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Hello! Our family's Texas adventure begins shortly. My husband's job will be on the southside of Ft Worth. Although I wish we could be on the northside of town, based upon commute times this forum has helped me decide to look for homes in the TCU area for intown and the Mansfield area for suburbs. Thank you. I look forward to beginning the home search.
I am hoping that the experienced DFW residents here could help me put one of my concerns to rest. With being responsible for the growing bodies of two young children, I am worried about the long-term health impact of poor air/water quality as it relates to fracking (fracing?). Several news articles and one recent video I stumbled across of a woman showing her possibly tainted water in Colleyville scared me.
Did you or did anyone you know choose a home based upon minimizing possible risks related to fracking or to any other environmental hazard? What were the most reputable (least fear-mongering) sites that were helpful? How did you (they) go about their home search?
If I just had to visibly look for something, i.e. cell phone towers close by, then it would be easy. I'm concerned about air quality, well water contamination and other "invisible" hazards. I would like to be a prudent, educated buyer. Thank you for any feedback that might be helpful.
what is your price point?
if you can afford Southlake--there is no drilling there and leases for two largest drilling companies have lapsed which makes it very unlikely that Southlake residents will have to fight off o/g drillers in future
as far as "fear mongoring" sites--who knows
no one has any verified tainted water at this point in DFW metroplex that I know of--
There are some discussions about fracking in the news and papers, but overall, most people in the area do not seem to be overly concerned by it. Being in the vicinity of the Barnett Shale, there will be drilling in almost all locations. The cities have restrictions on how close wells can be installed near residential properties. As a real estate agent, I rarely have any clients bring up fracking as a concern. If you would like any other information, please feel free to private message me. Thanks!
There is many inches of steel pipe in gas wells which protect it from infiltrating ground water. I'm pretty sure water can't travel through 10 - 15 inches of impermeable steel. Ground water is typically less than 2000'. Most Barnett shale wells are 10,000+'.
Gas can not travel thousands of feet through impermeable rock to infiltrate ground water. Fracing concerns are unfounded and mostly make believe (to sell movies in gasland's case).
I do find it funny that Southlake banned fracing though... considering a lot of those residents work in the O&G industry-- the nutcases in the community must have taken over...
accidents happen...and sometimes not enough research is done before some operations happen that can lead to problems...
the stories coming from Ohio seem to indicate that disposal salt water wells--one in particular--may be involved in series of earthquakes the state has experienced--
because water sent underground has managed to find its way into zones that were not anticipated...
whether further investigation will prove that accurate or not remains to be seen--
but the state has stopped the use of that well and others in the area for salt water disposal for more investigation...
many people are concerned about fracking because the o/g companies that do it refuse to release the info of the ingredients--citing proprietarial information about what they use--
people are afraid of toxins in the fracking solutions being forced into strata that would contaminated underground water supplies...
the BP Horizon well blowout should be lesson in what happens when companies do not follow safety standards--
all companies involved on that well failed to follow "normal" industry standards--and they are pretty loose since they have not been tightened up in more than 10 yrs
there are companies on land that make the similar mistakes...
remember asbestos was once consider a "safe/helpful" product...
there are many things we once considered fairly benign that now are viewed as dangerous...
so education about problems is ongoing and is usually resisted by people/companies who have invested in "old" technology and whose livelihoods are threatened by new information...
my husband works in o/g
we know that there are some aspects of producing o/g that have to be tolerated in order for energy needs to be met--but we know that people are the problem in any undertaking--
people get careless, break the rules for variety of reasons...sometimes that causes problems...
you just want to know about anything that would affect you directly and drilling/production in the area you consider living is something to know about...
you can't always control what happens AFTER you buy--that is why it is important to do your investigation before...
and remember that much of this drilling activity is relatively new--
there are hundreds of pipeline below and above ground in this state that are 50+ yrs old--
THEY are likely a real hazard and have minimal oversight of their condition...
but you rarely see anything about them in paper unless there has been a bad accident...
that is how most of our "policing" of hazardous areas occurs--after the fact...
Location: Visitation between Wal-Mart & Home Depot
8,309 posts, read 38,779,335 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by loves2read
accidents happen...and sometimes not enough research is done before some operations happen that can lead to problems...
the stories coming from Ohio seem to indicate that disposal salt water wells--one in particular--may be involved in series of earthquakes the state has experienced--
because water sent underground has managed to find its way into zones that were not anticipated...
whether further investigation will prove that accurate or not remains to be seen--
but the state has stopped the use of that well and others in the area for salt water disposal for more investigation...
many people are concerned about fracking because the o/g companies that do it refuse to release the info of the ingredients--citing proprietarial information about what they use--
people are afraid of toxins in the fracking solutions being forced into strata that would contaminated underground water supplies...
the BP Horizon well blowout should be lesson in what happens when companies do not follow safety standards--
all companies involved on that well failed to follow "normal" industry standards--and they are pretty loose since they have not been tightened up in more than 10 yrs
there are companies on land that make the similar mistakes...
