The president of plastics at Brightmark stands amid 900 tons of waste plastic in Indiana. Their purpose is to turn plastic waste into diesel fuel, naphtha and wax.

From an Article by James Bruggers, Inside Climate News, September 11, 2022

ASHLEY, Indiana—The bales, bundles and bins of plastic waste are stacked 10 feet high in a shiny new warehouse that rises from a grassy field near a town known for its bright yellow smiley-face water tower.

Jay Schabel exudes the same happy optimism. He’s president of the plastics division of Brightmark Energy, a San Francisco-based company vying to be on the leading edge of a yet-to-be-proven new industry—chemical recycling of plastic.

Walking in the warehouse among 900 tons of a mix of crushed plastic waste in late July, Schabel talked about how he has worked 14 years to get to this point: Bringing experimental technology to the precipice of what he anticipates will be a global, commercial success. He hopes it will also take a bite out of the plastic waste that’s choking the planet.

“When I saw the technology, I said this is the sort of thing I can get out of bed and work on to change the world,” said Schabel, an electrical engineer. “My job is to set it up and get it running,” he said of the $260 million, 120,000 square foot building and adjacent chemical operations. “Then perpetuate it around the world.”

But the company, which broke ground in Ashley in 2019, has struggled to get the plant operating on a commercial basis, where as many as 80 employees would process 100,000 tons of plastic waste each year in a round-the-clock operation.

Schabel said that was to change in August, with its first planned commercial shipment of fuel to its main customer, global energy giant BP. But a company spokesman said in mid-August that the date for the first commercial shipment had been pushed back to September, with “full-scale operation…extending through the end of the year and into 2023.”

Even with that new timetable, the plant, located along Interstate 69 in the northeast corner of Indiana, Brightmark faces ongoing economic, political and — environmental critics and some scientists say — technical headwinds. Its business model must contend with plastics that were never designed to be recycled. U.S. recycling policies are dysfunctional, and most plastics end up in landfills and incinerators, or on streets and waterways as litter.

Environmental organizations with their powerful allies in Congress are fighting against chemical recycling and the technology found in this plant, known as pyrolysis, in particular, because they see it as the perpetuation of climate-damaging fossil fuels. “The problem with pyrolysis is we should not be producing more fossil fuels,” said Judith Enck, a former regional director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the founder and executive director of Beyond Plastics, an environmental group. “We need to be going in the opposite direction. Using plastic waste as a feedstock for fossil fuels is doubling the damage to the environment because there are very negative environmental impacts from the production, disposal and use of plastics.”

The global plastics crisis is well documented with annual plastic production soaring from 20 million metric tons to 400 million metric tons over the last five decades. Nearly all are made from fossil fuels and much is designed to resist biodegradation and can last in the environment for hundreds of years, increasingly as microscopic bits that are ubiquitous and have invaded the human body.

The amount of plastic discharged into the ocean could reach up to 53 million metric tons per year by 2030, or roughly half of the total weight of fish caught from the ocean annually, according to a December report by a committee of scientists with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

The U.S. produces the most plastic waste in the world, nearly 300 pounds per person in a year, the report found. But only a small percentage, less than 6 percent, of plastics used by consumers in the U.S. actually get recycled, a recent analysis of EPA data by Beyond Plastics and the Last Beach Cleanup found.

What does get recycled, such as soda bottles, typically goes through a mechanical process involving sorting, grinding, cleaning, melting and remolding, often into other products. But there are limits to the kinds of plastics that are acceptable for mechanical recycling and how many times these plastics can be re-used in this way.

Chemical recycling, called advanced recycling by the chemical industry— which touts it as almost a Holy Grail of solutions—seeks to turn the harder-to-recycle kinds of plastic waste back into plastics’ basic chemical building blocks. Pyrolysis is among the chemical recycling technologies getting the most attention, with industry representatives saying pyrolysis can turn mixtures of plastic waste into new plastic, fuel or chemicals for making everything from detergents to cars to clothing.

