Mobilisation nationale contre le gaz de schiste en Ardèche – Sciences – Toute l’actualité scientifique et médicale – France Info
March 20, 2011
Tioga Co. Resource Binder
March 20, 2011
TING_FINAL_Resource_Binder_3_11_11.pdf (application/pdf Object).
Resource Binder:
Natural Gas Exploration & Development Prepared by Tioga Investigates Natural Gas
Winter, 2011
EPA BEGINS INVESTIGATION OF PENNSYLVANIA
March 18, 2011
EPA BEGINS INVESTIGATION OF PENNSYLVANIA
EPA sends letter to PA regarding drinking water.
PA has 30-days notice about waste treatment / records:
http://www.damascuscitizens.org/EPA-to-PA.pdf
Capitol Confidential » Martens: SGEIS might be a tad after June
March 18, 2011
Capitol Confidential » Martens: SGEIS might be a tad after June.
Martens: SGEIS might be a tad after June
Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Joe Martens appeared this morning on The Capitol Pressroom and said the DEC plans to release its Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement on horizontal hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus Shale…this summer.
Gov. David Paterson, in one of his last acts in office, declared a moratorium on drilling until June this document — which will measure the cumulative impacts of the process, often called hydrofracking, and suggest mitigation — is finalized. The Environmental Protection Agency is also studying the issue; the DEC has not issued any permits for horizontal hydrofracking.
“We don’t know how long it’s going to take, number one, for EPA to complete its study. I have a lot of confidence that DEC has the resources – not just at DEC, but the state of New York – we’re taking advantages of the resources of other states, other state agencies, to look at all of these issues,” Martens told Susan Arbetter. “We’re going to do a very thorough job…I’m confident we are going to have all the information we need to complete the supplemental generic environmental impact statement.”
She asked if the study was still on track for June.
“It’s on or about June, is the precise words in the executive order,” Martens said. “It will come out when I’m satisfied that it’s ready to come out.”
“I’m satisfied it’s going to come out, but probably more like this summer some time,” he said.
Arbetter asked Martens how the document will compare to a draft document released in September of 2009. He stressed that there will still be opportunity for public input.
“The document that will come out this summer will be a final draft, so it won’t be the end of the line,” he said. “We’re going to give the public one more chance to look at the document, to look at all of our findings, to look at the document, to look at our responses to the 13,000 questions that we got in the process and then tell us whether they think we got it right.”
Jimmy Vielkind, Capitol bureau
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Follow: Court allows condemnation of 9,100 acres in Kansas – BusinessWeek
March 17, 2011
Court allows condemnation of 9,100 acres in Kansas – BusinessWeek.
Court allows condemnation of 9,100 acres in Kansas
WICHITA, Kan.
A federal judge has confirmed a Nebraska gas company’s legal right to condemn more than 9,100 acres in south-central Kansas to contain gas migrating from an underground storage facility.
Omaha-based Northern Natural Gas Co. is seeking to use eminent domain to take the formations beneath property in Pratt, Kingman and Reno counties from unwilling sellers. U.S. District Judge Wesley Brown granted the company’s motion Tuesday.
In June, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted the firm authority to expand its Cunningham Storage Field in Kansas by more than 12,000 acres.
The decision comes in a lawsuit targeting at least 173 property owners who have some interest in 40 tracts of land.
Still to be determined is the compensation the owners will receive.
D. RECOMMENDED CHANGES TO THE REGULATIONS PROPOSED IN THE DRAFT GEIS Tbe
March 16, 2011
fgeisregch.pdf (application/pdf Object).
D. RECOMMENDED CHANGES TO THE
REGULATIONS PROPOSED IN THE DRAFT GEIS
Do not be confused by the common confusion of the SGEIS and “regulations”. That confusion is a tool the state and industry use to disarm doubters about its intentions.
The draft SGEIS as well as the current GEIS are about the PERMITTING PROCESS. They are not rules or regulations. No matter what the many thousands of comments received, information displayed, or areas of interest studied or not studied, the GEIS and its Supplement contain NO regulations. They are only the means whereby the SEQRA process for reviewing the expansion of WalMart parking lot, discharges from manufacturing facilities and the like – is exempted in the case of Gas, Oil and Solution (salt) mining. It is the legal requirement for such an exemption. It is neither statute nor regulation.
