Ellen Cantarow - Fracking Gets Its Own Occupy Movement

This is a story about water, the land surrounding it, and the lives it sustains. Clean water should be a right: there is no life without it. New York is what you might call a “water state.” Its rivers and their tributaries only start with the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Delaware, and the Susquehanna. The best known of its lakes are Great Lakes Erie and Ontario, Lake George, and the Finger Lakes. Its brooks, creeks, and trout streams are fishermen’s lore.

Far below this rippling wealth there’s a vast, rocky netherworld called the Marcellus Shale. Stretching through southern New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, the shale contains bubbles of methane, the remains of life that died 400 million years ago. Gas corporations have lusted for the methane in the Marcellus since at least 1967 when one of them plotted with the Atomic Energy Agency to explode a nuclear bombto unleash it. That idea died, but it’s been reborn in the form of a technology invented by Halliburton Corporation: high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing -- “fracking” for short.

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http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175492/

Well Blowout, Toxic Water: Fracking Disasters on the Rise

The process of hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, has recently been linked to earthquakes in Ohio, and fracking chemicals were confirmed in Wyoming groundwater just a month ago.

On Friday afternoon, The Calgary Herald reports, fracking at one oil well in Alberta caused a blowout at another oil well a kilometer away.

Fluids blasted deep into the earth under high pressure appear to have intersected underground with the second well, forcing oil up through the well bore at explosive rates.

A witness saw what appeared to be oil and chemicals spewing into the air.

"We're still not quite sure what happened," said Scott Ratushny, Midway Energy's chief executive. "We're still investigating it, but something allowed the frack to carry into the same zone, 130 to 140 metres away (underground),"

The company, through Canyon Technical Services, was finishing a 16-stage hydraulic fracture at about 1,400 metres when the rupture occurred. Approximately 50 cubic metres of oil, fracturing fluid, nitrogen and sand were spilled on the surface and have been recovered from the site, Ratushny said.

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http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/01/17-3

Nicholas Kusnetz - Oh, Canada’s Become a Home for Record Fracking

December 28, 2011 by ProPublica

http://www.propublica.org/article/oh-canadas-become-a-home-for-record-fracking

 

by Nicholas Kusnetz

Early last year, deep in the forests of northern British Columbia, workers for Apache Corp. performed what the company proclaimed was the biggest hydraulic fracturing operation ever.

The project used 259 million gallons of water and 50,000 tons of sand to frack 16 gas wells side by side. It was "nearly four times larger than any project of its nature in North America," Apache boasted.

The record didn't stand for long. By the end of the year, Apache and its partner, Encana, topped it by half at a neighboring site.

As furious debate over fracking continues in the United States, it is instructive to look at how a similar gas boom is unfolding for our neighbor to the north.

To a large extent, the same themes have emerged as Canada struggles to balance the economic benefits drilling has brought with the reports of water contamination and air pollution that have accompanied them.

The Canadian boom has differed in one regard: The western provinces' exuberant embrace of large-scale fracking offers a vision of what could happen elsewhere if governments clear away at least some of the regulatory hurdles to growth.

Even as some officials have questioned the wisdom of doing so, Alberta and British Columbia have dueled to draw investment by offering financial incentives and loosening rules. The result has been some of the most intensive drilling anywhere.

"There definitely is concern on the part of people living in northeast B.C. on the scale of developments, which are quite significant already and are only in their infancy,"said Ben Parfitt, an analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a research institute that promotes environmental sustainability. "We are seeing some of the largest fracking operations anywhere on earth."

Canada's eastern regions have proceeded more cautiously. In March, Quebec placed a moratorium on shale development pending further study. Protesters have taken to the streets in New Brunswick demanding the same.

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Scott Thill - The Fracking Industry Has Bought Off Congress: Here Are the Worst Offenders

By Scott Thill, AlterNet

Posted on December 16, 2011, Printed on December 18, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153467/the_fracking_industry_has_bought_off_congress%3A_here_are_the_worst_offenders

Environmentalists and other well-adjusted citizens of Earth, I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that, thanks to illuminating documentaries like Josh Fox's Gasland and determined pressure from activists in and out of the mainstream, the toxic ravages of hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, are no longer the shale gas sector's dirty secret. The bad news is that, thanks to the United States' morally bankrupt political system and its Supreme Court's reality-defying ruling on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the fracking lobby's power of the purse is greater than it has ever been.

