Have Another Hit of Fracked Air

[unhappycamper]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Have-Another-Hit-of-Fracke-by-j-dial-130427-82.html



Frack the Rockies

Have Another Hit of Fracked Air
By j dial
OpEdNews Op Eds 4/27/2013 at 20:58:59

We were treated to two speakers on the subject of the state of our air. Jana Milford[1], an engineer and lawyer, began by requesting that we stop her if we heard her use the words "frack" or "hydraulic fracturing". She did not explain her reason but one suspects it might stem from their status as "loaded" words. One avoids inflaming the ambiguous throng. Of the options for assessing atmospheric impacts of our actions, said scientist Gabrielle Petron[2], she much prefers the evidentiary approach and so spends much time in the field collecting air.

As of 2012, 26 percent of US power was derived from natural gas, and that percentage is growing. Colorado is approaching 50,000 active fracking wells; compare that to the 35,000 populating the Middle East. Yet among Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado, the four states straddling our substrate of fecund shale, Colorado is not foremost in wells. That position is held now by Wyoming, formerly by New Mexico. These are production trends, Milford tells us, that lead to emissions. But, she hastens to add, fracking is hardly the sole source of such emissions. Don't forget feedlots and landfills.

And while the Front Range with its temperature inversions suffers hot-weather ozone spikes, said Petron, gas fields in Utah and Wyoming measure oddly high levels of ozone in winter. Also of interest is that regulators who set monitors to measure air in Denver and Fort Collins have not seen fit to place any in the multi-poked gas fields of Weld County.

Natural gas is lighter than air, highly combustible, clean-burning, and odorless; mercaptan with its distinctive smell is added to make even small leaks easy to detect. (It's a pity mercaptan can't be sooner paired.) Although natural gas burns relatively cleanly into carbon dioxide and water, when vented into air intact, its main component, methane, traps 25 times more warmth ton for ton than does carbon dioxide. Opportunities for escape are frequent and far-flung, from well-heads, valves, pipelines, storage tanks, compressors, controllers, connectors, and trucks. Methane leaks are invisible to the naked eye but become alarmingly real through an infrared lens:



Infrared methane emissions

[Buzz Clik]

1. Without question, this is the most important criticism of fracking.