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The Five Myths About Fracking

Orphia Nay

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Orphia Nay
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From author Matt Ridley, the five myths about fracking:

It was the American senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who once said: “You are entitled to your opinions, but not to your own facts.” In the debate over shale gas – I refuse to call it the fracking debate since fracking has been happening in this country for decades – the opponents do seem to be astonishingly cavalier with the facts.

Here are five things that they keep saying which are just not true. First, that shale gas production has polluted aquifers in the United States. Second, that it releases more methane than other forms of gas production. Third, that it uses a worryingly large amount of water. Fourth, that it uses hundreds of toxic chemicals. Fifth, that it causes damaging earthquakes.
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http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-five-myths-about-fracking-(1).aspx

If you read the full post, he sounds like he's done the research.

Are his points correct?
 
Orphia Nay said:
From author Matt Ridley, the five myths about fracking:



http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-five-myths-about-fracking-(1).aspx

If you read the full post, he sounds like he's done the research.

Are his points correct?
Click to expand...

Since he doesn't list each point under a separate subheading, doesn't include topical images and comical captions with each point, and isn't publishing on Cracked.com, I can only assume his points are incorrect.

See here for a canonical example of a correct list of points.
 
Not very strongly referenced, but let's leave that aside.

The first two points are okay. I'm not entirely certain about the facts, but at least they're reasonably argued and there's nothing glaringly wrong with them.

The third point is extremely poorly argued. Sure, in the US 0.3% of water is used for fracking. That said, where that water is used is a serious issue. If it's in the former Great Black Swamp, use as much as you want--the biggest problem we had there when I was living there was with getting rid of the stuff. If you want to use the same amount in the Mojave Desert, the issue becomes much more serious. The issue isn't how much water is taken out of the USA each year, it's how much is taken out of each aquifer.

The fourth point isn't exactly well-argued either. Yes, you can find those chemicals in your kitchen. That doesn't mean you want to find them in your groundwater. You can find gasoline in your garage, but it's considered LNAPL in groundwater and I know various people who make a good living cleaning that stuff out of groundwater. The issue isn't "Is it in your home?" The issue is "What does it do to the groundwater?"

The fifth is something I'm honestly not sure about. Fracking can certainly, in theory at least, cause earthquakes. But I'm honestly not certain if it has or not, or the magnitude of any such quakes.

I can say that the wind industry in the USA is not immune to wildlife laws. I know numerous biologists working with the BLM and wind power companies to ensure that the turbines don't damage wildlife. I will certainly agree that it's not a viable staple energy source--too variable, takes up too much land, etc.

In all, it's not terrible. That said, it's not exactly well-informed either. It glosses over a lot of issues that really need examined in more depth in order to understand them. It reads like an okay introduction to a chapter in a book--it needs a lot of fleshing out.
 
The Facts on Fracking
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/14/opinion/global/the-facts-on-fracking.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
of the tens of thousands of deep injection wells in use by the energy industry across the United States, only about eight locations have experienced injection-induced earthquakes, most too weak to feel and none causing significant damage.
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Is Fracking Safe? The Top 10 Controversial Claims About Natural Gas Drilling
http://www.popularmechanics.com/sci...hs-about-natural-gas-drilling-6386593#slide-1
answers the question about water and much more
 
Thanks for those links, Scott. :thumbsup:

Thanks for your comments, Dinwar.

The 5 myths again:

  • "First, that shale gas production has polluted aquifers in the United States.
  • Second, that it releases more methane than other forms of gas production.
  • Third, that it uses a worryingly large amount of water.
  • Fourth, that it uses hundreds of toxic chemicals.
  • Fifth, that it causes damaging earthquakes."

Dinwar said:
The first two points are okay. I'm not entirely certain about the facts, but at least they're reasonably argued and there's nothing glaringly wrong with them.

[...]

The fourth point isn't exactly well-argued either. Yes, you can find those chemicals in your kitchen. That doesn't mean you want to find them in your groundwater. You can find gasoline in your garage, but it's considered LNAPL in groundwater and I know various people who make a good living cleaning that stuff out of groundwater. The issue isn't "Is it in your home?" The issue is "What does it do to the groundwater?"
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But if the first point - that it doesn't pollute aquifers - is correct, then that is beside the point.

Also, are those chemicals in amounts that would pollute the groundwater? Needless worries about fluoride in water come to mind.
 
Well, it isn't a needless worry about fluoride in ground water, as fluoride concentrations can naturally occur well in excess over the suggested 0.7 ppms normally added to community water systems.
 
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Orphia Nay said:
But if the first point - that it doesn't pollute aquifers - is correct, then that is beside the point.
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True. It merely points to a worrying laps in rationality on the part of the blogger. It's a case of, if he can make this type of error we need to watch for similar errors in other areas of his arguments.

Also, are those chemicals in amounts that would pollute the groundwater?
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I honestly don't know. I haven't had an opportunity to work with fracking yet (most of my drilling has been DPT stuff, to be honest).

The other issue that needs to be raised is whether the polution, if it occurred, would matter. What I mean is that if it's in an aquifer that isn't utilized by humans and is contained (some aquifers in the Great Basin come to mind) the polution is irrelevant. I'm not saying that you SHOULD do that; I'm merely saying that if they're using chemicals in an aquifer that no one uses, the process cannot impact usable water, by definition.
 
Dinwar said:
.... I'm merely saying that if they're using chemicals in an aquifer that no one uses, the process cannot impact usable water, by definition.
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A slightly anthropocentric view, no? One that depends on the interpretation of "no one" and "usable".
 
