Nyamuragira in the Congo is erupting. As it’s one of the most active volcanoes in Africa, this isn’t exactly a surprise to anyone. Nyamuragira is a shield volcano, so it tends to have runny rather than explodey eruptions.
Scientific, I know.
Io9 did a post yesterday about peridotite and its ability to soak up carbon dioxide, and mentioned in the first paragraph that no one’s talking about it. And another article that says we’re not excited about it.
I imagine a lot of people haven’t even heard of peridotite, or don’t know what ultramafic rocks are, which is fair enough. Most people aren’t geologists, and have a hard time getting excited about rocks. I actually hadn’t heard of looking at ultramafic rocks for carbon sequestration until I took introduction to Geochemistry last year. After that, yes, I thought it was a pretty exciting concept.
Now, the reason we were talking about this in geochemistry is that the carbon sequestration comes down to a very basic chemical reaction that occurs every day – the chemical weathering of rocks. Most rocks in our lives are some form of silicate; their chemical formula is SiO2 plus some other junk, and the crystalline structure is usually the silica tetrahedra arranged in different ways around the other junk. Most chemical weathering of these silicates comes from CO2 dissolving in rain water to make carbonic acid, H2CO3. Rain is actually naturally a little acidic, since it’s made up of water plus a little carbonic acid. It falls, runs over rocks, and then you end up with something like this:
Mg2SiO4 + 4CO2 + 4H2O ⇌ 2Mg2+ + 4HCO3– + H4SiO4
Where the water and carbon dioxide are what make up the carbonic acid. In this particular equation, the rock in question is olivine, the main constituent of peridotite. So basically, it’s:
Olivine + water + carbon dioxide ⇌ magnesium ions + bicarbonate + silicic acid
So chemically, you can use this kind of reaction to get CO2 out of the air. And peridotite is certainly a good candidate for this kind of reaction. Olivine has a mineral structure that’s basically individual silica tetrahedra jumbled together; it’s not really stable at surface conditions, and it’s easy for the tetrahedra to get picked off by whatever happens to come by. That’s why olivine weathers away much faster than something like quartz, which has a very organized framework and doesn’t allow a lot of room for party crashers. Once you’ve got the olivine broken down via this process, then you can separate out the ions and acid. The magnesium, you could make in to salts, or perhaps there’s a good industrial use for it. The bicarbonate just needs some calcium, and then you end up with limestone, which is the end result we want for getting the carbon chemically locked away. The silicic acid could be precipitated in to amorphous silicate if nothing else.
Honestly, I can’t say why people aren’t excited about this possible solution to getting carbon out of the air. It’s got its problems that need to be figured out for sure, though not necessarily more than any other proposed sequestration method. Off the top of my head:
And I’m sure there are more questions than that. But I also don’t think these are more difficult questions than the ones that come with any proposed carbon sequestration scheme. It even has its advantages; once your carbon is chemically locked in to limestone and you toss that limestone down an old mine, you don’t really have to worry about it again. The dissolution of limestone does release the carbon, but you’re not going to have to worry about that until millions of years in the future, when there’s been some uplift and the contents of the old mine are exposed to weathering. I’d say that’s easier to deal with than figure out how to keep CO2 in gas form from escaping a reservoir you’ve injected it in to.
Most people I’ve explained this to have thought it was actually a very exciting idea, if one that’s so far just on paper. The big thing is that very few people have even heard about it, as is pointed out in the articles I’ve linked to. Maybe it’s because it’s difficult to get most media excited about talking rocks, unless we’re talking molten rocks that are poised to destroy a town, and then they’re all over it. Of course, one might argue that it’s more important to pump money in to research on finding energy sources that aren’t going to produce so much carbon dioxide. Fair enough, but until we get there it really wouldn’t hurt to figure out how to stuff at least some of that excess CO2 back under the global couch cushions, so to speak. Or I suppose there are some that might say that none of this is a matter of concern, but I think I’ve already established that I wouldn’t want to sit next to them on the bus anyway.
Well, it’s Wednesday, which is the one day a week I said I’d get a post on the blog, hell or high water, rain or shine. Except today I have a cold and feel just ghastly. So have a couple extremely lame links, since they’re quick and mean I can go meld with the couch again.
Odds of being a terrorism victim on a flight – a beautiful and also very hilarious infographic via Boing Boing. And while we’re talking terrorism on flights, I would also like to point toward Bruce Schneier’s op-ed on CNN about the topic. Which is more serious and less hilarious, but still interesting.
Doctor Who bingo cards for part two of “The End of Time” – Part one didn’t really knock my socks off, but I’m still excited about part two because there appear to be Time Lords, funny hat/shoulder/whatever things included. And Timothy Dalton.