That power was depressingly dissected in Common Cause's recent report, Deep Drilling, Deep Pockets, which explained that earnings junkies like Exxon, Koch and more have paid House and Senate politicians on select energy and commerce committees nearly $750 million over the last decade to smother regulatory oversight of the expanding fracking practice, whose complete chemical components still remain a relative mystery. It was evidently money well spent. During that lobbying stretch, the Environmental Protection Agency scientifically linked fracking with water poisoning in Wyoming, and probably isn't far from siding with the increasing ranks of those who blame fracking for earthquakes from Oklahoma to Ohio to England. And yet beyond manageable fines and stock devaluations, no one from the industry has yet to seriously face the music for groundwater contamination and worse.

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Josh Fox - Shale Gas Drilling's Dirty Secret Is Out

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/dec/09/shale-gas-drilling-epa-fracking-water-contamination

Published on Saturday, December 10, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

The EPA's findings about fracking's contamination of ground water have sent a shockwave through a gas industry in denial

by Josh Fox

Thursday's stunning announcement from US EPA that implicates hydrofracturing ("fracking") as the cause of groundwater contamination in Pavillion, Wyoming is news that has rocked the world. But as groundbreaking and innovative as the investigation has been, the news comes as no surprise to anyone who has been following fracking closely. 

Anyone who lives in a gas drilling area can tell you: fracking contaminates groundwater. Citizens have been shouting this at the top of their lungs in fracking areas since shortly after the process of hydraulic fracturing was exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act in 2005, paving the way for the largest gas drilling boom in domestic history. The exemption, known as the "Halliburton Loophole", allows fracking companies to inject toxic chemicals under the ground in huge quantities and not report it to the EPA. But with this much fracking going on, with thousands of wells being drilled and fracked in 34 states, and with thousands of reported cases of contamination, the gas industry just can't keep their secrets buried; they keep bubbling up through the ground.

Since April 2009, I have been documenting the water contamination in the gas fracking field in Pavillion, Wyoming. The testimony of Pavillion cowboys John Fenton, Louis Meeks and Jeff Locker and their incredible families is some of the most stirring in our film Gasland. Since that time, I have been closely following the extensive three-year EPA investigation, and the results have shown over and over again that there were contaminants in the groundwater, which posed a significant health risk to the residents.

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ecowatch.org - Fracking Compounds Found in Drinking Water

Published on Thursday, December 8, 2011 by EcoWatch.org

http://ecowatch.org/2011/fracking-compounds-found-in-drinking-water/

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a draft analysis of data Dec. 8 from its Pavillion, Wyoming ground water investigation. At the request of Pavillion residents, EPA began investigating water quality concerns in private drinking water wells three years ago. Since that time, in conjunction with the state of Wyoming, the local community, and the owner of the gas field, Encana, EPA has been working to assess ground water quality and identify potential sources of contamination.

EPA’s analysis of samples taken from the agency’s deep monitoring wells in the aquifer indicates detection of synthetic chemicals, like glycols and alcohols consistent with gas production and hydraulic fracturing fluids, benzene concentrations well above Safe Drinking Water Act standards and high methane levels. EPA constructed two deep monitoring wells to sample water in the aquifer. The draft report indicates that ground water in the aquifer contains compounds likely associated with gas production practices, including hydraulic fracturing. EPA also re-tested private and public drinking water wells in the community. The samples were consistent with chemicals identified in earlier EPA results released in 2010 and are generally below established health and safety standards. To ensure a transparent and rigorous analysis, EPA is releasing these findings for public comment and will submit them to an independent scientific review panel. The draft findings announced Dec. 8 are specific to Pavillion, where the fracturing is taking place in and below the drinking water aquifer and in close proximity to drinking water wells—production conditions different from those in many other areas of the country.

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Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility - Fracking Fluids - The Deeper, the Dirtier

CONTACT: Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER)

http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=1534

November 17, 2011

New Study Finds Bottom-of-Barrel Flowback Fluids Much More Contaminated

WASHINGTON - November 17 - A new federal study finds wastewater from natural gas hydrofracturing has higher levels of contaminants the deeper in the storage tank the samples are taken.  These findings may be a key to preventing environmental damage from disposal of huge volumes of post-fracking water produced in the boom to exploit shale gas, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

Released November 16, 2011, the study by the U.S. Forest Service researchers is entitled “Chloride Concentration Gradients in Tank-Stored Hydraulic Fracturing Fluids Following Flowback.”  It analyzes 11,000 gallons of fracking fluids that flowed back to the surface and were stored in two 18-foot tall tanks after drilling in the Fernow Experimental Forest within West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest.  

The key finding is that samples taken near the surface below the top scum are far less contaminated than samples taken deeper in the tank.  Increasingly higher levels of the tracked chemical, chloride (Cl), are found the deeper samples are drawn.  These differences are also visible to the naked eye:

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