Category Archives: Water

Ansari - New Environmentalism, Earth, Water

EPA plans to study “Potential Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing on Drinking Water Resources”
in 2011

I came across a 2011 proposal by the EPA which has left me somewhat confused.   Click the image below to download and read the actual document published by our Environmental Protection Agency, “Plan to Study the Potential Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing on Drinking Water Resources.”

For the record, hydraulic fracturing was pioneered by the Halliburton corporation in 1940.  There are over one million (1,000,000) such wells in the United States with more on the way.

The word “SCIENCE” on the background of the report’s cover is intended to connote scientific method and oversight: that process of systematic thought and labor which put men on the moon and successfully brought them back again.  How exactly is the scientific method to be invoked seventy years after this industrial process began?  It seems a little late to “plan” a study of “potential impacts.”

Plan to study the potential impacts of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water resources

Man and Nature, Water

“Gulf of Mexico…. fully recover by 2012” – Kenneth Feinberg

“Earlier this month, Kenneth Feinberg, the government’s oil compensation fund czar, said based on research he commissioned he figured the Gulf of Mexico would almost fully recover by 2012”

“BP Plc’s $20 billion oil-spill damages fund, run by Kenneth Feinberg, “far exceeds” the company’s legal obligations to compensate victims of the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, company lawyers said in a court filing.”

For more on Mr. Feinberg as BP’s fund representative click here.

Man and Nature, Water

Strong Evidence Emerges of BP Oil on Seafloor

Strong Evidence Emerges of BP Oil on Seafloor
Strong Evidence Emerges of BP Oil on Seafloor

Scientific teams have reported in recent months finding a strange substance on the Gulf floor, in some cases as far as about 80 miles from BP’s ill-fated Macondo well, which blew out in April and spilled an estimated 4.1 million barrels of oil into the Gulf before it was capped.

They have speculated that the substance—found as deep as 2,300 meters below the surface— was oil from the BP blowout. But, until now, they haven’t had this evidence from chemical tests.

David Hollander, an oceanographer at the University of South Florida, said in an interview that he and colleagues have just completed tests showing that the chemical profile of oil they found in Gulf sediment matches that from the blown-out BP well.