Oil/Gas drilling has become “unconventional.”
How does this affect you?
A relatively new drilling method, known as high volume, slick water hydraulic fracturing, is believed by many to carry significant environmental risks—from the hydraulic fracturing and all of the stages and associated processes of drilling, production, waste disposal, etc.
Much of the current debate also includes the vast amounts of fresh water that become permanently removed from the natural water cycle and massive amounts of toxic frack waste that are being generated. Much of this waste comes from other states and is being brought to Ohio and being injected into the ground beneath our feet!
Big Oil and Gas would have us believe that fracking is a perfectly safe process that does not put our health, drinking water, or environment at risk. Should we trust this industry to look out for us?
This site is meant to be a resource to help you make informed decisions for yourself, decisions about how to help protect your community, and to keep up to date on legislative changes, industry positions, current news articles, and more…
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Why the Gas Industry Fought For the 2005 Energy Policy Act
April 18, 2013
This is an industry document – Halliburton from 1998 – D R I L L I N G CONTRACTOR Nov./Dec. 1998
They have known all along that gas migration occurs and why – that is the functional reason the industry fought so hard to get the exemptions in the 2005 Energy Policy Act
Predicting Potential Gas-Flow Rates to Help Determine the Best Cementing Practices
By Ron Crook and James Heathman, Halliburton Energy Services Inc
CONCLUSION: Flow channels created by gas migration cannot be “healed.”
QUOTE: “Once a flow channel develops, there is no level of gel strength that can cause the channel to heal; the channel is permanent and can be removed only by remedial (squeeze) cementing.”
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Steingraber Calls Out Illinois Fracking Regulations
by Jeff Biggers
Before environmental lobbyists and legislators push a hydraulic fracking bill through the Illinois legislature, they need to sit down with farmers in Clinton County and learn how well regulations defended their water, farms and cankered lives from the contamination of coal slurry in the Pearl Aquifer.
Then they would fight to the end, like five southern Illinois county boards, for a moratorium on fracking—instead of a regulatory compromise that undercuts their efforts.
That was the advice given to me by an old farmer this week, as Illinois’ controversial bill to regulatehydraulic fracturing rushes its way to a vote that will have national implications.
In the process, potentially impacted residents in southern Illinois have repeatedly raised an important question: Who should we trust to speak on behalf of protecting our water, land and lives: The moratorium stance of Dr. Sandra Steingraber or the compromising role of the Sierra Club and otherenvironmental groups?
Left in ruins from the boom and bust cycles of heavily-mechanized coal mining by absentee coal companies, who have left behind 1,300 abandoned mines, few other regions in the country have borne the deadly burden of compromised environmental and workplace safety regulations than the coalfields of my own southern Illinois.
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Gasland II: From Broken Promises to Renewable Solutions
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Three Arrested at Court Appearance for Protesting Fracking Infrastructure Storage Site
More than 150 people packed the Town of Reading Court in New York on April 17 to witness what they believe is a shocking miscarriage of justice.
Three members of a group dubbed the “Seneca Lake 12”—massage therapist Melissa Chipman of Schuyler County, farm owner Michael Dineen of Seneca County and Sandra Steingraber, PhD, author, biologist and distinguished scholar at Ithaca College—were sentenced to jail terms for their resistance to the heavy industrialization of the peaceful rural region they call home.
Dr. Sandra Steingraber was one of three arrested last night and sentenced to 15 days in jail for refusing to pay an imposed fine for trespassing while protesting the Inergy fracking infrastructure storage site on Seneca Lake in New York. Photo courtesy of Green Umbrella“What has happened to civil society?” asked a stunned Helen Savich when she saw her hero Sandra Steingraber hauled off to jail.
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Mock Wedding Illustrates Misguided Marriage Between Fracking Industry and Environmental Groups
A coalition of Pennsylvania and Ohio students and residents staged a mock wedding today at the EQT Plaza in downtown Pittsburgh, PA, to condemn the misguided union of corporations and environmental nonprofits through the Center for Sustainable Shale Development (CSSD).
