January 22, 2013 • 45 mins
Fracking, the process of breaking trapped resources like natural gas and oil from shale, has led to a revolution in energy production in the U.S. It's also given rise to increasing worries that the process can have sweeping environmental impacts.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Camry.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and uh, this is stuff
(00:21):
you should don't very serious edition, So don't even laugh
once we're the whole episode. We're just a couple of
fracking podcasters. But we can't do that the whole time.
I wasn't going to do it at all. Well, you know,
I would I find a distasteful to something. For the effort. Yeah,
(00:42):
even the effort. I can barely get that out calling
it the F word. Oh yeah, yeah, right, you just
want to say it. Yeah, don't say fudging right, I
hate those people, Yeah, fudging Midwesterners. Yeah, just don't even
say anything at all. Yeah, just yeah, or say entirely unrelated.
But all it does is make people think of the
(01:04):
real left word, which is like loses the spirit of
your intent, which is did not curse. Oh yeah, that's
definitely a way to put it. That's one problem with it. All. Right,
what's your intro? What's your frecking intro? Well, you know,
we did that episode on peak oil. And it was
(01:25):
really funny that we recorded it when we did, because
like two days after we're talking about the US running
out of oil, a report was released that basically said
the United States is predicted to be energy independent by
UM and we actually are. We probably are never going
(01:47):
to achieve true energy independence. That's just I mean, a
hundred percent of our supplies of oil and fossil fuels
and all that stuff created here. It's just it's never
gonna happen. But we're gonna closer and closer and closer.
And in fact, in two thousand ten, John Kerry, famous senator,
possibly a future Secretary of State. Oh yeah, he's being
(02:09):
bandied about UM, he said that the United States is
the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. And definitely natural gas
is one of the reasons one of the ways that
US has suddenly experienced this huge boom in oil production. Yeah,
oil production, gas production, fuel production, clean clean burning natural gas. Uh,
(02:31):
but we will learn that doesn't necessarily make it clean
over its life cycle. It's a big difference. Yeah, So
I say it's as dirty as coal over its life cycle,
especially people who love coal. Yeah, that is one problem
I had with this fracking article is, and not just
the article that the whole topic is. Everybody has a
(02:53):
slant depending on who they're working for. Like if you're
an environmentalist, you're gonna have your slant. If you're working
with the big oil companies, you're gonna have your slant.
And they all say, like, these are the facts. Yeah,
it's really annoying. Well, one of the reasons why everybody
is able to get away with saying these are the
facts is because this stuff is so new and so
(03:16):
um unstudied. I guess at this point, yes, as far
as published, pure of viewed studies are concerned, and as
far as massive amounts of fracking, like it's been around
for a while. But yeah, not like it's going on today,
right exactly. Um, apparently there's in some form or fashion,
it's been around since the nineteenth century. This the concepts
of fracking. But the fracking like you just described massive
(03:39):
fracking operations carried out by huge energy concerns, that's a
couple of decades old. Yeah, I think Haliburton started it
in Yeah, they invented it, did they really? Dick Cheney?
I don't think Dick Cheney invented it. He's like, give
me that pipem gone to try something new. Uh uh yeah,
(04:00):
so they they developed the process at least, but it's
really started to take off in the last few years
and in the in the last decade or two is
when you started to see real concerns about what's going
on here. Wait a minute, what are you guys doing?
And that's where this idea that oh, it's perfectly safe,
Oh it's gonna cause a catastrophe has come about and
(04:21):
that's why we should probably say, like we this isn't
gonna settle the issue, but um, you should keep your eyes.
I hope this raises people's awareness of this. Well yeah,
I just on that note, I saw a study today
that Americans have never heard of fracking and about said
they've heard of it, but don't know what it is.
(04:41):
So that's that's a lot. Well, let's let's teach a
few people fracking a K hydraulic fracturing or if you're
a total square, hydro fracking. You know, like that's the
kid who's who thinks he's cool, but it's really kind
of out of the loop, so he's calling it hydro fracking. Still,
we really just call it fracking. It's a UM. It's
(05:01):
a technique that's used to get to incredibly deep deposits
of fossil fuels, not always natural gas. But most of
our discussion will be on that, right. And I shouldn't
even say fossil fuels, because you can use fracking to
get to incredibly deep deposits of water, sure if you
wanted to UM. But the one thing in common that UM,
(05:23):
all of this, all of these techniques have UM is
that you go down in a vertical line and then
all of a sudden you just cut to the right
or cut to the left anywhere between six thousand and
thirteen feet down to get after shale, to get after it.
And shale UM is this type of porous rock. Yeah,
(05:46):
we did right a long time ago, years ago, maybe
like two oil shale UM. And it's a type of rock.
It may contain oil and may contain gas, it can
contain water, but the stuff is trapped in it because
of the trim this pressure at these debts. And with
a fracking operation, you go down there, break it up,
get it out, and it comes back up. Yep. And
(06:08):
here in the US, UM we have a lot of
the shale specifically the Marcella Shale is one of the
main fracking grounds in the in the country. And what
does it cover Pennsylvania, Ohio, parts of New York, Virginia, Maryland,
or West Virginia, Maryland. Yeah, it's huge. So that's where
a lot of this stuff is taking place right now.
And many more states and Europe are hot on the
(06:30):
the scene here to get into fracking. And they think that, Um,
there's about fifty two trillion cubic feet of natural gas
in the United States and about five hundred trillion of
that is in the Marcelli's region on so it's a
big deal. Yeah. New York just they were letting it
(06:53):
through and then um the governor kai boshed it and
for now and said, wait, maybe we should study this
some more. Yeah, because a lot of municipalities were taking
it on their own outlaw fracking in one form or fashion.
And this has caused like a huge problem because there's
a lot of people out there who are saying, well,
wait a minute, I own land, I'm kind of happy
with this idea, and I want to get incredibly rich overnight.
(07:16):
Like Jed Clampett, did you know where's my where's my
bubbling crude. Well, yeah, you gotta. You do have two sides.
You have some farmers that are like, this is contaminating
our land, and you have some farmers saying, I haven't
been able to farm and make money a year, so
I would love to sell my land off or least
my land and um make some serious money. So it's
(07:40):
not like every farmers like, no, I don't want this.
A lot of them do. No, it's very much divided.
And this out in like town halls around New York
and around the country wherever fracking is is possible, I guess, um,
and it is definitely dividing communities. All right, So let's
let's go a little more in depth about the process
of fracking in depth. Yeah, it's really pretty simple. Um.
(08:04):
It starts off like a conventional Well, so you drill deep. Um,
I think you said between six and thirteen. They said
the average is about seventy feet down and I think
chess peak energy as wells and so, um, Well, they
go to wherever the deposits are. So it just sort
of depends, Um, how do they find that? Out of wonder? Um,
(08:26):
what's a good site? They they detect radioactivity I believe
because this stuff is slightly radioactive. We'll get to that too,
but I think that's one of the techniques they use
as they really analyze the radioactivity and say, oh, there's
a bunch right here. Interesting. Okay, So you got your
regular well and like you said, what's called the kickoff point.
(08:47):
It's gonna take a left or right and become a
horizontal um line and that can span anywhere from a
thousand and six thousand feet. Then they stick something called
a well board. It's just basically a steel uh casing
like a big steel pipe, and they stick that down
in there, and then they shoot a bunch of cement
(09:07):
down and it comes out the bottom and goes back
and fills it up on the outside further in casing it,
and they cleared out of the middle of the well board.
Then they clear that out, so you've got a you know,
a pipeline, I guess. And then the actual fracking uh
part takes place. Right So I'm setting you up for
that part. Oh you were sure, you'd think after all
these years I would have noticed that, um. Well, So
(09:30):
that you've got the well board completely cemented and in place,
and it's going down about a mile off from the
kickoff point, and it's right there in the in the
middle of this shale deposit. And they send down a
a little tool. It's like, um, a little cable scrambler,
you know what I'm talking about. It looks kind of
like that, yeah, Um. And it it's an explosive device.
(09:53):
And it blows a hole into a little holes, a
bunch of little holes in through the well board, through
the sum and into the surrounding rock, just a few
inches each each one, will you know, be two or
three inches of a little mini shaft. I guess right.
So you've got you've got the horizontal well boar and
the cracks are then vertical, vertical perpendicular to it, right,
(10:17):
and then they plug that up and then move on
and do it again all the way down the line
of this the horizontal kickoff point, in the horizonal kickoff point,
and they blow them up and blow them up and
blow them up. You've got all these perforations into the rock.
And then all of a sudden, now you are prepared
to frack. Yeah, And I was setting you up at
(10:38):
this point. They pump um water. Well, they pump a
lot of stuff. It's mostly water though it's it's mostly
water and sand and then uh what they call other
chemicals and um, although sometimes diesel fuels are part of this.
Apparently they stopped doing that in two thousand three. That's
not true. Well, they were supposed to stop it. The
(10:58):
e PA came up the something that sounds like it
has a lot of teeth. It's called a Memorandum of Agreement,
and they asked the oil companies to sign it and
say that they won't use diesel as part of their
fracking fluid any longer. I didn't realize that people were
still doing Yeah. A recent congressional investigation found that thirty
two million gallons of diesel fuel has been injected UM
(11:19):
in nineteen different states between two thousand five and two
thousand nine. So it's still going on. Well, that flies
in the face of the memorandum of understanding. The memorandum understanding. Yeah,
they didn't have teeth that it. Yeah. Um, but you
can get a permit to do it. That's messed up.
