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Hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” has been associated with water contamination, global warming-causing air pollution, health problems, falling property values and even earthquakes. Each year fracking pumps billions of gallons of water and chemicals deep underground under high pressure to force open cracks and release natural gas.

According to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the chemicals used in fracking fluids include over 750 different chemicals. Some are innocuouse (salt, gelatin) while others pose significant human health hazards (methanol, isopropanol and 2-butoxyethanol). About 650 of the 750 chemicals used in fracking operations are known carcinogens, according to the report filed with the U.S. House of Representatives in April 2011. They include toxic chemicals like benzene and tholuene.

Returning fracking fluids are referred to as “flowback” and in addition to chemical additives, they can include many naturally occurring substances that pose hazards, including methane, heavy metals like barium and radioactive matter. Fracking can unlock 2,552 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the U.S., which is enough to power the country for more than a century. However, there are some serious problems with fracking as well as natural gas itself.

Although natural gas burns cleaner than other fossil fuels (combustion of natural gas releases less carbon dioxide per BTU than combustion of either coal or gasoline), when all things considered, natural gas is not cleaner than other fossil fuels and may even be worse.

Water contamination

According to American Rivers, fracking threatens rivers and streams that provide clean drinking water, habitat for fish and wildlife, and recreational opportunities, such as fishing and boating. Many of America’s greatest rivers are under threat from natural gas development. They include the Upper Delaware, Susquehanna, Monongahela, and Hoback Rivers.

A PNAS study found that drinking wells near the Marcellus Shale contained 17 times as much methane as those half a mile away. Part of the problem is that natural gas development enjoys exemptions from keystone environmental laws, such as the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act.

“Unchecked by adequate safeguards, natural gas production has the potential to pollute clean water for millions of people. We have already experienced instances of surface and groundwater pollution, air pollution, soil contamination, habitat fragmentation, and erosion from extracting gas from shale using fracking,” American Rivers said.

Earthquakes

While it is widely suspected that fracking pollutes waterways, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the practice can also cause earthquakes. According to scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the oil and gas industry is “almost certainly” responsible for the earthquakes in the U.S. Midwest.

The midsection of America is a relatively quiet geologically zone, but in 2009 USGS seismologist Bill Ellsworth noticed a dramatic increase in the number of quakes in this area. Ellsworth and his colleagues watched the number of quakes go from an average of 20 tremors a year to more 50 in 2009, 87 in 2010 and 134 last year.

What makes the earthquakes in this area so anomalous is the fact that the thick basement rock underlying the U.S. Midwest is relatively static and it is not near an active volcano. This has led him and his team to conclude that the startling increase is “almost certainly man-made.”

Ellsworth’s closer inspection revealed that many of the new quakes were clustering around the wastewater wells, which are very deep holes where companies dump the frack water once it has been used.

Air pollution

As reported in the Washington Post, another problem with fracking is the fact that it inevitably causes methane to escape into the atmosphere. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, it is more than 20 times the heat trapping capacity of carbon dioxide. Modeling studies have suggested that if more than 2 percent of the methane from natural-gas production escapes out into the air, then natural gas may not offer much of a climate advantage over coal. The EPA pegs the leakage rate at around 2 percent, but a study from Cornell’s Robert Howarth suggests that the leakage rate could be as high as 7.8 percent. An NOAA studyestimated the methane leakage at around 4 percent, but this study did not include inevitable leaks from distribution pipelines.

In addition to contributing to global warming , the air pollution associated with fracking also endangers human health. A Texas hospital serving six counties near drilling sites reported asthma rates three times higher than the state average; one-quarter of young children in the community had asthma.

Opponents to fracking point to numerous cases of health problems such as headaches, nosebleeds and rashes in humans, and reproductive problems in livestock in areas of the country with heavy gas-drilling activity.

Gag order

Gas companies are using state legislatures to push ahead with an agenda that destroys the environment and endangers public health. In at least two states it is now illegal for medical professionals to report the human health effects from fracking. On May 15, the Ohio State Senate approved legislation that would prevent physicians from sharing information about patients’ exposure to hydrofracking chemicals (the oil and gas industry has given hundreds thousands of dollars to the Ohio General Assembly to help secure this support).
Gas companies have also resisted efforts to find out about the toxic chemicals used in fracking. A new Pennsylvania law forbids health care professionals from sharing information they learn about certain chemicals and procedures used in fracking.

