London “Super Sewer” Approved

The Thames Tideway Tunnel will be 15 miles long.

The Government has given the go-ahead to start building London’s ‘super sewer’ which will tackle the sewage pollution in to the tidal River Thames.

The 25km tunnel will run underground from Acton storm tanks in West London, and travel roughly the line underneath the river to Abbey Mills Pumping Station in East London, where it will connect to the Lee Tunnel.

The sewage collected from the 34 most polluting discharge points along the tidal river in Central London, will then be taken via the Lee Tunnel to Beckton sewage works for treatment.

Last year, 55 million tonnes of sewage polluted the tidal River Thames, far higher than the average 39 million tonnes that discharges in a typical year.

This was due to the exceptionally wet weather, which caused the combined sewerage system that London has, collecting rain water and sewerage water from drains, to fill up and pour into the river even more than normal.

With the weather of 2014 already proving to be wetter than a typical year, the amount of sewage which is going into the river is likely to once again be above average.

Andy Mitchell, Chief Executive of Thames Tideway Tunnel, said: “If the tunnel had been in operation last year, it would have captured 97% of the sewage that poured in to London’s river. Hardly a week goes by when untreated sewage is not pouring in to London’s river and we are pleased that we can now start to tackle this archaic problem.

“This is a huge project but it’s a huge problem, and we can now get on with tackling it. It’s no easy task, but we’re confident that we can deliver this project and still achieve our aim of minimising the impact on our customer bills.”

The Thames Tideway Tunnel will take seven years to build, and main construction can now start in 2016 as planned.

Source: Stormwater.

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More about the very interesting Thames Tideway Tunnel.

A lifetime of sugary sodas may be 4.6 years shorter

By Lindsey Bever

You knew that drinking sugary sodas could lead to obesity, diabetes and heart attacks — but, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health, it may also speed up your body’s aging process.

As you age, caps on the end your chromosomes called telomeres shrink. In the past several years, researchers at the University of California at San Francisco, have analyzed stored DNA from more than 5,300 healthy Americans in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from some 14 years ago. And they discovered that those who drank more pop tended to have shorter telomeres.

The shorter the telomere, the harder it is for a cell to regenerate — and so, the body ages.

“We think we can get away with drinking lots of soda as long as we are not gaining weight, but this suggests that there is an invisible pathway that leads to accelerated aging, regardless of weight,” psychiatry professor Elissa Epel, senior author of the study, told CBS San Francisco.

According to the research, drinking a 20-ounce bubbly beverage every day is linked to 4.6 years of additional aging. You get the same effect by smoking, said UCSF postdoctoral fellow Cindy Leung, lead author of the study. About 21 percent in the sample said they drank at least that much soda per day. However, researchers say, a link does not mean causation.

“The extremely high dose of sugar that we can put into our body within seconds by drinking sugared beverages is uniquely toxic to metabolism,” Epel told Time.

Scientists found no link between cell aging and drinking diet sodas or fruit juices. But Epel said the results might be different with more modern data.

“We think that the jury’s still out on sugared beverages — theoretically they’re just as bad,” she told Time. “But 14 years ago, people were drinking a lot less sugared beverages. … They were mostly drinking soda.”

The authors said the study looked at each participant at only one point in time; it did not track them. The participants, ages 20 to 65, had no history of diabetes or cardiovascular disease.

But, with or without sodas, telomeres naturally shorten over time.

Source: Washington Post.

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The Kissimmee: A River Recurved

by Amy Green

Kissimmee Straightened by the Army Corps of Engineers 

Click for larger view.

It sounds almost superhuman to try straighten a river and then recarve the curves.

That’s what federal and state officials did to the Kissimmee River in central Florida. They straightened the river in the 1960s into a canal to drain swampland and make way for the state’s explosive growth. It worked — and it created an ecological disaster. So officials decided to restore the river’s slow-flowing, meandering path.

That billion-dollar restoration — the world’s largest — is a few years from completion. And so far, it’s bringing signs of new life, especially on a man-made canal that was dug through the heart of the river.