Apparently you can get a permit, but there is no
office to process the permit at the e p A.
(11:40):
So it's an effective ban. But they're still doing it. Okay,
So you you've got you've got your fracking ready, you
pump your you start actually the process of fracking. What
you've just done. Everything we talked about up to the
water is preparing for fracking. Once you start pumping this
water down at an incredibly um pressurized state like nine
(12:00):
thousand p s I. By contrast, you know air compressor
for your air tools and your garage that's like s
i H. Nine thousand p s I is just an
incredibly pressurized state. Um. The water rushes down and when
it hits those perforated areas, it cracks the shale even further. Uh.
(12:24):
And eventually the it also the particulate matter sand or
whatever else that they added, goes into those cracks and
then keeps it open, keeps the cracks open after the
water they are but it's enough, because what you're talking
about is like you're getting gas out of rock rather
than yeah, just a little bit UM. And then once
(12:47):
the once you stop pumping the water and the pressure
pushes it back up and eventually the water's done. The
water that you set back down there comes back up,
and then it's followed by U or whatever else. Yeah,
and that water is waste water that is UM and
we will get into. This is one of the controversies.
How that wastewater is handled is um kind of one
(13:09):
of the things at the center point of the controversy.
So that's that's fracking. Um. It's it's it's complex engineering wise,
but it's actually kind of simple as a concept. And
then the whole thing lasts from preparation. I guess the
first drilling to the end of fracking about four months.
(13:30):
But then this well that's just been developed can produce
natural gas for decades, possibly years or decades. Yeah, I
saw up to like forty years even sometimes. Okay, So
that's that's fracking, and that's where the story ends. That's
where the story ends. Um. So we're gonna present both
sides of the argument, like we try to do, sometimes
more successfully than others at other times. Yeah, because if
(13:53):
you're an environmentalist, you probably just noticed eight things that
we said that are driving you crazy right now, because
it's like, well, what about this? What about that? We're
going to address that. Well, let's let's take the pro
fracking side, um first of all, Um, which right now
you know includes President Obama. You know, it's not like
we're not dividing this politically as best we can, like
(14:13):
he's in favor of it right now. And we also
need to point out that we had a listener mail
that point out that there was a there's an ep
A study that was commissioned in two thousand eleven that's
really the most comprehensive study ever and it will be done,
and I think it by the time this comes out,
some preliminary notes should be should be in, so we'll
(14:35):
learn a lot more soon and maybe the Obama administration
will come out against it after that. But as of now,
there's not a lot of hard science, which is problematic.
It is problematic. So on the pro side, you're gonna say,
you know what, we can these horizontal wells are really
sort of efficient, and that you're not gonna have above
ground hundreds and hundreds of wells. This one well can
(14:59):
go horse only for six thousand feet and do most
of the work out of sight. Yeah. Of course, counter
that with their like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands
of these wells fracking wells, and there's still a lot
going on above ground. There is because the whole operation.
While once they finished drilling, they removed the drill rig.
(15:21):
But now you have pump trucks coming in. It takes
about two hundred trucks to deliver a million gallons of water. Yeah. Man,
I saw this one mini documentary on this small town
in Pennsylvania. They're like on main Street and the guy
was like, yeah, we used to sit out here at
the sidewalk cafe, and literally while they were filming this,
it's like every other every third car that passed was
(15:42):
a huge tanker truck through like the middle of this
like little quaint town, carrying water to the site and
removing waste water and whatever else. So if it takes
two hundred trucks to carry one million gallons of water,
some of these some of these operations used ten million gallons,
so two thousand trucks just to carry it there. Then
(16:02):
you've got pump trucks and it, I mean, it is
an operation. Even though compared to oil drilling above ground,
it's it's less Yeah, it's more nocuous, that's right. So um,
another pro is that natural gas is pretty great and
you're you're not gonna find a lot of people argue
with that. It burns very cleanly. It's a good solution.
(16:23):
But it's the like we said over its lifetime. Some
contend that because of the practices, it's not any cleaner
than coal UM in the end. Yeah, like if you
burn it itself, if in a perfect world, as emits
one third the nitrogen oxides of coal, half of the
CO two, and just one percent of the sulfur oxides,
(16:46):
so it is like a lot cleaner. But then again,
as part of the fracking process, you have like all
these trucks that are using all this diesel that are
coming to and from the site. Right. Another problem with
it is methane release associated with UM tapping natural gas.
Apparently as much as eight percent of the methane in
a natural gas well is lost, and methane is bad.
(17:11):
It's a really serious greenhouse gas. It's worse than CEO
two as far as creating the greenhouse effect is concerned.
It's just there's typically less of it, and we usually
produce less than we produce CEO two, so there's an
air pollution factor to it as well. Yeah, that's true. Um.
We should probably point out if anyone's seen them the
documentary gas Land from two thousand ten, that was the
(17:31):
famous scene where the guy lights his tap water on fire. Impactful. Yeah,
did you see it. Yeah, and you know you can't
see that and not go holy crap, like they're letting
this happen. Um. As it turns out, in fairness, the
officials determined that it was a naturally occurring methane reserve
at this particular homeowners well, and it was not due
(17:52):
to fracking. Right, his well hit hit like a methane reserve,
So that would explain what his flaming water. But before
that came out, I think, um, truth Land, which was
I guess an answer to gas Land, came out. Did
you hear about that? Truth Land um was released by
(18:13):
Energy and Depth, which is a pro fracking group which
if you go into source watch, is funded by frank
by oil companies. But they released this documentary that said
nothing about the oil companies funding in and called it
truth Land. It was exposed to propaganda like right out
of the gate. But um, there's definitely this uh propaganda
(18:35):
war going on, um between you know, pro and con
sides speaking of prone country got any more prosum, I do,
but quickly but just because that guy and gas Land, Um,
it turned out to be a different thing. The companies
have been fined um for negligence with methane reaching water
supplies like that has happened, right, which is not supposed
(18:57):
to happen. Because if you're talking about like a the
Marcellus region, this this, that's the typically very deep deep shale,
like seven thousand, ten thousand feet, that's how far you
have to drill down before you hit that kickoff point. Right,
Your um groundwater reserves, your aquifers are gonna be a
(19:17):
few hundred to a thousand feet. So if you pass
through them and then you use your steel well board
and in case it and cement correctly, you're not you're
not going to get any release into that groundwater. And
the cracks that you're making the fractures are so deep
and small enough that they're not going to travel all
(19:37):
the way up thousands and thousands of feet up to
the aquifer just the pressure won't allow it. Supposedly, that's
like that, that's the that's the logic behind it now.
But there are things like coal bed methane fields that
are typically much more shallow and they're closer to aquifers,
and those are the ones. If you're tapping those using fracking,
(19:59):
you run amendous risk of of methane getting into the
water supply big time. But if you're doing deep shale
stuff as it stands now, all the evidence suggests that, No,
it's it's if you steal your well bore correctly, you
should be fine. Right, Well, that's the listener. Mail pointed
out that, um, you know, most of the issues of
(20:21):
the problems have been because of that concrete or incorrect Well,
you know this and that, not the fracking itself, but
it's the same people doing that, so it's still counts
as part of the problem with fracking. Yeah, you know,
you can't say, like, oh, the fracking segment of this
operation went well, but of course we had cracks all
up and down that ruined everything. So come on, that's semantics,
(20:43):
all right. Um, some of them. The more last couple
of pro arguments here, Josh, are UM revenue. It's a
big one. Seventeen thousand, six hundred jobs would be created
and a hundred million dollars in tax revenue if New
York State UM lifted their fracking ban. Yeah, so a
(21:07):
lot of jobs. A lot of these are former farming
communities that are somewhat depressed, and a lot of people
want those jobs. And anytime you're reducing our dependence on
foreign oil. That's a good thing, uh in a worldview.
So those are some of the pro arguments and they're
good ones. Yeah. So um, and again we should say
(21:28):
like the jury is still very much out, but there
is a lot of common sense criticism of fracking operations. Um,
some have already been discarded. Like a lot of people
are worried about that radio activity and um, the wastewater
that does come back up is slightly more radioactive than
(21:49):
it was when it went down, but not any That's,
as one professor put it, that's like the least of
your worries with fracking is the radio activity. Yeah. Another
one is that, um, it causes earthquakes, which is sensible.
You know, you're down there, you're drilling, you're blowing holes
into the shale thousands of feet down. How can you
not cause an earthquake. Apparently, earthquakes are associated with fracking,
(22:11):
but it's not the actual fracking. It's when you store
wastewater in a retention pond reservoir induced seismicity where it's
coming from. Yeah, So there are a couple of earthquakes
that were associated with fracking, but not from the fracking process,
from storing the wastewater. Again semantics, but so, but the
wastewater is probably the single most UM. I guess if
(22:36):
you're an environmentalist, that's the smoking gun, Like, that's the
one that you can't get around if you're an energy company,
because fracking uses tons of water, lots and lots of water,
I mean millions of gallons of water to get to
these and recovers maybe between fifteen and fifty of that water.
