Fracking: Destruction of the American Dream for Short Term Profit

Part IV: Pick Your Poison – Earthquakes, Train Bombs, Leaking Pipelines

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has linked earthquake activity in Arkansas, Ohio, Texas, Colorado, and Oklahoma, to fracking activity. Oklahoma has seen a 50% increase in earthquake activity since last year. Since 2009, when the fracking boom began, earthquake activity has been 40 times higher than in the previous 30 years. Most of which are only 2.5 on the Richter scale, but in 2011, one earthquake in Prague, Oklahoma reached 5.7 on the Richter scale and destroyed 14 homes. The cause is related not to the fracking process itself, but to the disposal of the waste water into deep injection wells.

Basically, to understand how the fracking-related activity causes an earthquake, think of an air hockey table. When the table is turned off and the compressed air is not flowing through the table, you have your puck sitting motionless on the table. If you turned the table diagonally slowly, the puck still stays motionless in place as it is held by static friction. The surface of the puck and table appear relatively smooth to the naked eye, but if you looked at the surfaces with a microscope you would see a surface with all kinds of cracks, nooks, and crannies, so the surfaces of the puck and table interlock. In physics this specific contact force is referred to as a static friction force. Turn the air hockey table on the puck flies off as the cushion of air acts like a lubricant. A fault line is basically when you have two huge pieces of the Earth’s crust separated by a fracture but pressing against each other, and they are held in place by static friction force. Well, you force the waste water into that fault line and it is just like turning the air hockey table on; the fault slips, and this leads to a seismic event. Outside of recycling the same water for another fracking, the industry can’t clean the water to the point where it can be released back onto the surface. There has been occasional dumping of fracked waste water on the surface, all of which are illegal.

Senator James Inhofe, who consistently fights against any regulation on the oil industry and denies global warming even exists, insists that it would be wrong and arrogant for man to claim he can do any significant damage to the Earth because Genesis 8:22 of the Bible insists that is not within man’s ability to do so. Unfortunately, evidence proves otherwise. For instance, Youngstown, Ohio experienced nearly 12 earthquakes in a row, and the epicenter seemed to be the North Star 1 deep injection well. Unfortunately, man has proven that he is quite effective at damaging the world. Although some politicians seem to fall back on them, religious arguments made in the name of maintaining the status quo among ongoing environmental crisis do far more harm than good.

The fracking boom has also put stress on an inadequate infrastructure in terms of transporting the resulting crude. The volume of crude oil shipped by rail in the United State increased from 9,500 carloads per year in 2008 to 400,000 per year carloads in 2013. Much of the oil is from the Bakken region in North Dakota, and the oil produced from fracked wells is far more flammable. Just this past Wednesday, April 30, 2014, we saw a fiery train derailment in Lynchburg, Virginia. About 15 train tanker cars derailed and exploded, many of which plunged into the James River, and continued burning thick plumes of black acrid smoke for hours. James River is an important source of drinking water for Richmond, VA, and as a result, intakes from the river had to be shuttered due to the oil leaking into the river. In January, another spectacular series of fireball explosions were witnessed as 17 tanker cars were derailed in Plaster Rock, New Brunswick of Canada. This last December, there was a train derailment which spilled 400,000 gallons of crude oil onto the prairie outside of Fargo, North Dakota which led to a fiery explosion. Last November, 2013, a train derailment shipping fracked oil led to fires that lasted nearly a week in Alabama. In the summer of 2013 a runaway train transporting 72 tankers of Bakken crude careened into the Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic, killing 47 people and incinerating the downtown. Quite literally, over half of Lac-Megantic is utterly destroyed as a million and a half gallons spilled into the town. There is a reason that rail workers now nickname these tanker trains as ‘bomb trains.’

As a side note, transporting the fracked oil by truck is even more hazardous with 20 incidents per billion-ton miles versus 2 incidents per billion ton miles by train.

