Came across this Colbert clip on hydraulic fracturing. A humorous take on the debate.
Colbert on Fracking
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Tag Archives: Pennsylvania
Recycled Wastewater
Hydraulic fracturing consumes million of gallons per well. Recently, much has been made of the recycling of the “produced water” (aka, toxic waste). Turns out, far less wastewater is being recycled than originally reported.
From 57% to 17% recycled
Hydraulic Fracturing and Marcellus Shale
Yesterday, hydraulic fracturing and Marcellus shale were front page news — both locally and nationally.
The top story in the Centre Daily Times was “Forest Leases Under Fire.” Already, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has issued leases to gas companies for nearly half of its 1.5 million acres of state forest. At issue are concerns that current Governor Tom Corbett will over turn a moratorium enacted by outgoing Governor Ed Rendell. According to a study by the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) there remain ”zero state forest land acres suitable for gas leasing involving surface disturbance.”
In an interesting twist, the article reported that further development would threaten the sustainability certification of Pennsylvania’s forests. In particular, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) has certified that the Commonwealth’s state forest operations are sustainable, based on factors including a 2 percent rate of conversion of forests over any five-year span. However, even without further leasing, several state forests are projected to lose more than 2% of their acreage to conversion by 2020, jeopardizing their certification. Some 35 wood-industry related companies have attained FSC certification for adopting sustainable practices in Pennsylvania, which they use as a selling point for their products. They stand to forfeit their certification if their harvests come from forests deemed to be losing acreage unsustainably. An expansion of drilling in state forests — as Corbett has suggested — would exacerbate the problem.
In another front page story, the New York Times continued its Drilling Down series which examines the risks of natural-gas drilling and efforts to regulate this rapidly growing industry. The latest installment announced “Wastewater Recycling No Cure-All in Gas Process.” Lately, the oil and gas industry has been touting innovations in wastewater recycling. But apparently the rhetoric and reality don’t match up. In Pennsylvania, for example, natural gas companies recycled less than half of the wastewater they produced during the 18 months that ended in December, according to state records.
According to Brent Halldorson, chief operating officer of Aqua-Pure/Fountain Quail Water Management, a drilling wastewater recycling company: “No one wants to admit it, but at some point, even with reuse of this water, you have to confront the disposal question.” He added that the wastewater contains barium, strontium and radioactive elements that need to be removed.
Data posted by the commonwealth on Tuesday, show that operators produced more than 680 million gallons of wastewater in the year and a half that ended in December 2010. Of this amount, well operators reported recycling at least 320 million gallons. At least 260 million gallons of wastewater were sent to plants that discharge their treated waste into rivers. Another 50 million gallons or more of wastewater is unaccounted for, according to state records.
Pennsylvania Green Energy
The Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Power Partnership released the top 50 purchasers of green energy in the country. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is #5 on the list. The state’s annual purchases totaled 500 million green kilowatt hours, equivalent to 50% of total power consumption. Also in the top 50 from Pennsylvania are several universities, including:
- University of Pennsylvania (#19; 202 million KWh; 48% of electricity consumption)
- Carnegie Mellon University (#44; 87 million KWh; 75% of electricity consumption); and
- Pennsylvania State University (#46; 84 million KWh; 20% of electricity consumption).
Out of curiosity, I translated these figures into KWh per student:
- The University of Pennsylvania had 24,599 total students (full-time and part-time combined) as of the Fall 2009. Extrapolating from the figures above, UPenn consumes approximately 420,503,333 KWh annually. That equates to 17,095 KWh per student.
- Carnegie Mellon University had 11,443 total students as of the Fall 2009. Extrapolating from the figures above, CMU consumes approximately 115,786,667 KWh annually, or 10,119 KWh per student.
- The Pennsylvania State University had 95,833 total students as of the Fall 2010. PSU consumes approximately 418,000,000 KWh annually, or 4,362 KWh per student.
Obviously, these are wide ranges and should be interpreted with care. Students are only one source of electricity demand on a college campus. Moreover, it is not clear whether the figures for Penn State on the EPA website are for just the University Park campus, or for all the Commonwealth Campuses (out of convenience I have assumed the latter). If instead, these figures are for University Park only, then PSU’s electricity consumption for this campus only would jump to 9,493 KWh per student. Additionally, the Penn State University Park campus steam plant consumes about 7,500 tons of coal per year, and produces about 20,000 MWh per year, or 7% of the campus’s electricity demand, as well as about 175 tons of steam per hour, which is used for heating campus buildings. To make an apples to apples comparison, this would also need to be factored in to the calculations.
PECO Reduces Energy Demand
Act 129, Pennsylvania’s historic energy savings law passed in 2008, requires Pennsylvania’s utilities to reduce both overall demand for electricity by one percent by 2011 and three percent by 2013, and peak demand for electricity by 4.5 percent by 2013.
This week PECO announced that it has already met its electricity savings requirement for 2011. PECO Smart Ideas, the utility’s Act 129 program, has saved its customers over $68 million. The energy savings from reducing demand has the same impact as not driving about 457 million miles or planting nearly 440,000 trees.
From PennFuture’s Session Daze 5-Nov-2010.
Marcellus Drilling Visualized
Today the Penn State Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research posted a series of animated visuals based on data from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. For example, the number of permits issued has climbed from 99 in 2007, to 519 in 2008, to 1,985 in 2009, to 2,108 through the first 8 months of 2010 — a total of 4,711 permits.
