|
|
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?
|
|
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
|
|
 |
