Thursday
Feb232012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill More tactical lying
Feb 23, 2012 Energy: gas This website purports to present an easy to understand overview of the dangers of fracking.
This bit made me fall off my chair:
Fracking fluid
Up to 600 chemicals are used in fracking fluid, including such known carcinogens and toxins as:
- Lead
- Uranium
- Mercury
- Ethylene glycol
- Radium
- Methanol
- Hydrochloric acid
- Formaldehyde
Radium eh? You know, I'm struggling slightly with the idea that a gas company would want to collect hard-to-handle materials such as radium and use them as industrial surfactants. I mean, radium as a surfactant? Who knew?
Reader Comments (65)
that list includes a number of things that are somewhat more expensive than the oil they are trying to recover..... not to mention the EPA in the states is not a fan of the oil business,...shutting them down for environmental reasons would be a no brainer
I don't think they are talking about what goes into the ground. From what I understand, fluid is pumped into the deep rock to fracture it and then pumped back out and probably re-cycled. I suspect that many of the minerals and the radon gas are picked up from the ground.
With regards to methanol, ask for a concentration. I recall a panic about a sweetener that would break down and form methanol if it was stored in a warm environment too long. It made the round in the media until someone pointed out that orange juice has 10x the concentration of methanol as they had found in the aged artificial sweetened liquid and all the methanol in orange juice was there "naturally".
As a retired environmental engineer who specialized in water pollution control, I would have to say that this list is almost certainly bogus. Any number of chemicals are found at trace levels in everything. If we were to analyze you, for example, we would find trace levels of nearly all these compounds plus dioxin, etc.
Environmentalist sites and environmentalist organizations are totally unreliable as sources of information. Unfortunately, the EPA itself is highly politicized and controlled by environmentalist extremists, and it cannot be trusted either.
I should think that someone who spends a significant amount of time debunking alarmist climatologists would know this.
Sean, you're probably right that there would be traces of radium (inter alia) in the fluid after it has been pumped into the rock - but the nifty little website animation says that more than 600 chemicals are used in fracking fluid - not that they are present there afterwards. I somehow doubt that any lead, uranium or mercury is "used" either, and I'm fairly sceptical about the formaldehyde. Methanol, ethylene glycold and HCl I can believe - not bad, 3 out of 8...
Bish; I remember doing a little background digging on this sometime last year. If I remember correctly, these so called 'lists of ingredients' are actually chemicals that have been found in groundwater in areas where fracking has been conducted, or in effluent from fracking plants. They are only present in ppm and ppb quantities. Most are actually natural contaminants from the hydrocarbon deposits or radioactive decay elements (uranium, radium and lead). They almost certainly do not come from the fracking fluids. Although the recipies for these fluids are commercial secrets, they are unlikely to be any more than diluted drilling mud.
Perhaps they meant Radion washing powder.
Hang on a sec, mercury/? I thought mercury was officially safe now? After all, they've been putting it in all these new-fangled light bulbs ever since the old ones got banned, haven't they?
The list is a lie. Period.
A fairly old article, but a useful discussion:
Baffled About Fracking? You're Not Alone
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/05/13/13greenwire-baffled-about-fracking-youre-not-alone-44383.html
and this is about the Gasland film:
The truth about Gasland
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/04/the-gasland-movie-a-fracking-shame-director-pulls-video-to-hide-inconvenient-truths
A newer article, with details on how to avoid the problem of using water.
It soooo good they aren't letting on exactly what they do!
Fracking with propane gel
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2011/November/15111102.asp
This is about work done in Canada and has some useful figures:
Water use in Utica Shale Gas Development
http://www.questerre.com/assets/files/PDF/Water%20Use%20Backgrounder%20ENG%20FINAL.pdf
for example:
"WATER USAGE
Based on independent analysis, the potential water volumes used for a 400 well shale gas development program is seen as a small portion of total water used within the province.
...
To put the water usage and highly diluted frac fluid additives in context, the average person in Québec uses 386 litres of water per day. The average household in Québec uses approximately 70 Mcf of natural gas per year. Based on estimated 12 million litres of frac fluid (99.5% water and sand and 0.5% additives) to frac and produce 2.5 Bcf from a Utica shale gas well, it takes less than one litre of water and one teaspoon or 5 ml of additives per day to heat a home with natural gas from shale.
