Fracking = Earthquakes

Mon Apr 07, 2014 at 10:57 AM PDT

New fracking studies conclude we're not paying enough attention to health and environmental impacts

by Meteor BladesFollow

Fracking in Wyoming. Four fracking pads for every square kilometer.

 

One of the key problems with hydraulic fracturing—"fracking"—aimed at freeing natural gas and oil from tight shale formations is how little we know for certain about the environmental and health effects. Industry and its sycophants would have us believe that the risks are few if any.

 But the evidence is growing that this is far from the case. A new study from the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project (SPEHP) published in Reviews on Environmental Health and an analysis by the Center for Sustainable Development (CSD) at University of Texas published in the Virginia Environmental Law Journal point out that not only do we not know enough about this process that is being touted as a welcome American renaissance in fossil fuel energy production, but we don't have the proper tools to measure or regulate it.
Here's Rachael Rawlins at the CSD:

Under both the state and federal programs, the regulation of hazardous air emissions from gas operations is based largely on questions of cost and available technology. There is no comprehensive cumulative risk assessment to consider the potential impact to public health in urban areas. Drilling operations are being conducted in residential areas. Residents living in close proximity to gas operations on the Barnett Shale have voiced serious concerns for their health, which have yet to be comprehensively evaluated. Given the complexity of the science, and the dearth of clear, transparent, and enforceable standards, inadequate studies and limited statistical analysis have been allowed to provide potentially false assurances. The politically expedient bottom line dominates with little attention paid to the quality of the science or the adequacy of the standards.

Rawlins and former University of Montana professor Maria Morandi took a second look at a state of Texas analysis of cancer-causing emissions around the city Flower Mound, where shale gas development is underway. The state study couldn’t confirm with 99 percent certainty that childhood leukemia rates were higher in the area. It did confirm with 99 percent certainty that breast cancer rates were higher there. But it concluded that toxic emissions had nothing to do with the increase. The Rawlins-Morandi reanalysis, however, found with 95 percent certainty that childhood leukemia rates in Flower Mound are not a random occurrence. 

 

Here's David Brown, lead author of the SPEHP study, writing in the abstract of "Understanding exposure from natural gas drilling puts current air standards to the test":

Currently, human health risks near [unconventional natural gas development] sites are derived from average population risks without adequate attention to the processes of toxicity to the body. The objective of this paper is to illustrate that current methods of collecting emissions data, as well as the analyses of these data, are not sufficient for accurately assessing risks to individuals or protecting the health of those near UNGD sites.

While the industrial propagandists and their marionettes in Congress and state legislatures like to downplay any possible problems arising from the drive to spread fracking far and wide, those problems are profoundly troubling.

 More on this subject below the fold.

It wasn't so very long ago that the idea fracking and its associated disposal wells could cause earthquakes was sneered at as extremist nonsense. Not so crazy after all, we've learned.
Bobby Magill at Climate Central writes:

[T]he gap in scientists' understanding of what shale oil and gas development means for the environment and human health is significant, said Susan Brantley, a Pennsylvania State University biogeochemist studying the impacts of shale gas development in Pennsylvania. Brantley, unaffiliated with the UT-Austin study, is among the scientists who have spoken out about the fracking data gap. "A few health studies have been initiated, but data are few and far between that allow scientists to interpret potential impacts," Brantley said via email. "In addition, the lack of federal oversight on a lot of activity which is controlled by the states makes for difficulties for scientists to evaluate or even get hold of needed data. In Pennsylvania, it is even difficult to determine exactly where spills have occurred, let alone the volume of the spill, the timing or the chemicals that were spilled."

The situation prompted the Inspector General's Office of the Environmental Protection Agency to state in a report last year:  

Recent and projected growth in the oil and gas production sector has underscored the need for EPA to gain a better understanding of emissions and potential risks from this industry sector. Harmful pollutants emitted from this industry include air toxics such as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene; criteria pollutants and ozone precursors such as NOx and VOCs; and greenhouse gases such as methane. These pollutants can result in serious health impacts such as cancer, respiratory disease, aggravation of respiratory illnesses, and premature death. However, EPA has limited directly-measured air emissions data on criteria and toxic air pollutants for several important oil and gas production processes. [These] limited data, coupled with poor quality and insufficient emission factors and incomplete NEI data, hamper EPA’s ability to assess air quality impacts from selected oil and gas production activities.

Rawlins calls for adequate funding of regulators so they can track toxic emissions from fracking. “It’s not just Texas," she says. "It’s at the national level as well.” 

Indeed it is. But given the anti-regulatory attitude in many states as well as in Congress, and given the immense political clout of the petrochemical industry, getting adequate funding and improving regulations to protect health is, to say the least, a difficult proposition.

