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Groundwater Contamination May End the Gas-Fracking Boom

158 points by zzzeek 13y ago

tibbon 13y ago
Aside from money (which is pretty motivating), I don't understand why the gas companies simply continue to deny that there is contamination and that there are negative outcomes to the environment for doing this (let's put it this way, its almost certainly not a positive impact. Its unlikely to be a neutral impact.) Its like what cigarette companies used to do- just constantly deny what's completely obvious.
- adestefan 13y ago
  Because it will take decades for any lawsuits to make it through the courts. If they were to lose such lawsuits, by that time they'll have already pulled out enough money to cover the cost of the lawsuits with the rest just being gravy.
  - johnward 13y ago
    They will move as fast as they can to make as much money as they can. By the time something could stop it they will be so deep in the pockets of our representatives that it will be hard to make it happen.
- anateus 13y ago
  (Hi David!) Well, yes it's money, but the complication is that fracking has that effect only in some places. The contamination is much more a function of the geology than the fracking process itself. Pennsylvania has been hit heavily with contamination. Most wells drilled are safe: http://mitei.mit.edu/publications/reports-studies/future-natural-gas http://mitei.mit.edu/publications/reports-studies/future-nat... There is an annoying combination of legal and commercial pressures that prevent the companies from going "actually it's more dangerous than we previously said" without it seeming like "it was a lie all along this is TERRIBLE". The crucial take-away is that there is a bunch of additional geologic due diligence that the gas companies could be doing that would actually enable them to continue fracking. But the boom is driven in part by the utter dirt cheapness of it now and they're afraid of hopping off the wave.
- jeffasinger 13y ago
  The other thing to consider is that simply not getting natural gas at all is also a terrible idea. A lot of the power infrastructure that handles peaks in demand (and averts rolling blackouts) uses natural gas. The question we need to be asking ourselves is which is the least bad alternative, because they're all bad.
- ars 13y ago
  > let's put it this way, its almost certainly not a positive impact. No. It's completely positive. Methane has almost no pollution, and far less CO2 than any other large scale energy source. The "contamination" is methane in water, which is harmless even if you drank it, and trivial to remove.
  - lhc- 13y ago
    What about the other pollutants dumped by fracking?
    - ars 13y ago
      See my reply to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6265828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6265828 He picked the ones that seemed most dangerous to him, and they are all harmless. (But I haven't checked if there are others.) Don't forget these chemicals are injected deep underground, so unlike lighter-than-air methane they won't easily get to water. (PS. It's not "dumping" if you are actively using them. Dumping is the waste you don't need, no need for inaccurate emotive language.)
  - smky80 13y ago
    Methane's greenhouse gas effect is 20x that of CO2. [0] --- [0] http://epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html http://epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html
    - ars 13y ago
      The quantities we are talking about are pretty minimal though, and definitely worth the tradeoff with less coal (or oil for that matter).
      - smky80 13y ago
        I don't have a source handy, but I remember reading something to effect that when you figured in all the transportation costs for the fracking fluid and gas production, it really wasn't so clean.
tocomment 13y ago
Why isn't there a way to track without toxic chemicals?
- mhb 13y ago
  Maybe there is, but it works with the chemicals they currently use. I'm sure the geological engineers would welcome suggestions. Additional information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing
  - johnward 13y ago
    This is interesting because the gas industry defends the fluid as harmless. A quick look at the ingredients and it doesn't seem that harmless. - hydrochloric acid: Concentrated hydrochloric acid (fuming hydrochloric acid) forms acidic mists. Both the mist and the solution have a corrosive effect on human tissue, with the potential to damage respiratory organs, eyes, skin, and intestines irreversibly. Upon mixing hydrochloric acid with common oxidizing chemicals, such as sodium hypochlorite (bleach, NaClO) or potassium permanganate (KMnO4), the toxic gas chlorine is produced. - polyacrylamide: Concerns have been raised that polyacrylamide used in agriculture may contaminate food with the nerve toxin acrylamide. - Ethylene glycol (the stuff in antifreeze): Ethylene glycol is moderately toxic with an oral LDLO = 786 mg/kg for humans.[8] The major danger is due to its sweet taste. Because of that, children and animals are more inclined to consume large quantities of it than of other poisons. Upon ingestion, ethylene glycol is oxidized to glycolic acid which is, in turn, oxidized to oxalic acid, which is toxic. It and its toxic byproducts first affect the central nervous system, then the heart, and finally the kidneys. Ingestion of sufficient amounts can be fatal if untreated. - glutaraldehyde: As a strong disinfectant, glutaraldehyde is toxic and a strong irritant - Isopropyl alcohol (I think this stuff is in aerosol deodorant and hairspray): Isopropyl alcohol and its metabolite, acetone, act as central nervous system (CNS) depressants. Symptoms of isopropyl alcohol poisoning include flushing, headache, dizziness, CNS depression, nausea, vomiting, anesthesia, and coma.
    - ars 13y ago
danso 13y ago