“I have never seen anything like this in my 37 years of practice,” says Dr. Helen Podgainy, a pediatrician from Coraopolis, Pa. She says it’s common for physicians, epidemiologists, and others in the health care field to discuss and consult with each other about the possible problems that can affect various populations. Her first priority, she says, “is to diagnose and treat, and to be proactive in preventing harm to others.” The new law, she says, not only “hinders preventative measures for our patients, it slows the treatment process by gagging free discussion.”

The law is not only “unprecedented,” but will “complicate the ability of health department to collect information that would reveal trends that could help us to protect the public health,” says Dr. Jerome Paulson, director of the Mid-Atlantic Center for Children’s Health and the Environment at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Dr. Paulson, also professor of pediatrics at George Washington University, calls the law “detrimental to the delivery of personal health care and contradictory to the ethical principles of medicine and public health.” Physicians, he says, “have a moral and ethical responsibility to protect the health of the public, and this law precludes us from doing all we can to protect the public.” He has called for a moratorium on all drilling until the health effects can be analyzed.

Fracking bans

France banned fracking in July 2011, followed by South Africa in August 2011 and most recently Bulgaria did the same. In Canada, the province of Quebec has banned fracking and now Quebec’s neighbors in Vermont have followed suit. Vermont is the first U.S. state where fracking is now illegal. On May 4, 2012, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin signed a statewide hydraulic-fracturing ban into law.
The town of Dryden, N.Y., won a court ruling saying it could prohibit fracking as part of its zoning ordinance. State environmental officials in New York placed a moratorium on fracking while they come up with new regulations to cover oil and gas drilling in the underground geological deposits. Now that New York’s courts have given municipalities the power to ban fracking within their borders, environmentalists are pushing Governor Andrew Cuomo to outlaw the practice altogether.

More states seeking to ban fracking

In Michigan, citizens are pushing for a ballot initiative to amend the state’s constitution to ban horizontal hydraulic fracturing statewide. The proposed amendment would also ban the storage of wastes from horizontal hydraulic fracturing. An inclusive group of citizens called for a ban on fracking, in California and 50,000 Californians have signed a CREDO Action petition that supports a ban on fracking.

“Californians from rural Kern County to urban South Los Angeles and throughout the state are standing together in opposition to fracking, which threatens the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land upon which we grow food and build our homes,” said Kristin Lynch, Pacific Region director of Food & Water Watch. “No amount of regulation can make this fundamentally destructive and toxic drilling safe; most certainly not mere notice of where fracking is taking place or the carcinogenic chemicals being used.”
Other American states and Canadian provinces are also rallying to ban fracking along with people in countries around the world.

Growing US Resistance

“Across the United States, people are waking up to the threat fracking poses to our environment and health,” said Josh Fox, creator of the critically acclaimed documentary Gasland. “Once you contaminate an aquifer, you can’t go back—just ask the residents of Pavillion, Wyo., Dimock, Pa., or Garfield County, Colo. The evidence is indisputable that this destructive practice must be stopped.”
“The grassroots are tens of thousands of people using their vacation days to go to rallies, spending their savings to get the word out, and going door-to-door getting thousands of signatures on petitions,” said Sue Rapp of Vestal Residents for Safe Energy, a local group in Broome County.

The combination of air pollution, water contamination, earthquakes, public health issues and falling property values make fracking a less than attractive option.

Source: Global Warming is Real

Natural Gas is Not Clean Energy

Natural gas has garnered a lot of attention, but the research reveals it is anything but clean. To increase domestic energy production and reduce reliance on coal, there is a natural gas boom in the U.S. and elsewhere. However, reliance on natural gas is not a panacea to our energy woes. According to a February 2012 study published in Nature, extracting and producing natural gas releases enough methane into the atmosphere to negate any greenhouse gas advantages that its somewhat cleaner burning chemistry provides.

Approximately 85 percent of natural gas is composed of methane, which is 105 times worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas (GHG). Based on EPA data, methane leaks at a rate of 3.3 percent and that number more than doubles (7.9 percent) when fracking is employed to extract natural gas. Extrapolating from this data, gas burning for electricity is much dirtier than coal burning in terms of GHG emissions.

Dr. Drew Shindell and colleagues (NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies) have published a paper in the scientific journal Science (US), in which he said:

“We found that gas-aerosol interactions substantially alter the relative importance of the various emissions. In particular, methane emissions have a larger impact than that used in current carbon-trading schemes or in the Kyoto Protocol. Thus, assessments of multigas mitigation policies, as well as any separate efforts to mitigate warming from short-lived pollutants, should include gas-aerosol interactions.”

