Are we done for? Fracking fluid found in well water!!! OMG!!1!

[Rhea]

I realize that I didn't exactly answer your question:

The proposed injection wells in that area are 50 miles away and North from the fracking. The people in whose area the injection wells will be have successfully stopped most of those. The plan was to inject into old previously mined salt caverns in an area that is not fracked. The wine producers of the area said NFW.

The fracking area is typically residential and they have less power.

 

[dismal]

I'm a little too programmed with our area, which isn't very oil/gas rich, but has the shales that are quite popular these days.

As it turns out Ohio -- with current technology-- is very oil and gas rich if you count shales, but shales don't make good injection well formations. They don't have much porosity or permeability which is why you must frack the bejesus out of them to get them to produce.

The reason there are so many wells in other places is the geology allows it and there was a whole oil & gas industry that existed for decades before shales became the thing and activists learned the word "fracking".

 

[Rhea]

Also there are places where the geology does not really work. Pennsylvania is one such place. I was trying to look something up on this and found a source that says there are only 8 SWDs in PA, whereas there are 50,000 in TX.

They are trucking the wastewater to Ohio for injection.
They have been caught sprinkling it on roads in New York and Pennsylvania, pretending to be DPW dust control.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I'm a little too programmed with our area, which isn't very oil/gas rich, but has the shales that are quite popular these days.

As it turns out Ohio -- with current technology-- is very oil and gas rich if you count shales, but shales don't make good injection well formations. They don't have much porosity or permeability which is why you must frack the bejesus out of them to get them to produce.

Yup. Good ole impermeable shale. Even our shallow shales can be "gassy" though... however, not high enough to tap for sale, just enough to blow shit up when building tunnels.

Youngstown does have injection wells. No idea what they are founded in. Pretty much if the rock is greater than 300 feet deep, I don't care about it professionally.

 

[dismal]

As it turns out Ohio -- with current technology-- is very oil and gas rich if you count shales, but shales don't make good injection well formations. They don't have much porosity or permeability which is why you must frack the bejesus out of them to get them to produce.

Yup. Good ole impermeable shale. Even our shallow shales can be "gassy" though... however, not high enough to tap for sale, just enough to blow shit up when building tunnels.

Youngstown does have injection wells. No idea what they are founded in. Pretty much if the rock is greater than 300 feet deep, I don't care about it professionally.

There was a small conventional oil & gas business in Ohio before shale but I don't know much about the geology. I think mostly shallow low productivity oil wells.

The first commercial oil well was in Western PA and was only 70 feet deep. It's fascinating there could be a sealed reservoir this shallow and that he was lucky enough to drill on top of it, but I guess it's not a very big reservoir or under much pressure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Well

 

[Rhea]

Yup. Good ole impermeable shale. Even our shallow shales can be "gassy" though... however, not high enough to tap for sale, just enough to blow shit up when building tunnels.

Youngstown does have injection wells. No idea what they are founded in. Pretty much if the rock is greater than 300 feet deep, I don't care about it professionally.

There was a small conventional oil & gas business in Ohio before shale but I don't know much about the geology. I think mostly shallow low productivity oil wells.

The first commercial oil well was in Western PA and was only 70 feet deep. It's fascinating there could be a sealed reservoir this shallow and that he was lucky enough to drill on top of it, but I guess it's not a very big reservoir or under much pressure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Well

I don't think it was luck, I think it was seeping up.

 

[dismal]

There was a small conventional oil & gas business in Ohio before shale but I don't know much about the geology. I think mostly shallow low productivity oil wells.

The first commercial oil well was in Western PA and was only 70 feet deep. It's fascinating there could be a sealed reservoir this shallow and that he was lucky enough to drill on top of it, but I guess it's not a very big reservoir or under much pressure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Well

I don't think it was luck, I think it was seeping up.

They drilled near natural seeps, yes.