To say nothing of the impact of the burgeoning fracking process on global warming—what with the high potential for methane emissions associated with prying hydrocarbons from the rock. Fracking seems like a prime candidate for generating, 10 or 20 years down the road, one of those scandalous reports of devastating effects nobody could have predicted.

Originally posted to Meteor Blades on Mon Apr 07, 2014 at 10:57 AM PDT.

Also republished by Gulf Watchers Group, Climate Change SOS, and Daily Kos.

Trans-Canada Pipeline Commercial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJh76dCSt_A

Indigenous Environmental Network's Videos:

 https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=vb.186264980641&type=2

 Published April 05, 2014, 11:51 AM

Debate: As safety questions persist, crude oil transportation modes show differing records

Fargo, ND - As the national debate over the safety of crude oil transportation continues to swirl, two high-profile North Dakota incidents illustrate the risks associated with moving the commodity. By: John Hageman and Kyle Potter, Forum News Service, Grand Forks Herald, WDAY

• Debate: As safety questions persist, crude oil transportation modes show differing records

 
Fargo, ND - As the national debate over the safety of crude oil transportation continues to swirl, two high-profile North Dakota incidents illustrate the risks associated with moving the commodity.

Fargo, ND - As the national debate over the safety of crude oil transportation continues to swirl, two high-profile North Dakota incidents illustrate the risks associated with moving the commodity.
More than 865,000 gallons of crude oil spewed out of an underground Tesoro pipeline near Tioga last September, causing millions of dollars in damages and requiring cleanup that may take years.
A few months later, a train derailment outside of Casselton spilled about 475,000 gallons of oil and prompted an explosion and partial evacuation of the small town. No one was killed or injured, but local officials agreed the accident was a “near miss.”

Officials representing both the pipeline and rail industries say their method is the safest way to transport crude oil. But while federal data analyzed by the Forum News Service confirms that crude oil spills account for a fraction of a percent of the amount shipped by rail or pipeline every year, neither trains nor pipelines operate without risks.

Pipeline operators reported almost 1,900 crude oil spills nationwide between 2003 and 2013, or roughly once every other day, according to data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, and a majority were caused by corrosion or equipment issues. Those incidents resulted in roughly 21 million gallons of oil being spilled, and in five fatalities and 11 injuries.
Meanwhile, train incidents spilled more oil in 2013 — 1.15 million gallons — than the four previous decades combined, according to a McClatchy News analysis. And that doesn’t include the crash in Quebec that killed 47 people last summer, a tragedy that heightened concerns over moving crude oil by trains.

Lawmakers in North Dakota and Washington, D.C., are pushing for more pipeline construction, which they say can ease the amount of crude oil moved on the tracks. But they acknowledge that rail transportation will play a heavy role in the energy development that’s propelled North Dakota to its status as the country’s No. 2 oil-producing state.

Comparing records

The relative lack of injuries or deaths associated with a crude oil pipeline spill can at least be partially explained by the rare instances of fires or explosions. Fires occurred in 22 different oil spills since 2003 — or 1 percent of the time — and just four of those resulted in an explosion, according to the PHMSA data.

None of those fires took place in North Dakota, but three of them happened in neighboring Minnesota. That includes an incident that killed two Enbridge Energy workers in Clearbrook, Minn., in November 2007.

Despite such incidents, most say pipelines are a safe way to transport oil, and spills are extremely rare.

“We’re going to be using energy,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, who advocates for pipelines. “We might as well think of the safest way of transporting it.”

Furchtgott-Roth cited accident data compiled by the U.S. Department of State — in its review for the proposed TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline — to make her case that pipelines are by far the safest method.

The State Department’s analysis shows that, for every million ton-miles transported, pipelines spilled more barrels of crude than trains every year except one between 2002 and 2009.
But over that time period, more spills per million ton-miles shipped were recorded on rail. And between 2002 and 2012, more injuries and fatalities occurred on the tracks than from pipeline accidents.

“The data is just blindingly clear,” Furchtgott-Roth said.

Many of the drawbacks of both rail and pipeline are inherent to their design. Pipelines are purposely routed and buried through more rural areas, whereas trains run through towns that sprung up around the tracks.

With those trains, “the containers are moving, and they’re moving with other traffic,” Furchtgott-Roth said. “If there’s an incident, it’s liable to hurt other people too. Plus at the end of it, the container has to come back empty.”

“With a pipeline, you don’t have any of these problems,” she added.
"Spills add up"

Still, pipeline spills aren’t without costs. Between 2010 and 2013, pipelines cost operators more than $700 million in environmental remediation, and more than $1.5 billion in total property damage, according to the PHMSA data.

