. Either will produce a flare if a match is put to them.
The 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.
I bring this up not to be pedantic, but to point out that the OP comes off as that this is new conclusive evidence...it is not. Opponents of fracking would argue that there are several other studies showing similar data, and they'd argue that politics/industry has shelved other planned studies. In other words, it's not just amount or existence of evidence that comes into play in this debate.
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 overriding emotional narrative many people have, if you just explained what the study says using other terms, most folks would realize how tenuous and superficial the reporting is. Correlative research is great, but geesh, it's a tiny, almost minuscule part of actually accomplishing anything. Most of the time, it's a waste of time. Medical research, for instance, is full of correlative research that never amounted to a hill of beans.
Samples 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.
I have mixed feelings about fracking. It almost certainly pollutes areas, but lots of areas in not-United States get polluted currently from the oil industry:
Aside 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.
(Hi David!) Well, yes it's money, but the complication is that fracking has that effect only in some places. The contamination is much more a function of the geology than the fracking process itself. Pennsylvania has been hit heavily with contamination. Most wells drilled are safe: http://mitei.mit.edu/publications/reports-studies/future-nat...
There is an annoying combination of legal and commercial pressures that prevent the companies from going "actually it's more dangerous than we previously said" without it seeming like "it was a lie all along this is TERRIBLE".
The crucial take-away is that there is a bunch of additional geologic due diligence that the gas companies could be doing that would actually enable them to continue fracking. But the boom is driven in part by the utter dirt cheapness of it now and they're afraid of hopping off the wave.
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.
The other thing to consider is that simply not getting natural gas at all is also a terrible idea.
A lot of the power infrastructure that handles peaks in demand (and averts rolling blackouts) uses natural gas. The question we need to be asking ourselves is which is the least bad alternative, because they're all bad.
This "new" evidence of contamination will not end it. People will be paid in quiet settlements, sell their houses at a fraction of what they paid for them, and move somewhere else. This will probably continue until the oil/bitumen/gas is gone.
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.
This was on TV one day, I had no intention of watching anything that day. 2 hours later...I'm sitting there weeping for humanity. Not literally, but I definitely recommend this movie to those interested. I can't make any recommendation to credibility, but I assure you that you won't come away with any positive outlook on fracking.
A friend lived in Italy for awhile and they had all sorts of earthquakes on non fault zones. They thought it had to do with fracking. I haven't really read up much on this....but something else worthy to consider.
What is even worse is that the extracted methane is burnt for heating houses that would need less to no heating at all with the proper thermal insulation. Insulation is passive and is put there once for all.
It will be tricky to explain to further generations that we ruined our land while extracting fossil energy to waste it right away.
Same thing applies to Fukushima.
I don't think it's cynical to suggest that groundwater contamination is a non-issue as far as the gas fracking boom is concerned. We've already seen that demonstrable contamination in the form of oil spills is legally and financially viable for energy companies, why would natural gas be any different?
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.
To clarify, the problem discussed here is methane contamination of water rather than contamination from the process itself (though that's been an issue in some places). Methane is the gas extracted. The fracturing process tends to exacerbate existing fractures in addition to the one intended allowing more of that gas to enter groundwater.
I believe they need to use a fluid that is viscous enough to stay in place after being pumped into the rock, so that the fissures do not immediately close when pressure is released.
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
Fracking will end when the oil/gas is gone. In its wake it will leave behind the mess the energy and chemical industries have left all over the country: polluted, barely usable land in economically devastated regions (which is what happens after the oil is gone and the companies leave) that must be cleaned up at enormous public expense: http://www.epa.gov/superfund.[1]
Every story is some form of the same thing (plug: http://cleanupdepue.org). Company moves into little town. Residents rejoice in the new jobs. Company leaves when the land is polluted and used up. Property values plummet, and the town is left with no jobs and no ability to sell their houses and move out. The western midwest is in the first part of that story right now, hopefully they'll be smart enough and not have to see what the second part looks like 30-50 years from now.
[1] Incidentally, I think one of the great weaknesses of our country is that Congress sits in D.C., a city that is insulated from pretty much every substantial problem present in the rest of the country. In this particular context, it's a city that has never seen much industrialization and which has historically been surrounded by low-intensity agriculture in every direction (now: vast swaths of suburbia). I think we'd see a different attention to environmental issues if we relocated Congress to say the industrial New Jersey/Delaware/Pennsylvania coast...
[+] [-] johnward|12 years ago|reply
What are left of the mills are pretty much rusty wastelands but I don't think quite as much pollution (at least in the ground) as we will see from fracking.
[+] [-] groks|12 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] hawkharris|12 years ago|reply
It's inaccurate to group together hydraulic fracturing and traditional oil drilling in terms of environmental damage. The regulations and safety procedures for oil are leaps and bounds beyond those of hydraulic fracturing.
My girlfriend is in charge for assessing the environmental impacts of the Keystone XL pipeline, and she recently spent two weeks rerouting KXL because she and her team discovered beetles in the proposed pipeline corridor.
[+] [-] lukifer|12 years ago|reply
Yes, there are practical and security obstacles to governance via permanent telepresence, but there are many upsides as well. Aside from the enourmous cost and disruption to existing practices, is there anything that makes it completely unfeasible? I imagine many representatives would much rather live in their home state than move to DC or constantly commute.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] madaxe|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makhanko|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|12 years ago|reply
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 fracking everywhere: this is a maturing technology. It'll be used all over the planet. What's happening elsewhere?
