FRACKED: A PERSONAL ACCOUNT OF LIVING ON THE SHALE

From theclean.org:

FRACKED: A PERSONAL ACCOUNT OF LIVING ON THE SHALE

October 26, 2011: Nothing can prepare a person for the reality of high-volume "fracking"; certainly not the coaxing of suave salesmen who convince landowners to sign leases by telling them that they've won "the natural gas sweepstakes." And certainly not their description of benign completed gas wells that stand in green meadows, silently pumping money out of the ground.

When the frackers come, they arrive like an invading army:

Trucks by the hundreds, tankers, dump trucks, drilling rigs, fracking rigs. Five-acre drilling pads were bulldozed in the middle of farmers' best fields, million-gallon ponds were installed, roads were built, woods and fields were trenched and bulldozed for tie lines. Drilling rigs went up at an unbelievable rate. From one spot on our farm, I counted eight rigs.

Then the generators started. You could hear them a half-mile away.

Then the pumping stations - small, industrial sites with buildings and pipes sticking up out of the ground.

This is the scene as described by Libby Foust. Her family farm was the site of some of the first Marcellus wells in Bradford County, Pennsylvania.

Read the rest of the blog post at: theclean.org

Pennsylvania Environment Department orders water pipeline for residents affected by natural gas contamination

The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in Pennsylvania plans to build an $11.8 million water pipeline to supply water to homeowners whose wells were contaminated by drilling operations in the Marcellus Shale.  The pipeline would supply water to 18 residences at a cost of $650,000 per home, and the cost will be charged to the Texas driller Cabot Oil & Gas Corp.  Cabot is calling the decision "unfounded, irrational, and capricious", but the DEP says that the waterline is the only certain remedy for homeowners with contaminated wells. 

In advance of the decision by the DEP, Cabot took out ads in the Susquehanna County region addressed to the "Citizens of Pennsylvania" denying it caused the pollution and saying that it will fight the allegations.  Cabot says it was not responsible for natural gas that migrated into the homeowners' wells.  The residents have sued Cabot and declined to accept having new wells installed on their properties as they no longer trust water coming from the local aquifer. 

The DEP contends that it has collected "overwhelming" evidence that Cabot's gas wells were poorly constructed and were the source of major leaks of gas.