(22:58):
And then the water that is recovered is now way
more toxic than it was before. So you're taking water
from a municipal water supply, drinking water people, people, water
people need, sending it down into the earth, and then
getting maybe fifteen fifty back, and then the stuff you
do get back is like, what are we gonna do
(23:18):
with this? Yeah? Well they um, the oil companies will
say that they dispose of it in ways that uh
adequately match state regulations, UM, which may or may not
be adequate. Yeah, may or may not be in depending
on the state, the regulations are a little more lax
than others. UM. I know a lot of the wastewater
(23:39):
from Pennsylvania is deposited in surrounding states because I think
they have one of the more aggressive wastewater policies. So
they'll just say, ironically, New York, even though they banned
fracking for now allows Pennsylvania wastewater to be dumped there. Okay,
so there's at least one municipality that has banned uh,
fracking fluids, Like you can't buy or sell them or
(24:01):
possess them in the city, and you aren't allowed to
introduce any used fracking fluid into their waste treatment plants
like there their city waters and allowed to treat fracking fluid.
So and some of this water, like the wastewater, some
of it is reused for other fracking operations. Some of
it is just treat makes sense, Yeah, economically, it just
(24:23):
makes sense to get as much back as you can
and then use it again. And she's the same water
as much as possible. Yeah, that'd be a good idea.
Some is treated, you're gonna say, in like a wastewater plant. Um. Others,
like a lot of the stuff that comes back up
includes like ancient salt beds, salt from ancient seabeds, yeah, um.
And they use those on the to like clear off
(24:46):
snow and ice on roadways. But they're starting to outlaw
that as well. It's basically like the fracking industry went
unregulated for a very long time. Like it was unregulated
in that it was a drilling technique as as the
EPA was concerned, and it wasn't until this environmental um
group leaf sued. I guess the e p A over
(25:08):
some fracking techniques in the late nineties in Alabama before
the EPA finally started to regulate fracking. Wow, I'm sorry,
but I got a little, a little into it for
a second. No, I love it. Um. We were talking
about waste water. Some of that water also spills. Uh.
In June two thousand eleven, there was a well blowout
in Clearwater County, Pennsylvania. It's a gas explosion, sixteen hours
(25:33):
of uncontrolled spill about a million gallons of toxic waste
into a creek in Mohannon State Park. Um. I saw
this one documentary they interviewed of a guy that used
to one of the blue collar guys used to work
at the operation and he was like, yeah, you know,
some of them are heavily regulated and get visited by
inspectors and he went, but many thousands are not. And
(25:55):
he said, I worked at one of those and he said,
in the at the frack path, it was on top
of a like a mountain area. That's where the bar is. Yeah,
I got so. But he said, you would look at
this mountain on the side of it, and he said
it would looked like it was bleeding like this red
oozy water just tumbling down into like the forest below.
And he said, but yeah, some of them regulated, some
(26:17):
of them are or inspected, And I think it's probably
one of the same issues as uh the mountaintop uh
coal removal, is that you've got like a handful of
inspectors for these like thousands and thousands of operations, which
is not good. No, wasn't there and wasn't there a
spill of just not even wastewater bills, straight up fracking
(26:38):
fluid like all the additives, which by the way, are
for a very long time. UM energy companies said that
they're fracking fluid mixtures were proprietor proprietary and they wouldn't
reveal what was in there. The PA finally said, no,
you have to. We need a hundred percent transparency. So now,
well not a percent though, because there's still some uh
(27:01):
that is true. And dude, I saw that too, and
I was like, great, finally released the chemicals that you're
you're putting in there. And then they said that there's
a bit of a loophole in that some of them
can be still be listed as trade secrets. Well, it's
like trans fat, like you can list you can put
trans fats in your food still and say that has
zero grams of trans fat as long as it has
(27:23):
half a half a gram or less per serving of
trans fats. But you can still play that big zero
on there. It's very tricky. So some of the some
of the state's outlawed um or some of the states
said all right, you have to tell us at least
what your little trade secrets are, and we won't release them.
And then some states like Colorado believe it or not,
just said you don't even have to tell us what
(27:45):
your trade secret is. So well, the ones that have
been released, it it's very there's some unusual stuff in there.
Walnut holes, table salt, well that doesn't sound harmless, lemon
juice that sounds great, laundry detergent, anti freeze, Okay, it's
getting worse. Uh moosifiers. Apparently the price of this uh
(28:07):
uh i' what is it called I want to say Guar,
but it's not Guar, you knowir the band, But it's
like gar. It is like Gar, but instead of a W,
it's just a single us Amosifi are using ice cream,
and apparently cracking operations have driven the price of this up.
So much of the ice cream industry is like, what
the heck man? Like we we you just lowered our
(28:30):
profit margin significantly. Is that why Ben and Jerry's is
so expensive now? Ben and Jerry's is expensive because it's
so delicious. It is delicious. Chubby Hubby, that's a good one.
It's my favorite one New York superfudge chunk that white
chocolate in there. I like the offerings, the seasonal offerings
to like I had some pumpkin cheesecake the other day
that was really good. I have not tried that. It's delicious.
(28:53):
You know what else as good as there? Um it's
a blueberry graham Greek yogurt and we had that as
a very good too. But we can conside checked the
food the drop of a half. We've been doing good
this when we've been talking about nothing but fracking. That's true,
So they will um. Depending on what website you go to,
you will if you're worried about chemical additives. You will
(29:14):
see stats from people like Caliber and they say it
only makes up like point five percent of this mixture.
But what they don't say is that can still equal
like three hundred millions I'm sorry, three hundred tons of
chemical additives. Is that for a single operation? That's for
for four million gallons of water used in a fracking
operation would equal about three hundred tons of these additives
(29:37):
chemical additives. So there's a lot of this stuff. It
may be only a point five percent to two percent,
but um, there's still a lot of like many tons
of harmful chemicals. And again, what are you doing with it?
I mean, like what do you do with it afterwards?
If you could reuse it? Awesome, I have very few
problems with it. Um, But it's taking water from a
water supply, and it's in Texas. Fracking operations have been
(29:59):
shown to actually have exacerbated droughts in the area. Um. Yeah,
around the Marcellus region. There's apparently plenty of water, like
for example, in Pennsylvania in a single day, Uh, the
whole state uses about nine point five billion gallons of
water every day. The natural gas development fracking uses about
(30:20):
one point nine million gallons of the nine point five
billion every day, one point nine million to nine point
five billion, So it's insignificant. But in an area that's
already water stressed, that's a problem taking all that water
and using it for fracking, wasting it, and then what
do you do with it afterwards. Yeah, Well, at least
Texas has um apparently that's like the leading state as
(30:43):
far as having capabilities to have many more disposal wells
is what they're called there um. But in places like
Pennsylvania where the Marcella shale is, they don't have nearly
the kind of disposal wells at this point yet, which
leads to more um retreatment or treatment of the water
and dumping it in places like New York. When I
say they're dumping it, I mean I don't think they're like,
(31:05):
you know, putting a big tube out in the middle
of a field in New York and just letting it
run out everywhere. They better not be doing that. They
probably aren't. Um. I saw one stat where there is
one serious environmental concern for every one and fifty wells,
which if you multiply that over hundreds of thousands of
wells the reason a lot of people point out and
(31:26):
say it's not so dangerous. It's like, where the where's
the hard science on the effect right now? And this
guy was like, well, we're not seeing it quite yet.
Like come back in ten years at the rate that
we're going, uh, and you'll you'll see some problems. One
for every hundred and fifty operations h one serious environmental
concern could be spill, could be leaching into the soil.
(31:50):
Kind of depends. Um. And my whole thing is, if
it's really no big deal and it's totally safe and
it's just not going to impact anyone in any way, Um,
then why do you exclude it from the Safe Water
Drinking Act in two thousand five? Like why do you
take congressional measures measures to have the language of what
(32:13):
a pollutant is changed? Which is what happened in two
thousand five? Well, the Safe Water Drinking Act, um, the
Energy Policy Act of two thousand five. Um. And then
this is not political. This this happened. You can go
look it up, settled down. Dick Cheney did push for
these measures to go through. They went through the loophole.
(32:36):
The Haliburton loophole is what it's called um and I
will even give you the section if you go to
page one or two. Section two. It covers hydraulic fracturing
and it excludes in the Safe Water Drinking Act the
underground injection of fluids or propping agents other than diesel fuels.
That's the one that they still said, like, you can't
do pursue it too. Hydraulic fracturing related to oil, gas
(33:00):
or geothermal production activities. So basically, uh, you need to
keep your water safe unless it's hydraulic fracturing, fracturing, fractling,
hydro fracking. Furthermore, in the Clean Water Act, they change
the definition of pollutant to not include water, gas, or
other material which is injected into a well to facilitate
(33:23):
production of oil or gas. So if it's so clean
and no big deal, where are they going in and
changing the term for pollutant and saying exclude fracking from
Safe Water Drinking Act? You know, it's a great question.
And what was the guy behind pushing this? A former
Haliburton executive. It's like, I'm no smart guy, but I'm
(33:44):
no dummy either, you know, well, I think you know,
check the jury still out. As we said on this
and we're waiting for this hard science to come in.
