The full horror of shale gas extraction

The Mail was briefly leading on shale again this morning although the story has been shunted down since. The only new development is that someone has taken a photo of the Balcombe site from the air. The Mail captions the photo "concrete carbuncle", but to me it's astonishing just how small the site is and how little concrete is involved.

Obviously, once the drilling is complete, the full horror of a shale gas well will be revealed...

From here.

Postscript: I wonder who wrote the Mail article?

Comments

[John Marshall]

Didn't they do well well.

I see no problem with this at all.

[anonym]

ssat, not banned yet:

Yes. I was commenting on a question about fracking; I didn't say anything about Balcombe specifically.

geronimo:

My source is Chesapeake. As to gas tankers, by all accounts road traffic to a well site is higher at the beginning. (You can see from this NPR report that the road traffic in an area undergoing shale drilling is quite something.) That apparently includes trucks carrying off waste saltwater in the early stages of production, before well traffic reaches a steady state of "less than one truck per day per well" (source: Chesapeake).

Mike Jackson:

Again, I'm for exploiting Bowland and against windfarms. That doesn't mean I'm going to deliberately underplay the nuisance level of large-scale fracking.

[mikeh]

Anonym; you are transposing the US experience onto UK environs. Over there it is normal to truck in all of the water and truck out the flowback because there is usally little local infrastructure. That may not be the case here.
Up in the Northwest, United Utilities have said that they would expect to supply the water required for a frack site via a temporary main. Disposal of the waste water has not been mentioned but I would expect them to be able to handle that as well - for a fee, of course, based on an industry-wide formula for the degree of contamination (and, compared to some industrial waste, flowback water is pretty mild stuff).
Things may be different in Balcombe, depending on the local constraints. For the moment there is no plan to frack so the question is moot.