by Greg Palast
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.gregpalast.com
written for No Fracking Ireland
July 3, 2012
No Fracking Ireland presents Greg Palast in Dublin, Today 3. July
Connolly Books, Temple Bar – 1pm
The Ireland Institute – 7.30pm
Full info here
On the 20th of April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oilrig blew out in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven men instantly, then destroying 600 miles of coastline. On 9 September 2010, a natural gas pipeline exploded in San Bruno, California, burning eight to death, one of several recent pipeline explosions in the USA. In 1992, in Chicago, a gas pipe leaked and 18 houses exploded, incinerating three people.
What do these deaths have to do with plans for “fracking” for natural gas in Ireland?
Everything. It was my job to investigate these three explosions, the Deepwater Horizon and California explosions as a reporter for the UK Channel 4’s Dispatches, the earliest as a US government investigator. In all three cases, the deaths were preceded by the same reassurances about the safety of drilling and piping that I read now in the debate about fracking in Ireland.
First, the Deepwater Horizon. Eleven men died when the ‘mud’ – drilling cement meant to cap the wellhead – failed and methane gas blew out the top of the pipes and exploded. The Shannon Basin is not the Gulf of Mexico, but your safety will be just as dependent on Halliburton’s mud.
Can we trust Halliburton’s reassurances? The owners of the Deepwater Horizon have told a US court that they’ve discovered that Halliburton hid critical information that the well cement could fail. Halliburton denies the cover-up. But cover-up or not, the cement failed as it has several times recently in the US in wells drilled for fracking. In all cases, including the contamination of water supplies in Pennsylvania (where some residents could set their tap water alight with a match), drilling was proceeded by mollifying studies indicating that all was safe. But they failed to see all the looming dangers.
In Ireland, you haven’t even done the studies. The University of Aberdeen study for the Irish Environmental Protection Agency has been played as some kind of endorsement for charging ahead with fracking in Ireland – but this is not the case if you actually read the study. The University study is, in fact, a long series of warnings that proposed drilling methods, the local geology and the potential impacts on water quality all require studies not even begun. It also points to the necessity of creating a regulatory system not now in place which can cope with watching thousands of explosive, toxic well-sites.
The Shannon river basin is a truly eyebrow-raising place to blindly drill thousands of wells. It’s located in proximity to one of Irelands few major aquifers (your drinking water supply) and the drilling will be relatively shallow. Where I live in the State of New York, the government, though a major booster of fracking, has banned the fracking of shallow shale deposits and banned the process from all locations near our aquifers. The US experience is not comforting.
Horizontal fracking (as proposed for Irish deposits) requires explosive charges to be fired along miles of pipe underground (and under houses and water supplies) followed by the pumping of fluids at high pressure through these pipes. The result has been man-made earthquakes. Buildings don’t fall down, but cracks bring hydrocarbon poisons into the aquifers. In the vast uninhabited wastes of the American Dakotas, we simply abandon water systems. Where in Ireland can you do that?
And then there are the pipelines. The fracked gas doesn’t get to market by carrier pigeon. Ireland has had virtually no discussion of the difficulties, danger and cost of running hundreds, and ultimately, thousands of miles of gathering pipes. I’ve been investigating the horror of pipeline explosions for three decades now and the problem is exponentially worsened by the new web of lines created by fracking. Highly explosive transport systems require an elaborate system of on-site government regulation which Ireland does not have and cannot now afford. And it’s simply too easy for the PIGs to cheat.
A PIG is a Pipeline Inspection Gauge, a robot that looks like a mechanical porker with wire whiskers that crawls through pipes hunting for corrosion, cracks, leaks and trouble. When the PIG ’squeals’, the pipes must be dug up and replaced. And that’s frightfully expensive.
It especially frightens the executives who have to pay for pipe replacement. So, what I’ve found and reported is that the providers of software and its users are aware that the PIGs’ diagnostic computer code, which converts the squeals of the PIG into warnings, has flaws which understate dangers. And the results have been horribly predictable: Despite the reassuring noises from the PIGs, pipes have leaked, polluted, exploded and killed.
Is there a safe way to frack? Probably: but not profitably; and certainly not within the geology of a little emerald isle. I am weary of appearing at scenes of death and destruction when cement fails, pipes crack and tremors spew poisons only to hear a gas or oil company executive’s PR flack issue an apology. I doubt those apologies will sound better in Gaelic.
Re-prints permitted with credit to Greg Palast.
Greg Palast is the author of Vultures’ Picnic (Penguin 2011), which centers on his investigation of BP, bribery and corruption in the oil industry. Palast, whose reports are seen on BBC-TV and Britain’s Channel 4.
You can read Vultures’ Picnic, “Chapter 1: Goldfinger,” or download it, at no charge: click here.
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[DS added the Action Alert.]
Stop the Export of Fracked Gas!
Fracking is bad enough on its own. There is no reason that we should contaminate America’s water here to export cheap natural gas to other countries. Exporting gas only creates more profits for the multinational corporations that are doing the fracking, at our expense. Let’s make an impact by taking away their ability to export natural gas from fracking to other countries.
Please ask your representative to co-sponsor these bills that would limit the export of natural gas. Fill out the form below, and we’ll deliver it to your member of Congress.
see
Greg Palast: Preventing Death By Pipeline (fracking)
Fracking: Pennsylvania Gags Physicians, Part 1 by Walter Brasch
Fracking: Health, Environmental Impact Greater Than Claimed, Part 2 by Walter Brasch
Fracking: Corruption a Part of Pennsylvania’s Heritage, Part 3 by Walter Brasch
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Nanotechnology converts ordinary carbon into fullerenes (C60) which
are unimaginably small, identical, with the hardness of diamonds, but with new characteristics that are troubling, making them so cytotoxic NIOSH calls for very special hazzard handling, because mesothelioma and other diseases has been found in animals and
fish exposed to C-60 diamonds.
C-60 buckyballs are used extensively to increase the lubrication in fracking fluids used at great deapths, msking this the ideal proppants in shales so deep and heavy that the sand usually used to prop the layers of stone apart crushes into dust.
It is very possible that these super lubricant buckyballs lubricate faults deep underground, causing earthquakes.
Many tons of this substance are rinsed
back into our lands and precious waters. Benzine and toluene are found in spent fracking fluids because they keep c-60 nanomaterials from clumping.
NO NANO FRACKING
must become part of the sad litany of dangers associated with gas mining; it was a rallying cry in southern France.
Thanks for your comment, Val.