Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Study links fracking with methane-contaminated drinking water
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| Spencer Platt / Getty Images / AFP |
Household drinking water that comes from wells near known fracking sites contains levels of methane six times greater than what’s common elsewhere, a new study has found.
Researchers at Duke University sampled drinking water from 141 wells across northeastern Pennsylvania and southern New York and determined that the concentration of methane, the main component of natural gas, is much higher when those wells are within one kilometer of a hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” sites.
Fracking is a method of drilling deep into the Earth in order to extract natural gas and has seen an emergence in recent years as an increasingly popular process used by energy companies. That spread in popularity is not without opposition from environmentalists and activists, however, who fear fracking has detrimental effects on the Earth.
According to the latest study, researchers have linked fracking sites with methane contamination several times over what is seen elsewhere. The scientists say that those high levels aren’t a direct result of the drilling, though, but caused in part by poor well construction that has allowed the water to become contaminated.
"It is looking like we are seeing a problem with well construction in some places and not others," wrote the study’s main author, Robert Jackson.
"Poor casing and cementing problems are the simplest explanation of what we found,” he said, but declined to single out well construction as the exclusive cause of the contamination.
"We need to understand why, in some cases, shale gas extraction contaminates groundwater and how to keep it from happening elsewhere," the researchers wrote.
Jackson and his crew determined that 82 percent of the 141 water wells tested had elevated levels of methane, with other additives appearing in unusually high numbers as well. In addition to finding methane concentrations at around six times the usual level, Jackson also found ethane concentrations 23 times higher in drinking water at homes near fracking sites. In ten of the sites located within one kilometer of a drilling, propane was detected in 10 separate water samples.
“The methane, ethane and propane data, and new evidence from hydrocarbon and helium isotopes, all suggest that drilling has affected some homeowners’ water,” Jackson wrote.
Steve Everley, a spokesman for Energy in Depth, told the Wall Street Journal that Jackon’s study "is not a smoking gun to say that gas drilling is a problem."
"There is methane concentration near gas wells, but there is also methane concentrations in areas where there is no gas drilling," he said. Energy in Depth, wrote the Journal, is funded by the Independent Petroleum Association of America.
Jackson’s peer-reviewed study appeared in this week’s edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
EPA refuses to finalize study blaming fracking for water pollution
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| Denise Truong, 21, (L) and Elizabeth Lerer, 51, protest against fracking in California, in Los Angeles May 30, 2013. (Reuters) |
The US Environmental Protection Agency has dropped its plans to further investigate whether or not fracking led to the contamination of a Wyoming aquifer, and the agency no longer plans to write a report on the matter. The EPA in 2011 released a draft report, which revealed that hydraulic fracturing fluids used at a shale gas drilling site had likely contaminated groundwater in Pavillion, Wyoming. Oil and gas companies have long argued that fracking poses no water contamination risks, but the EPA’s results demonstrated otherwise. Critics of the findings, including Wyoming state officials and drilling advocates, argued that the EPA conducted a poor and inaccurate study, which could ultimately harm the industry. Despite the initial wave of criticism in 2011, EPA officials planned to resume the study and continue making assessments regarding the influence of fracking on groundwater. But the EPA on Thursday abandoned those plans, announcing that state officials will instead take over the investigation into Pavillion’s water pollution and draw up a conclusion in 2014. "We think this is the most pragmatic, quickest way to help the residents of Pavillion. We're going to work hand in hand with the state to make sure this investigation moves forward," EPA spokesman Tom Reynolds announced in Washington, D.C. Wyoming will receive a $1.5 million grant from Encana Corp.’s US oil and gas subsidiary, which owns the Pavillion gas field in question. The state plans to issue a final report about its findings in late 2014. Industry officials and drilling proponents have praised the decision to hand over responsibility of the study to Wyoming state officials. "EPA has to do a better job, because another fatally flawed water study could have a big impact on how the nation develops its massive energy resources," Erik Milito, from the Washington, D.C.-based American Petroleum Institute, said in a news release. “The EPA has been on a witch hunt to shut down hydraulic fracturing,” Sen. David Vitter, the top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, told Reuters. Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead said in a news release that letting state officials run the investigation is “in everyone’s best interest”, since it would lead to “an unbiased, scientifically supportable conclusion.” But Mead, a known advocate of drilling, has made no attempts to hide his own biases. Last September, Mead asked the Interior Department to abandon fracking rules, claiming that it was unnecessary to request companies to disclose the chemicals they inject down well bores. He has long opposed having any federal fracking rules, and urges lawmakers to let states make their own decisions. And the Native Americans who live around the fracking site may not even take part in the study, despite the fact that contaminated groundwater has the greatest impact on their tribe. The Northern Arapaho Tribe, which lives on a reservation surrounding Pavillion, has long sought to maintain a role in the investigation. But a tribal official told AP that the EPA has stopped consulting with the community."They have a legal duty to consult with the tribe and that didn't happen as part of their dialogue with the governor," Ronald Oldman, co-chairman of the tribe's business council, said in a statement. It is unclear why the EPA abandoned the study, but with state officials – many of which are fracking proponents – leading the investigation, the results could look very different from the 2011 draft report that linked fracking chemicals to groundwater contamination.
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Google’s chief engineer: People will soon upload their entire brains to computers
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| Ray Kurzweil (AFP Photo / Gabriel Bouys) |
There are around 377 million results on Google.com for the query “Can I live forever?” Ask that question to company’s top engineer, though, and you’re likely to hear an answer that’s much more concise. Simply put, Google’s Ray Kurzweil says immortality is only a few years away. Digital immortality, at least. Kurzweil, 64, was only brought on to Google late last year, but that hasn’t stopped him from making headlines already. During a conference in New York City last week, the company’s director of engineering said that the growth of biotechnology is so quickly paced that that he predicts our lives will be drastically different in just a few decades. According to Kurzweil, humans will soon be able to upload their entire brains onto computers. After then, other advancements won’t be too far behind. “The life expectancy was 20, 1,000 years ago,” Kurzweil said over the weekend at the Global Future 2045 World Congress in New York City, CNBC's Cadie Thompson reported. “We doubled it in 200 years. This will go into high gear within 10 and 20 years from now, probably less than 15, we will be reaching that tipping point where we add more time than has gone by because of scientific progress.” "Somewhere between 10 and 20 years, there is going to be tremendous transformation of health and medicine," he said. In his 2005 book “The Singularity Is Near,” Kurzweil predicted that ongoing achievements in biotechnology would mean that by the middle of the century, “humans will develop the means to instantly create new portions of ourselves, either biological or nonbiologicial,” so that people can have “a biological body at one time and not at another, then have it again, then change it.” He also said there will soon be “software-based humans” who will “live out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including holographically projected bodies, foglet-projected bodies and physical bodies comprising nanobot swarms.”
Those nanobot swarms might still be a bit away, but given the vast capabilities already achieved since the publication of his book, Kurzweil said in New York last week that more and more of the human body will soon be synced up to computers, both for backing up our thoughts and to help stay in good health. "There's already fantastic therapies to overcome heart disease, cancer and every other neurological disease based on this idea of reprogramming the software," Kurzweil at the conference. "These are all examples of treating biology as software. ...These technologies will be a 1,000 times more powerful than they were a decade ago. ...These will be 1,000 times more powerful by the end of the decade. And a million times more powerful in 20 years." In “The Singularity Is Near,” Kurzweil acknowledged that Moore’s Law of Computer suggests that the power of computer doubles, on average, every two years. At that rate, he wrote, “We're going to become increasingly non-biological to the point where the non-biological part dominates and the biological part is not important anymore.” “Based on conservative estimates of the amount of computation you need to functionally simulate a human brain, we'll be able to expand the scope of our intelligence a billion-fold,” The Daily Mail quoted Kurzweil. Kurzweil joined Google in December 2012 and is a 1999 winner of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. In the 1970s, Kurzweil was responsible for creating the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer.
