Fracking waste leads to injection well standoff in Wilson County

[douglas9]

Published: July 3, 2012

Fracking waste leads to injection well standoff in Wilson County


The air outside Trudi Buckley's rural Wilson County home stinks with the noxious odor of hydrogen sulfide, the smell seeping from a waste injection well just 150 yards outside her house. "That rotten egg, that sulfur smell is always there," she said. Touring the property Friday, her 20-year-old son Dusty said, "I'm afraid I've gotten used to it."

Like the 52,000 waste disposal wells drilled across the state of Texas, the nearly two-decade-old well outside Buckley's home was drilled to shoot hazardous waste from oil and gas fields thousands of miles into the earth. With oil and gas production teeming in the Eagle Ford to the south, a new well owner is asking the Texas Railroad Commission to sign off on a permit boosting the well's intake, tripling the amount of waste it can take along with the pressure with which it's shot underground.

http://sacurrent.com/news/the-queque-fracking-waste-leads-to-injection-well-standoff-in-wilson-county-beer-dreams-gets-upper-hand-in-hays-street-bridge-scuffle-bexar-county-jail-suicide-by-spoon-1.1338068?localLinksEnabled=false

[DocMac]

1. "thousands of miles into the earth"

Is that the real distance? I didn't know they could drill that deep.

[TahitiNut]

2. It'd be laughable if it weren't so pitiful.

The abysmal scientific illiteracy infesting our media culture gives birth to such patently moronic claims.

[DocMac]

3. Yeah, that's true.

I know nothing about drilling, but that distance got my attention.

To me, the depth is a big part of the story.

[mbperrin]

5. Real distance is thousands of feet, likely around 3-5 miles deep.

Don't worry, though, that's deep enough to ruin all known water tables.

That's what happened in Ector County 40 years ago, when Shell used a well for salt injection. Eventually, all the water in the county was ruined, residents formed a water district and now purchase from the city of Odessa at 150% of the city rate.

The district was headed up by Mac Boring, owner of Dixilyn Drilling, not exactly a green freak. He was the one who filed the complaint with the Railroad Commission and noted that there must be a casing leak. RRC investigated and said no, this was all natural.

Turns out the investigation consisted of asking Shell if the casing was good, and Shell said yes. End of story. End of ground water in Ector County.

So yes, there's one wrong word in the article, but yes, the water there is about to go away in terms of usability, because there is no doubt that the permit will be granted, just like we allow the energy freeloaders to pound all the roads of Texas to death with overweight loads and no consequence to them, in fact, billions of dollars in subsidies given to them instead.

[DocMac]

7. I don't support or condone fracking.

I'm in Pennsylvania and i'm concerned about the water here, as well.

The tone of your reply would suggest that i'm not concerned about the dangers of fracking or I minimize it by posting such a trivial thing.

[mbperrin]

8. Sorry if my post gave you that impression. I intended nothing at all except to clear

up the depth of the wells. I worked in the industry for 20 years before I started teaching, but I got better

Please accept my apology for any offense at all - none was intended.

[DocMac]

9. No need to apologize, my friend.

I should have givin my opinion of the article as a whole.

Thank you for the details on the capabilties of the drilling industry, concerning the depth.

[Gman]

4. FYI, the San Antonio Current

Is a free newspaper/magazine commonly found in bars and restaurants. Their reporting is usually good. But this "thousands of miles" thing is plain wrong. OTOH, they are not MSM.

[white cloud]

6. Most injection wells

range 1,000 feet to 5,000 feet. Danger lies in poor construction material (casing and cement). If either leaks they don't care as long as it does not come to surface. Meaning it could rust out or bust out in our water table or aquifer and put chemical in water table. No telling how many are already leaking from bad casing or poor cement jobs.

Only wells that get shut down are the one that flood the surface. Most of the time the salt water just goes into the water table we consume. Wonder why we have such and increase in hard water lately?

All Fracking and injection well should have tracer chemical to tell us where the leak is. But big oil would never allow this to happen.