West Virginia is home to one of the most destructive coal mining practices in the world--mountaintop removal--a process that blows up pristine mountains to lay bare the bituminous coal below. But a new fossil fuel Gold Rush has hit the Mountain State; fracking for natural gas trapped deep in the Marcellus Shale underground. And it has residents and experts worried that its poisonous impacts will leave an even more damaging environmental legacy. NRDC’s Amy Mall has blogged about the many hazards associated with this gas drilling rampage rapidly spreading across the country.
As thousands of fracking sites spring up like metal mushrooms across the state, angry residents are filling public meetings with a myriad of complaints; streams polluted by what appears to be chemical-laced fracking fluid; busted roads and tractor trailers abandoned along hairpin turns; valuable farmlands gobbled up by gas drilling pads and toxic waste holding ponds that dot the mountainous terrain like gravel-bedded tumors.
Producer Roshini Thinakaran and cameraman/video editor Zak Wenning, NRDC’s Journey OnEarth documentary team, traveled to West Virginia recently to investigate a raging battle over natural gas development in hard-hit Wetzel County. They found a dramatic community face-off with a fracking industry driven by dollar signs and quick cash propositions.
But many residents wonder what will be left of their mountain homes after the drillers make their fortunes and leave their equipment behind.
Follow Rocky Kistner on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rockyatnrdc
And when all this is over...what will your children have to hand down?
A Barren Birthright.
"And it has residents and experts worried that its poisonous impacts"
One might be the number of poisoning incidents directly tied to fracturing as it has been practiced for the last 50 or so years
Back to K-Y Jelly, they also put propylene glycol in this personal lubricant. Propylene glycol is what we use for antifreeze in our automobiles. So, fracturing fluid isn't as bad as K-Y Jelly. Since fracturing fluid is food, bacteria like to eat it. Halliburton now uses ultraviolet light to kill the bacteria instead of bacteriocide.
PS you lied when you said "Because the gas industry keeps the formula secret"
http://geology.com/energy/hydraulic-fracturing-fluids/
FOR STARTERS
The old "C02 is a naturally occurring non-toxic substance" argument.
Nice.
... for more on solastalgia.
May those in West Virginia who wish to be genuinely productive and are pro-life win out over the forces that destroy good land, good people and a good, living earth. I call the cooperation needed to defeat solastalgia, 'soliphilia' ... the love of the interconnected whole and the affiliation needed between people to keep it whole.
Yours in soliphilia,
Glenn Albrecht PhD, Professor of Sustainability, Murdoch University, Perth Western Australia.
You need to post to a source of information more credible than an NRDC blog to make an assertion like that.
I for one am against the thousands of barrels of oil,gasoline, diesel and antifreeze that we Americans spill all over the US every year. We are lucky that the rain washes this sludge into the environment or we would kill more than 40,000 of our fellow Americians on oil slick roads. Still be careful when there is a light rain. The roads are very slick with oil.
I would rather we started using more methane and less coal and crude for our energy. We were warned 40 years ago that gasoline-powered pollution mobiles were bad for the environment and our economy. Same with coal. We were so proud back then. We were going to be foreign oil free by the end of the century. But still today, all we want is cheap gasoline so that we can continue to poison our planet.
If we didn't finance the Evil Petroleum Industry with a large portion of our money, they would quit drilling oil and gas wells. They make a very small profit margin as it is. If we just quit wasting energy, they would lose money.
Or you can read the MIT blue-ribbon panel report, summarized here.
http://web.mit.edu/press/2010/natural-gas.html
Their consensus is "challenging but manageable", which seems about right to me.
Gasland comes to a different conclusion. But Gasland was put together by movie makers in la-la land, not scientists.