EPA Claim Fracking Caused Wy. Water Contamination

|Dow Jones Newswires ^ | Thursday, December 08, 2011 | Ryan Tracy|

[Rabin]

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday that chemicals found in Wyoming drinking water were likely associated with hydraulic fracturing in natural gas wells in the area, raising tensions in an ongoing debate over the drilling practice.

[Smokin' Joe]

I read somewhere these wells are shallower than 2000 ft.

We run surface casing past that.

[SaxxonWoods]

“...likely associated with hydraulic fracturing...”

Science!

[LomanBill]

>>Wonder what they will do with it.

Most likely something that involves demanding from some according to their ability, and giving to others according to their need. As usual.

BOHICA.

[LomanBill]

“We” who? The same manipulative Royal Oligarchs who’ve corrupted the global economic infrastructure for their amoral hedonistic amusement?

NO SALE.

[LomanBill]

[the EPA just happens to hit paydirt with a contaminiated well.]

Uhuh.  No doubt the ensuing regulatory facade will conveniently further bankrupt any truly AMERICAN endeavors to develop OUR resources; and it will primarily benefit the usual NyLon scum who've been fracking America from within since long before Guss Hall and other Useful Idiots endowed them with the benefits rendered by the EPA...

 

=================================

The Game Statistics

So, who are these guys at the NRDC? Well, it’s an interesting list.

Natural Resources Defense Council Board of Trustees
Chairman	Frederick A. O. Schwartz, Jr.	Partner, Cravath Swaine & Moore; (a British Law Firm) Former New York City Corporation Counsel (under Mayor Ed Koch)
Executive Director	Frances Beinecke	Co-founder, The New York League of Conservation Voters (with RFK Jr.)
Trustee	Laurance Rockefeller	Private philanthropist; Former Chairman, Rockefeller Brothers Fund; Former chairman, Citizens Advisory Committee on Environmental Quality; Trustee, the Laurance Rockefeller Charitable Trust
Trustee	Thomas A. Troyer	Partner, Caplin & Drysdale; Former Chairman, the Foundation Lawyers’ Group; Former member of the IRS Commissioner’s Advisory Group on Tax-exempt Organizations; (no conflict of interest there?) Board member, the Carnegie Corporation of New York
Pres & Co-founder	John H. Adams	Former Assistant US Attorney (New York)
Vice Chair	Adam Albright	Board member, Redefining Progress; Board Chair, Population Communications International; Program Chair, Conservation International
Vice Chair	Alan Horn	Chairman & Chief Operating Officer, Warner Brothers
Vice Chair	Burks Lapham	Chairman, Concern Inc.; Director, Chesapeake Bay Foundation (a relatively benign group)
Vice Chair	George Woodwell	Founding Director, Woods Hole Research Center; Co-founder, Environmental Defense Fund (they banned DDT, Alar, etc.)
Co-founder & Treas	Richard E. Ayres	Partner, Howrey & Simon; Former Chairman, National Clean Air Coalition
Trustee	Patricia Bauman	Member, Pew Environmental Health Commission; Former Manager, National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences; Co-Director, The Bauman Foundation
Trustee	William Richardson	Former US Secretary of Energy; Former US Ambassador to the United Nations; Former US Congressman (D-NM)
Trustee	Michael Finnegan	Managing Partner, J.P Morgan Securities

Is this "Natural Resources" defense, or natural resource SUPPLIERS defense?

Now, let’s look at who gives the NRDC money, shall we?

Top Funders of NRDC
Funder	Total Donated	Comments
		Descriptions in bold are major energy investors
Pew Charitable Trusts	$11,568,000.00	Sunoco money
Blue Moon Fund	$7,818,735.00	This is W. Alton Jones Money (Citgo)
Energy Foundation	$6,965,000.00	Launched by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, and The Rockefeller Foundation. The Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation joined as a funding partner in 1996, and The McKnight Foundation joined in 1998. In 1999, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation joined to support two programs: the U.S. Clean Energy Program (now the Climate Program) and the China Sustainable Energy Program. In 2002, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation joined to support advanced technology transportation and clean energy for the West.
John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation	$5,636,500.00	Bankers Life and Casualty money (investment portfolio unknown)
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency	$4,681,097.00	Your tax dollars at work subsidizing the interests of whom?
Turner Foundation	$3,795,167.00	CNN, and a lot more
Public Welfare Foundation	$3,500,000.00	Too confounded to determine
Joyce Foundation	$3,309,445.00	Timber Wealth
Charles Stewart Mott Foundation	$3,022,340.00	General Motors
Ford Foundation	$2,733,300.00	Ford
Beinecke Foundation	$2,150,000.00	Major player at Yale.
J. M. Kaplan Fund	$2,057,500.00
William Bingham Foundation	$1,995,000.00
Homeland Foundation	$1,733,000.00
San Francisco Foundation	$1,654,739.00
Rockefeller Brothers Fund	$1,377,510.00	Them again
McKnight Foundation	$1,365,500.00
Robert Sterling Clark Foundation	$1,310,000.00
Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation	$1,310,000.00
Bauman Family Foundation	$1,226,000.00
Nathan Cummings Foundation	$1,220,000.00
Educational Foundation of America	$1,210,000.00
Richard & Rhoda Goldman Fund	$1,205,000.00
Mertz Gilmore Foundation	$1,201,000.00
Carnegie Corporation of New York	$1,200,000.00
Park Foundation	$1,198,010.00
New York Community Trust	$1,186,821.00
Overbrook Foundation	$1,182,585.00
Surdna Foundation	$1,147,000.00
Bullitt Foundation	$1,122,675.00
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation	$1,075,000.00	Note also the participation with the Energy Foundation