“Birds are back, both wading birds and ducks. They’re all over the place,” says Paul Gray of Audubon Florida. “The oxygen levels in the river are better. There’s a lot more game fish in the river like bass and bluegill and stuff. Most of the biological perimeters, the goals of the restoration we’ve already met.”

The man-made canal begins near Walt Disney World in Central Florida and flows 50 miles south. “It messed up our water management infrastructure,” Gray says. “Now we drain so much water that when it’s dry we don’t have enough water for our human needs. We over drained, and so now we’re trying to rebuild the system where we’re going to catch water instead of wasting it when it’s wet.”

For decades, piles of dirt dug for the canal have remained heaped on its banks. Now bulldozers are pushing the dirt back into the waterway, filling it and making way for the river’s old meanders to recarve their historic path. Five dams controlling the waterway’s flow are being blown up, allowing the water to flow naturally.

The 20-year restoration effort is expected to be complete by 2017.

Defending The Water

The Kissimmee also is the backbone of the Everglades. It supports farming and the drinking water for 6 million south Floridians. The problem is now central Floridians are looking to the Kissimmee.

“Groundwater is not an infinite resource,” says Joanne Chamberlain of the Central Florida Water Initiative, a group of state agencies, cities and utilities who together are examining how much water the region needs.

The group estimates by 2035 Central Florida’s demand will exceed its supply, which it gets mostly from an underground aquifer. So the group’s members are considering other sources. One possibility they’ve identified is the Kissimmee’s headwaters.

“There’s opportunities under certain situations that water can be used — high-water level situations where that water could be taken, stored and used for other purposes,” Chamberlain says.

She means during the summer wet season, when Florida receives the bulk of its rain.

“Florida is not like any other state in the union. We revolve around our water so greatly, not just as a drinking source but as a source of recreation and as source of tourism,” says Chuck O’Neal, chairman of the natural resources committee of the League of Women Voters of Florida.

The group supports a state constitutional amendment on the ballot in November that would put more money toward land and water conservation, including the Kissimmee.

Other environmentalists hope to protect the Kissimmee’s water with a unique legal tool called a water reservation, which would set aside a certain amount of water so utilities can’t have it for consumer use.

“The future is going to be trying to defend the water, to make sure the river has the proper hydrology,” Gray says.

Cynthia Barnett, a Florida author who writes about water issues. “The key for the future is to learn from those past mistakes and now do things differently. Instead of clashing all the time the idea is to work together to use less.”

She says the Kissimmee is a lesson, that Floridians don’t need more water but that environmentalists, utilities and farmers together can work toward a future of conservation.

The restoration’s goal is to put as much of the Kissimmee as possible back to the way it was. This photo shows the river after restoration.

Click for larger view.

Source: National Public Radio.

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Dissolved Oxygen: An important Constituent of Water

by Pure Water Annie

Gazette Technical Wizard Pure Water Annie Explains How Oxygen Gets Into Water and Why It Needs to Be There

Our atmosphere consists of around 21 percent oxygen.  Water, however, has only a fraction of 1 percent.

Oxygen dissolves into water at the point where water and air meet.

Dissolved oxygen, called DO, is made up of microscopic bubbles of oxygen gas in water.  This dissolved oxygen is critical for the support of plant life and fish.

According to one authority, “DO is produced by diffusion from the atmosphere, aeration of the water as it passes over falls and rapids, and as a waste product of photosynthesis.  It is affected by temperature, salinity, atmospheric pressure, and oxygen demand from aquatic plants and animals.”

Dissolved oxygen is measured as percent saturation or as parts per million (ppm) or milligrams per liter (mg/L).   As the chart below indicates, oxygen dissolves easily into cold water, not so easily into warm, and not at all into boiling water.

In water treatment, a high level of dissolved oxygen can make water taste better, but it can also make water corrosive to metal pipes. Dissolved oxygen is a necessary ingredient of many water treatment processes.  The use of catalytic carbon to remove iron, for example,  requires a minimum of about 4.0 ppm of dissolved oxygen in the source water, and Birm, the popular iron removal medium, will not work without sufficient dissolved oxygen.

Oxygen can be added to water by simple aeration techniques which involve exposing the water to air.  Ozone is also used in water treatment to greatly increase the oxygen content of water.

