tagged w/ benzene
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Meet Rod Brueske. Like thousands of Coloradans, his family and property is being threatened by fracking. Watch the video, and then join Food & Water Watch's campaign to ban fracking now in Colorado: www.foodandwaterwatch.orgMeet Rod Brueske. Like thousands of Coloradans, his family and property is being... more
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What the frack am I talking about? A fracking tragedy is playing out all across America, and it’s about fracking time we all learn the truth about this blatant destruction of our environment for the temporary easing of our energy needs. We all can agree that we (Americans) need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, however hydraulic fracturing of ground shale for gas extraction (fracking) is an investment in a finite resource that destroys groundwater supplies and possibly induces man-made earthquakes. This article will be an overview of the reckless destruction of personal property, environment, and quality of life for those unfortunate enough to have shale gas deposits under their homes.What the frack am I talking about? A fracking tragedy is playing out all across... more
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R3zn8D
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4 months ago
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What the frack am I talking about? A fracking tragedy is playing out all across America, and it’s about fracking time we all learn the truth about this blatant destruction of our environment for the temporary easing of our energy needs. We all can agree that we (Americans) need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, however hydraulic fracturing of ground shale for gas extraction (fracking) is an investment in a finite resource that destroys groundwater supplies and possibly induces man-made earthquakes. This article will be an overview of the reckless destruction of personal property, environment, and quality of life for those unfortunate enough to have shale gas deposits under their homes.What the frack am I talking about? A fracking tragedy is playing out all across... more
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R3zn8D
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added this
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4 months ago
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The Pennsylvania homes of Karl Wasner and Arline LaTourette both sit atop the Marcellus Shale, a geologic formation that stretches from Tennessee to New York and holds vast deposits of natural gas. They also sit on opposite sides of a national debate over hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. That's the process that makes it economical for energy companies to tunnel 5,000 feet below ground and remove the gas—but also poses environmental risks.
Wasner settled 14 years ago in Milanville, in the state's northeast corner, and will leave if drilling companies set up derricks nearby. He already moved away for six weeks last year while an exploratory well was drilled nearby. The noise, muddy water pouring from his taps, and chemicals that turned up in a neighbor's well drove him off, he says. "I moved to a beautiful rural residential area," says Wasner, "not an industrial park."
LaTourette, whose roots in the area go back five generations, is banking on the drilling. Her family has leased almost 700 acres of farmland to Hess (HES) and other companies to tap into the Marcellus Shale. She won't say what she's getting, but signing bonuses can range from $2,000 to $5,000 an acre, and royalty payments are about 20 percent of the value of the gas produced.
President Barack Obama enthusiastically backs gas drilling, and these days 90 percent of it is done by fracking, which involves forcing below ground chemically treated water under high pressure to smash through layers of rock, thus freeing the gas to flow upward. Along with wind, solar, and nuclear power, natural gas is crucial to Obama's goal of producing 80 percent of electricity from clean energy sources by 2035. But the drilling is taking place with minimal oversight from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. State and regional authorities are trying to write their own rules—and having trouble keeping up.
Now, reports of contaminated water and alleged disposal of carcinogens in rivers have caught state and federal regulators, and even environmental watchdogs, off guard. Sometimes the fracking mix includes diesel fuel. Between 2005 and 2009, drillers injected 32 million gallons of fluids containing diesel into wells in 19 states, an investigation by Representative Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) concludes. Just as it recovers its footing from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Administration faces a new threat, again involving a risky drilling technology and charges of lax regulation. Obama is "evaluating the need for new safeguards for drilling," says White House spokesman Clark W. Stevens. "It's likely that the science is going to say we need to regulate fracking," says Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program for Public Citizen, a liberal advocacy group. "But Obama's political team is going to say don't regulate, and I think the political team will win."
The Marcellus Shale may contain 490 trillion cubic feet of gas—enough to heat U.S. homes and power electric plants for two decades, says Terry Engelder, professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University. That makes it the world's second-largest gas field behind South Pars, shared by Iran and Qatar. The shale gas rush is creating thousands of jobs and reviving the economy in states such as Wyoming, Texas, and Louisiana. In Pennsylvania, where 2,516 wells have been drilled in the last three years, $389 million in tax revenue and 44,000 jobs came from gas drilling in 2009, according to a Penn State report. Perhaps best of all, natural gas emits half the carbon emissions of oil.
