The Fracking Problem: Carcinogenic water, sinking valley of Central California, underground bases in Hawthorne?...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42627764/ns/us_news-environment/

WASHINGTON — Millions of gallons of potentially hazardous chemicals and known carcinogens were injected into wells by leading oil and gas service companies from 2005 to 2009, a report by three House Democrats said Saturday.

The report said 29 of the chemicals injected were known or suspected human carcinogens. They either were regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act as risks to human health or listed as hazardous air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

Methanol was the most widely used chemical. The substance is a hazardous air pollutant and is on the candidate list for potential regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

The report was issued by Reps. Henry Waxman of California, Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Diana DeGette of Colorado.

The chemicals are injected during hydraulic fracturing, a process used in combination with horizontal drilling to allow access to natural gas reserves previously considered uneconomical.

The growing use of hydraulic fracturing has allowed natural gas production in the United States to reach levels not achieved since the early 1970s.

However, the process requires large quantities of water and fluids, injected underground at high volumes and pressure. The composition of these fluids ranges from a simple mixture of water and sand to more complex mixtures with chemical additives.

The report said that from 2005 to 2009, the following states had at least 100,000 gallons of hydraulic fracturing fluids containing a carcinogen injected underground: Texas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Wyoming, North Dakota, New Mexico, Montana and Utah.

States with 100,000 gallons or more of fluids containing a regulated chemical under the Safe Drinking Water Act were: Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma, Mississippi and North Dakota.

The report said many chemical components were listed as "proprietary" or "trade secret."

"Hydraulic fracturing has opened access to vast domestic reserves of natural gas that could provide an important stepping stone to a clean energy future," the report said.

"Yet, questions about the safety of hydraulic fracturing persist, which are compounded by the secrecy surrounding the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing fluids. This analysis is the most comprehensive national assessment to date of the types and volumes of chemical used in the hydraulic fracturing process."

Max Igan - Radio Skidrow - Fracking - 05/03/11 - 1/2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjiXrzBpGOQ&feature=youtube_gdata


Note : first few minutes are dedicated to Bin Laden
Fracking starts at 5:00

Love Always
mudra

South Rising and Sinkholes May Be Related

In what may become one of the most important papers ever written, Michael Wyesession of Washington University in St. Louis and his graduate student Jessie Lawrence, now at UC, discovered a massive ocean deep under the earth.

Here is a summary of the findings: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/12/scientists-scan.html

Pay particular attention to the figures at the top of the link. It shows that not only is there this vast deep reservoir under China but also there is one under the Untied States.

Some may be familiar with my theory of core heating caused by the death stars. But whatever the cause of this heat wave coming up from the center of the earth, it would be hitting these reservoirs and causing the water to heat and surge up through the earth.

Also note that under Australia there is water. There is a lesser amoount there but it is closer to the surface and note that these figures were compiled three years ago so the situation may have changed since that time.

I found that the methods used to create geothermal wells called fracking result in massive numbers of small quakes and sometimes even larger quakes. In fact, fracking has been forbidden near Berne because it has caused quakes resulting in millions of dollars of damage to the city and was ordered stopped. Likewise the fracking at The Geysers in California was causing similar quakes and stopped.

Then over the last few weeks I began to see these quakes in California near hot springs that are acting just like human fracking quakes only there is no human fracking going on there. These are the Redondo quake near the Redondo mud volcano, Borrego, Big Bear, The Geysers, and one in Nevada east of Mammoth Hot Springs. I think that these quakes may be due to an increase in geothermal activity from the heat pulse coming up from the core.

Now we are seeing the giant sinkholes in China and also in the US, giant sinkholes are opening from California to Texas. I can't help but think that these may be the result of this water being heated and coming up through the earth and fracking the area underneath the sinkholes. Sinkholes are also observed during human fracking of geothermal wells.

Human fracking can be one of three ways. One is simply to pump water in at high pressere, the second is shocking or hammering the underground formation using pressure shocks delivered through the injected water, and the third is using chemicals to eat away the rock. The goal is to create a path of fractured rock through which water can be circulated and heated by the geothermal region under the earth and then broght back up to the surface for use in heating.