With these plastic wastes, such as grocery bags, cups, lids, containers and films, the industry claims, pyrolysis heats them at high temperatures in a vessel, with little or no oxygen and sometimes with a chemical catalyst, to create synthetic gases, a synthetic fuel called pyrolysis oil, and a carbon char waste product. It’s a process that’s been around for centuries, used for making tar from timber for wooden ships in the 1600s, for example, or coke from coal for steelmaking in the last century.

Brightmark describes its plant as the “largest-scale pyrolysis facility in the world.” It is designed to take plastic waste hauled in from municipal and industrial sources. The waste is cleaned, chopped up and pressed into small pellets, then fed into pyrolysis tanks and heated by burning natural gas. The synthetic gas created by the pyrolysis process is then mixed with the natural gas to generate temperatures between 800 degrees and 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, Schabel said.

“We flush the molecules out and condense them,” Schabel said, describing what the high heat does to the plastic waste. “We are hitting them with a thermal hammer to break them into pieces. They want to come back together but we control how they come back together.”

The char is sent to a landfill as non-hazardous waste, he said, and the pyrolysis oil goes to a small-scale refinery behind the warehouse, where it’s separated into low-sulfur diesel fuel, flammable liquid naphtha, and wax for industrial uses or candles. “We call this a hyper-local oil well,” Schabel said on the tour. But a lot of what comes into the plant gets lost in the process.

In a document Brightmark filed in December with the EPA, the company acknowledged that just 20 percent of the plant’s output is its primary product — what it described as fuels. Most of the rest, 70 percent, is the synthetic gas that the company said is combusted with natural gas to generate heat, with 20 percent of that syngas burned away in a flare. The rest is the char, according to the filing.

The company now disputes its own numbers, with a spokeswoman saying company officials are working to get them corrected to reflect a larger percentage of output as diesel fuel or naphtha. But the EPA filing plays into one of the sharpest criticisms of pyrolysis — that it’s not really plastics recycling at all.

With pyrolysis, “what you make is what I would call, and I grew up in New Jersey, so forgive me, a dog’s breakfast of compounds,” said University of Pittsburgh Professor Eric Beckman, a chemical engineer with a Ph.D. in polymer science. “It’s like everything you can think of, gases, liquids, solids,” he said.

If plastic waste could be turned only into naphtha, a bonafide building block for plastics, a company could operate what Beckman called a closed loop, and circular system for plastics that could be considered recycling, he said. But that is not what pyrolysis does.

“And this is where it gets controversial,” Beckman said, adding: “because you have people doing this who are saying, ‘We’re recycling it.’ No, you’re not. You’re burning it.” And any time that fossil fuels are being burned, he said, they are emitting greenhouse gas and air pollutants.

Jan Dell, a chemical engineer who has worked as a consultant to the oil and gas industry and now runs The Last Beach Cleanup, a nonprofit that fights plastic waste, agreed. “The fact that pyrolysis operations have to burn so much of the material to get to the high temperatures is a fundamental flaw,” she said.

>>> To be continued tomorrow …….

Antero Water Treatment Plant & Waste Dump

Letter from Barbara Daniels, Nicholas County, WV, August 4, 2014

With three high-priced lawyers and an imported team of experts, Antero Resources LLC and the WV DEP recently steam-rolled over a one-man appeal to temporarily stop construction of a 447-acre frack-waste dump in Doddridge County at the Ritchie border.

WV Mountain Party Environmental Justice Committee member, Tom Rhule, had compiled an extensive roster of damning facts, complete with subpoenas for WV officials and their documents. However, though accepting Antero’s experts, the Environmental Quality Board quashed Rhules’s subpoenas, saying there would be plenty of time for his witnesses at the September permit hearing–after the dump was fully operational.

Antero claims this facility will solve a problem Antero causes. Every time a natural gas well is horizontally hydrofractured, millions of gallons of toxic, radioactive waste are produced. Each well is fracked up to ten times in 20 years, with as many as 24 wells per pad. The water for this is typically drawn from local rivers and streams.

Where the water goes after it’s thus been poisoned is a major problem. Although Antero’s fracking operations have ruined numerous water wells in Doddridge County, the facility will purify waste water only enough for reuse in fracking. It will pollute every fresh water source it contacts.