The OP is a kind of shallow summation of the details here...first of all, the study was published in June. Second, it's not the "first step" in determining the link between fracking in the Marcellus Shale and water contamination...a previous study by Duke, which the OP references later, documented "systematic evidence" of such a link. 2013: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/06/19/1221635110.full.pdf+html http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/06/19/1221635110.full... 2011: http://biology.duke.edu/jackson/pnas2011.html http://biology.duke.edu/jackson/pnas2011.html I bring this up not to be pedantic, but to point out that the OP comes off as that this is new conclusive evidence...it is not. Opponents of fracking would argue that there are several other studies showing similar data, and they'd argue that politics/industry has shelved other planned studies. In other words, it's not just amount or existence of evidence that comes into play in this debate.
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  Yeah this is the worst kind of nerd bait. "You guys already know that the oil companies are evil and will poison people given the chance. Here's a tiny piece of evidence that you could misinterpret in multiple ways" To the author's credit, at least he pulled back and didn't do the entire ranting, hand-waving ritual. I believe that job is being left for online commenters to complete :) The funny thing is, without the overriding emotional narrative many people have, if you just explained what the study says using other terms, most folks would realize how tenuous and superficial the reporting is. Correlative research is great, but geesh, it's a tiny, almost minuscule part of actually accomplishing anything. Most of the time, it's a waste of time. Medical research, for instance, is full of correlative research that never amounted to a hill of beans.
  - anon1385 13y ago
    >Medical research, for instance, is full of correlative research that never amounted to a hill of beans. Yes like smoking being linked with cancer. I'm glad we listened to the corporate funded libertarians on that one and didn't fall prey to the wishy washy lefty propaganda and emotive narratives about evil tobacco companies wanting to make money from killing people. What a ridiculous, politically motivated caricature that was. I'd like to point out that the Heartland Institute and Cato still deny the link between passive smoking and cancer, so it's not like that kind of lobbying is all in the distant dark past. The very same people writing lies about tobacco are writing propaganda about fracking. They also think climate change is a giant marxist conspiracy.
bitteralmond 13y ago
For anyone interested, I'd recommend Gasland. http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/ http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/ This "new" evidence of contamination will not end it. People will be paid in quiet settlements, sell their houses at a fraction of what they paid for them, and move somewhere else. This will probably continue until the oil/bitumen/gas is gone.
- thatswrong0 13y ago
  I would not. If you're going to watch Gasland, then you also need to read the opposing side. There are some parts of it that are incredibly misleading, such as the tap water on fire. http://energyindepth.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Debunking-GasLand.pdf http://energyindepth.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Debunkin... http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2011/08/01/gasland-producer-misled-viewers-lighted-tap-water http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2011/08/01/gasla... Edit: Admittedly, these sources suck. Here's a NYTimes article that should hopefully be more palatable: http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/02/24/24greenwire-groundtruthing-academy-award-nominee-gasland-33228.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/02/24/24greenwire-groundtr...
  - justin66 13y ago
    Without having seen Gasland, my impression is that if it's the "opposing side" of those websites, it must be a work of genius. If JimmaDaRustia wept for humanity after seeing Gasland, well, I do the same when I see how easily people are manipulated by really dumb political lobbying materials.
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    When the "opposing side" (the heartland institute) also deny the existence of global warming and second-hand smoke, I think your choice of references does more to harm that viewpoint than support it.
    - thatswrong0 13y ago
      It was a news article. I just grabbed the first relevant link pertaining to "gasland tap water fire". Because I apparently was using the wrong keywords: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasland#Negative http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasland#Negative > In an article for Forbes magazine, Dr. Michael Economides, a professor of engineering at the University of Houston, commented on the Gasland scene of "a man lighting his faucet water on fire and making the ridiculous claim that natural gas drilling is responsible for the incident. The clip, though attention-getting, is wildly inaccurate and irresponsible. To begin with, the vertical depth separation between drinking water aquifers and reservoir targets for gas production is several thousand feet of impermeable rock. Any interchange between the two, if it were possible, would have happened already in geologic time, measured in tens of millions of years, not in recent history."
taude 13y ago
A friend lived in Italy for awhile and they had all sorts of earthquakes on non fault zones. They thought it had to do with fracking. I haven't really read up much on this....but something else worthy to consider. Something from Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/10/17/shale-fracking-causes-earthquakes/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/10/17/shale-fra...
