Tag Archives: fracking

The Trillion-Gallon Loophole: Lax Rules for Drillers that Inject Pollutants Into the Earth

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by Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica, Sept. 20, 2012, 12:12 p.m.by Abrahm Lustgarten and Krista Kjellman Schmidt, ProPublica, Sept. 20

On a cold, overcast afternoon in January 2003, two tanker trucks backed up to an injection well site in a pasture outside Rosharon, Texas. There, under a steel shed, they began to unload thousands of gallons of wastewater for burial deep beneath the earth.

The waste – the byproduct of oil and gas drilling – was described in regulatory documents as a benign mixture of salt and water. But as the liquid rushed from the trucks, it released a billowing vapor of far more volatile materials, including benzene and other flammable hydrocarbons.

The truck engines, left to idle by their drivers, sucked the fumes from the air, revving into a high-pitched whine. Before anyone could react, one of the trucks backfired, releasing a spark that ignited the invisible cloud.

In The World Of Renewable Energy, Solar Power Is King And Fracking Should Be Banned

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I was reading in Google News this morning an article about how we shouldn’t worry too much about the potential for earthquakes that surrounds the process of “fracking” natural gas wells.

The article was entitled: Report: Don’t worry much about quakes and fracking.

Honestly, after reading the report, I had the feeling that the author was a little biased in their “interpretation” of the real potential “fracking” has to cause earthquakes.

In the article, the author throws around a few fancy statistics and downplays the potential for “Induced Seismicity” as a true proponent of the natural gas industry would.

It is interesting to note that since the surge in usage of fracking as a technique for revitalizing old “plays”, natural gas prices have indeed tumbled down to around $2 USD per million cubic feet, far short of where they were just a few years ago.