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Andrew Higgins reports in the NYT that Romanian officials including the prime minister point to a mysteriously well-financed and well-organized campaign of protests over fracking in Europe and are pointing their fingers at Russia's Gazprom, a state-controlled energy giant, that has a clear interest in preventing countries dependent on Russian natural gas from developing their own alternative supplies of energy and preserving a lucrative market for itself — and a potent foreign policy tool for the Kremlin.
“Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs) — environmental organizations working against shale gas — to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas,” says NATO’s former secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
A wave of protest against fracking began three years ago in Bulgaria, a country highly dependent on Russian energy. Faced with a sudden surge of street protests by activists, many of whom had previously shown little interest in environmental issues, the Bulgarian government in 2012 banned fracking and canceled a shale gas license issued earlier to Chevron.
Russia itself has generally shown scant concern for environmental protection and has a long record of harassing and even jailing environmentalists who stage protests. On fracking, however, Russian authorities have turned enthusiastically green, with Putin declaring last year that fracking “poses a huge environmental problem.” Places that have allowed it, he said, “no longer have water coming out of their taps but a blackish slime.” For their part Green groups have been swift to attack Rasmussen’s views, saying that they were not involved in any alleged Russian attempts to discredit the technology, and were instead opposed to it on the grounds of environmental sustainability. “The idea we’re puppets of Putin is so preposterous that you have to wonder what they’re smoking over at Nato HQ,” says Greenpeace, which has a history of antagonism with the Russian government, which arrested several of its activists on a protest in the Arctic last year.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday December 07 2014, @12:55AM
Why not simple sample the water around the fracking well? or simple take when no one notice regarding these fracking fluids? and send it for chemical analyze?
Anyway it seems we have polluting psychopathic Wall street people.
(Score: 3, Informative) by edIII on Sunday December 07 2014, @06:44AM
The water directly around the well might actually be contaminated to some small degree. Drilling and oil & gas well is an amazing process, and extraordinarily dirty. It's not a question of finding the chemicals really. We can just assume that fracking chemicals and worse are present within a couple hundred feet of the well. By worse, I mean the long sequestered hydrocarbons themselves (maybe some drilling fluids). I was always told to not get that on your hands or let it stay on them. Wash it off right away. Basically, I think you will get almost nothing but false positives measuring it this strictly.
My educated guess is that the complaints mostly surround not the fracking fluids themselves, but other hydrocarbons interacting with the water supply. Which it's a good time to remember that the whole point of drilling is recovery. So a proper well with good casing should have nothing more being introduced into the environment. Failures usually indicate a problem in the lines that need to be addressed, and soon. How much of this is not from already completed wells with all of their lines connected back to whatever energy company is refining it? They certainly don't haul this stuff off in trucks :) You also need to assume that all the existing lines and completed wells are in good order and well maintained before you conclude a single operation is responsible. I know this first hand due to the costs of fixing problems in the lines and keeping production going.
According to all of the definitions of the processes involved, they are indeed safe and well engineered processes worthy of respect. What I allege they are doing instead is performing a rather violent and brutish kind of fracking where it's not a single operation done carefully. After each frac (or series) we were really taking the time to evaluate the formations and recovery process. It took months, and we spent a lot of money hauling off water and contaminated fluids. In the documentation I saw, it was very clear that it was fracks being performed successively, with massive amounts of water being pumped into the formation. From what I also understand, a lot of "horizontal" drilling through formations far shallower than the typical 8k feet in the Marcellus Shale. So most of the fracking examples are not relevant to damage in shallower water tables. The people affected aren't lying, the earthquakes need to be explained, and they're allowed to keep secrets. I allege they are being unsafe and reckless even by traditional fracking standards. Either that, or I am grossly misinterpreting what I read in those documents. It described a process that did not have a well engineered tube proceeding to the surface, but a scorched earth attempt at pulverizing the formations and sucking up the juices. I was unable to visualize their process succeeding without the water tables being completely screwed, and I say that as somebody who has visually inspected well casing, and the explosives used for perforation. No expert, but I think I've got the basic concepts as they were explained to me by the well paid experts in attendance.
If you read some of the links, the doctors are always so incredulous because it really is so ridiculous to contaminate the water supply.
In oil & gas it's not the lack of engineering that kills us. It's the timetables and financial concerns imposed on the engineering and maintenance. Guess where that comes from? I believe my instincts about rampant greed and a complete disregard for their fellow man are correct in this case. BP in the Gulf happened precisely because the engineering was heavily influenced on how much money the executives could siphon out of the company. I think it's happening on land, which is much more difficult to track since you can't see it. In some cases you're deliberately prevented by law. Oil & Gas is that well protected.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.