From “Not Evil, Just Wrong”: Gasland director hides full facts
Written by Phelim McAleer
Josh Fox has made a documentary that makes some pretty alarming claims about gas drilling across the US. But as is often the case when these claims are examined they do not stand up to scrutiny.
Fox’ documentary Gasland, claims that fracking, a way of drilling for natural gas, has polluted water and endangered lives. One of the most alarming scenes is when he lights water that residents claim has been polluted by fracking. It is dramatic and at first glance seems like a slam dunk. I mean they can light their water – it is polluted and there is gas drilling nearby. It must be responsible.
But then a little digging reveals a few inconvenient facts. A 1976 study by the Colorado Division of Water found that this area was plagued with gas in the water problems back then. And it was naturally occurring.
As the report stated there was “troublesome amounts of methane” in the water decades before fracking began. It seems that in geographical areas gas has always been in the water.
But Josh Fox knew this and chose not to put it in Gasland.
I asked him about this omission at a recent screening at Northwestern University in Chicago.
He said he had not included these facts that questioned his alarmism because “they were not relevant.” He also dropped the bombshell that I had not been aware of that there were media reports of people lighting their water as far back as 1936. Again this was not included in Gasland because it was not relevant.
Perhaps Josh you should include all the evidence and let people figure out what is relevant and what is not.
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Note from Anthony: The Gasland director apparently didn’t like this video being used to criticize him (which falls under fair use) and he has pulled it from YouTube claiming a copyright violation. Fortunately, there are other options besides YouTube to show Phelim McAleer’s video:
And as way of verification of the Gasland’s claim of fracking causing methane in groundwater was based on a fabricated claim or not, I went looking for the 1976 report that McAleer cited. I didn’t find it, but I did find another report from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) which was equally damning:
Source: http://search.datapages.com/data/doi/10.1306/03B5B46B-16D1-11D7-8645000102C1865D
Additionally, on May 13th, the New York Times reported:
Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” got a clean bill of health this week in the first scientific look at the safety of the oil and production practice.
So in light of all this, perhaps this description of Gasland’s director Josh Fox’ situation would be apt:
Liar, liar, tap water on fire!
Lest anyone think that natural gas right at the surface is a problem unique to the United States, I offer this video of the “Door to Hell” in Turkmenistan.
Also, back in 2009, before the green movement went fracking crazy, Treehugger reported this story about methane in a lake that could be ignited in a matter of fact sort of way.
Why Yes, Methane Bubbling Up From a Frozen Lake Can Be Lit on Fire
Here’s the video:
No mention of fracking or drilling nearby.
Even research scientists get a kick out of naturally occurring biogenic methane:
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In Alberta, there were lots of people who had gas collectors built into their water systems to acquire the “free” gas but the government claimed they were avoiding paying royalties and the systems were unsafe so they are no longer allowed to collect the gas.
However the government produces a brochure on how to vent methane from domestic wells since it is a common occurrence. http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/all/agdex10840
There was a TV show about fracking in Queensland, Australia. Farmers didn’t like it, as they had no control over their own land. Gas producers could just set up and start drilling….
If I had methane in my water, I’d want them to drill more gas wells around me so they could extract all the methane as quickly as possible. Or I’d plumb my water main to my gas furnace and cut down on my heating bill!
Anyhow, I doubt methane in water poses a health risk. Just don’t use open flame around your tap.
My father was fracking played-out gas wells west of Fort Worth, Texas, in the ’60s. These were shallow wells, only a couple of thousand feet deep. In those days, they injected “produced” water from the wells — recycling the salt water brought up with the oil (what little oil there was) under pressure. This is not a new technology.
What is new, apparently, is the chemical mix now used to improve the result. It is not the harmless salt water of the past, but a toxic brew designed to create higher pressures and reduced shear resistance. In the event of contamination, the health risk is higher due to the efficacy of the process, which increases the area of contamination, and the higher toxicity of the materials used.
Aside: Old-time petroleum prospectors looked for surface seeps to locate promising drilling sites. One wonders if global seepage is stable over time, or if volcanic and tectonic activity causes emissions to vary — this could be an important factor affecting atmospheric “greenhouse gas” levels not adequately accounted for in climate modeling. Anyone know if there is good solid data on global methane (and CO2) seepage and its magnitude compared to anthropogenic emissions?
I did a Google search on fracking a while back to try and learn a bit about it, the results were interesting to say the least with most returns focused on the controversy including the Wikipedia page.
As George Carlin would say. The planet is fine, the people are fracked. I can’t help but smell an agenda. As usual I hope I’m wrong.
re: well testing
The only test required for private wells in my area is for coliform bacteria. It is required for newly drilled wells and by lenders in conjunction with a mortgage application. Of course most smart people also test for ph, hardness, dissolved solids, tannins and other “ingredients” in order to determine what type of filtering would be needed. It is also wise to do so after any portion of your well water delivery system has been opened and exposed to air.
