From Duke University , something sure to irritate people like Josh Fox, Joe Romm, and Bill McKibben who are certain that fracking is terrible.
DURHAM, N.C. — A new study by scientists at Duke University and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) finds no evidence of groundwater contamination from shale gas production in Arkansas.
“Our results show no discernible impairment of groundwater quality in areas associated with natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing in this region,” said Avner Vengosh, professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.
The scientists sampled 127 shallow drinking water wells in areas overlying Fayetteville Shale gas production in north-central Arkansas. They analyzed the samples for major and trace elements and hydrocarbons, and used isotopic tracers to identify the sources of possible contaminants. The researchers compared the chemical composition of the contaminants to those found in water and gas samples from nearby shale gas drilling sites.
“Only a fraction of the groundwater samples we collected contained dissolved methane, mostly in low concentrations, and the isotopic fingerprint of the carbon in the methane in our samples was different from the carbon in deep shale gas in all but two cases,” Vengosh said. This indicates that the methane was produced primarily by biological activity in the region’s shallow aquifers and not from shale gas contamination, he said.
“These findings demonstrate that shale gas development, at least in this area, has been done without negatively impacting drinking water resources,” said Nathaniel R. Warner, a PhD student at Duke and lead author of the study.
Robert Jackson, a professor of environmental sciences at Duke, added, “Overall, homeowners typically had good water quality, regardless of whether they were near shale gas development.”
Vengosh, Warner, Jackson and their colleagues published their peer-reviewed findings in the online edition of the journal Applied Geochemistry.
Hydraulic fracturing, also called hydrofracking or fracking, involves pumping water, sand and chemicals deep underground into horizontal gas wells at high pressure to crack open hydrocarbon-rich shale and extract natural gas. Accelerated shale gas drilling and hydrofracking in recent years has fueled concerns about water contamination by methane, fracking fluids and wastewater from the operations.
Previous peer-reviewed studies by Duke scientists found direct evidence of methane contamination in drinking water wells near shale-gas drilling sites in the Marcellus Shale basin of northeastern Pennsylvania, as well as possible connectivity between deep brines and shallow aquifers, but no evidence of contamination from fracking fluids.
“The hydrogeology of Arkansas’s Fayetteville Shale basin is very different from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale,” Vengosh noted. Far from contradicting the earlier studies, the Arkansas study “suggests that variations in local and regional geology play major roles in determining the possible risk of groundwater impacts from shale gas development. As such, they must be taken into consideration before drilling begins.”
Human factors — such as the drilling techniques used and the integrity of the wellbores – also likely play a role in preventing, or allowing, gas leakage from drilling sites to shallow aquifers, Vengosh said.
“The take-home message is that regardless of the location, systematic monitoring of geochemical and isotopic tracers is necessary for assessing possible groundwater contamination,” he said. “Our findings in Arkansas are important, but we are still only beginning to evaluate and understand the environmental risks of shale gas development. Much more research is needed.”
Vengosh, Warner and Jackson’s coauthors on the new study were Timothy M. Kresse and Phillip D. Hays of the USGS, and Adrian Down and Jonathan D. Karr of Duke.
Funding for the study was provided by Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment and the Duke Center on Global Change. Field sampling activities were funded by Shirley Community Development Corporation; Faulkner County, Ark.; the University of Arkansas; the Arkansas Water Resource Center; and the USGS Arkansas Water Science Center.
CITATION: “Geochemical and Isotopic Variations in Shallow Groundwater in Areas of the Fayetteville Shale Development, North-Central Arkansas,” Nathaniel R. Warner, Timothy M. Kresse, Phillip D. Hays, Adrian Down, Jonathan D. Karr, Robert B. Jackson, Avner Vengosh. Applied Geochemistry, May 15, 2013.
DOI: 10.1016/j.apgeochem.2013.04.013
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Good news!
More good news if these folks can make enough of it. But I wonder how they plan to dispose of the foam after it has soaked up the contaminates?
http://www.wncn.com/story/22251184/raleigh-company-may-have-solution-to-clean-up-frackings-toxic-mess
The process of fracking involves pumping millions of gallons of chemically treated water about two miles into the ground at an extremely high pressure. That pressure then causes fracturing of the shale formation, which pushes natural gas up to the surface.
The process, though, also pushes millions of gallons of now toxic water to the surface.
“It’s actually a toxic waste problem that we just deal with,” said Scott Bolin, CEO of Tethis. “When you are doing mining or any kind of industrial processing, you end up generating millions and millions of gallons of water that is very salty.”
Bolin says Tethis has created a biodegradable foam that could transform that toxic problem.
The sponge was created by two professors in the forestry department at N.C. State who were trying to figure out what to do with waste that comes out of the pulp and paper industry. So they mixed it with seashells and created the material that now makes up Tethex sponge.
Tethex binds with dissolved salts, mineral and other materials, allowing them to be physically removed from waste water.
