Hydraulic Fracturing: Regulators Weigh Drilling in Marcellus Shale, EPA Opens Public Hearings

[defendandprotect]

As Regulators Weigh Drilling in Marcellus Shale, EPA Opens Public Hearings on Health and Environmental Impact of Hydraulic Fracturing
The Environmental Protection Agency has begun public hearings in Binghamton, New York on hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," a controversial technique that mining companies use to extract natural gas from rock formations thousands of feet underground. The hearings are part of a broad investigation by the EPA into the human health and environmental effects of fracking. We speak to Josh Fox, director of the Sundance award-winning documentary Gasland, which opens in theaters across the country this Wednesday, and ProPublica reporter Abrahm Lustgarten, who has written extensively about natural gas drilling.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/14/as_regulators_weigh_drilling_in_marcellus

[doc03]

1. People in this area are making a killing selling gas

leases. I wish I had just 50 acres I would be set for life.

[XOKCowboy]

2. Then all you'll need is drinking water.

The thing about a lease is you still have to live there. The oil companies aren't interesting in buying your land, just leasing all that's beneath the ground.

Have you seen the documentary Gasland?

[doc03]

3. People are getting in the area of $3000 to $3500 an acre

plus royalties and get to keep their land. Water, we have the Ohio river. I haven't seen it and really don't know much about the downside of it since I don't have any land anyway haven't paid much attention to it..

[Champion Jack]

5. drink the water from the mercury laced Ohio river?

where abouts are you?

[doc03]

6. It has it's advantages, you can tell the temperature of the

water by how high the mercury rises in the glass. The city periodically sends us their water analysis and it doesn't contain high levels of mercury.

[XOKCowboy]

8. I highly recommend everyone watch Gasland.

Here is the Wikipedia entry on it..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasland

and here is Josh's website with trailer.

http://gaslandthemovie.com/

See it if you can.

[yella_dawg]

4. There is a great deal of shale recovery in my area.

They may dig as many as twenty holes in a radial pattern stacked as deep as the shale formation. Rigs are now built to walk the few feet necessary to begin a new hole in the pattern. The holes go down six to seven thousand feet, then turn horizontal for as much as eight to ten thousand feet. The second hole is drilled immediately below the first. Perhaps a third hole (or more) is drilled until the bottom of the formation is reached. Then another set of holes is drilled to form a fan-like pattern like bicycle spokes. When completed, the horizontal sections are fractured at intervals until the formation is completely destroyed.

Fracturing has typically been used to shatter rock formations to improve natural gas recovery rates. In the case of shale recovery, they augment any naturally occurring oxygen in the formation and apply pressure sufficient to create combustion much like a diesel engine. The formation blows itself apart at a microscopic level. The shale becomes slurry and is pumped out.

The process leaves a circular void roughly three miles below the surface and as much as six miles across and up to seven hundred feet deep (in this particular formation). The rig moves a few miles and does it again. This is being done under the Dallas / Fort Worth metroplex. Which is the fourth largest metro area in the US and home to six and a half million people. At this point, I cannot imagine that the residents of DFW will avoid waking up in a crater one morning. May be next year, or next century, but at some point, those holes have to cave in. We're not talking a single cavity, but cavities laid out like checkers on a board covering thousands of square miles of the shale formation.

On a brighter note, the Trinity river flows through both Dallas and Fort Worth, so the result will be an amazing system of deepwater lakes.


People wonder why I'm a misanthrope.

[doc03]

7. Interesting, we have mine subsidence now it sounds like

that could at some point be far worse.