Water use for shale gas development is a one time use per well, as opposed to an ongoing annual requirement."
fracking fluid = 98% water, 2% surfactant
Bish, the link at the bottom of your link is;
gaslandthemovie.com
The director, Josh Fox performing here.
Tactical lying? Surely not!
I think that information is from Wikipedia which we all know as an unimpeachable source. So that should be the end of the discussion...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing
Water is by far the largest component of fracking fluids. The initial drilling operation itself may consume from 65,000 gallons to 600,000 gallons of fracking fluids. Over its lifetime an average well will require up to an additional 5 million gallons of water for the initial fracking operation and possible restimulation frac jobs.[79]
Chemical additives used in fracturing fluids typically make up less than 2% by weight of the total fluid.[80] Over the life of a typical well, this may amount to 100,000 gallons of chemical additives. These additives (listed in a U.S. House of Representatives Report[28]) include biocides, surfactants, viscosity-modifiers, and emulsifiers. They vary widely in toxicity: Many are used in household products such as cosmetics, lotions, soaps, detergents, furniture polishes, floor waxes, and paints,[81] and some are used in food products. Although some of the chemicals pose no known health hazards, some are known carcinogens, some are toxic, some are neurotoxins. For example: benzene (causes cancer, bone marrow failure), lead (damages the nervous system and causes brain disorders), ethylene glycol (antifreeze, causes death), methanol (highly toxic), boric acid (kidney damage, death), 2-butoxyethanol (causes hemolysis). Gamma-emitting isotopes (can cause cancer) are also included in the fluid. Some of the isotopes used are Gold-198, Xenon-133, Iodine-131, Rubidium-86, Chromium-51, Iron-59, Antimony-124, Strontium-85, Cobalt-58, Iridium-192, Scandium-46, Zinc-65, Silver-110, Cobalt-57, Cobalt-60, and Krypton-85.[26]
So there you go... case closed... hah! Nobody has ever proved THEM wrong!
I suspect that there are trace amounts of many of those chemicals in oil and gas plays. But almost definitely not in the water pumped underground to fracture the rock.
bob sykes:
As a retired environmental engineer who specialized in water pollution control . . .
As you might be just the person to give a serious answer, could I ask you to explain something that's been bothering me for a while. I ask because, while I've learnt over the years that it is wise not to take on trust much of what one is told by mining and extraction companies, I've also learnt over the last ten or so to rely even less on what one is told by the mainstream eco-lobby.
So, is there an essential difference between fracking to get methane out of underground rocks (a Bad Thing) and Carbon Capture and Storage to get a lot of oil out of hard-to-access oil fields and leave the gas behind (a Good Thing). I'm confused because both of them seem to involve pumping fluids at high pressure a long way underground.
Thanks!
There is a comprehensive list here, with other information elsewhere on the site on other webpages
http://fracfocus.org/chemical-use/what-chemicals-are-used
I notice that Ethylene glycol is in the list supplied by WillR.
to quote an internet source:
"The 1985 diethylene glycol wine scandal involved a limited number of Austrian wineries that had illegally adulterated their wines using the toxic substance diethylene glycol (a primary ingredient in some brands of anti-freeze) to make the wines appear sweeter and more full-bodied in the style of late harvest wines. Many of these Austrian wines were exported to Germany, some of them in bulk to be bottled at large-scale German bottling facilities."
I don't recall if any deaths were attributable to this contamination, But I would suspect that the concentration in the wine was several orders of magnitude greater than we're talking about in the fracking process.
"antifreeze causes death"
Except when it is used to, er, prevent freezing.
Does that mean that H2O is both carcinogenic and toxic too?
Stick to the Gin folks!
I think you will find there are dead bodies in fracking fluid too. Thousands of them.
(Admittedly only 1 or 2 molecules from each dead body, but nevertheless dead bodies).
Fracking fluid is people!
