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You are here: Home / Economics / Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You / A Sophisticated Waste Disposal Plan

A Sophisticated Waste Disposal Plan

by John Cole|  July 12, 20119:58 am| 46 Comments

This post is in: Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You, Assholes, Sociopaths

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Lots of info in this story about the complete deforestation of an area in WV after it was exposed to fracking fluid,but my favorite (not really) portion is the highly sophisticated, rigorously engineered, and carefully thought through method of disposing of fracking fluid:

A gas company that legally doused a patch of West Virginia forest with salty wastewater from a drilling operation killed ground vegetation within days and more than half the trees within two years, a new report from the U.S. Forest Service says.

***

In 2007, Berry Energy Inc. of Clarksburg began drilling a conventional, vertical gas well in a section of the Fernow Experimental Forest, a part of the Monongahela set aside for research.

Adams said what unfolded over the next two years was an unexpected opportunity for observation.

Some results were expected, from deforestation and road damage to runoff and erosion. Others, including the dramatic die-off when wastewater was land-applied, were not.

Berry Energy didn’t immediately return messages Monday, but the report says that in June 2008, under a permit from the state Department of Environmental Protection, it sprayed 75,000 gallons of treated fracking fluid on the quarter-acre.

Adams said the Forest Service hoped to minimize damage and was only told afterward that the industry standard is to use a much larger area.

“We were surprised when the vegetation responded so quickly because we were told there would be no effect, ‘This is done all the time,'” Adams said. “And there was a very dramatic response.”

Within a few days, all ground vegetation was dead. Within 10 days, the leaves of the hardwoods began to turn brown and drop. Within two years, more than half of the 150 trees were dead, and sodium and chloride concentrations in the soil were 50 times higher than normal.

Those levels declined over time, but the report says high salt content in the soil had another unexpected result: It attracted foraging white-tailed deer and black bears, slowing the regrowth of vegetation.

Really? That’s the disposal plan? To just spray it all over the god damned forest? How many engineers and scientists did it take to come up with this “idea?” You have to be kidding me, right?

It’s so fucking perfect, even down to the imagery of a large corporation shooting fracking fluid out of a hose into a forest. They’re pissing on you, me, and everyone and everything else and they don’t give a shit.

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Reader Interactions

46Comments

  1. 1.

    murbella

    July 12, 2011 at 10:03 am

    Market-based capitalism in action.
    Its the American Way.

  2. 2.

    Jeffro

    July 12, 2011 at 10:03 am

    I’m fine with fracking as long as the CEOs of said energy companies live right next to wherever fracking takes place. Even if it’s just for six months.

    In fact, you could apply that principle to most anything…I think it’s called the Golden…Golden something or other.

  3. 3.

    cleek

    July 12, 2011 at 10:03 am

    this problem wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t so much regulation. i blame the EPA.

  4. 4.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    July 12, 2011 at 10:03 am

    And our politicians like to tell us how they are thinking of the future and our children in all of their decision making. They don’t give a shit about the children, or anybody else for that matter. Just keep giving the pols their campaign contributions and cushy jobs after their political life is over.

    That’s all they really care about. Fuck everyone else, all they care is that they get their cut of the pie first.

  5. 5.

    eric

    July 12, 2011 at 10:06 am

    Both sides do it.

  6. 6.

    scav

    July 12, 2011 at 10:07 am

    Shades of Carthage. No one could have predicted.

  7. 7.

    JGabriel

    July 12, 2011 at 10:08 am

    John Cole @ Top:

    Within 10 days, the leaves of the hardwoods began to turn brown and drop. Within two years, more than half of the 150 trees were dead, and sodium and chloride concentrations in the soil were 50 times higher than normal.
    __
    Those levels declined over time, but the report says high salt content in the soil had another unexpected result: It attracted foraging white-tailed deer and black bears, slowing the regrowth of vegetation.

    Really? That’s the disposal plan? To just spray it all over the god damned forest?

    On the other hand, it’ll help with the deer and bear populations — apparently they’ll all be dying from early heart attacks due to a high sodium diet.

    Charming, innit? We can give our wild animal friends, those cuddly creatures of the forest, all the benefits of a modern homo sapien McDonald’s diet, just by spraying the woods with fracking waste.

    .

  8. 8.

    The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik

    July 12, 2011 at 10:10 am

    But Fracking is the way of the future and will give us cheap energy, thus making us energy independent and saving the economy. If you hate Fracking, you’re a luddite and Anti-American. Remember that, you goddamned hippie.

  9. 9.

    Davis X. Machina

    July 12, 2011 at 10:11 am

    Has anybody told 2012 primary challenger and 2016 Democratic frontrunner and liberal hero Andrew Cuomo about this?

  10. 10.