Scott says the material is the key to soaking up dangerous metals, nuclear material and salt, which is produced during the highly controversial practice of fracking.
In the past, the water was dumped into what are called re-injection wells; which means, in the last 30 years, 70 trillion gallons of the water has been dumped back into the ground. Tethis says, with its fracking sponge, that water can be re-used…
Good news as far as it goes, but it doesn’t cover everything, only shallow groundwater quality in Arkansas’s Fayetteville. What causes the difference between the two samples showing shale gas methane and the other samples? What is the difference between Arkansas’s Fayetteville Shale and Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale – depth, geology, or what? Are there possible problems not addressed by this study and therefore not cleared by this study, eg. contamination of deeper aquifers, contamination in different geologies, loss of water from aquifers, land subsidence, etc? I’m not saying these are existing problems, just that the study is limited to other things.
Fracking is dangerous, sorry man.
“””””……Much more research is needed.”……””””””
In other words, send more grant money.
Seems to me Tethex is throwing more gunk at the problem of what to do with an already large volume of tainted water that is now tainted with Tethex. The water becomes two stages removed from the pure state it was in before it was used for fracking and then made ever less safe with Tethex. We’re no closer to curing the problem. Maybe they could toss it all into the Berkeley Pit in Montana – everything else is going in there. How could it get worse? It has now become the Hotel California for migratory water fowl.
To put a fine point on it – we would like the water back, clean and drinkable. After we toss in Tethex, a waste by-product like flouride, and fracking snot which is the slurry used to pass gas professionally, I’m betting it delivers the runs to anyone who drinks it. The sun is going down on a work-a-day at the fracking mill and America wants to know where we’re putting the Tethex and fracking snot left-overs, and is the water that goes into it drinkable when it comes back out? Not fracking likely.
It sounds to me like we don’t have an adequate tariff on fracking snot to make reclaiming and reusing it profitable. Sounds an awful lot like Obamacare for efficiency and problem solving. Why are we not using compressed/liquified CO2 what at least has shown significant benefit to the world at large. Unlike Tethex, we would all die without CO2.
The article raised a few questions in my mind:
I thought the fracking fluids were brines – or at least a byproduct of the fracking procedures – and thus contamination.
Also, I wondered what Duke tested for in their Arkansas field study? Did they survey for all the contaminants found in the Marcellus operation?
My understanding that no drinking water anywhere has been found to have been affected by fracking.
The only thing dangerous about hydraulic fracturing of rocks miles in the ground to allow hydrocarbons to be produced is the hysterical response of the Gaia-worshiping bunny people.
Water is commonly unusable for drinking once it has migrated to 2,500 to 3,000 feet below surface because it has collected to much dissolved salt getting that deep. In many cases the major quality problem with many domestic water wells are drillers drilling too deep trying to find more producible water zones. The methane found in the landowner well which started the USEPA Range Resources enforcement case was most probably caused by this problem.
My brother-in-law lives in rural central Alberta. About 3 years ago he noticed a hissing sound from his water well. Not sure what it was he did something rather dumb…he took a match to it and a small jet of flame shot out from the wellhead (fortunately his well is outdoors). They had been fracking not far from his home and apparently they managed to get natural gas into the well water reservoir. He told me that he had an interesting dilemma: does he keep it quiet and find a way to use the free gas or does he tell someone that there is a problem. Fortunately I convinced him to tell the authorities and a few days later there was no more gas leakage. Later I asked how often the well water has been tested. It has not been tested.
I am not against finding ways of extracting gas from the ground but there needs to be more regulation, monitoring and research in place as there seems to be a “wild west” attitude toward fracking. Unfortunately reports like the one above do not address all possibilities, only probabilities, and they provide the industry a misdirected sense of safety.
OK, so who’s most likely to be secretly funding the anti-fracking rent-a-crowd? The evil coal industry or the evil nukular/military guys?
My experience with the anti-fracking loonies is they are simply lonely and dimwitted people who are searching for a cause to make themselves relevant. You get them together at a meeting and each will present their particular brand of paranoia, land subsidence, poisoned drinking water, using up all the water, et cetera, ad nausium. They meet and bond and are buddies for life. Money cannot buy that level of willful ignorance.
I don’t think they believe fracking is terrible, they just want it to be terrible so they can have a reason to stop it.
The sooner people wake up to what these civilization-haters are really up to, the better.
The take home message is ..gimme more grant money!
The anti-fracking movement is:
1. Funded and supported by Gazprom, the Russian producer which supplies natural gas to much of Europe.
2. Funded and supported by the ilk of Greenpeace, who need an alternative scare story to replace global warming now that it has become boring and continually demonstrated to have been grossly exaggerated.
3. A boon for ambulance chasing lawyers who specialise in promoting bad science lawsuits.
4. Oblivious to the huge economic benefit the USA is deriving from fracking. Ultimately the rest of the world will follow.