What we appear to be seeing is heated water from these deep newly discovered reserviors coming up toward the surface. This would be occuring because of the heat pusle traveling out from the core and is creating pressure fracking in areas under the ground and these seem to be occuring in California at existing known hot springs.

As far as the South Rising, the water in that area seemes to be closer to the surface and so it may be comming up in a broad front rather than through fissures as in the deep reservoirs.

I would expect to see some geyser activity. We saw a new geyser at Kamchatka last year and this may be from the heating of the China reservoir.

http://www.alien-earth.org/forum/aitem.php?message=68258&show=0610&page=1

___________

Of Fracking, Earthquakes, and Carbon Sequestration

Hydraulic fracturing — the process of drilling and then pumping fluid deep into a formation to generate fractures or cracks, typically for extracting natural gas from shale formations — has been under fire lately, owing to concerns that it contaminates drinking water. But while Congress debates proposed legislation that would impose new restrictions on the technology, an entirely different concern related to fracturing — or "fracking" — is emerging: It may trigger earthquakes.

The claim is not new, but attention to it has been renewed following a June 2 earthquake recorded at Cleburne, Texas — the first in the town’s 140-year history — and four subsequent smaller quakes, none with a magnitude greater than 2.8. Speculators assert that what’s causing the temblors is fracking, which began in earnest in 2001 in the Barnett Shale, a geologic formation said to be the nation’s richest gas field. A geologist has yet to confirm the claim.

At the same time, fracking-related quake concerns are mounting in northern California, around The Geysers region, where start-up company AltaRock Energy is looking to tap geothermal energy in a demonstration of Engineered Geothermal Systems technology. The technology essentially pumps water into the earth, creating fractures in the hot dry rock (Figure 3). The water then flows into the fissures, creating a reservoir of very hot geothermal fluid that is continuously heated, and when it is returned to the surface, the pressure decrease produces steam, which is used to turn a turbine. That project has secured more than $36 million from the DOE and has the backing of several large venture capital firms.

3. Cracks that run deep. Hydraulic fracturing—a process that involves drilling and then pumping fluid deep into a formation to generate fractures or cracks—has been thought to cause earthquakes, most recently in Cleburne, Texas, where fracturing, or “fracking,” is used to extract natural gas from shale. But Alta Rock’s geothermal demonstration plant, which uses Engineered Geothermal Systems technology (shown here) has also come under scrutiny because the project proposes fracturing hard rock more than 2 miles deep in an area overlying two fault lines. Courtesy: Department of Energy


But it has caught bad press from The New York Times, which points out that the project proposes fracturing hard rock more than 2 miles deep in an area overlying two fault lines. The newspaper draws similarities between the Alta Rock demonstration and a Swiss geothermal prospecting project in Basel, which is believed to have triggered a massive earthquake on Dec. 8, 2006, after prospectors drilled 3 miles into a significant fault.

Alta Rock has disputed the comparison, saying that Basel sits on top of a large (200-km long) "locked" fault that previously ruptured and heavily damaged the city in the 14th century. "We carefully chose our site to avoid Basel’s problems," the company said in a statement. "There has been geothermal energy production at the Geysers since 1965. AltaRock’s project is located in a seismically active area adjacent to smaller faults (the closest faults are 3 and 11 km long) which are not ‘locked’ due the constant stress relief resulting from small seismic movements."

Can Fracking Cause Earthquakes?
There is no consensus among geologists on whether drilling causes earthquakes. But, according to Dr. David Oppenheimer, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the fracking process could certainly generate seismic activity "because that is how the fractures are made," he told POWER in July. Concerning the Alta Rock project, he said, "After the fractures have been established at the Geysers and an enhanced geothermal system has been implemented where cold water introduced in the injector flows through the fractures to the second well to return to the surface, it is possible that seismicity could be induced due to thermal contraction of the reservoir rock."