GlennB said:
A slightly anthropocentric view, no? One that depends on the interpretation of "no one" and "usable".
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Merely a poorly worded statement. Quite obviously if the aquifer is used by some organism, that's another issue. If we're talking about water buried by miles of sediment, essentially locked away from the biosphere? I'm not overly concerned with contamination. I'm not alone in this, either--before Yucca Mountain was selected as the potential nuclear repository the task force considered burying the nuclear waste in Pahrump Valley, or at least some nearby valley (the guys I spoke with on that committee were in favor of Pahrump Valley). The reason was exactly the same: if the containers leaked it'd only get into an aquifer nothing can utilize anyway. It was abandoned, as I understand it, for political, not scientific or ecological, reasons.
 
CapelDodger said:
That's what he's good at. "Industry-friendly op-ed by Matt Ridley" is, frankly, not news.


They don't rise above opinion. The truth is, fracking doesn't have enough history yet for any definite answers about it.
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Excuse me?
Every gas (and oil, for that matter) well has been "Fracked" pretty much since we started drilling. You can't get the stuff out of the rock unless you create a few cracks for it to ooze in to...
 
krx said:
Well, it isn't a needless worry about fluoride in ground water, as fluoride concentrations can naturally occur well in excess over the suggested 0.7 ppms normally added to community water systems.
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Sorry, I meant people worrying needlessly about adding prescribed amounts of fluoride to water supplies.

I was trying to make the point that kitchen chemicals could be harmless when diluted in large amounts of water.
 
rwguinn said:
Excuse me?
Every gas (and oil, for that matter) well has been "Fracked" pretty much since we started drilling. You can't get the stuff out of the rock unless you create a few cracks for it to ooze in to...
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For those who consider a masonary hammer to be a tool for brick laying: The issue here is permiability, the ability for fluid to move through a rock. A rock can have a high porosity, but a low permiabillity, and still not produce anything in a well. I used to fight this constantly--clay in particular can have a high porosity (lots of spaces between rock grains) but low permiability (the ability for fluid to move through the rock). Fracking increases permiability by creating fractures in the rock, allowing the fluid in it to move freely.

Standard drilling practices damage the rock in a lot of ways, but I wouldn't say they result in fracking the rock. At least, none that I've used have. DPT-equiped GeoPorbes with a screen are NOT easy to collect groundwater from. I can't count hte times I've spent trying to take yet another VOA vial because of that blasted bubble. Hollow-stem augurs cause a few more fractures, but we're still talking about impacting the immediate area. As for more agreesive rigs, I can't say. I know sonic rigs can bust up rock fairly well, but can't speak to their efficacy from personal experience.

Can someone provide some data on standard oil drilling techniques? It's probably fairly obvious, but my experience is generally in the remediation phase. My only experience with actual extraction (well, petrolium extraction--I've dealt with groundwater extraction systems) has been in portions of Ohio where the problem is STOPPING the oil from coming out of the ground. I think a post outlining basic industry standards would be appropriate, and my references on the subject are three hours away.
 
Wirelight said:
Exactly. When I think of fracking, the old saying "out of sight, out of mind" comes to mind everytime.
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"Get off my land!" comes to mine.

The race to expand production, even wastefully - flaring off excess production? - suggests that the industry itself suspects a short window of opportunity. When you think about it, it's not going to work out well everywhere, is it? And everywhere is pretty much where it's being proposed. Every government's drooling over the projected revenues, even while the actual return on investment remains in doubt, and can sell it as enhancing energy-security - as if any of us non-frackers will be any less energy-insecure.

It'll all end in tears, mark my words.
 
rwguinn said:
Excuse me?
Every gas (and oil, for that matter) well has been "Fracked" pretty much since we started drilling. You can't get the stuff out of the rock unless you create a few cracks for it to ooze in to...
Click to expand...
It's become an issue recently, not least because the industry itself has been promoting it as a whole new paradigm. It did unspeakable things to gas and coal prices in the US over the last few years, unnatural things. We know what we're talking about and it's not traditional extraction.
 
CapelDodger said:
How do they do that, and why?
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In the Great Black Swamp there are records of areas where the water was poisonous. We now know that the issue was petrolium contamination. My wife's thesis was on remote sensing techniques for detecting wells, using the fact that many are still seeping. Even I, with my deminished sense of smell, can identify the Silica Shale formation merely by odor (it's scratch-and-sniff).

The issue is that the oil filds in Ohio were under pressure. You just had to drill the things and they'd produce oil--no pumping required. Wildcat drilling ruined the pressure in the fields, which is why oil production shifted to new areas in the USA. There's still a huge amount of oil in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and that region; the issue is that until recently it hasn't been economically justifiable to extract it.
 
On that note: there are also wells that produce gasoline, diesel, and kerosine. And I'm not talking wells that produce products which, with refinement, become those materials--I'm talking some farmers have (or at least used to have) wells that they'd use to fill up their tractors. It was a bit rough on the engines, but the cost savings due to never buying gas were more than worth it up until extremely recently (the well I'm thinking of went dry after an earthquake).
 
Dinwar said:
Fracking increases permiability by creating fractures in the rock, allowing the fluid in it to move freely.
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The great trick is to introduce sand to keep the fractures open when the pressure is taken away. The pressure which would close the fractures still acts on the desirable fluids and up they come. No vast fields of nodding donkeys, more like the gushers of old. There's no denying its attractions.
 
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