by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 24, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Abrahm Lustgarten / ProPublica
Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation’s geology as an invisible dumping ground.
No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental officials have assumed that deep layers of rock beneath the earth would safely entomb the waste for millennia.
There are growing signs they were mistaken.
Records from disparate corners of the United States show that wells drilled to bury this waste deep beneath the ground have repeatedly leaked, sending dangerous chemicals and waste gurgling to the surface or, on occasion, seeping into shallow aquifers that store a significant portion of the nation’s drinking water.
In 2010, contaminants from such a well bubbled up in a west Los Angeles dog park. Within the past three years, similar fountains of oil and gas drilling waste have appeared in Oklahoma and Louisiana. In South Florida, 20 of the nation’s most stringently regulated disposal wells failed in the early 1990s, releasing partly treated sewage into aquifers that may one day be needed to supply Miami’s drinking water.
There are more than 680,000 underground waste and injection wells nationwide, more than 150,000 of which shoot industrial fluids thousands of feet below the surface. Scientists and federal regulators acknowledge they do not know how many of the sites are leaking.
Federal officials and many geologists insist that the risks posed by all this dumping are minimal. Accidents are uncommon, they say, and groundwater reserves — from which most Americans get their drinking water — remain safe and far exceed any plausible threat posed by injecting toxic chemicals into the ground.
But in interviews, several key experts acknowledged that the idea that injection is safe rests on science that has not kept pace with reality, and on oversight that doesn’t always work.
“In 10 to 100 years we are going to find out that most of our groundwater is polluted,” said Mario Salazar, an engineer who worked for 25 years as a technical expert with the EPA’s underground injection program in Washington. “A lot of people are going to get sick, and a lot of people may die.”
The boom in oil and natural gas drilling is deepening the uncertainties, geologists acknowledge. Drilling produces copious amounts of waste, burdening regulators and demanding hundreds of additional disposal wells. Those wells — more holes punched in the ground — are changing the earth’s geology, adding man-made fractures that allow water and waste to flow more freely.
“There is no certainty at all in any of this, and whoever tells you the opposite is not telling you the truth,” said Stefan Finsterle, a leading hydrogeologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who specializes in understanding the properties of rock layers and modeling how fluid flows through them. “You have changed the system with pressure and temperature and fracturing, so you don’t know how it will behave.”
A ProPublica review of well records, case histories and government summaries of more than 220,000 well inspections found that structural failures inside injection wells are routine. From late 2007 to late 2010, one well integrity violation was issued for every six deep injection wells examined — more than 17,000 violations nationally. More than 7,000 wells showed signs that their walls were leaking. Records also show wells are frequently operated in violation of safety regulations and under conditions that greatly increase the risk of fluid leakage and the threat of water contamination.
Structurally, a disposal well is the same as an oil or gas well. Tubes of concrete and steel extend anywhere from a few hundred feet to two miles into the earth. At the bottom, the well opens into a natural rock formation. There is no container. Waste simply seeps out, filling tiny spaces left between the grains in the rock like the gaps between stacked marbles.
Many scientists and regulators say the alternatives to the injection process — burning waste, treating wastewater, recycling, or disposing of waste on the surface — are far more expensive or bring additional environmental risks.
Subterranean waste disposal, they point out, is a cornerstone of the nation’s economy, relied on by the pharmaceutical, agricultural and chemical industries. It’s also critical to a future less dependent on foreign oil: Hydraulic fracturing, “clean coal” technologies, nuclear fuel production and carbon storage (the keystone of the strategy to address climate change) all count on pushing waste into rock formations below the earth’s surface.
Read more from ProPublica: http://www.propublica.org/article/injection-wells-the-poison-beneath-us
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 21, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Agence France-Presse
The US government offered up new areas of the central Gulf of Mexico for drilling for the first time since the 2010 BP oil spill and received $1.7 billion in winning bids, officials said Wednesday.
Environmental groups tried to block the long-awaited sale by filing a lawsuit Tuesday arguing that it will endanger the already damaged ecosystem.