There are also certain conditions that could trigger a large earthquake, and foremost among them is "sufficient, pre-existing tectonic stress," conditions that exist at The Geysers because the geothermal field is located near the Pacific-North American plate boundary, he said. "However, even in areas like Colorado, far from a plate boundary, a magnitude 5.3 quake was induced by pumping of waste fluids into a deep disposal well at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal." With regard to fracking and earthquakes associated with natural gas extraction, Oppenheimer said that the pressures introduced by the process would have to exceed a "minimum compressive tectonic stress" to encourage an earthquake. "If the hydrofracture pressures are lower, then no fractures should occur," he said.

Implications for Carbon Sequestration
The fracking-quake debate raises questions about whether geological carbon sequestration — storing carbon dioxide by injecting it deep within geologic formations — could prompt quakes. Dr. Christian Klose, a geophysical hazards research scientist from Columbia University, says it could — as much as any geological fluid injection can. He told POWER in July that three processes could trigger seismic activity, large and small: pore fluid pressure changes; fluid mass (volume) changes, which can cause stress on the rock; and migration of the CO2 through the rock over decades to centuries. "CO2 is buoyant since its density is [lower] than saline water deep in the crust," he said. "Thus it will come upward through cracks and fractures and faults — even in so-called cap rocks are rock discontinuities that cause leakages."

Klose said that the quake risk is intensified by hydrofracturing, a process that is recommended by the DOE’s Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership to provide a better injection rate into rocks that have moderate porosity and low effective permeability. The recommendation comes as one of several "lessons learned" from a sequestration field test at FirstEnergy’s R.E. Burger Plant near Shadyside, Ohio, in the Appalachian Basin.

But, according to Traci Rodosta, a geological sequestration project manager for the National Energy Technology Laboratory, quake risk is well-assessed during research and development of any given project. "Potential sequestration reservoirs are thoroughly characterized prior injection," she told POWER. "In order to eliminate and reduce the potential for fault activation and slippage along preexisting fractures that could be caused when injecting fluids at high pressures, regulatory agencies limit injection rates and pressure to avoid unintentional hydrofracturing. CO2 storage projects would operate under similar guidelines, and the risk managed through site characterization, injection design, and monitoring."


http://www.powermag.com/environmental/Of-Fracking-Earthquakes-and-Carbon-Sequestration_2079.html

Geothermal energy vs. hydraulic fracturing (stuff on the geysers in here):

http://able2know.org/topic/169199-1

Some questions:

1. Are we depleting the water source at the Geysers by only returning 25% of what we remove? The severe drought in California is probably also contributing to the depletion.

2. Could this geothermal process and/or the depletion of water be causing the continuous minor earthquakes in the area?

3. Are these man-made quakes vs. natural quakes?


At The Geysers the magma is believed to exist at least four miles below the earth's surface. The heat from the magma radiates to the layers of rock above heating water in the pores and fractures of the hot rock. A small portion of the heated water may rise to the surface causing hot springs, geysers, and fumaroles. At The Geysers, the reservoir water boils to steam and is trapped by an overlying layer of tight, unfractured rock, called cap rock.

Wells, some more than two miles deep, drill through the cap rock and tap the natural steam, which is piped to our 15 operating power plants at The Geysers complex. In the process steam is cleansed of tiny particles of rock that could damage turbine blades. Steam is then put to work spinning turbine generators in the power plants to create electricity.

Turbines are designed to operate with steam at 350 degrees Fahrenheit and 100 ponds of pressure per square inch. About two million pounds of steam per hour are necessary to operate a 110- megawatt-generating unit. After passing through the turbine, spent steam goes through a condenser where it is cooled and turns back into water. With existing technology, Calpine recycles approximately 25 percent of the water back into the steam reservoir with the remainder lost to evaporation.


