Shale Gas Drilling in the News

There’s been increased focus on natural gas drilling in a variety of news venues recently. The focus has been on environmental problems and environmental justice issues rather than how great industry is.

In early March the New York Times published a series of articles by Ian Urbina called Drilling Down. The first can be found here (there’s a link to the whole series on that page). The three articles deal with the problem of contaminants in fracture flowback, including radioactive ones brought up from underground. This is especially a problem with the Marcellus shale in the northeast. Regulators and industry seem to have a difficulty finding a way to adequately deal with the huge volumes of waste water. At this point in time a lot of this waste is released, after totally inadequate “treatment,” into surface water used as drinking water sources for millions of people.

Supporting the New York Times’ articles are interactive features, a huge library of documents (over 1,100 pages culled from EPA, industry, and state regulatory sources), and a great 7 minute long video about the issue of air emissions from wells and compressor stations. The video, library and interactive features best can be seen if you have high speed.

Also worthwhile checking out is National Geographic’s series of articles which can be seen here.

The West Virginia legislature has been working on a bill devoted to regulate oil and gas drilling. There were two versions, a Senate and House bill. The House ended up stopping work on their bill and took up the passed Senate version. There’s been a tremendous amount of pressure from oil and gas industry folks to quash these bills or any form of regulation and it seems to have been successful. The Senate bill died in the House and what was passed instead was a bill offering state tax breaks for the industry. You can read about it here.

Needless to say we are both discouraged by the, not unexpected, turn of events.

A Harrison county, West Virginia resident has recently uploaded some videos of a Marcellus drilling operation across the road from her house. You can see one here and while you’re on Youtube, check out her other videos about Marcellus drilling.

More soon!

March 13, 2011