 

[bilby]

Back to the contamination found. Not mentioned in the article, the quantity, other than it was below regulatory limits. Paper is behind a pay wall, but the abstract says the reads were at a magnitude of nangrams per liter. I had to stop and think for a second. Is that PPB (parts per billion) or PPT (parts per trillion)? I've never seen anything reported to the PPT before. Even PPB isn't common. Things usually need to be in the PPM to start raising eyebrows. What is a PPT. Well, unless I'm mistaken, you'd need a trillion liters of water to find a single gram of the chemical. In fact, the quantity is so small, I ponder how reproducible that result is.

Just picking a nit or two: a nanogram is one billionth of a gram, so it would be analogous to PPB. One PPB means that a billion liters of water would contain one liter of the contaminant. Applied to nanograms, this would indicate that one billion grams would contain one gram of contaminant. It does, however, seem odd to measure liquids in grams. I would surmise, given the nanogram measurement, that the contaminant itself is not a liquid, but rather a solid.

Where precision is important, chemicals should always be measured by mass. Mass is always proportional to amount (the number of molecules present); other measures, such as volume or weight, imply different amounts of a chemical in different environmental conditions. Changes to temperature and pressure affect volumetric measures, and changes in location (particularly in altitude) affect weight.

Mass is the right way to measure chemicals, regardless of their phase state.

 

[bilby]

Absolutely correct! But we are talking about mg/L, which makes it 1000 times less concentrated relative to mg/g. Which is why it is extremely important to check the reported units on chemical testing results!

Oops, I misread your mg/L as mg/g.

This is why I refuse to write code dealing with both weight and volume in one measurement.

Jesus wept.

Never let Americans discuss units of measure.

Mass is not weight, any more than it is volume.

Mass is a fundamental. It is measured in kg. (Note that the SI defines the kg as the basic unit, NOT the g; note also that kilo is abbreviated as 'k' and NOT 'K'. These are pretty much the only oddities in the SI system).

Volume is length cubed. It is not related to mass at all. However the volume of a specified amount (in mol) of a given substance, at a specific temperature and pressure, is directly proportional to its mass.

Weight is mass multiplied by acceleration. The acceleration due to gravity at the Earth's surface varies quite a bit from place to place; moving above or below the surface can result in even larger variations. Weight is measured in Newtons - one Newton is a kg.m.s^-2, or kilogram metre per second per second. A mass of 1kg at sea level has a weight of about 9.8 Newtons.

If you are writing code that relates volume to weight, then it either has to include the relative molecular mass of the substance, the temperature, the pressure, and the acceleration due to gravity; or it is WRONG.

 

[barbos]

Back to the contamination found. Not mentioned in the article, the quantity, other than it was below regulatory limits. Paper is behind a pay wall, but the abstract says the reads were at a magnitude of nangrams per liter. I had to stop and think for a second. Is that PPB (parts per billion) or PPT (parts per trillion)? I've never seen anything reported to the PPT before. Even PPB isn't common. Things usually need to be in the PPM to start raising eyebrows. What is a PPT. Well, unless I'm mistaken, you'd need a trillion liters of water to find a single gram of the chemical. In fact, the quantity is so small, I ponder how reproducible that result is.

Just picking a nit or two: a nanogram is one billionth of a gram, so it would be analogous to PPB. One PPB means that a billion liters of water would contain one liter of the contaminant. Applied to nanograms, this would indicate that one billion grams would contain one gram of contaminant. It does, however, seem odd to measure liquids in grams. I would surmise, given the nanogram measurement, that the contaminant itself is not a liquid, but rather a solid.

Nanogram per liter is PPT.

 

[barbos]

Just picking a nit or two: a nanogram is one billionth of a gram, so it would be analogous to PPB. One PPB means that a billion liters of water would contain one liter of the contaminant. Applied to nanograms, this would indicate that one billion grams would contain one gram of contaminant. It does, however, seem odd to measure liquids in grams. I would surmise, given the nanogram measurement, that the contaminant itself is not a liquid, but rather a solid.

Where precision is important, chemicals should always be measured by mass. Mass is always proportional to amount (the number of molecules present)

Not always, only at constant temperature. if you want truly independent measure of amount of stuff then you need to measure that in moles.

 

[barbos]

I know it's coincidence but I could not resist.