The regulations that apply to the gas, oil and salt industry are listed IN THEIR ENTIRETY at http://www.dec.ny.gov/regs/2490.html (under sub-chapter B) Here is THE ENTIRETY of the policy statement introducing the regulations:
§550.1 Policy
The Department of Environmental Conservation, having been entrusted with the basic responsibility for administering to and regulating activities relative to the natural resources of oil and gas within the State, does hereby promulgate the following rules and regulations. These have been formulated after consultation with landowners, producers and other interested persons involved and a public hearing relative thereto. The rules have as their objectives:
(a) the fostering, encouragement and promotion of the development, production and utilization of the natural resources of oil and gas in such a manner as will prevent waste;
(b) the operation and development of oil and gas properties in such a manner that a greater ultimate recovery of oil and gas may be had;
(c) full protection of the correlative rights of all owners and the rights of all persons, including landowners and the general public;
(d) similar provisions for the underground storage of gas.
No protection of the environment or public health. That isn’t the point of the regulation. Read the poilicy statement again.
Now check ALL the regulations. It won’t take that long before you understand that the nature of the regulations, guided by the policy statement above. Impressed that New York has the toughest regulations in the entire universe? Try these:
§551.5 Amount of financial security:
(2) for wells between 2,500 feet and 6,000 feet in depth:
(i) for 1 to 25 wells, $5,000 per well, not exceeding $40,000;
(ii) for 26 to 50 wells, $40,000, plus $5,000 per well in excess of 25 wells, not exceeding $60,000;
(iii) for 51 to 100 wells, $60,000, plus $5,000 per well in excess of 50 wells, not exceeding $100,000; or
(iv) for over 100 wells, $100,000, plus $5,000 per well in excess of 100 wells, not exceeding $150,000.
[25 wells are secured by $40,000. Do the math. These are wells in the case of shales costing $1million to $5million each to drill]
§553.2 Surface restrictions
No well shall be located nearer than 100 feet from any inhabited private dwelling house without written consent of the owner; nearer than 150 feet from any public building or area which may be used as a place of resort, assembly, education, entertainment, lodging, trade, manufacture, repair, storage, traffic or occupancy by the public; nearer than 75 feet to the traveled part of any State, county, township, or municipal road or any public street, road or highway; or nearer than 50 feet from any public stream, river or other body of water. This regulation, which is adopted in the interest of public safety, does not apply to a building or structure which is incident to agricultural use of the land on which it is located, unless such building is used as a private dwelling house or in the business of retail trade.
[These figures are for the well bore, not the pad, and in the case of “any inhabited private dwelling house” can be preempted by lease terms (“written consent of the owner”)]
§554.1 Prevention of pollution and migration
(a) The drilling, casing and completion program adopted for any well shall be such as to prevent pollution.
(b) Pollution of the land and/or of surface or ground fresh water resulting from exploration or drilling is prohibited
Thats all I have time for: you have to read the regulations to see that they have nothing to do with the protection of the environment and citizens of the state. Then look at the GEIS http://www.dec.ny.gov/energy/45912.html and understand what it is and does, and why it and the forthcoming SGEIS is not regulation. You might be entertained by the nature of the recommendations for regulatory changes at http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/materials_minerals_pdf/fgeisregch.pdf
Hydrofracking: Most N.Y. treatment plants not equipped to handle wastewater | Press & Sun-Bulletin | pressconnects.com
March 16, 2011
Hydrofracking: Most N.Y. treatment plants not equipped to handle wastewater
John Greene, lab technician at the Village of Endicott Wastewater Treatment Plant, completes biochemical oxygen demand testing on water entering and exiting the facility on Tuesday. / REBECCA CATLETT / Staff Photo
Composted sludge is stored outside of the Village of Endicott Wastewater Treatment Plant. / REBECCA CATLETT / Staff Photo
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When New York’s guidelines for hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus Shale are set in stone, officials say they will likely be stronger than those in Pennsylvania and other states that have long permitted the process.
But a major question remains: What will be done with the millions of gallons of chemical-laced wastewater and salty production brine that comes along with the process?
The wastewater, which flows back to the surface after being injected into shale formations to fracture the rock, can be cared for at treatment facilities, as long as those plants are properly equipped to remove the chemicals and the total dissolved solids in the fluid and radioactivity levels are within reason.
In New York, however, very few plants are equipped with that type of technology.
“There may be certain industrial facilities that may be qualified to handle these materials, but we don’t know of many,” said James Tierney, assistant commissioner for water resources at the state Department of Environmental Conservation. “We don’t know of anybody that is coming in right now and saying they want to be able to treat a million gallons of horizontal hydrofracking waste containing these chemical constituents.”
