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The people are being scared by the media. There have been seismic events, nobody has felt an “earthquake”.

The only reason most of the events are measurable is because there are sensors directly above them.

On a daily basis developments are putting piles into the ground all around the country which are bigger “earthquakes”.

The first well was planned to be fracked 45 times roughly once per day. The data is now in, I see no reason why the limit shouldn’t be raised unless they apply that same limit to all industries. The same technology is used on other wells in the country without that limitation, it was an arbitrary aspirational guess and it is time to improve it.

So why bother having any limit at all? let them do as they please, pick any site they like unless of course its on or near any lords estate, can't have that can we, disrupting the peace and quiet.

Is ' fracking ' still on the menu for the river Dee ?

Even the Queen's land is being fracked as well as Lord's properties.

Currently we are shipping fracked gas from the USA which doesn't make sense.

We have fracked wells for years, its just fracking shale that is new and the media thought it would make a good scare story after the 2011 earthquake in Blackpool.

The 2011 events were a natural stress fault whose release may have been triggered by the fracking through the presence of water (not fracking pressure), it was probably going to happen sooner as other earthquakes had done in the Blackpool area previously. The fracking put nowhere around the amount of energy in to create that earthquake. The fault line still hasn't been found it was so small, it is estimated the fault was about a 100m by 100m area and the rock moved 1 cm, it is still only assumed the fracking triggered it. The worst of the two quakes was 2.3 and was just about felt on the surface, we've felt much bigger quakes on the Wirral.

Just a few words from someone who has lived through the American process at first hand. My wife and I used to live in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania. Different states had different attitudes to the fracking (for those who haven't lived this side of the pond, the USA is like 50 different countries with some common Federal regulations). Pennsylvania's attitude to the frackers was basically 'give us the money, do what you like!' Each well in the Marcellus shale deposits meant a damn great gravel pad being constructed for the well head, then approximately 1,000 tankers of fracking fluid being brought in, and roughly 600 tankers worth of returned fluid (mildly radioactive, due to the elements leached out from the ground). We had two well heads on our very quiet country road (we lived on the outskirts of Wellsboro, which had then a population of about 3,000) and decided we had to move, due to my wife's health problems. Fortunately we managed to sell up before property prices were affected, but friends we kept in touch with gave us sufficient information to confirm that we'd made the correct decision.

Now, before somebody states the blindingly obvious, yes, this is America and the UK regulations may be different. I did do some research into the sort of stuff that they pushed down the wells as 'fracking fluid' (I've a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics, I know what I'm doing!) but that was almost 10 years ago now. It certainly wasn't water plus a single chemical, anything but! There was a percentage of hydrochloric acid in there for starters, that was the main reason for the leaching out of the trace radioactivity from the ground - even Pennsylvania's regulation required the returned fluid to be disposed of as hazardous waste.

The USA is more dependent on well water than the UK (we had a well in Pennsylvania, and have one now here in Maine), and certainly pollution of wells was far from unknown, you can't map out every underground fissure when you're drilling fracking wells, and at least when they were doing it in Pennsylvania (I'm talking about the years up to 2010, when we moved) they were limited to a 5000 foot radius (call it a mile) from each wellhead. A map of the well sites across the county sure showed the scale of the operation, and Pennsylvania's legislature put in a ridiculous escape clause for the drilling companies where they could either clean up after themselves or pay a derisory sum (I think it was a couple of million dollars) as a one-off payment and that got them out of any further cleanup obligations.

Guess what happened?

America seems to try its hardest to contaminate its water supply from every industry, even the water companies themselves, I'm surprised most houses don't have water purification plants. The dollar has always come before people.

I can't comment on most houses in the USA not having water purification, because I just don't know the figures. In many places where there's no mains water, the filters are essential, and that's not due to fracking. There's no fracking in this area, but the ground is rich in arsenic, and our well water contains almost 9 times the safe level of arsenic. We're 20 miles from the nearest water main, so we have no option. Fortunately a two-stage filtering process makes our water safe (arsenic below detectable levels) for about $250 a year in filters, which I suspect is a lot less than mains water would cost us.

None of that excuses what they did to the water supply in Pennsylvania, though. There was one place (Dimock, PA) where they could actually put a lit match next to the stream of water coming out of the tap, and the amount of methane dissolved in the water was such that you would get a flame burning at the tap.

There was one academic at Cornell (Tony Ingraffea) who did a lot of research work on contract to the drilling companies, and then when they came to drill in his neck of the woods, he jumped ship and became an anti-fracking man. I have one of his talks from about 10 years as a video, with full permission to distribute it. It's on You Tube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSWmXpEkEPg (I think that's the same talk, it's certainly the same man!) but if anybody reading this hasn't got the internet connection to handle the download and wants it badly enough to cover my costs (via Paypal) in burning and mailing a DVD from the USA, I'll be happy to do so. Send me an e-mail.