Glasses show how oxygen leaves water.  Milky water on left with high level of dissolved oxygen.  On the right, the air has gone back to the atmosphere and the water is clear.  Often a film will be left at the surface or “skin” at the top surface of the water.  When cloudy water clears from bottom to top. the discoloration is harmless air.  Water cloudy from silt clears from top to bottom and leaves residue at the bottom of the glass.

Drought Of 1934 In North America, During The Dust Bowl, Was The Worst In Thousand Years: Study

This photo shows a farmer and his two sons during a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936. The 1930s Dust Bowl drought had four drought events with no time to recover in between: 1930-31, 1934, 1936 and 1939-40.

The drought of 1934 in North America was the driest and the most widespread of the last millennium, according to a new study based on a reconstruction of North America’s history of drought over the last 1,000 years.

In the study, published in the Oct. 17 edition of Geophysical Research Letters, researchers from NASA and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, used a tree-ring-based drought record between the years 1000 to 2005, as well as modern-day records, to determine that the 1934 drought was 30 percent more severe than the next worst one in 1580. The study also found that the 1934 drought extended across 71.6 percent of western North America while, in comparison, the average extent of the 2012 drought was 59.7 percent.

“It was the worst by a large margin, falling pretty far outside the normal range of variability that we see in the record,” Ben Cook, a climate scientist at NASA and the study’s lead author, said in a statement.

The 1934 drought was one of four similar events that occurred in sequence over a period of 10 years. The droughts of 1930-31, 1934, 1936 and 1939-40 are together called the Dust Bowl. According to scientists, two sets of conditions led to the severity and extent of the 1934 drought — while a high-pressure weather system over western America affected normal rainfall patterns, poor land management practices caused dust storms in the spring of 1934.

A dust storm approaches Stratford, Texas, in 1935.

“In combination then, these two different phenomena managed to bring almost the entire nation into a drought at that time,” Richard Seager, professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the study’s co-author, said in the statement. “The fact that it was the worst of the millennium was probably in part because of the human role.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, said in a recent report that climate change is expected to make North America’s droughts worse, with the southwest likely to become significantly drier. The researchers believe that an analysis of the last thousand years could help them better understand the natural variability of droughts.

Although dust storms like the ones from the Dust Bowl are unlikely to occur in North America today, farmers still need to pay attention to the changing climate and adapt accordingly, the scientists said.

Source: International Business Times.

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If Columbus deserves a “day,” so, too,  do Hitler and Jack the Ripper

by Tiger Tom

I, Tiger Tom, seldom get to write for the Gazette or the Occasional because I so seldom write about water.  But since they taught us in school that Columbus was the brave sailor who sailed the ocean blue in 1492 in his three merry ships whose names we had to memorize, his connection with water makes him fair game.

The first thing you need to know about Christopher Columbus is that he was a mediocre sailor but a skilled con man.  Above all, he was unimaginably greedy and as cruel as a snake.  Personally, Columbus was described by one historian as “an unrelenting social climber and self-promoter who stopped at nothing— not even exploitation, slavery, or twisting Biblical scripture— to advance his ambitions….”
Those are his good qualities.

Here is how historian Howard Zinn describes Columbus’ interaction with the native Anawak:

Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were “naked as the day they were born,” they showed “no more embarrassment than animals.” Columbus later wrote: “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. American Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.  (Zinn, Howard,  “A People’s History of the United States”.)

This is mild in comparison to some of the accounts by the great man’s contemporaries.  For example, the author of the multi-volume History of the Indies, the Catholic priest Bartolomé de las Casas,  who observed the region where Columbus was governor, recounted countless atrocities committed by Columbus and his followers.  Las Casas describes Spaniards driven by “insatiable greed” — “killing, terrorizing, afflicting, and torturing the native peoples” with “the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty.”  He describes how systematic violence was aimed at preventing “[American] Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings.”  The Spaniards “thought nothing of knifing the natives by tens and twenties and cutting slices from their bodies to test the sharpness of their blades.” Las Casas said, “My eyes have seen acts so foreign to human nature that I now tremble as I write them.”