“The government is gambling with the Gulf by encouraging even more offshore drilling in the same exceedingly deep waters that have already proven to be treacherous, rather than investing in safer clean energy that creates jobs without risking lives and livelihoods,” said Jacqueline Savitz, vice president for North America at Oceana, one of five groups filing suit.
“This move sets us up for another disastrous oil spill, threatening more human lives, livelihoods, industries and marine life, including endangered species, in the greedy rush to expand offshore drilling.”
The Obama administration said it conducted a “rigorous analysis” of the impact of the 2010 spill prior to opening up new areas to leasing as part of a plan to expand “safe and responsible” domestic production.
“This sale, part of the president’s all-of-the-above energy strategy, is good news for American jobs, good news for the Gulf economy, and will bring additional domestic resources to market,” Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said in a statement.
Officials estimate that energy companies will be able to recover between 800 million and 1.6 billion barrels of oil and 3.3 to 6.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas if the tracts are fully developed.
The Interior Department had offered more than 39 million acres of new tracts ranging from three to more than 230 miles (give to 370 kilometers off the coasts of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi in depths ranging from 10 to more than 11,200 feet (3 to 3,400 meters).
It received winning bids on 2.4 million acres.
The sale comes six months after the government opened up 21 million acres — an area about the size of South Carolina — in the western Gulf of Mexico and received $337 million in winning bids for over a million acres off the coast of Texas.
The April 20, 2010 explosion on the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon drilling rig killed 11 workers, blackened beaches in five US states and devastated the Gulf Coast’s tourism and fishing industries.
It took 87 days to cap BP’s runaway well 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) below the surface that spewed some 4.9 million barrels (206 million gallons) of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
From PhysOrg: http://phys.org/news/2012-06-areas-gulf-mexico-drilling.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 8, 2012 | Lobbying, Mining & Drilling
By Der Spiegel
Germany has put the brakes on plans to use hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, to extract natural gas in places where it is difficult to access, such as shale or coal beds. Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen and Economy Minister Philipp Rösler have agreed to oppose the controversial process for the time being, SPIEGEL has learned.
Sources in the German government said that the ministers were “very skeptical” about fracking, which injects chemicals as well as sand and water into the ground to release natural gas. “There are many open questions which we will first have to carefully examine,” Rösler told close associates.
With their stance, the two ministers are opposing plans by energy companies to use the fracking process to tap into deposits of natural gas in shale, especially in northern and eastern Germany. In order to access the gas, the shale needs to be fractured using a mixture of hot water, sand and chemical additives, some of which are poisonous. Environmental groups reject the use of the technology, saying that the chemicals used can contaminate drinking water.
Local Protests
Last week, the energy giant ExxonMobil presented a study by the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research, in which researchers expressed their support for test drilling in the states of Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia.
Local environmental groups in the affected regions have already got into gear, setting up citizens’ initiatives to collect signatures for petitions and organize protests in a bid to block the fracking plans. Activists fear that the chemicals could pollute the local groundwater.
Fracking has been widely used in the US, where production of natural gas has sharply increased in recent years as the use of hydraulic fracturing becomes more widespread. Earlier this month, President Barack Obama’s administration unveiled new regulations to improve transparency on the chemicals used during fracking on public land.
From Der Spiegel: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-rejects-fracking-to-tap-natural-gas-a-831764.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 6, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Environment News Service
A federal government proposal requiring oil and gas companies to disclose the chemicals they use in hydraulic fracturing only after the completion of fracking operations is running into opposition from environmental groups.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves the high pressure injection of chemicals, sand and water into shale rock thousands of feet deep, fracturing it to release hydrocarbons trapped in tight spaces.
The Bureau of Land Management Friday issued a proposed rule that would, for the first time, require companies to publicly disclose the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing operations on 700 million subsurface acres of federal public lands and and 56 million subsurface acres Indian lands – but not before the chemicals are pumped deep underground.