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
There's a ton of context that's not included here. For starters: 1) How common was this in PA before fracking started? 2) Are these wells unusable? 3) Is the situation getting better or worse? 4) Is the gas linked to the fracking (the only interesting question that was mentioned in the article, and the answer is "we don't know") 5) What about other places fracking is occurring? It's not like we're going to stop fracking everywhere: this is a maturing technology. It'll be used all over the planet. What's happening elsewhere? 6) Any other studies being done? 7) What's the measured impact on health in the area? 8) Let's not even start on corrleation and causation -- but it needs to be mentioned, and it's the reason all these other questions are germane. I'm not trying to be an apologist. These are just sincere questions of import when reading about fracking news. They're germane to any reporting on the matter, and they weren't included. If "more details to come" means more random pieces of trivia that we are then supposed to knit up into our own version of a drama, filled in by whatever personal biases we have, then this isn't very useful from a scientific standpoint.
- zzzeek 13y ago
  hacker news is a community of highly technical and/or scientifically inclined people. Certainly a Scientific American article that discusses ongoing research, and is very specific in noting the preliminary nature of it, is something the community is capable of ingesting and discussing in a reasonable way. I found the article interesting because I recall just a couple of years ago, discussing the idea that fracking could ever have any relationship to the groundwater whatsoever was considered patently ridiculous and you'd get sent right off to pseudoscience reeducation camp just for suggesting it (which is really because: in the absence of reputable research having been done, all opinions were essentially political). Now if we were talking about an article that's discussing philosophy, religion, or other subjects within the humanities, there's a much higher chance the HN community will totally misinterpret and butcher the crap out of that, sure.
  - davidw 13y ago
    My wife subscribed to Scientific American for a while, and I thought their political articles were actually pretty crappy and unscientific. Admittedly, it was just a quick glance here and there, but there was some stuff that struck me as very simplistic. As an interesting aside, coal is none too healthy either. There's a town in PA that's been burning for something like 50 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire
rayiner 13y ago
Nothing will stop the fraking. It's simply too profitable for Congress to do something about it (one of the few bright areas in a dismal economy), and the courts have gutted the environmental laws too much for the courts to do anything about it. It's an intrinsically attractive business: the product is something (energy) that's extremely valuable and has exploding demand, and many of the inherent costs of creating that product can be foisted onto people in the surrounding community that have little recourse, legal or otherwise, to do anything about it. Fracking will end when the oil/gas is gone. In its wake it will leave behind the mess the energy and chemical industries have left all over the country: polluted, barely usable land in economically devastated regions (which is what happens after the oil is gone and the companies leave) that must be cleaned up at enormous public expense: http://www.epa.gov/superfund.[1] http://www.epa.gov/superfund.[1] Every story is some form of the same thing (plug: http://cleanupdepue.org http://cleanupdepue.org). Company moves into little town. Residents rejoice in the new jobs. Company leaves when the land is polluted and used up. Property values plummet, and the town is left with no jobs and no ability to sell their houses and move out. The western midwest is in the first part of that story right now, hopefully they'll be smart enough and not have to see what the second part looks like 30-50 years from now. [1] Incidentally, I think one of the great weaknesses of our country is that Congress sits in D.C., a city that is insulated from pretty much every substantial problem present in the rest of the country. In this particular context, it's a city that has never seen much industrialization and which has historically been surrounded by low-intensity agriculture in every direction (now: vast swaths of suburbia). I think we'd see a different attention to environmental issues if we relocated Congress to say the industrial New Jersey/Delaware/Pennsylvania coast...
- makhanko 13y ago
  Great summary!
- johnward 13y ago
  This is basically what happened in the rust belt with steel. Now another "boom" is happening with fracking. The people still haven't learned. You wouldn't believe how many gas workers are driving new trucks, buying toys, etc. I bet very few are putting any of this money in savings. When the fracking leaves we'll be in the same place we were when the steel mills shut down. Just waiting for the next economic boom to come. What are left of the mills are pretty much rusty wastelands but I don't think quite as much pollution (at least in the ground) as we will see from fracking.
falk 13y ago
There's obviously something nefarious going on. Why else would all of these natural gas companies be paying people off and making them sign confidentially agreements? Side-note: Before today I didn't realize how lax the laws on natural gas companies are. The New York Times has a great graphic on the subject. "The natural gas industry has exemptions or exclusions from key parts of at least 7 of the 15 major federal environmental laws designed to protect air and water from radioactive and hazardous chemicals. Below are the seven laws listed in the order they were passed." http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/03/us/20110303-natural-gas-timeline.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/03/us/20110303-na...
