With only a handful of proven incidents of induced fracturing affecting an aquifer, out of literally hundreds of thousands of induced frac jobs over the last century, environmentalists are in a frenzy to regulate this "harmful activity".
This is the way of government today. Induced frac'ing is safer than the Space Shuttle program by nearly three orders of magnitude (1:100,000 vs 1:126). For some reference on how "problematic" this is, if you live a long and wonderful life, you have a 1 in 3000 chance of being struck by lightning sometime during that lifetime.
Environmentalists want to regulate induced frac'ing because they want to stop oil and gas drilling in the US, end, period and paragraph. Journalists that propagate this nonsense are in league with the anti-oil and gas folks. Or maybe they are just stupid. They don't require much math or science for a journalism career these days.
As Ronald Reagan once said... "Government's philosophy seems to be that if it works, regulate it, if it keeps working, tax it, if it quits working, subsidize it". Never more than today can we see the governmental mechanations that inspired the Gipper to that quote.
OK, I'll advocate the devilish liberal position here if no one else will. Let's start with:
"With only a handful of proven incidents"...
Given the way insurance companies, big money, lawyers and conservative courts work these days, it is a miracle that there are ANY cases where it is conceded that someone poisoned the ground water. Do I exaggerate? No. Change the channel to Libby, Montana and take a look at how a couple hundred corpses killed by asbestos or vermiculite do not qualify as proof that a corporation has done wrong. By the standard of that Montana court room, there is probably NOTHING that a company could do that would qualify as criminal. Forgive that digression but how long might it take for chemicals to diffuse into someone's drinking water, how much longer might it take for someone get sick, and once that happens, what are the odds that the victims will ever know, much less prove, what it was that sickened them? So the arguments for regulation here hinge upon the difficulty of knowing what is happening at great depth, knowing where the stuff will diffuse, proving the connection to any delayed consequences and the enormous expense of dealing with eco-tastrophes after they happen.
So how about this compromise: stay with water and fraccing sand.
Posted by: fred mrozek | June 08, 2009 at 09:17 PM
Sorry, Fred. I guess I really disagree. People commonly frac aquifers with cross-linked gels to make them produce more. The "chemicals" we put into formations are meant to clean the fluids we put into them. The only incidents where frac'ing affected groundwater is when the frac intersected an old, unplugged wellbore that was not known or thought to be plugged, and formation fluids flowed up the old wellbore. No amount of regulation can "fix" this, and given the rarity, we should ignore it. This is command and control for the SAKE of command and control... not to fix a problem.
Posted by: Open Choke | June 08, 2009 at 10:24 PM