remember asbestos was once consider a "safe/helpful" product...
there are many things we once considered fairly benign that now are viewed as dangerous...
so education about problems is ongoing and is usually resisted by people/companies who have invested in "old" technology and whose livelihoods are threatened by new information...
my husband works in o/g
we know that there are some aspects of producing o/g that have to be tolerated in order for energy needs to be met--but we know that people are the problem in any undertaking--
people get careless, break the rules for variety of reasons...sometimes that causes problems...
you just want to know about anything that would affect you directly and drilling/production in the area you consider living is something to know about...
you can't always control what happens AFTER you buy--that is why it is important to do your investigation before...
and remember that much of this drilling activity is relatively new--
there are hundreds of pipeline below and above ground in this state that are 50+ yrs old--
THEY are likely a real hazard and have minimal oversight of their condition...
but you rarely see anything about them in paper unless there has been a bad accident...
that is how most of our "policing" of hazardous areas occurs--after the fact...
I think that's a reasonable take...
But bear in mind that asbestos isn't considered very dangerous anymore since the litigation money has dried up. Heavy occupational exposure has been linked to a variety of illnesses, but having some asbestos in your floor tiles or insulating your ducts in the attic was never a legitimate health concern and certainly never justified the expenditures and measures that people took to rid their homes of it. Fervor makes litigation easy and it makes selling remediation services easy.
I think that there are legitimate environmental concerns associated with the production and transportation of oil & natural gas, but the sky isn't falling from hydraulic fracturing. The whole idea about disclosing frac fluid recipes is also WAY overblown. Every truck and every chemical tote on a wellsite has an MSDS detailing exactly what's in it (though not recipes). Frac fluid recipes ARE intellectual property and there have been large suits with large awards between service companies for poaching the competition's engineers and stealing frac fluid designs. That isn't a red-herring; those really are trade secrets.
The measures that we in Texas take to safeguard water are pretty good. To permit a well, an operator must submit their well coordinates to the TCEQ for review. The TCEQ tracks the deepest fresh water zones across the entire state and issues a recommendation for surface casing depth. Say for example a well is permitted in Fort Worth and the TCEQ says that the deepest ground water is at 1800' (pulled that number out of my hat), then the operator would drill to somewhere around 2,500' or deeper, run casing, pump cement down the casing and up around the annulus until it overruns at the surface*, wait for the cement to cure, then they drill through the bottom of the cement at the "shoe" and perform a pressure test to ensure that nothing will get around the shoe joint to contaminate the ground water. The abridged version for the remainder of drilling is: you resume drilling to TD, which in the preponderance of the Barnett Shale is around 7,000', at which point you run a smaller diameter casing from TD all the way to surface, cement that into place, then attempt to complete the well.
To me, surface spills in recharging zones present a much more present danger to ground water than fracing. There are multiple layers of steel and cement, then a mile or more of geologic strata between the location of the actual frac injection and the closest fresh water zone.
Salt water disposal is a different story. I've seen a lot of very poorly managed properties that are a blight on the landscape and the soil is so impregnated with chlorides that it will never grow anything again. There are also miles and miles of old, corroded pipelines with God-knows-what in them leaching bad stuff into the soil and historic wells that have been temporarily abandoned since the 60's, also with God-knows-what in them leaching bad stuff into the soil - but fracs aren't the big bad guy that they are presented as - at least not in Texas (and, yes, that is my opinion).
*a volume of cement sufficient to fill the annulus to surface is pumped, then chased down the pipe with water, mud or brine until the interior volume of the casing has been completely displaced. If cement does not appear at the surface, the operator must run 1" "top-out tubing" into the annulus and pump cement until the surface casing has been filled to ground level.
with the info recently about Chesapeake cutting back on production, some of these areas won't be drilled in forseeable future...
my husband said some landowners (especially the ones with large royalty interests) likely won't be too happy to read about Chesapeake cutting back production--
could create more headaches than low stock price...
Location: Visitation between Wal-Mart & Home Depot
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Reputation: 7185
I just got word this morning that the RRC will now be regulating fracs. An operator must make an application for a fracture stimulation and, as part of the permitting process, must disclose all chemicals that will be pumped away.
This is certainly going to be inconvenient and will cut into service company efficiency, but I can't say that I don't feel this to be a reasonable measure of regulation (nor can I say that the potential for this to be very problematic in the future exists).
then who is regulating the frac process???
the city/county the well is being drilled in?
we live in Hurst and the city just rewrote the drilling/production ordinance the first part of 2011 and made it more demanding with more oversight required
Chesapeake has requested the city "revisit" that ordinance and basically downgrade some of the requirements--did that at meeting last week...
to make it less "burdensome" for Chesapeake to drill/operate the three+ they proposed to drill
I am hoping that with the recent fall in gas prices that Chesapeake is going to walkaway from these three locations--they all fall within the 600 ft separation requirement and the city is NOT giving relief on that from what I have read...
so I don't know what Chesapeake hopes to gain by whittling away at the city's ordinance with other requests about security and other aspects...
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