As drilling technology improves, we are able to access new sources of natural gas and oil in shale formations. The U.S. has abundant resources of oil and natural gas in shale deposits. According to the U.S. Geological Survey the U.S. holds more than half of the world’s oil shale resources. The largest known deposits of oil shale are located in a 16,000-square mile area in the Green River formation in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. The USGS’s most recent estimates (April, 2009) show the region may hold more than 1.5 trillion barrels of oil – six times Saudi Arabia’s proven resources, and enough to provide the United States with energy for the next 200 years. For a map of U.S. shale oil and natural gas deposits see here.

But there are environmental concerns. Most of those concerns are about possible contamination of groundwater from the drilling fluids. The Department of Energy has announced “Breakthrough Water Cleaning Technology Could Lessen Environmental Impacts from Shale Production.”

A private company, ABSMaterial, developed its Osorb® technology, which uses swelling silica material to remove impurities from the flow back water and produced water from hydraulically fractured oil and gas wells. Tests show that the silica removes “more than 99 percent of oil and grease, more than 90 percent of dissolved BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes), and significant amounts of production chemicals.” Testing has shown that total petroleum hydrocarbon levels in the water were slashed from 227 milligrams per liter to 0.1 milligrams per liter. The silica material “a hybrid organic-inorganic nano-engineered structure, is a breakthrough in hydrocarbon removal technology that rapidly swells up to eight times its dried volume upon exposure to non-polar liquids. The swelling process is completely reversible—with no loss in swelling behavior even after repeated use—when absorbed species are evaporated by heating the material.”

Still, some media hypes anti-energy propaganda. Typical is the headline from an April 10 story in the Arizona Daily Star which read: “Water wells show contamination near gas-drilling sites.”

The story mentions “potentially dangerous concentrations of methane gas in water from wells near drilling sites in northeastern Pennsylvania…” Methane is non-toxic but can produce a fire hazard if concentrated. The Star story says that researchers from Duke University did not find any trace of chemicals used in the hydro-fracturing process.

Upon further reading we find, “The authors admit they have no baseline data at all, which makes it impossible to characterize the state of those water wells prior to recent development.” So we don’t know if nearby drilling caused “contamination” or if the presence of methane there is a natural phenomenon. The headline does not match the story.

The Arizona Daily Star has so far not mentioned the water cleaning technology. Does the Star practice content bias?

Update from a reader:

The chemist who first discovered Osorb and its unique properties, Dr. Paul Edmiston, grew up in Tucson. He is an a graduate of Salpointe High School, went to college at Pepperdine in California and returned to the U of A for his PhD.  He is now at College of Wooster in Ohio, He and his partner, Steve Spoonamore, are the founders of ABSMaterials.

As the Arizona Daily Star reported today, the EPA is considering lowering the allowed concentration of dioxane in drinking water. That would cost the city millions to build a new water purification plant.

Current EPA standards allow up to three parts per billion. Tucson Water mitigates some contaminated water from Tucson’s south side by diluting the water and now delivers water with 1.15 parts per billion dioxane. The EPA says that under current standards, drinking the water for 70 years would give you a one in 1 million chance of getting cancer from dioxane. That’s about the same as the chance of getting hit by lightning in the U.S.

Here’s the rest of the story:

The EPA is running into trouble over these standards from the Department of Defense and some industry groups such as the Alliance for Environmental Responsibility and Openness (AERO). AERO says that the “only studies that show … dioxane causes tumors are very high dose rodent studies.” There is no reason to assume, as the EPA does, that there is any evidence to suggest a “proportional or linear relationship between health problems experienced in rodents at high doses and those that would be expected to occur in humans exposed to the chemical in more typical environmental circumstances.”

The Department of Defense (DOD) warned the EPA that it may face challenges under the Data Quality Act because the EPA changed conclusions of peer-reviewed studies after the fact. The changes included “the number of animals, the number of animals that had tumors, the doses given to the animals, and changes in both the statistical procedures and . . . calculations,” DOD says.

What all that means is that the EPA may be mired in lawsuits before it can impose any changes.

By the way, dioxane is a byproduct of the production of materials used in cosmetics, notably sodium myreth sulfate and sodium lauryl sulfate (check your shampoo). Since 1979, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has conducted tests on cosmetic raw materials and finished products for the levels of dioxane, and found dioxane levels up to 1410 parts per million(ppm) in raw ingredients, and levels up to 279 ppm in off the shelf cosmetic products. But EPA bureaucrats are now trying to scare us with three parts per billion.

The chemophobia of the EPA seems founded on a political agenda and upon pure guess work based in part on the “linear threshold” hypothesis. Simply stated, this hypothesis maintains that if a large dose is harmful, then smaller doses are also harmful in proportion. That is equivalent to saying that the harm from one man falling 100 feet is equivalent to that of 100 men falling one foot. This reasoning is applied to many natural phenomena and potentially carcinogenic substances to justify regulation and government programs.