Another Fracking Mess for the Shale-Gas Industry
By Bryan Walsh
Time Magazine
Monday, May 09, 2011
A Chesapeake Energy natural-gas well site is
seen near Burlington, Pa, on April 23, 2010
When I traveled through northeastern Pennsylvania in March for my TIME cover story on shale natural gas, it wasn't hard to find unhappy homeowners like Sherry Vargason. Vargason, who lives on a cattle farm in rural Bradford County, has leased her land for shale-gas exploration, and a well was drilled a few hundred feet from her front door. Not long after, she began to experience problems with her water, which comes from an underground well on her property. It turned out she had unusually high levels of methane in her water — so high, in fact, that it posed an explosive threat to her home.
Methane is the main component of natural gas, and Vargason naturally connected the methane in her water to the gas operation just outside her home. But though the gas company installed a venting system on her well to reduce methane buildup, they denied there was any connection between drilling and contamination — a position the industry as a whole has maintained for years. "Unless you can prove how the contamination came, you can't do anything about it," Vargason told me.
(See "Frack: Is Shale Natural Gas Worse for the Climate than Coal?" http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2011/04/11/frack-is-shale-natural-gas-worse-for-the-climate-than-coal/ )
As it turns out, however, that proof may not be so elusive. A new study published in the May 9 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that methane levels in water wells near shale-gas hydrofracking sites is 17 times higher than they are in wells that are far from shale-gas operations. The peer-reviewed paper is the first independent scientific confirmation of something advocates, environmentalists and homeowners have passionately argued, and that the gas industry has vociferously denied. "We found a clear relationship between how near someone's drinking water was to a gas well and the concentration of methane in the water," says Robert Jackson, the director of Duke University's Center on Global Change and a co-author of the PNAS study.
Article continues: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2070533,00.html
Gold is $1,581/oz today. When it hits $2,000, it will be up 26.5%. Let's see how long that takes. - De 3/11/2013 - ANSWER: 7 Years, 5 Months
| 