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EPA and Fracking - pure BS

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  • EPA and Fracking - pure BS

    As most of you know, the EPA wants to regulate fracing of wells. The EPA has no business regulating what should be a State by State regulation implementation. The EPA is an Agency and can issue orders without any argument by YOU. It slows processes down to a crawl and under Obama is trying to exercise much greater oversight than ever before-all in the name of protecting people.

    Here is a prime example of over-extension of power by the EPA and is pure bullchip by the EPA-they act without doing their GD homework (and probably are being told by Obama to "sick em").:

    The EPA’s Abusive Power
    By Mario Loyola, Director, Center for Tenth Amendment Studies


    If you’re looking for a dramatic example of a government regulatory agency run amok, consider the Environmental Protection Agency’s arbitrary and shameful attack on one Texas natural gas company.
    In December 2009, Steven Lipsky noticed gas fumes coming from his water well at his new home just west of Dallas, Texas. He began to suspect that the source was a nearby natural gas well that Range Resources had built and “fracked” earlier that year to exploit a part of the massive Barnett Shale a mile underground.
    Mr. Lipsky proceeded to contact the EPA, and the agency slapped Range Resources with an endangerment finding and remediation order. “We know they’ve polluted the well,” claimed EPA regional administrator Al Armendariz in a television interview at the time.
    In fact, the EPA hadn’t even completed the most elementary investigation before issuing the “emergency order.” If it had, it would have quickly realized what the source of the gas was. Just beneath the Trinity Aquifer, from which the Lipsky well draws its water, is a rock strata laden with natural gas and salt water called the Strawn formation, which extends down to about 400 feet underground. Over 5,000 feet below that is the Barnett Shale, from which Range was extracting natural gas.
    A complex battery of chemical finger-print testing, focused particularly on nitrogen content, quickly and irrefutably demonstrated that the gas in the Lipsky well was the same as that in the Strawn formation, and different than that in the Barnett Shale. That explained why area residents had found natural gas in their water wells years before any drilling for natural gas. One area subdivision’s water tanks even warn “Danger: Flammable Gas.”
    At every step in this fast-moving fiasco, EPA’s legal position shifted: Its original order was based on the factual assertion that Range had caused the contamination; when it couldn’t explain how, it retreated to the position that Range “may have” caused it; and when that possibility was excluded, it retreated to the ultimate redoubt of government authority: arbitrary power. Now, confronted with incontrovertible evidence that the source of the gas was something else entirely, EPA claims that the law didn’t require the agency to prove or even allege any connection between Range and the contamination. It is suing Range for millions of dollars for failure to comply fully with its original order.
    The EPA claims that, under the Safe Drinking Water Act, it can commandeer anybody at random and force him to clean up, at his own expense, a problem that he can immediately prove he’s had nothing to do with.
    If this doesn’t show you why we need due process, consider this: The Lipsky well wasn’t even “contaminated” to start with. The methane measured in Lipsky’s well water, 2.3 parts per million, was well within the typical range for wells in that area, and significantly below the federal endangerment threshold of 10 parts per million. According to the U.S. Department of Interior, water wells bearing methane below that threshold pose no danger if properly monitored and vented.
    State regulators should have been allowed to deal with the problem from the start. They know the area, they knew where the gas was coming from, and they knew that Lipsky’s house was not in imminent danger. EPA regulators, by contrast, don’t know the area, they have no experience with oil and gas operations, and they jumped to conclusions based on uneducated guesses.

    Mario Loyola is Senior Analyst for the Anne & Tobin Armstrong Center for Energy & the Environment at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

    Is this how you want to be treated? No due process-you are guilty because the EPA says so without any basis of fact or proof? This could happen to you at some point in time for doing something that has been accepted practice and used for almost 60 years and is fully regulated by the Railroad Commission and TDEQ. Bullchip.
    "Hey Hillary, regarding the Benghazi Attack on 9/11-we'll just blame it on that movie, not my total lack of security. By the way, what's so significant about 9/11 anyway-was that a date my buddy Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground blew up a government building?" asked Obama to Hillary. BEAUTIFY AMERICA, RUN OVER A LIBERAL, THEN BACK UP AND SEE IF HE'S DEAD.

  • #2
    TCEQ

    and also the local subsidence district, if there is one.
    At his baptism, Sam Houston was told his sins were washed away. He reportedly replied, “I pity the fish downstream.” - Nov. 19, 1854 - Independence, Texas

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