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!

We’ve completed the text for our Gas Well Study, 2010 and it is now available for download.

This year we went back to some of the wells we first looked at in 2008. We wanted to see if there had been any changes, for better or worse, and we wanted to examine the sites for potential pollution, something we weren’t able to do in 2008.

We’ve already written a post about one of the wells we revisited. This well was in some ways a good example of what we found. There are still a number of wells without API numbers, but the operator had, for most of the wells, put in the required secondary containment dikes for condensate storage tanks. There were still maintenance problems, even though most of the wells had recently painted metalwork. There were still problems with the well access roads and the sites’ vegetation in a number of cases. And we found two sites with surface contamination showing elevated chloride.

The second part of the Gas Well Study provides a summary of our experiment where we applied various concentrations of chloride to a single species of woodland vegetation. We’ve written a post about that with a link to the report.

One disturbing thing we saw this year was severe corrosion of the steel condensate storage tanks. Condensate is crude petroleum and brine that comes up with the gas. Several tanks’ trap doors were entirely rusted through.

It’s impossible to say how long these tanks will safely hold the condensate before leaking.