The Nature News part of the prestigious scientific journal Nature (UK) has summarized the key findings of Shindell and colleagues as follows:

“a range of computerized models to show that methane’s global warming potential is greater when combined with aerosols — atmospheric particles such as dust, sea salt, sulphates and black carbon. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol assume methane to be, tonne-for-tonne, 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming the planet. But the interaction with aerosols bumps up methane’s relative global warming potential (GWP) to about 33, though there is a lot of uncertainty around the exact figure.”

Dr. Shindell has summarized the findings by saying: “What happens is that as you put more methane into the atmosphere, it competes for oxidants such as hydroxyl with sulphur dioxide. More methane means less sulphate, which is reflective and thus has a cooling effect. Calculations of GWP [Global Warming Potential;] including these gas-aerosol linkages thus substantially increase the value for methane.”

Major systemic gas leakage from the hydraulic fracking of shale formations has led Professor Robert Howarth, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, to conclude:

“The large GHG footprint of shale gas undercuts the logic of its use as a bridging fuel over coming decades, if the goal is to reduce global warming. We do not intend that our study be used to justify the continued use of either oil or coal, but rather to demonstrate that substituting shale gas for these other fossil fuels may not have the desired effect of mitigating climate warming”.

The February 2012 study of air samples revealed high emission levels from gas fields. The study explains that methane leaks during production may offset any benefits of natural gas. In 2007, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) researchers noticed pollutants including methane, butane and propane, in air samples from a tower north of Denver, Colorado. They linked the pollutants to a nearby natural-gas field. Their investigation produced the first hard evidence that the cleanest-burning fossil fuel might not be better than coal when it comes to climate change.

In 2008, NOAA researchers and the University of Colorado, Boulder, estimated that natural-gas producers in an area known as the Denver-Julesburg Basin (where more than 20,000 oil and gas wells have been drilled during the past four decades) are losing about 4% of their gas to the atmosphere. Additional emissions come from the storage tanks and pipelines.

Natural gas emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal per unit of energy when burned, but separate teams at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concluded that methane emissions from shale gas are much larger than previously thought.

Robert Howarth, a Cornell researcher whose team raised concerns about methane emissions from shale-gas drilling in a pair of papers, said “I’m not looking for vindication here, but [the NOAA] numbers are coming in very close to ours, maybe a little higher.” Howarth said natural gas might still have an advantage over coal when burned to create electricity, because gas-fired power plants tend to be newer and far more efficient than older facilities that provide the bulk of the country’s coal-fired generation. But only 30% of US gas is used to produce electricity, with much of the rest being used for heating, for which there is no such advantage.

Natural gas is touted as a cost effective energy, but capturing and storing gases that are vented during the fracking process is feasible, but considered too costly to adopt. An EPA rule that is due out as early as April would promote such changes by regulating emissions from the gas fields.

A major 2011 study by Tom Wigley of the Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) concluded:
The most important result, however, in accord with the above authors, is that, unless leakage rates for new methane can be kept below 2%, substituting gas for coal is not an effective means for reducing the magnitude of future climate change.

As explained by Gabrielle Pétron, an atmospheric scientist at NOAA and at the University of Colorado in Boulder, “I think we seriously need to look at natural-gas operations on the national scale.” The findings surrounding natural gas has far reaching consequences, not the least of which is the emerging understanding that natural gas is not the bridge energy solution many had hoped for.

Howarth’s online version of his new 2012 paper concludes: We reiterate our conclusion from our April 2011 paper that shale gas is not a suitable bridge fuel for the 21st Century. Even without a high-leakage rate for shale gas, we know that Natural Gas Is A Bridge To Nowhere. The International Energy Agency, in its big June 2011 report on gas, said “Golden Age of Gas Scenario” Leads to More Than 6°F Warming and Out-of-Control Climate Change.

These studies demonstrate the urgency to radically reduce our fossil fuel consumption. Even with large and early cuts in emissions, the indications are that temperatures are likely to rise to around 2 °C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. Currently the world’s overall emissions are increasing at a rate of 1 percent every year.

We need to shift away from fossil fuels including natural gas. We need to rapidly adopt renewable forms of energy energy like wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal. We must rapidly move toward an economy based on renewable fuels. Studies by Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi and Robert Howarth indicate that the U.S. and the world could rely 100% on such green energy sources within 20 years.

We need to expose the subterfuge of the fossil fuel industry, which falsely asserts that “gas is clean energy” or that “gas is cleaner energy” than coal burning. Natural gas does not reduce GHGs compared with coal and therefore it will not minimize the impacts of global warming. In fact, as revealed by a growing body of research, increased reliance on natural gas will actually hasten catastrophic climate change.

Source: Global Warming is Real (http://s.tt/15HRX)

Whats the Fracking Problem?

Natural Gas is Not Clean Energy