Sorry New Mexico didn’t have reasonable legislative restrictions to frac site choice, construction, or maintenance. I worked for 8 years in the Marcellus and Utica plays in PA, OH and WV, and saw varying degrees of state requirements for containment and reporting.
Solint’s complaints are:
- there are now pipelines crossing the land. In PA all pipelines are run underground, and the only evidence you’d have is the occasional no dig sign, and lack of trees along the path of the subterranean pipeline if it transited a wooded area.
- there are now roads in the desert. There’s lots of roads in PA too.
- big trucks drove on those roads.
- There’s not enough surface water, and frac water is contaminated forever. She undercuts her argument by stating forever. Yes, water does get pumped underground, and chemicals are added, but given enough filtering or evaporation, all water can be reclaimed. The most cost-effective solution to the energy companies though is to reuse that contaminated water in other wells or, if it’s allowed in that state, just pump it down a disposal well. In PA, disposal wells were not usually permitted, or required.
- there’s too much surface water in the streams eroding the landscape.
- there’s abandoned wells. Abandoned in this case =/= neglected. After a well isn’t profitable, it will be abandoned, which means that plug is set X number of feet down, and the rest of the casing is filled with cement. it’s then capped. What you’ll see on the surface is a capped pipe some 3 feet above the ground, and maybe some cement barricades positioned around it. Not sexy, but hardly an obstruction to the landscape.
- there’s methane released. This is her best point. In the Permian basin where she visited, the main goal of frac operations was to produce crude oil. The vast majority of what came out of the well was liquid crude, but it also had bubbles of gaseous hydrocarbons, which of course had to be dealt with. The most likely course of action in TX and NM was to pump it all into a separator and burn-off the gas phase. In the Marcellus / Utica shale, all of what came back up the well (aside from some of the water pumped down) was the Methane, and so all of the infrastructure on the surface was to harness the gasses from the well. Is there methane release from PA frac operations? Yes. Are companies invested in minimizing them? Of course - it’s what they’re selling. Is there methane release from TX and NM frac operations? Yes - orders of magnitude more per well relative to PA. Are the companies invested in minimizing them? Not at all. It’s a nuisance by-product. The option that the states had was to require capture and processing of the gasses from the well, and that would have required political will.
- there’s a strip coal mine in Germany. I also feel sorry for the Germans. That’s not frac tho.
The rest of the article was about how renewables are better, and I wholeheartedly agree to that. What I didn’t see mentioned in her article? Citing chemical spills on the ground. Citing crude oil releases on the ground. Citing water table pollution.
I believe that we should move away from frac, but not because of the paltry reasons in the article, but because any hydrocarbon usage will continue to harm our climate. We’ll see peak oil in the next ten years, and it won’t be through lack of sources, but from a shift in need. We can hasten that by insisting that frac sites pay upfront for possible remediation, contain and process all materials that come out of the well, pay sufficiently for freshwater usage, and have liability for costs from cradle to grave. New earth-first legislation would work to make frac unprofitable now, instead of waiting for peak oil and the falling price per barrel of oil to do it for us. So go vote locally and at the state level, because SCOTUS just made it hard for the EPA to enforce its rules at the federal level.
The article might as well have said, “The Cincinnati Euchre League privately trashed Biden’s top campaign advisers at Million’s Cafe this weekend,” because I have a similar lack of interest in what they’d have to say.