Tracking the Fracking

Please go out and rent the movie Gasland. Check out how the bush/cheney folks got the chemicals used for fracking expempt from reporting requirements of the CWA. Now if there is suspicion of groundwater contamination the oil companies don't have to divulge what chemicals they use, which is a lot of nasty ones, and therefore it makes it tough to correlate thier activities directly with the contamination. Check out the folks in PA who had the property adjacent to them "frac'd" and now their water well, which was drinkable for decades now spits out natural gas and they can physically light a flame right out of the kitchen spicot. Halliburton claims they were not responsible. Also note that methane is a far more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Can you tell me that these guys can frack the heck out of our subsurface and capture all that methane with none of it escaping to the atmsosphere?

Gasland is a movie for people who can't make up their own minds. The producer assumes we are incapable of thinking for ourselves, so he feeds us what he wants us to believe. Just like Fox - balanced news (ha ha ha). So now we have a bunch of oil and gas "experts", trained by a producer with an agenda. Sorry, there's much to the story that Gasland leaves out.

Don't Panic it's Organic!

Check out what Lisa Jackson, head of the EPA, had to say on May 24, 2011:

"The head of the Environmental Protection Agency told a House committee Tuesday that she favored natural gas production and said she didn't know of any “proven case” in which hydraulic fracturing had affected drinking water."

http://www.newsok.com/article/3571012...

We don't want junk science influencing our climate change policy, and we shouldn't let junk science dictate the way we use our natural resources.

junk science is building a machine that runs on fuel that requires you to rape the earth in order to extract it, then spew it back into the atmosphere when the energy conversion is done. If 'fracking'(curse word to those in space) isn't so bad, why did the company proceed w/o telling anybody? Seems like our local govt isn't bought and paid for yet. Hopefully what happens in DC stays in DC and someday we take it back from what is now a corporate plutocracy.

I guess, spacey, that you are them guilty of raping the earth every time you drive somewhere, every time you get on a plane, every time you use plastics (including when you posted the above response), and every time you patronize any business that uses fossil fuels to assemble and deliver their products and services to a place you can buy them... which means every time you eat something.

Gasland is a very good documentary but it leads the viewer to suspect that everytime fracking occurs it leads to groundwater contamination which clearly isn't the case. At the same time it is clear that there have definitely been proven cases where fracking directly resulted in groundwater contamination. This is a relatively new process and if properly regulated could be a win-win for both sides, but that isn't the case right now, it's like the wild west in some states regarding the lax regulations. The head of the EPA is such an abysmal failure of a person.

Chato,

Gasland is a very poor "documentary." In fact, I wouldn't even call it a documentary, I'd call it a political statement made by someone who has absolutely no technical experience or expertise in his subject matter. Josh Fox may be well meaning, but he doesn't know what he's talking about. His film been refuted by the EPA, by the State of Colorado, the State of Pennsylvania, and by researchers in West Virginia. It's junk science to be sure, but in this case politically correct junk science. The same folks who decry climate change deniers embrace this brand of junk science uncritically, because it's sufficiently ideologically pure.

I'm going to repeat what I posted above:
On May 24, Lisa Jackson, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, told a House committee that she favored natural gas production and said she didn't know of any “proven case” in which hydraulic fracturing had affected drinking water."

Can you provide evidence to show that she is wrong? And credentials to demonstrate that you are more qualified than she is?

Fracking is not a new process, and neither is it even "relatively new." It was introduced in the 1940's, and since then hundreds of thousands of wells have been fracked all over the US.

^Wrong and wronger. You believe someone just because they hold a temporary government position that they were appointed to by the president? You clearly have very little knowledge about fracking. Try talking to someone in the industry. The practice known as fracking today was developed in the 90's, not the 40's.

I'll believe the head of the EPA before I'll believe someone like yourself who has no oil industry experience. And it's not just the head of the EPA who's saying this.

Your belief that fracking began in the 1990's is evidence that you're uninformed.

See for example, Wikipedia's entry for "hydraulic fracturing" in which they quote: "Hydraulic fracturing for stimulation of oil and natural gas wells was first used in the United States in 1947."

This comment is supported by two footnotes:

Howard, G.C. and C.R. Fast (editors), Hydraulic Fracturing, Monograph Vol. 2 of the Henry L. Doherty Series, Society of Petroleum Engineers New York, 1970.

Montgomery, Carl T.; Smith, Michael B. (December 2010). "Hydraulic Fracturing: History of an Enduring Technology". Journal of Petroleum Technology (Society of Petroleum Engineers) 62 (12): 26–32. ISSN 0149-2136. Retrieved January 5, 2011.

How the first authors wrote about hydraulic fracturing 20 years before you claim it was invented is beyond me, but perhaps you can explain their clairvoyance.

Chato,if you're going to criticize people, stick to topics you know something about.