Based on data released by Range Resources on the chemical cocktail used, as well as data from Chesapeake Energy on the 5.6 million gallons of water used during drilling and fracking, I estimate that some 30,000 pounds of hazardous and/or toxic chemicals are required per well. Others have put the quantity at 80,000 pounds. At this point, given the general lack of regulation and disclosure, there is necessarily some uncertainty in the estimates. Nonetheless, even using my lower estimate, these permitted wells are likely to result in the injection of something like 141 million pounds of hazardous and/or toxic chemicals into the ground. It is believed that somewhere between 50% and 85% of these chemicals never come back out again, but instead remain in the ground. It is a matter of some controversy as to whether they might effect the water table. Having just seen GASLAND on Sunday night, it strains the limits of credibility to assert that such contamination of water never happens.
Of course, at the present time, all of the above is entirely legal. But even considering the lax regulatory environment, the industry has managed to rack up plenty of violations. In the last 2-1/2 years, Marcellus Well drillers were cited for more than 1,600 violations, a rate of more than 1.5 per day.
Graham Spanier, Gasland and the FRAC Act
Last night I went to see GASLAND at the State Theatre (movie trailer below). As I was headed in for the 9:30pm showing, Penn State President Graham Spanier was headed out from the 7:00pm showing. I bring this up primarily in the interest of turning what is otherwise a bit of trivia into possible common knowledge. Now, we all know, that we all know, that President Spanier has seen the movie and therefore has some responsibility — as do the rest of us — for responding to the issues and challenges it raises. Knowledge is like that. Once you know something, you cannot go back.
The movie is excellent — provocative, heart wrenching, inspiring. And I heartily recommend that anyone living in the NY/NJ/PA watershed see the film. The film starts innocently enough. One day Josh Fox, the film’s director, gets a contract in the mail, offering him some $100,000 for the mineral rights to his 19 acres of property in Northeastern Pennsylvania. He wonders what exactly is involved in drilling for natural gas and so he sets off to Dimock, where a number of wells had recently been completed. From there his journey takes him all across America — West Virginia, New York, Wyoming, Colorado, Texas, etc.
Along the way he discovers that drilling leaves behind a wake of water and health problems. Some of the most poignant moments in the movie are scenes in which tap water is set on fire and others where water turned into plastic when heated because of the glycol ethers that have contaminated it.
If Gasland has a primary message it is that we need to repeal the “Haliburton Loophole” in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPACT 05). This loophole effectively exempted natural gas drilling from the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Superfund Act. In the Q&A session afterwards, Josh Fox stressed that it is only because of these four exemptions that hydraulic fracturing is economically viable. Reinstate these regulations and there is a good chance “fracking” will go away, or at least be reigned in significantly.
The first step in this direction is the so-called FRAC Act (H.R. 2766: Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act; S. 1215: Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act), which aims to repel the exemptions from the Safe Drinking Water Act. But of course, that still leaves fracking exempt from the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Superfund Act.
In addition to these obvious fixes, I found myself wondering why so few people seem to have made a connection between drilling and the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA). Of course at the federal level, fracking is exempt — because it is not among the industries regulated by the act. However, considering that natural gas wells use between 30,000 and 80,000 pounds of hazardous and/or toxic chemicals (based on the best estimates I can find), it seems that communities have the right to know this information. It would be easy for one of our congressional leaders to author legislation extending the EPCRA to cover oil and natural gas industries.
But even without such an extension, as best I can tell, natural gas drilling is NOT exempt from the Pennsylvania Worker and Community Right to Know Act (Act 159 of 1984). And considering the quantities of chemicals used, is probably also liable for reporting under the OSHA Hazard Communication Standard and the Pennsylvania Hazardous Material Emergency Planning and Response Act (Act 165 of 1990). And even though the Department of Environmental Protection claims the industry is bound by the Right to Know Act, I was unable to find satisfactory information on this issue. In fact, it appears they are not complying with this regulation.
So, today I contacted Pennsylvania’s Department of Labor & Industry and filed a formal request for clarification on their interpretation of this matter. I also contacted several attorneys asking for their interpretation of whether these statutes might hold jurisdiction over the use of chemicals by natural gas drillers in Pennsylvania. Of course, it is entirely possible I have missed a loophole somewhere. Stay tuned…
Clean Air = Dirty Water?
The New York Times has just released another fantastic story in its “Toxic Waters” series. The article highlights some of the complexities involved when attempting to address externalities and the tragedy of the commons. The article also vividly illustrates how solutions to such externalities and commons problems often create new (presumably unintended) spillovers (on externalities and commons see Coase 1960; Hardin 1968; Dietz, Ostrom, Stern 2003, etc). In other words, we see how new framings rather than solving problems can actually set in motion a cascade of overflows (see Callon 1998, 2007, etc). In this case cleaner air comes at the expense of dirtier water, at least in part because the institutional arrangements (such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act) have been designed in ways that do not account for the interrelatedness of these dynamic processes.
Source: New York Times
At a more practical level the story is again accompanied by an interactive database of water polluters searchable by location. For this story the database has been updated with the ability to look specifically at the violation records of coal fired power plants. Of note, Pennsylvania coal plants represent 4 out of the 15 violators of clean water regulations in the United States. These plants include:
- Reliant Energy Ne Mgt Conemaugh Generating Station
- Eme Homer City Gen Lp
- Horsehead Corp
- Hatfield’s Ferry Power Station
For more on the issue of water pollution, see my earlier post here.