Bishop Hill Fracking chemicals found in space
May 5, 2015 Energy: gas Greens The New York Times is reporting today that fracking chemicals have been found in drinking water in Pennsylvania.
Fracking chemicals detected in Pennsylvania drinking water
An analysis of drinking water sampled from three homes in Bradford County, Pa., revealed traces of a compound commonly found in Marcellus Shale drilling fluids, according to a study published on Monday.
The paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, addresses a longstanding question about potential risks to underground drinking water from the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The authors suggested a chain of events by which the drilling chemical ended up in a homeowner’s water supply.
In related news, BH learns that health food stores are selling fracking chemicals to unsuspecting customers! Housewives have been washing their children's clothes in fracking chemicals! And fracking chemicals have been detected in deep space, worrying evidence that the oil industry is taking over the universe.
Sheesh.
Reader Comments (28)
They found parts per trillion in drinking water of a chemical which is commonly used in paint and cosmetics. And this is publishable in a scientific journal and given news coverage! They must have looked really hard to find this chemical. Sheesh indeed.
So really this a report that reports on the subject of what exists in the wide background noise?
It is irritatingly noisy to TBH.
What else was in that sampling I wonder, or was that not a worthwhile part of cherry picking ?
As a natural born sceptic I am only be sceptical of the wild and often exaggerated claims of 'big green' but also those of 'big oil'. If there is a problem I want to know, but who can I trust to investigate, tell the truth warts, uncertainty and all?
Until now that answer is mostly sites like Bishop Hill and even Dellingpole. Certainly not the alarmist cabal at the Grauniad. Please keep it that way by not excluding the possibility that there is actually a problem with hydraulic facturing!
The point though is that this is not about science but firstly and ONLY about activism.
Mailman
@FarleyR: I am afraid it goes all the way back to Health & Safety & Risk. There is ALWAYS a risk in anything we do. There is ALWAYS contamination somewhere, but it comes down to the good old saying, "the poison is in the dosage"! We use rat poison in patients with bood clot disorders for example! Too much & we'd kill them. Just the right amount & we save them. Modern medicine is based on preventative care, i.e. innoculation against disease & infection, we effectively poison ourselves to protect ourselves. We have the technical ability to analyse everything to the enth degree, therefore exposing more detail of what anything consists of. Our bodies are riddled with bacteria, more so than cells in our bodies, mosdt of us don't know this nor care about it.
To put this is context the workplace exposure limit to 2-Butoxyethanol is 50 part per million.
The levels they have found is in parts per trillion. A trillion is a million million.
So they are jumping up and down over a level that is in the region of 1 million times LESS than the safe exposure limit.
Give me strength!
PNAS is where bad greenie papers go find a place where to get some pretend life as zombies
But now the paper is out and will be forever referenced as some kind of proven science.
Mailman
Shock horror, evidence of science found in PNAS paper. It may have been accidentlal cross contamination from typists correction fluid.
Was this water source ever checked before fracking? If not then there is no case to answer with the chemicals concerned being used for common purposes for many years.
I suspect that almost any chemical can be found in drinking water if you look for it using sensitive equipment. However, the levels involved will probably be so low as to be practically zero. It is a cheap way of generating a scare story.
I remember when someone used atomic absorption to find all the metals in the humble garden spud. The list was very impressive and full of toxic and radioactive nasties, but all at negligible trace levels.
Chemophobia kills.
During my high school science days, we mocked the obviousness of the American Chemical Society's motto: "Without Chemicals, life would be impossible."
Our geek humor went: "Without chemicals, life would be [impossibly] hard."
This decades old - centuries old? - science wisdom does not seem to have reached the NYTimes, yet.
From the NYT report:
I know little about US homeowners' own wells & how they're used. However, the NYT's use of the words 'outdoor spigots' implies they are different to indoor taps which perhaps reasonably might be expected to supply their potable water.
'The analysis showed that the water in one household ...'; and how many other analyses showed .... nothing?
I saw a great picture of the environmental risk, a picture of a huge pile of tins of fracking chemicals next to a truck. Poorly stored and ready to leak. What if all that Marmite had entered the environment?
Yes, yeast extract was being used as a fracking chemical.
The lead author is Garth T. Llewellyn, from the footnotes at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/05/01/1420279112:
"To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: gllewellyn@appalachiaconsulting.com or brantley@geosc.psu.edu.
...
Conflict of interest statement: G.T.L. and Appalachia Consulting provided litigation support and environmental consulting services to the impacted households."
Joe Public, in some parts of the US it is common for house owners/land owners to drill their own shallow wells to access not-potable groundwater for lawn watering etc, which means it may contain traces of many common garden/agro/sceptic tank chemicals etc. [In the UK I've been told that groundwater is generally the property of the local water company so significant new extraction is not permitted without their consent. Others may know more]
Common fracking chemicals are generally chosen partly because they are biodegradable and/or no worse than that which is already present due to geology etc. I certainly wouldn't lose any sleep over parts per trillion of butoxyethanol in drinking water. I'd be much more interested in faecal coliform etc from various sources such as locally-encamped crusties complaining about fracking and their unvaccinated dogs.
