The High Hidden Cost of Fracking...

[Nbadan]

USGS finally links rash of earthquakes in Oklahoma to fracking...

"We've statistically analyzed the recent earthquake rate changes and found that they do not seem to be due to typical, random fluctuations in natural seismicity rates," said Bill Leith, USGS seismologist. "These results suggest that significant changes in both the background rate of events and earthquake triggering properties needed to have occurred in order to explain the increases in seismicity. This is in contrast to what is typically observed when modeling natural earthquake swarms."

The analysis suggests that a contributing factor to the increase in earthquakes triggers may be from activities such as wastewater disposal--a phenomenon known as injection-induced seismicity. The OGS has examined the behavior of the seismicity through the state assessing the optimal fault orientations and stresses within the region of increased seismicity, particularly the unique behavior of the Jones swarm just east of Oklahoma City. The USGS and OGS are now focusing on determining whether evidence exists for such triggering, which is widely viewed as being demonstrated in recent years in Arkansas, Ohio and Colorado.

This "swarm" includes the largest earthquake ever recorded in Oklahoma, a magnitude 5.6 that occurred near Prague Nov. 5, 2011. It damaged a number of homes as well as the historic Benedictine Hall at St. Gregory's University, in Shawnee, Okla. Almost 60 years earlier in1952, a comparable magnitude 5.5, struck El Reno and Oklahoma City. More recently, earthquakes of magnitude 4.4 and 4.2 hit east of Oklahoma City on April 16, 2013, causing objects to fall off shelves.

Following the earthquakes that occurred near Prague in 2011, the agencies issued a joint statement, focusing on the Prague event and ongoing seismic monitoring in the region. Since then, the USGS and OGS have continued monitoring and reporting earthquakes, and have also made progress evaluating the significance of the swarm.

Important to people living in the Oklahoma City region is that earthquake hazard has increased as a result of the swarm. USGS calculates that ground motion probabilities, which relate to potential damage and are the basis for the seismic provisions of building codes, have increased in Oklahoma City as a result of this swarm. While it’s been known for decades that Oklahoma is "earthquake country," the increased hazard has important implications for residents and businesses in the area.

To more accurately determine the locations and magnitudes of earthquakes in Oklahoma, the OGS operates a 15-station seismic network. Data from this system, and from portable seismic stations installed in the Oklahoma City region, are sent in real-time to the USGS National Earthquake Information Center, which provides 24x7 reporting on earthquakes worldwide.

http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article...0#.UmlhsJQ6XXE

Scary stuff...

[Nbadan]

Fracking linked to rape, meth addiction, and STDs
By Holly Richmond

Yet another reason to hate fracking: It’s connected with an increase in STDs, car crashes, drug-related crimes, and sexual assault in areas where the oil and gas industry sets up shop. Or in Vice-speak, fracking workers have “an insatiable appe e for raw sex and hard drugs.” Writes Peter Rugh on Vice:

Critics of fracking have compared it to raping the Earth, but where drilling has spread, literal rape has followed. Violence against woman in fracking boomtowns in North Dakota and Montana has increased so sharply that the Department of Justice (DoJ) announced in June that it plans to spend half a million dollars investigating the correlation…The DoJ speculated that “oil industry camps may be impacting domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking in the direct and surrounding communities in which they reside.”

Yikes. You can “correlation doesn’t equal causation” all day, but Rugh is persuasive: Fracking workers are overworked, undertrained, and seven times more likely to die on the job than the rest of us. (On a rig, 12-hour shifts are the new normal.) So workers are under an unbelievable amount of stress — and it’s yielding antisocial results. Food and Water Watch certainly agrees:

“We’ve found that fracking brought a host of social costs to communities where drilling has begun,” said FWW’s Program Director Emily Wurth. “These are the real costs of fracking that are never discussed.”

Then again, one retired drill worker told Vice that FWW is smearing fracking because Big Coal is lining its pockets. (FWW program director Emily Wurth, of course, denied this.)

But no matter how you slice it, the correlation between fracking towns and meth-fueled crime, auto accidents, rape, and gonorrhea is a scary. The easy reaction is “Fracking suxx!” A more nuanced response might be, “Let’s get more clean energy jobs, training for those jobs, consent-based sex ed, oil spill condoms widely available contraception, drug treatment programs, and eight-hour shifts.”

That’s not very catchy, though.

[boutons_deux]

BigOil execs wouldn't GAF if their wives and daugters were raped as badly as they are raping the earth, just as long as those $Bs keep rolling in.

[Halberto]

If the earthquakes are fracking induced I'd like to see details concerning the foci of past and present earthquakes. I can tell you that an earthquakes with a shallow focus is like the earth scratching once to satisfy the itch, while a deep one is like popping a shoulder back in place. Two different events with different driving mechanisms. I'm not saying numerous shallow earthquakes are things to ignore, I just hope people out there don't jump to conclusions and think it will eventually produce the kind of earthquakes that cause death. Numerous shallow earthquakes will gradually cause small damage, foundation repair maybe?