A rule of thumb from a chemist. The atomic weight of nitrogen is 14. N2 that makes up most of the air it is atomic weight 28. Rule of thumb, the atomic weight is proportional to the density among simple gases. If you take a light gas like H2 with atomic weight = 2, it will rise rapidly through free air. A heavy gas like H2S = 34, greater than 28, will tend to hug the ground. Methane is 16, much less than 28, so it’s another quite light gas. CO2 at 44 is definitely a ground hugger (which is why I think the global abundance is rather more than measured high up on Mauna Loa. There will be large amounts sitting in valleys etc.) Among other climate gases, Ozone at at a heavy 48 should not rise into the stratosphere unless carried convectively. SO2 is a real heavy at 64. Chlorine at 70 is obviously heavy enough for trench warfare.
In parts of Australia, there is another name because “frakking” can be a bit towards the Politically Incorrect. So we used “cracking” instead. We have good cracks and bad cracks, there are natural cracks that give off a lot of gas and refined cracks that are sweet. Along a fault, we can have a line of crack and that can sure get up your nose. When having a beer with dissolved gas from a metal can, we use “crack a tinnie”. People working for weeks in remote areas come to town to “chase some crack”. When they get back on site, mates ask them “Did you crack it?” Laughter is sometimes described as a “big crack up”, but conversely, that is seen by some males as an opportunity. Etc; etc.
*it’s “FRACCING”, not “fracking”.
this message brought to you by your friendly oil company shill. 😉
The controversy over fracing is far more fabricated than than even the AGW scare. As a geologist in the industry, I have seen nothing but scare tactics & misrepresentations. The whole thing took the industry by surprise because the claims are so ridiculous. Image the safest practice in your business & some outsider coming in & saying it was hazardous. You would be left speechless. How do you argue with a crazy man? You can’t. That’s essentially what has happened with the whole fracking controversy.
Oh, forgot to post this. This is pretty fun – at least to us in the biz :
Kristiabstad, the town I lived in when I went to high school in southern Sweden use water that contains hydrogen sulfide which is taken from wells deep underground from wells inside the city. Before the water is distributed to households the hydrogen sulfide is removed by letting air bubbles remove the H2S gas inside a pool. The air with the gas is then let out trough high chimneys. Depending in weather and the wind you can sometimes feel a smell of rotten eggs if you are near that building.
I guess that methane can be removed cheaply using the same method, if ever methane is a problem.
The worst thing the greenies can imagine is that there exists new potential abundant cheap alternative for energy production that can deliver base loads such as from shale gas or from thorium reactors. After all, their great master plan is to impose energy rationing, get control over people and stop economic growth.
Gore understands this well. You get Academy Awards for top-notch acting.
That firey hole in the ground picture gives new meaning to lighting a human…well, you know.
No doubt the attempt to build contempt prior to investigation will increase. I wasn’t aware of the extent of the religious ferocity of the anti-fracking movement until recently when a lefty friend went off unprovoked with all this misinformed bile. Always agenda – first and last. Fact is far less important than accusation.
Too much fear to be peddled for villification of energy company whipping boys. Just can’t resist. There’s a lot at stake in terms of “clean” ideology. Natural gas is plentiful, clean and cheap. For those with an agenda, it has to be stopped.
The main similarity with AGW is the inability to disprove the claims. “Danger” can never be ruled out.
I grew up in Western Pennsylvania. Industries there included coal strip-mining and glass bottle factories. The glass industry was there because of the gas available with the drilling technology early in the last century. Many rural homes were heated and lighted with gas produced on the property.
We hunted whitetail deer. One of the paths we used was along a stream and went past an unused well (unplugged). The well bubbled up water, sulphur (sulfur) and iron in solution, and gas. Beside the well was a large fallen tree. We often sat on the log and tossed matches (remember paper book matches?) toward this wondrous spring. Just as a lighted match was about to touch down in the water there would be a little ‘poof’ and tiny bit of flame. One day while returning along this path a friend sat for a bit to rest and threw a match or two while softly singing a popular song of the day. A nicely antlered buck came along the same path and met his demise. This was about 1960. Even then the well was old.
Background: I’m a Dallas CPA, been living/working in the oil patch all my life, with many clients in the oil business, as well as small working interests in dozens of wells. All this info has been accumulated over years working with and observing their businesses. I offer this only as a primer of what goes on downhole. Depending on geographic location, underground geology and technology used, a particular well may differ in many aspects from what I’m about to describe. Note to mods: if this is too long, just delete it. I’m not sharing anything that’s not otherwise available on the web anyway.
