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posted by on Thursday February 23 2017, @07:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-just-sugar-water dept.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-39032748

Up to 16% of hydraulically fractured oil and gas wells spill liquids every year, according to new research from US scientists. They found that there had been 6,600 releases from these fracked wells over a ten-year period in four states. The biggest problems were reported in oil-rich North Dakota where 67% of the spills were recorded. The largest spill recorded involved 100,000 litres of fluid with most related to storing and moving liquids.

[...] A [previous] study carried out by the US Environment Protection Agency on fracking in eight states between 2006 and 2012 concluded that 457 spills had occurred. But this new study, while limited to just four states with adequate data, suggests the level of spills is much higher. The researchers found 6,648 spills between 2005 and 2014.

"The EPA just looked at spills from the hydraulic fracturing process itself which is just a few days to a few weeks," lead author Dr Lauren Patterson from Duke University told BBC News. "We're looking at spills at unconventional wells from the time of the drilling through production which could be decades."

Patterson, et.al. Unconventional Oil and Gas Spills: Risks, Mitigation Priorities, and State Reporting Requirements Environ. Sci. Technol. DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.6b05749

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  • (Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:18PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:18PM (#470804) Journal

    Grass above major acquifer source dead, local farmers puzzled. In other news, local farmers are having problems with their crops, probable cause determined to be "early spring".

    My point exactly. This hysteria is so overblown. You can't even come up with a serious rebuttal.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:43PM (#470816)

    Actually, the point was that the spills have environmental impacts that aren't always immediately apparent. No one is going hysterical, but the evidence is clearly mounting that oil is not the best future for humanity. We've known it for a long time, but apparently it takes overwhelming evidence of environmental damage for the oil defenders to admit there MIGHT be a problem.

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday February 23 2017, @07:35PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 23 2017, @07:35PM (#470847) Journal

      I'm sorry, but I don't quite read the evidence the same way. I'll agree that petrochemicals are a bad idea, but that's because they add archaic carbon back into the currently overheating process rather than because there's something inherently wrong with oil. (There *are* things wrong with oil, but the same is true for all sources of power.)

      The best idea I've heard in the last year is using excess power generated by solar in tropical areas and wind power when it's really blowing to drive an electrical process to convert air into oil. (Actually, I think it was into methane, but that can be used as a feedstock to build oil.) There's a lot of work that needs to be done to make the process reasonable, but it's a wonderful idea. So are bio-reactors that build diesel grade oil. And several other approaches that also depend on building oil.

      P.S.: While these are good ideas, and need to be developed, my guess is that eventually supercapacitors will be the storage method of choice (for short periods of time...say days or weeks). They also need to be further developed, but I've recently encountered encouraging news (but at the laboratory stage).

      OTOH, what should we do now? Short term we've got all the cars and trucks that are dependent on oil. If the price of oil goes up, that hurts the economy. But if it doesn't go up, people won't conserve reasonably. My general opinion is that the tax on gas/diesel should be PREDICTABLY slowly increasing. That 2 degrees warming was always a politically chosen goal, even though, IIUC, it was some scientist-administrators who chose it. But by now it's quite clear that we aren't going to avoid an even larger increase than that. We may be at the point where even if we were to immediately cease all emissions of CO2, including farting cows and breathing humans, the planet would *still* pass that point, because of delays in the system. (I said the planet, because if people stop breathing, it won't be us that pass that point.) Perhaps the only way to avoid it is to have a major chain of volcanoes erupt with lots of gas...or a nice little nuclear war could also do it. Either would result in massive starvation, however, as an unpleasant side effect. Or, I suppose a major meteor strike into the ocean could do it, but it couldn't just be a trivially minor one, such as hit Russia a few years ago and blew out all the windows in a city.

      The point is, all alternatives to accepting that we're going to have massive global warming and trying to minimize it (and pre-adjust for rising sea levels of unknown extent) are worse. So just saying "stop all oil use now" isn't a reasonable approach. It's quite important to phase out coal and oil as rapidly as feasible, and if everyone could just admit that, then we could argue about "what's feasible?", which would have a chance of being a bit more productive. But it's too late to avoid quite a lot of global warming. The Arctic Ocean is already nearly ice free in the summers, and the Antarctic is also shedding lots of ice. (Antarctica is harder to study, and it's got a continent under the ice, so we don't understand it as well...but we can see that it's shedding lots of ice. It's just that it has a humongous amount of ice to start with, so "lots" doesn't say as much as we'd like to know. And some of that ice is mountain glaciers which are nearly guaranteed not going to melt.)

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    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 23 2017, @09:50PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 23 2017, @09:50PM (#470914) Journal

      Actually, the point was that the spills have environmental impacts that aren't always immediately apparent.

      And my point is that argument from ignorance combined with the small size and consequences of these spills is hysteria. For example, the biggest spill mentioned here was about 625 barrels of oil. Sorry that's insignificant even when one counts the effects which aren't immediately apparent such as getting into the water table. Also keep in mind that the minimum reported spill size was 1 to 5 barrels depending on the state and most such spills would both be on that small side and be cleaned up.

      The news story couldn't be bothered to state how much is estimated to go into the environment or how serious that is compared to other sources (like gas stations and personal vehicle oil changes, which I suspect are greatly worse even if we similarly restrict our attention to the areas of the study).

      No one is going hysterical, but the evidence is clearly mounting that oil is not the best future for humanity.

      It doesn't have to be the best future forever, it just happens to be the best option now. We can always change our minds later when it makes sense to do so.