While there have been no documented cases of fracking fluids flowing underground into drinking water, there have been spills above ground. Fracking produces millions of gallons of wastewater; some of it containing benzene has spilled from holding tanks. The wastewater can overwhelm treatment plants not equipped to handle high levels of contaminants. A Feb. 26 New York Times article, using documents from the EPA and state regulators, described how radioactive wastewater is being discharged into river basins. Sierra Club Deputy Executive Director Bruce Hamilton says Obama "has been sold a bill of goods." But even the Sierra Club has struggled with fracking. Last year it overruled New York and Pennsylvania chapters calling for a national fracking ban; now it's reconsidering that decision, Hamilton says.
The Delaware River Basin Commission, which manages the watershed that supplies drinking water to 15 million people in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, has put gas development on hold while it drafts rules. Wasner and LaTourette were among scores of people to comment at a Feb. 22 hearing in Honesdale, Pa., on a commission proposal to regulate the drilling. New York also has fracking on hold while it develops a drilling playbook. The Marcellus Shale runs beneath the watershed that supplies just over 1 billion gallons of water a day to New York City, the U.S.'s largest unfiltered water system.
The White House has sent mixed signals. "It's not necessarily federal regulation that will be needed," EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson told a Feb. 3 Senate hearing, noting that many communities and states already monitor parts of the process. Energy Secretary Steven Chu seems to differ. In a 2010 speech, he said fracking can be "polluting" and that rules were inevitable. "We continue to believe that state regulatory agencies have the appropriate expertise" to oversee gas production, says Dan Whitten, a spokesman for America's Natural Gas Alliance.
Even if the EPA stepped in, its authority would be limited. A clause in a 2005 energy law—dubbed the "Halliburton (HAL) loophole" for the company that helped pioneer fracking and is a supplier of fracking fluids—exempts fracking from parts of the Safe Drinking Water Act. Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.) says Dick Cheney, once head of Halliburton, pushed for the exemption when he was Vice-President. Hinchey's evidence is circumstantial: Fracking was endorsed in Cheney's 2001 energy task force report, which led to the 2005 law and, according to Waxman, did not reflect the EPA's initial concerns about water pollution. Cheney declined to comment. Halliburton referred a request for comment to its website, which doesn't discuss fracking's risks.
So far, the EPA has begun a study of fracking's effect on drinking water. In February the agency said final results will come in 2014, two years after its initial target—and the 2012 elections. Its emphasis is "politics first and regulation second," says Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington policy group. "It's impossible to miss the jobs power of fracking in the Marcellus."
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_11/b4219025777026.htmThe Pennsylvania homes of Karl Wasner and Arline LaTourette both sit atop the... more
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Good old hydrofracking. You know about it right? It's the method to produce natural gas by fracturing rock formations with millions of gallons of water and toxic chemicals. It's been contaminating groundwater in the Western US for many years and now it is being pursued with a vengeance in the East, particularity with respect to the Marcellus Shale formation that extends across Pennsylvania and New York.
Everyone in the know has warned us for years that hydrofracking was highly dangerous to sources of groundwater used for human consumption. But only now are we being told how much worse is that contamination of our water supplies. So bad it will make you ill after you read this investigative report from the NY Times:
With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself.
While the existence of the toxic wastes has been reported, thousands of internal documents obtained by The New York Times from the Environmental Protection Agency, state regulators and drillers show that the dangers to the environment and health are greater than previously understood.
The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle.
In short, if your source of drinking water is a water plant that receives treated waste water from hydrofracking operations, your health and the health of your children and your neighbors and everyone else you know is at serious risk, a risk far greater than previously acknowledged by the oil and gas industry and federal regulators.
The Industry has known of these problems for many years, as has the EPA, as the documents shown to the NY Times reporters demonstrate. Yet neither the Industry nor the EPA has acted on those reports. Instead, both have turned a blind eye to the fact that waste water from hydrofracking is hazardous to your health. Indeed, since 2006, beginning with the Bush administration, the EPA told hydrofracking operators in Pennsaylvania that they did not need to test the the waste water that was released for radioactivity.
Astonishing, but true. Your government, politicians and the Oil and Gas Industry collaborated in a conspiracy of silence regarding the safety of using hydrofracking techniques to produce natural gas. As one alarmed expert stated:
“We’re burning the furniture to heat the house,” said John H. Quigley, who left last month as secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. “In shifting away from coal and toward natural gas, we’re trying for cleaner air, but we’re producing massive amounts of toxic wastewater with salts and naturally occurring radioactive materials, and it’s not clear we have a plan for properly handling this waste.”
