Waterthrush explores clean stream in WV

From an Article by Kara Holsopple, The Allegheny Front, April 26, 2018

One of the biggest unknowns about the shale gas boom is how it’s affecting wildlife. A new study from West Virginia University on a warbler that depends on clean streams is helping to change that.

The Louisiana waterthrush is one of the first migratory songbirds to appear in our region in the spring. It’s a little brown bird that bobs its tail and has a high-pitched call that can carry over the sounds of water. The Louisiana waterthrush breeds along forested headwater streams, and feasts on tiny invertebrates, like mayflies and crayfish, living in the water. So if something happens to the stream, the Louisiana waterthrush would be impacted.

Mack Frantz is a Ph.D. candidate at West Virginia University and part of the USGS Cooperative Fish & Wildlife Research Unit. He recently published a journal article about the measurable effect of shale gas development on the bird.

“The Louisiana waterthrush is the proverbial canary in the coal mine,” Frantz says.

The photos at the bottom show examples of types of disturbance in an area undergoing shale gas development. (E) shows a section of stream considered disturbed from frequent vehicular activity; and (F) Sedimentation that researchers traced upstream to its point of origin at an active shale gas well pad. Source: American Ornithological Society

Frantz and his colleagues studied habitat in West Virginia where there has been increasing activity from the gas industry. It’s a heavily forested area but there’s also forest fragmentation.

“It’s not really so much the placement of a well pad, but all of the infrastructure it takes in order to access that well pad and to transfer the gas — access road, pipelines, compressor stations,” Frantz explains. “So in areas where you used to have contiguous forested habitat, which is important to have for certain kinds of wildlife, that might be broken up.”

Frantz and the research team looked at aerial and satellite images of gas development, and spent hours in the field from 2009 to 2011 when unconventional drilling began and was peaking, and then again from 2013 to 2015. They also monitored waterthrush nests and territories. They found that nest survival decreased.

“So the probability that a nest is going to be successful over its 29 day nesting period, that was lower due to shale gas development,” Frantz says. “We also saw that shale gas-disturbed areas were producing less fledglings.”

Frantz says the riparian habitat quality also declined in areas where there was gas development. That means water quality in the streams, but also erosion of stream banks, and a loss of native plants. The study also suggests that Louisiana waterthrush have had to increase their range.

“They really like pristine forested areas,” Frantz says. “If you start to remove some of that forest cover, that’s going to affect their food resources. And so I think in part that’s what we’re seeing here: that the waterthrush are having to have larger territory to support their foraging needs, not only for themselves but for their nestlings.”

Frantz says that his research shows that it doesn’t take a very big disturbance to see significant negative effects on wildlife. “The study area is still more than 91 percent forested,” he says. “Yet we’re still seeing these effects.”

Frantz hopes that their findings could be used to influence policy around the oil and gas industry. “I’m not allowed to give management recommendations per se,” he says. “But we definitely need to evaluate [if we] should allow infrastructure and development this close to a forested headwater stream where our public drinking water comes from. So it is warranted to try to re-evaluate some of these regulations that are existing, and see if they need beefed up or if we need new ones.”
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LISTEN: “Study: Songbird that Needs Clean Streams Threatened by Fracking”

{Click on A,B,C,D,E, or F to enlarge}

See the Note in the Article.

Unconventional Oil & Gas Wastewaters Affect WV Surface-Water Stream

From the US Geological Survey, Reston, VA, May 9, 2016

These are the first published studies to demonstrate water-quality impacts to a surface stream due to activities at an unconventional oil and gas wastewater deep well injection disposal site.

Evidence indicating the presence of wastewaters from unconventional oil and gas production was found in surface waters and sediments near an underground injection well near Fayetteville, West Virginia, according to two recent studies by the U.S. Geological Survey, University of Missouri, and Duke University.

These are the first published studies to demonstrate water-quality impacts to a surface stream due to activities at an unconventional oil and gas wastewater deep well injection disposal site. The studies did not assess how the wastewaters were able to migrate from the disposal site to the surface stream. The unconventional oil and gas wastewater that was injected in the site came from coalbed methane and shale gas wells.

“Deep well injection is widely used by industry for the disposal of wastewaters produced during unconventional oil and gas extraction,” said USGS scientist Denise Akob, lead author on the current study. “Our results demonstrate that activities at disposal facilities can potentially impact the quality of adjacent surface waters.”

