Until recently, one of the most underlooked facets of the industry was the “cradle” portion of the shale gas lifecycle: frac-sand mining in the hills of northwestern Wisconsin and bordering eastern Minnesota, areas now serving as the epicenter of the frac-sand mining world.
Gary Wockner director of the Save the Poudre lays out the threat fracking poses to the health of Colorado's riivers.
Oil and gas drilling and fracking pose extraordinary threats to Colorado’s Denver metro and Front Range cities including to air quality, water quality in streams and groundwater, wildlife habitat, private property rights and landscape health. These impacts are generally similar wherever drilling and fracking occurs across the U.S.
But what makes drilling and fracking unique in Colorado—and especially across Colorado’s Front Range from Fort Collins to Pueblo—is its threat to Colorado’s rivers.
At Colorado's premier auction for unallocated water this spring, companies that provide water for hydraulic fracturing at well sites were top bidders on supplies once claimed exclusively by farmers.
A controversial method of drilling for oil and natural gas appears to be the cause of groundwater pollution in a central Wyoming town, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday.
The EPA last month said it had found compounds associated with chemicals used in the drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in the groundwater beneath Pavillion. Many residents say their well water has reeked of chemicals since the drilling began there and first complained to the EPA in 2008.
But until Thursday, the EPA said it could not speculate on where the contaminants came from.
In the draft report (.pdf) released Thursday, the EPA said that "the explanation best fitting the data ... is that constituents associated with hydraulic fracturing have been released into the Wind River drinking water aquifer."
Crackpot Senator James Inhofe, the senior Republican on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, said this is more evidence of the Obama administration agenda to shut down natural gas production and blasted the report as political science.
Hey Senator, regardless of your opinion on the report, how about a little sympathy for the people of Pavillion? In 2009 the EPA advised Pavillion residents not to drink their water and to ventilate their homes when they showered or washed dishes.
Breath deep, the fog you see obscuring this Pavillion home is haze from fracking fluids vaporized in the drilling process.
Oh, about that administration agenda of shutting down oil and gas drilling.
The Delaware River Basin Commission postponed the meeting after Delaware's governor announced he would vote no. The commission said it delayed the meeting to give commissioners more time to review the issue but more likely is the fact they probably did not have the votes to move the proposal forward.
Following on the heels of the Obama Administrations delay on the Keystone XL pipeline, this postponement represents another victory for environmentalists who had gathered more than 73,000 signatures on a petition opposing drilling in the watershed.
Tuesday, July 10, 2012 at 12:00AM 
