Posted on 02/28/2011 9:51:27 AM PST by SeekAndFind
There seems to be little question remaining over whether or not there is a rather blatant agenda in some segments of the media when it comes to natural gas drilling in this country. For the latest example, one need look no further than Ian Urbina’s latest piece in the New York Times with the excitable title, Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers.
Never one to soft sell a good meme, the Times skips right past any of the normal environmental hazards associated with energy exploration and goes right for… radiation!
With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself.
One of the dominant themes in the Times’ “analysis” is that drilling waste water – possibly containing radioactive particles (more on that below) – is being improperly dumped into waste water treatment plants by greedy energy companies. They do this, according to the author, because they are under-regulated and looking to save money. To back up the assertion, they quote former Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection secretary John Hanger.
“There are business pressures” on companies to “cut corners,” John Hanger, who stepped down as secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection in January, has said. “It’s cheaper to dump wastewater than to treat it.”
Records back up that assertion.
Well, he should certainly be in a position to know, so that must be some damning testimony, eh? Well… it would be, had the author actually spoken to Mr. Hanger for the article or even had a clue what he was talking about. But he didn’t and John quickly took to his blog to set the record straight and to point out that the quoted comments related to a different situation and that his actual position was almost precisely the opposite of that portrayed in the Times.
“[T]hough I am quoted in the piece, this reporter never interviewed me. … The words that I find myself saying in this piece were said by me somewhere at some time and in some context but they were not said in the context of an interview for this piece. The reporter never called me after January 18th for any purpose including to confirm the quotation that he put together for me. The reporter did not ask the new administration for my contact information after I left office.”
“I was informed by agency radiation experts that the radiation levels were not a threat to truck drivers, workers at sewage treatment facilities or the public. … I believe the agency staff were handling this issue in a serious, careful manner. I still believe that to be the case.”
The beginning of the article is discussing “radioactive elements” found in waste water from drilling sites and makes quite a fuss over it. Can you find unstable particles in such water? Yes. They’re known as Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials, and in this part of the country you find them in minute quantities if you drill for oil and gas. Or if you dig for coal, or copper or gravel. And if you dig a well down to the aquifer to obtain drinking water for your home, you’ll find them there also. When you dig a basement / foundation for a new home you’ve got a fairly good chance of stirring a few up. They are in the ground all over the planet.
NORM deposits are obviously something to be aware of and sensible precautions are required. But the density of these materials is so low that it is diluted in any major water flow to levels which fall far below any environmental standards, as Hanger further notes.
Once the Times finishes with their headline grabbing lede about radiation (!) in the water, the article then seems to go on in a scatter-shot fashion to throw mud at any wall they can find to see if something will stick. Their second line of attack moves from Eastern PA and NY out to Western Pennsylvania, where evil energy companies made the water so unsafe that residents were advised to drink bottled water instead of the public drinking water supply.
And recent incidents underscore the dangers. In late 2008, drilling and coal-mine waste released during a drought so overwhelmed the Monongahela that local officials advised people in the Pittsburgh area to drink bottled water. E.P.A. officials described the incident in an internal memorandum as “one of the largest failures in U.S. history to supply clean drinking water to the public.”
It’s true that a 2008 recommendation was made favoring the use of bottled water in the Pittsburgh area. But one look at their water safety report for that year shows that the concerns over water quality cover a wide range of problems, including agricultural run-off and unrelated industrial activity, with drilling of any sort falling far down the list. Oh, and then there’s the little matter of faulty sewage treatment plants.
Pittsburgh’s waste treatment plant Alcosan (North Shore) dumps an estimated 21 billion gallons of raw sewage into the river every year… They were fined 1.6 million dollars for violating the clean water act.
The hit piece then leaves the Marcellus shale entirely and swings all the way out west to Texas, where families in “affected areas” are suffering troubling health problems. The quotes from this section immediately got one concerned citizen up in arms over yet another tragic “fracking victim.”
In Texas, which now has about 93,000 natural-gas wells, up from around 58,000 a dozen years ago, a hospital system in six counties with some of the heaviest drilling said in 2010 that it found a 25 percent asthma rate for young children, more than three times the state rate of about 7 percent.
“It’s ruining us,” said Kelly Gant, whose 14-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son have experienced severe asthma attacks, dizzy spells and headaches since a compressor station and a gas well were set up about two years ago near her house in Bartonville, Tex.
Wait… what? I’ve seen a lot of ills laid at the doorstep of fracking in the past, but… asthma? Because of one well and a compressor station near your home? And this startling conclusion is drawn even though the very same paragraph in the article goes on to point out, “The industry and state regulators have said it is not clear what role the gas industry has played in causing such problems, since the area has had high air pollution for a while.”
