Water on Fire
You’d think it a bit odd if you turned the tap on and the water coming out burst into flames, yes? But a 2011 investigation by the New York Times has investigated samples from 68 private water wells near gas-drilling areas in the US and found methane concentrations so high (17 times above normal) that the water is actually flammable. One of the authors of the study said, "That sort of concentration is up at a level where people worry about an explosion hazard." As well they might. In Colorado, Ohio and Pennsylvania several homes have blown up after gas seeped into their basements or water supplies. In Pennsylvania a 2004 accident killed three people, including a baby. Has the US fuel industry gone completely insane?
No, it’s just responding to the rather secret fact that oil is running out. We are past the ‘peak’ of easy extraction, and from now on, the stuff is going to be harder to find and a lot more trouble to get hold of. So there is a desperate scramble to find new oil and gas resources. You may have noticed the rumpus over the tar sands business, which extracts a rather small amount of oil from ‘washing’ the tar out of tarry sand, a process that discards vast quantities of highly polluted water all over the landscape. More ambitious, and until now easier to hide is Hydraulic Fracturing, known casually as ‘fracking’.
This is a process of drilling down to the rock layers deep in the earth’s strata and splitting them open by forcing water into them. This releases pressurised liquid methane that promptly mixes with water and goes wherever it thinks it will. Water samples in the states of Pennsylvania and New York were tested and some were found to have 64 milligrams of methane per litre, compared with a normal level of one milligram or lower. The U.S. Department of the Interior has said the average concentration of methane in the water wells near drilling sites is dangerous and requires urgent "hazard mitigation" action. The research was conducted by scientists at Duke University and they found that the gas detected at high levels in the water was the same type that energy companies were extracting from thousands of feet underground. Residents in the areas studied said their water supply had been clean until the ‘fracking’ began.
“We certainly didn’t expect to see such a strong relationship between the concentration of methane in water and the nearest gas wells. That was a real surprise,” said Robert Jackson, a biology professor at Duke and one of the report’s authors. Methane is not regulated in drinking water, and while research is limited, it is not currently believed to be harmful to drink. But the methane is dangerous because as it collects in enclosed spaces it can asphyxiate people or lead to an explosion.
Could the earth be trying to tell us something?