A well starts with a large hole, usually 20″, drilled with an auger ~50 feet down. A metal tube is inserted and cemented into place. This is called “conductor casing,” and primarily is used to prevent deterioration of the hole as drilling proceeds. The rig is set over this hole.
Once drilling reaches 200-300 feet below the local water table, surface casing is set. This is usually 9″ pipe, that is centered in the hole with special centering tools. Cement is pumped down the hole, through the space at the bottom, and back up in the space between the casing and the wellbore. This casing is designed to ensure that everything that follows does not have a path into or out of the water table. It also provides a pressure barrier, and the blowout preventer is connected to the top of this casing. The well is usually pressure tested to ensure that there are no leaks.
While the mathematical probability of a failure of this casing or cement is not zero, they have been doing it this way for 60 years, the technology is relatively straightforward, and the well is tested to make sure that there is no passage to the water table. Besides the environmental consideration, the oil and gas that comes out of a well is too valuable to “lose” it to a porous rock formation.
Then the remainder of the well is drilled to the target depth. In many areas this will pass through several oil and gas producing layers, or “zones.” In the case of a horizontal well (which is a fascinating topic that deserves a post all it’s own) the wellbore may extend several thousand feet through the target zone.
Depending on the geology below, production casing may or may not be set at this time. This is 8″ pipe that “hangs” off of the bottom of the surface casing, or may extend all the way to the surface. This, too, is cemented into place, the goal being to prevent all those valuable minerals from being lost to porous rock layers during production.
In a deep well, the rock formations are to tightly compacted that little oil or gas can escape. In these cases, it is necessary to fracture the rock formation to release the oil/gas. This is called “fracking.” It is desirable to carefully control the exact location of the fracture, to maximize production from the entire wellbore.
This process is started by sending units down the wellbore to “perforate” the casing/cement at the desired locations. This is done with +/-200 explosive charges that each blast a small hole in the side. This is repeated for every desired fracture stage. One of our long horizontal wells had 49 frac stages along 14,000 ft of wellbore.
Next, a “plug” is sent down (usually sent down along with the perforation gun, but that’s irrelevant) that will isolate each fracture stage from the rest. You don’t want to have to pump enough fluid to frac the entire wellbore at once, so you concentrate the effort on one stage at a time, working from the toe back toward the surface. Water, along with various chemicals are pumped at extremely high pressures to fracture the rock. The pumping is monitored by computers, so that the frac team knows exactly how much water has been used at what pressures, so they have some assurance of how far the rock has been fractured. Along with water, sand or small ceramic beads (think poppyseeds) are pumped down to hold the fractures open after pressure is relieved. These “proppants” hold the rock open while allowing oil/gas to flow around and toward the wellbore where it can be collected.
Each stage is fracked in turn until complete. Then the plugs are drilled out to allow the stages to comingle and oil/gas to be produced.
The frack water collected from the wellbore over the next few weeks is stored in a tank, and then pumped into a nearby disposal well (in our area. some locations recycle the water for the next job). These disposal wells are nothing more than deep deep holes that have been fractured at zones with porous rock layers, usually below the oil producing zones. Since oil floats, having a water bubble below the oil can act to sweep oil upward, toward the producing wells. These wells are cased and sealed just like oil/gas wells, and the water is not allowed to comingle with the drinking water table.
So, to those who are concerned about gas or saltwater contamination of drinking water: it’s unlikely. The water or gas would have to either penetrate thousands of feet of rock, which has successfully sealed off the gas for thousands of years (otherwise there would be no gas layer to mine), or would have to penetrate at least two steel pipes that are cemented in place. I am totally unconvinced that drilling is the cause of water contamination.
Happy drilling.
In the Po valley in Italy you can light fire to the water from the pump in the old water wells in several of the town squares.
I have seen this myself over twenty years ago. Nobody ever freaked out. It was amusing and of course well known to be naturally in the water due to the Po Valley being a huge sedimentary basin with lots of long-ago buried decaying organic materials (source rocks for oil & gas)
Why it should recently be a surprise that you find dissolved gases, minerals etc. in ground water in many parts of the world is a mystery to me.
Unfortunately people have become so stupid and disconnected from nature that they can be totally hood winked by eco-fascist zealots.
It is not so sad that eco-fascist zealots exist and that they spew propaganda. These people always existed and probably always will. What is terribly sad is that the general public is becoming gullible to believe it, and worse our own western media is abetting these eco-wackos! In the past, these people were just humored and ignored – they did not get time in national press or on major TV networks. Worse still, recently there is a trend whereby Western Governments seem to be abetting these people. (possibly because alarm => fear => more control/power)
The end result is more unnecessary central control of all private and public activities for the “good” of the fatherland and a hysterical anti-industry public who are practically willing to stop industry at ALL cost because they believe the “end justifies the means”.
