Hi Folks, After my initial response to this thread, I laid low, not wanting to contribute to the fact that some are leaving this list. But, I have to respond to Don's statements. Don, I don't know where you get your information, but to say natural gas has no pollutants is absurd. Natural gas is primarily made of methane, which, as a global warming pollutant, is 20x worse than carbon dioxide. There are several reasons, based on fact that make the effort to "frack" unjustifiable. One, vast amounts of water need to be used. We can not afford to waste our most precious resource on this planet for dirty fuels. Two, having methane, as opposed to fracking fluid in your drinking water is not anymore desirable. Would you drink it? Three, just because "fracking fluid" has not leaked into water tables now, does not mean it will not happen in the future. How many times have we heard the oil companies say oil spills can not happen and they would bear all the cleanup responsibilities? False and false. Besides, I would dispute the thought that fracking fluids have not contaminated water tables. Four, fracking has been proven to cause earthquakes, although they are small. But whats happens in the future? Five, huge federal subsidies are needed to make any fracking projects economically viable, as all fossil fuel is subsidized. If Americans really paid the true cost of producing fossil fuels, we would be paying $5/liter. Six, if these subsidies were put into green technology, we would not need to "frack". Seven, saying the Sierra Club is impartial is true. But, not having billions of dollars at stake, I tend to believe they are being more open and honest regarding their stance on fracking than the fossil fuel industry. Eight, obviously, fossil fuel industries are not impartial either. To quote a line in a TOOL song.... They "Lie, cheat and steal." We can go on and on as to why fracking is not a good energy policy. I am sure I will never convince you of my beliefs in the realm of fracking, the environment and political philosophies, but there is no way I could let your last statements go without a response. My Three Cents, Jon The situation I mentioned is just reinjection of water from one producing formation into another depleted formation. A very routine process. However, I need to respond to some of the things you may have heard about fracking. 1. The technology is not new and is well understood. The first fracs were done in the late 40's and early 50's. During the 1980's several thousand fracs were performed and during the 1990's and up to the present day several hundred thousand wells have been fracked. 2. During this whole period there is not one documented case of frac fluid getting into a water aquifer. Some of the reasons for this are that the formations fracked are almost always deeper than 5,000 feet, well below most fresh water aquifers, and government agencies require that the fresh water zones, which are typically 1500 feet or shallower, be sealed off by cementing surface casing through them. Frac fluids are not flammable and some fracs consist only of fresh water and sand. Others contain cross-linked gels and other chemicals. 3. There are cases of methane getting into drinking water. This can be caused by not having proper integrity in the surface casing and a leak developing in the production casing and gas leaking into the aquifer but this has nothing to do with the frac. Another common cause of methane in drinking water is caused by culinary water wells that are drilled in areas of shallow coals. After producing gas free water for a period the coals "dewater" and produce methane which gets into the water supply. This is a very common occurrence particularly in areas like Wyoming, Utah, Pennsylvania and West Virginia which have shallow coals associated with fresh water aquifers. 4. The frac basically enhances the producibility of gas from the existing gas reservoir. 5. Much of the hysteria about fracking has been promoted by organizations like the Sierra Club which opposes the drilling of ANY new wells ANYWHERE in the U. S. They can hardly be objective. 6. Natural gas contains no pollutants and is far preferable to coal or oil from any environmental viewpoint. It also has the smallest production footprint. The United States has sufficient natural gas resources to become energy independent and I believe it is the height of folly not to develop them. Don Quoting utah-astronomy-request@mailman.xmission.com:

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