PA State concerned about waste water from new gas wells(Marcellus Shales)

[RamboLiberal]

Gas well drillers tapping into the deep Marcellus Shales add up to 54 substances, some of them toxic, to the water they use to fracture that rock and release the gas.

And the state Department of Environmental Protection doesn't know what chemicals, metals and possibly radioactive elements are in the waste water that is pushed out of the wells. It is discharged into the state's waterways including the Monongahela River, from which 350,000 people get their drinking water.

"That's the bigger issue. They don't have an analysis of what's in the waste water they're pulling out," said Dr. Conrad Dan Volz, assistant professor in the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh. "What they're putting into the wells can chemically change and be added to underground, and no one is saying how much arsenic, manganese, cobalt, chromium and lead is in the stuff. Depending on the concentration, it could be a hazardous waste."

Each well drilled into the Marcellus Shales, which lie at least a mile deep beneath parts of Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia and Ohio, uses up to 4 million gallons of water to fracture the rock and release natural gas. The chemicals are added to the "frac" water that is pumped into the wells under high pressure to reduce friction in the pipe and allow the water to flow more freely into the rock layers.

Among the chemical additives are formaldehyde, a human carcinogen; various acids; a variety of petroleum compounds and several pesticides that are toxic to fish and other aquatic life. Many of the chemicals, depending on their concentrations, can also cause human skin, eye and nose irritations, and damage kidney, heart, liver and lung function.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08356/936646-113.stm

Being in SW PA this is of great concern to me.

[Muttocracy]

1. big concern to me too... glad things are partly on hold in NYS

pending some new DEC regulations.

[dipsydoodle]

2. Such issues should be the concern of all.

The corporations generally have ways and means of ultimately ducking out of their responsibilities with regard to safe disposal of byproducts especially where copious amounts of water are used in a process.

Sometimes the effects are not apparent until many years later. Here's an example with a different product but with the same end result 30 years later : http://www.lenaldis.co.uk/page19.html Note the convenience of hiving off part of a multinational company only to let the offshoot sink and remove all liability.

Constant vigilance is the only answer with frequent expert water testing and even that isn't foolproof given the time delays which can occur. The well being of fish stocks is a good guide too.

I'm remote from all this but it would seem from the views of friends in the USA that those remote from your coasts favour off shore drilling and those on the coast favour oil shale whatever drilling inland - cynical bastards.

x(