A quick hit about ocean acidification from National Geographic – because this post needed a buzzkill.
Have a lovely Wednesday. I’ll go snot elsewhere now.
We slept late on Christmas; I think it’s been years since I woke up early on Christmas morning. I’m one of those people who, given the chance, goes to bed around two in the morning and wakes up between nine and ten. Mike and I sat around a bit to wake up, then drove over to my parents’ house for the actual Christmas festivities. It was wonderfully snowy and a little icy; a beautiful, classic sort of Christmas morning where it’s just cold enough to keep the snow fluffy but not so cold that you have to bundle up too much.
My brother and his girlfriend were already there, having spent the night. My mom was already bustling around the kitchen, a cup of coffee (fortified with Bailey’s) at hand. A random selection of Christmas music played over the speakers in the living room.
We were on something of a schedule, since April (my brother’s girlfriend) had to be to work in the evening and we wanted to have dinner and dessert done by then. So we tried to get down to the business of opening the little pile of presents under the tree early, but were confounded first by my brother vanishing, then by my dad, then by Mike receiving a phone call from his parents. We settled down eventually, taking out time opening gifts and examining each item with a smile. I can’t think of many pleasures greater than watching someone open a gift you’ve given them and smiling at it. We kept the gift giving fairly low-key this year; none of us are feeling that wealthy, after all, and at least Mike and I have a wedding to save up for. But there were still plenty of smiles to go around. The coolest of the gifts was definitely the one that April gave to my mother; a cork board she’d made from wine bottle corks.
Presents opened, we sat and talked, eating fudge and drinking coffee. Our family friends Diane and Glen arrived, and suddenly my mother realized that we’d gotten distracted, that we were behind schedule to get dinner ready. She ran off to the kitchen, with my dad and I following to help her get the food ready. My dad had somehow converted the grill on the back porch in to a second oven, where he roasted some root vegetables. I peeled hard-boiled eggs to top off the salad, while Mike prepared the asparagus to be baked, then opened up some bottles of wine. In the end, it all came together beautifully and we had a warm, wonderful meal that barely fit on the table. We ate and drank, laughed and talked, surrounded by good company and the warmth of good spirits. With dinner done, I was lazy and let other people help with the clean up while I finished up my glass of wine. We moved in to the living room and relaxed, talking about whatever came to mind, about going to Hawaii on vacation one day, about politics, about the wedding, since we can’t seem to go five minutes without it coming up.
Around seven in the evening, Mike and I headed home, laden with leftovers and cookies and lots of hugs. And that was our Christmas.
I’m sure this all sounds very ordinary, and perhaps a little boring. I think that it is (ordinary, at least, not boring); what I did for my Christmas was probably not all that different from what most other families who celebrate this holiday do, year after year. Perhaps the one difference you can find, aside from quirky little family traditions, is that we didn’t go to church, and we didn’t say grace before the meal. My family is a bunch of atheists and agnostics, after all, and we celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday.
I find this all worth mentioning because of things like this, where the Governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, said:
People who reject the idea of a God -who think that we’re just accidental protoplasm- have always been with us. What bothers me is the implications -which not all such folks have thought through- because really, if we are just accidental, if this life is all there is, if there is no eternal standard of right and wrong, then all that matters is power.
It’s been a week and a half since I read that, and it’s still upsetting me.
Actually, having “thought it through,” I think all that matters are the things that define Christmas with my family; smiles, laughter, being surrounded by the people I love most, and the hope that many other people share this happiness as well.
Hey, it’s a post that’s not about hydraulic fracturing! SAY IT AIN’T SO!
I saw Avatar on Christmas Eve with my handsome and talented fiance. I was actually supposed to see the movie on the Monday before that, but I was having stomach problems that day and elected to stay home so I could lay on the couch and feel sorry for myself. Mike (the handsome and talented fiance) saw the movie without me with our friends. With his assurances that it was excellent – and excellent enough to make him want to see it at least twice in theaters – we braved the ice and snow to catch the noon showing.
I just saw the normal version of the movie, by the way. I’ve had multiple people now tell me that 3-D is the only way to go, but honestly I thought it was just fine in boring old 2-D. And with the added benefit of me not having to wear uncomfortable fake glasses over my real glasses, which is the reason I don’t bother with 3-D. I’m sure it’s all very pretty, but I have a hard time getting in to movies when I’ve got two pairs of glasses sitting on my nose and tugging on my ears and feeling generally awkward and annoying.
The movie is beautiful. Very, very beautiful. Very, very, very beautiful. I think there was a moment or two where the CGI broke down, but they were few and far between. The technology sure has advanced, and it made for some spectacular looking aliens and a breathtaking world.