The scientists collected water and sediment samples upstream and downstream from the disposal site. These samples were analyzed for a series of chemical markers that are known to be associated with unconventional oil and gas wastewater. In addition, in a just-published collaborative study tests known as bioassays were done to determine the potential for the impacted surface waters to cause endocrine disruption.

Waters and sediments collected downstream from the disposal facility were elevated in constituents that are known markers of UOG wastewater, including sodium, chloride, strontium, lithium and radium, providing indications of wastewater-associated impacts in the stream.

“We found endocrine disrupting activity in surface water at levels that previous studies have shown are high enough to block some hormone receptors and potentially lead to adverse health effects in aquatic organisms,” said Susan C. Nagel, director of the EDC study and associate professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Women’s Health at University of Missouri.

Scientists analyzed the microbial communities in sediments downstream. These microbes play an important role in ecosystems’ food webs.

“These initial findings will help us design further research at this and similar sites to determine whether changes in microbial communities and water quality may adversely impact biota and important ecological processes,” said Akob.

Production of unconventional oil and gas resources yields large volumes of wastewater, which are commonly disposed of using underground injection. In fact, more than 36,000 of these disposal wells are currently in operation across the United States, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the volume of unconventional oil and gas wastewater requiring disposal has continued to grow despite a slowing in drilling and production.

“Considering how many wastewater disposal wells are in operation across the country, it’s critical to know what impacts they may have on the surrounding environment,” said Duke University scientist Christopher Kassotis, the lead author on one of the studies. “These studies are an important first step in that process.”

Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that interfere with normal functioning of organisms’ hormones.

The studies were published in Environmental Science and Technology and Science of the Total Environment and can be found here. They are titled:

• “Wastewater Disposal from Unconventional Oil and Gas Development Degrades Stream Quality at a West Virginia Injection Facility,” with Akob as the lead author
• “Endocrine Disrupting Activities of Surface Water Associated with a West Virginia Oil and Gas Industry Wastewater Disposal Site,” with Kassotis as the lead author

This study is part of USGS research into the possible risks to water quality and environmental health posed by waste materials from unconventional oil and gas development. The USGS Toxic Substances Hydrology Program and the USGS Environmental Health Mission Area provide objective scientific information on environmental contamination to improve characterization and management of contaminated sites, to protect human and environmental health, and to reduce potential future contamination problems.

NOTE: Map of sampling locations near Fayetteville, WV within the Wolf Creek watershed (A) and specific sites (B) in a stream running adjacent to a class II disposal facility. Panel A shows that Site 2 was located in a separate drainage from the disposal facility sites (outlined in black box), which are shown in panel B (Sites 4, 5, 6, 7 and 3). In panel B, the blue line highlights the stream and the yellow outline is the location of the former impoundment ponds.

See also:  www.FrackCheckWV.net

Humanity may exhaust the Earth’s low-cost mineral resources before the end of this century – but better resource management could avoid the worst risks.

From an Article by Nafeez Ahmed, The Guardian UK, June 10, 2014

A new landmark scientific report drawing on the work of the world’s leading mineral experts forecasts that industrial civilisation’s extraction of critical minerals and fossil fuel resources is reaching the limits of economic feasibility, and could lead to a collapse of key infrastructures unless new ways to manage resources are implemented.

The peer-reviewed study – the 33rd Report to the Club of Rome – is authored by Prof Ugo Bardi of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Florence, where he teaches physical chemistry. It includes specialist contributions from fifteen senior scientists and experts across the fields of geology, agriculture, energy, physics, economics, geography, transport, ecology, industrial ecology, and biology, among others.

The Club of Rome is a Swiss-based global think tank founded in 1968 consisting of current and former heads of state, UN bureaucrats, government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists and business leaders.

Its latest report, to be released on 12th June, conducts a comprehensive overview of the history and evolution of mining, and argues that the increasing costs of mineral extraction due to pollution, waste, and depletion of low-cost sources will eventually make the present structure of industrial civilisation unsustainable.

Much of the report’s focus is on the concept of Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI), which measures the amount of energy needed to extract resources. While making clear that “we are not running out of any mineral,” the report finds that “extraction is becoming more and more difficult as the easy ores are depleted. More energy is needed to maintain past production rates, and even more is needed to increase them.” As a consequence, despite large quantities of remaining mineral reserves:

“The production of many mineral commodities appears to be on the verge of decline… we may be going through a century-long cycle that will lead to the disappearance of mining as we know it.”