Moreover, Antero proposes to transport the resulting radioactive waste to an out of state licensed facility. Yet that company has never been required to either transport or pay for proper disposal of radioactive sludge before. So proper enforcement is extremely suspect. The WV DEP has a history of letting frackers dangerously cut corners, especially for radioactive frack waste disposal.

Some 98% of the toxic portion will be landfilled as “salts” at the unbelievable rate of up to 2100 TONS EVERY DAY FOR 25 YEARS. At that rate, with Antero’s claimed 2% of chemical compounds still in the salt, this landfill will eventually be a hazard for taxpayers to deal with. Frack-waste is exempt from all federal environmental protections, including the Superfund law, and the permit requires no pollution controls for leaching and runoff after Antero leaves.

Further, the WV DEP permit in question does not require Antero to monitor for the most cancer-causing toxins associated with frack waste, either in its landfill leachate OR its recycled fluids. In fact, The WV DEP’s monitoring methods fail to even come close to adequately testing for the carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic toxins common to frack waste from either the “Clearwater” industrial fluid recycling center or the landfill.

The most alarming part of this dump, however, may be the pits. The landfill will occupy 134 acres. Although the permit doesn’t tell us, after buildings and such, about 250 acres should be left. Are these covered with sludge pits? Antero is receiving an average of 600 tanker-loads of waste daily and settling the solids in these pits is the first step.

As the pits fill, this vast area will begin emitting enormous, cancer-causing plumes of toxins that spread everywhere. According to a University of Maryland study, such frack-related clouds have reached communities hundreds of miles away.

The stay of the Antero construction permit was denied by the WV Environmental Quality Board July 21. Mr. Rhule had given ample reasons for personal harm and his access to evidence was barred by the Board. Nevertheless, the EQB grounds for denial were that he would not be harmed, and that he failed to supply adequate evidence!

Antero’s stated reasons for denial were: 1. They would lose millions already invested in construction, brazenly assuming that their money is worth more than lives, 2. The construction itself would not harm Rhule — which in essence denies that a toxic-waste dump harms taxpayers.

Large corporations obviously have far too much control over West Virginia regulators. But we have the power to change this if informed. The hearing on the permit is scheduled for September 14 at the EQB courtroom, 601 57th St. (Kanahwa City) in Charleston. Rhule, the WV Rivers Coalition and Lissa Lucas (candidate-WV House) will be separately challenging this extremely dangerous permit. You are invited.

OMG: Maybe the Bible is a Chinese hoax?

Climate of Capitulation — An Insider’s Account of State Power in a Coal Nation

Book By Vivian E. Thomson, University of Virginia (MIT Press), April 2017

Overview –

The United States has pledged to the world community a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 26–28 percent below 2005 levels in 2025. Because much of this reduction must come from electric utilities, especially coal-fired power plants, coal states will make or break the U.S. commitment to emissions reduction. In Climate of Capitulation, Vivian Thomson offers an insider’s account of how power is wielded in environmental policy making at the state level. Thomson, a former member of Virginia’s State Air Pollution Control Board, identifies a “climate of capitulation” in state government—a deeply rooted favoritism toward coal and electric utilities in states’ air pollution policies.

Thomson narrates three cases involving coal and air pollution from her time on the Air Board. She illuminates the overt and covert power struggles surrounding air pollution limits for a coal-fired power plant just across the Potomac from Washington, for a controversial new coal-fired electrical generation plant in coal country, and for coal dust pollution from truck traffic in a country hollow.

Thomson links Virginia’s climate of capitulation with campaign donations that make legislators politically indebted to coal and electric utility interests, a traditionalistic political culture tending to inertia, and a part-time legislature that depended on outside groups for information and bill drafting. Extending her analysis to fifteen other coal-dependent states, Thomson offers policy reforms aimed at mitigating the ingrained biases toward coal and electric utilities in states’ air pollution policy making.

About the Author–

Vivian E. Thomson is Professor in the Departments of Environmental Sciences and Politics and Director of the Environmental Thought and Practice BA Program at the University of Virginia.