The story itself is fairly unremarkable. It’s not a bad story, though I feel like the story was more there to prop up the HOLY CRAP LOOK AT ALL THIS COOL STUFF than anything else. The movie is very, very worth seeing, and you should go do that. In fact, go watch it now, because I’m going to do a little bit of complaining and discussing issues people have brought up about the film that is going to involve some spoiler-like stuff. But let’s be clear… the complaining I’m about to do in no way means I didn’t like the movie. I loved it. I want to see it at least once more in theaters, maybe twice more if I’m lucky and have the time. I’m going to buy the DVD. I’m going to obsessively watch all the special features. I just also have no problem admitting that it’s not the most perfect piece of pretty film ever created.
SPOILERS BELOW
Race
A lot of people have likened the movie to Dances With Wolves. I tend to agree. In fact, rather than go into detail about how and why I agree, I’m going to send you to this post from Io9, because I think it sums everything up nicely: When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar? I’ll just say that I would like, just once, to see a big box office movie like this where the brown people (or the blue ones, as the case may be) get to save the day without the white hero saving them.
In Avatar, what basically summed up the whole issue for me is the scene where Jake comes flying up to the Tree of Souls on the scary giant read bird-thing. He goes up to the guy that’s the best warrior of the tribe, the one that’s supposed to take over as chief now that Neytiri’s father has gotten turned in to a battered blue kabob. And he says, almost literally, “I can’t do this without you… Translate for me.” Now, I’ve had various people argue that I’m taking it the wrong way, that the pause between the two sentences significantly changes the meaning, and such. But frankly, it still came across to me that Jake was in one breath saying he needed Tsu’tey to follow him, and in the next asking the man to be his mouthpiece. It really rubbed me the wrong way. Imagine how different it would have been if Jake had walked up and Tsu’tey had said something like, “I’m going to lead everyone in to battle. Will you help me?” At which point Jake could have coughed up all sorts of useful information and been very involved in the defense, but still wouldn’t quite have been the white dude leading everyone to victory. Because considering the technological gap, I think it’s fair to argue that the Na’vi would have had a heck of a time scraping together the victory they did without some outside help.
As an aside on the race issue, my mother’s apparently heard complaints that Avatar is in some way anti-American. It all sounds very defensive, and I have a feeling this connects to the race/white guilt issue, since it really is a movie about how it’s shitty to abuse the native people and take their land just because they’ve got something you want. To me, this falls in the same category as the people who get defensive when you point out that it sucked to live in Hiroshima and have an atomic bomb dropped on you. People can make arguments to justify the action all they like, but it doesn’t change the basic fact that it sucks to have an atomic bomb dropped on you, period. When there’s this sort of bitter defensiveness, I’m forced to wonder just why it’s so hard for some to realize – or at least admit – that we’ve done some things in the past (in the very recent past, in some cases) that haven’t exactly been an ice cream social for all the involved parties.
The Military
I would like to get one thing straight. Avatar is NOT an anti-military movie. I’m sure that after watching Stephen Lang gnaw on the scenery for five minutes as Colonel Quaritch, it’s easy enough to pick up that impression. That Colonel Quaritch is actually not actually in the military any longer is an extremely easy fact to miss. As a near throw-away line at the beginning of the movie, Jake Sully narrates that the forces on Pandora are actually mercenaries, soldiers hired directly by the company. I think that little understated and easily missed line is a very important one, to be honest.
If you look at James Cameron’s other big movies, I think it’s actually pretty fair to say he’s mostly been pro-military, or at the very least not anti-military in them. The Colonial Marines in Aliens were certainly heroic. In The Abyss we had one Navy SEAL go bad due to HPNS, but in the end the other SEALs come through and help the civilians save the day. True Lies gives the Marine Corps a chance to show off their jets, which is always good for a “Woohoo, America!” moment. I would even argue that the Terminator movies are not actually anti-military, but rather anti-corporate and anti-taking-soldiers-out-of-the-loop-in-favor-of-autonomous-robots.
Honestly, keeping in mind from the start that the badguys of Avatar were basically corporate mercenaries immediately made me think of the scandals we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan that have involved military contractors, which are basically mercenaries. (Blackwater and KBR, for example.) I don’t know if that’s what was on Cameron’s mind, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a factor in making the Avatar villains corporate hired guns.
