If I make an Environment category is it really going to end up being Dystopian Environment?

I might be inclined to put some of the stories around movement away from fossil fuels etc. there.

Alright, let's give it a shot.

If I'm reading this right, the spills aren't the direct result of fracking but from failures in the storage and movement of the already extracted materials. It would be interesting to compare these figures to more conventional means of fossil fuel extraction, but it seems to drive home the biggest problem with fracking- lack of effective oversight and accountability.

I was thinking the same thing.

"Fifty percent of spills, including those spills whose cause was unknown, occurred at tanks or pits, and flowlines. In tanks and pits, the cause of those spills can vary widely, from equipment failure that manifests in a tank overflow due to corrosion, to human error, to lightning strikes. Many of the flowline leaks were due to corrosion or being punctured by equipment. Spill prevention in these instances might include marking flowlines clearly, replacing or inspecting flowlines more frequently, or using more corrosion resistant materials.

For example, where data reveals that spills occur during the transport and transfer of materials, caused by human error, industry could target loading and unloading training for drivers. Or, if industry finds that a lot of valves are freezing in a particular location, and then failing when temperatures rise, they could replace those valves with freeze-resistant valves. Meanwhile, regulators could calibrate inspection efforts to wells in the first three years of life, or wells that have already experienced a spill and to pieces of equipment most at risk for failing."

None of that had to do with fracking in an of itself, but rather just the issues with oil in general.

There are issues with fracking, to be sure. Central to the process is the injection of various liquid compounds into the ground to effectively build up the pressure to fracture the rock layers (the 'hydraulic' in hydraulic fracturing). We have no idea what's in these compounds because they're 'proprietary formulas'- so there's virtually no oversight into what exactly is being pumped into water tables. Big question here is whether this lack of oversight extends to the safe handling and storage of extracted fuels.

We know exactly what is in these 'proprietary compounds" because they are required by law to disclose all of the ingredients in their fracking fluid. Its nearly entirely water, with some sand.


http://fracfocus.org/

Well, not quite exactly. Fracfocus is an industry-based website that offers voluntary disclosure of fracking fluid ingredients. Disclosure rules vary from state to state, but companies are still allowed to keep certain chemical content secret as proprietary information.

I over-generalized, sorry.

Disclosure rules do vary from state to state, and there is the ability to not disclose 'trade secrets', but the disclosure on FracFocus is not entirely voluntary. Many states mandate it, as so some federal regulations.

The vast majority of the time, if they don't say the exact chemical name, they provided information on the standardized chemical family the chemical belongs to. The EPA has a recent report on all this. Alabama had no 'trade secrets' withheld.

I have yet to see any data that indicates I should be hand-wringing over fracking fluid (no one has found contamination of ground water due to fracking), but there's plenty of data on how poor regulation of transport/storage/maintenance causes issues.

Thank you for this. I will be tracking down copies of the actual papers this discusses. I'm happy to update my opinion afterwards.

It could be petroleum products already in the ground, not the fracking liquid itself, that is being forced into the water table. Not that it's any better...