Review Commentary –

“Vivian Thomson kicks ash and names names in this no-holds-barred exposé on the coal industry and its efforts to seize control of the environmental policy apparatus. Climate of Capitulation is a must-read at a time when entrenched fossil fuel interests have strengthened their hand and pose a heightened threat to efforts to avert dangerous climate change.”

—Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science, Penn State University; coauthor, with Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles, of The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy

>>>>>>>>>>

“Voluntary commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Climate Convention will only be implemented if they are in the self-interest of the parties involved. It would seem, for now, that national authorities in the United States fail to perceive their strong self-interest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, emission reductions in the United States may depend mostly on action at the state and local levels. Vivian Thomson shows, in this book, how these problems are considered at the state level and what can be done to facilitate state-level action.”

—José Goldemberg, former President, University of São Paulo; former Secretary of State for Science and Technology, Brazil; Time magazine “Hero of the Environment”

You can help protect our water!

Your Comments are Needed on Antero Landfill Project

Announcement from WV Rivers Coalition, August 22, 2016

Public Hearing Tomorrow, August 23, 2016, in West Union, WV

The WVDEP is currently accepting comments on two permit applications for Antero’s landfill project, 401 water quality certification and NPDES stormwater construction permit. The permit application for these large projects should be very detailed, but both lack all the information that WVDEP needs to certify the projects will not significantly impact our water.

The proposed Antero landfill and wastewater treatment facility encompasses approximately 486 acres located in Doddridge and Ritchie Counties, view our fact sheet on the project here. The facility would treat fracking wastewater for re-use and dispose of the salt byproducts in the attached landfill. It is still unclear how they plan to dispose of the sludge byproduct. The project would impact 89 streams and 11 wetlands and is located within Hughes River Water Board’s drinking water protection area. To submit comments to WVDEP on Antero’s 401 application click here and to submit comments on Antero’s stormwater permit click here. 

View WV Rivers’ comments on the 401 application and stormwater permit. 

The WVDEP is holding a public hearing on the Antero stormwater permit tomorrow, 8/23/16, in West Union, WV. Attend the public hearing and use your voice to protect our water!

What: Antero Landfill Stormwater Permit Public Hearing
When: August 23, 2016 at 6:00 p.m.
Where: Doddridge County High School Auditorium, 79 Bulldog Dr, West Union, WV 26456

Pacific Ocean Garbage Accumulating

Solar Impulse Pilot: ‘I Flew Over Plastic Waste as Big as a Continent’

From an Article by Lorraine Chow, EcoWatch.com , April 25, 2016

As the Solar Impulse 2 made its historic 62-hour flight from Hawaii to California without fuel, pilot Bertrand Piccard personally saw the horrific amount of plastic in our oceans.

While flying above the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Piccard sent out a tweet to Boyan Slat, the 21-year-old founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup.

“I flew over plastic waste as big as a continent,” Piccard wrote. “We must continue to support projects like @BoyanSlat Ocean Cleanup,” referring to Slat’s ambitious project of ridding the world’s oceans of plastic trash.

The Ocean Cleanup describes itself as the “world’s first feasible concept to clean the oceans of plastic” and has garnered widespread public admiration and support especially for Slat, a former aerospace engineering student who proposed the concept when he was only 17.

Piccard and Slat also spoke on Friday as the solar-powered plane made its risky journey. It’s no surprise that the pilot and the young inventor linked up—both are using innovative technology to promote the greater good of the planet. Piccard and the Solar Impulse team plan to fly around the world using only the power of the sun to promote clean transportation and other environmental causes.

“We have demonstrated it is feasible to fly many days, many nights, that the technology works,” fellow pilot Andre Borschberg told the Associated Press. “I think innovation and pioneering must continue,” Piccard added. “It must continue for better quality of life, for clean technologies, for renewable energy. This is where the pioneers can really express themselves and be successful.”

Slat has spoken before about the necessity to protect our oceans. “The oceans are the most important life—support systems of our planet,” he said in 2014. “It regulates the climate, it produces oxygen. The vast majority of biodiversity can be found in the ocean.”