But he did, as we like to say, “discover America,” so we have given him a “day” on our calendar.  I vote that we take it back.

A Landmark Event in the Understanding and Control of Waterborne Diseases

by Pure Water Annie

Gazette technical writer Pure Water Annie describes a landmark moment in the history of water’s role in disease.

Waterborne diseases like infectious hepatitis,  bacterial dysentery, cholera, and giardiasis were common until fairly recently.  Throughout the world, health impacts were staggering. Entire villages in Europe were wiped out by plagues in the 11th and 12th centuries.   In 1848 and 1849 in a single cholera epidemic alone, 53,000 people died in London.

 Dr. John Snow’s 1854 Pump Study is a landmark in the development of epidemiology (the study of infectious diseases).

The Broad Street Pump Findings

Dr. John Snow, a London obstetrician,  became interested in the cause and transmission of cholera after witnessing severe outbreaks of the disease in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1849 he published a pamphlet that suggested that cholera was transmitted by contaminated drinking water.  Many theories about the cause of cholera were in circulation at the time, and Dr. Snow’s polluted water theory was not widely accepted. The then-dominant theory was the miasma theory that stated that diseases such as cholera or the Black Death were caused by a noxious form of “bad air.” This was a short time before Pasteur’s “germ theory” became popular.

In 1854 Dr. Snow carefully plotted the locations of the illness and compared his findings to the subscriber lists of two private companies that provided water for London. His research showed that cholera occurred with greater frequency among the customers of one of the companies–the one that drew its water from the lower Thames river which was contaminated by London sewage. The other company used upper Thames water, which was less polluted.

Dr. Snow’s maps indicated a strong correlation between cholera cases and the proximity to the intersection of Cambridge and Broad Streets. The obvious conclusion was that the main cause of the cholera epidemic was the water drawn from a community pump on Broad Street.

Although few at the time believed Dr. Snow’s theory, the handle was removed from the pump to prevent further use of the water and the plague of cholera was broken.

Both the pump and its handle are on public display today and Dr. Snow’s discovery remains a landmark achievement in public health.

Reference: Thomas V. Cech: Principles of Water Resources: History, Development, Management, and Policy. (John Wiley and Sons, 2005).

Texans Getting Creative With Water Conservation

WICHITA FALLS, Tex. — As this North Texas city struggles through one of the most severe droughts ever, saving water is no longer just about avoiding fines or staying in the good graces of one’s neighbors.

Since the city raised water rates by 53 percent in October, it is also about saving money.

“We have big buckets in our showers that catch the cold water as it warms up, and we carry those out and pour them on trees or bushes or whatever,” said Katie Downs, who lives with her husband and 8-year-old daughter near the edge of town.

Wichita Falls’s hefty rate increase is unusual, and it is in part because extraordinary conservation efforts by residents have meant that the utility was selling less water and needed to make up for lost revenue. Water and sewer bills are going up substantially across Texas and in many other places around the country as utilities struggle to maintain aging infrastructure, deal with drought or come to grips with the rising costs of a scarce resource while searching for new supplies. 

 This Wichita Falls Nursery Specializes in Plants that Don’t Need Much Water

“People have been hit on both sides,” said Jeff Hughes, director of the Environmental Finance Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “The rates have been increasing higher than inflation, but also, salaries and wages have gone down in many regions.”

Those increases are causing people to get creative. Ms. Downs said her family saved the last 2 ounces in bottles of drinking water for houseplants or their dog. Other residents in the city of 100,000 spoke of taking “Navy” showers — quick showers taken on ships with limited water supplies — or replacing water-intensive lawns with drought-resistant plants.

The popularity of such plants has been a boon for Paul Dowlearn, who owns a nursery and sells plants that can withstand drought, like red yucca and Texas sage. “I’m selling plants that can live on the rainfall, and I’m not talking cactus and gravel,” Mr. Dowlearn said, standing in the nursery’s small indoor area, where two large rainwater collection bins are surrounded by brightly colored plants.

One reason for rising water rates is simply the need to catch up, Mr. Hughes said. Most water utilities, which are government-owned, have been loath to raise rates enough to keep pace with the cost of maintaining old and expensive infrastructure — until breakdowns and staggering debt force increases.