ghostdiver 13y ago
For some european countries gas-fracking is the only way to break out of russian gas-oil monopoly, even at the cost of devastated environment.
giardini 13y ago
Methane is a natural contaminant of groundwater and is commonplace in water wells. A simple solution is to run the well water into a holding tank; the methane readily comes out of solution. Venting methane from well water is less a problem than Joe Mulroy's farts at a beer-soused Friday night card game. Either will produce a flare if a match is put to them.
vectorpush 13y ago
I don't think it's cynical to suggest that groundwater contamination is a non-issue as far as the gas fracking boom is concerned. We've already seen that demonstrable contamination in the form of oil spills is legally and financially viable for energy companies, why would natural gas be any different?
patmcguire 13y ago
But methane isn't harmful. Also the article doesn't mention the quantities, but another does. [1] It seems that the most that's been found is about 70mg/L, which is not a lot. [1] http://realclearscience.com/blog/2013/06/theres-methane-in-your-drinking-water-so-what.html http://realclearscience.com/blog/2013/06/theres-methane-in-y...
- refurb 13y ago
  The article does mention the levels, the highest one was 70 mg/L also. Methane is a pretty inert molecule. It's only a hazard in really high concentrations where it acts as an asphyxiant. I don't know of any metabolic toxicity (but maybe there is).
  - johnward 13y ago
    It's harmful in the sense that it's flammable also.
- dclowd9901 13y ago
  You should be at the top of the comments list. What's the fear of "contamination" if the so-called contaminant doesn't harm?
  - altcognito 13y ago
    People should be happy! I'm sure that the wealthy will be paying extra for their ground-water to be "infused" with methane before we know it!
- protomyth 13y ago
  I would be curious about the any early studies before fracking in Penn. For a bit of history, google Thomas Payne, George Washington, and the story of their experiments in the area.
- eclark 13y ago
  Methane's not the only possible contaminant. http://www.businessinsider.com/there-are-many-scary-chemicals-in-fracking-fluid-at-this-pennsylvania-site-2012-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/there-are-many-scary-chemical...
johnward 13y ago
You know what will end the fracking boom? It won't be politicians. The only things that will end it are 1) running out of gas/oil 2) the method becomes too costly to be profitable 3) a much much more profitable way to extract the resources is discovered.
refurb 13y ago
Samples were collected upstream of any treatment systems and as close to the water well as possible I guess my question would be: does it matter? If you read the article you'll see that out of the 118 homes that tested positive for methane, only 12 were above the threshold for immediate remediation. However, if they sampled the water before it was treated, it doesn't tell you what the level of the treated water is. Even if the water is simply pumped into a holding reservoir, that can cause a lot of the methane to outgas from the water.
deleted 13y ago
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kubiiii 13y ago
What is even worse is that the extracted methane is burnt for heating houses that would need less to no heating at all with the proper thermal insulation. Insulation is passive and is put there once for all. It will be tricky to explain to further generations that we ruined our land while extracting fossil energy to waste it right away. Same thing applies to Fukushima.
minikites 13y ago
I have mixed feelings about fracking. It almost certainly pollutes areas, but lots of areas in not-United States get polluted currently from the oil industry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_the_Niger_Delta#Oil_spills http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_the_Nig... In other words, what makes us special? Why are we okay with polluting other places but by golly we get mad when it happens in our own country?
- rayiner 13y ago
  > Why are we okay with polluting other places but by golly we get mad when it happens in our own country? Because we live here and not there?
  - dylangs1030 13y ago
    You have a fair point, Rayiner. Peoples' attention is due to their local affairs before others. But I think the parent meant in a more idealistic sense, in which case, we really should care, we should care about both, just prioritize one. I guess it's semantics.
  - minikites 13y ago
    So it's okay to use oil when it pollutes somewhere else? I live in the northeast and I find it very interesting when someone has an anti-fracking bumper sticker on his or her car. It essentially says "oil is okay as long as there are no problems near me"
greedo 13y ago
Correlation does not equal causation.
four12 13y ago
Gas-Fraking Boom. Excellent band name.
aaron695 13y ago
> Groundwater Contamination May End the Gas-Fracking Boom No it won't, even if the article showed there was harmful contamination, which it didn't. The only thing of interest in the article is Scientific American is resorting to untrue link baiting titles.
aooeeu 13y ago
The boom will be over in a few years, when it is no longer economically viable. http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/08/well-and-truly-fracked.html http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/08/well-and-trul...
jgalt212 13y ago
This is very much a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. If you don't permit fracking, then you away large sums of money to support the following regimes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_gas_fields http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_gas_fields If you do, you may be literally sh1tting where you eat.

