Today, I was looking around online for some more great fracking information to pass on to you, my loyal readers. Wow! There is a lot of news popping up all over. Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and even Canada, are all suffering the bad side effects caused by raping the Earth for her treasures.
Jessica Ernst, “We were used as test tubes” a post over on Life Essential-Water. Jessica is from Canada, and believe it or not, they are running neck and neck with the USA and hydraulic fracturing wells. I really do not understand how the engineers and other planners of this destruction figure that breaking apart the inner shell of our Mother Earth will not cause any kind of damage. Earthquakes, accidental spills of fracking fluid, intentional dumping of the used fracking fluids, contaminating water and land, killing fish and wild life, and yes, even humans.
This story out of Michigan is just a sample of how far big oil will go to get what they want.
(Reuters) – Late in the summer of 2010, hundreds of farmers in northern Michigan were fuming.
All had signed leases with local brokers permitting drillers to tap natural gas and oil beneath their land. All were demanding thousands of dollars in bonuses they had been promised in exchange. But none knew for certain whom to go after.
That’s because the company rejecting their leases hadn’t signed them to begin with. In fact, the company issuing the rejections wasn’t much of a business at all. It was a shell company – a paper-only firm with no real operations – called Northern Michigan Exploration LLC.
One jilted land owner, Eric Boyer-Lashuay, called to complain to the broker who had handled his lease. Northern, he recalls saying, is “a shell company … a blank door with no one behind it.”
Today, he puts it this way: “It was all a fake, all a scam.”
Northern has voided hundreds of land deals, and was indeed a facade – a shell company created so that one of America’s largest energy companies could conceal its role in the leasing spree, a Reuters investigation has found. Oklahoma-based Chesapeake Energy Corp. (CHK.N), the nation’s second-largest gas driller, was behind the entire operation.
Just north of the Jersey shore, a truck carrying drilling mud had an accident the possibly contaminated a local creek. The full report is here. Make sure you watch the video.
And let us not forget the EPA. They are supposed to protect the environment, right? Well I would like to know just how this helps at all:
EPA report: Pavillion water samples improperly tested
By JEREMY FUGLEBERG Star-Tribune energy reporter | Posted: Tuesday, December 27, 2011From the moment the Pavillion water samples were bottled by testers with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the clock began to tick.
The testers zipped the bottles tightly in clear plastic bags, surrounded them with ice in two small coolers, and shipped them overnight to the agency’s laboratory in Golden, Colo., for analysis.
There, the samples waited as the deadline neared for them to be accurately tested. By the time the samples were tested, the EPA-mandated hold times had come and gone.
“Maintenance of the laboratory floor” caused the hold, according to the EPA’s lab data report on the April 2011 samples.
The overdue analysis of those samples was part of the data that underpinned the EPA’s eventual conclusions, released in a draft report in early December. The agency’s key conclusion: Natural gas wells in the area, most developed using hydraulic fracturing, might have harmed groundwater.
The report was quickly slammed by the oil and gas industry but trumpeted by environmental groups. Yet the EPA’s own data — including details not mentioned in the draft report — indicates the agency’s conclusions are partially based on improperly analyzed samples from six private drinking-water wells and two EPA-drilled deep monitoring wells in Pavillion.
The EPA also found contamination in pure water control samples, didn’t purge the test wells properly before gathering samples and didn’t mention in its report whether it tested water carried by a truck used in well drilling, say officials with the Wyoming Water Development Commission who, because of their expertise on water wells, reviewed the EPA’s publicly available information.
I am going to end this post with a video. This does a really good job of explaining the whole fracking process and what it does to the environment.
