Butterfield: Colorado's elegant solution for fracking

Eventually those local moratoriums against fracking will expire in Boulder, Longmont and Erie. And residents will worry anew about fracking operations inching up on schools and neighborhoods chasing a product of costly sourcing that will go "poof" the instant it's used.
It has also just come out that fracking is inching up on agriculture to compete for Colorado's water. Taking only 0.08 of a percent per year, it's a smidge for sure, but that water gets so polluted it must be disposed in a way that removes it from the hydrologic cycle. And that's not pretty when we're looking down the craw of a new drought kicked off with a historic climate-change-induced heat wave plus a horrifying wildfire this season.
Permanently voiding precious Colorado water out of the hydrologic cycle feels even worse in view the fact that water can be lost for naught when the depletion rate on fracking wells is 63-85 percent in the first year according to Dave Hughes of the Geological Survey of Canada. This can mean fruitless drilling down the slippery slope of diminishing marginal returns.Read more..http://www.dailycamera.com/opinion-columnists/ci_20342247/butterfield-colorados-elegant-solution-fracking

Marcellus waste up by half in SWPA this year

fIt’s no surprise that with a more than 50 percent jump in gas production in southwestern Pennsylvania there is a corresponding spike in flowback water generated from fracking during the first six months of this year, compared with the second half of 2010.

Here’s how the newly-released waste numbers break down for this region.

1.8 million barrels of fracturing fluid, of which 1.1 million is being reused.

That’s about a 64 percent reuse rate. Nearly all of the rest was taken to industrial waste processing plants, which could mean companies treated the liquid and took it back for reuse. There’s no great way to tell if that’s happening unless the companies indicate that in their notes. There were a few other disposal methods. For example, EXCO Resources EXCO Resources Latest from The Business Journals Houston company acquires fracking water pipelineNorth Hills ‘a hot business corridor,’ something area officials have been working toward since 1995Top 25: Directors of Public Companies Follow this company is responsible for a small percentage of fracturing fluid either being injected into an underground well or being taken to the Reynoldsville Sewage Authority, a municipal sewage plant.

2.7 million barrels of brine, of which about 10 percent was injected into disposal wells in Ohio and West Virginia.Read More