But I feel like you should always be wary of
any group or industry or anyone on either side that
engages in a disinformation campaign that tries to sway the
(34:05):
public using underhanded tactics. That should always raise red flags
to you. And they're both doing it right now, which
is what's maddening for sure. UM and you anytime somebody's
selling you something and you find out that like they're
they're being underhanded, you should wonder about everything they're doing
across the board, Like with UM Energy and Development releasing
(34:28):
truth Land that was misinformation. That was a misinformation campaign.
They didn't say who released it, and there's yeah exactly,
And if you go onto the Energy and Development website
in particular, it reads really defensive, real defensive, like the
text of it does. I can't believe that they let
whatever whatever PR company put that together release it like that,
(34:49):
because it's it's like like, why are you asking you know,
almost like I'll bet you didn't know that. I'll bet
you didn't know that natural gas could blow up your
whole family if we wanted it to. Did happen to UM?
Well tell him first about the studies in This month
represents the third month in a row where a major
public university has taken a real black eye from being
(35:14):
exposed for being in bed with UM the fracking community. Yeah,
University of Texas study said that UM fracking is safe,
and um, it's really no big deal. Well, I don't
know if they said that. They said it was safe,
I don't want to paraphrase. Uh. And then they got
some independent reviews of Professor groats um study and they said, oh,
(35:34):
you know what, he's on the board of a natural
gas drilling company and received more than a million and
a half dollars in compensation and he didn't mention that
anywhere in his study. But what he did do is,
uh quit his job at the University of Texas afterward
and kind of retreat quietly into his corner full of money.
(35:54):
And the department head over him was forced to resign
to But the thing was, it wasn't just that he
didn't he didn't report that conflict of interest. He said that, Um,
there there was like flaws in the science. It was
a bad article, it was a bad study, and they
retracted it. And that's a big deal to retract the
scientific study. We're they're saying, like, we want that back.
(36:17):
Pretend we never said anything. UM. Penn State I tried
to open a shale development UM school, I guess UM,
and they couldn't because all the professors wouldn't wouldn't join, Like,
they couldn't get anybody to be a part of it.
And then there was one more I think that was
part of this little three months sweep that our buddy
(36:39):
Wade Goodwin over MPR was reporting. Yeah, the Shale Resources
Institute at the State University of New York at Buffalo
was closed after UM people wanted to know who was
funding its work and whether it's work was truly independent
into studying fracking. So they closed this whole cool down
(37:01):
because they found out that it was basically funded by
energy companies and that people were working for them rather
than the public good. Wow. So there are plenty more
anecdotal stories that we could not get to UM. If
you type in fracking timeline, there's a great UH timeline
oddly enough of UH of incidences and accidents. UM, and
(37:25):
you're you know, I realized that there's no way to
get oil and petroleum out of the earth without there
being accidents at some point. It's just one of the
dangers and unfortunate side effects. It's gonna happen. But um,
there are a lot of them out there. Wells exploding
U two thousand nine, a fracking waste water impoundment caught
fire exploded in develop, Pennsylvania. Soil tests conducted at the
(37:47):
site found arsenic at six thousand times of permissible level UM.
November to December two thousand seven, twenty two water wells
in Bainbridge, Ohio intaminated with drilling chemicals. One explodes, a
lot of methane explosions. One family was killed. Pretty flammable,
like when they lit their pilot light in their house.
(38:10):
Killed the family. So and what was it doing to
their brains leading up to that, just huffing it all
the time. Who knows that the levels were so high
it blew up their house. I mean, how long was
it acumulating? Well, anecdotally, you'll see interviews with people talking
it's just like Aaron Brockovich, like I went to drink
my water after they started this operation and it had
a little, uh, petroleum like residue on top, and it
(38:35):
tasted awful, and uh like they say don't even bathe
in it, and like this is what I'm supposed to drink.
I want to say, I want to really make sure
everyone one gets this. If you ask me, natural gas
is a really great fuel, Like it really does it, Chuck.
If we could convert the nation's transportation sector to natural
(38:58):
gas only UM cars and trucks, we would reduce UM
CEO two emissions by no, I'm sorry, we reduced CEO
carbon monoxide emissions, which makes small O T and UM
nitrous oxides by It really is a good idea, and
(39:19):
it probably will be this excellent bridge fuel between coal
and oil and whatever renewable we come up with, wind
solar in the future, and we could become energy independent
thanks to natural gas. And if fracking is the best
way to do it, that's awesome. But we have to
(39:41):
hold the people who are doing this feet to the fire,
to do it as safely as possible, to cut down
on these incidents that you're talking about, to not pollute water,
but to get it out as as reasonably inefficiently as possible,
but also as safely as possible, because if we don't
say you have to do this Martley and safely, they're
(40:01):
going to do it as cheaply as possible, because it's
a mandate of their corporate charters maximized profits, not maximized
public safety, which is why it's important for people to
be talking about this. It's not inherently bad, it just
has to be done correctly. It seems like to me
after researching this agreed um, And didn't he find a
new uh fracking method that does not use the chemicals
(40:22):
at all. Yeah, it's called jelled fracking. Uses a liquid
propane and um it when it when you pump it
down in there, it doesn't come back up. It turns
into vapor which escapes back up as a vapor which
you can capture and reuse, resell, or burn a fuel
for to power the site. That sounds pretty good. No
(40:45):
waste water. Jelled fracking doesn't even water at all. And
are people using this yet or is it? It's um,
they're patenting it. It's been used about a thousand times
since two thousand eight. I should probably say I invented it,
so I have an enormous financial stake in see, I
I admit my financial interests. Josh Jell's right, but um, yeah,
(41:07):
I ran across that today. It seemed like a pretty
good jam jelled fracking. Yeah. That. One of the issues
with that though, is like it probably requires some sort
of uh redoing of your current systems, which probably would
incur costs that companies don't want. I'm just guessing. But
plus you have to sacrifice like eight thousand cats just
to get the machine to start working. Who cares? This
(41:28):
is inhabited by a god that loves cats. Sacrifice. Just
leave my cats alone and you can have the rest
you got anything else? Now fracking has been done. Yeah,
We've been asked about this one for a while. So
if you want to learn more about fracking, you can
type that word f R A C K I n
G into the search part. How still works dot com?
(41:49):
And I said search parts. So it's time for listener mail, Josh.
Before we do listener mail, Yes, um our TV show
is going on the debut UH last week, hopefully to
great numbers, and we would like to remind everyone to
watch each and every week on Science Channel at ten pm. Yeah,
following uh Idiot Abroad which is our lead end, which
(42:11):
is great, and it's on Science Channel on Saturday's ten pm.
What else are you doing on Saturday night? Ten p m. Nothing.
That's why you should watch our show because you'll like it. Yeah,
if you're out DVR, and if you don't have a
DVR and you don't have TV or cable, you can
get these on iTunes for I think of Buck ninety nine. Yeah,
day after the premiere, so Sundays, that's right, So go
(42:33):
to iTunes and the search for stuff you should know
on the television side of things. And let me thank
you for your support. Yes, that's off to you, guys.
All right, listener mail, Yes, I'm gonna call this caving sucks.
This is from Michelle Marianni. Guys, I'm a Canadian speech
pathologists currently living in Manhattan. Last month, I went to
(42:53):
my honeymoon and belize insideed going a guid a cave tour.
I imagine a large opening in a rock, beautiful sparkling
waterfall and lights and rainbows coming from the ceiling, kind
of like you were talking about, Chuck. But what it
really turned out to be was five hours. It's total
darkness except for the headlight of course, high pressure water
rushing over jagged moving rocks. I swam, stumbled, crabbed, walked
(43:14):
for two and a half hours to reach a series
of seven waterfalls that I then climbed. Someday I look
back and laugh, but at the time I was screaming
to Jesus to save me. Luckily, my group thought I
was hilarious and enjoyed my jokes, but I kept my
tears on the inside. The guys were very well trained,
also very relaxed, and I never felt like we were
in too much danger. Um At first, I really tried
(43:38):
really hard enough to touch the precious centuries old stalag
tights as I stumbled through, but by hour or four
I was grabbing it anything I could as I was
going down, trying not to have my eyes stabbed out
by jagged rocks. I can't believe I let random tourists.
They let random tourists of these caves with no special
training or a fitness test. Living in New York City,
I've had some crazy experiences, so just inadvertently get taught
(44:01):
in the middle of a shootout and being quasi attacked
by a gentleman on PCP. But caving was the scariest
thing that has ever happened to me. Um. Had I
listened to this podcast before my honeymoon, I never would
have gone in disaster it would have been avoided. Thank
you for the delightful podcast. So much love, Michelle Marianni.
Thanks a lot, Michelle. Sorry about the PCP guy. Um, yeah,
(44:26):
that's really something. Maybe that requires its own email as well.
It's always PCP. I wonder how many times it really is.
Everyone's always like they were crazed out on PCP. Maybe
it was just ambient. They were eating a stick of
butter and coming for me. Um. Well, let's see if
you have a commentary about how something that we thought
(44:47):
was awesome actually sucks in real life. We want to
hear about that. Um. And if you have any kind
of fracking operation in your neighborhood, we'd love to hear
about that as well. Pro con whatever. Um, you can
and tweet to us at s Y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff
you Should Know, and you can send us an email
to Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com. For more on
(45:15):
this and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff works
dot com. M brought to you by the two thousand
twelve Toyota Camera
Brought to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Camry.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and uh, this is stuff
(00:21):
you should don't very serious edition, So don't even laugh
once we're the whole episode. We're just a couple of
fracking podcasters. But we can't do that the whole time.