158 points by zzzeek 13y ago

Aside from money (which is pretty motivating), I don't understand why the gas companies simply continue to deny that there is contamination and that there are negative outcomes to the environment for doing this (let's put it this way, its almost certainly not a positive impact. Its unlikely to be a neutral impact.) Its like what cigarette companies used to do- just constantly deny what's completely obvious.

adestefan 13y ago
Because it will take decades for any lawsuits to make it through the courts. If they were to lose such lawsuits, by that time they'll have already pulled out enough money to cover the cost of the lawsuits with the rest just being gravy.
- johnward 13y ago
  They will move as fast as they can to make as much money as they can. By the time something could stop it they will be so deep in the pockets of our representatives that it will be hard to make it happen.
anateus 13y ago
(Hi David!) Well, yes it's money, but the complication is that fracking has that effect only in some places. The contamination is much more a function of the geology than the fracking process itself. Pennsylvania has been hit heavily with contamination. Most wells drilled are safe: http://mitei.mit.edu/publications/reports-studies/future-natural-gas http://mitei.mit.edu/publications/reports-studies/future-nat... There is an annoying combination of legal and commercial pressures that prevent the companies from going "actually it's more dangerous than we previously said" without it seeming like "it was a lie all along this is TERRIBLE". The crucial take-away is that there is a bunch of additional geologic due diligence that the gas companies could be doing that would actually enable them to continue fracking. But the boom is driven in part by the utter dirt cheapness of it now and they're afraid of hopping off the wave.
jeffasinger 13y ago
The other thing to consider is that simply not getting natural gas at all is also a terrible idea. A lot of the power infrastructure that handles peaks in demand (and averts rolling blackouts) uses natural gas. The question we need to be asking ourselves is which is the least bad alternative, because they're all bad.
ars 13y ago
> let's put it this way, its almost certainly not a positive impact. No. It's completely positive. Methane has almost no pollution, and far less CO2 than any other large scale energy source. The "contamination" is methane in water, which is harmless even if you drank it, and trivial to remove.
- lhc- 13y ago
  What about the other pollutants dumped by fracking?
  - ars 13y ago
    See my reply to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6265828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6265828 He picked the ones that seemed most dangerous to him, and they are all harmless. (But I haven't checked if there are others.) Don't forget these chemicals are injected deep underground, so unlike lighter-than-air methane they won't easily get to water. (PS. It's not "dumping" if you are actively using them. Dumping is the waste you don't need, no need for inaccurate emotive language.)
- smky80 13y ago
  Methane's greenhouse gas effect is 20x that of CO2. [0] --- [0] http://epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html http://epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html
  - ars 13y ago
    The quantities we are talking about are pretty minimal though, and definitely worth the tradeoff with less coal (or oil for that matter).
    - smky80 13y ago
      I don't have a source handy, but I remember reading something to effect that when you figured in all the transportation costs for the fracking fluid and gas production, it really wasn't so clean.

tocomment 13y ago

Why isn't there a way to track without toxic chemicals?

mhb 13y ago
Maybe there is, but it works with the chemicals they currently use. I'm sure the geological engineers would welcome suggestions. Additional information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing
- johnward 13y ago
  This is interesting because the gas industry defends the fluid as harmless. A quick look at the ingredients and it doesn't seem that harmless. - hydrochloric acid: Concentrated hydrochloric acid (fuming hydrochloric acid) forms acidic mists. Both the mist and the solution have a corrosive effect on human tissue, with the potential to damage respiratory organs, eyes, skin, and intestines irreversibly. Upon mixing hydrochloric acid with common oxidizing chemicals, such as sodium hypochlorite (bleach, NaClO) or potassium permanganate (KMnO4), the toxic gas chlorine is produced. - polyacrylamide: Concerns have been raised that polyacrylamide used in agriculture may contaminate food with the nerve toxin acrylamide. - Ethylene glycol (the stuff in antifreeze): Ethylene glycol is moderately toxic with an oral LDLO = 786 mg/kg for humans.[8] The major danger is due to its sweet taste. Because of that, children and animals are more inclined to consume large quantities of it than of other poisons. Upon ingestion, ethylene glycol is oxidized to glycolic acid which is, in turn, oxidized to oxalic acid, which is toxic. It and its toxic byproducts first affect the central nervous system, then the heart, and finally the kidneys. Ingestion of sufficient amounts can be fatal if untreated. - glutaraldehyde: As a strong disinfectant, glutaraldehyde is toxic and a strong irritant - Isopropyl alcohol (I think this stuff is in aerosol deodorant and hairspray): Isopropyl alcohol and its metabolite, acetone, act as central nervous system (CNS) depressants. Symptoms of isopropyl alcohol poisoning include flushing, headache, dizziness, CNS depression, nausea, vomiting, anesthesia, and coma.
  - ars 13y ago

