WhistleBlower
Council Member
who can justify fracking against the environmental cost?
ban fracking
- Thread starter WhistleBlower
- Start date
WhistleBlower
Council Member
better warm up the old calculator, pops. you're next. there were 8.3 million hits on this: oil sands crude environmental damage
WhistleBlower
Council Member
i'm a biologist. i'm pushing for bio-fuels and the entire petroleum industry can go screw.
WhistleBlower
Council Member
something like 3/4 of that good agricultural land is being used to raise animal feed. most of the biomass is mulched and sent straight back to the soil.
raise less animals to eat and turn what they're not eating into fuel along with re-establishing hemp culture to provide a replacement biomass for the petroleum products.
raise less animals to eat and turn what they're not eating into fuel along with re-establishing hemp culture to provide a replacement biomass for the petroleum products.
WhistleBlower
Council Member
back to topic:
Fracking and earthquakes: The real risk is injecting liquid underground
By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 2:11 pm Friday, Jun 15
The National Research Council published a report today, reviewing and analyzing peer-reviewed literature, federal and state documents, data requested from private companies, and more ... all in an effort to better understand the link between earthquakes and natural gas fracking techniques.
Because this is the National Research Council, you can read the whole thing online for free. But here are the three key takeaways:
First: The actual process of hydraulic fracturing—injecting fluid into the ground to break rocks and release trapped natural gas—doesn't seem to come with a serious seismic risk. This process has been definitively linked to small earthquakes—no greater than 2.8 magnitude—at one location.
Second: Injecting wastewater from fracking back into the ground has a much more noticeable seismic effect. What's more, this effect goes far beyond fracking. Injecting liquids into the ground is part of advanced recovery for oil, conventional drilling for oil and gas, carbon capture and storage, and geothermal electricity generation. This should not be a surprise. We've known that human can induce small earthquakes since the 1920s and injecting large amounts of liquids into a space that previously didn't hold much liquid—what the NRC calls a fluid imbalance—is part of that.
The strongest induced earthquakes are related to hydrocarbon withdrawl—basically, oil drilling—in California, Illinois, Oklahoma, Texas, and Nebraska. Some of those events have reached magnitudes of 6.5.
But the highest frequency of events seems to be associated with a California geothermal site called The Geysers, which has experienced 300-400 events a year since 2005, some of them reaching a magnitude of 4.6.
Basically, whether we should be really worried about this effect or not is up for debate. None of these human-induced earthquakes have led to significant property damage or loss of life and, historically, human-induced earthquakes have been on the small side, magnitude wise. Also, we've been injecting liquid into the Earth for decades and the overall number of induced earthquakes remains small. But, if we are going to be concerned, we have to understand that this is not just a fracking problem. It's going to come into play any time you're extracting or injecting a large quantity of liquid from the earth without counterbalancing that liquid loss or gain.
Finally: The thing to keep your eye on is carbon capture and storage. There's only one commercial scale project in the whole world right now. So we really don't have enough data to know what's going on here. But, the paper points out, CCS involves injecting very large quantities of liquid. Larger than the quantities involved in, say, storage of wastewater from fracking. So while we don't know what will happen with CCS, there's definitely a potential for those sites to cause some earthquakes at the larger end of the human-induced-earthquake scale.
Read the full report (Executive Summary and Summary are particularly useful if you want a quick overview.)
Read a summary at Scientific American
Read a story I wrote last year about human-induced earthquakes
Image:Seismograph, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from fboyd's photostream
Fracking and earthquakes: The real risk is injecting liquid underground
By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 2:11 pm Friday, Jun 15
The National Research Council published a report today, reviewing and analyzing peer-reviewed literature, federal and state documents, data requested from private companies, and more ... all in an effort to better understand the link between earthquakes and natural gas fracking techniques.
Because this is the National Research Council, you can read the whole thing online for free. But here are the three key takeaways:
First: The actual process of hydraulic fracturing—injecting fluid into the ground to break rocks and release trapped natural gas—doesn't seem to come with a serious seismic risk. This process has been definitively linked to small earthquakes—no greater than 2.8 magnitude—at one location.
Second: Injecting wastewater from fracking back into the ground has a much more noticeable seismic effect. What's more, this effect goes far beyond fracking. Injecting liquids into the ground is part of advanced recovery for oil, conventional drilling for oil and gas, carbon capture and storage, and geothermal electricity generation. This should not be a surprise. We've known that human can induce small earthquakes since the 1920s and injecting large amounts of liquids into a space that previously didn't hold much liquid—what the NRC calls a fluid imbalance—is part of that.
The strongest induced earthquakes are related to hydrocarbon withdrawl—basically, oil drilling—in California, Illinois, Oklahoma, Texas, and Nebraska. Some of those events have reached magnitudes of 6.5.
But the highest frequency of events seems to be associated with a California geothermal site called The Geysers, which has experienced 300-400 events a year since 2005, some of them reaching a magnitude of 4.6.
Basically, whether we should be really worried about this effect or not is up for debate. None of these human-induced earthquakes have led to significant property damage or loss of life and, historically, human-induced earthquakes have been on the small side, magnitude wise. Also, we've been injecting liquid into the Earth for decades and the overall number of induced earthquakes remains small. But, if we are going to be concerned, we have to understand that this is not just a fracking problem. It's going to come into play any time you're extracting or injecting a large quantity of liquid from the earth without counterbalancing that liquid loss or gain.