The Ocean Cleanup involves a massive static platform and V-shapped booms that passively corrals plastics with wind and ocean currents. If all goes to plan, the project will officially launch in 2020 and be the longest floating structure ever deployed in the ocean.

Similarly, both parties have experienced hiccups along the way. Before arriving in California, the plane, the Solar Impulse 2, had been grounded in Hawaii for nine months as it underwent repairs after its record-breaking five-day trip from Japan to Hawaii in July.

As for the Ocean Cleanup project, despite a 530-page feasibility study, some critics and scientists have written off Slat’s idea on mechanical design and ecological impacts. Dr. Marcus Eriksen, the co-founder of 5 Gyres, offered a number of constructive suggestions for the project.

Still, it’s very clear that the environment needs whatever help it can get, from curbing our reliance on dirty energy to putting a stop to plastic waste. The world’s oceans and marine life are suffering from a devastating plastic crisis, with 8 million metric tons of plastic waste dumped into our oceans every year. Plastic pollution is only getting worse as consumer use of plastic and plastic-intensive goods intensifies in emerging countries.

Not only that, an alarming new study by the University of Delaware physical oceanographer Tobias Kukulka reported that there might be much more plastic than what’s estimated.

“My research has shown that ocean turbulence actually mixes plastics and other pollutants down into the water column despite their buoyancy,” Kukulka said, according to UD Daily. “This means that surface measurements could be wildly off and the concentration of plastic in the marine environment may be significantly higher than we thought.”

West Virginia Marcellus Shale Drilling Wastes (Bill Hughes Photo)

‘Marcellus shale waste is the elephant in the room that gas operators and regulators alike ignore,’ says environmentalist

From an Article by Deirdre Fulton, Common Dreams Blog, April 3, 2015

A slew of studies released this week, each examining different aspects of the fossil fuel extraction method known as ‘fracking,’ provide new evidence of problems with the practice.

The first, an investigation by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the FracTracker Alliance into oil and gas company violations, found that information about such transgressions is only publicly accessible in three states.

“Although 36 states have active oil and gas development, most state and federal oil and gas regulatory agencies publish little or no information regarding oil and gas companies’ compliance records,” reads the report, Fracking’s Most Wanted: Lifting the Veil on Oil and Gas Company Spills and Violations (pdf).

“Yet in states where data are available, we found significant violations both in number and severity,” it continues. “These violations include a wide range of dangerous infractions like improper well casing, illegal air pollution, failure to conduct safety tests, improper construction or maintenance of waste pits, various spills, contamination of drinking water sources or other water bodies, and non-functional blow-out preventers.”

Based on its findings, the report recommends the creation of a centralized and publicly accessible data hub on “all oil and gas enforcement activities, including citizen complaints, inspections, violation notices, and penalties issued, and incidents, including spills, leaks, blowouts, and worker injuries.”

The NRDC also makes policy recommendations related to holding violators accountable and keeping “repeat offenders” out of local communities.

Hazardous Waste

In Wasting Away: Four states’ failure to manage oil and gas waste in the Marcellus and Utica Shale (pdf), the environmental non-profit Earthworks examines how Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and New York neither regulate oil and gas development wastes as hazardous, nor can they assure the public that they are protected from exposure to fracking byproducts.

“Thirty years ago the Environmental Protection Agency exempted oil and gas waste from federal classification as hazardous, not because the waste isn’t hazardous, but because EPA determined state oversight was adequate,” said report lead author and Earthworks’ eastern program coordinator Nadia Steinzor.

However, she continued, “our analysis shows that states aren’t keeping track of this waste or disposing of it properly. States must take realistic, concrete steps to better protect the public.”

Activists in the affected areas expressed concern with the report’s findings and called for stronger regulations.

“Whether it is wastewater or solids such as drill cuttings, we know that Marcellus shale waste is the elephant in the room that gas operators and regulators alike ignore,” said Tracy Carluccio, deputy director of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network. “If the cost of treatment of this toxic material to standards protective of clean water was fully borne by the operators that are producing it, fracking for shale gas just wouldn’t be economical. The only responsible course is for government to require that frack waste not pollute or degrade the environment, and apply our environmental laws to the fullest, no matter how it impacts companies’ profits.”