Let me close by saying that I have no idea whether the stricter regulation you'll undoubtedly have in the UK will enable fracking to be undertaken safely. Knowing what I know, I would be on the side of opposing it unless proven safe, and I've no real idea as to how you prove it safe other than doing it and see what happens. I sure wouldn't want to live near a fracking site - that's why my wife and I moved to Maine.

Thank you for your well informed input Brian, I have no doubt that regulations here will be watered down to suit the fracking companies, they are already applying to relax standards now.

A number of sources on the web say that methane was in the water for many years prior to any fracking.




https://marcellusdrilling.com/2016/...p-water-on-fire-decades-before-drilling/

Fair enough, I note the report of the trial to which you linked was dated 2016. As I said upthread, my knowledge of the situation in Pennsylvania ended in late 2010, when we moved out of the state (apart from a few later reports from friends who still lived there). If they were lighting the water in Dimock pre-fracking, I wasn't aware of it, and I heard no reports of it when the anti-fracking movement started.

The Dimock situation was the only thing on which my knowledge was second hand, though. What I said about the disruption caused (1000 tankers in, 600 tankers out, approximately of course - the drilling companies said about 5,000,000 gallons of water to frack a well of which ~60% was usually 'returned') and the free hand that the Pennsylvania legislature gave to the fracking companies, that's from first hand experience. My wife has severe asthma and allergy problems at the best of times, and living in a house that was 30 feet from the very small country road that was going to have to bear all that traffic just didn't bear thinking about. That's why we sold up ASAP and moved up here to Maine.

Just to give you an example of how fracking-friendly the situation was in Pennsylvania, there's a law there which says that sub-surface rights trump surface rights. What that means (and one of my friends was on the receiving end of this!) is that if you didn't get the mineral rights when you bought your house, then whoever owned said mineral rights could come on your land and do whatever was necessary to extract the gas (or whatever), even contrary to your wishes. They also passed a law which said that if at least 60% of the landowners in a particular area sold out their mineral rights, then the drilling companies could assume that the other 40% would follow suit, and they could extract the gas provided they could do so without coming on the 40%'s land (the 40% owned their mineral rights, but they lost the right to refuse to sell a gas extraction deal). As I said before, at least in 2010, the drilling companies said they could go up to a mile horizontally from each drilling site.

I hope the UK doesn't go as far down the drilling company road as Pennsylvania did, I really do - but I'll tell you now, nothing would induce me to live close to a fracking site, I'd be looking to move as I did here.

I think Pennsylvania is just seen as the US's fuel reserve and its just pillaged at any environmental expense for cheap fuel.

Wasn't that where the Carbondale coal mine fire happened? Started in 1946 and ended in the 1970s.

And you also have Centralia.

I really think it's a bit more complicated than that. As far as the coal mining is concerned, there are (AFAIK) three main coal-mining areas in the USA, Wyoming/Montata, Illinois and Appalachia (the latter being Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky, as far as coal is concerned). Fracking takes place across a large part of the lower 48, probably less than half politically, but way over half geographically (some of those western states are B-I-G!) Texas is the big boy of oil production, although it actually happens across even more states than fracking, albeit to a greater or lesser extent. Some states, oil production is on a very limited scale.

The main consideration in all this, as far as I can see, is how compliant the state legislatures are. You have to remember that American states have *enormously* greater powers than English counties (to take the closest parallel), and the Federal government is very limited in what it can do without one or more of the states immediately trying to drag it off to the Supreme Court for exceeding its rights. I know that New York (state) introduced a statewide ban on fracking. AFAIK, it's still in place, but news travels slowly out here in the wilds, so I don't guarantee that's correct.

If anyone is interested in some up-to-the-minute reporting on fracking in the USA, this comes from West Virginia, at the southern end of the Marcellus shale deposits that stretch from New York down to West Virginia.

https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/wva

I have no personal experience of what goes on in WV, but their rules about sub-surface rights overriding surface rights are the same as it was in Pennsylvania.

This site is on the junction of Preachers Dream and the North Fork Road near Smithfield. Larry Barr owned the land, was approached by EQT to which he agreed its placement there and was presumably paid for it (unless he was foolish enough to offer it for free). EQT also offered to put him up in a hotel which he turned down.

It would appear that this site was one of the early locations as it existed before the main plant was built about 2km away and before the HB401 Act came into being. Other residents in the area weren't so lucky and didn't have as much choice in the matter.