<Channeling Penn and Teller> The most serious chemical used in Fracking is dihydrogen monoxide. Its an industrial solvent. This stuff can kill you, particularly if it gets in your lungs. Its a component of many known toxic substances. Unbelievably, they are now spraying it on vegetables and its showing up in baby food!
I'm starting a campaign to outlaw it. I've sent out a scientific survey to over 3000 experts and got nearly 1500 responses back, after adjusting the date to remove non-expert responses, 97% of the experts felt we need to ban this stuff. If that's not consensus, I don't know what is! Send money before it too late.
It's when you get right to the bottom of the page you see the reason for the disinformation - Grasslands the film.
Of course all the inorganic minerals come from underground in the first place. And the obvious primary pollution risk is conventional industrial pollution from possible escape from the chemical manufacturing plants, where these compounds exist in significant volumes at the surface. And no well operator is going to put the whole lot down and waste money. Each well is tailored using the minimum needed for the specific situation. Each well has to follow a pre-submitted well programme and environmental audit and get it officially approved before they start. Radioactive materials in drilling operations are normally contained within certain electric wireline logging tools lowered down and raised back out again, but radioactive depth markers are sometimes permanently set downhole.
boric acid (kidney damage, death)
Really? The stuff that I use in my eyewash? The same stuff I buy as an "environmentally friendly" insecticide?
Just as a reference, the prompt lethal dose of boric acid about 5 grams per kilogram of body weight. As opposed to table salt, which is toxic at about 4 g/kg of body weight. Boric acid is pretty much toxic only at levels high enough to crystallize out of solution...
Bish
Why "tactical"? I would say plain lying works.
Paul
It's even worse than that, they use vast quantities of Dihydrogen Monoxide!
The website links to the site of the highly acclaimed Gasland documentary. The one where they show tapwater with flammable gas in it but neglect to tell the viewer that the flammable tapwater predates any fracking by many decades.
Someone should call a leading ethicist like Peter Gleick to sort this lot out.
Feb 23, 2012 at 4:52 PM | DaveB says:
So, is there an essential difference between fracking to get methane out of underground rocks (a Bad Thing) and Carbon Capture and Storage to get a lot of oil out of hard-to-access oil fields and leave the gas behind (a Good Thing). I'm confused because both of them seem to involve pumping fluids at high pressure a long way underground.
Dave, I am not Mr. Sykes, but I am a technical lead for CCS for my company. To answer your question, using CO2 to recover oil has not been used in combination with fracking. In fact (in the US), CO2 used for oil recovery is not even considered as being sequestered, since much of it comes back out as you pump out the oil. And unless you can track and verify how much stays behind, you can’t take credit for it. CO2 sequestration has not been used with fracking because the rules specifically tell you to keep the injection pressure below the fracture point to protect the impermeable cap rock that keeps the CO2 in place. CO2 also as not been used to recover natural gas from any kind of well, fracked or not, because it dilutes the gas.
What quantities? All these materials are to be found in soil everywhere.
So the fluid is 98% dihydrogen monoxide... Pretty dangerous stuff eh - http://www.dhmo.org/
[/sarc] - but pretty much on the same level as the site in question.
I have it on the
best authority* that they
also use fine gold
for fracking, and costly
myrrh and frankincense—bastards!—
ere it gets too old.
Indeed, no evil
is too much for those frackers;
they grow overbold
for they do their work
for profit—yes, for money!—
or so I’ve been told.
* well, I assert it:
science is now based on what
I wish to uphold.
On Feb 13, 2012, the New York Times revealed that the Sierra Club received $26 million from Chesapeake Energy, a natural gas company, for an advocacy campaign called Beyond Coal to block new coal-fired power plants and shutter old ones.
Are we now seeing the coal industry advocating back?
Oops, I wrote my verses above too swiftly, and made a metrical error. I’ll amend it on my ’blog.
Something to give to anyone worried about carcinogens in food and water...
http://www.pnas.org/content/87/19/7777.full.pdf
I saw a similar list recently that listed sodium chloride as a carcinogen.
God knows we wouldn't want to 'contaminate' land that is loaded with FREAKIN' HYDROCARBONS!!!
On the other hand, the truth:
"Materials used in the fracturing process include 99.51% water and beach sand, as well as 0.49% of a range of compounds in minute quantities, which assist in carrying and dispersing the sand in the coal seam. The compounds are not specific to the CSG industry and have many common uses such as in swimming pools, toothpaste, baked goods, ice cream, food additives, detergents and soap.
"As part of the process, the beach sand remains in the coal seam while the vast majority of the liquid, including chemicals, is recovered to ensure it does not impede the gas flow."
I know it is on an oil and gas company website, but it is accurate, see: http://www.santos.com/coal-seam-gas/hydraulic-fracturing.aspx
It is pretty obvious that the Israelis are behind this. They want to cause further delays to Iran's attempt to develop nuclear weapons by tricking the Iranians into using their hard currency reserves to buy fracking fluid in the belief that they can extract uranium from it for their warheads!
Feb 23, 2012 at 4:53 PM | SandyS
SandyS, the frakking list refers to ethylene glycol and you quote an article on pollution of wine by Diethylene glycol. These are two different compounds, although, as the names suggest, they have similarities.
Use care. We chemists try to catch out casual readers!
I note that the list is quite possibly correct - it effectively says someone dropped a cigarette butt into the fracking fluid.
General:
Remember Paracelsus (1493-1541):
http://historymedren.about.com/od/quotes/a/quote_paracelsu.htm
(Often shortened to "The poison is in the dose".)
Applying the Precautionary Principle, there is an aesthetic intuition that there could be a 51.2% chance of the Radium we now now is being used in fracking to bond with Phlogiston and cause a disturbance in the Force as well as obesity. I am surprised it has not been banned altogether.
I apologise for being OT but I took a journey along the M18 today. There is a stiff breeze blowing, the kind that I would expect to be perfect for wind power generation. As I am driving northwards I see on my left a cluster of wind turbines, turning majestically, generating free, zero pollution energy, Yay. To my right however I see a cluster of wind turbines that are not turning at all. What can the problem be? Surely they can't all have broken down at the same time. It can't be that it is too windy or not windy enough, because the turbines on the left are working fine. Surely if we could strike up those turbines we would be able to switch off those nasty chimneys at Ferrybridge for a bit. I am baffled.
Newsbiscuit had this covered awhile back.
Before I retired, I was responsible for chemical safety at a major UK industrial site and responsible for the application of:
COSHH Control of Substances Hazardous to Health
CHIP Chemicals (Hazard Information and Packaging for Supply) Regulations and
COMAH Control of major accident hazards Regulations
If I had come up with such a load of codswallop I would have been removed from post PDQ.
Yes - I passed a couple by the M5 today that were suspiciously still - in a brisk breeze.
Perhaps it's something to to with green religious practices - they don't want offend Gaia by making too many demands on her wind at the same time.
Feb 23, 2012 at 7:49 PM | Stonyground
* Ferrybridge C (A & B are closed down) was the first European power station to produce 2000 MW (2 gigawatts).
* Since 2008 all 4 boilers have Boosted Over Fire Air in order to reduce the NOx emissions.
* Since 2009 two out of 4 units have flue gas desulfurisation (FGD). This removes 95% of the oxides of sulfur and produces gypsum for plasterboard.
* Finally, in November 2011 a carbon capture pilot plant was installed to study how capture of carbon dioxide from flue gas can be optimised.
* Admittedly, the 2 giant chimneys and 8 cooling towers have an engineering beauty which may not be to everybody's taste.
What Ferrybridge C gives is 2000 MW of power, 24/7/365, except for routine maintenance. Give me good coal-fired plant over on-shore wind every day!
At present I have lots of electrical appliances in my house and every time that I need them I turn them on and they work without fail. Should this happy situation ever come under threat due to misguided energy policies, I have already aquired a generator.
Darn, genemachine beat me to the punchline.
Try telling this bloke (Cameron who else?)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/82548604/David-Cameron-wind-letter
This a reply to those 101 "rebels". The spineless 101.
Re Cirby
There's probably kryptonite in fracking fluid too you know!
Check this out. Voluntary registry...
http://www.hydraulicfracturingdisclosure.org/fracfocusfind/