Quod erat demonstratum.

Most, if not all of these people at NRDC are energy investors. As individuals, they would not possess the financial wherewithal to so completely manipulate a market, finance selectively sufficient misleading or outright fraudulent data, and coordinate the timing of political action, nationwide. Together however, they have the political clout to combine federal money with their own tax-exempt "charitable" donations to fund lawsuits that manipulate access to resources, control processing of energy feed-stocks, and set attainment targets and process specifications in a manner preferential to their investments. ALL of the resulting capital gains in their trusts are tax-exempt. In any other universe, that’s interstate racketeering, fraud, conspiracy, and tax evasion, all of which are federal felonies.

You may be surprised to find the Hewlett and Packard fortunes listed as energy investors, but they gave over $130 million to Stanford to research extraction of methane hydrates and are directly tied in with Exxon/Mobil in that effort to the tune of $300 million more. “Keeping it in the family” they've put Lynn Orr, husband of Susan Packard, in charge of the global energy project. The idea is that they can use the energy revenues and the carbon credits for removing a principal source of atmospheric methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Unfortunately, the cost of marine operations is so high they need “carbon credits” to subsidize it or this will be a big loser of an investment. Curiously, if they disturb those nodules foolishly, they may end up releasing a great deal of methane to the surface which would release the gases into the atmosphere. What happens if they screw up? Can they be sued?

NRDC can’t be sued. Clinton EO 12986 indemnified them from such lawsuits as members in good standing at the IUCN, the United Nations' equivalent of the EPA. Nobody sued the NRDC for the cleanup costs of MTBE even though it contaminated drinking water wells across the State. Well it gets worse. Guess who is now making big moves in forcing State control of private and small municipal water supplies now that the groundwater has been poisoned for ten years? Yup, the NRDC.

http://www.wildergarten.com/wp_pages/articles/nrdc_energy_racketeering.html

 

Nothing to see there, moooove along.

With kudos as usual to FReeper Cary Okie.

[Sacajaweau]

http://www.statesman.com/news/texas/inhofe-asks-epa-about-pavillion-and-fracking-2019167.html

[old curmudgeon]

Another catchy turn of words that means nothing and adds absolutely nothing to the understanding of economics.

Natural resources, especially energy resources, are a source of wealth. To get the advantages of that wealth, they must be developed. Where and to whom you sell them makes some difference but does not alter the basic fact that they must be sold in order to gain wealth.

If our politicians do not have the smarts to work with the Canadians, they are going to sell it somewhere else.

What is the first thing any of us do when we need money? We sell something. Some of us sell our labor, some our timber, some our manufactured products and some our farm crops, just to name a few sources of income.

And some, in politics, sell their souls.

To say that selling our oil overseas is immoral is the same thing as to tell our farmers that they should not sell soybeans on the world market.

[jdsteel]

The linked article said the shallowest gas wells were 1600 feet. Nobody fracs at that shallow a depth; had to be old traditional wells.

[CedarDave]

From your link:

Drilling has been going on in the Pavillion area for more than 40 years.

Well construction and completion practices have improved considerably in 40 years. Environmental concerns rate high in any oilfield activity today. Contamination is much more likely to come from a casing leak or poor cementing practices than from a one-time frac job.

One environmentalist said pinpointing fracking as the cause of contamination there has been difficult in part because petroleum companies in years past didn't publicly disclose the chemicals they pumped underground.

I call BS. Chemicals injected in the past, together with naturally occurring natural gas constituents (benzenes, toluene, xylenes, naphthalenes, etc.) would make their way into the groundwater in the event of a casing leak or poor cementing as mentioned above. Again, the presence of frac chemicals in groundwater does NOT mean that hydraulic fracturing caused them to be there.

[apoliticalone]

“We” who? The same manipulative Royal Oligarchs who’ve corrupted the global economic infrastructure for their amoral hedonistic amusement?