These accidents have also fed into an argument that perhaps pipelines are so much better as there have been 0.6 incidents per billion-ton miles. However, the number of highly damaging pipeline spills just continues to pile-up as well. Just this past March, the Sunoco run Mid-Valley Pipeline had a 5-inch crack that led to spilling 20,000 gallons of crude oil into the Glen Oak Nature Preserve, just 20 miles north of Cincinnati, Ohio. That was the 40th such incident along this 1000 mile pipeline that runs from Texas to Michigan since 2006. Regarding pipeline incidents as a whole, since 1986 there have been nearly 8,000 significant pipeline incidents, resulting in more than 500 deaths, more than 2,300 injuries, and nearly $7 billion in damage. More than half the incidents occurred in three states: Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. Though actually last year, in North Dakota, 20,600 barrels of oil spilled in a wheat field in what is considered to be the worse onshore oil spill disaster in the history of the country. The pipeline was managed by Tesoro Logistics and was carrying fracked oil from the Bakken shale formation. Also last year, an ExxonMobil pipeline spill that was very notable occurred in the residential area of Mayflower, Arkansas. What makes it so noteworthy is the people there had no idea they were living near the pipeline till the leak and spill occurred. It is still not known how much oil was spilled but estimates suggest 5,000 barrels at least and it has adversely impacted the health of the residents who experienced symptoms of nausea, shortness of breath, burning in the back of the throat, and so forth.

A tar sands oil pipeline spill occurred in Battle Creek, Michigan back in 2010 which is a much heavier bitumen oil that sinks in water. The oil company, Enbridge, insisted it should be able to effectively clean the area of oil within one month. Well, it is now well into the year 2014, they are still cleaning the area, residents are very angry and continually sick, with the same type of symptoms mentioned in the Mayflower incident. This should be quite the red flag as to why the Keystone XL pipeline should not be completed, as America has already experienced one very bad tar sands pipeline related spill.

Oil pipeline Kinder Morgan just this past May 5, put out a comprehensive report to settle the matter of what is the best way to transport oil. Their argument was, ‘yes, there are lots of pipeline spills, but spills create jobs and thus are great for economic growth.’ Basically, as quoted directly from their report:

“Spill response and cleanup creates business and employment opportunities for affected communities, regions, and cleanup service providers.”

Sometimes reality becomes a satire of itself.

The fracking boom has also led the industry to throw workplace safety standards right out the window. From 2008 to 2012, the number of oilfield related deaths totaled 545, with 216 occurring in the state of Texas, a 7.2% increase for that state from the prior five year period. Among the other states recording increased fatalities during the boom, North Dakota reported a more than 340 percent increase to 31 fatalities and Pennsylvania saw a 300 percent increase to 20 deaths. Oklahoma saw 68 deaths, up 24 percent.

So, looking overall at the fracking boom and seeing how it is impacting our society. We have to ask ourselves, why are we doing this?

From the viewpoint of dealing with climate change, the notion that fracking provides cheap natural gas and is a good bridge to a move toward renewable energy sources is pushed. Yes, natural gas is cleaner and it has half the carbon content of crude oil, but it’s still putting carbon into the atmosphere. So, wouldn’t we be better off leapfrogging into renewable energy sources? Next, the industry is primarily targeting oil. If there is no convenient pipeline or simple way to transport the natural gas from the fracking well that has struck oil, the natural gas is burned up in a flare stack at the site anyway.

Another big argument has been ‘American energy independence for the next 100 years.’ There is actually quite a raging debate among geophysicist on this matter. Evidence seems to indicate that unlike conventional wells, fracked wells decline in productivity by 70% in one year. It also appears that some of the best fracked sites have already been hit, so with such a law of diminishing returns overhanging this method of oil production, the notion of America becoming the ‘next Saudi Arabia’ of oil seems very unrealistic.

The actions of corporations and government for short term profits and savings always place a heavier burden on society. For example, your cable company cuts down the size of its phone rooms and replace their service department with a lengthy automated menu. Their savings is a cost on your valuable time as your trapped on the phone desperately trying to reach a live person. The state government saves money by cutting down on road repair leaving streets ridden with potholes. The cost is passed onto the people as this ultimately leads to higher car repair bills as auto suspension systems are damaged. In both situations, the decisions may result in economic growth on a business or municipal balance sheet, but result in cost to the people.

The short term profits gained by the oil and gas sector are ultimately placing a very heavy cost on society in terms of shrinking and polluting the water supply, lowering the air quality, creating earthquakes, leading to dangerous oil spills in transit, and increasing worker deaths. We need to question if this is worth the cost to our society. What leads to a higher gross domestic product (GDP) for the nation, is shrinking wealth for the people, as the public pays for the consequences.

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