Gee. I wonder what might play a larger role in asthma rates? Nearly inert natural gas rigs or rampant air pollution combined with the usual particles found in an area with naturally high levels of dust, pollen, molds and other airborne irritants?
File this article under the heading of one more attempt to prevent the development of any domestic energy supplies unless they fit in with the green /renewable energy agenda. And that’s the same agenda which, while it may serve a great purpose in the future, still can’t finance itself without massive government subsidized support.
UPDATE: Further in the article, the Times uncovers what must certainly be some sort of conspiracy.
A confidential industry study from 1990, conducted for the American Petroleum Institute, concluded that “using conservative assumptions,” radium in drilling wastewater dumped off the Louisiana coast posed “potentially significant risks” of cancer for people who eat fish from those waters regularly.
Ooooo… a confidential study. Sounded pretty shady to me, so I contacted a representative of the American Petroleum Institute to find out why they would be keeping such blockbuster information secret from the public. As it turns out, that study has been public for almost two decades and the results aren’t quite what the Times implies.
The API study mentioned in the NYT article was not confidential. In fact, it was turned into API Publication 4532 and published in 1991. Furthermore, it discusses the health risk associated with radium radiation and concludes, “The number of excess cancers predicted per year is comparable to the number expected to result from background concentrations of radium. Because of the many conservative assumptions incorporated into this screening-level analysis, it can be concluded that the risks associated with the discharge of produced water to coastal Louisiana is small.”
Was anything in this article fact checked before they ran it?
>>Was anything in this article fact checked before they ran it?
Why would they start now?
Does anyone doubt that the American people are being lied to and deceived by politicians at every level of government and this Regime in particular? We sent Conservatives to DC to expose these lies and these liars. When do we hear the truth? When do the investigations begin, the exposure front and center, and jail time for the guilty?
Mr. Issa, impeachment proceedings in order?
I think the theory comes down to this: If you advocate a course of action, a policy, that's against the interests of your neighbors, of the economy of your town, your state, and your country; if you advocate a position that makes no economic sense, no sense in terms of national security, no sense in terms of improving the lives of anyone, anywhere in America...
Why then, you're being objective, and your ideas have to be implemented, because they're based on objectivity.
I’m sure it’s all perfectly safe. Yup. Perfectly safe.
Odd how the Greens, MSM, and Dems are opposed to anything that reduces our dependence on foreign oil. Very strange. Naturally they are not influenced by Arab money any more than the Clintons made special deals for China in return for a lifetime of cash support.
Also they oppose anything that increases the food supply or reduces dangerous pests and parasites.
Almost like a policy of population control, but they gave that up when Sanger died, right? Our current Science Adviser never advocated a world-killing plague to “fix things” after all.
BTW, there is about a milliCurie of potassium-40 in every cubic meter of soil, on average, everywhere. It’s even in your bones, bananas, Brazil nuts, and salt substitute.
I agree. I am tired of them pretending.
Combine this propaganda a story in the same Sunday paper dredging up the unions favorite the Triangle shirt fire. The owners locked fire exits to prevent the women from leaving early, the fire department ladders could not reach and as a result 146 died. Capitalizing on this tragedy the unions made it safe in New York by driving manufacturing overseas.
On another thread, I noted that the Times provided a spreadsheet of fracking fluid test results from over 200 wells in Pennsylvania - but didn’t provide the raw data in their linked document archive. So we have no way to check their data - if it is accurate, if it is cherry-picked, etc. Sounds a lot like AGW, eh?
So, define “safe” for us all, please?
ping
Excellent, thanks for the notice. If only the main stream media would pick this up and run with it.
I reread the NYSlimes article again and they present no direct evidence that there are elevated levels of radioactivity in surface water due to drilling waste. They mention a study done on outfall of a sewage treatment plant that is scheduled to be published in March as the smoking gun. And they point to a “model” done by the EPA that purports to show that dilution will not work. I looked in their notes and saw no modeling, but they had some very rough calculations in an EPA slide presentation that was cryptic to say the least. I would like to see some sampling from actual streams in PA that show elevated levels of radioactivity. And, when I say elevated, I mean elevated above naturally occurring background levels, which I doubt have ever been established.
To me the most ridiculous assertion in the NYSlimes article is this: “The level of radioactivity in the wastewater has sometimes been hundreds or even thousands of times the maximum allowed by the federal standard for drinking water. While people clearly do not drink drilling wastewater, the reason to use the drinking-water standard for comparison is that there is no comprehensive federal standard for what constitutes safe levels of radioactivity in drilling wastewater.” Why would there ever be any standards for drilling wastewater??? - it is WASTEWATER, not potable water.
For those interested in additional comments on the NYSlimes article, see this Freeper thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2680938/posts
That would be like trying to make a comparison to what comes out of my tap versus what goes out of my toilet.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.