On January 9 the Scranton Times-Tribune reported that the water wells serving 3 homes in Lenox Township, Susquehanna County were contaminated with methane related to fracking. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection said that a faulty well casing of a Cabot Oil and Gas well is to blame. A fourth well is under investigation.
Per the report:
Department regulators sent Cabot a violation notice on Sept. 19, but neither the department’s public eFACTS compliance database nor its monthly oil and gas violations report noted the inspection or violations until last week, when a Times-Tribune reporter asked about the investigation.
Cabot Oil and Gas is the operator involved in the Dimock, PA contamination cases.
COMMENT: This story came out at the same time that Pipeline staff detected serious flaws in the Pennsylvania DEP database, namely nearly 500 producing wells that were not recorded as having been drilled. See FrackCheckWV post of 1/10/12. The poor record-keeping demonstrated by the PADEP does not build confidence that the agency is enforcing effectively. I wonder how accurate and up-to-date the WVDEP’s records are.
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From the report above:
“On January 9 the Scranton Times-Tribune reported that the water wells serving 3 homes in Lenox Township, Susquehanna County were contaminated with methane related to fracking.”
I have read the Scranton Times-Tribune article.
Neither the newspaper article or the underlying Pennsylvania DEP violation notice implicated fracking. To the contrary, faulty well bore casing construction was alleged, a deficiency having NOTHING TO DO with fracking.
“FRACKING” (shudder). Ring the alarm bells!
Semantics, Mr Blakeslee. The gas industry and it’s supporters choose to narrowly define the term ‘fracking’ to the stage of natural gas production between drilling and completion when fracking water is forced at high pressures into the shale to create the fractures which allow the gas to escape. For years the industry has relied upon that very narrow definition to state unequivocally that “there have been no cases of water contamination due to fracking” even though they were well aware of the Pavilion, Wyoming contamination cases and the Dimock, PA cases. This allowed for misrepresentation of the truth by virtue of semantics.
However, media use of the term fracking and the general public have popularly expanded the definition of fracking to include the entire process including drilling, hydraulic fracturing, completion, flaring, and even to earthquakes. Thus you may see references to fracking-induced earthquakes even though the earthquakes are attributable to the
disposal of frack waste fluids in deep injection wells. Granted, this generalization of the term ‘fracking’ can be annoying to those such as yourself who have a thorough understanding of the process. But unless it’s scientific literature, when you read the term ‘fracking’, it can now commonly be assumed to refer to the entire process, inclusive of the function of well casings.
Lighting methane contaminated water on fire is not new to Pennsylvania, but what was once a local curiosity has become a serious problem. Thanks to the Duke University scientists, we now know that instances of methane migration after drilling and fracking begins are about 17% more likely. Drillers and the PA Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) have disregarded Duke’s findings, citing insufficient data, though it seems noteworthy that some of the wells tested were private wells that had been in use for years without excessive methane. It also stands to reason, had the local water table always been rife with methane, these towns would not have been settled in the first place.
Particularly worrisome are the downstream impacts of methane contamination. While the human health effects of elevated methane levels in drinking water are not known, we do know that chlorinating methane-contaminated water results in carcinogenic disinfection byproducts such as chloroform.