“Bad” Ozone

Also, a study published Tuesday by researchers at the University of Wyoming found that emissions from wastewater treatment facilities at oil and gas drilling sites likely contributed to a string of “high-ozone events” in the winter of 2011 in Wyoming’s Upper Green River Basin.

According to reporting by Environment & Energy Publishing, the team began studying the region’s wintertime ozone levels and the mix of non-methane hydrocarbons in 2009.

They measured several high-ozone events in the winter of 2011, with ozone topping 85 parts per billion numerous times. The national standard for ozone is currently 75 ppb.

According to the EPA: Ground level or “bad” ozone is not emitted directly into the air, but is created by chemical reactions between oxides of nitrogen (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOC) in the presence of sunlight. Emissions from industrial facilities and electric utilities, motor vehicle exhaust, gasoline vapors, and chemical solvents are some of the major sources of NOx and VOC. Breathing ozone can trigger a variety of health problems, particularly for children, the elderly, and people of all ages who have lung diseases such as asthma. Ground level ozone can also have harmful effects on sensitive vegetation and ecosystems.

“What we’ve done is hopefully just highlight that it’s an important source that should be considered,” said Robert Field, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Wyoming and lead author of the report.

Eastern Panhandle Officials Meet in Capitol

WV Senate Rules Committee Moves to Ban Marcellus Waste from Eastern Panhandle

From an  Article by the Editor, MorganCountyUSA.org, October 21, 2014

The West Virginia Legislative Rule Making Committee yesterday moved to close a loophole in state law that would have allowed radioactive Marcellus shale waste into the LCS Services Landfill in Hedgesville, West Virginia.

The Committee unanimously passed a rule that provides that “a commercial solid waste facility that is located in a county that is, in whole or in part, within a karst region as determined by the West Virginia Geologic and Economic Survey, may not accept drill cuttings and drilling waste generated from horizontal well sites.”

The Eastern Panhandle is a karst region.

Karst topography is a landscape formed from the dissolution of soluble rocks and is characterized by underground drainage systems with sinkholes, dolines, and caves. It is porous and exceptionally vulnerable to water contamination and pollution.

Clint Hogbin, chairman of the Berkeley County Solid Waste Authority, said that the passage through the committee was a “giant step forward,” but warned that the rule was not final until the full Senate and House pass it. They will take it up when the new legislature convenes in January 2015.

Hogbin says that the LCS Services landfill has yet to accept Marcellus waste and that it is unlikely that it will before the legislature takes up the measure in January. Hogbin attended the Committee meeting yesterday along with William Madert of the Jefferson County Solid Waste Authority.

The Committee is comprised of six Senators and six members of the House of Delegates. The Committee is chaired by Senator Herb Snyder (Jefferson County). Senator John Unger (Berkeley County) also sits on the committee.

Hogbin said he was concerned about Pennsylvania fracking waste finding its way down I-81 into the LCS Landfill in Berkeley County. He said that fracking waste from West Virginia is currently being disposed of in five landfills. Hogbin said that the Waste Management landfill in Harrison County takes in more Marcellus waste than the rest of the state landfills combined take in regular garbage waste.

Earlier this year, the West Virginia legislature passed a law – HB 107 — that allowed the industry to dump unlimited amounts of drilling wastes in segregated cells at certain municipal waste landfills. The law also allows municipal waste landfills without special cells — like the Eastern Panhandle’s only landfill — the LCS Services Hedgesville landfill — to accept Marcellus waste — but it cannot exceed its tonnage limits.

Hogbin says that the Hedgesville landfill has yet to accept any drilling waste, but it nevertheless has the legal authority to do so, even though its sits atop a significant karst region. Hogbin said that Senator Donald Cookman (Hampshire) first identified the loophole and tried to close it earlier this year, but his efforts were turned back by the House of Delegates.

Cookman then began pushing for a rulemaking fix. Yesterday, Cookman praised the work of the rules committee. “It was imperative that the Legislative Rule-Making Committee pass the provision in order to further protect West Virginia’s water,” says Cookman. “I vow to continue working with my fellow lawmakers and the citizens of this great state to make sure West Virginia’s waters remain pure and free of pollution.”