[baseline bum]

What is consent-based sex-ed?

[boutons_deux]

BigOil's army of lawyers crushing dissent

Texas Homeowner Battles $3 Million Defamation Lawsuit For Exposing Fracking Company’s Pollution



http://thinkprogress.org/climate/201...nge-resources/

[RandomGuy]

BigOil's army of lawyers crushing dissent

Texas Homeowner Battles $3 Million Defamation Lawsuit For Exposing Fracking Company’s Pollution



http://thinkprogress.org/climate/201...nge-resources/

Parker County Fire Marshal Shawn Scott was the first authority to see the fire trick. After blowing off Lipsky as an imaginative crank, in July 2010 Scott finally pulled up to Lipsky's palatial, 15,000-square-foot manse, at the end of a live oak-lined inlet off the Brazos River, just upriver from Lake Granbury.

"Mr. Lipsky turned on the valve at the top of the wellhead and said, 'Watch this,'" Scott recalls. Water gushed from the wellhead. A few flicks of a lighter, and water and flame poured forth together.

Scott, a good-natured but level-headed hulk, ordered him to snuff it out immediately. Lipsky turned, and the growing flame swept the wellhead, accidentally igniting a second fire. "That got us both a little stirred up there because now we got an uncontrolled flame coming from the top of the water well," Scott says. "That was the first time I'd ever seen that."

Scott radioed his assistant fire marshal and told him to bring his tools from downtown Weatherford, a 30-minute drive down two-lane roads. He needed to see just how much gas was coming from Lipsky's well.

"We got within 20 feet of that well and the hydrocarbon detector was going bonkers, full indication," Scott says. "I couldn't get any closer because you risk burning up the sensors. This is in open air. It's not like we were in a house."

Instead, Scott used a less sensitive monitor to gauge gas concentrations. "Anything above 5 percent, we start getting nervous. It went to 12 or 14 percent in nothing flat, which is definitely within the explosive range."

There was little Scott could do. Lipsky had a theory for the source of his gas, and the culprit was beyond Scott's reach. Lipsky had checked the Texas Railroad Commission's website and learned that two natural gas wells, drilled horizontally, ran practically beneath his home. "We really can't touch those guys at all," Scott says.

http://www.dallasobserver.com/2012-0...the-hole/full/

Even before she had finished sampling on August 17, 2010, Rich was worried. Lipsky's tap water effervesced like Alka-Seltzer. It made her glass sampling containers slippery, as though it had been ed with lubricant. More than a week later, lab results bolstered her su ions: His well had been polluted by nearby fracking operations, she believed. Rich advised Lipsky to stop using the water. His wife, Shyla, and their 18-month-old, and 6- and 7-year-old children should stay away, she told him. Gas could be building up inside the house. Lipsky moved into the guest house and stopped using the water. His wife and children extended their routine summer stay with her parents in Graham.

Meanwhile, the results of water quality tests performed by the Railroad Commission came in. They found levels of benzene, a known carcinogen, above the threshold limit for drinking water. Yet the agency did not act, nor did it have an answer yet for the fire Lipsky could ignite. But he and Rich believed they did: It could be no coincidence, they thought, that the two gas wells beneath his home had been fracked just months before Lipsky first noticed his failing pump. Dissatisfied with the commission's pace, Rich reached out to a contact with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. With a single phone call, another kind of blaze was set.

From the moment the do entary Gasland injected fracking into the public consciousness, the image of flaming tap water was its grim totem. YouTube is populated with videos of people near gas drilling sites in New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Texas holding cigarette lighters to drinking water giving off ghostly flares — an inchoate indictment of drilling more anecdotal than scientific. But they've gained currency among aggrieved landowners and environmentalists.

[RandomGuy]

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/20....full.pdf+html

"This study examined natural gas composition of drinking water using concentration and isotope data for methane, ethane, propane, and (4)HE. Based on the spatial distribution of the hydrocarbons (Figs 1 and 2), isotopic signatures for the gases, (figs 3 and 4), wetness of the gases (Fig. 2...) and observed differences in (4)HE:CH4 ratios (Fig 5), we propose that a subset of homeowners has drinking water contaminated by drilling operations, likely through poor well construction"

"Increased stray gas abundance in a subset of drinking water wells near Marcellus shale gas extraction" (by a buncha authors) posted at the website of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a PNAS peer-reviewed journal.



(Not sure about exactly which journal this appeared in, the website is a bit vague on that)

[boutons_deux]

Coast Guard Moves to Approve Barging of Hazardous Fracking Waste on Major Rivers


http://truth-out.org/news/item/20017...n-major-rivers

[MannyIsGod]

Not sure if your last comment is a joke but the journal is PNAS

[ErnestLynch]

fake

[Nbadan]

he growing fracking industry is "yielding gushers" of campaign donations for congressional candidates—particularly Republicans from districts with fracking activity—according to a new report from the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

The report, "Natural Cash: How the Fracking Industry Fuels Congress," examines a period spanning from 2004 to 2012. In that time, CREW finds, contributions from companies that operate hydraulic fracturing wells and fracking-related industry groups rose 180 percent, from $4.3 million nine years ago to about $12 million in the last election cycle.

