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Fracking

Study Measures Fracking’s Impact On Nearby Surface Water Quality

August 21, 2021 Bridget Reed Morawski, Nation Of Change. , , ,
A new study correlates poorer surface water quality with nearby hydraulic fracturing but finds that the impacts aren’t major enough to be considered harmful by federal regulators. However, the researchers noted they weren’t able to study “potentially more dangerous” substances related to fracking because of a lack of data. While some published studies have already linked groundwater contamination with hydraulic fracking activity, one of the researchers behind the study, Christian Leuz of the University of Chicago, said through a press release that their work was the “first large-sample evidence showing that hydraulic fracturing is related to the quality of nearby surface waters for several U.S. shales.” The study, published in the journal Science, found “small but consistent” increases in the concentration of nonbiodegradable salts in watersheds where new hydraulic fracturing activities were taking place.

EPA Approval Of PFAS For Fracking May Spell A New Health Crisis

August 2, 2021 Leanna First-Arai, Truthout. , , ,
For over a month, noxious wastewater has been leaching across the ground on Ashley Watt’s family ranch in the Permian Basin in West Texas where she lives and raises cattle. It started in mid-June, when a well Chevron Corps drilled in the 1960s (and plugged with cement in the 1990s before abandoning it) burst open. The well spewed what Watt described on Twitter as “super concentrated brine and benzene” into her water supply, the Pecos River Basin alluvial aquifer. After a month on site, according to Watt, Chevron plugged the well on July 16, but it failed a pressure test and continued bubbling brine at the surface again just over an hour later. Two calves and four cows have died, as Bloomberg News reported, and the well continues to spray onto the sandy land, where the water table is just over 50 feet below ground.

Highlighting The Too-Often Invisible Labor Of Mothers, Who Protect Us And Lead Us

March 13, 2021 Veronica Coptis, Coalfield Justice. , , ,
This week two major publications were released that highlight public health impacts on people living next to oil and gas operations. The Environmental Health News released their investigation looking at how chemicals associated with oil and gas are present at levels 90 times higher than the average in families’ urine, including samples from children. The New Yorker published “When the Kids Started Getting Sick” by Eliza Griswold, a deep dive on the increase in rare bone cancers in the region.  These articles highlight the reality of so many in our communities, and because they reflect that lived reality, they hit home. For that reason, this blog goes a bit beyond simply providing information. 

Investigation Into Chemical Exposure From Fracking Provokes Call For Rapid Phaseout

March 5, 2021 Jessica Corbett, Commondreams. , , ,
"While financial analysts, policymakers, and massive corporations squabble over the finer points of the fracking debate, families living amidst the wells day in and day out live in constant fear about what the industry might cost them—if they had another child, would they need to worry about birth defects? Are these exposures increasing their kids' cancer risk? Would it be safer to move to a place far away from all of this, even if it would also mean being far from their extended families, friends, and communities? And even if they could move, how far would they have to go to feel safe?" Those are just some of the questions facing the western Pennsylvania families featured in a report published Monday by Environmental Health News (EHN), a publication of the nonprofit Environmental Health Sciences. Five families from the region participated in a pilot study on the chemicals commonly found in emissions from fracking sites.

Coalition To Governor Wolf: No Sacrifice Zones In Pennsylvania

February 26, 2021 Berks Gas Truth. , , ,
Today, Governor Tom Wolf voted with the governors of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware to ban fracking in the Delaware River Basin and to remove from consideration regulations that would have allowed the transfer of water from the basin to fracking operations elsewhere and the importing of fracking wastewater for treatment, processing, storage, or disposal. We congratulate our allies who have fought for this ban for 11 years and worked to stop the additional regulations proposed in 2017. The reasons cited for today’s decision include the rapidly growing body of peer-reviewed science on the adverse impacts of shale gas development and evidence of the harms done in areas outside the basin for more than a decade.

Flint Activists Remember How Gina McCarthy Failed Their City

January 20, 2021 Naomi Lachance, Counterpunch. , , ,
Former EPA chief Gina McCarthy has reportedly been picked as Biden’s domestic climate policy chief. That concerns activists in Flint, Michigan, who say that she failed to address the Flint water crisis.  Karen Weaver, the former mayor of Flint, said that she was disappointed with the choice. “I hope she does better with climate control than she did with Flint,” she told MLive-The Flint Journal.  On Thursday, nine people, including former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, were charged over the crisis. Nick Lyon, Snyder’s health director, and Dr. Eden Wells, Snyder’s chief medical executive, were charged with involuntary manslaughter. Snyder was charged with two misdemeanor counts of willful neglect of duty.

