“The entire Fort Worth and greater area is covered with hydraulic fractured shale gas wells.”
Maybe they do it right in Texas. I don’t know. Maybe the geology is different.
The question remains:
Would you let your kids drink the well water in Dimock, PA.?
Not from the well Victoria Switzer. I believe she contaimnated her well deliberatly. But the other wells, yes. We have documented methane naturally occuring in water wells for over 100 years. It has to be dealt with properly, but this was a scam following a bad cement job on a well. It is not a hydraulic fracturing issue and I would welcome a hydraulically fractured well on my property with a water well, as have hundred of thousands of others.
http://nyshalegasnow.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-really-happened-in-dimock-pa.html
Reading closely, we find that a private consultant, who earlier did pre-drilling water tests paid for by Cabot, is now working for the litigating homeowners. In Spring and Summer 2010, this consultant found “positive test results” for certain toxic chemicals — hydrocarbons such as ethyl benzene, toluene, and xylene, and antifreezes such as ethylene glycol and propylene glycol — within basically the same set of domestic water wells that are already known to have suffered methane infiltration.
If you read this and follow-up articles really closely, you would also see that the elevated levels of hydrocarbons were found in “almost everybody” tested along Carter Road, while the elevated levels of the antifreezes were found in only one well — that of new anti-fracking crusader, Victoria Switzer.
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But then there was more. A week later, on 9-22-2010, the original reporter Legere did a follow-up story headlined, “Cabot: Dimock Water Contaminated Before Drilling…”
Cabot: Dimock water contaminated before drilling; residents’ tests show water more contaminated now
Tests of two private water wells in Dimock Twp. showed traces of toxic chemicals in 2008 before Marcellus Shale gas drilling began nearby, according to test results made available to The Times-Tribune on Tuesday by the gas driller active in the township.
But a spokesman for Cabot Oil and Gas Corp. said those chemicals - toluene, benzene and surfectants - were not detected in 2008 in pre-drill samples taken at more than a dozen nearby water supplies along Carter Road in Dimock where a private environmental engineering firm recently found toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene. Cabot also said that it does not use those chemicals in hydraulic fracturing, and so it could not be the source of the contamination.
The contaminants found this spring and summer by Scranton-based Farnham and Associates Inc. were at levels 1,000 times higher than the toluene levels detected in the two wells in 2008, the firm’s president, Daniel Farnham, said.
Cabot released the 2008 water tests on Tuesday in response to reports last week that Mr. Farnham had found widespread chemical contamination in water wells already tainted with methane linked to the gas drilling in Susquehanna County.
Mr. Farnham took the samples for families in Dimock who have sued Cabot for allegedly damaging their water, health and property.
The drilling company said the toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene found in the drinking water could not have come from hydraulic fracturing fluids used in its Marcellus Shale drilling operations because its service contractors do not use those chemicals.
Hydraulic fraccing is done at such a tremendous depth below ground that the fraccing itself is no threat to groundwater. There are thousands of feet of rock between the fracced rock and any aquifers, which are at a much shallower depth. There’s no way any of the frac fluid can possibly migrate through that much rock. The only way groundwater can be contaminated by fraccing is if the gas well isn’t constructed properly and frac fluid leaks out of the well, or the frac waste water is dumped illegally above an aquifer. But that’s the same issue we have with any kind of industrial waste water. The waste water has to be disposed of properly and if it’s just dumped somewhere than can contaminate soil or groundwater.
So fraccing is like many other industrial processes that has to be done with the right equipment and engineering methods, and produces waste that has to be disposed of properly. There’s nothing really new going on except that fraccing has moved into environmentalist territory in Pennsylvania and New York. This kind of scientifically complex subject can easily to distorted or simply misunderstood by journalists and environmentalists, and then there are the greedy people who distort the facts or even manufacture evidence because want to sue oil companies for profit.