Drive through northern Pennsylvania and you’ll see barns, cows, silos and drilling rigs perched on big, concrete pads.
Pennsylvania is at the center of a natural gas boom. New technology is pushing gas out of huge shale deposits underground. That’s created jobs and wealth, but it may be damaging drinking water. That’s because when you “frack,” as hydraulic fracturing is called, you pump thousands of gallons of fluids underground. That cracks the shale a mile deep and drives natural gas up to the surface ”” gas that otherwise could never be tapped.
My first two degrees are in geology, and my kid sister worked as a groundwater geologist for the State of Pennsylvania for more than 25 years. The story is a crock.
In Pennsylvania the Marcellus Shale is between 5000 and 9000 feet underground. Nearly all aquifers are within 500 feet of the surface. Back in my Environmental Geology studies over 40 years ago we looked at the issue of methane (explosions) and petroleum products in Pennsylvania groundwater. This was a generation before anyone even began the fracking process.
The 1859 Drake well in Pennsylvania found oil at about 100 feet. There are numerous oil-bearing sands and sandstones within the typical 500-foot limit for water wells. These units were the source of trouble half a century ago, and it has not changed.
To blame it on fracking is either terribly ignorant … or pushing an agenda despite sound science.
yah, i’m sure they are making the whole thing up. that makes sense.
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Bart rejects this story based on his own and his sister’s professional expertise and academic qualifications. On what basis to you choose to accept it at face value?
I have to agree with Magnolia. Surely the news media in general and NPR in particular wouldn’t tell a lie for political purposes. Would they?
Agree with David and Magnolia. The bloke from Duke who is studying this seems to be taking all sorts of variables into consideration, continues to research, and is not making any hard and fast conclusions.I accept that a lot more favorably than someone who hasn’t done the testing dismissing it out of hand based on previous academic knowledge.
The most precious commodity in the world is safe drinking water. From where I sit, we are in exceptional drought with our water sources drying up and the groundwater in this area not being fit for human consumption simply because of the geology. We can find and use other fuel sources but our water sources are limited. And water is too vital of a resource, too necessary to sustain life, to jeopardize.
Tenaska wants to build a state-of-the-art “clean coal” plant down the highway from me. Texans aren’t generally known for environmental heavy-handedness but folks are fighting this venture because of the huge water needs. Tenaska was begging our city to sell them water and the mayor refused. They came back begging for our effluent water; the city refused again.
Yeah, it IS that important to be very, very careful about technologies that require large amounts of water (even effluent) and can jeopardize water sources.
WEll, I guess it is all a figment of NPR’s imagination, but I lived in a town in Colorado where fracking did have a devastating impact on our water supply, so much so that we received notices every month with our water bills that we shouldn’t allow children to drink the water for fear it might cause brain damage. Yup, corporations are only looking out for our good, so it mustn’t have been what they said it was. I’m delighted that Mr. Hall with his geology degrees and his relatives with similar expertise are there to set us ordinary folk straight.
Interesting, Dan. The situation you describe did *not* make it onto the EarthJustice website listing Colorado fracking problems. EJ are not exactly a corporate site.
That said, nobody should be using benzene (in particular) in fracking fluids, especially in case of surface spills or worker contamination. One of the most common fracking additives, BTW, is ordinary gelatine.
The real issue is fracking additives, even though in most geological situations they’re not important provided the target formation is deep enough, and provided upper portions of the injection well are properly cased.
Pennsylvania to this day has a far bigger problem with the Bellefonte kepone spill of some forty years ago than with anything related to fracking.