The smallmouth bass, with a huge growth on its mouth, was caught last year by an angler. Two independent laboratories have confirmed a "malignant, or cancerous, tumor" on the bass, the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission said in a statement.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cancerous-fish-found-in-pennsylvania-river/

 

[bilby]

Where precision is important, chemicals should always be measured by mass. Mass is always proportional to amount (the number of molecules present)

Not always, only at constant temperature. if you want truly independent measure of amount of stuff then you need to measure that in moles.

True. Although the change in mass due to increased temperature is minuscule; m=E/c², so you need a truly prodigious change in the energy of the system to make a measurable difference to the mass.

I was wrong. My apologies.

 

[KeepTalking]

Oops, I misread your mg/L as mg/g.

This is why I refuse to write code dealing with both weight and volume in one measurement.

Jesus wept.

Never let Americans discuss units of measure.

Mass is not weight, any more than it is volume.

Mass is a fundamental. It is measured in kg. (Note that the SI defines the kg as the basic unit, NOT the g; note also that kilo is abbreviated as 'k' and NOT 'K'. These are pretty much the only oddities in the SI system).

Volume is length cubed. It is not related to mass at all. However the volume of a specified amount (in mol) of a given substance, at a specific temperature and pressure, is directly proportional to its mass.

Weight is mass multiplied by acceleration. The acceleration due to gravity at the Earth's surface varies quite a bit from place to place; moving above or below the surface can result in even larger variations. Weight is measured in Newtons - one Newton is a kg.m.s^-2, or kilogram metre per second per second. A mass of 1kg at sea level has a weight of about 9.8 Newtons.

If you are writing code that relates volume to weight, then it either has to include the relative molecular mass of the substance, the temperature, the pressure, and the acceleration due to gravity; or it is WRONG.

Further proof as to why I should be kept away from coding anything that requires conversion of weights and measures. Fortunately, every project I have worked on that required such had that groundwork completed before I was brought on board. Some Americans are quite good at it, I am just not one of them. Anyway, my confusion stemmed from a simple misreading, so thanks for being charitable.


Do you Aussies never express your weights in kg? If not, what do you use, stones? I have certainly never heard anyone say "That thing weighs X Newtons."

 

[bilby]

Jesus wept.

Never let Americans discuss units of measure.

Mass is not weight, any more than it is volume.

Mass is a fundamental. It is measured in kg. (Note that the SI defines the kg as the basic unit, NOT the g; note also that kilo is abbreviated as 'k' and NOT 'K'. These are pretty much the only oddities in the SI system).

Volume is length cubed. It is not related to mass at all. However the volume of a specified amount (in mol) of a given substance, at a specific temperature and pressure, is directly proportional to its mass.

Weight is mass multiplied by acceleration. The acceleration due to gravity at the Earth's surface varies quite a bit from place to place; moving above or below the surface can result in even larger variations. Weight is measured in Newtons - one Newton is a kg.m.s^-2, or kilogram metre per second per second. A mass of 1kg at sea level has a weight of about 9.8 Newtons.

If you are writing code that relates volume to weight, then it either has to include the relative molecular mass of the substance, the temperature, the pressure, and the acceleration due to gravity; or it is WRONG.

Further proof as to why I should be kept away from coding anything that requires conversion of weights and measures. Fortunately, every project I have worked on that required such had that groundwork completed before I was brought on board. Some Americans are quite good at it, I am just not one of them. Anyway, my confusion stemmed from a simple misreading, so thanks for being charitable.


Do you Aussies never express your weights in kg? If not, what do you use, stones? I have certainly never heard anyone say "That thing weighs X Newtons."

Like most people, we don't use weight very much at all. We buy and sell produce by mass, in kg. Our dietitians measure body mass, in kg. Just about the only thing routinely measured using a force meter is the weight of fish in angling competitions.

Of course, people refer to mass as 'weight' in casual conversation, but that's just because they don't care about the fact that they are wrong to do so.

I started a thread on the topic in the Science forum.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

This thread is getting too heavy for me.

 

[KeepTalking]

Sorry for the derail, what were we talking about again?

Oh, yeah, fracking. I was a fan of the BSG remake series right up until the last episode. Fracking pissed me right off.

I would totally frack Katie Sackhoff, though.