Accepting flow-back water from the natural gas industry could be a major revenue generator for local treatment plants, but upgrading plants to treat it would cost millions of dollars. Even with the upgrades, the composition of the fluid could be problematic.
“This stuff has a lot of iron and other things in it,” said Phillip Grayson, sewer pre-treatment administrator for the Village of Endicott’s treatment plant. “Even with some kind of pre-treating, I think it’s almost prohibitive for us because of our sewer-use ordinance. They would have to do a lot of work just to get it in the door for us.”
Gas companies reached out to a number of Southern Tier treatment plants in 2008, when the Marcellus gas rush had just begun in Pennsylvania and New York was weighing its options. In December of that year, the DEC sent out a memo reminding publically owned plants they could not accept the waste if it contained chemicals they weren’t permitted to treat, and that those plants would be required to complete an engineer-led analysis to determine whether it is feasible to fully treat the water before it is discharged. The plants would have to have a proper “pre-treatment” process, where the water is treated before it even gets to the main treatment facility.
Whether a plant could accept the water or brine would largely have to do with what kind of treatment technology it uses. In Endicott, for example, the plant uses a biological treatment process, where living, freshwater microbes clean the water. The amount of salt and total dissolved solids in the waste could harm that process.
“If all of a sudden the water taken in is salty, it could kill the microbes, and pretty significant technology is involved in desalination,” Tierney said. “That technology exists and it’s used for turning saltwater into freshwater in different technologies in places around the world, but it certainly isn’t standard and it can be costly.”
The biological treatment process could work if the salty fluid were bled in at low levels over time, allowing the microbes to become acclimated, Tierney said.
Radiation levels in the wastewater also are a concern. When the water is returned from below the ground, it collects a number of naturally occurring radioactive materials, or NORM. An analysis of wastewater samples by the Department of Health found levels of radium-226, and related alpha and beta radiation that are up to 10,000 times higher than drinking water standards.
A series of articles in The New York Times also brought to light concerns about the materials in frack water, analyzing samples from more than 300 gas wells in Pennsylvania that showed various levels of radioactivity.
In a memo sent to the DEC in 2009, state health officials said the radioactivity levels in the sample it tested “are not trivial but not insurmountable.” Health spokesman Tom Allocco said the department hasn’t tested any samples since then.
“The Department of Health is working with the (DEC) to address potential worker issues from the buildup of NORM in natural gas piping and equipment,” Allocco said. “This will be addressed in an upcoming Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Study.”
The SGEIS, an 800-page document that will guide the state’s permitting process for high-volume hydrofracking, is set to be released in June. As it stands now, gas companies would be required to set a plan for the disposal and transportation of the waste fluids before they would be able to obtain a drilling permit.
John Holko, president of Genesee County-based Lenape Resources and a board member of the Independent Oil & Gas Association of New York, said the industry is reusing the wastewater through closed-loop systems, and said the rate of reuse will continue to rise.
“The focus is on 100 percent reuse. I think some of the companies are there now,” Holko said. “Were they there at the beginning of 2010 or the end of 2009? I don’t think so, but by the time it happens in New York, I think the fluid handling will be easy.”
GASLAND creator responds to “Nazi” attack
March 16, 2011
An open letter to Journalists on the Comparison of GASLAND to Nazi Propaganda by a member of the Corbett Administration
by GASLAND on Wednesday, March 16, 2011 at 11:13am
An open letter to Journalists on the Comparison of GASLAND to Nazi Propaganda by a member of the Corbett Administration
by Josh Fox / GASLAND
March 16, 2011
This week, Teddy Borawski, the chief oil and gas geologist for the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) and a member of Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett’s administration, serving in an official capacity, and on the record, compared my Sundance award-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary film GASLAND to Nazi propaganda stating “Goebbels would be proud.” The slander was the latest in a series of smears and misinformation about the film and character attacks on me.
This kind of hateful speech shows a contempt for history, for truth, for science and sets a dangerous precedent in our state’s government. Such slanderous mudslinging has no place in any rational or adult debate on ANY topic, let alone the most important issue facing the state in decades – natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale.
When one speaks violence, he degrades himself and his fellow man. When that person represents the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, he violates the fabric of our civic trust, delegitimizes the government he represents and opens the door to madness. The Corbett administration has thrown the dialogue on Marcellus drilling into the gutter and it is it up to the Corbett administration to get it out.