The current fracking-enabled gas drilling boom across the United States has brought reports of poisoned drinking water, polluted air, mysterious animal deaths, and sick families. But industry secrecy has made it difficult for researchers to get the facts on health and environmental impacts of fracking.
Currently, there is no specific requirement for operators to disclose these chemicals on federal and Indian lands, where 90 percent of the wells drilled use hydraulic fracturing to greatly increase the volume of oil and gas available for production.
Now, the BLM proposes three new practices to protect public health, drinking water, and the environment. First, the agency proposes to require the public disclosure of chemicals used in fracking operations on federal and Indian lands after fracturing operations have been completed.
Second, the BLM proposes to require confirmation that wells used in fracturing operations meet appropriate construction standards. The agency says this would improve assurances of well-bore integrity to verify that fluids used in wells during fracturing operations are not escaping.
And third, the agency proposes to confirm that oil and gas operators have a water management plan in place for handling fracturing fluids that flow back to the surface.
“As the President has made clear, this administration’s energy strategy is an all-out effort to boost American production of every available source of energy,” said Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, announcing the proposed rule late Friday.
Read more from Environment News Service:
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 3, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Abraham Lustgarten / ProPublica
A new study has raised fresh concerns about the safety of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, concluding that fracking chemicals injected into the ground could migrate toward drinking water supplies far more quickly than experts have previously predicted.
More than 5,000 wells were drilled in the Marcellus between mid-2009 and mid-2010, according to the study, which was published in the journal Ground Water two weeks ago. Operators inject up to 4 million gallons of fluid, under more than 10,000 pounds of pressure, to drill and frack each well.
Scientists have theorized that impermeable layers of rock would keep the fluid, which contains benzene and other dangerous chemicals, safely locked nearly a mile below water supplies. This view of the earth’s underground geology is a cornerstone of the industry’s argument that fracking poses minimal threats to the environment.
But the study, using computer modeling, concluded that natural faults and fractures in the Marcellus, exacerbated by the effects of fracking itself, could allow chemicals to reach the surface in as little as “just a few years.”
“Simply put, [the rock layers] are not impermeable,” said the study’s author, Tom Myers, an independent hydrogeologist whose clients include the federal government and environmental groups.
“The Marcellus shale is being fracked into a very high permeability,” he said. “Fluids could move from most any injection process.”
The research for the study was paid for by Catskill Mountainkeeper and the Park Foundation, two upstate New York organizations that have opposed gas drilling and fracking in the Marcellus.
Much of the debate about the environmental risks of gas drilling has centered on the risk that spills could pollute surface water or that structural failures would cause wells to leak.
Though some scientists believed it was possible for fracking to contaminate underground water supplies, those risks have been considered secondary. The study in Ground Water is the first peer-reviewed research evaluating this possibility.
The study did not use sampling or case histories to assess contamination risks. Rather, it used software and computer modeling to predict how fracking fluids would move over time. The simulations sought to account for the natural fractures and faults in the underground rock formations and the effects of fracking.
The models predict that fracking will dramatically speed up the movement of chemicals injected into the ground. Fluids traveled distances within 100 years that would take tens of thousands of years under natural conditions. And when the models factored in the Marcellus’ natural faults and fractures, fluids could move 10 times as fast as that.
Where man-made fractures intersect with natural faults, or break out of the Marcellus layer into the stone layer above it, the study found, “contaminants could reach the surface areas in tens of years, or less.”
The study also concluded that the force that fracking exerts does not immediately let up when the process ends. It can take nearly a year to ease.
As a result, chemicals left underground are still being pushed away from the drill site long after drilling is finished. It can take five or six years before the natural balance of pressure in the underground system is fully restored, the study found.
Myers’ research focused exclusively on the Marcellus, but he said his findings may have broader relevance. Many regions where oil and gas is being drilled have more permeable underground environments than the one he analyzed, he said.
“One would have to say that the possible travel times for a similar thing in Arkansas or Northeast Texas is probably faster than what I’ve come up with,” Myers said.
Read more from Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/02/fracking-fluids-aquifers_n_1472355.html?ref=green