Some of the most notable examples include a July 2010 Enbridge Energy pipeline rupture that spilled almost 850,000 gallons into a creek that flows into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. Crews are still cleaning up the oil from the waterway.

Another in Arkansas, this time operated by ExxonMobil, spilled 210,000 gallons and prompted the evacuation of almost two dozen homes in spring 2013.

Last fall’s Tioga spill resulted in $5.4 million in total property damage, according to the PHMSA data.
However, most of the crude oil spills over the past few years were contained on the operator’s property, PHMSA data shows. And many crude oil pipeline spills are relatively small. About a third of the nearly 1,900 spills reported between 2003 and 2013 were a barrel — 42 gallons — or less.
‘Apples to oranges’

Industry officials say pipelines have improved their safety record over the years. Pipelines spilled about 42 percent less crude oil in the last three years than they did between 2003 and 2005, according to the PHMSA data.

Technological advances, like leak detection and inspection systems as well as pipe coating to prevent corrosion, are aiding that shift, industry officials said. Paul Oleksa, a pipeline safety consultant in Ohio, added that the introduction of one-call systems has reduced the number of pipes being punctured by third-party diggers.

“They’re so much safer than anything that we’ve had over the years,” Oleksa said.
But that doesn’t mean most spills aren’t preventable. More than 80 percent of crude oil pipeline spills in the last 10 years were the result of corrosion, equipment failure, incorrect operation or material and weld failures, according to the PHMSA data.

The Association of Oil Pipe Lines points to data showing those issues occur less often today. Instances of corrosion failures in liquid pipelines, for instance, decreased by 79 percent between 2001 and 2012, according to AOPL.

“That reflects a lot of the work that pipeline operators do to improve safety,” said AOPL’s vice president of government and public relations John Stoody.

But many aging pipes are still in operation. The average age of a pipeline involved in a spill between 2010 and 2013 was between 40 and 50 years, according to the PHMSA data. Stoody said a pipe’s age is only one potential factor in spills.

“What we don’t want to do is replace pipe that’s OK just because it’s of a certain age,” Stoody said. “We want to apply our maintenance budgets to where the actual problems are.”

While acknowledging that “there’s always room for improvement,” Enbridge spokeswoman Katie Haarsager said the company often goes “beyond its minimum regulatory requirements.”
Brigham McCown, a former administrator of PHMSA, said comparing the safety records of pipelines and railroads is “apples to oranges.”

“I don’t want to get into which one is safer, because they’re both very safe,” he said.
‘More of both’
As energy production soars in North Dakota and elsewhere, trains have become the primary mover of crude oil out of the Bakken — an anomaly in the transportation of oil nationwide, and one that state lawmakers and regulators never saw coming.

North Dakota’s top oil regulator Lynn Helms previously said as much as 90 percent of the oil production here could be moved by rail this year.

The amount of oil moved by pipeline out of the Williston Basin steadily increased in the few years leading up to 2013, when oil prices and market conditions helped push more oil to the tracks.
And as oil production increased, so did the frequency of pipeline spills here. While there was just one reported crude oil pipeline spill in North Dakota in 2009, there were 10 last year, according to PHMSA.

But since the Casselton wreck brought the potential dangers of moving crude oil by rail to the attention of the state and nation, lawmakers are pushing for more oil to be moved by pipeline.
Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., acknowledged that trains will continue to play a large role in crude oil transportation, but advocated for a better “mix” of trains, pipelines and trucks.
“We can’t try to move all of this capacity by rail,” Hoeven said. “It creates too much congestion, obviously you have more accidents.”

Hoeven has been particularly vocal about approving the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which wouldn’t run through North Dakota but would transport about 100,000 barrels of Bakken crude per day. Enbridge’s proposed Sandpiper pipeline would move about 225,000 barrels per day out of the Bakken region to Clearbrook on its way to Superior, Wis.

Josh Mogerman, spokesman for the National Resource Defense Council, said the debate over pipeline and rail is a “false choice.”

“The industry wants more of both,” he said. “Not one or the other.”

As pipeline capacity lagged behind the explosive growth of oil production in the Bakken oil region, about a dozen rail facilities were built in the matter of a few years in order to get oil to markets.
Oil producers have found that trains have distinct advantages over pipeline, including their relative speed and an ability to quickly shift where oil is shipped, including places that pipelines don’t currently reach. And the extra cost of shipping by train rather than pipeline can be mitigated if oil prices allow.

Wayde Schafer, conservation organizer at the North Dakota chapter of the Sierra Club, said the only real solution to crude oil transportation concerns is reducing reliance on fossil fuels.
“All forms of transporting the oil are putting the environment and the public at risk,” he said.