I made the film GASLAND out of a geniune care and love for the state of Pennsylvania. The film was designed to bring to light something that we were by and large overlooking — the extreme harm and danger of Fracking for Natural Gas, as it was taking place across the nation. To make the film, myself and a dedicated team of five people were working for no pay, day and night, without a major media company behind the film and without any assurances that anyone would see the film outside of the Delaware River basin.
The film GASLAND has been thoroughly vetted, fact checked, verified and backed up by true journalistic review and science and we stand behind it and the incredibly brave Americans in it 100%.
GASLAND has helped forge a movement in Pennsylvania, New York, and increasingly worldwide. Millions of people saw the film when it aired on HBO. In addition, I have toured to over 100 cities in the United States. Everywhere I go, I hear the complaints, concerns, outrage and dismay of the citizens facing the driller’s invasion.
But instead of engaging in a real dialogue on the issues, the Pennsylvania government and the gas industry have mounted successive attacks against the honest journalism of the film. I and my team have been branded terrorists, extremists, communists, traitors, liars and now, Nazis. NAZIS!!!!!!
The state deserves better.
If the Corbett administration fails to fire Borawski and fails to begin a real assessment of the effects of gas drilling on the state, then certainly the Corbett administration has lost all credibility and legitimacy.
Does slandering a documentary filmmaker as a Nazi constitute the level of dialogue that the Corbett administration believes is good governance? Do you call someone a Nazi just because they don’t agree with you?
Apparently, the whole world knows there is something terribly wrong with Hydraulic Fracturing for Natural Gas, everywhere except the dark cave of the Corbett administration. New York state has moved into a bi-partisan moratorium on fracking, Quebec has imposed a de-facto moratorium on shale drilling, the Maryland state house is on the verge of passing a similar moratorium, 20,000 protesters marched in France last week against shale drilling, Austrailian farmers are revolting and locking their gates against gas exploration, the New York Times reported that radioactive gas drilling waste was being dumped directly into Pennsylvania’s drinking water sources, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pro-Publica news organization reported thousands of cases of contamination across the country, CNN and 60 minutes has reported numerous case studies on families whose health have been harmed and whose water has become undrinkable due to drilling and yet there is one dark corner of the world that refuses to acknowledge the threat posed by gas drilling, the ruling party of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Is there any excuse for employing this kind of hate speech?
More disturbingly perhaps is Borawski’s (and this the Corbett administration’s) apparent enthusiasm for industry’s projection of 130,000 to 180,000 gas wells in Pennsylvania.
By the Pennsylvania DEP’s own account, one well out of 32 wells in Dimock caused an area of contamination that was nine square miles wide. From my experience and from the detailed reports of thousands of contamination cases across the country, and the industry’s own track record of failure, Dimock is no exception. What does it mean for Pennsylvania if you replicate Dimock across the state? Do the math–If you multiply this contamination rate in Dimock by 130,000 gas wells, you have contaminated 35,000 square miles, more than three quarters of the state. In other words, you have contaminated the entire area covered by the Marcellus shale. Permanently.
Calling people Nazis has no place in our civic dialogue whatsoever. What we need is a real scientific review of the harmful effects of gas drilling on the state and a statewide moratorium on new drilling, leasing, permitting and fracking until all of the problems can be addressed, not race baiting remarks.
Is it impossible to imagine that the Corbett administration could engage in a serious rational debate on the issue. Corbett could call for a substantive independent cost-benefit analysis of what this much drilling would mean to our state. Corbett could pay attention to the fact that both the U.S. Congress AND the U.S. EPA are now investigating Hydraulic Fracturing due to the massive public outcry across the nation. Could the state legislature investigate the possible collusion between the state DEP and DCNR and the gas industry?
When Pennsylvania’s homeland security director James Powers was found to be responsible for the characterization of people protesting gas drilling in the state as “terrorists.†he resigned under great pressure. Borawski should resign. But more importantly, Corbett should fire him. Immediately. Otherwise it is clear that Corbett condones this kind of slander, bigotry and hate.
I was born into a mixed religious family. My father is Jewish and my Italian mother was raised Roman Catholic. My father and his parents were survivors of the holocaust. Everyone in his extended family was killed by the Nazis except for his two brothers and his mother and father and a few distant cousins. He grew up with the shadow of the Nazi genocide hanging over his head for his whole life. The first place the family went after fleeing Europe just after the war, was Pittsburgh. In my family, we know what this kind of rhetoric can do, if left unchecked and unpunished.
