Posted on 08/29/2013 4:11:37 PM PDT by Lorianne
If you had to choose between natural gas production or drinking water in your hometown, which would it be?
Some Texas residents feel they haven't been given this choice—and that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is taking more than its fair share of their groundwater, exacerbating the drought problems in an already parched region. The Guardian recently reported on the predicament facing a small town in Barnhart, Texas—which "appears to have run dry because the water was being extracted for shale gas fracking."
And fracking appears to play a role in many of these water shortages elsewhere in the state. Another 30 towns in the state are expected to run out of water by the end of the year, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. And about 15 million people are under some form of water rationing, wherein they are prevented from watering their lawns and the like.
Beverly McGuire, a resident of Barnhart, told the Guardian that her wells ran dry soon after fracking started near her property two years ago. Another local rancher, Buck Owens, had to sell all of his 500 cattle and 90 percent of his goats because he didn't have enough water to feed them after fracking contractors drilled 104 wells on his land.
Other nearby residents with their own well water have been selling it for use in fracking, a process by which water and other chemicals are forcefully injected into the ground at high pressure to release pockets of oil and gas. In a nearby town, contractor Larry Baxter estimates he could make $36,000 per month selling water for fracking, he told the Guardian.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Thanks for the video link. It was very informative.
I like the cut of your jib, Grace. You post some of the best commentary around this place.
Thorium Reactors powering massive desalinsation on the coasts pumping massive amounts of fresh water BACK into the middle of continents.
I like the cut of your jib, Grace. You post some of the best commentary around this place.
My friends have accused me of having a weird way of thinking...
I tend to consider myself as an out of the box thinker, I use a lot of out of the box thinking and deductive reasoning in my daily life, I guess it spills over here.
Sorry, there is already a revolutionary new fracking technology that uses CO2 and a tiny fraction of water to do the same thing that once required lots of water. Try again, libs.
Dam a stream and create a water source. It could also be used for clean, CHEAP electricity generation!
OH WAIT...
The Democrats haven’t let us build anything like that in several decades now.
Agree- total BS. On top of it all, in TX all water belongs to TX so there are no such things as water rights.
Ping.
Can they put in an irrigation system like the kind used on produce farms?
They use brine for fracking... higher S.G.
No need to desalinate.
Though, technically, since we are building all this transloading infrastructure for RR tank cars, return unit crude oil tankcars could serve as water carriers on the backhaul.
Lord knows the Sierra Club would pitch a fit if a 36” water pipeline were to be built.
” he didn’t have enough water to feed them after fracking contractors drilled 104 wells on his land.”
Bitching about them drilling water wells he was paid for?
“Depending on the characteristics of the underlying aquifer it makes perfect sense that pumping from 104 new wells in one location could exceed its recharge capacity.”
Depending on the characteristics of the contract, I’m sure the landowner made money off the 104 wells he let them drill
Ludditism at it most obvious. Without fossil fuels, our national elites would still be farming and our commerce would move by sail. Paradoxically, only the exploitation of oil and gas will enable mankind to learn how to develop other forms of energy, because first the capital must be obtained to do the necessary research.
I was going to comment at the Yahoo source but they ditched comments with their new site. So many conservatives used to post there i guess the owners didn’t like it.
Oh, what a creative remedy. The only stream of consequence anyplace near, that carries a significant volume of water even in the summer, is at the bottom of a canyon about 2000 ft. lower in elevation than my city, and the water it carries is pretty well allocated to other competing purposes, including anadromous fisheries, irrigation, barge shipping, etc. Fortunately for me and many others in this region, we don’t have to compete with oil extraction.
Oh, I forgot. This stream also contributes mightily to regional electric power supplies.
First of it’s not a little town in Barnhart Texas, it’s a little town in Texas called Barnhart. Rough arid land with no water, thats why most of the ranchers run hair goats. If that ranchers running 500 head of cattle he’s going to need about 50 square miles of ranch and he’s still going to need a bunch of rain. I’m about a hundred miles nth of Barnhart, I’ve got some big ponds and a few water wells and nice green pastures for now. I can still only run 15 to 16 head per section.
If they drilled 100+ water wells on his place not only was he payed a per well price plus damages he’s also paid for the water that comes out of them. As we see in the article selling water for fracking is profitable and I’m sure he was paid hansomly for it and I’m will to bet he was given access to the water which is pretty much SOP.
If he did sell off his cows it was for the same reason we did over the last 2 years, there just wasn’t anything for them to eat due to the drought and you’ll go broke trying to feed them. I call bull shit on the whole article!
no mention of the substitution of butane in place of water.
The reason for using butane is not to lower the amount of water usage which it does, it’s to be able to blow down into the sale line and recover some of the cost. We do CO2 fracs and it may take a week or more to blow all the CO2 out of the well before we can send gas down the sale line. With CO2 you vent back to the atmosphere and all money is lost, with butane you can sale it back to the gas company.
Sorry, there is already a revolutionary new fracking technology that uses CO2 and a tiny fraction of water to do the same thing that once required lots of water. Try again, libs.
Thats old technology that we’ve been doing for years.
My well is not producing right now due to the fracking sun and not enough fracking rain.
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