    Dennis SGMM

    July 12, 2011 at 10:13 am

    If anyone was wondering why the companies that make and use fracking fluid are insistent that the components of it must be kept secret, here’s your answer. I’m not a chemist, but I’d bet that they’re all using minor variations of the same witches’ brew and I’d further bet that known carcinogens are a part of it.

    This is going to make the Love Canal look like Woodstock by comparison.

  11. 11.

    Davis X. Machina

    July 12, 2011 at 10:15 am

    Drill, congenitally deformed baby, drill!

    (Campaign slogan edited to conform with FTC truth-in-advertising requirements…)

  12. 12.

    Zifnab

    July 12, 2011 at 10:15 am

    @Jeffro:

    In fact, you could apply that principle to most anything…I think it’s called the Golden…Golden something or other.

    Golden showers?

    I thought you were talking about the Golden Rule for a second there, but I’m pretty sure we’re already playing by “Whomever has the gold makes the rules.”

  13. 13.

    PurpleGirl

    July 12, 2011 at 10:16 am

    Davis X. Machina: I’m assuming you’re singling him out because he recently said he was going to approve fracking in NYS and allow the gas companies to resume their fracking operations. (Note: this approval does not include areas within NYC’s watershed properties.)

    ETA: I would like to point out that is pundits who are calling him a liberal hero. I (and many others) know that he is not liberal and is not a hero. His election was another case of the (semingly) lesser evil.)

  14. 14.

    ottercliff

    July 12, 2011 at 10:17 am

    Not pissing on all of us: Our representatives in Congress get their pockets stuffed with wads of cash, the rest of us get the piss.

  15. 15.

    Davis X. Machina

    July 12, 2011 at 10:19 am

    @PurpleGirl: Or Syracuse’s. But as far as I know, the rest of the Empire State, hey, go for it. All I know is what I read in the papers.

  16. 16.

    JGabriel

    July 12, 2011 at 10:24 am

    Berry Energy didn’t immediately return messages Monday, but the report says that in June 2008, under a permit from the state Department of Environmental Protection, it sprayed 75,000 gallons of treated fracking fluid on the quarter-acre.
    __
    Adams said the Forest Service hoped to minimize damage and was only told afterward that the industry standard is to use a much larger area.

    Not to be contrarian, but a quarter-acre is about 35′ x 35′, the size of a large front yard. That’s a small space in which to be dumping 75,000 gallons of anything, even clean water, over two years.

    That doesn’t make the method of disposal any less stupid, of course. But the conditions of this experiment might not have been the ideal testing grounds.

    .

  17. 17.

    Sharl

    July 12, 2011 at 10:28 am

    In the public radio radio program This American Life, the most recent show* was on hydrofracking in Pennsylvania – specifically, how the politics and academic institutions in that state have been utterly corrupted by the big money involved.

    The utter selling out by Penn State was news to me. IIRC, the show had accounts of booing by community meeting attendees when the phrase ‘proven to be safe by a Penn State study’ (or similar) comes up.

    *You can listen to it online or download the mp3 this week; I don’t think they’re available beyond that, other than via podcast subscription.

  18. 18.

    Glen Tomkins

    July 12, 2011 at 10:28 am

    A disaster of Biblical proportions

    In ancient times, the ultimate act of aggression against a hated enemy, something that went beyond the worst act of war, was to plow their land with salt. This made it incapable of bearing crops for generations, and thus would condemn the whole enemy nation to a choice of starvation or migration.

    The ancients, living as they did in a much less productive society, tended to be much more practical about things in general than ours, and pushing your hatred of an enemy to the point of rendering perfectly good cropland infertile was the sort of luxury stupidity that they couldn’t afford to indulge. The Romans famously actually went through with plowing salt into some Carthaginian fields after the 3d Punic War, but this was done only to a very small area, as a symbol more than an actual attempt to make the territory of the former Carthage uninhabitable, beacuase that area, reorganized as a Roman province became the breadbasket of Rome.

    Well, unlike the ancients, we live in a highly productive society. We can afford to be stupid. And damn if we don’t sink stupid right up to the hilt of what we can afford. What in ancient times was an act of hatred and aggression so extreme that it was never actually carried out, but only talked about as some beyond-the-beyond extreme, we do to ourselves, to our own land.

    We’re going to inherit the wind, of course. And it will be a hot wind, a globally warmed wind.

  19. 19.

    CaptainFwiffo

    July 12, 2011 at 10:30 am

    Wait – they’re claiming they didn’t know salting the earth would kill the… Hold on… Wait what?

  20. 20.

    JGabriel

    July 12, 2011 at 10:35 am

    CaptainFwiffo:

    Wait – they’re claiming they didn’t know salting the earth would kill the… Hold on… Wait what?

    Heh. Yeah, that’s pretty much the short of it.

    .

