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To: Las Vegas Dave
How come fracking water wells gets no bad press? If fracking oil wells is supposed to cause so man problems then why are not water wells contaminated when they are fracked?
5 posted on 04/28/2012 5:46:27 AM PDT by mountainlion (I am voting for Sarah after getting screwed again by the DC Thugs.)
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To: mountainlion

I used to work in the water table cleanup business. Mainly we cleaned up DNAPLS - basically heavy petrosludge that seeped out of a leaky oil tank. The D in DNAPL meant the sludge hit the water table (below ground) until it found a ledge or cubby hole to sit on. So that might answer part of your question - with fracking at 7000 feet, the DNAPLS will go down not up.

There are LNAPLs - L is for light - those could be problematic because they rise up until they float across the top of the water table. Most companies are pretty cautious but there are a handful of rogue firms out there basically blowing up rocks at depth to see what happens. It’s a bonanza akin to the gold rush. At a GREAT time for the US too, with China and India adding expotentially to the world energy demand.

Personally I think it would be a good idea for the industry itself to come up with a way to reign in the wildcats most likely to cause headaches for everyone. That would be better than a few bad apples closing off this great opportunity (ala coastal oil drilling or building nuclear power plants).


6 posted on 04/28/2012 7:01:15 AM PDT by Mudcat (What would Reagan do?)
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