URL: http://able2know.org/topic/169199-1

• 
  USGS
  Fact Sheet-165-00 - PDF
• 
  Late
  Neogene Paleogeography and Paleobathymetry of the San Joaquin Basin
  - PDF
• 
  USGS
  - Largest human alteration of the Earth’s surface - PDF
• 
  Delta
  Subsidence in California - The sinking heart of the State - PDF
• 
  Subsidence:
  That Sinking Feeling - PDF
• 
  NASA
  - Rapid subsidence over oil fields measured by SAR interferometry
  International
  Association of Hydrological Sciences Proceedings 1976 - PDF
  
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Love Always

mudra

Thank you, mudra. Once again you have given more than a college try. This is great information. Scary and strange, but still great, too!

It's Official: Human Activity Can Cause Earthquakes
AUGUST 24, 2011

http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2011/08/its-official-human-activity-can-cause.html

Human Activity Is Officially Acknowledged to Cause Earthquakes
The United States Geological Survey is America's official expert on earthquakes. It's the Federal agency charged with monitoring, reporting on, researching and stressing preparedness for earthquakes.

So I was surprised to read the following statement by the USGS:

Earthquakes induced by human activity have been documented in a few locations in the United States, Japan, and Canada. The cause was injection of fluids into deep wells for waste disposal and secondary recovery of oil, and the use of reservoirs for water supplies. Most of these earthquakes were minor. The largest and most widely known resulted from fluid injection at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, Colorado. In 1967, an earthquake of magnitude 5.5 followed a series of smaller earthquakes. Injection had been discontinued at the site in the previous year once the link between the fluid injection and the earlier series of earthquakes was established. (Nicholson, Craig and Wesson, R.L., 1990, Earthquake Hazard Associated with Deep Well Injection--A Report to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 1951, 74 p.)
Injection Wells Can Induce Earthquakes
The New York Times noted in February:

Researchers with the Arkansas Geological Survey say that while there is no discernible link between earthquakes and gas production, there is “strong temporal and spatial” evidence for a relationship between these quakes and the injection wells.

For decades, scientists have been researching induced seismicity, or how human activity can cause earthquakes. Such a link gained attention in the early 1960s, when hundreds of quakes were recorded in Colorado a few years after the Army began injecting fluid into a disposal well near the Rocky Mountain Arsenal.

Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory points out:

Induced seismicity [i.e. earthquakes] in oil and gas production has been observed ever since the 1930s, i.e., ever since large scale extraction of fluids occurred. The most famous early instance was in Wilmington, California, where the oil production triggered a series of damaging earthquakes. In this instance the cause of the seismicity was traced to subsidence due to rapid extraction of oil without replacement of fluids.

***

In the last decade a number of examples on earthquake activity related to oil and gas production as well as injection of liquids under high pressure have been observed, although not with as serious consequences as for Wilmington. Almost all induced seismicity associated with petroleum extraction can be traced to either fluid injection or extraction. In some recent cases injection of produced water (excess water extracted during oil and gas extraction) has produce significant seismic activity. Examples are in Colorado and Texas where gas and oil production yield large volumes of water that must be put back underground. In some cases the water cannot be put back exactly where it was produced and over pressurization of the water causes induced seismicity.

Lawrence Berkeley Lab provides details:
Fluid pressures play a key role in causing seismicity. Explained in simple terms, fluids can play a major role in controlling the pressures that are acting on the faults. The fluid pressure in the pores and fractures of the rocks is called the pore pressure.

***

Injecting fluids into the subsurface is one way of increasing the pore pressure and thus allowing the faults and fractures to “fail” more easily, thus inducing an earthquake.

***
That is why in many cases induced seismicity is caused by injecting fluid into the subsurface or by extracting fluids at a rate that causes subsidence and/or slippage along planes of weakness in the earth. Figure 2 is an example of induced seismicity being caused by water injection. Figure 2 is a cross section of the earth showing the location of the earthquakes (green dots), the locations of injection wells (thick blue lines) and production wells (thin lines, these wells extract fluid). Note the large number of events associated with the injection wells.

more at the link

Love Always
mudra

Hydraulic Fracking 1/4 Contaminants

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpnEaRHFPB8


Love Always
mudra