I like that. The new world economy where government czars aid and abet the oligarchs, and global crony capitalism reigns supreme with a Russian style economy. A few win big, most of us become the saps who lose. It's about cronyism, connections and corruption, and not transparent open markets, competence and risk reward.

[The Theophilus]

Oh, that millions of people in our nation would turn to God! What is it going to take?

A work of God?

I understand that some folks are relying on the Gospel According to Charles Finney to magically erase the consequences of rebellion and wickedness - that somehow an emotional appeal to avoiding temporal destruction is an artificial replication of the Great Awakening. But it is profane to act as if God is a talisman who moves to perfect our material comfort.

Stated another way, We are just as likely to Christianize America as Lot was able to Christianize Sodom.

When I mean Christianize, I am labeling a variant Western culture that has an equal or greater footing in society as atheism, Islam and secularism. Setting up creches, commencement prayers, and "God We Trust" on our currency is Christianizing the culture, but does nothing for one's position with God.

People talk about a Judeo/Christian ethic, as if it is a positive thing, but Judeo/Christian is the ultimate in oxymoron. Religious Jews, by definition, hate Jesus Christ and are against anything truly of the Kingdom of God. Therefore a "Judeo/Christian ethic" has nothing to do with the soul changing attributes, but has everything to do with outward appearances, temporary false piety, and social/cultural habits.

As in DL Moody's revivals, they were the cultural equivalence of a sugar buzz, a tent revival is the same as scoffing down a one pound bag of M&Ms. During the sugar spike, there is all kinds of energy and enthusiasm, immediately followed by the emotional/glucose drop and we are back to where we were before - and sometimes much worse.

How do you know that we aren't in God's End Game?

[zeugma]

I think I’d demand a second opinion. I wouldn’t trust the EPA to accurately describe the phase of the moon.

[Red Badger]

MY theory is that some enviro-whack-jobs got some fracking chemicals and dumped/pumped them into the ground water system so they could be ‘discovered’ by the EPA Stasi...........

[thackney]

This field is rather unique in that decades ago, they actually did hydraulic fracturing IN the drinking water Aquifer rather than thousands of feet below it.

- - - - - - - - -

The agency also stressed that the findings are unique to Pavillion, where fracturing has taken place both in and below the drinking water aquifer and very close to drinking water wells — conditions that are not common elsewhere in the U.S. The region has been home to oil and gas drilling since the 1950s, and some of the 169 gas production wells in the area were fractured at points just 1,220 feet below the ground.

By contrast, in South Texas, energy companies are extracting natural gas from the Eagle Ford shale formation at depths ranging from 4,000 to 14,000 feet below the surface.

http://fuelfix.com/blog/2011/12/08/epa-says-hydraulic-fracturing-polluted-groundwater/

[thackney]

Note also the following from the Rig Zone Article:

The latest test results came from two wells that EPA itself constructed, and which reached to depths of about 775 and 970 feet, deeper than other private water wells in the area. It detected levels of benzene, a carcinogen, that exceeded safe drinking water standards as well as synthetic chemicals--glycols and alcohols--used in hydraulic fracturing fluid.

They didn't find those chemicals in people's water wells. They dug extra deep wells below where people were getting their water and found chemicals at the lower depths, not a health hazaard at the drinking water depth.

[apoliticalone]

But more than that, energy is a national security issue, one of several national security issues obummer has screwed up.

I don't disagree there, but I'd expand national security to much more than energy. Self sufficiency is what national security is about and we've had 40 years where 536 paid members of government (give or take some of both parties) have worked to destroy our self sufficiency with their one way trade pacts that resulted in the destruction of the USA manufacturing base. They allowed open access to the USA while our products were closed off from access by the exporting countries. It was a one way street. Their job was to maintain policies that promoted a strong US economy (tariffs, etc) and instead they sold us out.

[old curmudgeon]

I was using energy as an example because it is something everyone is dependent upon.

As for other industries, you don’t need to sell me on that.

I made a very good living for many years selling heavy equipment to an industry that has all gone to the Orient leaving me with no customers.

My industry was just one of many, some of which we would truly be up the creek if a war or some other devastating event were to take place.

DC is full of very impractical people.

[denydenydeny]

Shale has just handed EPA a hammer.

I would put nothing past this supremely politicized EPA, including falsifying the tests. In a Saul Alinsky world there are no lies, only tactics.

I never used to think conspiratorially like this but the Climategate emails--which are nothing less than conspirators speaking frankly about their manipulations of their data for political purposes--have changed my thinking.

[LomanBill]

How’s that A$$paper digestin’ these days Wiley?

NyLon thieves sold lots of that overseas too.

FAIL.

[LomanBill]

[What is the first thing any of us do when we need money? We sell something. ]

Uhuh. And COMMERCE BETWEEN MASTER AND SLAVE IS [still] DESPOTISM.

Frack that.