“We have about $5 billion worth of infrastructure, and you’ve got a lot of things you need to do,” said Terry Lowery, assistant director of business operations for Dallas Water Utilities, which plans to raise rates 3 to 6 percent each year for the next five years. “Moving water is expensive.”

In the Dallas area, invasive zebra mussels that clog water intake pipes have caused spikes in water rates. And the fast-growing region’s search for new supplies, which could include a hotly contested multibillion-dollar reservoirin Northeast Texas, is likely to send rates even higher.

In San Antonio, the city’s water system is considering a pipeline project that would cost $3.4 billion, bringing in groundwater from 140 miles away. That would add 16 percent to current water rates, the utility estimates. On top of that, more rate increases are needed to pay for repairs to an aging sewer system that has had multiple failures in the past several years, contributing to a forecast from the utility that combined water and wastewater rates in San Antonio will increase 41 percent over the next five years. (The San Antonio Water System is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune.)

Representing a San Antonio coalition of congregations, schools and unions, Diane Duesterhoeft told the City Council at a hearing last week that low-income and middle-class families would be hit hardest. “It doesn’t take a lot of courage to spend someone else’s money,” Ms. Duesterhoeft said. “It does take courage to face the public and gain their informed consent on such a critical decision.”

The San Antonio Water System said it had long offered discounts of close to 25 percent to people whose incomes fall near or below the poverty level. About 20,000 customers a month took advantage of that last year, the utility said. Another program offers one-time payment assistance financed by private donations for those struggling with their bills.

The programs are not common, and most government assistance for households is focused on electricity bills, which are generally significantly higher than water bills. Thousands of households in both Dallas and San Antonio — about 1 to 1.5 percent of ratepayers — have water service cut off for not paying, both cities’ utilities said. They send out multiple notices over a few months before cutting off someone’s water.

“We’ll still maintain our position as one of the lowest rates in the state,” said Greg Flores, a spokesman for the San Antonio Water System. He added that the utility was considering establishing a lower water rate for those using less than 3,000 or 4,000 gallons a month — more than someone living alone in an apartment would use, and perhaps barely enough for a family of four that did not have a lawn.

In Dallas, water rates have risen much more slowly for households that use low amounts of water, and the bigger increases have been reserved for those who use a lot of water, Ms. Lowery said.

Wichita Falls does not have any city-funded programs for water bills. But Jim Dockery, the city’s chief financial officer, said some nonprofits helped those in need, and the city was considering printing messages directly on billing statements that encouraged customers to donate to the cause or ask for help.

Mr. Dockery said he expected things to get better once the drought ends, but rates would still have to be high. That is because the habit of conservation is likely to continue, which means the utility will keep selling less water.

“A lot of customers have installed water conservation measures that they will likely continue using after the drought is over,” he said. “The price is going to continue to be high.”

But Mr. Dowlearn, the nursery owner, is not worried. He had rainwater collection systems at work and in his home long before the drought started.

“My wife and I have not paid a water bill in over 25 years,” he said.

Source: Texas Tribune.

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Study: Some cancer cases could be avoided through water treatment

by Jo-Anne MacKenzie

CONCORD — Hundreds of cases of cancer could be avoided if more New Hampshire residents tested — and treated — their private wells, according to a new study.

The study, funded by a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, looked at the long-term health effects of drinking water with elevated levels of arsenic. It estimates between 450 and 600 cases of lung, bladder or skin cancer here could be avoided if well water was tested and treated.

Some 46 percent of N.H. households get their drinking water from a private well, according to Paul Susca, a supervisor in the Department of Environmental Services drinking water division. Ninety percent of those wells are bedrock wells, which is where the arsenic is found.

Maine and New Hampshire rank highest nationally in the percentage of residents who use private wells, he said.

About one in five — some 20 percent — of private wells in New Hampshire have elevated levels of arsenic, according to NHDES Commissioner Thomas Burack.

Arsenic is considered a Class 1 carcinogen. It’s long been known that there’s a high incident of arsenic in many private wells, particularly in Rockingham, Merrimack, Strafford and Hillsborough counties. As many as 41,000 people in those four counties alone may be drinking water with arsenic levels higher than the EPA standard, the study says.