These donations are flowing to members of Congress at a time when some legislators are trying to increase regulation of fracking, a process in which drillers inject a mixture of water, sand, and chemicals into the bedrock to release oil and natural gas reserves. The most serious of these legislative efforts is the FRAC Act. First introduced in 2009, the act would require EPA regulation of the industry and would force fracking companies to disclose the chemicals that they inject under high pressure into the ground. Both the House and Senate versions of the bill are stalled in committee.


http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marb...cking-industry

[TeyshaBlue]

The unspoken high cost of not fracking. The study also makes a fair case for restricting LNG exports.

http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/relea...o-economy.html

[RandomGuy]

The unspoken high cost of not fracking. The study also makes a fair case for restricting LNG exports.

http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/relea...o-economy.html

That amounts to an average of $473 billion per year added to the economy during the period.

Restricting gas exports increases the magnitude of the annual gains to $487 billion, according to the report.

487-473= 14bn/yr

Drop in the bucket compared to the overall economy. Not worth restricting the profits of the producers by isolating those supplies from the world market with its rising demand, IMO.

[TeyshaBlue]

Yeah....the study makes a fair case for restricting exports.

[TeyshaBlue]

Which is why I said that in the first post.

[RandomGuy]

Not sure if your last comment is a joke but the journal is PNAS

Wasn't a joke, it just seemed a bit ambiguous to me exactly what the publication was.

[TeyshaBlue]

Oh you and your edits!

[boutons_deux]

Texas Supreme Court to Mull Underground Trespassing

A case involving the disposal of industrial wastewater pits two interests that are dear to many Texans against each other: oil and gas resources versus private property rights.

A decision by the state’s highest civil court could have major implications for both. The Texas Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on Jan. 7 in a dispute between a company that operates injection wells in Liberty County and a nearby rice farm that says wastewater from those wells has migrated into a sal er aquifer below its land. It calls the migration trespassing, for which it should be compensated.

Among several smaller questions, the court will weigh a broad one: Just how far below the earth’s surface do property lines extend?

“This is the classic battle between the two quintessential values that are in direct conflict with each other,” said Matthew J. Festa, a professor at the South Texas College of Law. “On a lot of different levels, this case could make some new law.”

This is not the first time oil and gas interests have clashed with landowners in Texas. State courts have weighed in on several such showdowns in recent years, including eminent domain cases involving land seized to build pipelines. But the court has yet to consider the idea of underground trespassing.

The dispute, which has reached the high court once before, has drawn the oil and gas industry’s attention.

The well in question is classified as Class I and used for nonhazardous industrial waste. It is not one of the 50,000 Class II waste wells that drillers typically use. But lower courts’ opinions have drawn no distinction between the wells, stirring concerns that a ruling in FPL Farming’s favor would harm production.

“Because the ability to produce oil and gas is inextricably tied to the availability of injection wells,” the Texas Oil and Gas Association says in a brief, “a new common law cause of action that threatens operation of injection wells likely threatens oil and gas production.”

http://www.texastribune.org/2013/12/...0Subscriptions

SCOTX? purchased and fully owned by corporations, esp BigCarbon

[RandomGuy]

The light touch of regulation does worry me, because of the potential for irresponsible, or incompetent drillers to do really stupid that would be almost impossible to clean up.

[Halberto]

This is pretty interesting. Honestly, I completely understand the argument here for the rice farm. You should have consent from the landowner (who has mineral rights) before you influence the chemistry under their land, regardless if the material is nonhazardous. You can't dump the material on their land, you shouldn't be able to dump it under their land either.

[boutons_deux]

"You should have consent from the landowner"

These are the BigCarbon Sky People, they don't need no steenkin consent.

[TeyshaBlue]

This is pretty interesting. Honestly, I completely understand the argument here for the rice farm. You should have consent from the landowner (who has mineral rights) before you influence the chemistry under their land, regardless if the material is nonhazardous. You can't dump the material on their land, you shouldn't be able to dump it under their land either.

Seema to me the ownership of mineral rights would carry the arguement in favor of the farmer.

[vy65]

This is pretty interesting. Honestly, I completely understand the argument here for the rice farm. You should have consent from the landowner (who has mineral rights) before you influence the chemistry under their land, regardless if the material is nonhazardous. You can't dump the material on their land, you shouldn't be able to dump it under their land either.

Seems like they have a pretty strong nuisance claim. Trespass seems like an odd theory because some level of trespassory intent has to be shown.

[Nbadan]

A study of hydraulic fracturing sites in Colorado finds substances that have been linked to infertility, birth defects and cancer.

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.

Tests of water from sites with no fracking activity also revealed the activity of so-called endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs. But the levels from these control sites were lower than in places with direct links to fracking, the study found.

http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sc...y#axzz2nl9mpeR