  21. 21.

    bobbie

    July 12, 2011 at 10:47 am

    What’s the big deal? We don’t need Nature. We got lots of smart people. We’ll let them engineer the whole friggin’ biosystem for us, and if that doesn’t work out as planned, we’ll pray. Where’s my chemistry set?

    Happy Fukushima to ya!

  22. 22.

    Dennis SGMM

    July 12, 2011 at 10:50 am

    Whatever else happens, I am confident that Congress will contrive a way to make us pay for any remediation.

    The Republican line will be, “Making these companies pay for the cleanup is a job-killing tax increase!”

    They will find enough Blue Dog and fracked state Democratic support to make it stick.

  23. 23.

    Ben

    July 12, 2011 at 10:57 am

    The thing that really gets me is the FS spokesperson’s quote: “we were told there would be no effect”. Why does the DEC and USFS rely on the polluters to describe the effect of their pollution, and issue permits based on that description? What kind of standard or oversight is that?

  24. 24.

    Dennis SGMM

    July 12, 2011 at 11:02 am

    @Ben

    It looks to me as though the EPA has inadvertently solved the nuclear waste disposal problem. All the nuclear industry has to do is assure EPA that there would be no effect from scattering spent fuel rods, etc. over the countryside and voila! problem solved.

  25. 25.

    patrick

    July 12, 2011 at 11:03 am

    actually, an acre is 43560 square feet, in a square it would be ~209’x209′, so 1/4 acre would be ~ 105’x105′

    hmm…making one huge salt lick attracting deer? hoocoodoonoode?

  26. 26.

    Wagon

    July 12, 2011 at 11:31 am

    The fact that this was in a national forest makes it even more maddening. Someone said this will make Love Canal look quaint. I hope I’m wrong, but that’s how I see it playing out too.

  27. 27.

    DecidedFenceSitter

    July 12, 2011 at 11:33 am

    @Ben: Because they don’t have the resources to evaluate on their own because budgets are tight.

  28. 28.

    piratedan

    July 12, 2011 at 11:43 am

    If Nature cared one way or the other, it would have hired better lawyers…..

  29. 29.

    Nellcote

    July 12, 2011 at 11:58 am

    They should be doing biopsies on the deer to see what other chemicals they’re ingesting in their “foraging”.

  30. 30.

    trollhattan

    July 12, 2011 at 12:00 pm

    Hoocoodanode, indeed? They might have asked these guys (blessed are the cheesemakers):

    http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-09-26/news/24098163_1_polluted-wells-drinking-water-wells-hilmar-cheese

    Last week’s “TAL” program cited earlier, on the gas industry assault on university research was a sure blood pressure enhancer. Shameless doesn’t begin to describe.

  31. 31.

    John Puma

    July 12, 2011 at 12:15 pm

    The underlying story is titled “W.Va. study raises questions about fracking fluid.”

    Indeed, questions raised and questions, most likely, summarily ignored.

  32. 32.

    SectarianSofa

    July 12, 2011 at 12:22 pm

    Reminded me of dumping PCBs along North Carolina roads :
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_biphenyl#North_Carolina

    That was in the late ’70s. Good thing we’re smarter now.

    In Capitalist America, the self-policing Markets beat *us* up…. That’s what policing means, right?

  33. 33.

    Johnny's Mom

    July 12, 2011 at 12:26 pm

    Back in the 70’s, Penn State studied the effects of spraying sewage (I believe they referred to it as “effluent”) on forest land. The sun, rain, dirt (sorry, “soil”) and bedrock cleaned and filtered all the nasties out and all was right with the world. I feel like some idiot-in-charge decided that if it worked for sewage (EWWWWW, what could be worse?), then the same process could be used, without limits, to get rid of anything (ANYTHING! I tell you, ANYTHING!).

  34. 34.

    Constance

    July 12, 2011 at 12:26 pm

    Did anyone bother to study birth defects, outright death by solution, mutations, or anything along those lines. I’ve read that fracking waste contains some pretty gnarly chemicals.

    Is anyone still doubting that humans will make this planet uninhabitable to mammal life (probably all life) in 30 or 40 years?

    I keep forgetting that it’s much more important to Senate republicans that they prevent the re-election of a black Democratic president than it is to do something about climate change, pollution, clean energy, the infrastructure–all the things that come under the heading of governance. and some of them actually believe it would go against god’s will to attempt to change these things.

    Sigh.

  35. 35.

    Pococurante

    July 12, 2011 at 12:32 pm

    Basically the same recipe as for Roundup, something I use on my farm and can attest to its almost frightening effectiveness.

  36. 36.

    Nellcote

    July 12, 2011 at 12:45 pm

    So John, as a citizen of WV what are you going to do about it?

  37. 37.

    Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937

    July 12, 2011 at 12:55 pm

    Davis
    New York State is now composed to two groups of people, those that live in NYC and Syracuse, and everybody else. According to Cuomo, ‘everybody else’ can DIAF.