The Ladies
I’ve seen a couple comments about James Cameron liking his “woman trapped by destiny” characters. I suppose it’s true… you could definitely draw some parallels between Rose from Titanic and Neytiri in Avatar. I do have to say, though, I actually really like how James Cameron does his female characters for the most part. Rose and Neytiri may be initially “trapped by destiny,” but the major theme of their stories is that they escape from those destinies on to a path of their own choosing. (The fact that it involves falling in love with a different guy… okay, you’ve got me there.) But James Cameron also brought us Ripley, Private Vasquez, Sarah Connor, Helen Tasker, Lindsey Brigman, and Trudy Chacon. I think it’s fair to say that the man likes to see the ladies kick some ass. It always thrills me to my toes to see situations in movies where the women get to defend the men – and effectively – since it doesn’t happen nearly as often as I like. Neytiri taking out the evil scenery-chewing Colonel-that-would-not-die and thus saving Jake filled me with absolute glee.
The Environmentalism
You could probably accuse the environmentalist message of being heavy-handed, but in all honesty I felt that message was subordinate to the “treating the native people like they’re sub-human and kicking them off their land because they have something you want is not cool” message. I suppose that there could possibly be people offended by the notion that strip-mining a pristine world and destroying its vegetation might be a bad thing. These are quite possibly the people who were yelling “Drill, baby, drill” at the RNC, which means I wouldn’t want to sit next to them in a movie theater anyway.
In all honesty, I think the environmentalism of Avatar is an interesting thing to think about, depending on how deeply you want to get in to it. For example, could the corporation have found a way to get the resource that it wanted without causing environmental destruction? Was the open pit mine not really necessary, but mostly used because it was cheap and fast and the corporation had no reason to care? But I also think that if you start parsing the environmental theme like that, it becomes apparent that it’s deeply tied to the movie’s other themes, such as corporate greed and racial guilt. For all that the story is rather heavy-handed at times, the very fact that you can jump off from it in to these sorts of discussions means that it may very well be a deeper film than people (even myself) really give it credit for.
After a small discussion in my previous post about hydraulic fracturing, I decided to look in to the subject a little more deeply, since the commenter focused strongly on concerns related to horizontally drilled wells. Horizontal wells weren’t really mentioned in the articles I linked to, but horizontal drilling is becoming the common method for extracting gas from tight shales and will likely be used in the development of the Marcellus Shale. As such, it’s more than fair to look at the practice and see if there are issues unique to it, or problems that occur more commonly in horizontal rather than vertical wells.
One thing I’ve noticed so far in researching is that papers that could answer that concern are few and far between. Looking at both GeoRef and GeoScience World, many reference hits are to expanded abstracts from meetings, and most of those are related to the effects of horizontal drilling on reservoir development rather than environmental impact. The EPA is also unhelpful on the topic; as the practice of hydraulic fracturing has been excluded from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the EPA isn’t in a position to look in to the safety from an environmental standpoint. The one study they have done relates to coal bed methane. In their coal bed methane study, the EPA concludes:
Although potentially hazardous chemicals may be introduced into USDWs when fracturing fluids are injected into coal seams that lie within USDWs, the risk posed to USDWs by introduction of these chemicals is reduced significantly by groundwater production and injected fluid recovery, combined with the mitigating effects of dilution and dispersion, adsorption, and potentially biodegradation. Additionally, EPA has reached an agreement with the major service companies to voluntarily eliminate diesel fuel from hydraulic fracturing fluids that are injected directly into USDWs for coalbed methane production.
However, that said, the coal bed methane situation is arguably not quite the same, since most coal beds used in that study were fairly shallow, and many in direct “communication” with adjacent formations or aquifers. As a side geological note, coal layers can often act as barriers to fluid (such as hydrocarbons) flow from lower formations to upper formations, since they’re only really permeable via fractures. Also, the conclusions have been called in to question in 2004 by an EPA employee named Weston Wilson:
While EPA’s report concludes this practice poses little or no threat to underground sources of drinking water, based on the available science and literature, EPA’s conclusions are unsupportable. EPA has conducted limited research reaching the unsupported conclusion that this industry practice needs no further study at this time. EPA decisions were supported by a Peer Review Panel; however five of the seven members of this panel appear to have conflicts-of-interest and may benefit from EPA’s decision not to conduct further investigation or impose regulatory conditions.
An apparent conflict of interest is certainly something to look in to. I found one site that said Mr. Wilson’s concerns were considered valid enough to prompt further investigation, though I have no idea if that investigation occurred or what the conclusion turned out to be. So I think for now, we’ll skip the coal bed methane study.
The commenter made two points that I looked in to, which I’ve paraphrased here:
1) That the fractures made by hydraulic fracturing can extend further than intended, and in to different zones than are desired, possibly putting the aquifer at risk.
