PA Bill Makes Using Acid Mine Water More Likely
One of the more intriguing developments over the past year or so is that drillers in Pennsylvania have considered using acid mine drainage as a source of water for hydraulic fracturing. Water that flows from abandoned coal mines creates acidic water, some 300 million gallons of it per day, destroying plants and fish in some 5,000 miles of Pennsylvania’s waterways. If drillers were to use it, it would address two issues: cleaning up acid mine drainage, and reducing the need for fresh water needed for fracking. Everyone wins, right? Life is never that easy.
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Ohio legislators have been working to craft new shale oil and gas drilling rules that will do more to protect the environment, and at the same time, help protect the fledgling shale drilling industry in the state. New legislation passed in committee yesterday that will now go to the full House includes a provision to help prevent frivolous lawsuits brought by deep-pocketed anti-drilling groups, like the Ohio Environmental Council and the Sierra Club. These groups, who are opposed to expanded use of fossil fuels, use the legal system to tie up shale drillers in court and force them to spend huge sums of money as a tactic to reduce fossil fuel mining and use.
An unnamed driller in Ohio has asked Canadian company GASFRAC to use its waterless fracking technology to drill two trial wells in the Utica Shale. You may recall that a group of Tioga County, NY landowners with a collective 135,000 Marcellus Shale acres were set to use GASFRAC’s LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) technology to jump start drilling in New York, but the lease and royalty deal with the driller, eCORP, fell through (no fault of GASFRAC,