As we’ve said before, Obama is giving fracking a pass now so that he can finish off the coal industry. Once coal is gone, fracking is next… probably a job for President Hillary.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
One year ago, the Environmental Protection Agency finished testing drinking water in Dimock, Pa., after years of complaints by residents who suspected that nearby natural gas production had fouled their wells. The EPA said that for nearly all the 64 homes whose wells it sampled, the water was safe to drink.
Yet as the regulator moved to close its investigation, the staff at the mid-Atlantic EPA office in Philadelphia, which had been sampling the Dimock water, argued for continuing the assessment.
In an internal EPA PowerPoint presentation obtained by the Tribune/Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau, staff members warned their superiors that several wells had been contaminated with methane and substances such as manganese and arsenic, most likely because of local natural gas production.
No, I don’t work for a gas company. I work for a faraway university in an unfortunate country whose population persists in electing dumbasses who ban gas exploration.
But I know enough about methane and its role in life to tell you it does not matter two hoots. You are right to observe that everything develops cracks. There is no material in the Earth’s crust that does not fracture. Cracks are everywhere. If there is a crack in a well casing that is so bad that sand and gravel are washed up through it, that is considered contamination, and such cracks are repaired. Methane is not contamination. It just bubbles by without trace. It is about the least soluble substance that you can find:
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/gases-solubility-water-d_1148.html
There is *no* methane in water at atmospheric pressure. Let’s not warp common words. Contamination means something undesirable mixing inseparably with the substance of value. Methane is neither undesirable nor inseparable.
clever , but the wells ARE contaminated with methane from the sleeves fracturing … 6 – 9 % fail just after they are poured and considered new … 45 – 60% will crack and contaminate the water supply.
You must work the the gas company!!
If President Obama is “fossil-fuel friendly”, he’s also the greatest job-creating president in history. And a real bridge across the races. And a true defender of liberty and privacy. And a diplomat of graceful yet forceful effect. And…
There is no such thing as water “contaminated with methane”.
Arsenic makes a lot of ground water sources unusable, but it has nothing to do with natural gas production.
http://www.isws.illinois.edu/gws/archive/arsenic/