Beacon Press, 2014

KIRKUS REVIEW: THE REAL COST OF FRACKING

How America’s Shale Gas Boom Is Threatening Our Families, Pets, and Food

Book by Michelle Bamberger &  Robert Oswald, Beacon Press, 2014

A primer on unconventional fossil fuel extraction, with convincing evidence as to its deleterious nature, from veterinarian Bamberger and Oswald (Molecular Medicine/Cornell Univ.).

Two significant questions loom over this study: “[W]hat degree of risk and environmental degradation are acceptable to obtain [fossil fuel] energy? Who should be asked to sacrifice, and who should profit?”

At issue here is the contested practice of fracking, the hydraulic shattering of shale to extract trapped energy through the administration of chemicals that are known to be carcinogenic and have mutation and endocrine disruptor issues.

The authors are not only lucid writers on scientific topics—the appendix on gas drilling should be required reading on the subject—but also warm storytellers, despite the contentious subject matter. They believe the burden of proof should not rest on the victim but on the company wishing to deploy fracking.

Since that is not the case, they took to the field to document instances of what appear to be serious air, water and soil pollution caused by the fracking process. The stories of people who have experienced what they believe will be fracking’s poisonous legacy are poignant, as they often involve animals and children, often the proverbial canaries in the coal mine: “Because of their higher metabolic rates and immature neurological and detoxifying systems, children are at higher risk of developing adverse health effects from environmental hazards, including those from nearby industrial operations.”

However, the trail between fracking’s spoils and health issues is often thwarted by the absence of testing evidence, which most owners do not conduct prior to drilling, typically due to its high cost.

Still, the authors “believe that the sudden deaths of farm animals following exposure to hydraulic fracturing fluid provides a clear link between gas drilling operations and health impacts.”

In this cool, disarming and persuasive indictment of fracking’s widespread negative consequences, the authors provide an important addition to an ongoing debate.

SkyTruth FrackaThon Project Activities

It’s Better Together – Host a FrackFinder Event to Help Map Fracking

Article from SkyTruth Projects, March 22, 2014

As you may know, we’ve been working on Project FrackFinder–a multi-phase effort to map drilling and hydraulic fracturing using collaborative image analysis by citizen scientists like you.

Not sure you want to sort through FrackFinder tasks on your own? Enlist some friends and host a FrackFinder-A-Thon! On February 28th, the Shepherd University Environmental Organization participated in the first ever FrackFinder-A-Thon. They threw a pizza party and in only 2.5 hours, 15 people powered through 10,000 tasks!

The following week, a group of University of San Francisco students were visiting Appalachia on a spring break immersion trip. These Bay area students spent the day with us, FrackFinding and learning about skytruthing mining, drilling and other extractive industries. Take a listen to this WV Public Radio piece to learn more about their experience.

We need your help to finish the last 14% of tasks for Project Dart Frog. The sooner we do, the sooner Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School can start crunching numbers on their study of public health as it relates to fracking. Over 200 folks have contributed to the FrackFinder project so far, but we still need your help to keep things moving.

Need help in figuring out how to host your own FrackFinder-A-Thon at your school or in your community? Let us know– kristy@skytruth.org! We’d love to help you set one up.

Once Project Dart Frog concludes, we’ll embark on a new phase of group image analysis based upon YOUR findings.

Submitted by Duane Nichols, www.FrackCheckWV.net

Gas Well Development

Gas drilling boom accelerates with little study of public health effects

Article by Lisa Song and Jim Morris, InsideClimate News, Charleston Gazette, March 5, 2014

A new study has underscored just how little is known about the health consequences of the natural gas boom that began a decade ago, when advances in high-volume hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and directional drilling allowed companies to tap shale deposits across the United States. “Despite broad public concern, no comprehensive population-based studies of the public health effects of [unconventional natural gas] operations exist,” concluded the report published Monday in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Last week, InsideClimate News, the Center for Public Integrity and The Weather Channel reported on the health data gap in the Eagle Ford Shale, where a lack of air monitoring and research is aggravated by a Texas regulatory system that often protects the gas and oil industry over the public. Scientists interviewed for the series said the uncertainties persist across the country. In the words of one expert, scientists “really haven’t the foggiest idea” how shale development impacts public health.