Oil and gas companies, including Shell, Chevron and CONSOL Energy, and environmental nonprofits, such as the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), Pennsylvania Environmental Council (PEC) and Group Against Smog and Pollution (GASP), began working together in March of 2013 in order to create a set of voluntary regulations for fracking. The demonstrators have asked all environmental nonprofits to divorce themselves from CSSD due to irreconcilable differences.
CSSD’s central mission is to promote the idea of “sustainable shale,” but fracking is fundamentally unsustainable. Burning fossil fuels is the primary driver of climate destabilization, and oil and gas are finite resources. The concept of sustainable shale is an oxymoron. The gas industry is using their partnership with environmental nonprofits to co-opt the brand of sustainability and hide the destruction caused by fracking.
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Scientists Say Oil Industry Likely Caused Largest Oklahoma Earthquake
Joe Eaton
Several homes were damaged in the earthquake that hit central Oklahoma on November 6, 2011. The injection of wastewater from oil production into abandoned oil wells was the likely cause, according to a new study.
Photograph by Sue Ogrocki, AP
The largest recorded earthquake in Oklahoma history was likely triggered by the injection of wastewater from oil production into wells deep beneath the earth, according to a study published Tuesday in the scientific journalGeology.
The magnitude 5.7 earthquake, which struck in 2011 near Prague in central Oklahoma, is the largest and most recent of a number of quakes scientists have tied to wastewater injection from oil and natural gas production, raising new concerns about the practice.
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Are Methane Hydrates Really Going to Change Geopolitics?
By Chris Nelder
ReutersThe right way to understand the potential of unconventional fuels like methane hydrates and tight oil is to closely examine their production rates and their prices. If these fuels can be produced at large scales and profitable prices, they very well might influence geopolitics and economics in the ways that Mann speculates. If they cannot, then it truly doesn’t matter how much of those resources may exist underground and in the ocean floor.
Unfortunately Mann offers precious little data on price or production rates.
A debate on the future of energy Read more
If Mann’s data on methane hydrates is correct, then Japan’s experiment so far has taken 10 years and $700 million to produce four million cubic feet of gas, which is worth about $16,000 at today’s U.S. gas prices, or about $50,000 at today’s prices for imported LNG in Japan. At this point, it is an enormously expensive experimental pilot project, and nothing more. We do not yet know when it might be able to recover commercial volumes of gas, or at what rate, or at what price. We have no reason to believe that if commercial quantities are recoverable by 2018 as Japan hopes–which seems incredibly optimistic–that the price of that gas will be competitive with imported LNG.
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Two New Studies Indicate Dangerous Financial Bubble in Shale Investing:
Shale Bubble – Drill Baby Drill (by J David Hughes, Post Carbon Institute)
Shale Bubble – Wall Street (by Deborah Rogers, Energy Policy Institute)
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The Baseline Water Testing Process: It is NOT Just About Getting a Sample
By Brian Oram, Professional Geologist
B.F. Environmental Consultants Inc.
Published in March ONG Marketplace
We have had the opportunity to witness a wide range of practices that have been called baseline testing. We have seen a team of 4 professionals working for the EPA in Dimock, Pennsylvania, take 4 to 5 hours to collect one water sample and we’ve seen a single sampler with virtually no training take 15 minutes to purge and sample a private well with no field measurements or even gloves.
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Portage County: Drilling blamed for home damage
(View Full Article via NEOGAP)
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Well casing failure can contaminate groundwater
View Dr. Ingraffea’s Newest Video on Shale Gas & Climate Change
View Dr. Ingraffea’s Study on Fluid Migration in Marcellus Shale
Dr. Ingraffea’s General Recommendations on Fracking:
1. Where fracking is not yet occurring, it should be banned.
2. Where fracking is already occurring, it should be done only under the strictest regulations that are rigorously enforced.
3. The use of all hydrocarbon fuels should be reduced as fast as possible.
4. The use of renewable, non-hydrocarbon fuels should be vastly accelerated.
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Gas Well Policy Guidelines for Key Bank
Click for Higher Resolution (Photo courtesy of Pete Maizitis)
- NO mortgages will be written on properties that have a Gas Well.
- Key Bank can deny mortgage underwriting to homeowners whose properties are within 600 feet of a gas well.
- No mortgages will be written on properties which have gas leases attached to them.
- Property owner/gas rights lesser and gas companies can be held liable for damages.
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