My father, Michael Fox, was so upset at Borawski’s comments that he wrote the following statement:
“When I was young I spent so many years trying to overcome the devastation of the holocaust that engulfed my mother and our home. My grandparents, my aunts and uncles and so many of my cousins perished. I was robbed of my heritage as they were robbed more cruelly of their lives. My seven year-old brother was shot and lost sight in his eye in front of me when I was two by a youth who wanted to get himself a Jew. Living with the weight of hatred that hung suspended above and through my life, I needed to know that there were indeed good people left in the world, that there was hope for kindness and justice in the future of the world. Otherwise, how could I go on? It took me such a long time and so much struggle to believe my constant mantra that the world could be good. To have my son called a Nazi after what happened to our family, and when what he did was to raise the alarm to the poisoning of our water and our people, is heart-rending and it highlights how quickly and callously some forget man’s inhumanity towards man and how some resort to cruel name calling and hatred when they have no other resources to justify their untenable and greedy positions.â€
Since the release of GASLAND, we have been subject to many kinds of attacks, not only in writing, but in action. Our family home in Pennsylvania has been vandalized several times since the premiere of the film. Windows have been broken while I have been away touring the state, property has been looted and articles on the property have been set on fire. This kind of hateful despicable, demonizing speech can encourage the most vile impulses within people. To call my work “Nazi propaganda†is to dehumanize me and those working on the issue with great care and love for our community. I can only think that this kind of dehumanization makes us that more susceptible to attacks of every kind. No apology can make that alright.
It is up to the Corbett administration to try to put this genie back in the bottle, fire Borawski and begin to entertain a rational dialogue on the issue. If Corbett fails to dismiss Borawski and put and end to the nose dive his administration seems hell bent on, we must conclude that he condones and indeed promotes this kind of behavior. If he fails to address this, we will be forced to acknowledge that this act of thuggery, bullying and despicable insensitivity is a hallmark of his approach to those who challenge his positions
Josh Fox
GASLAND
Milanville, Pennsylvania
3/16/11
Radioactive | Fort Worth Weekly – News, Entertainment, Restaurants, Music
March 16, 2011 1 Comment
Radioactive | Fort Worth Weekly – News, Entertainment, Restaurants, Music.
Radioactive
That’s how scrapyard owners describe drilling industry leftovers brought to their businesses.
On Fort Worth’s North Side, tons of copper, aluminum, old cars, sheet metal, and steel pipe arrive each day at huge scrapyards. According to several owners of such yards, those deliveries now routinely include truckloads of pipes and other metal scrap from Barnett Shale gas-drilling operations.As with every load of scrap metal that arrives, those trucks’ contents are tested for radioactivity. “And the stuff that comes in from the gas fields comes in hot,” one owner said — and therefore gets rejected.
Other scrapyard owners confirmed that experience. But gas industry officials deny it.
Scrapyards like this one on the North Side usually turn away gas-drilling scrap because they can’t resell it. Andrea McDaniel-Brentz
“If you think about drilling pipe,” said Joe Rauch, public information officer for Nabors Drilling, “there is constantly circulating drilling mud effectively cleaning the hole and the pipe itself, so there is no way for any radioactivity to build up in those pipes.”A state official whose agency deals with such contaminated materials said that gas-drilling pipes do build up radioactivity, but to much lower levels than oil-field pipe and that the buildup is easily removed and shouldn’t be a problem for scrapyards. But scrapyards sell to the big smelting plants, and because those plants won’t accept it, the scrapyards won’t either.
No one has yet studied radioactive loads carried by machinery and piping used in the Barnett Shale. It’s an important question because of the total volume of pipe and other equipment used in gas drilling in North Texas and something that may become a big issue down the road — as it was and is with oil-field equipment.
“You just look at West Texas oil fields and see how much machinery is just sitting there, and imagine the same thing happening to the pipe used in this city, and you’ll get the picture,” said an owner of one Fort Worth scrapyard. “And all that metal is just sitting in West Texas because nobody will touch it. It’s too hot, too radioactive to go near.”
In the oil fields, he explained, some of the pipe pulled from old wells “is 100 years old, and those pipes are just saturated with radiation. And that’s why you see oil fields just littered with metal that’s never going to be moved. It’s got nowhere to go and so it’s just going to sit there, hot, until it rusts away. And that’s going to leave the ground contaminated, of course.”
