Wednesday, August 24, 2011

The Confederacy Of Dunces Wants To Know Why The Yard Waterers Of Tarrant County Are Wasting Water That Could Go To Gas Well Fracking

Lately the Confederacy of Dunces has been confounding me more than the norm. This current confounding may be heat related.

The constant HOT seems to make everything HOTTER.

Like the level of outrage generated by Chesapeake Energy running 3 big water pipes through Fort Worth's Trinity Park, in order to suck a few million gallons of water out of the Trinity River, so that chemicals and sand can be added to the water, so that Chesapeake can frack yet one more Chesapeake Energy Barnett Shale gas drilling site.

The local CBS TV Station, Channel 11, covered the Trinity Park Chesapeake operation, with the help of Fort Worth's Watch Dog, Don Young. You can watch that particular news report below.

In that news report the news reporter reported that of the estimated water usage of Tarrant County only 1% was used by the Gas Drillers, while Yard Watering used 50-60%.

Does this seem credible to you? It does not to me.

One fracked well uses up a lot of water. Millions of gallons of water over the course of multiple frackings.

I do not see a lot of yard watering going on. Yes, there is an occasional sprinkler. But, it appears to me that most people let their yards turn brown during this water starved time of the year.

I know Oakland Lake Park does not irrigate its big fields of grass. Most of the fields of Gateway Park turn brown. Veterans Park is brown except for the Xeriscape garden that shows you how to grow green, in Texas, with little water.

How many thousands of gas wells are now in Tarrant County? How much water has been used to frack those wells?

If, in Tarrant County, there were only a thousand wells using a million gallons of water, to do their fracking, that amounts to 1 billion gallons of water. If yard watering is using 50-60 times that amount, that would be 50-60 billion gallons of water.

Yard watering uses more water than other household uses? Like washing clothes, dishes, drinking, bathing, flushing?

This whole yard watering fuss seems like a phony bogeyman, to me, an amorphous imaginary thing used by propagandists to frighten dunces into behaving.

What Dunce in the Confederacy came up with this 1% figure for the amount of water the gas drillers are using?

Methinks that the gas drillers need to be told there is a moratorium on using the local water supply until the drought ends. Or better yet, run a water pipeline to the Gulf of Mexico and pump that water to Tarrant County. It'd have the benefit of already being salted.

As wise man once said...

"When gas drillers use water, it's permanently removed from the water (hydrologic) cycle.. There's a finite amount of water on planet Earth. Whenever you use it to frack, it has to be buried in the ground a million years."

-DY

This is all very perplexing. Why is common sense so lacking in this part of the planet?

3 comments:

Gail Galtex said...

Good question, Durango. I always question numbers, but especially when the person putting them together doesn't even know how to spell the word 'usage' in the title of their chart. Sounds like an industry statistic to me (1% of what water supply, i.e., treated water we all drink, lake water, regional district water, what?) as they don't mention a source for the info.

Also, they mentioned that gas companies pay double wholesale rates for water. How nice. I wonder how that compares to the retail water rates we all pay? My guess is it's still much lower.

Steve A said...

On my ride to work, I know of two houses, an apartment complex, and the City of Bedford that have watered every single day this summer. How do I know this? Because their sprinklers are poorly set and sprinkle the street I ride on. Every day. Chesapeake may not be good, but I'm not convinced tha taking water for fracking is a lot worse than watering asphalt. At least other than the amount of water per incident.

Frank E said...

Hey Durango, have you been made aware of the sneaky plan by CHK and the city to turn that former Walmart land right near your abode into another heavy industrial drilling site? Yep, it's the one right across the street from the Chinese buffet and Alberton's.....and right next to a large apartment complex, full of people and children which the city's Ordinance classifies as a public-use and thus requires a minimum setback distance of 600 feet. But CHK and its servants the public officials seem to think that people who rent are third-class citizens, deserving little to no protection or input to such a hazardous plan. Maybe, the people in this city is like the proverbial frog-in-the-slow boiling pot of water when it comes to this crazy gas drilling+fracking+pipelining+profiteering enterprise...of the backs, and lungs, of regular people.