Your view on shale gas exploration ?

[Spendulus]

^Isn't the hydraulic fracturing excluded from the Safe Drinking Water Act (http://water.epa.gov/type/groundwater/uic/class2/hydraulicfracturing/wells_hydroreg.cfm)? It seems they passed something similar here and there may be no ecological expertise needed for hydraulic fracturing. I was in Texas A&M and the taste of the water... I'm not sure if it's a pollution or just the natural taste of your drinking water, but it's definitely not to my taste.

Edit: I forgot to add about the smell of the drinking water there. Both the taste and the smell are hard to describe.

Quite a few places that produce bad tasting and bad smelling water naturally.   There are a variety of reasons.  Not related to safety.

Generally one would not consider injection of fluids at 5000-10k depth in concrete pressure sealed wells to affect underground water at 200-1000 feet.

[Spendulus]

One thing I forgot to add about the shale gas exploration in the case that started the thread...

I don't know the situation in Texas ...
-wiki only mentions 2 larger than 6 Richter scale earthquakes last century and I don't know how far they are from the wells-
but in the case of the Pungesti exploration , it is in a 100 km range from the most active earthquake center in my country which triggered 5 7+ Richter scale earthquakes last century.

Wouldn't it be a team of experts that mapped out the areas that had valuable energy deposits, and determined the subset of them in which it was safe to drill? 

The days of wildcatters going out and drilling where ever they wanted are long over.   That doesn't work with fracking anyway.

[niothor]

One thing I forgot to add about the shale gas exploration in the case that started the thread...

I don't know the situation in Texas ...
-wiki only mentions 2 larger than 6 Richter scale earthquakes last century and I don't know how far they are from the wells-
but in the case of the Pungesti exploration , it is in a 100 km range from the most active earthquake center in my country which triggered 5 7+ Richter scale earthquakes last century.

Wouldn't it be a team of experts that mapped out the areas that had valuable energy deposits, and determined the subset of them in which it was safe to drill? 

The days of wildcatters going out and drilling where ever they wanted are long over.   That doesn't work with fracking anyway.

About those experts... I've seen so many different opinions about the explorations in that area that I won't take anyone side.
And there were a lot of people that were indeed specialists in earthquakes, not the casual guest to a talk show , people who worked in the INFP  for a long time and they still had different opinions.

[Spendulus]

One thing I forgot to add about the shale gas exploration in the case that started the thread...

I don't know the situation in Texas ...
-wiki only mentions 2 larger than 6 Richter scale earthquakes last century and I don't know how far they are from the wells-
but in the case of the Pungesti exploration , it is in a 100 km range from the most active earthquake center in my country which triggered 5 7+ Richter scale earthquakes last century.

Wouldn't it be a team of experts that mapped out the areas that had valuable energy deposits, and determined the subset of them in which it was safe to drill? 

The days of wildcatters going out and drilling where ever they wanted are long over.   That doesn't work with fracking anyway.

About those experts... I've seen so many different opinions about the explorations in that area that I won't take anyone side.
And there were a lot of people that were indeed specialists in earthquakes, not the casual guest to a talk show , people who worked in the INFP  for a long time and they still had different opinions.

Hmm...yeah "exploration"  provides physical cores, which tells the geologists a lot about what's down there. traditional, wells were drilled and a lot turned out to be "dry holes."  Fracking, I think pretty much every time they drill they frack.

The effects of fracking liquids disposal on quake frequency, last I heard, were not clearly understood.  So there would be no certainty in guidance on that issue. 

[newflesh]

Drillers are illegally using diesel fuel to frack, doctoring records to hide violations: report

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/08/15/drillers-are-illegally-using-diesel-fuel-to-frack-doctoring-records-to-hide-violations-report/

" A new report charges that several oil and gas companies have been illegally using diesel fuel in their hydraulic fracturing operations, and then doctoring records to hide violations of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.

The report, published this week by the Environmental Integrity Project, found that between 2010 and July 2014 at least 351 wells were fracked by 33 different companies using diesel fuels without a permit. The Integrity Project, an environmental organization based in Washington, D.C., said it used the industry-backed database, FracFocus, to identify violations and to determine the records had been retroactively amended by the companies to erase the evidence".