Finally: The thing to keep your eye on is carbon capture and storage. There's only one commercial scale project in the whole world right now. So we really don't have enough data to know what's going on here. But, the paper points out, CCS involves injecting very large quantities of liquid. Larger than the quantities involved in, say, storage of wastewater from fracking. So while we don't know what will happen with CCS, there's definitely a potential for those sites to cause some earthquakes at the larger end of the human-induced-earthquake scale.
Read the full report (Executive Summary and Summary are particularly useful if you want a quick overview.)
Read a summary at Scientific American
Read a story I wrote last year about human-induced earthquakes
Image:Seismograph, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from fboyd's photostream
gabriel
Governor
like i say, im all for banning it. i will buy more stock in canadian oil sands as soon as i hear the good news!!
http://www.cdnoilsands.com/
http://www.cdnoilsands.com/
WhistleBlower
Council Member
make a statement relevant to the top post, stop commenting or be reported for threadjacking.
TomFitz
Mayor
I would like to see the technology developed.
However, the industry has gone down a partularly dangerous and dishonest route so far.
It got its friends on the Bush adminstration to exempt fracking operations from the Clean Water Act. Thus, nobody knows what chemicals go into the fracking water, as the companies that do it aren't regulated.
Pennsylvania recently passed a fracking bill that stripped local government of the power to tax wells (something even Texans can do) and bound medical paractitioners to non disclosure in treating suspected fracking cases.
The Bill is also rich in subsidies to the industry, a Bush type pattern.
I think this resource is a valuable one for the US.
But the cloak of secrecy and the questionable record of some of the practitioners so far, suggest that a more comprehensive federal approach may be required.
However, the industry has gone down a partularly dangerous and dishonest route so far.
It got its friends on the Bush adminstration to exempt fracking operations from the Clean Water Act. Thus, nobody knows what chemicals go into the fracking water, as the companies that do it aren't regulated.
Pennsylvania recently passed a fracking bill that stripped local government of the power to tax wells (something even Texans can do) and bound medical paractitioners to non disclosure in treating suspected fracking cases.
The Bill is also rich in subsidies to the industry, a Bush type pattern.
I think this resource is a valuable one for the US.
But the cloak of secrecy and the questionable record of some of the practitioners so far, suggest that a more comprehensive federal approach may be required.
WhistleBlower
Council Member
obama was supposed to veto some bill if the requirement to disclose the composition of the waste water was removed. it was removed and he didn't veto it, so don't be blaming it all on bush. obama is being run by bush's daddy's business consortium and if anybody is trying to cover his tracks with a cloak of secrecy, it's the obamanable snow job.
one report i read said it wasn't the fracking operation itself that was the major problem. it was pumping the waste water back into the ground causing the big pollution problems and stronger earthquakes.
when they pump the water back in, it gets in between usually stable plates and causes slippage resulting in tremors as strong as 6.5. the earthquakes associated with the fracking have been less than 2.5.
i've seen several videos of well water that had been contaminated by fracking waste that was set on fire coming out of the tap. before you start screaming hoax, these flammable liquids don't dissolve in water and will burn sitting on the water. the cuyahoga river catching fire in the 60's or 70's before they cleaned it up some is well documented.
i graduated u tampa in 1978 with a BS in marine biology. UT was a very small school then. less than 2000 students with a teacher/student ratio of as low as 6:1. all the teachers had PhD's and none of them were required to publish anything as part of their job. they were there to teach and it often extended past the classroom in a more social setting, like the rathskellar every friday afternoon or a weekend student/faculty party somewhere.
quite a few of the science and math dept profs had bailed out of industry to teach. they spoke of how dangerous it was to pump all that oil and gas out of the ground just to burn it, postulating that pumping all those gases that the earth had taken out of the atmosphere over hundreds of millions of years to make it breathable for us in a period of decades was risking dire consequences. they also postulated that the gas and oil pockets may play a role in helping to keep the surface of the planet stable.
we've got a molten core spinning through space very fast. the physics of it all makes the stuff want to go flying off into space. the crust keeps it from doing that. removing all that oil and gas could result in major increases in earthquakes and volcano eruptions. if those calderas blow, the party's over for a long time for everybody who has no access to artificial environments that can make the air breathable and the water potable again.
the organic chemistry professor preached that if the oil had to be taken out of the ground, it should be made into durable goods.
the general philosophy toward energy capture and conversion technologies at the time was that it was recognized that risks far outweighed the benefits of fossil and nuclear fuels and they needed to be phased out, replaced with renewable resources.
there are many of them and few have been really developed because of resistance from the petrochemical and nuclear industries. at the rate we're going it's going to take a monstrous catastrophe to wake the governments up to the folly of what they're doing.
fukushima was only enough to get the germans to shut down their nukes and wake up the american dissident crowd a little. the deep horizon blowout hardly caused a ripple outside tree hugger circles.
did you know that there's a well fire that they tried to cap with a nuke in russia that got worse when they
nuked it and they haven't been able to put it out for a lot of years ?
(i'd need to go look it up but i think it was over 30 years ago. i think googling 'gate to hell' finds it. it makes the athabasca tar sands fields mess look like the garden of eden)
i'm sure we're going to hear from our neighsayer on this. my info is very old and i went to an unconventional school.
It's not that I want to ban fraking,; it's led to lower energy costs after all. I just want to know what the repercussions are. I certainly wouldn't want a fracking rig in my backyard.
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