It would all be a minor amusement if this trend was not leading towards a totalitarian society where no activities are allowed without the appropriate approval from central ruling authority.
Will we ever get to the situation where our democratic governments will call for industrial workers to be identified by a badge sewn on their clothes? (perhaps a badge indicating the worker’s carbon footprint)
Let’s hope not.
BBC News used a different clip of lighting methane – a young guy in what looked like a student digs. As it seemed an extreme example I happened to have it recorded so I watched it moment by moment to see if the water flowed – I did not see any. It was almost as if someone had fed mains gas in to a tap and lit it for propaganda purposes.
It is interesting to note that fracking has been used for 60 years in over 2 million operations without complaints of groundwater contamination. The difference now is that it offers the possibility of powering civilisation for another 200 years, something anathema to many Greens.
Many want a return to a pre-industrial society, along with a pre-industrial population. They have been most successful in Europe, where Spain and Portugal have crippled their economies by investing heavily in so called ‘renewables’, the UK is setting the path for de-industrialisation, and even Germany is taking the first steps to destroying its economy.
One issue is that when governments try to be green they think this is just a matter of doing what eco-activists tell them. For example it can be strongly argued that wind, solar and ethanol produce more CO2 than they save, hence the need for subsidies. So renewables are probably not ‘green’ even though backed by green organisations.
Also, by failing to confront the green propaganda they give the impression that the Green activists are the fount of all knowledge, which can lead the electorate to cut out the middlemen and vote in a green government, as happened in Germany. [See below]
Most people want to be ‘green’, but not neccessarily in a way that leads to poverty and death.
http://www.thegwpf.org/energy-news/2874-peter-glover-ten-fracking-things-everyone-should-know.html
http://www.thegwpf.org/the-climate-record/3133-germany-the-friendly-eco-dictatorship.html
Even novels have reference to natural methane in water. Nevil Shute’s “A Town like Alice” mentions a water bore being lit to amuse the heroine, if one can properly call her that.
So nothing new then, not even the lying for effect. The scary thing is when folk KNOW that the ends justify the means ( exaggerating, manipulating, etc).
The processes that release gases as well as oil are well documented. Gases are of course far more mobile and since they leave no traces (unlike an active oil seep) are probably leaking out of the ground in many places in EVERY sedimentary basin.
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/articles/article/theoracleatdelphinotjusthotair/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_seep
One of the challenges in petroleum exploration is to find the relatively few spots where gas & or oil is NOT seeping out! Source rock is prevalent everywhere but in 99.9% of cases the stuff just leaks out to surface and gets consumed by bacteria – finding the few spots where the hydrocarbons get “trapped” is actually a very very tricky business (needle in a hay stack problem).
Does Mr. Fox have any relatives at NBC who did the exploding gas tanks?
Martin Brumby says:
June 5, 2011 at 1:18 am
Sorry – was making the point (badly) that accumulation of gas in water is not uncommon. The process for accumulation of CO2 or methane is the same. What is needed is a steady source of the gas and a body of water.
This post, along with the entire collection of comments, is a great illustration of the main reason I regularly read WUWT. It’s a great learning experience. Thanks Anthony.
P.S. to davidmhoffer: In my part of Wisconsin (a state not known for lax regulatory behavior) there is also no testing required of private wells that are already in existence. (I don’t know about requirements on a new well or on the sale of the property, but the only testing on my well in 25 years has been voluntary. When the well is opened, the plumber will add chlorine as a disinfectant, but no testing is required then either.)
If you’re going to speculate in a comment, best that you say that you’re speculating (guessing) rather than sound as if you know what you’re talking about. Here on WUWT, I’ve found that the speculators/guessers, as well as alarmists, are usually called out quite effectively by people who actually know what they’re talking about because of direct experience. After a few such experiences these people usually disappear voluntarily, or else modify their behavior, rather than being banned from contributing as apparently occurs on the alarmist sites.
Any time I see the phrase “not evil, just wrong” I know almost immediately that what is to follow is “not only wrong, but evil”. In this case, the guy is deliberately making a documentary that doesn’t document alternative theories and problems that existed before fracking showed up on the scene. When questioned about it, he clearly states its “irrelevant”. He wants to shut down fracking and is willing to hurt the people who have jobs in this area and those who can use the cheap energy, when methane in the water may be explained by other processes. That’s evil in my book.
Please, for the love of all that is ‘holey’ (holey…get it? wink wink, nudge nudge)….’fracturfing’ does not contain anywhere in it’s spelling the letter ‘k’.
The slang short version is spelled fraccing or frac’ing.