But there’s a problem just as significant as the arsenic levels — getting residents to have their well water tested and then doing something about it if arsenic or other contaminants are found. Although radon is even more commonly occuring, this study only looked for arsenic.

Dartmouth College did the report for NHDES and the state Department of Health and Human Services. The reporters held focus group meetings with residents of four towns, including Londonderry, each with a high number of private wells, all in areas with relatively high arsenic levels and all with a high percentage of children.

The experts found many residents associated contaminants in water with taste, smell or appearance, none of which hold true for arsenic, radon and many other contaminants.

There appeared to be a significant lack of knowledge among residents about water testing standards, according to the report. Those who did have their water tested often stopped there, the study showed, either because the results were tough to interpret or because they thought the cost of treatment would be prohibitive.

But, Susca said, cost ought not to be a factor.

“In most cases, people can use a point-of-use, under-the-sink kind of system to treat arsenic at levels that commonly occur,” he said. “It’s not a hazard for skin exposure, it’s the consumption, including cooking, so you only need to treat water you’re consuming.”

He said a typical under-the-sink system costs “hundred of dollars.”

Officials don’t have a firm grasp on the percentage of residents who use well water who have their water tested, Susca said, although a survey to get that number is underway.

Those conducting the study surveyed — or tried to — thousands of households with private wells. But the response rate was just about 3 percent.

Of those who did respond, 82 percent always or frequently drink tap water, according to the report.

The risk of consuming untreated well water with high levels or arsenic is significant. The study estimates of 688 cases of cancer among residents with arsenic-contaminated well water, 451 cases could be avoided if the water were treated for elevated arsenic levels.

Chronic arsenic exposure potentially leads to bladder and lung cancer. The state’s rate of bladder cancer is the highest in the country at 29.7 cases per 100,000, according to the National Cancer Institute.

That statistic can’t be entirely attributed to arsenic in well water, the study reports, but it’s noteworthy that Maine  ranks second for bladder cancer incidence and also has high levels of arsenic in its groundwater.

The study authors recommend improved communication about the importance of well water testing, testing events and campaigns in targeted towns as a next step.

“We want to emphasize that people should test their wells and do something about it if (arsenic) is at an elevated level,” Susca said.

The NHDES is working to develop an online tool that would allow residents to plug in their test results and get recommendations for treatment. That’s expected to roll out in the first half of 2015.

In the meantime, he said, people should have their water tested and if it needs treatment, consult several water treatment vendors.

There’s a lot of information available at http://des.nh.gov/organization/divisions/water/dwgb/.

Source: Eagle-Tribune

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Research: Fracking Uses No More Water Than Traditional Oil Production

Research done at the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas has cleared fracking of one of the most serious allegations leveled against it by environmentalists who oppose the practice—that is uses a disproportionate amount of water and risks depleting water sources for agricultural and residential users, especially in already water challenges south Texas.

But researcher Dr. Bridget Scanlon tells Newsradio 1200 WOAI that claim is not true.

“The water used to produce oil using hydraulic fracturing is similar to the water used in the U.S. to produce oil using conventional techniques,” she said.

She says even though fracking works by blasting, or ‘fracturing,’ hard rock shale formations with a mixture of water, sand, and chemicals, the total amount of water used during the life of the well is not appreciably different than the amount of water used for traditional types of oil wells.

She says the only difference is the point in the drilling process where the water is used.

“We use the water for hydraulic fracturing up front, right after we drill the well,” she said.  “In conventional production, we use the water later in the production, with water flooding and enhanced oil recovery,” she said.

The alleged overuse of water is one of several techniques environmental groups have used to try to shut down or limit the fracking wells which are close to making the USA energy independent.

Scanlon says her research did not study whether water used for fracking is in fact depleting the water table under the Eagle Ford, but other studies have indicated that the total water use for fracking is about the same as the water used to keep a golf course irrigated.

“The reason we’re using more water is because we are producing more oil,” she said.  “Not because hydraulic fracturing is any more water intensive.”

Source: WOAI Radio News.

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