How Activists Shut Down Key Pipeline Projects In New York

January 7, 2021 Greta Moran, Grist. , , ,
If all had gone according to plan, the Constitution pipeline would be carrying fracked gas 124 miles from the shale gas fields of Pennsylvania through streams, wetlands, and backyards across the Southern Tier of New York until west of Albany. There it would join two existing pipelines, one that extends into New England and the other to the Ontario border as part of a vast network that moves fracked gas throughout the northeastern United States and Canada. For a while, everything unfolded as expected. When the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved the project in 2014, the U.S. was in the midst of a fracking boom that would make it the world’s largest producer of natural gas and crude oil.

Every Purple Dot

November 23, 2020 Eleanor Goldfield, Hard Road of Hope. , , ,
Water is Life – it is where we come from, who we are (both in a base physical sense and philosophically as fluid beings in space and time), how we and the ecosystems we depend on survive. And therefore, it is also of prime interest to a capitalist system desperate to commodify everything and everyone. Water is literally a traded commodity on the stock market , perhaps the most prime example of how our system treats finite entities like water as if they were infinitely marketable while treating infinite 1s and 0s on a screen as if they were essential to our survival as a species.

Fracking Shatters Illusions Of A Clean British Columbia

November 10, 2020 Peter McCartney, The Georgia Straight. , , ,
Wind howls in my ears. My fingers are numb. It’s midnight and I’m on top of Pink Mountain, near Mile 147 of the Alaska Highway in northeastern British Columbia. As I look out into the night, dozens of gas plants light up the horizon. This is fracking country. For two weeks, I’m driving the back roads of this sparse corner of the province to gather images of the destruction gas development has wrought here. It involves long periods of boredom punctuated by jaw-dropping moments where I curse aloud to no one in particular.

Boat Blockade At Ineos Oil Refinery

October 25, 2020 Jaime Shuttleworth, The Herald. , , ,
Scotland - Climate activists have blocked the gates of the Ineos refinery at Grangemouth with boats in a protest against pollution. Extinction Rebellion Scotland claims Ineos is Scotland’s biggest climate polluter and is staging the blockade as part of a programme of action. Small groups of no more than six people have locked themselves together at the gates and aim to remain there all day. Two boats are being used to block the entrances to the refinery and the headquarters.

Mountain Valley Pipeline Project Remains Stalled In Legal Limbo

October 25, 2020 Mike Tony, Charleston Gazette-Mail. , , ,
It was a shock to the system. That’s how EQT President and CEO Toby Rice described the impact of the July cancellation of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Rice made the allusion during EQT’s third-quarter earnings call Thursday while reporting talks with four or five other unnamed companies to offload some or all of EQT’s Mountain Valley Pipeline capacity. Environmentalists hope Mountain Valley is headed for the same fate as Atlantic Coast and view the natural gas industry’s recent slide as evidence the market might be on their side.

Victory: East Pittsburgh Community Stops Fracking Well

October 23, 2020 Food and Water Watch. , , ,
The East Pittsburgh Zoning and Hearing Board announced this evening that it was rejecting a permit appeal from Merrion Oil & Gas, the company seeking to drill a fracking well at the US Steel plant. The decision (a 3-2 vote) likely marks the final word on a well project that drew intense community opposition, led by groups like North Braddock Residents For Our Future. The well has long been championed by Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman. “Communities that have been hard hit by fossil fuel pollution in our state have been raising hell to stop projects like this fracking well...

Natural Gas Fracking Under Fire In Pennsylvania

September 29, 2020 Ad Crable, Bay Journal. , , ,
In a blistering report on Pennsylvania’s 12-year experience with hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, a special statewide grand jury said public health and the environment have suffered and the state’s environmental and health agencies, rather than acting as watchdogs, had a “culture of inadequate oversight.” “When it comes to fracking, Pennsylvania failed,” said Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who convened the Investigating Statewide Grand Jury that listened to scores of witnesses and reports of investigators over two years.

Fracking Company Made It Rain Toxic Water Upon New Mexico

September 4, 2020 Dahr Jamail, Truthout. , , ,
Penny Aucoin, her husband Carl Dee George, their son Gideon and their daughter Skyler have had their lives devastated by the fracking industry. There was no oil and gas infrastructure where they lived when they moved to Carlsbad, New Mexico. But six years ago, during a massive expansion of drilling across the Permian Basin that spans West Texas and southeastern New Mexico — one of the most prolific oil and gas basins in the United States — the drilling began. It was so loud they had to provide hearing protection for Skyler. Then when the flaring commenced, dead birds began literally falling out of the sky right next to their home, and one of their chickens died.

Trump’s Golden Era Of Energy Is Turning To Lead

August 1, 2020 Justin Mikulka, DeSmog Blog. , , ,
It was just over a year ago that President Trump announced, “The golden era of American energy is now underway,” saying that his policies focused on exploiting oil, gas, and coal were “unleashing energy dominance.”  What a difference a year makes. On July 10, the Financial Times ran an article with a headline that asked, “Is the party finally over for U.S. oil and gas?” And there is no doubt that it has been quite a party for the last decade. At least, for the fracking executives who have enriched themselves while losing hundreds of billions of dollars investors gave them to produce oil and gas.
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