This past week turned out to be an interesting introduction to the new Marcellus Shale project and gave me a broad understanding of the tasks at hand in a very short period of time. In all, I participated in a volunteer water quality monitoring project, visited a natural gas water filtration experiment site, and experienced the implications of water in an altogether different context by way of hurricane Irene. Here is a snapshot of each…
Baseline Water Sampling
Over the weekend of August 27th-29th (also the arrival of Hurricane Irene – more on this in a moment) I visited Bradford County, PA, to participate in a local monthly water quality monitoring exercise. This was followed by my attending their most recent group meeting to discuss quality control and view their initial test results compared to known but limited EPA, DEC, and other data sets. This particular group, organized by the Community Science Institute, focuses on establishing water quality baselines in order to anticipate potential degradation of watersheds due to gas extraction and other industrial factors. What makes this kind of work important is the relative absence of distributed water monitoring activities in rural areas. The Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) for example maintains only two remote water quality stations in the same area – each running a limited subset of possible tests. Here are a few images from this trip…
Treating Hydraulic Fracking Wastewater
Also this past week I traveled to a natural gas well site in Chenango County, NY, for an introduction to a research project conducted by Texas A&M’s Marcellus Shale Project (part of a collaboration with Environmental Friendly Exploration and Production). The gist of which is to use membrane filtration technologies to extract chemical, mineral, and other contaminants in order to produce waste water suitable for processing by municipal water treatment facilities. Or, it has been suggested, to become useful byproducts in other industrial processes. My take? While it shows potential and could easily be used as required practice by regulatory groups, the existence of filtration processes could also have the unintended effect of reinterpreting natural gas drilling as “safe”. This on basis of highlighting the reduction of post-process impacts alone, whereas the methods used to drill these wells remain less scrutinized (it is worth noting that only a portion of the fluids injected during fracking are recovered – leaving one to wonder to what extent does filtration solve water contamination that remains in the ground). Nevertheless, the work underway has merit in a secondary way – the availability of mobile filtration systems could be useful for disaster relief (again, see Hurrican Irene below) and emergency first responders.
Hurricane Irene
The two trips above bookend Hurricane Irene which, as many of you know, had severe consequences for much of the east coast. Hit particularly hard were communities along rivers and streams in upstate New York, Berkshire county Massachusetts, and much of southern Vermont. The capital region was not excluded from dire circumstances as we discovered on our way home from Bradford County the morning of Monday Aug. 29th. Route 88 was altogether closed (when was the last time you drove down a highway and encountered a “road closed” sign directly in front of you?) creating a state of near-panic on the part of travelers trying to get to various points around the Northeast. In the end, a trip that should have taken 3 hours amounted to over 12 as we had to travel a network of alternate country roads up to the base of the Adirondacks and back down to Troy on the other side of areas plagued with closed bridges and breaching dams. Here are a few images as well as a map of our eventual route…
