Happy Earth Day!

HAPPY EARTH DAY!

The First Fracking Case On Trial in Texas

Texas Sharon has an excellent blog, Bluedaze.  She has been intimately involved in the gas drilling problem in Texas since at least the early 2000s.  She helped me get started on my journey as an anti-fracking activist.  In this post she relates the stories of the Parr family and the Ruggierios who were neighbors surrounded by gas wells and the illnesses they all experienced.

Read much more here.

Flowback: How the Texas Natural Gas Boom Affects Health and Safety (2011)

Daily Kos coverage of this topic

Fracking the Marcellus Shale: A Quaker Perspective

What do Pennsylvanian Quakers think of Marcellus Shale fracking in their midst? Not much good.

Read more here.

"First they frack the community, then they frack the land."

Brine Truck Dumping on Road in Ft. Worth, TX

Yes, the methods of disposal of fracking waste are several, but one of them is illegal dumping.  It happens not only in Texas, but in Pennsylvania, North Dakota,  and New York, too.

Read more and see some photos here.

Thank you, Vera Scroggins, for bringing this video to my attention. 

Old Gas Pipelines Are Failing: New Dangers Loom

The private company planning to buy Philadelphia Gas Works has promised to upgrade the city’s aging and leaking pipelines. A new report by SNL Energy shows just how big that task could be, ranking the city’s utility second worst in the nation for pipeline leaks.

The firm looked at data from the federal Office of Pipeline Safety showing that in 2012, PGW reported 5,464 leaks over its 5,762 miles of gas mains and service lines. That’s a rate of roughly one leak (0.95) per mile. PGW came in second to New York’s Con Edison, which reported 7,328 leaks over 7,301 miles of pipelines. Pittsburgh-based People’s Natural Gas ranked fifth.

Read more here.


Your Guide to Pipelines in Pennsylvania

Thousands of miles of new pipelines in Pennsylvania will have to be built to transport Marcellus Shale gas. The new pipeline construction will benefit those in need of jobs, and the companies that do the building. But some residents and local politicians worry about the environmental impacts, and say the current regulatory structure needs updating.

Nobody knows how many miles of pipeline already exists in the state. That’s because Pennsylvania does not have one regulatory authority that oversees intrastate gas pipelines. In fact, out of 31 states that produce natural gas, Alaska is the only other state, besides Pennsylvania, that doesn’t.

The New Pennsylvania: It's All About Natural Gas Development

Well pad next to a cemetery in Independence, PA

Pennsylvania has seen many new gas wells drilled since 2008.  The state has 46,000 square miles of land/water.  Here are a few facts about the drilling:

There are currently 14,413 permitted Marcellus gas
wells in the state located on 4,533 well-pads.
12,422 are horizontal wells, 8,109 are reported
as active, and 5,080 have reported production values.

In the past week, we've (MarcellusGas.org)  added 245 inspection
reports, bringing the total number of inspection
events at our site to 51,244.

So, if we averaged out the number of wells per square mile, it would come to 3 wells per square mile.  However, there are multiple wells on most well pads.  Another way to think about it: There is one well pad for every 10 square miles in PA.  Well permits continue to be applied for and issued.  This is only the beginning. Well pads are put in near schools, cemeteries, people's homes, nursing homes, just about anywhere. 

Well pads come with another bad thing:  pipelines and compressor stations.  These cause all kinds of pollution- air, soil, noise, water.  Eventually PA will look like a huge web covered with gas wells and the infrastructure needed for them.  It is indeed a grim vision for the future.  And in many cases, the future is now.