What the frack? US natural gas drilling method contaminates water

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, uses pressure blasts to release natural gas but leaves highly toxic waste water

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/feb/27/frack-natural-gas-drilling-water?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
A controversial new method of natural-gas drilling, embraced rapidly across the US, has contaminated water supplies with radioactive waste, according to an investigation by the New York Times. The paper said internal documents from the Environmental Protection Agency and state regulators showed that the dangers to the public from the drilling method – hydraulic fracturing – were greater than previously understood.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, uses huge volumes of water, chemicals and sand injected into rock at high pressure to release natural gas. Its development has unleashed a natural gas boom in the US and around the world. But the NYT said the waste water contained dangerously high levels of radioactivity. It was being sent to treatment plants that were not designed to deal with or being discharged into rivers that supply drinking water.

The NYT said its main findings included:

• • More than 1.3bn gallons of waste water was produced by Pennsylvania wells over the past three years, far more than has been previously disclosed. Most of this water – enough to cover Manhattan in three inches – was sent to treatment plants not equipped to remove many of the toxic materials in drilling waste.


• • At least 12 sewage treatment plants in three states accepted gas industry waste water and discharged waste that was only partly treated into rivers, lakes and streams.


• • Of more than 179 wells producing waste water with high levels of radiation, at least 116 reported levels of radium or other radioactive materials 100 times as high as the levels set by federal drinking-water standards. At least 15 wells produced waste water carrying more than 1,000 times the amount of radioactive elements considered acceptable.

The investigation comes amid growing concern about the potential dangers of natural gas drilling as it spreads from western states to the more densely populated north-east. The investigative website ProPublica has published an extensive series on the threats to water supplies from hydraulic fracturing. It has also raised doubts about whether natural gas can indeed offer a solution to climate change, noting that the mining process is extremely energy and water intensive.

The dangers of natural gas drilling were also the subject of a gritty documentary, Gasland, which was nominated for an Academy Award. The film's director , Josh Fox, told the Guardian: "All these things are starting to add up in a very clear picture of a massive failure to protect public health."

Hydrofracked? One Man’s Mystery Leads to a Backlash Against Natural Gas Drilling

Meeks used to have abundant water on his small alfalfa ranch, a 40-acre plot speckled with apple and plum trees northeast of the Wind River Mountains and about five miles outside the town of Pavillion. For 35 years he drew it clear and sweet from a well just steps from the front door of the plain, eight-room ranch house that he owns with his wife, Donna. Neighbors would stop off the rural dirt road on their way to or from work in the gas fields to fill plastic jugs; the water was better than at their own homes.

But in the spring of 2005, Meeks’ water had turned fetid. His tap ran cloudy, and the water shimmered with rainbow swirls across a filmy top. The scent was sharp, like gasoline. And after 20 minutes — scarcely longer than you’d need to fill a bathtub — the pipes shuttered and popped and ran dry.

Meeks suspected that environmental factors were to blame. He focused on the fact that Pavillion, home of a single four-way stop sign and 174 people, lies smack in the middle of Wyoming’s gas patch. Since the mid 1990’s, more than 1,000 gas wells had been drilled in the region — some 200 of them right around Pavillion — thousands of feet through layers of drinking water and into rock that yields tiny rivulets of trapped gas. The drilling has left abandoned toxic waste pits scattered across the landscape.It has also disturbed the earth itself. One step in the drilling cracks and explodes the earth in a physical assault that breaks up the crust and shakes the gas loose. In that process, called hydraulic fracturing, a brew of chemicals is injected deep into the earth to lubricate the fracturing and work its way into the rock. How far it goes and where it ends up, no one really knows. Meeks wondered if that wasn’t what ruined his well.

Read more: http://www.propublica.org/article/hydrofracked-one-mans-mystery-leads-to-a-backlash-against-natural-gas-drill

Singleton Councillors tour gas-drilling rig in Singleton

From Singleton parish council's website:

Exploring gas drilling issues
February 11th, 2011
FOUR of Singleton’s five parish councillors were treated to a tour of the gas-drilling rig in Grange Road on Thursday, 10th February 2011 and a chat about exploration issues which have been raised locally, nationally, and internationally.

We were particularly keen to raise our residents’ fears, and came away much reassured, as the fracturing or ‘fracking’ process being used in the parish is different to that used in the States. The 350m-year-old shale is much deeper - two miles underground - and covered by deeper layers of rock than in the States.

Cuadrilla, the private company exploring the Fylde’s shale gas reserves, has spent $50 million on buying its own rig and equipment which it is moving around various exploration sites. Exploring Preesall has cost Cuadrilla £10 million, and costs are equally high at Grange Road, where Cuadrilla spends around £50,000 a day paying just for routine suppliers.