This is a classic case of analytical fishing for chemicals simply because they can and they think someone might get upset enough to give them funding to carry on doing it.
Michael: Sceptic tanks - don't give the green loonies ideas.
The main fracking chemicals are yeast extract and quar gum. Both are widely used as food thickeners. Their use in fracking is to increase viscosity to help uniformly suspend the propant (sand). Horrors.
From the wiki article (sorry, but it was quick) on 2-Butoxyethanol:
They haven't a clue where it came from, fracking or anywhere.
Maybe if they hanged a few journalists/activists/politicians (not necessarily in that order) using only guilt by association, then it might encourage the others.
Bish: "BH learns that health food stores are selling fracking chemicals to unsuspecting customers! Housewives have been washing their children's clothes in fracking chemicals! And fracking chemicals have been detected in deep space, worrying evidence that the oil industry is taking over the universe."
Guar gum, is a permitted food additive, and is one of the most commonly used stabilisers/emulsifiers in most prepared foods, not just health foods. Sodium hydroxide is not just used in laundry products and drain unblockers, but is also a permitted food additive - most of the "ready to cook" fresh veg and frozen veg is chemically peeled with it, not to mention de-feathering poultry. Hydrochloric acid is also a permitted food additive, used as an acidity regulator. 2-butoxyethanol is one of the most used permitted solvents used in the food industry.
If the PNA are so concerned about the parts per trillion consumer exposure to such chemicals from 'contaminated' groundwater due to fracking, then why aren't they focusing on the parts per million or parts per thousand due to their use as food additives?
You would probably ingest more than a million times of any/all of these chemicals from eating a single big mac than drinking a whole bucketful of that water.
Joe Public, in some parts of the US it is common for house owners/land owners to drill their own shallow wells to access not-potable groundwater for lawn watering etc, which means it may contain traces of many common garden/agro/sceptic tank chemicals etc. [In the UK I've been told that groundwater is generally the property of the local water company so significant new extraction is not permitted without their consent. Others may know more]
In these parts, if someone drills a well, it's generally because the residence is not connected to the water mains. Well water is quite potable, though it tends to have a chalky taste due to the high mineral content. That can be taken care of with a water softener, of course.
In the case of the 2012 study, they probably used outdoor taps to bypass any water softeners and drinking water filters that homeowners may have installed to improve the quality of their drinking warer.
I think the most likely pathway to get those chemicals into the water involves activists or academics placing them there.
hunter, after all the trials and recriminations that followed the faking of gas cominig out of water pipes, are you suggesting that green activists would be so dumb as to fraudulently create false evidence to try and attract national newspapers and scientists into some kind of scam?
I never thought they would be that dumb, or predictable ..... again.
It's worse than you thought. (It's always worse than you thought).
Tests on drinking water also show traces of a chemical that is linked to serious health dangers for humans.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2242094/Chlorine-tap-water-linked-increase-number-people-developing-food-allergies.html
Farley R,
Certainly you should be sceptical.
Just bear in mind a few things:
Hydraulic fracturing is fracking. Fracking requires fluid, always has as far as I know. It isn't part of the drilling process but part of the completions process - it's acceptable for brevity to conflate the two I guess, but already the lines are blurred in the public mind by doing so.
There could be problems (plural) with any activity or industrial process. Nobody knows that better than people in the drilling and completions industry. These problems are neither inevitable nor insurmountable. The industry people might be biased, but they are also infinitely better-informed and more technically-minded than their critics. If "hydraulic fracturing" has "a problem" singular, it is media misrepresentation.
"Big Oil" (why not Big Gas?) is a relative newcomer to the tight shale success story. It was developed by entrepreneurial "Little Oil" (and, importantly, gas).
I've seen relatively little propaganda from the shale companies. I wish they'd speak up more.
Most of it is technical information on websites, which you can look up at your leisure and absorb or ignore as you choose, whereas the "anti-" side offers a seemingly endless avalanche of propaganda which is repeated as fact without question in every media outlet available.
Lastly, if fracking is so bad, why does widespread anti-fracking activism not pre-date the Gasland propaganda film?
It was so bad for the previous 60 years that nobody noticed?
Chemophobia to the nth.
Wait till they find out that chlorine is widely used to kill potentially fatal bugs in our drinking water.
They might swoon on the spot, while millions of people all over the world are in a somewhat different position. Feeling more than usually grumpy today, and having worked with ... oh never mind - &^%#*@%& and so on.
I mean, a few hundred conscientious housewives throwing their dishwater and and washing water for years around their homes could have affected the results. Who knows? Not to mention the stuff that they used to wash their hair and their dishes.
Sounds like material for the perfect c&w song to me.
"And then ma dawg died."
PNAS is where papers that can't pass peer review go.
Yes 2011 article highlighted that often PNAS has poor standards in peer review and some papers seem peer reviewed but are only 'edited'.