I tend to think that subsurface, technically anything is possible; geophysics is a difficult field (certainly not one I’ve mastered) since the conditions are uncontrolled and it’s nigh impossible to know what the underground stress field is like precisely or what zones of weakness/minor faults may also exist. So is it possibly that a fracture created in a deep zone could “go rogue” (oh, I feel dirty just typing those words!) and go 4,000 feet up in to an aquifer? Possible, yes, but I would venture to say highly unlikely and would probably require an existing network of fractures/faults to do. The EPA coal bed methane study does actually say one thing of use about this matter, which holds true even if we’re not talking coal bed methane:
A hydraulic fracture will propagate perpendicularly to the minimum principal stress. In some shallow formations, the least principal stress is the overburden stress; thus, the hydraulic fracture will be horizontal. In deeper reservoirs, the least principal stress will likely be horizontal; thus, the hydraulic fracture will be vertical.
Basically, the generic stress you’d expect in a deep formation would cause the fractures to tend to propagate upward. However, the general stress field will change as you approach the surface, and there are going to be other stress factors that may redirect fractures along the way. Intervening formations with different properties and different zones of weakness also have an important effect. A basin is in no way homogeneous vertically – and often formations will change their properties over horizontal distance as well. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation SGEIS report is a little more specific:
ICF – citing PTTC, 2006 – concludes that: “In the Appalachian Basin, the stress state would be expected to lead to predominantly vertical fractures below about 2500 feet, with a tendency towards horizontal fractures at shallower depths.”
Depending on the depth of the aquifer, this conclusion makes the propagation of a vertical fracture in to it seem fairly unlikely.
At this point, the best that can be done is computer modeling, which has become increasingly sophisticated – though it can always be argued of course that we lack perfect knowledge of sub surface conditions. However, the fact of the matter is that it’s in the best interest of the people fracturing the formation to prevent such wild fracture propagation from happening. Going outside the intended zone tends to mean getting a lot of unintended fluid – normally salt water – which has to be separated and disposed of, not something that is cheap or convenient to do.
The New York Department of Environmental Conservation has a report that’s an overview of the historical and current practice of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing here. I think the authors of the report make a valid point by stating:
Not only is fracture growth outside of the target formation discouraged relative to the potential of reduced production by production of fluids from non-productive zones, creating fracture size outside of the productive interval is more expensive and less cost beneficial to the well’s economics.
The DEC SGEIS also quotes ICF again in noting:
• The developable shale formations are vertically separated from potential freshwater aquifers by at least 1,000 feet of sandstones and shales of
moderate to low permeability.
• The amount of time that fluids are pumped under pressure into the target formation is orders of magnitude less than the time that would be required for fluids to travel through 1,000 feet of low-permeability rock.
• The volume of fluid used to fracture a well could only fill a small percentage of the void space between the shale and the aquifer.
• Any flow of fracturing fluid toward an aquifer through open fractures or an unplugged wellbore would be reversed during flowback, with any residual fluid further flushed by flow from the aquifer to the production zone as pressures decline in the reservoir during production.
These factors point to groundwater contamination without wild fractures going a thousand or more feet farther than intended being highly unlikely as well.
At this point, the question of the threat that the fracturing practice has on the ground water becomes a cost/benefit analysis. It’s in the best economic interest of the company developing the well to model their fractures properly to ensure that they do not move out of the intended zone. But it’s also fair to argue that modeling is imperfect and that the most bizarre accidents can happen. Is that amount of risk worth the economic benefit?
2) Horizontal wells carry a greater risk of inducing harmful seismic activity which can cause an array of problems.
I’m actually already familiar with the concept of just plain old vertical wells inducing seismic activity; I doubt horizontal wells would be at all different. It’s certainly not a new concept. Most of the reading I’ve done on this subject relates to disposal wells; in particular there was a case in Colorado where a deep disposal well was lubricating nearby faults and causing them to reactivate. The seismic activity in these cases is generally pretty low level (0 to 3 on the Richter Scale) and mostly an argument for being careful where one puts one’s disposal wells – and for not overpressurizing them.
Subsidence is another matter that goes with the extraction of any fluid from a reservoir. With the reservoir losing pressure and volume with the removal of fluid, it can compact, which destroys reservoir permeability and causes subsidence. Subsidence also occurs and is a significant threat when aquifers are overused for drinking water. Basically, any time fluid is taken out of the ground and not replaced, there will be subsidence. From the US Department of Energy:
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. Once this was realized the oil extraction was balanced with water injection to mitigate the seismicity. Ever since then the oil and gas industry has adopted these practices to mitigate seismicity , but also mitigate damage to the oil wells in the producing field (wells would be sheared off in the subsurface as subsidence occurred).
The practice of reinjecting fluid isn’t exactly perfect – if nothing else there are cases where the replacement fluid can’t be returned to the right location and overpressurization can occur.
