Coal extraction issues will remain lost in the shuffle
by David Zetland
reposted from Aguanomics
(Rdan here…
I have not posted David’s material in awhile, nor actually much on economics of water in more than a year. We don’t always agree on the economics of water, but we do agree on its importance and value. My first postings on water economics were a result of a challenge from Tim Worstall to look at privatizing water utilities as occurred in 1989 in the United Kingdom, in relation to privitizing water supplies in the US and ongoing changes of ownership through the World Trade Oganization rules. Time permits a return to my special interest. Unfortunately it is still a ho-hum issue for the bulk of Americans if the media is any indication.
I am posting David’s post on coal and water tables so I don’t have to. But my sentiments are along the same lines.)
Some of you may have heard of the 25-plus coal miners who died in an “accident” at the Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine. What you may not have heard is this:
In 2009, the Mine Safety and Health Administration cited the UBB mine 515 times, often for problems with its ventilation and escape-route plans. Some 48 of the citations were for violations deemed likely to lead to serious injury or illness.
The Massey Energy Company, which owns the UBB mine, is contesting many of those violations. But this is not the first time that Massey—the fourth-largest coal company in America—has come under fire for its safety practices. In 2006 two people died in a fire at the Aracoma mine, which Massey owns and which was found to have inadequate water supplies and poor ventilation. Massey paid $4.2m in criminal and civil fines. In 2008 Massey paid $20m in fines levied by the Environmental Protection Agency for clean-water violations.
Don Blankenship, Massey’s boss… called safety violations “a normal part of the mining process”.
I’ve a few things to say about this:
1.Fuck you, Blankenship. (Yeah, sorry, but I gotta say it.)
2.Massey and Blankenship should be tried for corporate manslaughter.
3.West Virginia politicians are not serving their citizens; they are owned by resource extraction companies. After a change in administration, the EPA is finally slowing down mountaintop removal coal mining; see this post for more background.
4.Marilyn Hunt read my piece on human rights and wrote, asking about their right to be free on pollution from fracking”:*
My site is from rural Wetzel Co West Virginia. My husband Robert N Hunt is a research scientist so his friends at Bayer Pittsburgh have been doing free water tests finding Toluene, benzene, and other chemicals in wells and springs and now we are learning biocides are in the water too.
The air is also contaminated, workers have died here most not knowing what the chemicals were they handled or how to handle the pipes. Total SA is accused of crimes against humanity and is Chesapeake Energy’s new partner.
No one knew what these people were going to do and they said they used only salt water to “frac”. I kept them off my farm by hiring a good lawyer but many people signed leases and now they have no top soil and contaminated water.
Today I got an email that animal deaths are increasing in Pennsylvania and that ducks with multiple beaks are hatching out. We now have water testing from here up to Pittsburgh with our volunteer effort. Corruption of officials and state regulators has led us to the Region 3 EPA for enforcement but things are moving so slowly, we also are getting help from Sierra Club and Joe Lovett environmental activist who took on the coal cos. Halliburton got the frac drilling exempted from the Clean Water Act in 2005, opening the way for the concealment of chemicals and methods.
People are getting sick and many do not know what they are going to do.
What, indeed, can we do when companies pay to get the laws changed in their favor, pollute without fear of prosecution and lie to people who cannot discover the truth on their own. West Virginia has more in common with Angola or Nigeria than their neighbors in Virginia. Why do those neighbors have nice clean water, air and soil? Because they commute to Washington DC, where they enforce laws to ensure that their neighborhoods are safe and clean.
Bottom Line: Can we get a little justice here, please?
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* Using water to hydrologically fracture hardrock, to extract natural gas. I’ve ignored fracking until now, but I — like others — wonder if the process of pressure injecting water and “proprietary” chemicals underground, and then draining the waste into local watersheds is really such a good idea. Fracking is certainly not harmless, those chemicals are probably not harmless, and those who extract are not taking responsibility for the environmental harm they are causing. This is just terrible.
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Addendum: Manslaughter charges are justified (via JWT): “A comparison between Massey’s safety practices and those of other operators in the coal industry shows sharp differences”
21 April 2010
http://corporatecrimereporter.com/massey041610.htm
See also involuntary manslaughter in state law.
It starts with the Board of Directors. If the board tells the CEO that safety is #1 and makes the number of safety citations a factor to reduce his bonus, the CEO will get the message. But in Massey’s case I suspect the board is Blankenships creature.
Salt water is not used to ‘frac’. Salt water comes up with the oil and/or gas and is put through a seperator. The salt water is then diverted to storage tanks where it remains until it is hauled away to a disposal. A disposal is is much the the same as a well but in reverse. There is steel casing running thousands of feet below the ground to a cavity or a fissure and the salt water, which comes up out of the ground as hot as bathwater, is essentially put back from where it came, give or take a little mileage. And all of this is monitored closely by the EPA and in Texas by the Railroad Commission (each load receipt must be accompanied by a disposal receipt). I have driven a tanker and hauled salt water and even though it is only mildly caustic, there is very little tolerance for those who fail to get every last drop down the disposal. (this is an easy way to give the appearance of being concerned about the environment)
It is very unlikely that ‘fracing’ pollutes because it is all done as part of a closed system that is controlled by pressure. Nor are chemicals used much in the fracing process, it is done mostly with just a mixture that consists of freshwater and some refined sand at about 99 to 1. Any and all fluids that come up as a result of the pressure being applied are diverted to holding tanks to be hauled away to disposals, or, if chemicals are used the excess is hauled to pits that are either lined with membranes, or in some cases clay pits are used, either way, the chemically contaminated wastewater is dehydrated and then buried within a protective membrane.