Call Hageman at (701) 780—1244, (800) 477—6572 ext. 1244 or send email tojhageman@gfherald.com. Call Potter at (701) 241—5502 or send email tokpotter@forumcomm.com

HP ENVY 4500 e-All-in-One Printer

Product Review: HP ENVY 4500 e-All-in-One Printer

I have ALWAYS purchased HP Printers, but I'm pretty sure this will be the last....I finally got this printer running, but it was not an easy task.

1. It came all taped up for safety, but the tape holding the paper tray in was nearly impossible to remove.

2. Trying to find where to load the ink cartridges was also a PAIN..... You have to lift the glass scanner platen, hold it up, flip up cheaply made plastic cartridge holders and FORCE the cartridges in, because they do not simply Front Load... they go in at a downwards angle, which is difficult to maneuver.

3. Loading the paper is Another PAIN..... You have to pull the paper feeder tray out, load the paper, and push it back in. The problem? The paper tray is cheap & flimsy and does not easily glide in & out, it has to be pulled out with force and pushed back in with force.

4. Because the printer turns itself off when not being used, EVERY SINGLE TIME I TURN THIS PRINTER ON, IT FORCES ME TO ALIGN IT... SO I WASTE INK AND PAPER......

5. The face is dark as are the buttons, because I keep the printer under the desk I can not see the function buttons and I now need a flashlight to see what I am doing.

HP use to make their items easy to use and quite sturdy.... I paid triple for this HP printer than I did my last one and in comparison it is poorly made.

It is obvious that HP staff that designed this printer did not care about quality nor making the equipment user friendly. It is also obvious, that they didn't make this with the thought of using it themselves, for if they had it would be easier to use!

Too bad I waited two months before I opened it & set it up, or I'd have returned it immediately. The reviews that I read for this product were obviously inaccurate.....

2nd Oil Leak in Southern Utah

 

(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Burnt sagebrush and oil-covered junipers line the perimeter of the pond at Citation Oil Company's #11 oil well leak in Dixie National Forest, Wednesday, April 2, 2014. "The oil made its way under the snow to a pond that was directly downhill from the release," according to a Forest Service statement. "On several occasions since the release, Citation Oil personnel ignited and burned off the oil that had gathered on top of the pond and around the edges." This spill is located about 10 miles southwest of the town of Escalante and about three miles north of the Little Valley leak in the Upper Valley Oil Field.

 

Another oil leak reported in southern Utah

 

Newest spill » Citation Oil leak in Dixie National Forest is near the one discovered in Grand Staircase Monument. 

 

By Christopher Smart

| The Salt Lake Tribune

First Published Apr 02 2014 05:07 pm • Updated 5 hours ago 

 

Days after an unreported Citation Oil and Gas Corp. spill within the Grand Staircase came to light, the U.S. Forest Service announced Wednesday a second leak from the same company.

The size of the spill in Dixie National Forest remains uncertain, according to Forest Service spokesman Joe Harris. He said the agency is unsure whether the leak exceeds 10 barrels, the prerequisite for a "reportable incident" under federal guidelines.

 

Photos

• 
• 
• 
• 

But it could be much larger, Harris said.

"We wanted to get this [information] out there," he said. "We aren’t trying to hide anything."

The spill was discovered by the Forest Service on March 24, but the company said it may be related to a repair made in November, Harris said.

Recently, officials from the Bureau of Land Management reported another Citation Oil leak in Little Valley Wash within Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. It remains unclear how old that oil leak is.

The Dixie National Forest abuts the national monument in southern Utah’s Garfield County. The new leak is about 10 miles southwest of the town of Escalante and about 3 miles north of the Little Valley leak in the Upper Valley Oil Field, Harris said.

Representatives of the Houston-based oil firm told Forest Service investigators that an undetermined amount of oil was released during the repair of a valve in November, according to a Forest Service statement.

"The oil made its way under the snow to a pond that was directly downhill from the release," the statement said. 

"On several occasions since the release, Citation Oil personnel ignited and burned off the oil that had gathered on top of the pond and around the edges."

Such burning is allowed under the operation plan for the oil field, according to the Forest Service.

The preliminary investigation has found no evidence that the oil traveled beyond the pond, the agency officials said.

The BLM and Forest Service are not adequately protecting public lands from the oil and gas industry, said Neal Clark of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

"This, unfortunately, is another example of the agencies failing to protect public lands," Clark said.

The federal agencies apparently lack the resources to provide oversight of oil and gas companies, Clark added. 

"If BLM and the Forest Service don’t have the resources to protect our public lands, they shouldn’t be leasing them."

The Dixie National Forest is working with Citation Oil on a cleanup plan for the oil leak, according to Harris. 

The Forest Service is recommending that the water be removed from the pond, along with oil residues and contaminated soil in the area.

csmart@sltrib.com