Fracking - where is it headed ?

[Lamplighter]

Fracking is not an issue in the U.S. only....


NY Times
ROGER COHEN
August 26, 2013
Britain’s Furor Over Fracking

BALCOMBE, England — The lovely green hills of the High Weald are Tory country,
a corner of West Sussex full of affluent residents who commute to London and like their golf
and ambles and thatched cottages.<snip>
But peace and love are not the story. This is the heavily policed front line of Britain’s fracking war.
A conflict has erupted over Prime Minister David Cameron’s vision
of turning the English countryside into hydraulic-fracturing central, a place
where West Sussex would release its inner West Texas.

“There’s about 1,300 trillion cubic feet of shale gas lying underneath Britain at the moment,”
he enthused this month. Extracting even one-tenth of it would provide 51 years of gas supply.
The man who vowed in 2010 to head “the greenest government ever” was adamant
in an article in The Daily Telegraph: “We cannot afford to miss out on fracking.”

To which banners on the road outside the village of Balcombe offer this retort: “Fracking kills.”<snip>

So Cameron has stuck his neck out on fracking, with little or no national debate.
He has vowed to win the fracking cause while avoiding any major speech
on the government’s supposed commitment to low-carbon energy.
Like the Labour prime minister Tony Blair’s advocacy of genetically modified food in the 1990s
— an attempt that failed — he has taken on nature-loving middle England.

Why? There is huge money involved....
<snip>

[Griff]

Two local stories.

The DEP apparently issued a well permit for an unleased piece of land only a couple miles from Grifftopia. It was rescinded but does show how little effective oversight we have.

The local who took Yoko Ono and company on a tour has had an injunction filed against her for repeated trespass on Cabot sites. Word on the street is she's engaged in a lot of property damage but they can't make it stick.

[Clodfobble]

So wait, someone tried to sell fracking rights on land they didn't own, or they sold rights to an area that should have been protected environmentally, but accidentally wasn't?

[Griff]

The driller sent a drilling proposal to the DEP that included a horizontal under a property they had no lease for. The owners of the property are not really anti-drilling, they just felt the compensation wasn't sufficient so they didn't sign a lease. As soon as they made their complaint, everything stopped but if a neighbor hadn't mentioned seeing a map of the proposal they could have been drilled under and could have ended up in court over it. It just looks like sloppy or corrupt work by the driller and/or DEP.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Susqu...11745075546371

[busterb]

From New Scientist.
Third, we risk being surprised by the boom in shale gas production. That, too, may prove to be a bubble, maybe even a Ponzi scheme. Production from individual shale wells declines rapidly, and large amounts of capital have to be borrowed to drill replacements. This will surprise many people who make judgement calls based on the received wisdom that limits to shale drilling are few. But I am not alone in these concerns.

Even if the US shale gas drilling isn't a bubble, it remains unprofitable overall and environmental downsides are emerging seemingly by the week. According to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, whole towns in Texas are now running out of water, having sold their aquifers for fracking. I doubt that this is a boom that is going to appeal to the rest of the world; many others agree.

Fourth, we court disaster with assumptions about oil depletion. Most of us believe the industry mantra that there will be adequate flows of just-about-affordable oil for decades to come. I am in a minority who don't. Crude oil production peaked in 2005, and oil fields are depleting at more than 6 per cent per year, according to the International Energy Agency. The much-hyped 2 million barrels a day of new US production capacity from shale needs to be put in context: we live in a world that consumes 90 million barrels a day.

[Lamplighter]

There is an editorial today in the NY Times about these new rules in Colorado.
The thrust of the rules is concern over C02 and VOC's on air pollution and climate change (warming).
This is the link to that editorial, entitled: "Fracking’s Achilles’ Heel"

LA Times
Neela Banerjee
November 18, 2013
Colorado proposes reducing methane leaks from energy production

Colorado proposed new rules Monday to reduce methane leaks from oil and gas operations,
the first effort in the country to address emissions of the greenhouse gas that is a byproduct
of the domestic fossil fuel boom.

Carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuels is the main driver of climate change, but while
less methane is emitted overall, it is an even more potent heat-trapping gas than carbon.<snip>

The state has rules in place to curb emissions of methane,
the primary component of natural gas, during drilling.
The proposed new rules call for detecting and repairing methane leaks
throughout a company’s infrastructure once a well is producing:
at equipment at the well site, above-ground pipelines and at compressor stations.

The rules would also reduce emissions of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs,
an air pollutant that can be created from the production and burning of fossil fuels.
Because high output of VOCs tracks with high methane pollution,
the new rules base their monitoring requirements on the tons of VOCs companies generate annually.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Achille's other heel.

Water samples collected at Colorado sites where hydraulic fracturing was used to extract natural gas show the presence of chemicals that have been linked to infertility, birth defects and cancer, scientists reported Monday.

The study, published in the journal Endocrinology, also found elevated levels of the hormone-disrupting chemicals in the Colorado River, where wastewater released during accidental spills at nearby wells could wind up.

[glatt]

New study: Recent natural gas fracking operations have tainted the ground water, but it's actually good news, because it's the well casings that are to blame and they can be fixed.

The shale-gas boom of recent years has contaminated drinking-water wells in North Texas’ Barnett Shale and the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, a study published Monday concludes.

The study, by researchers from five universities, concludes that neither drilling itself nor the hydraulic fracturing that follows it is directly to blame.

Instead, gas found in water wells appeared to have leaked from defective casing and cementing in gas wells, meant to protect groundwater; or from gas formations not linked to zones where fracking took place.

“Our data do not suggest that horizontal drilling or hydraulic fracturing has provided a conduit to connect deep Marcellus or Barnett formations directly to surface aquifers,” the authors wrote.

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, adds to a growing body of science that examines the environmental impacts of natural gas production, which has seen a rush of drilling and processing in numerous states over the past decade.

In an email, lead author Thomas Darrah of Ohio State University said tracing the blame to well construction problems instead of fracking offers hope of protecting groundwater supplies.

“This is relatively good news because it means that most of the issues we have identified can potentially be avoided by future improvements in well integrity,” said Darrah, who teaches in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Instead, gas found in water wells appeared to have leaked from defective casing and cementing in gas wells, meant to protect groundwater; or from gas formations not linked to zones where fracking took place.

“This is relatively good news because it means that most of the issues we have identified can potentially be avoided by future improvements in well integrity,” said Darrah, who teaches in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State.

So the drillers/frackers who install the casings and cement them, are doing a half-assed job. And have been right along, just nobody has been paying attention and it's not as noticeable as Deepwater Horizon/Macondo circus.

[Lamplighter]

This announcement is from an long-expected "NY State Health Commission Report",
and appears to be based on the frequency of industry-wide leaks occurring in the fracking wells,
... as well as zoning laws passed by cities and counties and approved by an Appeals Court.

Cuomo to Ban Fracking in New York State, Citing Health Risks
NY Times
JESSE McKINLEY
DEC. 17, 2014

ALBANY — The Cuomo administration announced Wednesday that it would ban hydraulic fracturing in New York State,
ending years of uncertainty by concluding that the controversial method of extracting gas
from deep underground could contaminate the state’s air and water and pose inestimable public-health risks.<snip>

The state has had a de facto ban on the procedure for more than five years, predating Mr. Cuomo’s first term.
The decision also came as oil and gas prices continued to fall, in part because of surging American oil production,
as fracking boosted output.<snip>

[busterb]

Well they banned it in Denton, TX. the place where it was started.

[classicman]

first Soda, now fracking .... whats next? Bacon?!?!?!?!??!

[busterb]

HUmm maybe intercorse Spell check

[Griff]

New York takes the wrong approach to ‘fracking’

Fracking’s risks concern water and air contamination. States should control where and how wastewater is disposed of, require robust wells that are resistant to blowouts, demand that drillers prevent methane and volatile organic compounds from escaping into the air and regulate leaks from storage facilities and well sites. States such as Colorado have developed rules with sensitivity both to industry and to environmental concerns. The Obama administration is developing its own, national fracking rules, too. That’s the model to follow — not New York’s.

[xoxoxoBruce]

He figures it'll be worth more later, after the others have petered out, and he's out of office so he can belly up to the trough, too.