There's a major new front-page article in the New York Times this morning concerning the operational safety of hydro-fracked natural gas wells. It's shocking and scary, far in excess of what you might expect from the title: Regulation Is Lax for Water From Gas Wells.
Just for comparison. here's the title from the Guardian UK "What the frack? US natural gas drilling method contaminates water". Oh, those crazy Brits and their understatement!
The Times report is a good one and deserves to be read in full but, in brief: far more HF-NG well wastewater is being produced than has previously been disclosed. Waste treatment plants are not equipped to cleanse-out much of the exotic contaminants and in any event the volume of the waste effluent is often overwhelming.
Radioactivity assays at Pennsylvania drinking water intake facilities are apparently done only at intervals of 6-9 years or so. Therefore in many cases the most recent testing was performed prior to the current drilling boom. New rounds of testing for radioactive contaminants are producing disturbing results.
“We simply can’t keep up,” said one inspector with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection who was not authorized to speak to reporters. “There’s just too much of the waste.”
“If we’re too hard on them,” the inspector added, “the companies might just stop reporting their mistakes.”
Poor dears.
At this point I'm not sure if hydro-fracking is just a bad idea all around or an insane desperate gambit, but aquifer poisoning, river contamination and toxin leaching are a high price to pay for an extraction technique. There has to be a better way.
Now a quorum of drill-it-alls may snark that since tonight is Oscar night and Gasland (an unnerving documentary about hydro-fracking) has been nominated this is all some kind of New York-Hollywood conspiracy. Yet the industry attacks on that film have so far been less a rigorous refutation of the film's claims than a canonical confirmation of the Streisand Effect.
And anyway not to worry, the new Governor is On The Case:
In December, the Republican governor-elect, Tom Corbett, who during his campaign took more gas industry contributions than all his competitors combined, said he would reopen state land to new drilling, reversing a decision made by his predecessor, Edward G. Rendell. The change clears the way for as many as 10,000 wells on public land, up from about 25 active wells today.
In arguing against a proposed gas-extraction tax on the industry, Mr. Corbett said regulation of the industry had been too aggressive.
Pennsylvania deserves better, the country deserves better. We All deserve better.