The risks are particularly severe in Pennsylvania, which has seen a sharp increase in drilling, with roughly 71,000 active gas wells, up from about 36,000 in 2000. The level of radioactivity in the wastewater has sometimes been hundreds or even thousands of times the maximum allowed by the federal standard for drinking water.
cont.Good old hydrofracking. You know about it right? It's the method to produce... more
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This video exposes a confidential report of an experiment done in Norway in 2000 by a consortium of oil companies including BP and the US government showing how a deep water blowout would create clouds of super toxic oil which could not be recovered. Was it a surprise that most of the oil from the BP well stayed in the Gulf of Mexico, at depth, in clouds of small particles? It may have been to us but it shouldn't have been to BP or MMS (the government agency whose job it is to regulate deep water drilling). It also should have come as no surprise to NOAA (the government agency that regulates anything in the sea around the U.S.) All of those institutions did deny the first reports of the clouds when they were found by the Pelican research vessel and the University of Missisippi's Dr. Ray Highsmith and his crew. But they must have known because MMS and the oil companies paid for, and conducted an experiment off the coast of Norway in 2000 to see what would happen in a deepwater oil well blowout. Remember all that "this is a new problem" you heard on television? Well the study showed that the oil would not all rise to the surface to be collected but would tend to form cloud layers of neutrally buoyant particles that might be the most toxic part of the oil.
Here's a direct quote from the report:
"This is important information, because the water-soluble compounds are generally the most toxic ones when exposed to marine biota. The results from these measurements show that the rising of the oil through the water column represents a kind of a "stripping" process of some of the most toxic compounds in the oil. The end result is therefore that a portion of the most toxic compounds is left in the water column."
to see the final report go to
http://afterthepress.com/?p=315
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But hey, the media and government told us everything is all gone, and a "study" just coming out (how timely) states that bacteria ate every little bit of the methane in three months! Gee did it chase it through the atmosphere too? Wow! What a miracle! G U L L I B I L I T Y is killing this planet. But hey, let's not seek truth or rock the boat or try to connect the dots. Afterall, it was only a little over a few million gallons of toxic oil and pounds of toxic soup mixed in.This video exposes a confidential report of an experiment done in Norway in 2000 by a... more
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Warning To Gulf Volunteers: Almost Every Cleanup Worker From The 1989 Exxon Valdez Disaster Is Now Dead
Michael Snyder
Jun. 30, 2010
BusinessInsider.Com
Are you sure that you want to help clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? In a previous article we documented a number of the health dangers from this oil spill that many scientists are warning us of, and now it has been reported on CNN that the vast majority of those who worked to clean up the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska are now dead. Yes, you read that correctly. Almost all of them are dead.
VIDEO WARNING! To Gulf Volunteers…Almost Every Cleanup Worker From The 1989 Exxon Valdez Spill Is Dead!!!....http://ctpatriot1970.wordpress.com/2010/07/05/video-warning-to-gulf-volunteers-almost-every-cleanup-worker-from-the-1989-exxon-valdez-spill-is-dead/Warning To Gulf Volunteers: Almost Every Cleanup Worker From The 1989 Exxon Valdez... more
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Environmental engineer Joe Taylor has a dire warning for BP: they have to stop using their chemical dispersant, Corexit, immediately. Or else, according to a report from WKRG in Mobile, everything is going to die!
He says the sulfur and sulfuric acid based dispersant makes the oil spewing into the gulf sink, where its impossible to clean up--and where it depletes oxygen levels under the water, killing plankton and everything above plankton in the food chain. "Corexit is toxic, petroleum is toxic, and its depleting the oxygen levels," he says.
What's worse says Taylor, is that if he knows this information, so does BP. "They have a lot of chemists who are a lot smarter than I am, and they know this," he says.
Taylor told WKRG that BP is using Corexit "the wrong way," recommending they use an alternative, BioSolve, that is "bio-friendly" and usable on the beaches as well as in the Gulf.
The problems keep mounting for the Gulf, environmentally speaking. As USA Today reported today, BP's next problem is how to dispose of "millions of gallons of potentially toxic oil sludge." BP's plan, which has been endorsed by the Coast Guard and the EPD is to recycle as much of the sludge as possible, but experts say the toxic goop could actually "ruin refineries."Environmental engineer Joe Taylor has a dire warning for BP: they have to stop using... more
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Truth be told, dispersants are far from a panacea. They are first and foremost a public relation tool to manipulate public opinion into believing the oil spill is disappearing, digested by microbes. The dispersants keep the oil underwater and together have created a deadlier mix than oil and water. Out of sight, out of mind, and the American public, with an increasingly short attention span buys into it. In reality an oil spill treated with chemical dispersants poses an even greater ecological threat than the oil spill left alone.
