Saturday I was at a meeting where a speaker, talking about hydro-fracking, emphasized the importance of casings in gas wells. A good cement casing will protect your groundwater from potential contamination, he said. The problem with Dimock was the casing, not the fracking, he insisted.
OK. So now in both PA and NY the regs call for cement casings in the gas wells. Layers and layers of protective casings. But, according to John Broder's article in today's New York Times, both Halliburton and BP knew weeks before the fatal explosion of the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico that the cement mixture they planned to use to seal the bottom of the well was unstable. And they still went ahead with the job.
It won't matter how many layers of cement casing they put in if the cement is no good.
Yet another another reason to protest the gas industry on November 3rd.
ReplyDeletehttp://marcellusprotest.org/they-new
So you could have the most perfect pristine regulations on the planet but as long as you have these types of lowlife corporations and the "just doing my job" employees, we'll always have problems with drilling. The solution is not to improve or change the regs. The solution is to improve or change the humans and the corporate culture. That ain't gonna happen in our lifetimes. Ergo, the only real practical solution is to ban this sucker activity.
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