Fracking does nothing to improve the landscape, the roads, the air, the water, or the lives of the locals. And energy companies are devious and without honor in these matters. Who will safeguard the parks?
Can’t Make it Go Away
When you throw something away, where is “away?” The Westmoreland County Landfill is one “away” place where fracking waste is disposed of. But there is no away. The fluids leach out of the landfill and must be disposed of, or should we say disposed of again. WSL currently transports radioactive leachate and other chemically-laced liquid waste to treatment plants, but is seeking a new National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit to discharge liquid waste directly into the Monongahela River, via a pipeline. What could be wrong with that idea?
Climat News
The Waste Doesn’t Just Go “Away”
Information and Propaganda
How fracking causes earthquakes, explained | The Narwhal
The point of fracking is to cause tiny earthquakes that fracture rocks and release natural gas or oil. The problem is when the quakes are big enough for us to feel
If you read the following article, you would think that fracking was a benign technical option. The problem with articles like this one should be obvious. It fails to address the history of things that can and do go wrong. Nor does it discuss the issue of sealing abandoned wells, which may be a practical impossibility once we punch holes through layers of rock. Steel rusts, concrete cracks, but the hole they attempt to seal with those materials is there forever. There is a long history with plenty of evidence that wells leak, and companies drill negligently, or exhaust their financial resources and fail to do as they should. The locals bear the long-term risks and costs. The lie is in what’s not said.
Guess Who Pays the Bill?
Players in the energy industry know how to skip on their cleanup obligations. Nobody wants to admit to it, but there are ways to game the system so that investors can take the money and leave behind a shell that has no capacity to clean up the mess they leave behind. “IBG/YBG” means “I’ll be gone and you’ll be gone when the bill comes due.” Those “good paying jobs” are gone too, such as they were.
The bill is coming sooner that expected.
Fires in California, violent weather elsewhere, floods, tornad
Let’s Be Skeptical
Here is a Reuters article about a government study that concludes fracking doesn’t necessarily hurt our water. The problem with such studies is always in the circumstances that were not considered. Keep in mind that the process involves punching a big hole through many different layers of strata, lining it with a big pipe and attempting to fill the gaps between pipe and strata with a cement-like substance. If successful, nothing leaks from the casing, and nothing can move up or down along the outside of the casing. The problem is that metal expands and contracts, the earth itself moves, and the pressures inside the pipe are extreme.
If you have ever had a wet basement, you know the problems inherent with holes in the ground and water. Once that hole has been punched it is there forever. Even if the well is properly sealed, the hole, the steel, the bentonite are all there to move and loosen and eventually leak. So be skeptical when you read reports like this:
Fracking not a ‘widespread risk’ to drinking water: U.S. EPA
Fracking for shale oil and gas has not led to widespread pollution of drinking water, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency draft report said on Thursday, although it warned some drilling activities could potentially cause health risks.
The study does not consider the disposal of produced water.
Scary Video
The energy industry does not want us to focus on fossil fuel-induced global warming. They want us to perceive it as a distant and equivocal risk. But we should be alarmed by evidence like this:
The data shows us that global warming is real and is accelerating. Many things contribute to this vicious cycle, but one thing is certain: Abundant and cheap fossil energy is not helping. The invisible hand of the market place favors renewables only when renewables are cheaper than fossil fuel. (Read More)
Let’s keep fossil fuels in the ground.
About those Fracking Earthquakes: It’s True
Here’s the abstract of a study summarizing the reliability of findings concerning induced earthquakes. The evidence is credible.
Claims of industrially induced seismicity vary from indisputable to unpersuasive and yet the veracity of industrial induction is vital for regulatory and operational practice. Assessment schemes have been developed in response to this need. We report here an initial assessment of the reliability of all globally known cases of proposed human-induced earthquakes and invite specialists on particular cases to refine these results. 1235 cases were assessed, requiring over 1000 h of work. From the 881 cases for which scorable evidence is available, we class 87% as ‘Confidently Induced’, 10% as ‘Probably Induced’, 2% as ‘Equivocal’ and < 1% as ‘Confidently Natural’. The most seismogenic activities are fracking, research, geothermal, water reservoir impoundment, conventional oil and gas. Least seismogenic activities are construction, deep penetrating bombs, coal bed methane. 354 cases (29%) lack enough information to be assessable. Future work could include applying data mining techniques including natural language processing and AI to uncover new evidence. Future best practice for rapid assessment of cases would ideally involve an independent panel of scientists who rapidly apply a questionnaire scheme, reach consensus, and inform a response.
If you are the scholarly type, here is the PDF of the study from Nature.com.
Consequences
New York State is trying to put the externalized costs of fossil fuel back on fossil energy producers. I don’t know if this legislation will be effective, but it sure focuses attention on the fact that “cheap” fossil energy is not truly cheap when the consequences of burning such fuels are considered.
Pennsylvania, are you listening? A lot of people think fracking is a bad idea.