6) Any other studies being done?
7) What's the measured impact on health in the area?
8) Let's not even start on corrleation and causation -- but it needs to be mentioned, and it's the reason all these other questions are germane.
I'm not trying to be an apologist. These are just sincere questions of import when reading about fracking news. They're germane to any reporting on the matter, and they weren't included. If "more details to come" means more random pieces of trivia that we are then supposed to knit up into our own version of a drama, filled in by whatever personal biases we have, then this isn't very useful from a scientific standpoint.
[+] [-] chernevik|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zzzeek|12 years ago|reply
Now if we were talking about an article that's discussing philosophy, religion, or other subjects within the humanities, there's a much higher chance the HN community will totally misinterpret and butcher the crap out of that, sure.
[+] [-] johnward|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] patmcguire|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://realclearscience.com/blog/2013/06/theres-methane-in-y...
[+] [-] refurb|12 years ago|reply
Methane is a pretty inert molecule. It's only a hazard in really high concentrations where it acts as an asphyxiant. I don't know of any metabolic toxicity (but maybe there is).
[+] [-] kbajorin|12 years ago|reply
Obviously, this study needs to be repeated many more times and more regulations need to be put on fracking, but the technology is getting better already.
[+] [-] eclark|12 years ago|reply
http://www.businessinsider.com/there-are-many-scary-chemical...
[+] [-] dclowd9901|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fnordfnordfnord|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielharan|12 years ago|reply
They lied.
They claimed there would be no contamination to the groundwater. Now we see there is. What chemical is next? We don't know.
[+] [-] protomyth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e40|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falk|12 years ago|reply
Side-note: Before today I didn't realize how lax the laws on natural gas companies are. The New York Times has a great graphic on the subject.
"The natural gas industry has exemptions or exclusions from key parts of at least 7 of the 15 major federal environmental laws designed to protect air and water from radioactive and hazardous chemicals. Below are the seven laws listed in the order they were passed."
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/03/us/20110303-na...
[+] [-] giardini|12 years ago|reply
Venting methane from well water is less a problem than Joe Mulroy's farts at a beer-soused Friday night card game. Either will produce a flare if a match is put to them.
[+] [-] danso|12 years ago|reply
2013: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/06/19/1221635110.full...
2011: http://biology.duke.edu/jackson/pnas2011.html
I bring this up not to be pedantic, but to point out that the OP comes off as that this is new conclusive evidence...it is not. Opponents of fracking would argue that there are several other studies showing similar data, and they'd argue that politics/industry has shelved other planned studies. In other words, it's not just amount or existence of evidence that comes into play in this debate.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|12 years ago|reply
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 overriding emotional narrative many people have, if you just explained what the study says using other terms, most folks would realize how tenuous and superficial the reporting is. Correlative research is great, but geesh, it's a tiny, almost minuscule part of actually accomplishing anything. Most of the time, it's a waste of time. Medical research, for instance, is full of correlative research that never amounted to a hill of beans.
[+] [-] refurb|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] minikites|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_the_Nig...
In other words, what makes us special? Why are we okay with polluting other places but by golly we get mad when it happens in our own country?
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
Because we live here and not there?
[+] [-] tibbon|12 years ago|reply
Its like what cigarette companies used to do- just constantly deny what's completely obvious.
[+] [-] anateus|12 years ago|reply
There is an annoying combination of legal and commercial pressures that prevent the companies from going "actually it's more dangerous than we previously said" without it seeming like "it was a lie all along this is TERRIBLE".
The crucial take-away is that there is a bunch of additional geologic due diligence that the gas companies could be doing that would actually enable them to continue fracking. But the boom is driven in part by the utter dirt cheapness of it now and they're afraid of hopping off the wave.
[+] [-] ars|12 years ago|reply
No. It's completely positive. Methane has almost no pollution, and far less CO2 than any other large scale energy source.
The "contamination" is methane in water, which is harmless even if you drank it, and trivial to remove.
[+] [-] adestefan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffasinger|12 years ago|reply
A lot of the power infrastructure that handles peaks in demand (and averts rolling blackouts) uses natural gas. The question we need to be asking ourselves is which is the least bad alternative, because they're all bad.
[+] [-] bitteralmond|12 years ago|reply
http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/
This "new" evidence of contamination will not end it. People will be paid in quiet settlements, sell their houses at a fraction of what they paid for them, and move somewhere else. This will probably continue until the oil/bitumen/gas is gone.
[+] [-] thatswrong0|12 years ago|reply
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://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/02/24/24greenwire-groundtr...
[+] [-] JimmaDaRustla|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malyk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aooeeu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghostdiver|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taude|12 years ago|reply
Something from Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/10/17/shale-fra...
[+] [-] kubiiii|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|12 years ago|reply
No it won't, even if the article showed there was harmful contamination, which it didn't.
The only thing of interest in the article is Scientific American is resorting to untrue link baiting titles.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jgalt212|12 years ago|reply
If you don't permit fracking, then you away large sums of money to support the following regimes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_gas_fields
If you do, you may be literally sh1tting where you eat.
[+] [-] vectorpush|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnward|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tocomment|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anateus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhb|12 years ago|reply
Additional information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing
[+] [-] jlgreco|12 years ago|reply
Edit: source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proppants_and_fracking_fluids