I wasn't going to do it at all. Well, you know,
I would I find a distasteful to something. For the effort. Yeah,
(00:42):
even the effort. I can barely get that out calling
it the F word. Oh yeah, yeah, right, you just
want to say it. Yeah, don't say fudging right, I
hate those people, Yeah, fudging Midwesterners. Yeah, just don't even
say anything at all. Yeah, just yeah, or say entirely unrelated.
But all it does is make people think of the
(01:04):
real left word, which is like loses the spirit of
your intent, which is did not curse. Oh yeah, that's
definitely a way to put it. That's one problem with it. All. Right,
what's your intro? What's your frecking intro? Well, you know,
we did that episode on peak oil. And it was
(01:25):
really funny that we recorded it when we did, because
like two days after we're talking about the US running
out of oil, a report was released that basically said
the United States is predicted to be energy independent by
UM and we actually are. We probably are never going
(01:47):
to achieve true energy independence. That's just I mean, a
hundred percent of our supplies of oil and fossil fuels
and all that stuff created here. It's just it's never
gonna happen. But we're gonna closer and closer and closer.
And in fact, in two thousand ten, John Kerry, famous senator,
possibly a future Secretary of State. Oh yeah, he's being
(02:09):
bandied about UM, he said that the United States is
the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. And definitely natural gas
is one of the reasons one of the ways that
US has suddenly experienced this huge boom in oil production. Yeah,
oil production, gas production, fuel production, clean clean burning natural gas. Uh,
(02:31):
but we will learn that doesn't necessarily make it clean
over its life cycle. It's a big difference. Yeah, So
I say it's as dirty as coal over its life cycle,
especially people who love coal. Yeah, that is one problem
I had with this fracking article is, and not just
the article that the whole topic is. Everybody has a
(02:53):
slant depending on who they're working for. Like if you're
an environmentalist, you're gonna have your slant. If you're working
with the big oil companies, you're gonna have your slant.
And they all say, like, these are the facts. Yeah,
it's really annoying. Well, one of the reasons why everybody
is able to get away with saying these are the
facts is because this stuff is so new and so
(03:16):
um unstudied. I guess at this point, yes, as far
as published, pure of viewed studies are concerned, and as
far as massive amounts of fracking, like it's been around
for a while. But yeah, not like it's going on today,
right exactly. Um, apparently there's in some form or fashion,
it's been around since the nineteenth century. This the concepts
of fracking. But the fracking like you just described massive
(03:39):
fracking operations carried out by huge energy concerns, that's a
couple of decades old. Yeah, I think Haliburton started it
in Yeah, they invented it, did they really? Dick Cheney?
I don't think Dick Cheney invented it. He's like, give
me that pipem gone to try something new. Uh uh yeah,
(04:00):
so they they developed the process at least, but it's
really started to take off in the last few years
and in the in the last decade or two is
when you started to see real concerns about what's going
on here. Wait a minute, what are you guys doing?
And that's where this idea that oh, it's perfectly safe,
Oh it's gonna cause a catastrophe has come about and
(04:21):
that's why we should probably say, like we this isn't
gonna settle the issue, but um, you should keep your eyes.
I hope this raises people's awareness of this. Well yeah,
I just on that note, I saw a study today
that Americans have never heard of fracking and about said
they've heard of it, but don't know what it is.
(04:41):
So that's that's a lot. Well, let's let's teach a
few people fracking a K hydraulic fracturing or if you're
a total square, hydro fracking. You know, like that's the
kid who's who thinks he's cool, but it's really kind
of out of the loop, so he's calling it hydro fracking. Still,
we really just call it fracking. It's a UM. It's
(05:01):
a technique that's used to get to incredibly deep deposits
of fossil fuels, not always natural gas. But most of
our discussion will be on that, right. And I shouldn't
even say fossil fuels, because you can use fracking to
get to incredibly deep deposits of water, sure if you
wanted to UM. But the one thing in common that UM,
(05:23):
all of this, all of these techniques have UM is
that you go down in a vertical line and then
all of a sudden you just cut to the right
or cut to the left anywhere between six thousand and
thirteen feet down to get after shale, to get after it.
And shale UM is this type of porous rock. Yeah,
(05:46):
we did right a long time ago, years ago, maybe
like two oil shale UM. And it's a type of rock.
It may contain oil and may contain gas, it can
contain water, but the stuff is trapped in it because
of the trim this pressure at these debts. And with
a fracking operation, you go down there, break it up,
get it out, and it comes back up. Yep. And
(06:08):
here in the US, UM we have a lot of
the shale specifically the Marcella Shale is one of the
main fracking grounds in the in the country. And what
does it cover Pennsylvania, Ohio, parts of New York, Virginia, Maryland,
or West Virginia, Maryland. Yeah, it's huge. So that's where
a lot of this stuff is taking place right now.
And many more states and Europe are hot on the
(06:30):
the scene here to get into fracking. And they think that, Um,
there's about fifty two trillion cubic feet of natural gas
in the United States and about five hundred trillion of
that is in the Marcelli's region on so it's a
big deal. Yeah. New York just they were letting it
(06:53):
through and then um the governor kai boshed it and
for now and said, wait, maybe we should study this
some more. Yeah, because a lot of municipalities were taking
it on their own outlaw fracking in one form or fashion.
And this has caused like a huge problem because there's
a lot of people out there who are saying, well,
wait a minute, I own land, I'm kind of happy
with this idea, and I want to get incredibly rich overnight.
(07:16):
Like Jed Clampett, did you know where's my where's my
bubbling crude. Well, yeah, you gotta. You do have two sides.
You have some farmers that are like, this is contaminating
our land, and you have some farmers saying, I haven't
been able to farm and make money a year, so
I would love to sell my land off or least
my land and um make some serious money. So it's
(07:40):
not like every farmers like, no, I don't want this.
A lot of them do. No, it's very much divided.
And this out in like town halls around New York
and around the country wherever fracking is is possible, I guess, um,
and it is definitely dividing communities. All right, So let's
let's go a little more in depth about the process
of fracking in depth. Yeah, it's really pretty simple. Um.
(08:04):
It starts off like a conventional Well, so you drill deep. Um,
I think you said between six and thirteen. They said
the average is about seventy feet down and I think
chess peak energy as wells and so, um, Well, they
go to wherever the deposits are. So it just sort
of depends, Um, how do they find that? Out of wonder? Um,
(08:26):
what's a good site? They they detect radioactivity I believe
because this stuff is slightly radioactive. We'll get to that too,
but I think that's one of the techniques they use
as they really analyze the radioactivity and say, oh, there's
a bunch right here. Interesting. Okay, So you got your
regular well and like you said, what's called the kickoff point.
(08:47):
It's gonna take a left or right and become a
horizontal um line and that can span anywhere from a
thousand and six thousand feet. Then they stick something called
a well board. It's just basically a steel uh casing
like a big steel pipe, and they stick that down
in there, and then they shoot a bunch of cement
(09:07):
down and it comes out the bottom and goes back
and fills it up on the outside further in casing it,
and they cleared out of the middle of the well board.
Then they clear that out, so you've got a you know,
a pipeline, I guess. And then the actual fracking uh
part takes place. Right So I'm setting you up for
that part. Oh you were sure, you'd think after all
these years I would have noticed that, um. Well, So
(09:30):
that you've got the well board completely cemented and in place,
and it's going down about a mile off from the
kickoff point, and it's right there in the in the
middle of this shale deposit. And they send down a
a little tool. It's like, um, a little cable scrambler,
you know what I'm talking about. It looks kind of
like that, yeah, Um. And it it's an explosive device.
(09:53):
And it blows a hole into a little holes, a
bunch of little holes in through the well board, through
the sum and into the surrounding rock, just a few
inches each each one, will you know, be two or
three inches of a little mini shaft. I guess right.
So you've got you've got the horizontal well boar and
the cracks are then vertical, vertical perpendicular to it, right,
(10:17):
and then they plug that up and then move on
and do it again all the way down the line
of this the horizontal kickoff point, in the horizonal kickoff point,
and they blow them up and blow them up and
blow them up. You've got all these perforations into the rock.
And then all of a sudden, now you are prepared
to frack. Yeah, And I was setting you up at
(10:38):
this point. They pump um water. Well, they pump a
lot of stuff. It's mostly water though it's it's mostly
water and sand and then uh what they call other
chemicals and um, although sometimes diesel fuels are part of this.
Apparently they stopped doing that in two thousand three. That's
not true. Well, they were supposed to stop it. The
(10:58):
e PA came up the something that sounds like it
has a lot of teeth. It's called a Memorandum of Agreement,
and they asked the oil companies to sign it and
say that they won't use diesel as part of their
fracking fluid any longer. I didn't realize that people were
still doing Yeah. A recent congressional investigation found that thirty
two million gallons of diesel fuel has been injected UM
(11:19):
in nineteen different states between two thousand five and two
thousand nine. So it's still going on. Well, that flies
in the face of the memorandum of understanding. The memorandum understanding. Yeah,
they didn't have teeth that it. Yeah. Um, but you
can get a permit to do it. That's messed up.