danso 13y ago

The OP is a kind of shallow summation of the details here...first of all, the study was published in June. Second, it's not the "first step" in determining the link between fracking in the Marcellus Shale and water contamination...a previous study by Duke, which the OP references later, documented "systematic evidence" of such a link. 2013: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/06/19/1221635110.full.pdf+html http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/06/19/1221635110.full... 2011: http://biology.duke.edu/jackson/pnas2011.html http://biology.duke.edu/jackson/pnas2011.html I bring this up not to be pedantic, but to point out that the OP comes off as that this is new conclusive evidence...it is not. Opponents of fracking would argue that there are several other studies showing similar data, and they'd argue that politics/industry has shelved other planned studies. In other words, it's not just amount or existence of evidence that comes into play in this debate.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago
Yeah this is the worst kind of nerd bait. "You guys already know that the oil companies are evil and will poison people given the chance. Here's a tiny piece of evidence that you could misinterpret in multiple ways" To the author's credit, at least he pulled back and didn't do the entire ranting, hand-waving ritual. I believe that job is being left for online commenters to complete :) The funny thing is, without the overriding emotional narrative many people have, if you just explained what the study says using other terms, most folks would realize how tenuous and superficial the reporting is. Correlative research is great, but geesh, it's a tiny, almost minuscule part of actually accomplishing anything. Most of the time, it's a waste of time. Medical research, for instance, is full of correlative research that never amounted to a hill of beans.
- anon1385 13y ago
  >Medical research, for instance, is full of correlative research that never amounted to a hill of beans. Yes like smoking being linked with cancer. I'm glad we listened to the corporate funded libertarians on that one and didn't fall prey to the wishy washy lefty propaganda and emotive narratives about evil tobacco companies wanting to make money from killing people. What a ridiculous, politically motivated caricature that was. I'd like to point out that the Heartland Institute and Cato still deny the link between passive smoking and cancer, so it's not like that kind of lobbying is all in the distant dark past. The very same people writing lies about tobacco are writing propaganda about fracking. They also think climate change is a giant marxist conspiracy.

bitteralmond 13y ago

For anyone interested, I'd recommend Gasland. http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/ http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/ This "new" evidence of contamination will not end it. People will be paid in quiet settlements, sell their houses at a fraction of what they paid for them, and move somewhere else. This will probably continue until the oil/bitumen/gas is gone.

thatswrong0 13y ago
I would not. If you're going to watch Gasland, then you also need to read the opposing side. There are some parts of it that are incredibly misleading, such as the tap water on fire. http://energyindepth.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Debunking-GasLand.pdf http://energyindepth.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Debunkin... http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2011/08/01/gasland-producer-misled-viewers-lighted-tap-water http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2011/08/01/gasla... Edit: Admittedly, these sources suck. Here's a NYTimes article that should hopefully be more palatable: http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/02/24/24greenwire-groundtruthing-academy-award-nominee-gasland-33228.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/02/24/24greenwire-groundtr...
- justin66 13y ago
  Without having seen Gasland, my impression is that if it's the "opposing side" of those websites, it must be a work of genius. If JimmaDaRustia wept for humanity after seeing Gasland, well, I do the same when I see how easily people are manipulated by really dumb political lobbying materials.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  When the "opposing side" (the heartland institute) also deny the existence of global warming and second-hand smoke, I think your choice of references does more to harm that viewpoint than support it.
  - thatswrong0 13y ago
    It was a news article. I just grabbed the first relevant link pertaining to "gasland tap water fire". Because I apparently was using the wrong keywords: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasland#Negative http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasland#Negative > In an article for Forbes magazine, Dr. Michael Economides, a professor of engineering at the University of Houston, commented on the Gasland scene of "a man lighting his faucet water on fire and making the ridiculous claim that natural gas drilling is responsible for the incident. The clip, though attention-getting, is wildly inaccurate and irresponsible. To begin with, the vertical depth separation between drinking water aquifers and reservoir targets for gas production is several thousand feet of impermeable rock. Any interchange between the two, if it were possible, would have happened already in geologic time, measured in tens of millions of years, not in recent history."

taude 13y ago

A friend lived in Italy for awhile and they had all sorts of earthquakes on non fault zones. They thought it had to do with fracking. I haven't really read up much on this....but something else worthy to consider. Something from Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/10/17/shale-fracking-causes-earthquakes/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/10/17/shale-fra...