Corexit is an extremely toxic chemical dispersant. It was favored by BP over other alternative dispersants more ecologically friendly and with a better track record, mostly for cost reasons. It is estimated that more than 870,000 gallons (3.2 million litres) of Corexit has been used so far, either sprayed on the surface or released underwater-150,000 gallons (570,000 litres).
Dispersants rely on wave movements shearing the oil film mechanically in order to refine crude oil into separate chemicals. This may have worked to some extent on the Exxon Valdez spill of Alaska where waves are big but in the Gulf of Mexico? Ever heard of a surfing competition in the gulf? The waves are just not there for the dispersant to work.
Seven cleanup workers were hospitalized last week after complaints of headache, dizziness, breathing problems and nausea. The workers are said to have told the doctors, according to the medical centre sources, that the chemical dispersant used to break up oil had made them sick. Doctors believe the likely cause to be chemical irritation as well as dehydration from working in the heat. Manufactured by Nalco Energy Services L.P., the Material Safety Data Sheets state that Corexit 9500 cause irritation when in contact with skin, chemical pneumonia if ingested and irritation to the respiratory tract with repeated and prolonged inhalation. MSD of Corexit EC 9527A states:
Symptoms of Exposure
- Acute : Excessive exposure may cause central nervous system effects, nausea, vomiting, aesthetic or narcotic effects.
- Chronic : Repeated or excessive exposure to butoxyethanol may cause injury to red blood cells (hemolysis), kidney or the liver.
No toxicity studies have been conducted for either product, so the extent of damage is still not known. However, according to a study by Exxon, Corexit 9527 and Corexit 9580 have low to "moderate toxicity to most aquatic organisms in laboratory tests." Corexit 9527 is also known to damage the red blood cells, leaving fishes to bleed to death.
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Know this: Most of the hydrocarbon chemicals extracted by the dispersants stay at the surface. They are the first ones to evaporate alongside water into clouds overhead that later fly over the continent and provide rain to the southern states. We are talking about chemicals causing cancer or kidney failure such as benzene and pretty much any possible chemical that can be extracted from crude oil. These chemicals would end up in water supplies, rain on crops, and eventually imbibed by humans and animals alike.
The 2010 Atlantic hurricane season began on June 1 and The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts 8-14 hurricanes ,14-23 storms, and 3-7 major hurricanes-the figures higher than normal years.
During the next few hurricanes, extreme shearing at the surface of the sea will boost the chemical action of dispersants which separate petroleum chemicals and suddenly increase the concentration of noxious chemicals evaporating from the spill. These hurricanes will carry this noxious cocktail across the southern US and north of Mexico, polluting the water supply and all that depend on it.
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How to recognize the signs that the spill aftermath rained inland:
if after a downpour you notice that the road is slicker than usual, this is a sign the rain water may be contaminated
if after a downpour any foliage appears waxy, and any white surface stained.
crops and plants which whither unexpectedly after a downpour. The oily substance coating the leaves block respiration and photosynthesis. A lot of herbicides are petroleum-based (but so are fertilizers). cont.Truth be told, dispersants are far from a panacea. They are first and foremost a... more
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The controversial oil and gas drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has come under congressional scrutiny lately after concerns that the mysterious fluids used in the process may contaminate drinking water and harm the environment. While Congress and the EPA in states like Texas--where high rates of leukemia in certain areas have led some to suggest a link to drilling-- are launching investigations into fracking, no such study has been required in Colorado, where local news station KDVR recently caught some shocking footage.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/23/colorado-drilling-operati_n_473190.htmlThe controversial oil and gas drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or... more
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In its rush to recreate the industrial revolution that made the West rich, China has absorbed most of the major industries that once made the West dirty.
This is the ninth in a series of articles and multimedia examining the human toll, global impact and political challenge of China's epic pollution crisis.
Link to complete coverage:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2007/12/21/world/asia/choking_on_growth_9.html
"A study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that if all the goods that the United States imported between 1997 and 2004 had been produced domestically, America's carbon emissions would have been 30 percent higher."In its rush to recreate the industrial revolution that made the West rich, China has... more
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