...

"The report asserts that the industry data shows that the companies admitted using diesel without the proper permits. The Integrity Project's analysis, the report said, then showed that in some 30 percent of those cases, the companies later removed the information about their diesel use from the database.

"What's problematic is that this is an industry that is self-reporting and self-policing," said Mary Greene, senior managing attorney for the environmental organization. "There's no federal or state oversight of [filings with FracFocus]."

[Spendulus]

Drillers are illegally using diesel fuel to frack, doctoring records to hide violations: report

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/08/15/drillers-are-illegally-using-diesel-fuel-to-frack-doctoring-records-to-hide-violations-report/

" A new report charges that several oil and gas companies have been illegally using diesel fuel in their hydraulic fracturing operations, and then doctoring records to hide violations of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.

The report, published this week by the Environmental Integrity Project, found that between 2010 and July 2014 at least 351 wells were fracked by 33 different companies using diesel fuels without a permit. The Integrity Project, an environmental organization based in Washington, D.C., said it used the industry-backed database, FracFocus, to identify violations and to determine the records had been retroactively amended by the companies to erase the evidence".

...

"The report asserts that the industry data shows that the companies admitted using diesel without the proper permits. The Integrity Project's analysis, the report said, then showed that in some 30 percent of those cases, the companies later removed the information about their diesel use from the database.

"What's problematic is that this is an industry that is self-reporting and self-policing," said Mary Greene, senior managing attorney for the environmental organization. "There's no federal or state oversight of [filings with FracFocus]."

The article doesn't actually say what you assert as fact.  It lists those ALLEGATIONS, then debunks them.

Cheers!

[Fray]

One thing I forgot to add about the shale gas exploration in the case that started the thread...

I don't know the situation in Texas ...
-wiki only mentions 2 larger than 6 Richter scale earthquakes last century and I don't know how far they are from the wells-
but in the case of the Pungesti exploration , it is in a 100 km range from the most active earthquake center in my country which triggered 5 7+ Richter scale earthquakes last century.

Although there are some places in the world that it is thought that the edges of tectonic plates sit, this is not a 100% known fact. Also there are some places where earthquakes are more common, but in reality earthquakes can happen in any place at any time.

If fracking is done in places where the risks of earthquakes is greater, then more precaution can be taken to protect against the effects of earthquakes; similar to what is done to buildings in these kinds of places.

[niothor]

One thing I forgot to add about the shale gas exploration in the case that started the thread...

I don't know the situation in Texas ...
-wiki only mentions 2 larger than 6 Richter scale earthquakes last century and I don't know how far they are from the wells-
but in the case of the Pungesti exploration , it is in a 100 km range from the most active earthquake center in my country which triggered 5 7+ Richter scale earthquakes last century.

Although there are some places in the world that it is thought that the edges of tectonic plates sit, this is not a 100% known fact. Also there are some places where earthquakes are more common, but in reality earthquakes can happen in any place at any time.

If fracking is done in places where the risks of earthquakes is greater, then more precaution can be taken to protect against the effects of earthquakes; similar to what is done to buildings in these kinds of places.

Trust me , the so called Vrancea area is at the edge of 3 not two tectonic plates.

Vrancea seismic zone is located in Romania at the South-Easter Carpathians bend, where at least three major tectonic units are in contact: East Europen Plate, Intra-Alpine Plate and Moesian Plate. The seismicity of the Vrancea zone consist of both crustal and intermediate-depth earthquakes. The crustal events are moderate (M w ≤ 5.5) and generally occur in clusters in space (the subzones Râmnicu Sărat and Vrâncioaia, situated in the Vrancea epicentral area and adjacent to it) and in time (main shocks accompanied by aftershocks and sometimes by foreshocks or swarms). Seismic activity in Râmnicu Sărat zone consist of shallow earthquakes with moderate magnitudes M s ≤ 5.2 (Radu, 1979), wich frequently occur in clusters.