5.Subject to virulent attack from the providers of wind turbines and solar power because, unlike them, fracked natural gas provides an energy source which is both cheap and reliable.
6. Supportive of totally unsubstantiated, bad science, scare stories, such as “Fracking will cause earthquakes, fracking will pollute ground water and fracking uses poisonous chemicals.” None of which are the slightest bit relevant for properly constructed wells, which are deep (>1,000 metres) in a stable geological environment.
So what is wrong with: i) cheap energy, ii) energy independence and iii) reliable energy?
For those who say: “Hey man, fracking is dangerous.” All you are doing is expressing your complete ignorance on the subject. There are around 550,000 fracked wells in the USA today. If there had been any real problems with the industry, then these would have been exposed long ago, but Greenpeace inspired problems are another matter altogether.
“variations in local and regional geology play major roles in determining the possible risk of groundwater impacts from shale gas development. As such, they must be taken into consideration before drilling begins.”
This is called an open door, I believe.
Good news but mat not satisfy the NIMBY element in the UK who seem to want to live in caves warmed by open wood fires.
“The take-home message is that regardless of the location, systematic monitoring of geochemical and isotopic tracers is necessary for assessing possible groundwater contamination,”
Which we will happily carry out for a fat fee….
if its so bad???? why has Germany been fracking with no problems since the early 60’s!!
Much of this is reminiscent of the power line and cell phone scares of the early and mid 1990’s. Does anyone remember when power lines were going to give all of us Leukemia? And a cell phone near your head could produce a brain tumor? The epidemiology finally put that to rest, but not before there was a great deal of time, expense, and misinformation.
Continue independent monitoring, by all means. But people have been drinking water from the ground with trace levels of methane since the stone age–our bodies are likely adapted to it. People have also had spontaneous gas leaks on their lands for hundreds of years. I have not yet seen hard evidence of contamination well above the baseline–assuming that the good folks doing the monitoring really know what the baseline is.
Richard George says:
May 15, 2013 at 11:23 pm
“… people who are searching for a cause to make themselves relevant”
Well said, that applies to just about everyone who finds some kind of issue with modern ways of life.
Opto, I live in Calgary. My family heritage includes 4 farms, one east of High River, one west of Airdrie, and two others in the general area.
All four of those farms at some point had natural hydrocarbons in their well water, long before fracking, according to my parents who are in their 70s. I distinctly remember the sour gas smell when I was very young in the 60s at the Airdrie farm. Lo and behold, some people came to their door one day in the early 70s and said their land was over a prime formation for exploration, and a test well is STILL producing today (that farm was near the highest hill in the vicinity).
This is Alberta, we have all hell for a basement. I suspect that if your brother in law gets testing done he’ll find that any hydrocarbon presence in his well water was coincidental with any nearby activity. It’s NORMAL in this part of the world to have oil and gas underneath you, especially as you get closer to the sands.
There have been a few people in Alberta that are complaining about fracking near their property affecting their well water, and each time a team goes to investigate and can’t find any connection. These teams aren’t the oil companies, they’re usually environmentalist types who WANT to find a connection. If there was a demonstrable connection it would have been impossible to hide it.
I realize that people WANT fracking to be a horrible thing, but the evidence to date shows that as practised now it is not. Those involved are not maverick wild-west types. Contrary to popular belief Alberta oil and gas production is under very tight control and is being watched by practically every enviro and special interest group in the world. Oil execs are not reckless cowboys (well, some are cowboys).
I raised 6 kids and livestock on a farm in eastern Canada that had sulphur and natural gas in the well water – the whole area was affected and it was natural – there was no production of oil and gas in the region. The well drillers even put a small elbowed pipe on the top of the cap to vent it. I’m 75, healthy as a show horse and still working in the mining industry. My children are all healthy and their children. Visitors raved about the great coffee it made (tea- well not so much, except for we being used to it.). We had the water checked and they said there was no problem, the area had been farmed for 200 years.
In a mine setting, we do a baseline environmental study before development and then monitor water, etc. beyond the life of the mine to detect and ameliorate problems if and when they start. We aren’t the delicate plants we are made out to be these days, although there seems to be more cranial problems which manifest themselves as fear. The water seems to have been just fine for the folks in Alberta who lived on top of the world’s largest natural “oil spill” for a few generations.
The results are no surprise to anyone who is actually involved in drilling modern oil & gas wells.
What we truly need is the same type of studies in all the major resource play areas of the country (at least the Bakken, Eagleford & Marcellus / Utica for starters). I am certain that the results for these areas would also come out the same. It would certainly go a long way in debunking the latest eco-alarmist myth that “fracking” is bad. Everyone should remember that this myth is brought to you by the same folks that brought you the CAGW -CO2 myth.
Socialists hate capitalism because it works. They will go to all extremes to end it. It was never about saving the planet and it’s not about saving the farm now.