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

There's a ton of context that's not included here. For starters: 1) How common was this in PA before fracking started? 2) Are these wells unusable? 3) Is the situation getting better or worse? 4) Is the gas linked to the fracking (the only interesting question that was mentioned in the article, and the answer is "we don't know") 5) What about other places fracking is occurring? It's not like we're going to stop fracking everywhere: this is a maturing technology. It'll be used all over the planet. What's happening elsewhere? 6) Any other studies being done? 7) What's the measured impact on health in the area? 8) Let's not even start on corrleation and causation -- but it needs to be mentioned, and it's the reason all these other questions are germane. I'm not trying to be an apologist. These are just sincere questions of import when reading about fracking news. They're germane to any reporting on the matter, and they weren't included. If "more details to come" means more random pieces of trivia that we are then supposed to knit up into our own version of a drama, filled in by whatever personal biases we have, then this isn't very useful from a scientific standpoint.

zzzeek 13y ago
hacker news is a community of highly technical and/or scientifically inclined people. Certainly a Scientific American article that discusses ongoing research, and is very specific in noting the preliminary nature of it, is something the community is capable of ingesting and discussing in a reasonable way. I found the article interesting because I recall just a couple of years ago, discussing the idea that fracking could ever have any relationship to the groundwater whatsoever was considered patently ridiculous and you'd get sent right off to pseudoscience reeducation camp just for suggesting it (which is really because: in the absence of reputable research having been done, all opinions were essentially political). Now if we were talking about an article that's discussing philosophy, religion, or other subjects within the humanities, there's a much higher chance the HN community will totally misinterpret and butcher the crap out of that, sure.
- davidw 13y ago
  My wife subscribed to Scientific American for a while, and I thought their political articles were actually pretty crappy and unscientific. Admittedly, it was just a quick glance here and there, but there was some stuff that struck me as very simplistic. As an interesting aside, coal is none too healthy either. There's a town in PA that's been burning for something like 50 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire

rayiner 13y ago

Nothing will stop the fraking. It's simply too profitable for Congress to do something about it (one of the few bright areas in a dismal economy), and the courts have gutted the environmental laws too much for the courts to do anything about it. It's an intrinsically attractive business: the product is something (energy) that's extremely valuable and has exploding demand, and many of the inherent costs of creating that product can be foisted onto people in the surrounding community that have little recourse, legal or otherwise, to do anything about it. Fracking will end when the oil/gas is gone. In its wake it will leave behind the mess the energy and chemical industries have left all over the country: polluted, barely usable land in economically devastated regions (which is what happens after the oil is gone and the companies leave) that must be cleaned up at enormous public expense: http://www.epa.gov/superfund.[1] http://www.epa.gov/superfund.[1] Every story is some form of the same thing (plug: http://cleanupdepue.org http://cleanupdepue.org). Company moves into little town. Residents rejoice in the new jobs. Company leaves when the land is polluted and used up. Property values plummet, and the town is left with no jobs and no ability to sell their houses and move out. The western midwest is in the first part of that story right now, hopefully they'll be smart enough and not have to see what the second part looks like 30-50 years from now. [1] Incidentally, I think one of the great weaknesses of our country is that Congress sits in D.C., a city that is insulated from pretty much every substantial problem present in the rest of the country. In this particular context, it's a city that has never seen much industrialization and which has historically been surrounded by low-intensity agriculture in every direction (now: vast swaths of suburbia). I think we'd see a different attention to environmental issues if we relocated Congress to say the industrial New Jersey/Delaware/Pennsylvania coast...

makhanko 13y ago
Great summary!
johnward 13y ago
This is basically what happened in the rust belt with steel. Now another "boom" is happening with fracking. The people still haven't learned. You wouldn't believe how many gas workers are driving new trucks, buying toys, etc. I bet very few are putting any of this money in savings. When the fracking leaves we'll be in the same place we were when the steel mills shut down. Just waiting for the next economic boom to come. What are left of the mills are pretty much rusty wastelands but I don't think quite as much pollution (at least in the ground) as we will see from fracking.

falk 13y ago

There's obviously something nefarious going on. Why else would all of these natural gas companies be paying people off and making them sign confidentially agreements? Side-note: Before today I didn't realize how lax the laws on natural gas companies are. The New York Times has a great graphic on the subject. "The natural gas industry has exemptions or exclusions from key parts of at least 7 of the 15 major federal environmental laws designed to protect air and water from radioactive and hazardous chemicals. Below are the seven laws listed in the order they were passed." http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/03/us/20110303-natural-gas-timeline.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/03/us/20110303-na...

