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Bjinse, you're putting the cart before the horse that has already left the barn.  

Goes without saying that this is a very preliminary result, and should be treated as one measurement of a time series. That the same result after three months of every other day flights would be far more significant.

That the same results from direct measurement of all the different processes at the source would be seriously more significant.

But we're trying to analyze, with very limited funding, a technology which has already been allowed to expand at incredibly high levels of new installations, before any actual independent testing was done.

For an industry which is allowed to bypass current environmental law. For an industry which is allowed to keep the chemicals used secret. For a technology and a resource which is already a known polluter to a very high degree.

The object of a civil society is to embark on such serious, expensive testing, BEFORE the vast deployment of such a potentially dangerous technology.

Under those circumstances, including the poor likelihood of finding sufficient funding, ANY reputable data point is all the more valuable, EVEN if it's only a data point.

Bjinse (from the link):


Practically, Obama committed himself to a 5 percent decrease up to 2020. A cynical person could comment that bit more fracking should do the job.

Heh. Double Heh.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

by Crazy Horse on Fri Aug 9th, 2013 at 08:25:58 AM EST
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PS. Their methodology is absolutely standard for atmospheric science, especially when speaking of a specific basin which contains some 1% of the entire US wellheads.

And from the Salt Lake paper cited by oui, there's this:


The study based its findings on measurements recorded during a four-hour window Feb. 3, a calm, cloudless day that was perfect for measuring methane concentrations. There was almost no snow on the ground so the boundary layer over the basin was unusually high for winter, which allowed gas field emissions to mix evenly with the air, Sweeney said.

The basin's oil and gas infrastructure serves 6,000 wells that account for 1 percent of the nation's natural gas production.

The team found it leaked 60 tons of natural gas an hour during the Feb. 3 window.

"Most days we measured concentrations far greater than what we reported in the paper," Sweeney said. The new study was not designed to determine points of leakage.

To sum up, fracking should have to prove it's safety prior to implementation, rather than society has to prove its danger after the fact.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

by Crazy Horse on Fri Aug 9th, 2013 at 09:28:40 AM EST
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I don't need convincing of the virtues of the precautionary principle. Which obviously needs to be applied to the adoption of slickwater fracking for 'unconventional' gas reservoirs in shales.
by Bjinse on Fri Aug 9th, 2013 at 10:58:43 AM EST
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