With the reading, I’ve done, I tend to agree with the DoE assessment:
Overall the impact of induced seismicity on the implementation of various different energy recovery and or disposal activities will depend on the risk associated with the activity and the cost-benefit ratio. All experience to date has shown that the risk, while not zero, has been either minimal or can be handled in a cost effective manner.
So once again, this comes to a question of cost/benefit analysis. Are the possible seismic dangers present worth the economic benefit? Are the means by which the concern about subsidence good enough at mitigating the problem? Since we live in a less than perfect world, it becomes a personal choice if the mitigation of the risk makes the development of the resource worth it. Though I think it is worth noting that in the DEC review of the pertinent geology that comes from their SGEIS, they state that in at least New York, the Marcellus and Utica shales underlie the areas of lowest seismic risk.
The DoE also makes a point of separating the induced seismicity associated with fluid injection and extraction from hydraulic fracturing:
Hydrofracturing is distinct from many types of induced seismicity because hydrofracturing is by definition only created when the forces applied create a type of fracture called a “tensile” fracture, creating a “driven” fracture… To our knowledge hydrofracturing to intentionally create permeability rarely creates unwanted induced seismicity large enough to be detected on the surface with very sensitive sensors, let alone be a hazard or annoyance.
I think the crux of this issue becomes the phrase “to our knowledge.” With what data and studies are available, it seems this is not something to be overly concerned about. However, I think a good argument can also be made in regards to needing more knowledge and more research. At this time, since the practice of hydraulic fracturing is in many ways proprietary and also exempt from government oversight, that makes the study of it in regards to environmental impacts difficult. I think that an NPR story on this topic sums it up nicely:
Critics of hydraulic fracturing suspect that the chemicals used in the process have somehow leaked into the groundwater supply. It has been difficult, however, to demonstrate a direct connection between these apparent instances of water pollution and the hydraulic fracturing procedures that have taken place nearby…It is also true, however, that state regulators have not been able to disprove a connection between hydraulic fracturing and water contamination.
At this time, it’s not something that could be directly proven or disproven. Off the top of my head, I think there are experiments that could be conducted that could tell us if:
a) Is there groundwater pollution associated with fracturing fluid?
b) Is this contamination associated with surface pollution or with the underground process?
For example, if you could add an inert “tracer” compound to fracturing fluid, you could then check if contaminated water had that tracer in it. As far as discerning between surface contamination and subsurface contamination, that might be more difficult. Though I imagine geologists who know far more about hydrology than I do may be able to determine the source just by looking at how quickly the contamination showed up. If you have contamination showing up in a reservoir two days after a nearby well has been fractured (and our mythical tracer compound shows it was from that well) then the next question is if a subsurface fracture could have possibly delivered fluid that quickly; if not, the more likely culprit is surface run off from an accident or inadequately observed safety practices.
Either way, this is all very pie in the sky. I’ll be interested to see more on this subject as more data is collected.
As a final note, the Department of Energy Induced seismicity primer is honestly a fascinating read in and of itself and I’d highly recommend it. I also recommend the New York Department of Environmental Conservation report that I linked to above as well, since it’s also a very good historical overview. The DEC also has a review of the pertinent geology that comes from their SGEIS that’s definitely worth a read. There is also a good description of the drilling process and equipment used from the SGEIS, which also includes a look at slickwater fracturing as used in the development of the Marcellus Shale.
Edit: An anonymous comment was left rather incongruously my post about Heene being sentenced. The commenter left a link for another bit of good reading on this topic, however: Impact Assessment of Natural Gas Production in the New York City Water Supply Watershed. The report covers quite a bit about the underlying fractures/faulting that was not in the other reports I read.
I hadn’t actually heard about the proposed regulation to subject hydraulic fracturing to the Safe Drinking Water Act. I suppose I’ve been too inundated with the entire horrific healthcare mess to hear much of anything else. I don’t have any problems with Congresswoman DeGette’s proposal – and I’m not just saying that because I voted for her.
Hydraulic fracturing is something that’s actually been in use for quite some time in the United States – at this point, a little bit over fifty years. Obviously, length of use doesn’t necessarily say anything about a practice’s safety; there are plenty of industrial practices that have been in use for far longer that do not-nice things to the environment and to people. I mostly point this out because by now, the practice is ubiquitous in the industry. When I started working for my company* as a temp four years ago, some of the first reports I ever read detailed how formations were being fractured.
The basic one sentence explanation in the article is fair enough, but I’d like to go in to just a little more detail about the what and why. Most fluids that we’re interested in getting out of rocks (water, oil, natural gas) are locked in sedimentary rocks**. We’re used to thinking of rocks as very solid things; the fact of it is, many of them are surprisingly un-solid. There are two very significant properties to these sedimentary rocks that determines how hard it’s going to be to extract the fluid.