The last decade has seen the world shift to more expensive and difficult to extract fossil fuel resources, in the form of unconventional forms of oil and gas, which have much lower levels of EROEI than conventional oil. Even with technological breakthroughs in fracking and associated drilling techniques, this trend is unlikely to reverse significantly.

A former senior executive in Australia’s oil, gas and coal industry, Ian Dunlop, describes in the report how fracking can rise production “rapidly to a peak, but it then declines rapidly, too, often by 80 to 95 percent over the first three years.” This means that often “several thousand wells” are needed for a single shale play to provide “a return on investment.”

The average EROEI to run “industrial society as we know it” is about 8 to 10. Shale oil and gas, tar sands, and coal seam gas are all “at, or below, that level if their full costs are accounted for… Thus fracking, in energy terms, will not provide a source on which to develop sustainable global society.”

The Club of Rome report also applies the EROEI analysis to extraction of coal and uranium. World coal production will peak by 2050 latest, and could peak as early as 2020. US coal production has already peaked, and future production will be determined largely by China. But rising domestic demand from the latter, and from India, could generate higher prices and shortages in the near future: “Therefore, there is definitely no scope for substituting for oil and gas with coal.”

As for global uranium supplies, the report says that current uranium production from mines is already insufficient to fuel existing nuclear reactors, a gap being filled by recovery of uranium military stockpiles and old nuclear warheads. While the production gap could be closed at current levels of demand, a worldwide expansion of nuclear power would be unsustainable due to “gigantic investments” needed.

US Geological Survey data analysed by the report shows that chromium, molybdenum, tungsten, nickel, platinum-palladium, copper, zinc, cadmium, titanium, and tin will face peak production followed by declines within this century. This is because declared reserves are often “more hypothetical than measured”, meaning the “assumption of mineral bonanzas… are far removed from reality.”

In particular, the report highlights the fate of copper, lithium, nickel and zinc. Physicist Prof Rui Namorado Rosa projects an “imminent slowdown of copper availability” in the report. Although production has grown exponentially, the grade of the minerals mined is steadily declining, lifting mining costs. ‘Peak copper’ is likely to hit by 2040, but could even occur within the next decade.

Production of lithium production, presently used for batteries electric cars, would also be strained under a large-scale electrification of transport infrastructure and vehicles. Sustainable lithium production requires 80-100% recycling – currently this stands at less than 1%.

Perhaps the most alarming trend in mineral depletion concerns phosphorous, which is critical to fertilise soil and sustain agriculture. While phosphorous reserves are not running out, physical, energy and economic factors mean only a small percentage of it can be mined. Crop yield on 40 percent of the world’s arable land is already limited by economical phosphorus availability.

In the Club of Rome study, physicist Patrick Dery says that several major regions of rock phosphate production – such as the island of Nauru and the US, which is the world’s second largest producer – are post-peak and now declining, with global phosphorous supplies potentially becoming insufficient to meet agricultural demand within 30-40 years. The problem can potentially be solved as phosphorous can be recycled.

A parallel trend documented in the report by Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) agronomist Toufic El Asmar is an accelerating decline in land productivity due to industrial agricultural methods, which are degrading the soil by as much as 50% in some areas.

Prof Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that the report is “an effective piece of work” to assess the planet’s mineral wealth “within the framework of sustainability.” Its findings offer a “valuable basis for discussions on mineral policy.”

But the window for meaningful policy action is closing rapidly. “The main alarm bell is the trend in the prices of mineral commodities,” Prof Bardi told me.

“Prices have gone up by a factor 3-5 and have remained at these level for the past 5-6 years. They are not going to go down again, because they are caused by irreversible increases in production costs. These prices are already causing the decline of the less efficient economies (say, Italy, Greece, Spain, etc.). We are not at the inversion point yet, but close – less than a decade?”

For part 2 of this story see here.

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an international security journalist and academic. He is the author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It.

"induced seismicity" under study

Commentary by S. Tom Bond, Jane Lew, Lewis County, WV

1. The top ten well-pads in Pennsylvania [in 2013] have produced 820 million dollars worth of natural gas, with estimated total royalty payouts of over 100 million dollars. These values are based on a total production of 245 million Mcf, at-the-wellhead pricing of $3.35/Mcf (the most recent pricing published by the US Energy Information Administration), and estimated 1/8th royalty payments (no allowances for production deductions). The residential pricing value of the produced gas is 2-1/3 billion dollars.

www.MarcellusGas.org 30 May 2014

With a few wells like this, no wonder the urban gambling investors are ready to despoil the countryside! Perhaps they think all Marcellus wells are as good.