  38. 38.

    Bill Murray

    July 12, 2011 at 1:39 pm

    actually, an acre is 43560 square feet, in a square it would be ~209’x209’, so 1/4 acre would be ~ 105’x105’

    hmm…making one huge salt lick attracting deer? hoocoodoonoode?

    If the 75,000 gallons was spread evenly over this area in a day, this would, I think, be equivalent to about 1 foot of rain in that day. So a very heavy rain storm, but not record breaking. In 1947 Holt, MO got that much rain in an hour

  39. 39.

    Johnny's Mom

    July 12, 2011 at 2:00 pm

    @Bill Murray- It comes across like you’re trying to minimize the effects of a toxic-soup storm by comparing it to a lot of rain. Just sayin’

  40. 40.

    trollhattan

    July 12, 2011 at 2:24 pm

    @39.Johnny’s Mom

    The big difference: in Holt, MO, it was rainin’ men.

    Also, too, percolating a foot of water in a day would take some awfully porous soil. Methinks there was a lot of runoff as well as some evaporation.

  41. 41.

    HyperIon

    July 12, 2011 at 5:30 pm

    “under a permit from the state Department of Environmental Protection”

    I did not know WVa had such a dept, given the amount of mountain top removal and coal mining in the state. I mean, why bother?

  42. 42.

    oil guy

    July 12, 2011 at 6:14 pm

    This is neither a defense of, nor a condemnation of the gas industry, rather an explanation for those who want it. PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THIS IS A GROSS SIMPLIFICATION, a full explanation would take pages:

    In the natural gas drilling industry, it is common practice to land-apply (or “landfarm”) the residual water and mud slurry** used during drilling operations, after the drilling of a well. This slurry is created and used during the drilling of the well, to cool the drill bit, lubricate the drilling process and seal rock formations above the target zone. An average vertical gas well, depending on the target formation, is ~10k feet deep, so it is important to seal off all the rock formations that will be passed on the way down to depth. **This is not the same liquid as fracking fluid, we’ll get to that in a minute**

    In order to be able to land-farm in the state of Texas (the only state I can speak to), the fluid must be no more than app. 10,000 barrels for every 10 acres of open pasture (10 acre minimum) of area over which it is to be spread, and contain a chloride concentration of not more than 3,000 mg/l. In my experience, I have never seen proper landfarming result in damage to soil or grass.

    However, what this article seems to be describing is frac fluid, namely the fluid that is recovered from a completed well during flow-back, which is another matter entirely. To the best of my knowledge, the standard disposal procedure for this fluid is to pump it into what is called a salt water dispossal or “salt water injection well”. Basically, a well is drilled to about the same depth (~10k ft) as other producing wells in the area, only in this well, waste fluid is continually pushed down into the formation at pressure. This in turn can often stimulate the productiveness of nearby gas wells by slightly raising the nearby pressure in the formation.

    I have never heard of land-applying frac fluid, and I would assume the only conceivably acceptable way would be over an area as large or larger than what I have described above. However, as many of you have mentioned, there are likely some pretty nasty chemicals in frac fluid (surfactants, preservatives, etc) that should not be spread on the surface, period. My guess is that this area is new to production and does not have the necessary safety regulations in place to monitor this stuff. I can assure you that the steps we have to go through with the BLM (bureau of land management) in Texas to drill in a public forest are extensive, requiring months of applications, review and testing of the soil, flora, fauna, etc, and a great deal of money. If we were to do what was described in this story, not only would we never be allowed to drill another well on public land, there would be prosecutions, firings and severe fines.

    Whatever your opinion on natural gas drilling, understand that hydrofracking is the only practical way we know of to produce natural gas. I am not defending the gross negligence in this story, but I do think that if we want to change things for the better, than educating ourselves is an important first step.

  43. 43.

    LanceThruster

    July 12, 2011 at 7:26 pm

    It reminds me of the stories of the mafia running waste disposal companies where they would load the toxic sludge (including radioactive) in tanker trucks and drive along remote country roads and open the taps letting it all flow onto the unpaved shoulders. There are some rural routes to this day that are highly toxic.

  44. 44.

    Fiasco

    July 13, 2011 at 12:26 am

    To those wondering about the composition of fracking fluid, check out documentary Gasland. And for those of you whom are wondering…*SPOILER ALERT* Dick Cheney is involved.

    The whole thing is just disgusting at its most base level.

  45. 45.

    LanceThruster

    July 15, 2011 at 7:25 pm

    The documentary “Gasland” had the same effect on me as did “Burning Our Future” about the practice of mountain top removal by the coal industry. It made me cry. Regular Americans are being poisoned and and run off their land due to corporate greed and lies and their governmental enablers.

    Being informed is half the game, but both showed what an uphill climb it is to combat such outrages, and for some communities, it is already too late for them.

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