Fracking Hell: what it’s really like to live next to a shale gas well

[unhappycamper]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/14/fracking-hell-what-its-really-like-to-live-next-to-a-shale-gas-well/



Nausea, headaches and nosebleeds, constant drilling, slumping property prices – welcome to Ponder, Texas.

Fracking Hell: what it’s really like to live next to a shale gas well
By Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian
Saturday, December 14, 2013 7:55 EST

Veronica Kronvall can, even now, remember how excited she felt about buying her house in 2007. It was the first home she had ever owned and, to celebrate, her aunt fitted out the kitchen in Kronvall’s favourite colour, purple: everything from microwave to mixing bowls. A cousin took pictures of her lying on the floor of the room that would become her bedroom. She planted roses and told herself she would learn how to garden.

What Kronvall did not imagine at the time – even here in north Texas, the pumping heart of the oil and gas industry – was that four years later an energy company would drill five wells behind her home. The closest two are within 300ft of her tiny patch of garden, and their green pipes and tanks loom over the fence. As the drilling began, Kronvall, 52, began having nosebleeds, nausea and headaches. Her home lost nearly a quarter of its value and some of her neighbours went into foreclosure. “It turned a peaceful little life into a bit of a nightmare,” she says.

Energy analysts in the US have been as surprised as Kronvall at how fast fracking has proliferated. Until five years ago, America’s oil and gas production had been in steady decline as reservoirs of conventional sources dried up. Then a Texas driller, George Mitchell, began trying out new technologies on the Barnett Shale, the geological formation that lies under the city of Fort Worth, Texas, and the smaller towns to the north, where Kronvall lives. Mitchell did not invent the technique. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, was first used in the 1940s to get the gas out of conventional wells. As the well shaft descended into the layer of shale, the driller would blast 2m-4m gallons of water, sand and a cocktail of chemicals down the shaft at high pressure, creating thousands of tiny cracks in the rock to free the gas.

Mitchell’s innovation was to combine the technology with directional drilling, turning a downward drill bit at a 90-degree angle to drill parallel to the ground for thousands of feet. It took him more than 15 years of drilling holes all over the Barnett Shale to come up with the right mix of water and chemicals, but eventually he found a way to make it commercially viable to get at the methane in the tightly bound layers of shale. The new technology has turned the Barnett Shale into the largest producible reserve of onshore natural gas in the US. Other operators, borrowing from Mitchell’s work, began drilling in Colorado, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and, most recently, California. More than 15 million Americans now live within a mile of an oil or gas well, 6 million of them in Texas.

[Orrex]

1. Why/how would fracking drive her neighbors into foreclosure?

[djean111]

3. Perhaps they need to move because of medical issues or just do not want to live right

next to fracking, or get jobs elsewhere - but they will never be able to sell their homes, they have to just pack up and leave the homes to the banks.
I don't think people who own homes whose value drops and saleability evaporates should have to "take one for the team". There is no team, really, anyway. Just profiteers.

[Orrex]

4. Possibly. The article could have been more clear on this point, and others.

I'm not defending fracking or its profiteers, just wondering why the article phrased it that way.

[Uben]

2. I'm about 20 miles northeast of Ponder....

....no fracking in my immediate area, but there are literally thousands of gas and oil wells in my county. I worked on a wire-line and perforating truck in the oilfield for a while and I have seen how unresponsible these independents do business. The railroad commission is in charge of regulating and monitoring these oil companies, and in the two years I worked in the oilfield, I never saw anyone from the RR commission.
Once a well is abandoned, it is plugged and cemented. We were required to put at least six bags of concrete on top of the plugs, but I have seen guys just spread a little cement around the wellhead so if the RR comm. did show up, it appeared to be done when it was not. They don't give a shit. Whatever is the cheapest way. They are going to foul the underground reservoirs of water and there will be no way to tell who is responsible. Actually, they ALL are reponsible as well as the RR commission. However, the RR Comm. has so few inspectors, there is no way they can do their job correctly. One guy to watch over thousands of wells?
If I lived within a 1/2 mile or so of a fracking operation, I would sell out and move before the water supply goes.
Also, it takes millions of gallons of water to frack a well, and they are using up a lot of the surface water we use for drinking to frack these wells. There are always ongoing battles for water rights, and the damned oil companies usually win by throwing absurd amounts of money into the mix. Greed and pollution wins....we lose.