Apparently you can get a permit, but there is no
office to process the permit at the e p A.
(11:40):
So it's an effective ban. But they're still doing it. Okay,
So you you've got you've got your fracking ready, you
pump your you start actually the process of fracking. What
you've just done. Everything we talked about up to the
water is preparing for fracking. Once you start pumping this
water down at an incredibly um pressurized state like nine
(12:00):
thousand p s I. By contrast, you know air compressor
for your air tools and your garage that's like s
i H. Nine thousand p s I is just an
incredibly pressurized state. Um. The water rushes down and when
it hits those perforated areas, it cracks the shale even further. Uh.
(12:24):
And eventually the it also the particulate matter sand or
whatever else that they added, goes into those cracks and
then keeps it open, keeps the cracks open after the
water they are but it's enough, because what you're talking
about is like you're getting gas out of rock rather
than yeah, just a little bit UM. And then once
(12:47):
the once you stop pumping the water and the pressure
pushes it back up and eventually the water's done. The
water that you set back down there comes back up,
and then it's followed by U or whatever else. Yeah,
and that water is waste water that is UM and
we will get into. This is one of the controversies.
How that wastewater is handled is um kind of one
(13:09):
of the things at the center point of the controversy.
So that's that's fracking. Um. It's it's it's complex engineering wise,
but it's actually kind of simple as a concept. And
then the whole thing lasts from preparation. I guess the
first drilling to the end of fracking about four months.
(13:30):
But then this well that's just been developed can produce
natural gas for decades, possibly years or decades. Yeah, I
saw up to like forty years even sometimes. Okay, So
that's that's fracking, and that's where the story ends. That's
where the story ends. Um. So we're gonna present both
sides of the argument, like we try to do, sometimes
more successfully than others at other times. Yeah, because if
(13:53):
you're an environmentalist, you probably just noticed eight things that
we said that are driving you crazy right now, because
it's like, well, what about this? What about that? We're
going to address that. Well, let's let's take the pro
fracking side, um first of all, Um, which right now
you know includes President Obama. You know, it's not like
we're not dividing this politically as best we can, like
(14:13):
he's in favor of it right now. And we also
need to point out that we had a listener mail
that point out that there was a there's an ep
A study that was commissioned in two thousand eleven that's
really the most comprehensive study ever and it will be done,
and I think it by the time this comes out,
some preliminary notes should be should be in, so we'll
(14:35):
learn a lot more soon and maybe the Obama administration
will come out against it after that. But as of now,
there's not a lot of hard science, which is problematic.
It is problematic. So on the pro side, you're gonna say,
you know what, we can these horizontal wells are really
sort of efficient, and that you're not gonna have above
ground hundreds and hundreds of wells. This one well can
(14:59):
go horse only for six thousand feet and do most
of the work out of sight. Yeah. Of course, counter
that with their like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands
of these wells fracking wells, and there's still a lot
going on above ground. There is because the whole operation.
While once they finished drilling, they removed the drill rig.
(15:21):
But now you have pump trucks coming in. It takes
about two hundred trucks to deliver a million gallons of water. Yeah. Man,
I saw this one mini documentary on this small town
in Pennsylvania. They're like on main Street and the guy
was like, yeah, we used to sit out here at
the sidewalk cafe, and literally while they were filming this,
it's like every other every third car that passed was
(15:42):
a huge tanker truck through like the middle of this
like little quaint town, carrying water to the site and
removing waste water and whatever else. So if it takes
two hundred trucks to carry one million gallons of water,
some of these some of these operations used ten million gallons,
so two thousand trucks just to carry it there. Then
(16:02):
you've got pump trucks and it, I mean, it is
an operation. Even though compared to oil drilling above ground,
it's it's less Yeah, it's more nocuous, that's right. So um,
another pro is that natural gas is pretty great and
you're you're not gonna find a lot of people argue
with that. It burns very cleanly. It's a good solution.
(16:23):
But it's the like we said over its lifetime. Some
contend that because of the practices, it's not any cleaner
than coal UM in the end. Yeah, like if you
burn it itself, if in a perfect world, as emits
one third the nitrogen oxides of coal, half of the
CO two, and just one percent of the sulfur oxides,
(16:46):
so it is like a lot cleaner. But then again,
as part of the fracking process, you have like all
these trucks that are using all this diesel that are
coming to and from the site. Right. Another problem with
it is methane release associated with UM tapping natural gas.
Apparently as much as eight percent of the methane in
a natural gas well is lost, and methane is bad.
(17:11):
It's a really serious greenhouse gas. It's worse than CEO
two as far as creating the greenhouse effect is concerned.
It's just there's typically less of it, and we usually
produce less than we produce CEO two, so there's an
air pollution factor to it as well. Yeah, that's true. Um.
We should probably point out if anyone's seen them the
documentary gas Land from two thousand ten, that was the
(17:31):
famous scene where the guy lights his tap water on fire. Impactful. Yeah,
did you see it. Yeah, and you know you can't
see that and not go holy crap, like they're letting
this happen. Um. As it turns out, in fairness, the
officials determined that it was a naturally occurring methane reserve
at this particular homeowners well, and it was not due
(17:52):
to fracking. Right, his well hit hit like a methane reserve,
So that would explain what his flaming water. But before
that came out, I think, um, truth Land, which was
I guess an answer to gas Land, came out. Did
you hear about that? Truth Land um was released by
(18:13):
Energy and Depth, which is a pro fracking group which
if you go into source watch, is funded by frank
by oil companies. But they released this documentary that said
nothing about the oil companies funding in and called it
truth Land. It was exposed to propaganda like right out
of the gate. But um, there's definitely this uh propaganda
(18:35):
war going on, um between you know, pro and con
sides speaking of prone country got any more prosum, I do,
but quickly but just because that guy and gas Land, Um,
it turned out to be a different thing. The companies
have been fined um for negligence with methane reaching water
supplies like that has happened, right, which is not supposed
(18:57):
to happen. Because if you're talking about like a the
Marcellus region, this this, that's the typically very deep deep shale,
like seven thousand, ten thousand feet, that's how far you
have to drill down before you hit that kickoff point. Right,
Your um groundwater reserves, your aquifers are gonna be a
(19:17):
few hundred to a thousand feet. So if you pass
through them and then you use your steel well board
and in case it and cement correctly, you're not you're
not going to get any release into that groundwater. And
the cracks that you're making the fractures are so deep
and small enough that they're not going to travel all
(19:37):
the way up thousands and thousands of feet up to
the aquifer just the pressure won't allow it. Supposedly, that's
like that, that's the that's the logic behind it now.
But there are things like coal bed methane fields that
are typically much more shallow and they're closer to aquifers,
and those are the ones. If you're tapping those using fracking,
(19:59):
you run amendous risk of of methane getting into the
water supply big time. But if you're doing deep shale
stuff as it stands now, all the evidence suggests that, No,
it's it's if you steal your well bore correctly, you
should be fine. Right, Well, that's the listener. Mail pointed
out that, um, you know, most of the issues of
(20:21):
the problems have been because of that concrete or incorrect Well,
you know this and that, not the fracking itself, but
it's the same people doing that, so it's still counts
as part of the problem with fracking. Yeah, you know,
you can't say, like, oh, the fracking segment of this
operation went well, but of course we had cracks all
up and down that ruined everything. So come on, that's semantics,
(20:43):
all right. Um, some of them. The more last couple
of pro arguments here, Josh, are UM revenue. It's a
big one. Seventeen thousand, six hundred jobs would be created
and a hundred million dollars in tax revenue if New
York State UM lifted their fracking ban. Yeah, so a
(21:07):
lot of jobs. A lot of these are former farming
communities that are somewhat depressed, and a lot of people
want those jobs. And anytime you're reducing our dependence on
foreign oil. That's a good thing, uh in a worldview.
So those are some of the pro arguments and they're
good ones. Yeah. So um, and again we should say
(21:28):
like the jury is still very much out, but there
is a lot of common sense criticism of fracking operations. Um,
some have already been discarded. Like a lot of people
are worried about that radio activity and um, the wastewater
that does come back up is slightly more radioactive than
(21:49):
it was when it went down, but not any That's,
as one professor put it, that's like the least of
your worries with fracking is the radio activity. Yeah. Another
one is that, um, it causes earthquakes, which is sensible.
You know, you're down there, you're drilling, you're blowing holes
into the shale thousands of feet down. How can you
not cause an earthquake. Apparently, earthquakes are associated with fracking,
(22:11):
but it's not the actual fracking. It's when you store
wastewater in a retention pond reservoir induced seismicity where it's
coming from. Yeah, So there are a couple of earthquakes
that were associated with fracking, but not from the fracking process,
from storing the wastewater. Again semantics, but so, but the
wastewater is probably the single most UM. I guess if
(22:36):
you're an environmentalist, that's the smoking gun, Like, that's the
one that you can't get around if you're an energy company,
because fracking uses tons of water, lots and lots of water,
I mean millions of gallons of water to get to
these and recovers maybe between fifteen and fifty of that water.
