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Gas drilling
 Talking Points


SPICE RACK
Some gas drilling companies will use a photo of a kitchen spice rack while discussing frac fluids. They will tell the audience: "We only use a few chemicals, just 4 or 5, and this is everyday stuff you use in your house." Spice racks hold ingredients for cooking, not ones for fraccing gas shales.
Frac fluids put a nurse in Colorado into organ arrest after she came in contact with a drilling worker soaked with frac fluids. The good news is that she lived. Bad news is that it took more than 30 hours before she could be safely released from intensive care. These are POTENT "spices" indeed!
  


Frac fluid containers on a flatbed truck
  
  


ROAD SALT
People learn that hydraulic fracturing fluids coming back out of the ground (flowback or produced water) contain high levels of salt which are bad for the environment, so the gas drilling company 'spin' will address this topic very simply. They tell the crowd they could drill for 10 years and not create as much salt runoff as the Pennsylvania highway department uses for de-icing roads during one winter.
OK then, we need the roads salted for safety and winter transportation, but do we really need gas drillers adding that much salt to the environment, especially when most of it now gets very little treatment (other than dilution with treated sewage) before being dumped back into our rivers, where we get our drinking water?
  


Brine tanker headed for a treatment plant. Wastewater
can easily be 5-times saltier than ocean water.
  
  


RESTORED TO THE SAME OR BETTER CONDITION
Drilling companies profess that they will put the land they use for gas drilling pads, frac pits, pipelines and other facilities back into the same or better condition. While they might get some vegetation to grow, it will never be the same.
  


Will this ugly slope along an impoundment get restored
to a condition as good or better than before?
  
  


ZERO CASES OF DRINKING WATER CONTAMINATION
Gas drilling company PR staff continue to state with certainty that there have been no documented cases of drinking water contamination in the United States from drilling. What about Dimock Pennsylvania, just to name one?
Be sure to ask them why so many people near drilling operations are being provided with water buffaloes at the drilling company's expense. Just a coincidence?
    


Spring house water replaced by a water buffalo
  
  

THE MON RIVER WATER PROBLEM AND GAS DRILLING WASTEWATER
Late in 2008, about 1/3 of a million Pittsburgh area residents were treated to "chunky" water, that being tap water that was much higher than normal in TDS (Total Dissolved Solids).
A gas industry consortium commissioned a study by Tetra Tech in an attempt to show that drawing millions of gallons of water from surrounding streams and waterways had little to do with the terrible tasting drinking water. Using their numbers, and assuming the study was correct.... they said hydraulic fracturing of gas wells contributed to less than 7-percent of the chunky water problem (Keep in mind this study was done by a paid contractor).

This high-TDS situation is aggravated by a couple factors:
1) low river flow in the Mon River due to massive water withdrawals, and
2) the dumping of high-TDS drilling brine into the Mon
  
Low river flow occurs primarily during drought periods. Fall 2008 was very dry with a Pennsylvania drought warning finally being issued on November 7th. This low water condition was aggravated by drillers taking free water out of local streams and watersheds to provide the millions of gallons of water required to frack (correct spelling is 'frac' which is short for fracture) each Marcellus Shale gas well. There are environmental regulations concerning the 'dewatering' of streams in the Clean Streams Law, but enforcement is lax to non-existent in southwestern Pennsylvania.
  
The dumping of drilling brine back into Pittsburgh tap water sources became a serious issue when ill-equipped waste treatment plants were accepting all the drilling wastewater they could get. The extra business greatly improved their bottom lines. However, most were not equipped to handle industrial grade wastewater and much of the processing was incomplete. Even well-equipped treatment plants have difficulty removing salts from water, so they count on dilution as the key to solving a high TDS problem. The more drilling brine is watered-down, the story goes, the closer the water will come to having acceptable TDS levels.
  
Photo below: Three tankers pumping water out of a stream running low due dry summer conditions on Marcellus Shale near Houston, Pa.  Is gas well fracking more important than aquatic life in this stream?
   

Steal the water from the fish...
Three vacuum trucks removing water from a stream experiencing low flow. Washington Firefighter Academy in Chartiers Township

  


LINKS

Marcellus Shale gas drilling wastewater

Damage to roads from heavy drilling traffic

 

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