The first is porosity – just how much “air space” there is in a rock. (Picture here) These spaces in the rock are basically the gaps between the grains that have been cemented together to form the rock. The higher the porosity of the rock, the more of your fluid of interest it can contain.
The second important quality is permeability – just how interconnected are the spaces in the rock? For example, a rock could potentially be quite porous, but if each of the spaces in it are completely isolated, it would be impossible for fluid to flow through the rock.
Permeability is a nice quality for a reservoir rock to have. If you want to get fluid out of that rock and it’s nice and permeable, often all you really have to do is drill down into the rock and then let the pressure differential do the work for you. The fluid in the rock will be under a lot more pressure than what’s in the well, so the liquid will just move on its own. But if a rock’s not very permeable, that fluid flow doesn’t happen easily because there just aren’t many paths for the fluid to travel. Rocks like that are referred to as “tight.”
Enter hydraulic fracturing. At its most basic, you just pump a lot of water and sand down in to a formation, under high pressure. The water finds zones of weakness in the formation and fractures them further; the sand keeps the fractures open. The end result is the creation of a lot more paths through which fluid can move through the formation and in to your well. However, there’s also the addition of a lot of chemicals to the fracturing process, many of which are included to help keep the sand from clumping up and clogging the fractures that you’ve just made.
For the most part, I don’t see a lot of problems with the basic practice of hydraulic fracturing. (Not on the table for discussion at the moment: the basic practice of using fossil fuels.) It aides in production – sometimes making it possible to produce from formations that would otherwise not produce at all – and ups the amount of fluid recovery. Most of the time, oil and gas producing formations are far deeper than the water table and properly done fracturing shouldn’t intrude anywhere near it. That said, a lot of the time you’re drilling through an aquifer to get where you need to go, or more importantly, fluid spills can occur at the surface or nasty things may find a way to escape waste pits. Even if you’ve got the most environmentally conscious and careful drilling company in the world, accidents can happen and should not be ignored. It doesn’t take too many mistakes to harm an aquifer and potentially hurt all of the people who rely on it for their water.
In my rather inexpert opinion (and from the news articles I’ve read thus far) the main problem with fracturing doesn’t seem to be the process in the ground, but rather spills and waste collection at the surface. Thus, I don’t think banning hydraulic fracturing would necessarily solve the basic problem, which at this point appears to be surface safety, and would quite possibly have an adverse effect on the natural gas market***. If there’s real, substantiated concern (which there seems to be) over contamination of ground water, then the Safe Drinking Water Act no doubt has something to say about it. Though I am also forced to wonder if adding another layer of regulation will do much good if current safe practice requirements are not being properly enforced.
Side note: There’s quite the collection of links for groundwater contamination news stories at the site NoFracking.com. I used the site as a link mine to see what contamination complaints/news was out there rather than as an informational source.
* I am an intern at an oil company. My opinions are not in any way the opinions of my company.
** Some times you’ll get water out of an igneous/metamorphic rock because it’s seeped in to fractures from the surface, or from an underlaying sedimentary reservoir. We won’t worry about that here.
*** Your mileage on this may vary, depending on how worried you are about the price of natural gas versus the possibility of finding some extremely scary chemicals in your drinking water.
Richard and Mayumi Heene got sentences this morning for wasting everyone’s time with their balloon hoax. (See here for a reminder if you’ve somehow forgotten that glorious week in October for which the highlight was video of a six-year-old boy vomiting on national TV.) The jail sentences are fairly light (Richard Heene is going to spend 30 days in jail full time only) but the couple is also being hit with mountain bills from the various local, state, and federal agencies that had their time wasted by this stupid bid for public attention. Per the article, the bill is currently sitting at $47,000, and could go up.
I think the judge for the case put it best:
“In summary,” Schapanski said in imposing Richard Heene’s sentence, “what this case is about is deception, exploitation — exploitation of the children of the Heenes, exploitation of the media and exploitation of people’s emotions — and money.”
Obviously the legal system in Colorado isn’t taking this one lightly. It’d be nice if Judge Schapanski could say similar stern things to, say, Peckman (he of the UFO commission ballot initiative) but I suppose wasting a lot of public time and money isn’t illegal if you’re just a deluded (yet arguably honest) crank.
Daniel Loxton has written an interesting post over at Skepticblog about the role of skeptics in science. There’s quite the lively discussion going on in the comments of the post, as you can imagine.
For the most part, I agree with him. I’m in an interesting position as a skeptic with just enough science education (woohoo, undergrad degree!) to make me dangerous, so to speak. I find it fascinating that the skeptic movement has come up swinging when it comes to evolution denial, whether in the form of Intelligent Design or good old Creationism, but seems to be chasing its own tail when it comes to the science surrounding climate change. Now, I think part of the problem here is that the climate science is relatively new – at least in our understanding of it – compared to evolution, or geology, or medicine. Part of it may even be the subconscious realization that the climate science is saying something very scary about the way we live and the future that may be in store for us. I’ve honestly found it rather infuriating.