(22:58):
And then the water that is recovered is now way
more toxic than it was before. So you're taking water
from a municipal water supply, drinking water people, people, water
people need, sending it down into the earth, and then
getting maybe fifteen fifty back, and then the stuff you
do get back is like, what are we gonna do
(23:18):
with this? Yeah? Well they um, the oil companies will
say that they dispose of it in ways that uh
adequately match state regulations, UM, which may or may not
be adequate. Yeah, may or may not be in depending
on the state, the regulations are a little more lax
than others. UM. I know a lot of the wastewater
(23:39):
from Pennsylvania is deposited in surrounding states because I think
they have one of the more aggressive wastewater policies. So
they'll just say, ironically, New York, even though they banned
fracking for now allows Pennsylvania wastewater to be dumped there. Okay,
so there's at least one municipality that has banned uh,
fracking fluids, Like you can't buy or sell them or
(24:01):
possess them in the city, and you aren't allowed to
introduce any used fracking fluid into their waste treatment plants
like there their city waters and allowed to treat fracking fluid.
So and some of this water, like the wastewater, some
of it is reused for other fracking operations. Some of
it is just treat makes sense, Yeah, economically, it just
(24:23):
makes sense to get as much back as you can
and then use it again. And she's the same water
as much as possible. Yeah, that'd be a good idea.
Some is treated, you're gonna say, in like a wastewater plant. Um. Others,
like a lot of the stuff that comes back up
includes like ancient salt beds, salt from ancient seabeds, yeah, um.
And they use those on the to like clear off
(24:46):
snow and ice on roadways. But they're starting to outlaw
that as well. It's basically like the fracking industry went
unregulated for a very long time. Like it was unregulated
in that it was a drilling technique as as the
EPA was concerned, and it wasn't until this environmental um
group leaf sued. I guess the e p A over
(25:08):
some fracking techniques in the late nineties in Alabama before
the EPA finally started to regulate fracking. Wow, I'm sorry,
but I got a little, a little into it for
a second. No, I love it. Um. We were talking
about waste water. Some of that water also spills. Uh.
In June two thousand eleven, there was a well blowout
in Clearwater County, Pennsylvania. It's a gas explosion, sixteen hours
(25:33):
of uncontrolled spill about a million gallons of toxic waste
into a creek in Mohannon State Park. Um. I saw
this one documentary they interviewed of a guy that used
to one of the blue collar guys used to work
at the operation and he was like, yeah, you know,
some of them are heavily regulated and get visited by
inspectors and he went, but many thousands are not. And
(25:55):
he said, I worked at one of those and he said,
in the at the frack path, it was on top
of a like a mountain area. That's where the bar is. Yeah,
I got so. But he said, you would look at
this mountain on the side of it, and he said
it would looked like it was bleeding like this red
oozy water just tumbling down into like the forest below.
And he said, but yeah, some of them regulated, some
(26:17):
of them are or inspected, And I think it's probably
one of the same issues as uh the mountaintop uh
coal removal, is that you've got like a handful of
inspectors for these like thousands and thousands of operations, which
is not good. No, wasn't there and wasn't there a
spill of just not even wastewater bills, straight up fracking
(26:38):
fluid like all the additives, which by the way, are
for a very long time. UM energy companies said that
they're fracking fluid mixtures were proprietor proprietary and they wouldn't
reveal what was in there. The PA finally said, no,
you have to. We need a hundred percent transparency. So now,
well not a percent though, because there's still some uh
(27:01):
that is true. And dude, I saw that too, and
I was like, great, finally released the chemicals that you're
you're putting in there. And then they said that there's
a bit of a loophole in that some of them
can be still be listed as trade secrets. Well, it's
like trans fat, like you can list you can put
trans fats in your food still and say that has
zero grams of trans fat as long as it has
(27:23):
half a half a gram or less per serving of
trans fats. But you can still play that big zero
on there. It's very tricky. So some of the some
of the state's outlawed um or some of the states
said all right, you have to tell us at least
what your little trade secrets are, and we won't release them.
And then some states like Colorado believe it or not,
just said you don't even have to tell us what
(27:45):
your trade secret is. So well, the ones that have
been released, it it's very there's some unusual stuff in there.
Walnut holes, table salt, well that doesn't sound harmless, lemon
juice that sounds great, laundry detergent, anti freeze, Okay, it's
getting worse. Uh moosifiers. Apparently the price of this uh
(28:07):
uh i' what is it called I want to say Guar,
but it's not Guar, you knowir the band, But it's
like gar. It is like Gar, but instead of a W,
it's just a single us Amosifi are using ice cream,
and apparently cracking operations have driven the price of this up.
So much of the ice cream industry is like, what
the heck man? Like we we you just lowered our
(28:30):
profit margin significantly. Is that why Ben and Jerry's is
so expensive now? Ben and Jerry's is expensive because it's
so delicious. It is delicious. Chubby Hubby, that's a good one.
It's my favorite one New York superfudge chunk that white
chocolate in there. I like the offerings, the seasonal offerings
to like I had some pumpkin cheesecake the other day
that was really good. I have not tried that. It's delicious.
(28:53):
You know what else as good as there? Um it's
a blueberry graham Greek yogurt and we had that as
a very good too. But we can conside checked the
food the drop of a half. We've been doing good
this when we've been talking about nothing but fracking. That's true,
So they will um. Depending on what website you go to,
you will if you're worried about chemical additives. You will
(29:14):
see stats from people like Caliber and they say it
only makes up like point five percent of this mixture.
But what they don't say is that can still equal
like three hundred millions I'm sorry, three hundred tons of
chemical additives. Is that for a single operation? That's for
for four million gallons of water used in a fracking
operation would equal about three hundred tons of these additives
(29:37):
chemical additives. So there's a lot of this stuff. It
may be only a point five percent to two percent,
but um, there's still a lot of like many tons
of harmful chemicals. And again, what are you doing with it?
I mean, like what do you do with it afterwards?
If you could reuse it? Awesome, I have very few
problems with it. Um, But it's taking water from a
water supply, and it's in Texas. Fracking operations have been
(29:59):
shown to actually have exacerbated droughts in the area. Um. Yeah,
around the Marcellus region. There's apparently plenty of water, like
for example, in Pennsylvania in a single day, Uh, the
whole state uses about nine point five billion gallons of
water every day. The natural gas development fracking uses about
(30:20):
one point nine million gallons of the nine point five
billion every day, one point nine million to nine point
five billion, So it's insignificant. But in an area that's
already water stressed, that's a problem taking all that water
and using it for fracking, wasting it, and then what
do you do with it afterwards. Yeah, Well, at least
Texas has um apparently that's like the leading state as
(30:43):
far as having capabilities to have many more disposal wells
is what they're called there um. But in places like
Pennsylvania where the Marcella shale is, they don't have nearly
the kind of disposal wells at this point yet, which
leads to more um retreatment or treatment of the water
and dumping it in places like New York. When I
say they're dumping it, I mean I don't think they're like,
(31:05):
you know, putting a big tube out in the middle
of a field in New York and just letting it
run out everywhere. They better not be doing that. They
probably aren't. Um. I saw one stat where there is
one serious environmental concern for every one and fifty wells,
which if you multiply that over hundreds of thousands of
wells the reason a lot of people point out and
(31:26):
say it's not so dangerous. It's like, where the where's
the hard science on the effect right now? And this
guy was like, well, we're not seeing it quite yet.
Like come back in ten years at the rate that
we're going, uh, and you'll you'll see some problems. One
for every hundred and fifty operations h one serious environmental
concern could be spill, could be leaching into the soil.
(31:50):
Kind of depends. Um. And my whole thing is, if
it's really no big deal and it's totally safe and
it's just not going to impact anyone in any way, Um,
then why do you exclude it from the Safe Water
Drinking Act in two thousand five? Like why do you
take congressional measures measures to have the language of what
(32:13):
a pollutant is changed? Which is what happened in two
thousand five? Well, the Safe Water Drinking Act, um, the
Energy Policy Act of two thousand five. Um. And then
this is not political. This this happened. You can go
look it up, settled down. Dick Cheney did push for
these measures to go through. They went through the loophole.
(32:36):
The Haliburton loophole is what it's called um and I
will even give you the section if you go to
page one or two. Section two. It covers hydraulic fracturing
and it excludes in the Safe Water Drinking Act the
underground injection of fluids or propping agents other than diesel fuels.
That's the one that they still said, like, you can't
do pursue it too. Hydraulic fracturing related to oil, gas
(33:00):
or geothermal production activities. So basically, uh, you need to
keep your water safe unless it's hydraulic fracturing, fracturing, fractling,
hydro fracking. Furthermore, in the Clean Water Act, they change
the definition of pollutant to not include water, gas, or
other material which is injected into a well to facilitate
(33:23):
production of oil or gas. So if it's so clean
and no big deal, where are they going in and
changing the term for pollutant and saying exclude fracking from
Safe Water Drinking Act? You know, it's a great question.
And what was the guy behind pushing this? A former
Haliburton executive. It's like, I'm no smart guy, but I'm
(33:44):
no dummy either, you know, well, I think you know,
check the jury still out. As we said on this
and we're waiting for this hard science to come in.
