Sunday, September 16, 2012

The amount of our precious water used for fracking is staggering

Being a geeky engineer type of person, I like to have a way to visualize data
involving very large numbers.

These photos were just posted by Don't Frack Stuben County.
https://www.facebook.com/DontFrackSteubenCounty
This is a WATER TRAIN leaving Painted Post NY to PA for Fracking.
Each car is 100 tons of water, 24,000 gallons...






Assuming 100 cars / train (about a mile long),
each train carries 2.5 million gallons of water,
or about 1/2 that which is needed for ONE FRACK....

So ONE 5 million gallon frack would be a train like this ~2 miles long.

According to data obtained by SKYTRUTH,
http://blog.skytruth.org/2012/09/water-water-everywhere-20-months-of.html in 20 months,

  • In Pennsylvania, 8 Billion Gallons has been used for ~2000 fracks.

    => this is a water train like this over 3000 miles long,
    spanning the entire continent, from Augusta, Maine to Los Angeles, CA.

    Even more shocking is that Pennsylvania has only been developed
    at 2% of the projected.

    This means that ultimately, JUST FOR PA,
    there will be 50 such trains filled with water spanning the United States.




    Are you beginning to get a sense of the scale involved?
  • US overall has used 65 Billion gallons over 26,000 fracks.

    => this is a water train 27,000 miles long,
    looping around the equator of the earth.

Projected for New York:

  • 70k wells * 5mg/frack * 5 fracks/well = 2E-12 (2 trillion gallons).
  • The volume of the entire Fingerlakes watershed is about 8 trillion gallons.
Three ways to visualize 2 T gallons:

  • Seneca Lake is 4.2 Trillion Gallons, so about 1/2 of it would be needed to frack NY.
  • Cayuga Lake is 2.5 Trillion Gallons, so about all of it would be drained for fracking NY.
  • Or, all 11 of the remaining lakes, combined.
Fracking NY will require using 1/4 the water in the entire Finger Lakes watershed.

And we wonder why there are droughts everywhere?

We need a national ban on fracking NOW.
What are YOU going to do to join this effort?


Link to this:

3 comments:

Colleen Boland said...

Piggy-backing on Bill's stats: About 2% of the planet's water is fresh. 1.6% of that water is locked up in the polar ice caps and glaciers. Another 0.36 percent is found underground in aquifers and wells. ONLY 0.036% OF THE PLANET'S TOTAL WATER SUPPLY IS FOUND IN OUR LAKES & RIVERS.
The Earth is pretty much considered "closed system," like a terrarium. Our fresh water supply is FINITE. If you take billions and billions of gallons of water out of our fresh water sources, frack it up with a mixture of toxic & carcinogenic chemicals, it is lost to us FOREVER.
Please, consider sending the President an online comment to tell him to vote no ON SEP 22nd for withdrawing water from the Susquehanna River Basin for use in fracking operations.
I wrote, I called. Scary, the campaign office staffer had never heard of fracking. http://www.wearepowershift.org/blogs/will-obama-give-millions-gallons-water-natural-gas-drillersagain

Colleen Boland said...

Piggy-backing on Bill's stats: About 2% of the planet's water is fresh. 1.6% of that water is locked up in the polar ice caps and glaciers. Another 0.36 percent is found underground in aquifers and wells. ONLY 0.036% OF THE PLANET'S TOTAL WATER SUPPLY IS FOUND IN OUR LAKES & RIVERS.
The Earth is pretty much considered "closed system," like a terrarium. Our fresh water supply is FINITE. If you take billions and billions of gallons of water out of our fresh water sources, frack it up with a mixture of toxic & carcinogenic chemicals, it is lost to us FOREVER.
Please, consider sending the President an online comment to tell him to vote no ON SEP 22nd for withdrawing water from the Susquehanna River Basin for use in fracking operations.
I wrote, I called. Scary, the campaign office staffer had never heard of fracking. http://www.wearepowershift.org/blogs/will-obama-give-millions-gallons-water-natural-gas-drillersagain

Aunt Mary said...

Hi Bill! the pix are great, the station is full as the well pump broke two days after the village board meeting about it (no help there)...here's part of my speech from Painted Post yesterday, interesting that the village only sold one million gallons a day, I think they might be taking more than that, as another questioned me:

"I feel bad that people in Painted Post have been quite literally waking up to whistles, bells, horns, and lights of trains running through the village at night. The trains carrying water to PA from a Painted Post well (and the aquifer to which this well is connected) for fracking in PA.

Painted Post was granted permission by the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) to sell to Royal Dutch Shell one million plus gallons per day for 2.6 million dollars a year.

Elsewhere in NY and PA the Srbc has granted Shell 268 water consumption approvals in the Susquehanna River basin. Each of these approvals is for up to four million gallons of water per day (four times that from Painted Post); each is earmarked for natural gas/crude petroleum extraction. Four million times 268 adds up to the withdrawal of up to one billion, seventy two million gallons of water per day. Over one billion gallons of water potentially consumed each day for the use of fracking. Over one billion gallons of water destroyed per day. And that is only what Shell has been permitted.

The SRBC lists over thirty other corporations that have permission to withdraw water, all of them together would potentially withdraw, and destroy, trillions of gallons of water a year. Never to be replaced… and we think it’s just a drought that makes our rivers low. It’s a crime to be stealing from the People’s Commons like this.

Royal Dutch Shell made six billion dollars in the second quarter of this year; or sixty six million six hundred and sixty six thousand dollars a day, or over two million seven hundred thousand dollars an hour… gee for less than an hours worth of profit they will be buying and destroying potentially 365 million gallons of water from Painted Post each year…that’s a lot of water and a lot of trains.

One question I have is WHY is Shell buying Painted Post’s water when it seems they have plenty of withdrawal sites elsewhere? My greatest concern is that maybe Shell is buying the water now to get ready to frack locally. Maybe the trains are running at night to get the folks used to them because the thousands, yes literally thousands, of frack trucks won’t want to be held up during the day by trains. I saw two signs up West Hill Road near farms, near areas that would be well pad accessible, with new roads too; Taliesman signs, not Shell, but they say “In case of Emergency” to call Taliesman. I say to call the cops, call the fire department, call the local leaders; just like the folks in Painted Post are doing regarding the trains noise (I heard the well pump broke and they can’t pump right now...Hmmm, curious that! But I gotta smile!)