This actually makes me think of the little speech that Dr. Farmer gave at the department graduation last week. He told us that part of the importance of having our degrees is that it means we don’t have to take anyone’s word for it. We have the tools necessary to think for ourselves. Now, I’m sure this sentiment could be interpreted as something that supports the climate change deniers, for example. They’re just refusing to take the scientists’ word for it. Fight the power!
I couldn’t disagree with that more.
Having critical thinking skills and an understanding of basic science doesn’t mean that within us all is the power to take raw data and interpret is perfectly, or come to a reliable expert opinion after staring at tide gauge graphs for a couple of hours. What it does mean is that we don’t have to take, say, Al Gore’s word that climate change is a real thing and is happening. Rather, because we know how science works, we know where to go looking for the papers and the research. We can find a reliable body of experts in their field, such as the IPCC, because we know what sort of methodology and review are indicative of robust research.
This leads to how I often respond to just about any scientific issue that doesn’t involve geology (and many that do, since I’m certainly no expert); well, I don’t know enough to have my own opinion, but these other guys (e.g. the IPCC) have some good credentials and evidence, so I’ve got to go with them. The real pitfall here is that it’s very easy to get caught in the same trap as Randi did with the “Petition Project.” Some denialists are quite well camouflaged, and when they’re saying what you’d like to hear anyway, it becomes something of a siren song. Determining just who you ought to be listening to because you lack the necessary scientific background on your own is a gargantuan skeptical task in and of itself.
Skepticism works best when we’re going after pseudoscience because pseudoscience is at its heart bullshit lovingly dressed up in a lab coat. It takes twenty minutes on Google to become an expert (so to speak) on why homeopathy is crap because the base claim is so ridiculous in the face of reality. Psuedoscience and the paranormal often have only a lack of critical thinking or a dearth of common knowledge to support them; we bring in the “big guns” of basic scientific thought, and we win. The only expertise you need for these fights is in the field of critical and scientific thinking.
Once you get in to something like climate science, however, it’s time to admit that just one’s expertise at being a skeptic is no longer sufficient. When you’re wading in to a scientific field hip deep, you actually need expertise in that field to understand its subtleties and its messy parts, its strange interpretations and incredibly counter intuitive bits. At that point, whether you like it or not, you start relying on consensus and experts in the field. Or, I suppose, you can start sounding like an arrogant jerk who thinks that he understands tidal fluctuations when coupled with changes in the Earth’s geoid better than some schmoe who just (psh, whatever) did his PhD in it.
Critical thinking skills don’t give you the expertise to interpret data in a field that you haven’t been trained in. But it does give you the ability to detect that whiff of bullshit on the wind when an anti-vaccinationist waves around a study with a pathetically small sample size and some very dubious methodology in it. To rephrase what Dr. Farmer had to say, having a good science education means discerning just whose word is worth taking.
Done by AGI, looking at Earth Science education from state to state.
I’m guessing that the colors of the various states on the map don’t have a specific meaning, since there’s no key. However, you can click on a state on the map (or in the list) to see what states require earth sciences education in public schools, what percentage of students in selected grades are taking earth sciences courses, and other information. I haven’t looked through all of the states, but I’m finding the numbers depressingly low. Then again, I suppose when you’ve only got the kids in high school for four years at the most, and are only on average requiring two years of science education, earth sciences gets trumped by chemistry and biology. That’s certainly what it was like in my high school – everyone took some form of chemistry and biology, and then you went on to physics if you were the sort of alpha geek that didn’t mind being in to school at seven in the morning so you could listen to the world’s most boring teacher drone on about algebra-based physics**. Maybe one reason is that chemistry and biology are more “general,” particularly chemistry since just about any other science you could go on to in college will require basic chemistry. Or it could just be that given limited time, chemistry and biology are more “important.”
Still, I think geology is rather important, since it’s about the world around us and how it came to be. And what kid doesn’t love watching videos of volcanoes exploding? Though I also wonder if the reason that geology as a field hasn’t suffered too many major attacks by the religious fringe is because it’s not exactly a major component of the high school curriculum like biology is.
** – As one of those snobs that did my two semesters of physics on the calculus-based side, I really don’t get the point of algebra-based physics. I suppose the math is technically easier, but considering that calculus was effectively developed in order to describe physics, it also makes a lot less sense. At least in my thinking, Difficult Concepts in Physics + Math That Makes No Sense =/= The Easy Way Out.
