Several days before yesterday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US (PNAS) report outlined the inherent dangers of hydraulic fracturing on health, climate and water, the DeSmog Blog published a ground-breaking analysis of the multiple devastating impacts of unregulated and rapidly increasing extraction and of "unconventional gas."
Among the findings from Fracking the Future:
The potentially devastating impacts from unconventional gas development on water supplies, air quality and the global climate deserve much greater study and scrutiny. The emerging red flags of concern raised by scientists conducting research into unconventional gas threats clearly indicate that a precautionary approach is necessary. Despite the uncertainties, one fact is clear: the U.S. unconventional gas industry is currently exempt from many of the needed transparency, oversight, monitoring, and enforcement statutes designed to protect public health and safety. That must change.
Fracking the Future investigates documents released recently by The New York Times which reveal the "well-orchestrated effort to misinform the public and officials has created the perfect recipe for the gas industry to grow much too fast, and to remain essentially unaccountable for many of its practices."
It also provides a scathing insight into the energy policy initiated during the Bush Administration, including an in-depth analysis of the impact of "The Halliburton Loophole."The 'Loophole,', a 'minor' provision inserted in the 2005 Energy Policy Act exempted hydraulic fracturing from oversight by the EPA, most specifically from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Halliburton had pioneered the frackturing process for extracting gas in the 1940s. Currently, the gas industry is the only industry permitted to pump with no public disclosure chemicals directly into the ground, even when the sites are adjacent to underground sources of drinking water.
Halliburton today is well established as one of the largest purveyors of the tools, technologies and chemicals used in the fracking process. (See SourceWatch)
A 2005 report released by the Oil and Gas Accountability Projectdocuments how the EPA removed essential findings from the study, included insubstantial data and partial findings and failed to address serious concerns relevant to the study’s conclusion.
The EPA study was also extremely limited in scope, focusing solely on coalbed methane fracturing and the potential for the underground migration of chemicals through rock layers
Comparison of greenhouse gas emissions from shale gas with low and high estimates of fugitive methane emissions, conventional natural gas with low and high estimates of fugitive methane emissions, surface-mined coal, deep-mined coal, and diesel oil. A is for a 20-year time horizon, and B is for a 100-year time horizon.
Estimates include direct emissions of CO2 during combustion (blue bars), indirect emissions of CO2 necessary to develop and use the energy source (yellow bars), and fugitive emissions of methane, converted to equivalent value of CO2 as described in the text (gray bars).
http://www.springerlink.com/...
A sampling of recommendations on hydraulic fracking:
* A national moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for unconventional gas until independent scientific studies are conducted to verify that fracking is not responsible for adverse outcomes on drinking water, public health and the global climate.
* The federal government, not the states, should strictly oversee setting and enforcing standards for unconventional gas drilling. Federal oversight of the unconventional gas industry is critical, since the states have not demonstrated the capacity to hold drillers accountable for contamination of water supplies, growing air pollution problems and the potentially devastating climate change implications of fugitive methane and other emissions. Federal agencies should employ existing federal statutes that don’t currently apply to gas drilling, and review the need for any new standards necessary to protect public health and the environment.
* Greater scrutiny is needed on common drilling practices such as cementing procedures, wastewater handling and storage of harmful drilling chemicals.
* Congress and federal agency officials must immediately require mandatory industry reporting of lifecycle emissions of gas drilling operations to ensure relevant and reliable information is accessible to the public, especially independent experts.
* They must also require mandatory disclosure of fracking fluid chemicals, including the exact chemical recipes used in each operation.
All images are from Fracking the Future.
The Full Reports
DeSmogBlog: Fracking the Future:
Carol Linnitt, Dr. Daniel Botkin, Dr. Ronald Bishop, Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, Dr. Robert Howarth, Renee Santoro and Dr. Maurice Dusseault, Jessica Ernst, and Kevin Grandi.
Download. Online
PNAS: Methane contamination of drinking water accompanying gas-well drilling and hydraulic fracturing
Stephen G. Osborna, Avner Vengoshb, Nathaniel R. Warnerb, and Robert B. Jacksona
(Published online before print May 9, 2011, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1100682108 )
Download Abstract