2. The Bazhenov in Russia may be the largest shale play on earth. 80 times bigger than the Bakken. Despite the threat of sanctions hanging over Russia because of the standoff with Ukraine, Russian oil and gas opportunities like the Bazhenov appear to be too lucrative for Western companies to pass up, as follows:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2012/06/04/bakken-bazhenov-shale-oil/

ExxonMobil and Statoil have joint ventures with Rosneft, the Russian company. Not a drop of national loyalty to the U. S. to be seen here. Both the U. S and Norway (to a much lesser extent) are at loggerheads with Russia over Ukraine, while the oil companies are kissing Russia up, trying to get the oil.

3. Between 1967 through 2000, there were an average of 21 earthquakes yearly above magnitude 3.0. That rate shot up to an average of 300 earthquakes yearly after 2010. Because of the recent jump in earthquakes, and their significant size, the USGS plans to estimate the national shaking risk from “induced seismicity” for the first time, as follows:

http://news.yahoo.com/fracking-linked-earthquakes-may-strike-far-wells-133057848.ht

Ever see the old physics demonstration where the instructor fills a one gallon jug with water, inserts a cork so no air is between the cork and the water, then hits the cork lightly? The jug breaks easily. The identical force applied by one square inch of cork applies to each and every square inch of the interior of the jug.

Imagine the force that develops down the well when the equivalent volume of many tankers of water are forced down it day after day!

4. In 2013, the average total water volume for a fracturing event at a Pennsylvania unconventional well site was 5,365,363 gallons – the equivalent of 670 full tanker trucks. This is a 25% increase when compared to the average volume of water used per event in 2012 (4,259,693 gals). Our review of fracturing events shows the highest water usage recorded was nearly 19 million gallons. On February 15, 2012, the DCNR 595 6H well in Bloss township Tioga county, operated by Seneca Resources Corp, used 18,754,176 gallons of water for a fracturing event – enough to fill over 2,340 tanker trucks.

www.MarcellusGas.org 5/2/14

This “670 full tanker trucks average” is 96 truckloads of water a day for 7 days or one every 15 minutes, day and night for a full week. Noise, dust, diesel odors, lights at night, harrowing traffic conditions, school bus risk; and if rural, road destroyed, flag men, livestock and crops affected. If only Aubrey McClendon and Rex Tillman could live in such luxury, they would understand “externalized cost.”

5. Aubrey Miller found 52,000 unconventional (shale) gas wells in the U. S., yet when he searched the literature for research, he found little. “How do we have no data on an enterprise of this magnitude?”

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/science/20140302_GreenSpace__The_uncertain_state_of_gas_drilling_and_health.html#YRFxEB1kyymCLpea.99

The short answer: Because the industry doesn’t want any data let out.

Tomorrow, let’s focus on West Virginia specifically.

>>> Tom Bond is a retired professor of chemistry and resident farmer in central West Virginia <<<

EARTH’S WATER COMPARISON: Ocean Water (large blue sphere), Groundwater (small blue sphere), Freshwater (nearly invisible blue dot).

Source: Howard Perlman, United States Geological Survey.  Data source: Igor Shiklomanov “Worlds Freshwater Resources” in Peter H. Gleick (editor), 1993, Water in Crisis: A Guide to the World’s Fresh Water Resources (Oxford University Press, New York).

Note: The arrow is missing which locates the tiny freshwater dot below the others. Clearly, legislation is needed to provide a legal framework for the protection of our limited water resources here on earth.  As more and more chemicals are released into the environment, less of our existing water resources will be useful to us.  Life support is our number one need, as drinking water, for growing our food, for food preparation, and for the continued preparation of the products that support our life functions.

Earthquakes in Mahoning County, OH

Did Fracking Cause All Four Earthquakes in Ohio?

From an Article by Brandon Baker, EcoWatch.com, March 12, 2014

The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) has ordered Texas-based energy company Hilcorp to halt all fracking operations in Mahoning County after at least four earthquakes shook the area on Monday.