The pollution occurs at what are called ‘mud-farms’ but the polluted ‘mud’ is what remains at the end of the drilling phase. The drill rig must be dismantled and removed before the frac operation can begin and it is important to recognize that these are separate efforts. The drill rig has a platform where most of the activity takes place and under this platform there are large rectilinear tanks that can all be interconnected so as to move large volumes of fluid as needed to facilitate the drilling. It is difficult to describe just how much mechanical activity takes place during the drilling process but it is on a huge scale and all draining down into the tanks. This is all done so as to ensure that the site is not left contaminated by having the tanks covered with porous decking that serve as a catch-all for what is basically a huge machine with an insatiable thirst for nearly every imaginable petroleum product.
At the end of the drilling phase there is a sludge at the bottom of these tanks that is consolidated and then hauled to a mud-farm where this ‘mud’ is dispersed onto the ground. An effort is made to contain the contaminants by using flat terrain that is deeply plowed and encircled with berms. This would probably work too if it were not for the copious amounts of this sludge that is put on the land. Again, it is difficult to describe the scale here and I don’t have anything other than anecdotal offerings and some very vague math, but… each tanker-truck carries about 40,000 pounds of this ‘mud’, there are at least as many mud-farms on the Barnett as there are towns (50ish), and there is sometimes a queue of trucks waiting to be processed in — throughout the day and 7 days a week (unless of course the price of nat gas is down and then everything slows down accordingly). Drilling on the Barnett has been somewhat steady though for several years now and the rigs move about 3 to 5 weeks (low price of nat gas tends to mean more vacation time between set-ups). Maybe it is best just to say: Bookoo ‘mud’, and these farms are easily the most likely source of the pollutants mentioned in the post.
“After a change in administration, the EPA is finally slowing down mountaintop removal coal mining;”
This is something I don’t understand.
If you want coal you’ve effectively two ways of getting it. Deep mining and open cast mining. You either drill a shaft down and get men hundreds/thousands of feet underground digging it out, in which case there will be accidents and men will die. Or you take the dirt off the top of the coal and get at it from the surface. Mountain top removal is simply a form of open cast mining.
Now, it’s entirely possible to say that we shouldn’t be using coal at all but if you’re not willing to go that far then mountain top removal/open cast mining seems better in terms of lives potentially lost than deep mining.
No?
Good post. As long as the governmnet continues to favor coal mining (by failing to deal with its externalities), people will continue to die mining it, and the environmental disaster that is coal will continue (remember TVA). Coal is probably the dirtiest, nastiest form of energy there is. We should be switching all coal electricity generation to nuclear. Nuclear waste’s footprint is tiny compared to coal’s. Of course, that won’t necessarily stop coal exports.
I wrote the comment above while watching a movie last night and it is a little misleading. What needs a bit more explaining is that ‘mud’ is used as a weighting agent to hold down the pressure created by the drilling process. Water, and in some cases heavy-water, is mixed with a clay of sorts, usually barite, and this emulsion is pumped into the bore above the drill-bit so as to encase the stem as the boring advances. The pressure will at times though ‘blow’ the ‘mud’ out of the bore-hole and into a holding tank. When this occurs the pressure is released and then the mud is pumped back into the hole and and the weight is increased as needed to hold down the pressure. This can require tens of thousands of pounds of mud and ultimately this is constitutes the bulk of what is hauled away to the ‘mud-farms’ along with, as I explained above, the inherent lubricant residue of the entire mechanized operation.
It might also be worth mentioning that when a well first comes on line, during the fracing phase, some of the salt water comes up containing residues and the disposals refuse to accept anything that might clog their systems so essentially anything that dosn’t qualify for a disposal, but that isn’t classified as a substance containing toxic chemicals, is taken to a mud-farm. Some drill sites also have fresh water storage pits and once these are no longer needed they are drained down and the water from these is often times too murky for disposals and so it too goes to the mud-farms. ( the pits are ultimately back-filled and the sites are reconditioned after the fracing )
weighting material
1. n. [Drilling Fluids] ID: 2409
A high-specific gravity and finely divided solid material used to increase density of a drilling fluid. (Dissolved salts that increase fluid density, such as calcium bromide in brines, are not called weighting materials.) Barite is the most common, with minimum specific gravity of 4.20 g/cm3. Hematite is a more dense material, with minimum specific gravity of 5.05 g/cm3, per API and ISO specifications. Calcium carbonate, specific gravity 2.7 to 2.8, is considered weighting material but is used more for its acid solubility than for density. Siderite, specific gravity around 3.8, has been used to densify mud, but can cause problems by dissolving into the mud at high pH. Ilmenite, specific gravity of 4.6 has been used in drilling fluid and cement. Only barite and hematite have API/ISO standards.
Compare mining safety records of various mines, per the link. What is the “marginal?” cost for appropriate safety measures…I think comparing types of mining is useful, but bears little relation to safety issues as practiced my Massey Energy if the article is accurate.
Tim
I don’t think it’s that easy. I doubt it’s a simple tradeoff between “inevitable deaths in deep mines and environmental destruction in open pit. It seems that both operations can be conducted with more or less attentioin to safety of the miners and the neighborhood if the operator is willing to spend the money. And that environmental damage is not exactly “death free.”
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