The radiation he’s talking about is called NORM — naturally occurring radioactive material, which exists in many things, from granite to peanut butter, although drilling activists are quick to point out that “naturally occurring” doesn’t mean “safe.” In oil fields and in the flowback water from the hydraulic fracturing of shale deposits — as well as in the “produced” water that comes up with oil and gas during extraction — it exists most commonly as radium 226 and radium 228, decay products from uranium.
Greg Hughes, who worked for two years at a nuclear facility, said that the drilling process can concentrate that radiation. “Now if you look at the water that comes through the pipe, let’s say a gallon of it, it’s not particularly dangerous,” said Hughes, now a member of the North Central Texas Communities Alliance, an activist group that is a frequent critic of the drilling industry. “But as that liquid moves through the pipe, you get scaling on the inside of those pipes, which is kind of a naturally occurring concentration of that radioactive material. And that’s when it becomes dangerous.”
There’s an important difference between oil and gas pipes, said Richard Ratliff, manager of radiation safety licensing for the Texas Department of Health Services, which oversees the decontamination of oil and gas pipelines, among other things. “Any time you drill through strata that has uranium in it, you are going to see NORM. And that builds up in pipes as scaling. Now when the scaling gets thick — and I’ve seen six-inch pipes that have been reduced to two inches because of scaling — you have to pull that pipe. At that point you can either dispose of it, or you can have the pipe decontaminated and then work with it again.” There are two landfills in Texas licensed to bury contaminated metals.
The decontamination takes place at one of five or more plants licensed to do that work in Texas. The pipes or other machinery contaminated with NORM are put into a controlled environment and then blasted either with sand or high-pressure air. “All of that air and solid debris is collected, and then the solid waste is taken for disposal,” Ratliff said.
But with gas pipes, he said, the buildup is more often in thin layers on the inside of the pipe. “And gas companies might just clean that with acid and then collect the contaminated acid and dispose of that. Or they send them to a licensed facility for decontamination.” Disposal of the solid waste or acid generally involves adding enough liquid to make a slurry and then shooting it down injection wells.
The bottom line, he said, is that pipes contaminated with NORM “are one of the lower risks we deal with.”
But if NORM from the gas fields is not a serious risk — other than to the people who work with the pipes regularly — why would the companies that trade in used metal refuse to deal with it? And why do the large smelting houses, like Chaparral Steel in Midlothian, refuse to accept NORM-contaminated steel?
“There really is no reason for either the scrapyards or the steel mills to reject pipes and machinery with NORM,” Ratliff said. “The reason is that when you smelt that material, the NORM products wind up in the slag and not in the new steel or whatever you’re making. There is a huge difference between that and, say, contamination that comes from cobalt. Cobalt radiation stays in the steel, and so it winds up contaminating anything you make from that contaminated metal.”
It’s probably the memory of having had to spend exorbitant amounts of money on contamination cleanups that has made the smelting industry so gun-shy when it comes to radiation, he said. “And with no smelting house willing to take NORM-contaminated material, it makes sense that the scrapyards won’t take it. What are they going to do with it?” The yards sell their metal to the smelters.
Chaparral is so wary of NORM that its safety and environmental requirements, available on the company’s web site, note that “if a shipment is processed at a Chaparral plant site to remove NORM (Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material) materials, the VENDOR will be responsible for all related processing costs … .”
“There is no question that there is a potential health hazard from NORM for people who work around the pipes,” said Scott Anderson, senior policy advisor for the Environmental Defense Fund’s Texas office. He’s a former executive vice president and general counsel of the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association. “And the people who clean pipes are exposed to levels of NORM that are potentially dangerous.”
On one hand, he said, studies of NORM done in the Texas oil fields in the 1980s and 1990s indicated that “concentrations of NORM in the pipes and equipment were not a significant health hazard to the general public.”
But NORM levels caused by hydraulic fraccing are generally higher than in oil-well flowback, he said — the same chemicals, but in higher concentrations. He noted a recent New York Times report of a study by the American Petroleum Institute, never before published, that suggested such radiation could concentrate in Gulf of Mexico fish, making them unsafe to eat. The study was one of thousands published on the Times’ web site regarding the natural gas industry throughout the country.
Anderson said the study referred to in the Times story is the only one he’s heard about. “That [more studies] might be something that ought to be done as long as we’re going to dig all these gas wells,” he said.