ghostdiver 13y ago

For some european countries gas-fracking is the only way to break out of russian gas-oil monopoly, even at the cost of devastated environment.

giardini 13y ago

Methane is a natural contaminant of groundwater and is commonplace in water wells. A simple solution is to run the well water into a holding tank; the methane readily comes out of solution. Venting methane from well water is less a problem than Joe Mulroy's farts at a beer-soused Friday night card game. Either will produce a flare if a match is put to them.

vectorpush 13y ago

I don't think it's cynical to suggest that groundwater contamination is a non-issue as far as the gas fracking boom is concerned. We've already seen that demonstrable contamination in the form of oil spills is legally and financially viable for energy companies, why would natural gas be any different?

patmcguire 13y ago

But methane isn't harmful. Also the article doesn't mention the quantities, but another does. [1] It seems that the most that's been found is about 70mg/L, which is not a lot. [1] http://realclearscience.com/blog/2013/06/theres-methane-in-your-drinking-water-so-what.html http://realclearscience.com/blog/2013/06/theres-methane-in-y...

refurb 13y ago
The article does mention the levels, the highest one was 70 mg/L also. Methane is a pretty inert molecule. It's only a hazard in really high concentrations where it acts as an asphyxiant. I don't know of any metabolic toxicity (but maybe there is).
- johnward 13y ago
  It's harmful in the sense that it's flammable also.
dclowd9901 13y ago
You should be at the top of the comments list. What's the fear of "contamination" if the so-called contaminant doesn't harm?
- altcognito 13y ago
  People should be happy! I'm sure that the wealthy will be paying extra for their ground-water to be "infused" with methane before we know it!
protomyth 13y ago
I would be curious about the any early studies before fracking in Penn. For a bit of history, google Thomas Payne, George Washington, and the story of their experiments in the area.
eclark 13y ago
Methane's not the only possible contaminant. http://www.businessinsider.com/there-are-many-scary-chemicals-in-fracking-fluid-at-this-pennsylvania-site-2012-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/there-are-many-scary-chemical...

johnward 13y ago

You know what will end the fracking boom? It won't be politicians. The only things that will end it are 1) running out of gas/oil 2) the method becomes too costly to be profitable 3) a much much more profitable way to extract the resources is discovered.

refurb 13y ago

Samples were collected upstream of any treatment systems and as close to the water well as possible I guess my question would be: does it matter? If you read the article you'll see that out of the 118 homes that tested positive for methane, only 12 were above the threshold for immediate remediation. However, if they sampled the water before it was treated, it doesn't tell you what the level of the treated water is. Even if the water is simply pumped into a holding reservoir, that can cause a lot of the methane to outgas from the water.

deleted 13y ago

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kubiiii 13y ago

What is even worse is that the extracted methane is burnt for heating houses that would need less to no heating at all with the proper thermal insulation. Insulation is passive and is put there once for all. It will be tricky to explain to further generations that we ruined our land while extracting fossil energy to waste it right away. Same thing applies to Fukushima.

minikites 13y ago

I have mixed feelings about fracking. It almost certainly pollutes areas, but lots of areas in not-United States get polluted currently from the oil industry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_the_Niger_Delta#Oil_spills http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_the_Nig... In other words, what makes us special? Why are we okay with polluting other places but by golly we get mad when it happens in our own country?

rayiner 13y ago
> Why are we okay with polluting other places but by golly we get mad when it happens in our own country? Because we live here and not there?
- dylangs1030 13y ago
  You have a fair point, Rayiner. Peoples' attention is due to their local affairs before others. But I think the parent meant in a more idealistic sense, in which case, we really should care, we should care about both, just prioritize one. I guess it's semantics.
- minikites 13y ago
  So it's okay to use oil when it pollutes somewhere else? I live in the northeast and I find it very interesting when someone has an anti-fracking bumper sticker on his or her car. It essentially says "oil is okay as long as there are no problems near me"

greedo 13y ago

Correlation does not equal causation.

four12 13y ago

Gas-Fraking Boom. Excellent band name.

aaron695 13y ago

> Groundwater Contamination May End the Gas-Fracking Boom No it won't, even if the article showed there was harmful contamination, which it didn't. The only thing of interest in the article is Scientific American is resorting to untrue link baiting titles.

aooeeu 13y ago

The boom will be over in a few years, when it is no longer economically viable. http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/08/well-and-truly-fracked.html http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/08/well-and-trul...

jgalt212 13y ago

This is very much a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. If you don't permit fracking, then you away large sums of money to support the following regimes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_gas_fields http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_gas_fields If you do, you may be literally sh1tting where you eat.