Gas and oil production releases many toxic chemicals into the air and water, including carcinogens like benzene and respiratory hazards like hydrogen sulfide. While residents near drilling areas in Texas reported symptoms that are known to be caused by these chemicals, including migraines and breathing problems, it was impossible to link them to the drilling boom because no studies could be found that prove cause and effect.

The new study, led by John Adgate at the Colorado School of Public Health, examined available research on the environmental, social and psychological impacts of shale gas drilling. It was the first time anyone had tried to tackle the question in a systematic way, Adgate said. The researchers found that much of the existing work “isn’t explicitly tied to health.” Many studies analyzed the level of pollutants in the air or water, but didn’t track how the exposures are connected to local health trends. Other studies used health surveys, but didn’t compare the respondents’ results with the health of the larger surrounding community.

What’s needed, Adgate said, are comprehensive studies that examine possible connections between chemical exposures and community health trends. But these types of studies require substantial funding and good baseline data, both of which are hard to obtain.

“You’re not going to find anything if you don’t look, and some people think we shouldn’t be looking, or that it’s not worth looking,” he said. “We do know a lot of these things are hazardous, and we just need to develop a system [that] provides people with a reasonable level of certainty [on the] effects, or lack thereof.”

Health impacts will vary based on local geology, weather patterns, operator practices and other factors, Adgate said, so it would make sense to set up a study that tracks people from different parts of the country.

Regulators are well aware of the knowledge gap. In 2012, the Government Accountability Office — the investigative arm of Congress — reviewed more than 90 studies from government agencies, the industry and academic researchers and concluded that oil and gas development “pose inherent environmental and public health risks, but the extent of these risks is unknown, in part, because the studies GAO reviewed do not generally take into account the potential long-term, cumulative effects.”

On the issue of air pollution, the GAO said the studies “are generally anecdotal, short-term, and focused on a particular site or geographic location. [They] do not provide the information needed to determine the overall cumulative effect that shale oil and gas activities have on air quality.”

Bernard Goldstein, a professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh and a co-author of the paper, pointed to a need for well-designed studies in large populations. Scientists could analyze a community before, during and after drilling begins, or compare the health of residents in communities close to and far from a shale play, he said.

Both Adgate and Goldstein cited major barriers in funding. “There hasn’t been a lot of money thrown at this problem,” Adgate said. “It’s a contentious issue as everybody knows, and nobody’s stepped up to say we’re going to fund independent research.”

Goldstein said the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences — part of the National Institutes of Health — has started to fund some studies, but the results won’t emerge for years. Adgate suggested more public-private partnerships like the Health Effects Institute, an independent research organization that studies vehicular air pollution. It is jointly funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and the auto industry.

Goldstein, a doctor and toxicologist who served as an assistant EPA administrator under President Ronald Reagan, sees the lack of research as a failure of transparency. “The impression I have is, there’s at least some part of industry that believes it’s better not to have these studies, because they believe it will lead to toxic tort lawyers suing the industry.”

There seems to be little interest in obtaining better data, he said. Two years ago, he led a study that analyzed the membership of three advisory committees established by President Barack Obama and the governors of Maryland and Pennsylvania. All three groups were tasked with studying the impacts of shale gas, yet Goldstein and his colleagues found that none of the 51 members had a medical or health background.

“The current lack of almost any support for research directly related to the health effects of unconventional gas drilling is shortsighted and counterproductive,” he said in 2012 in testimony before the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee. “[The] only cost-effective time to make this investment is now….”

This report is part of a joint project by InsideClimate News, the Center for Public Integrity and The Weather Channel. Lisa Song is with InsideClimate News and Jim Morris is with the Center for Public Integrity. InsideClimate News is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers clean energy, carbon energy, nuclear energy and environmental science. More information is available at http://insideclimatenews.org/.