We were particularly interested by Cuadrilla’s partners’ wish to use shale gas merely to generate electricity, as at the long-established unit at Elswick. Partners said trying to pipe gas into the national gas grid was likely to be far too expensive, in view of the land and rights costs involved, whereas generating electricity was much more cost-effective and controllable.

We will continue our regular contact with Cuadrilla’s partners and relevant outside agencies to keep abreast of this issue and will report back to residents when we know more. We’re hoping to produce a special newsletter which will cover the topic more thoroughly.

[Research] The Aquifers of the Fylde

Sherwood Sandstone Group Aquifers
The Sherwood Sandstone Group of Yorkshire and the East Midlands is the second most important aquifer in the UK. It provides a source of groundwater for industry, agriculture, and the home, especially in northern and central England.

Increasing demands on this natural resource, and corresponding legal processes including the EU Water Framework Directive require that the Environment Agency, the authority responsible for licensing the way in which the aquifer is used, enhance their understanding of the region's water by producing a groundwater model.


The Fylde Aquifer

Fig 10.30: Schematic cross-section through the Fylde Aquifer (source: Groundwater hydrology, Fig 10.30, p330)

The Sherwood Sandstone of the Fylde Aquifer is bounded in the east and underlain by Carboniferous strata, comprising interbedded mudstones, shales, sandstones and limestone (fig. 10.30, above). Permo-triassic sediments were deposited on the Carboniferous; the Sherwood Sandstone Group is the main aquifer. From it's contact with the Carboniferous in the east, the thickness increases to over 500m; it is then downthrown by up to 600m beneath the siltstones and mudstones of the Mercia Mudstone Group.

The Sherwood Sandstone Group is predominantly a fine-to-medium-grained sandstone with occasionally inter-bedded mudstone (marl) beds. The sandstone aquifer is almost entirely covered by drift deposits, which are mainly inter-bedded boulder clay (till), with sands and gravels of glacial origin. The thickness of the drift various from 5m to 30m.

Since the 1970s, the Fylde aquifer has been part of the Lancashire Conjunctive Use Scheme, in which upland reservoirs, river abstractions, river transfers and borehole sources are used conjunctively to utilise the cheaper and more abundant surface water when available, but relying on groundwater to meet the shortfalls, especially in times of drought (Walsh 1976). Since the groundwater sources are only called upon in drought years, skill is required in utilising these resources.

Abstractions are licensed according to three-year 'rolling' totals; abstraction is spread over the whole aquifer by using groups of boreholes. to avoid the risk of saline intrusion, groundwater gradients must be positive towards the boundaries. River augmentation is used to lessen the impact of groundwater abstraction with 'hands-off' conditions enforced at certain observation boreholes to prevent derogation of other groundwater sources.

Due to the extensive low-permeability drift cover, the original conceptual model of the Fylde acquifer was that the vertical flow through the drift would be neglible but that pumping would draw water from the Carboniferous strata to the east; this is indicated on Figure 10.30 by arrows with a question mark. A mathematical model was derived in which the Carboniferous strata provided most of the water pumped from the sandstone aquifer.

This initial analysis proved to be unreliable. A careful study of the Carboniferous strata shows that, due to faulting and the low permeability of many of the strata, little water can be drawn into the sandstone aquifer from the Carboniferous. Further more, it is possible to draw water downward through the low permeability drift in a similar manner to the Mehsana aquifer (Section 10.2). In a recent study (Seymour et al. 1998), conceptual and mathematical models of the Sherwood sandstone aquifer are developed with an upper layer representing the drift. As abstraction occurs from the sandstone aquifer, water is drawn down through the drift. These flows are represented in Figure 10.30 by small arrows at the top and bottom of the drift.

However, certain observation borehole responses at some distance from the major abstraction sites were not reproduced adequately by the model. When a single layer is used to represent the vertical leakage through the drift, the storage properties of the drift are ignored.

As shown in Section 7.5.4, failure to represent the storage qualities of the drift can lead to incorrect simulations. A more detailed investigation showed that towards the bottom of the drift there are extensive sand and gravel deposits, as indicated in Figure 10.30. When substantial abstraction occurs from the sandstone aquifer, the source of water most easily accessible is from the sand and gravel deposits towards the bottom of the drift. This means that is easier to attract water than if it has to be drawn through the full thickness of the low permeability drift layer. Local dewatering of these sand and gravel deposits has subsequently occurred. Consequently, larger pumped drawdowns are now required to draw water through the drift into the sandstone aquifer and then into the pumped boreholes.

When the true nature of the drift is represented in the numerical groundwater model, improved simulations are achieved.

Source: Groundwater Hydrology: Conteptual and Computational Models by K. R. Rushton