As Texas Withers, Gas Industry Guzzles

—By Josh Harkinson

Thu Sep. 1, 2011 3:00 AM PDT
At Trinity Park, a popular picnic spot near downtown Fort Worth, Texas, a scorching summer has killed stately oaks and turned lawns into brittle moonscapes. On the park's eastern edge, loud diesel generators pump some 4 million gallons of water from the Trinity River, though they're not supplying the park or city residents, who began facing drought-imposed watering restrictions on Monday. Instead, Chesapeake Energy is piping the water across the park to frack a nearby natural gas well.

As Texas faces its worst single-year drought ever, many drinking wells have failed, entire towns could go dry, and millions of residential water users face mandatory cutbacks. A study released at a meeting of Texas water districts yesterday predicted that the drought will persist through next summer. But so far, the state's booming and increasingly thirsty natural gas industry faces no limits to how much water it can pump.

"In a drought like this, every drop is important," says Don Young, a local anti-fracking activist who showed me where Chesapeake's water pipes had been hoisted over a jogging trail. "And if we're asked to conserve, then I think the drilling industry should be doing the same thing."

Fracking, which employs high-pressure jets of water to fracture rock and release natural gas, accounts for a fast-growing share of water use in some of the driest parts of Texas. Though the overall affect of fracking on reservoirs and rivers in Fort Worth's Barnett Shale zone is dwarfed by agriculture and homeowners, its local impacts can be severe. For example, in the Upper Trinity Groundwater Conservation District (UTGCD) west of Fort Worth, the share of groundwater used by frackers was 40 percent in the first half of 2011, up from 25 percent in 2010.

more

http://motherjones.com/environment/2011/09/texas-drought-fracking-water

The profits of the Natural Gas Industry is more important then the preservation of human life.

After they bring the tar sands oil pipeline into Texas from Canada, Texas will have an enormous amount of oily slurry water to dispose of, so rather than taint surface water and groundwater supplies with the sand and residual petroleum PAHs that would otherwise happen during the oil removal process, let them pump that crap into their fracking wells.

Now that was an easy solution, wasn't it?

which in turn makes more CO2, and so on.

Will the last one out turn the lights off?

:eyes:

> As Texas faces its worst single-year drought ever, many drinking wells have failed,
> entire towns could go dry, and millions of residential water users face mandatory
> cutbacks. ... But so far, the state's booming and increasingly thirsty natural gas
> industry faces no limits to how much water it can pump.

> in the Upper Trinity Groundwater Conservation District (UTGCD) west of Fort Worth,
> the share of groundwater used by frackers was 40 percent in the first half of 2011

Scary ... both how blatantly the gas industry is operating and how timidly the
Texans are allowing it ...

:wtf: