More tactical lying

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?

Comments

[RoyFOMR]

"More tactical lying"
Gotta disagree with your title Bish. After a couple of days of exposure to the self-deception, religious intolerance and tortured logic of supposed intelligent commentators such as Black, Monbiot and Gleick my jaw has declared UDI from its Northern cranial components.
These guys have moved beyond lying somehow. I respected each of them. Once.
Now, FWIW - Dick should be moved to Radio 10'ish central planning duties; Georgia-Borgia to 5 down in the cryptic crossword looking for hidden mulberries while PG learns how to identify reality from fantasy by being shown photographic images of the spittle-flecked lips of notable warmistadors while being instructed in basic mathematics such as $Billions>$Millions>>$Thousands and elementary Bible theory as in "Goliath was the massive bloke, BTW. David, the one that won Gold was the wee one.
When big lies are overwhelmed by little facts, tactics turn from axioms into beliefs. When beliefs are battered by observation into gospel, the BBC and the Guardian become priceless!

[RoyFOMR]

I wish that one had to buy a licence to read the Guardian. More money saved!

[andy scrase]

I presume that a lot of these chemicals appear as a side-effect of the fracking (radon rather than radium sounds more likely) rather than being directly used

The same could be said for burning coal, which produces a fair bit of radioactive material during combustion.

You can make anything sound scary enough, including (or especially) wind and solar, if you try.

[Oakwood]

As a hydrogeologist, I have been following the cracking scare with interest. It is the Climate Change scare in miniature. It would make an interesting study in mass psychology. Fracking has been going on for years. The risks are no more significant than from any other industrial activity. The checks and quality control need to be there, but the risks are manageable. The scare is whipped up by campaigners with emotional methods and words: earthquakes, chemicals, poison, profit, that YouTube film of flammable tap water, etc. Then any one who challenges the exagerations and propaganda is "in the pay of big oil". It's tragic how those claiming to want to save the world and humanity waste so much time, money and effort on non-issues, while so many genuine problems remain unaddressed.

[Lord Beaverbrook]

When does the UK join the party

The belief that global oil production has peaked, or is on the cusp of doing so, has helped to fuel oil’s more than decade-long rally. The resurgence of US gas production to well over its 1970s peak and into the number one slot globally over the last seven years is a result of hydraulic fracturing – fracking – techniques being applied to shale gas reserves across the US. The same companies are now using the same techniques on shale oil reserves, with results that in many cases look as promising as the early stages of the shale gas revolution. US oil production is now on the rise, entirely because of shale oil production, as conventional sources such as Alaska or California are structurally declining, and as Gulf of Mexico production is poised for a post-Macondo recovery.

[Jonathan Drake]

Will this be blamed on Fracking too? ;-)

"A grandmother has spoken of her anger at being told her newly landscaped garden will have to be dug up as it is contaminated with radon."

http://www.thisisbath.co.uk/Radioactive-garden-bulldozed/story-15296336-detail/story.html

[jamspid]

Got this link of Dellingpole in the Daily Telegraph

Ive posted this on here once already

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1009530098/fracknation?ref=category

[tty]

I wonder how they get all that nasty radioactive Krypton-85 to stay put in the fracking fluid. Must be quite a trick since it is a noble gas.
That list reminds me of an experiment I did once in university when I was working with neutron activation analysis. Just for fun I left a piece of mild steel in the neutron source over the weekend and took a gamma spectrum of it on Monday. If I remember rightly I found every single element that emits gamma rays in the detectable range in that piece of steel (except Technetium, which is too unstable to exist in nature on Earth). Gamma spectrometry is a remarkable technique - in principle it is possdible do detect a single atom with it.

[genemachine]

This comment on Delingpole's blog gives a lot of information on fracking and related issues:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100138480/fracknation-pay-one-dollar-become-a-movie-mogul-save-the-world/#comment-444307077

[Mike Ozanne]

Well it isn't a lie per se, its a deliberate misrepresentation.

If you were to pick up river and ground water and put it through a decent GC or MS you would find and I quote

"the following emitters of radiation of low linear energy transfer (LET): potassium-40 (40K), tritium (3H), carbon- 14 (14C), and rubidium-87 (87Rb). In addition, high-LET, alpha-emitting radionuclides, such as radium-226 (226Ra), the daughters of radium-228 (228Ra), polonium-210 (210Po), uranium (U), thorium (Th), radon-220 (220Rn), and radon-222 (222Rn), may also be present in varying amounts."

also a whole range of organics, aromatics, biocides, chloroform etc etc

<see NAS "Drinking water and health" ISBN: 0-309-55400-4>

So, you take running water from a babbling brook, add nothing to it, pump it through the process, take a sample at the end and categorise it as a radioctive soup of bubbling carcinogens containing all these "undeclared" ingredients.

[Paddy]

I recall an old research paper that concluded that saliva is carcinogen, but only when it is swallowed in small quantities over long time periods.

[Frank]

I did some of reading about fracking and ground water contamination at Pavilion, Wyoming - a problem that is going into be in the news more in the future and may prompt expensive regulation by the EPA in the US. A significant amount of fracking fluid comes out of the ground (geysers?) after the rock is fractured and pockets of natural gas have been released. This offers a route for release of whatever toxic materials are in the rock: radium, mercury, benzene and organic hydrocarbons which haven't broken down to natural gas, etc. What comes up is certainly not as safe as what went down. With normal mines, toxic materials are leached by rain from mine tailings on the surface, a big source of pollution. With fracking, the tailing remain underground, but the polluted water comes up. Almost all of the incidents have involved surface spills of this waste. Unfortunately, waste fracking fluid currently can not be recycled since there are components that are designed to expand and keep open microscopic channels in the rock. A second major danger occurs where the natural gas well passes through drinking water aquifers. If the casing around the well leaks (see Deepwater Horizon), there is potential for waste fracking fluid to enter ground water. What doesn't happen is fracking fluid or natural gas rising through a mile or so of rock underground to reach the surface.

With tens of thousands of drinking water wells - some of which get contaminated (sometimes with natural gas) for a variety of reasons having nothing to do with fracking - near tens of thousand of fracking wells, there are going to be times when drinking water contamination occurs soon after fracking is done. It could be a chance event, but the owner of the drinking water well will be convince a clear cause-and-effect relationship exists. Many locations where fracking is being done today were the site of more primitive oil and gas operations decades ago when environmental protection was non-existent. Fracking starts in an area, people get worried and have their wells tested, and discover problems that may have been around for decades. Trial lawyers and environment groups are going to reinforce the belief that fracking must have been responsible: The big environment groups want to get rid of fracking and the lawyers can't collect damages from operations that ended decades ago. In a dry place like Wyoming, land with good ground water underneath is valuable and land without is almost worthless and Pavilion has a big problem with ground water contamination.

The Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania, NY and NJ is an area bigger than Scotland with a layer of shale tens of meters thick about a mile underground. Left unchecked, the natural gas industry is going to dig wells about a mile apart across the whole area, frack as much of it as they possibly can (probably about 50%), and then leave. Anyone owning the mineral rights to a sizable chunk of rural land can get royalties amounting to 10-20% of the value of the gas, while the rest of the population inherits the risk.

[Doug Proctor]

eb 23, 2012 at 6:11 PM | oeman50

WRT fluids and fracking. I, also, am in the oil and gas business. In Canada, Encana and others love to talk about CO2 injection into the Weyburn, Sask. oil field as a "sequestration". Right in the beginning I was going, No, it's a CO2-flood to get more oil out. And the CO2 comes back out - as a problem if you don't have stainless steel equipment. But in the CAGW war, I guess everyone grabs a brownie point when he can, even if a redefinition or two is necessary.

Nobody puts mercury, uranium or radium/radon into a frack or mud system. But it sure comes out as a contaminant of oil. Some well pipes are technically radioactive wastes with the uranium-adsorbed mineral deposits that happen. But that is Nature, not man, messing things up.

If barium muds are added, then you do have a heavy metal, barium. As a lubricant. Is there lead in pipe grease, as a lubricant?

If you want metals or hydrocarbons: how about all the vapours that come out of rubber and oil and gas you use driving around looking for oil activities? Or what about all those horrible glues from your new wall-to-wall, or the benzene etc. that comes out of the various stains your hobbyist uses? Benzene from the denatured alcohol?

We all sin. Even the Bible says so. What is important is what sins they are, and why they occur, and who is harmed and how much is harmed. Fracking is not a systemic problem. Never has been, never will be.

[stun]

That's it then. We're going to have to set Cornwall loose into the Atlantic due to the Radon levels in the Godolphin granite.

[Hugh]

The Company behind the find in Lancashire is Cuadrilla Resources. They have a good web site with lots of info. those interested might like to look at their description of the fracking fluid they use. It makes sense to me.

http://www.cuadrillaresources.com/what-we-do/hydraulic-fracturing/fracturing-fluid/