A magnitude 3.0 earthquake at 2:26 a.m. and a magnitude 2.6 at 11:45 a.m. on March 10 were among those reported in Poland Township just south of Youngstown near a fracking site with seven drilling wells, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

“It’s an area which (before 2011) had no history of earthquakes,” John Armbruster, a retired Columbia University geology professor, told the Columbus Dispatch. “It looks very, very suspicious.”

Ohio Department of Natural Resources personnel say earthquakes near Youngstown are not related to injection wells, but some have a different opinion.

The ODNR has stressed that the order to suspend drilling was precautionary and that the earthquakes were not related to fracking waste-injection wells which were tied to severe earthquakes near Youngstown in 2011. Armbruster monitored those wells along with Ohio officials.

“We are in the process of analyzing the data,” Mark Bruce, an ODNR spokesman, said in a statement. ”All available information indicates the events are not connected to Class II injection activities.

“Out of an abundance of caution, we notified the only oil and gas operator in the area and ordered them to halt all operations until further assessment can take place.”

However, Dr. Ray Beiersdorfer of Youngstown State University has issued an open letter suggesting that the epicenters of the quakes are even closer to the fracking site than originally reported. “Simply put, the longitude, latitude and depth of the shale well laterals are within a few thousand feet from the epicenters of the earthquakes,” he wrote. He also questions the state and Hilcorp’s swift denial that the temblors are related to the injection wells.

“Reading between the lines both the regulator and company seem to be implying that by, ruling out injection induced seismicity this somehow rules out other forms of human-induced seismicity, such as the fracking that was going on at the same time and same location as the earthquakes,” he wrote.

“I find ODNR’s focus on injection-induced seismicity as a bit ironic, since as recently as 2011 these regulator were avidly denying injection-induced seismicity in Youngstown, even after we suffered eight regional-size earthquakes. Research—known at the time—concluded that the earthquakes were induced by frackwaste disposal wells.”

ODNR has not provided any more information since its halting order earlier this year. Radioactive fracking wastewater has been coming to Ohio for disposal since 2011, when neighboring Pennsylvania ordered oil and gas companies to stop dumping fracking wastewater into the state’s streams and rivers.

In 2012, more than 14 million barrels of toxic waste from oil and gas drilling were injected into the ground in Ohio’s Class II disposal wells, with 8.16 million barrels of waste from other states. Wastewater injection wells pose a series of threats to public health and the environment, including groundwater contamination.

Visit EcoWatch’s FRACKING page for this and related news.

WV Public Radio reported this past Thursday on the EarthScope program of the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) with assistance from the National Science Foundation.  In 2004, EarthScope began installing small seismic stations on a grid across the continental US, and since then they’ve been systematically moving the array across the country from west to east.

 Thirteen or 14 stations will be installed in WV this summer. The stations remain in given locations for two years. EarthScope is looking for landowners in specific areas across the state who would be willing to participate.

Senior research geologist Ron McDowell from the WV Geologic and Economic Survey recently attended a meeting to learn more about the effort. “They are pretty much self-contained once they’re in the ground,” McDowell says. “You don’t do much more to them. Someone may come out and change batteries every once in a while, but they send data through satellite phone or by internet connection and the EarthScope people take care of all of that.”

Installation takes about three days. First a 6 foot hole is dug four feet wide. A plastic tank is placed in the hole and cement is poured into the bottom to create a sealed container. On the second day seismograph electronics, sensor, and communication equipment are installed. The third day is for testing and to recondition the landscape.  See this document for more information.

McDowell said  the data these instruments provide will be very useful since our current understanding the crust beneath the state and region is very limited. “One of the questions regarding the earthquake that happened in Virginia, ‘Why are we feeling it on this side of the Appalachians?’ It has to do with how that energy gets transmitted through the crust,” McDowell explains.  McDowell says the WV Geologic and Economic Survey is also looking to invest in a smaller, portable array of seismic monitors that can be used to gauge various areas in the state more specifically.

Introduction

While New York awaits documents from three large energy companies in order to review the accuracy of their reserve estimates, the USGS released a new report today that significantly increases its previous estimate of how much natural gas is contained in the Marcellus Shale.  However, the estimate is still far below the 500 trillion cubic feet estimated by Penn State in 2008.

In 2002 the United States Geologic Survey estimated the Marcellus Shale to contain 1.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 10 million barrels of natural gas liquids– not much when spread out over such a large area.  The USGS now estimates that number to be closer to 84 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas and 3.4 billion barrels of technically recoverable natural gas liquids.