Bird’s Eye: Coming to a water-faucet near you! What tarsands are to Canada, fracking is to the US: dirty hydrocarbons with major environmental side effects. The New Yorker gives an overview, followed by closeups on problems in New York, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming.

* Marcellus Shale, Hydraulic Fracturing, and the E.P.A.   The New Yorker

Americans have never met a hydrocarbon they didn’t like. Oil, natural gas, liquefied natural gas, tar-sands oil, coal-bed methane, and coal, which is, mostly, carbon—the country loves them all, not wisely, but too well. To the extent that the United States has an energy policy, it is perhaps best summed up as: if you’ve got it, burn it.

America’s latest hydrocarbon crush is shale gas. Shale gas has been around for a long time—the Marcellus Shale, which underlies much of Pennsylvania and western New York, dates back to the mid-Devonian period, almost four hundred million years ago—and geologists have been aware of its potential as a fuel source for many decades. But it wasn’t until recently that, owing to advances in drilling technology, extracting the gas became a lucrative proposition. The result has been what National Geographic has called “the great shale gas rush.” In the past ten months alone, some sixteen hundred new wells have been drilled in Pennsylvania; it is projected that the total number in the state could eventually grow to more than a hundred thousand. Nationally, shale-gas production has increased by a factor of twelve in the past ten years.

…Every kind of energy extraction, of course, poses risks. Mountaintop-removal mining, as the name suggests, involves “removing” entire mountaintops, usually with explosives, to get at a layer of coal. Coal plants, meanwhile, produce almost twice the volume of greenhouse gases as natural-gas plants per unit of energy generated. In the end, the best case to be made for fracking is that much of what is already being done is probably even worse. 

* ‘Hydraulic Fracturing as It’s Practiced Today Will Contaminate Our Aquifers’ Alternet

A former staffer at a state government agency responsible for regulating hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has warned that allowing the controversial gas drilling method in New York would lead to contamination of the state’s aquifers and would poison its drinking water.

These stark warnings, issued by Paul Hetzler in a letter to an upstate newspaper, came as a current employee and union representative at the Department for Environmental Conservation (DEC) sounded alarm bells over the under-staffed agency’s ability to monitor the industry and to deal with any emergencies if the plan goes ahead.

* Northeast Ohio Rocked By 11Th Earthquake Linked To Youngstown Injection Wells. Ohio.com

The 4.0-magnitude quake was centered near Youngstown, reported the U.S. Geological Survey and the Ohio Earthquake Information Center. The earthquake at 3:05 p.m. was felt as far away as Michigan, Ontario, Pennsylvania and New York, reported Michael C. Hansen, state geologist and coordinator of the Ohio Seismic Network, part of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Geological Survey.

The quake was “a pretty good-sized one,” he said. There were no initial reports of injuries or major damage, he said. The quake was the 11th over the last eight months in Mahoning County, all within two miles of the injection wells, he said. Saturday’s quake was the largest yet.

* A Fracking Chemical Appears in Wyoming Aquifer  The Atlantic Wire

An EPA study found cancerous compounds, including one used in hydraulic fracturing to harvest natural gas, in an aquifer in Wyoming, ProPublica reports.

The findings come from monitoring wells near Pavillion, Wy., an area where residents have long complained about contaminated drinking water, which some have long blamed on the hundreds of hydraulic fracturing operations in the area.

The area’s residents “have alleged for nearly a decade that the drilling — and hydraulic fracturing in particular — has caused their water to turn black and smell like gasoline,” writes Abrahm Lustgarten, who has covered the fracking debate for ProPublica. “Some residents say they suffer neurological impairment, loss of smell, and nerve pain they associate with exposure to pollutants.”

The new findings are not conclusive, but seem to strongly suggest that the fracturing of underground shale to free natural gas has, in some instances, allowed the high-pressure chemical mixtures — and the released gas itself — to leak into the aquifer that supplies the region’s fresh water.