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Fracking: Is it safe and clean enough? – this NYT opinion piece thinks so.
Apart from a couple of gripes and moans about co2 from gas, this NYT article is a lot better than most of theirs concerning fossil fuels. Here’s the kicker; Susan Brantley is distinguished professor of geosciences and director of the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute – at Pennsylvania State University.
The Facts on Fracking
Susan Brantley and Anna Meyendorff
Some of the local effects of drilling and fracking have gotten a lot of press but caused few problems, while others are more serious. For example, of the tens of thousands of deep injection wells in use by the energy industry across the United States, only about eight locations have experienced injection-induced earthquakes, most too weak to feel and none causing significant damage.
The Pennsylvania experience with water contamination is also instructive. In Pennsylvania, shale gas is accessed at depths of thousands of feet while drinking water is extracted from depths of only hundreds of feet. Nowhere in the state have fracking compounds injected at depth been shown to contaminate drinking water.
In one study of 200 private water wells in the fracking regions of Pennsylvania, water quality was the same before and soon after drilling in all wells except one. The only surprise from that study was that many of the wells failed drinking water regulations before drilling started. But trucking and storage accidents have spilled fracking fluids and brines, leading to contamination of water and soils that had to be cleaned up. The fact that gas companies do not always disclose the composition of all fracking and drilling compounds makes it difficult to monitor for injected chemicals in streams and groundwater.
Pennsylvania has also seen instances of methane leaking into aquifers in regions where shale-gas drilling is ongoing. Some of this gas is “drift gas” that forms naturally in deposits left behind by the last glaciation. But sometimes methane leaks out of gas wells because, in 1 to 2 percent of the wells, casings are not structurally sound. The casings can be fixed to address these minor leaks, and the risk of such methane leaks could further decrease if casings were designed specifically for each geological location.
The disposal of shale gas brine was initially addressed in Pennsylvania by allowing the industry to use municipal water treatment plants that were not equipped to handle the unhealthy components. Since new regulations in 2011, however, Pennsylvania companies now recycle 90 percent of this briny water by using it to frack more shale.
In sum, the experience of fracking in Pennsylvania has led to industry practices that mitigate the effect of drilling and fracking on the local environment.
2013-03-15 10:33:21
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