https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/04/25/australian-politician-blames-fracking-after-he-sets-river-ablaze-with-a-lighter/
[So, really, what's the problem here? Now, you can go fishing, catch
something for dinner, and then cook it, all without leaving your boat.
/sarcasm off Wooden boats not recommended for this activity.
Other than the risk of lighting up the shorelines (admittedly a big
risk), at least burning the methane reduces the greenhouse gas impact by
transforming it into methane.
Better still, if the vents are stable, would be to set up a way to
capture the methane, store and transport it for use elsewhere,
displacing the need for other natural gas production.
Links, video in on-line article
I recommend watching the video.]
Australian politician blames fracking after he sets river ablaze with a
lighter
By Ben Guarino April 25 at 4:00 AM
Some people want to watch the world burn. Others — like Jeremy
Buckingham, a member of the Australian Parliament — will settle for rivers.
In an act of protest against coal seam fracking, the Greens Party member
recently took an aluminium boat down the Condamine River in Queensland,
Australia. This was no lazy afternoon cruise. The surface of the river
fizzed with bubbles of methane gas. Methane is colorless and odorless —
but it’s also quite flammable. Buckingham leaned over the side of the
boat, and, as though lighting a barbecue, set the methane ablaze.
Presto: Instant river flambé. “We did not expect it to explode like it
it did,” Buckingham told The Washington Post early Monday in a phone
interview. He’s calling for the gas industry to halt fracking in
Australia until the source of the methane can be determined.
“This is the future of Australia if we do not stop the frackers, who
want to spread across all states and territories,” Buckingham said in a
video of the river fire, which he posted to Facebook. The flames lasted
for an hour as the methane continued to churn out of the river bed and
feed the fire, he said. As of early Monday morning, more than 3.3
million people had viewed the video.
The Condamine River isn’t the first flaming body of water to spark
environmental health concerns. When a layer of oil and trash on top of
Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught flame in 1969, the resulting furor led
to the passage of the Clean Water Act. In 2014, a discarded cigarette
set a polluted river on fire in Wenzhou, China; a year later, flaming
waste floating on a lake in India oozed sulfuric fumes so pungent they
ruptured a bystander’s cornea.
Fracking, too, has its share of heated discussion centered on fiery
water. Homeowners living near hydraulic fracturing wells in Texas and
Pennsylvania were able to light methane in the water coming out of their
faucets. In 2014, American researchers hunting for this so-called
fugitive methane were able to trace it by following specific inert
elements that had hitchhiked along with the natural gas. In the cases of
flaming spigots, the researchers believe that faulty casings and other
chinks in the wells’ integrity allowed the methane to escape, not the
fracking itself.
Buckingham’s evidence isn’t as concrete — his experimentation begins and
ends with setting rivers ablaze. “I acknowledge we don’t have the
proof,” he told The Post. But Buckingham points to reports of
increasingly bubbly water after fracking began in the Queensland area to
buttress his view.
Not everyone shares this conviction. “At this stage we don’t know fully
the reason why the methane is coming to the surface,” said Damian
Barrett, a natural gas researcher at the Commonwealth Scientific and
Industrial Research Organization, Australia’s national science agency.
Barrett told The Washington Post early Monday that because the gas wells
are more than 3 miles away from the Condamine, fracking’s connection
with the river methane is dubious. The fracking wells would have to
connect chambers of gas improbably far apart. “It’s highly unlikely,” he
said — though “not impossible.”
In an interview with the Guardian Australia, Buckingham accused the
Australian research agency of being in bed with the coal gas industry.
(Barrett, in addition to his post at the CSIRO, directs the Gas Industry
Social & Environmental Research Alliance, a partnership between the coal
gas industry and the Australian government.)
Barrett denied any impropriety. “The work that we do is entirely
independent,” he told The Post. “We don’t hold back any information
that’s coming out of our research. We’re just stating the science.”
Though it’s “quite possibly true” that the river’s methane has begun to
bubble more dramatically — CSIRO has been studying the area for the past
3 years — Barrett points out that the coal seams near Condamine are
close to the surface, tucked under just a few hundred feet of earth.
Typically, he said, the sediment on the bottom of the river bed prevents
the rising methane from producing such bubbles. It’s possible that the
river, scoured clean of sediment, is simply releasing gas that has been
there all along.
Made flammable by fracking or not, Barrett hopes no one else will try to
light the river on fire. “It’s not really advisable.”
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