But I feel like you should always be wary of
any group or industry or anyone on either side that
engages in a disinformation campaign that tries to sway the
(34:05):
public using underhanded tactics. That should always raise red flags
to you. And they're both doing it right now, which
is what's maddening for sure. UM and you anytime somebody's
selling you something and you find out that like they're
they're being underhanded, you should wonder about everything they're doing
across the board, Like with UM Energy and Development releasing
(34:28):
truth Land that was misinformation. That was a misinformation campaign.
They didn't say who released it, and there's yeah exactly,
And if you go onto the Energy and Development website
in particular, it reads really defensive, real defensive, like the
text of it does. I can't believe that they let
whatever whatever PR company put that together release it like that,
(34:49):
because it's it's like like, why are you asking you know,
almost like I'll bet you didn't know that. I'll bet
you didn't know that natural gas could blow up your
whole family if we wanted it to. Did happen to UM?
Well tell him first about the studies in This month
represents the third month in a row where a major
public university has taken a real black eye from being
(35:14):
exposed for being in bed with UM the fracking community. Yeah,
University of Texas study said that UM fracking is safe,
and um, it's really no big deal. Well, I don't
know if they said that. They said it was safe,
I don't want to paraphrase. Uh. And then they got
some independent reviews of Professor groats um study and they said, oh,
(35:34):
you know what, he's on the board of a natural
gas drilling company and received more than a million and
a half dollars in compensation and he didn't mention that
anywhere in his study. But what he did do is,
uh quit his job at the University of Texas afterward
and kind of retreat quietly into his corner full of money.
(35:54):
And the department head over him was forced to resign
to But the thing was, it wasn't just that he
didn't he didn't report that conflict of interest. He said that, Um,
there there was like flaws in the science. It was
a bad article, it was a bad study, and they
retracted it. And that's a big deal to retract the
scientific study. We're they're saying, like, we want that back.
(36:17):
Pretend we never said anything. UM. Penn State I tried
to open a shale development UM school, I guess UM,
and they couldn't because all the professors wouldn't wouldn't join, Like,
they couldn't get anybody to be a part of it.
And then there was one more I think that was
part of this little three months sweep that our buddy
(36:39):
Wade Goodwin over MPR was reporting. Yeah, the Shale Resources
Institute at the State University of New York at Buffalo
was closed after UM people wanted to know who was
funding its work and whether it's work was truly independent
into studying fracking. So they closed this whole cool down
(37:01):
because they found out that it was basically funded by
energy companies and that people were working for them rather
than the public good. Wow. So there are plenty more
anecdotal stories that we could not get to UM. If
you type in fracking timeline, there's a great UH timeline
oddly enough of UH of incidences and accidents. UM, and
(37:25):
you're you know, I realized that there's no way to
get oil and petroleum out of the earth without there
being accidents at some point. It's just one of the
dangers and unfortunate side effects. It's gonna happen. But um,
there are a lot of them out there. Wells exploding
U two thousand nine, a fracking waste water impoundment caught
fire exploded in develop, Pennsylvania. Soil tests conducted at the
(37:47):
site found arsenic at six thousand times of permissible level UM.
November to December two thousand seven, twenty two water wells
in Bainbridge, Ohio intaminated with drilling chemicals. One explodes, a
lot of methane explosions. One family was killed. Pretty flammable,
like when they lit their pilot light in their house.
(38:10):
Killed the family. So and what was it doing to
their brains leading up to that, just huffing it all
the time. Who knows that the levels were so high
it blew up their house. I mean, how long was
it acumulating? Well, anecdotally, you'll see interviews with people talking
it's just like Aaron Brockovich, like I went to drink
my water after they started this operation and it had
a little, uh, petroleum like residue on top, and it
(38:35):
tasted awful, and uh like they say don't even bathe
in it, and like this is what I'm supposed to drink.
I want to say, I want to really make sure
everyone one gets this. If you ask me, natural gas
is a really great fuel, Like it really does it, Chuck.
If we could convert the nation's transportation sector to natural
(38:58):
gas only UM cars and trucks, we would reduce UM
CEO two emissions by no, I'm sorry, we reduced CEO
carbon monoxide emissions, which makes small O T and UM
nitrous oxides by It really is a good idea, and
(39:19):
it probably will be this excellent bridge fuel between coal
and oil and whatever renewable we come up with, wind
solar in the future, and we could become energy independent
thanks to natural gas. And if fracking is the best
way to do it, that's awesome. But we have to
(39:41):
hold the people who are doing this feet to the fire,
to do it as safely as possible, to cut down
on these incidents that you're talking about, to not pollute water,
but to get it out as as reasonably inefficiently as possible,
but also as safely as possible, because if we don't
say you have to do this Martley and safely, they're
(40:01):
going to do it as cheaply as possible, because it's
a mandate of their corporate charters maximized profits, not maximized
public safety, which is why it's important for people to
be talking about this. It's not inherently bad, it just
has to be done correctly. It seems like to me
after researching this agreed um, And didn't he find a
new uh fracking method that does not use the chemicals
(40:22):
at all. Yeah, it's called jelled fracking. Uses a liquid
propane and um it when it when you pump it
down in there, it doesn't come back up. It turns
into vapor which escapes back up as a vapor which
you can capture and reuse, resell, or burn a fuel
for to power the site. That sounds pretty good. No
(40:45):
waste water. Jelled fracking doesn't even water at all. And
are people using this yet or is it? It's um,
they're patenting it. It's been used about a thousand times
since two thousand eight. I should probably say I invented it,
so I have an enormous financial stake in see, I
I admit my financial interests. Josh Jell's right, but um, yeah,
(41:07):
I ran across that today. It seemed like a pretty
good jam jelled fracking. Yeah. That. One of the issues
with that though, is like it probably requires some sort
of uh redoing of your current systems, which probably would
incur costs that companies don't want. I'm just guessing. But
plus you have to sacrifice like eight thousand cats just
to get the machine to start working. Who cares? This
(41:28):
is inhabited by a god that loves cats. Sacrifice. Just
leave my cats alone and you can have the rest
you got anything else? Now fracking has been done. Yeah,
We've been asked about this one for a while. So
if you want to learn more about fracking, you can
type that word f R A C K I n
G into the search part. How still works dot com?
(41:49):
And I said search parts. So it's time for listener mail, Josh.
Before we do listener mail, Yes, um our TV show
is going on the debut UH last week, hopefully to
great numbers, and we would like to remind everyone to
watch each and every week on Science Channel at ten pm. Yeah,
following uh Idiot Abroad which is our lead end, which
(42:11):
is great, and it's on Science Channel on Saturday's ten pm.
What else are you doing on Saturday night? Ten p m. Nothing.
That's why you should watch our show because you'll like it. Yeah,
if you're out DVR, and if you don't have a
DVR and you don't have TV or cable, you can
get these on iTunes for I think of Buck ninety nine. Yeah,
day after the premiere, so Sundays, that's right, So go
(42:33):
to iTunes and the search for stuff you should know
on the television side of things. And let me thank
you for your support. Yes, that's off to you, guys.
All right, listener mail, Yes, I'm gonna call this caving sucks.
This is from Michelle Marianni. Guys, I'm a Canadian speech
pathologists currently living in Manhattan. Last month, I went to
(42:53):
my honeymoon and belize insideed going a guid a cave tour.
I imagine a large opening in a rock, beautiful sparkling
waterfall and lights and rainbows coming from the ceiling, kind
of like you were talking about, Chuck. But what it
really turned out to be was five hours. It's total
darkness except for the headlight of course, high pressure water
rushing over jagged moving rocks. I swam, stumbled, crabbed, walked
(43:14):
for two and a half hours to reach a series
of seven waterfalls that I then climbed. Someday I look
back and laugh, but at the time I was screaming
to Jesus to save me. Luckily, my group thought I
was hilarious and enjoyed my jokes, but I kept my
tears on the inside. The guys were very well trained,
also very relaxed, and I never felt like we were
in too much danger. Um At first, I really tried
(43:38):
really hard enough to touch the precious centuries old stalag
tights as I stumbled through, but by hour or four
I was grabbing it anything I could as I was
going down, trying not to have my eyes stabbed out
by jagged rocks. I can't believe I let random tourists.
They let random tourists of these caves with no special
training or a fitness test. Living in New York City,
I've had some crazy experiences, so just inadvertently get taught
(44:01):
in the middle of a shootout and being quasi attacked
by a gentleman on PCP. But caving was the scariest
thing that has ever happened to me. Um. Had I
listened to this podcast before my honeymoon, I never would
have gone in disaster it would have been avoided. Thank
you for the delightful podcast. So much love, Michelle Marianni.
Thanks a lot, Michelle. Sorry about the PCP guy. Um, yeah,
(44:26):
that's really something. Maybe that requires its own email as well.
It's always PCP. I wonder how many times it really is.
Everyone's always like they were crazed out on PCP. Maybe
it was just ambient. They were eating a stick of
butter and coming for me. Um. Well, let's see if
you have a commentary about how something that we thought
(44:47):
was awesome actually sucks in real life. We want to
hear about that. Um. And if you have any kind
of fracking operation in your neighborhood, we'd love to hear
about that as well. Pro con whatever. Um, you can
and tweet to us at s Y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff
you Should Know, and you can send us an email
to Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com. For more on
(45:15):
this and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff works
dot com. M brought to you by the two thousand
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