At what cost: Hydraulic Fracturing

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iEWoL4_.MVesHydro-fracking or Natural Gas Hydraulic Fracturing is the fracturing of rock by pressurized liquid to extract natural gas. The process was created by Haillburton Inc., Schlumberger Inc., and Messina Inc. in 1947. The technique is mixing sand, water, and chemicals in which the mixture is injected at high pressure into a wellbore to generate small fractures (< 1mm) along with gas such as petroleum, uranium-bearing solution, and brine water may travel to the well. Wellbore is a drill hole used for the purpose of withdrawal or examination of natural resources such as natural gases or oil where a well may be produced as resource for extended period. The most common natural gas in Shale gas which are fine-grained sedimentary rocks that can be rich sources of petroleum. Natural gas is used for 24% of America’s energy demand. It heats 51% of American households.Hydro-fracking

As of 2012 there are 2.5 million jobs available in hydro-fracking and more than one million of those jobs are in the US. Although fracking provides millions of jobs these jobs are dangerous, exposing workers to chemicals with long term effects that are still unknown to us. Many people wonder if hydro-fracking will bring the U.S. more energy independence but in fact it won’t. Much of the gas being fracked will end up in Europe because gas will flow to the highest bidder. Once the gas flows overseas the prices will rise in the U.S. and the gas prices will be dictated by the world market.

Challengers of hydraulic fracturing point to some environmental risks including reduction of fresh water, contamination of ground water, corruption of the air, noise pollution, migration of gases and hydro-fracking chemicals to the surface contamination from spills and flow-back, and also health effects. Each time they build a well they need 3,500,000 gallons of water when fracking one well. It is stated that upwards of 70% of fracking fluid remains in the ground after fracking and is not biodegradable. Researchers suspect 65 of the components used in hydro-fracking are hazardous to humans.

Natural gas is cleaner than oil and a lot cleaner than coal but it’s still a fossil-fuel that enhances greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. Although the leakage of methane outweighs the climate benefit of natural gas versus coal. Natural gas gives off 50% of the carbon dioxide emissions as coal. Methane’s warming potential far exceeds that of coal; methane traps heat up to 105 times more effectively than the mass of carbon dioxide.fracking29noshadows-013

Scientists have identified cancer-causing chemicals like “BTEX” benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene and 596 other chemicals are being used in hydro-fracking, but nobody knows for sure what chemicals are pumped underground. In 2005, the Bush administration supported an energy bill that excuses hydro-fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act. The Safe Drinking Water Act is a federal law that ensures the quality of American drinking water. The law protects drinking water and its sources: rivers, lakes, streams, and ground water wells although they do not regulate private wells which serve fewer than 25 persons. The peculiar thing is that companies that participate in hydro-fracking keep their chemical mixtures a secret to the people that allow them to engage in hydraulic fracturing on their land. This is peculiar because if they were using environmental friendly chemicals during the process of fracturing they wouldn’t have to hide the truth.

660-Yoko-Ono-fracking-AP

The hydro-fracking chemicals used within the mixture to help obtain natural gases becomes sealed deep underground, there’s a good chance the chemicals enter private wells destroying drinking water quality. When the natural gas comes to the surface, it carries millions of gallons of contaminated water with fracking fluid and radium that is stored in on-site ponds that can leak or overflow into streams connecting to major bodies of water. And in many other cases the poisoned water is transported to water treatment plants that cannot handle radioactive water. That contaminated water is then sent downstream to the town’s drinking water. The above serious long term threats to water quality are one of the many oppositions people have to hydro-fracking, especially in the Marcellus Shale Region where important watershed provides drinking water to 16 million people.Understanding-Fracturing-Fluid_0

There are a few companies in the world that are planning an alternative to hydro-fracking by using sunlight and nanoparticles to produce natural gas from wastewater. They hope that it will alleviate the need to drill for gas using hydraulic fracturing. I believe that if we can find a safer non-toxic way to obtain natural gasses then I am all for it but not until then. I firmly believe hydraulic fracturing is not in the best way to obtain natural gases and if we continue global warming will worsen and more drinking water will be contaminated.

Videos:

Fracking Causes Flaming Taps

Fracking Hell: The Untold Story

Hydraulic Fracturing 3D Animation

Gasland

Resources:

  1. Time: The Debate over Shale Gas Deepens
  2. Discovery: Shale-Gas Drilling Contaminating Drinking Water
  3. Energy API: Natural Gas and Its Uses
  4. A Brief Chat About Fracking
  5. Geology: What is Shale Gas?

NXT Robotics Motor Car

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Throughout the last few weeks the “Contemporary Science and Innovation” class has been

Parts to motor car

Parts to motor car

experimenting with Lego robots to understand: distance, velocity, acceleration, and force. Lego Mindstorm NXT is a robotics kit that is programmable released by Lego Company in 2006 replacing their first generation kit. The computer of the Mindstorm NXT is called the NXT intelligent brick. The intelligent brick is the brain of the machine that lets the robot perform operations you tell it to.

To be able to experiment with the cars the class had to construct them first. With our teammates we assembled the NXT motor car using the parts provided to us within our kits and the instructions on the blog. The first thing we had to attach was the motors to the intelligent brick which makes the car eventually move. Attached to the motors is supportive components and the wheel.The support is connected at the top of the motors through pegs so that the motors stay steady and don’t sway when moving. The back wheels are attached to the bottom of the motors with connector pins and the front wheel is attached creating L-beams and axel jointers. After attaching all the wheels we placed the RJ-11 cables into the two motors and the USB cable into the intelligent brick and computer.

How to support the motors

How to support the motors

After powering on the motor car the group went into the LabVIEW program through Windows. LabVIEW or Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench is a platform and development environment for visual programming language through a company called National Instruments. To make the motor run forward Within LabVIEW, click view > function pallet > NXT I/O > place motor and drag into block diagram. That makes it so the motor car has a motor but a constant isn’t created yet. To create a constant you move the mouse over the object (motor) > right click > create > constant > Port A. What this does is tell the computer that you want Port A to move or the wheel attached to Port A. Next the group created a while loo which is a control flow statement that allows information to be implemented recurrently (structure palette > selection rectangle).

If you want to make the while loop stop so that the motor car stops with the press of the orange button; you have to wire the NXT button to the stop button. This is done by clicking the NXT button and dragging the grey dotted line to the stop button. To change a constant’s power the group right clicked the constant and typed in the number needed (in this example 50). To make more functions follow the directions above (third paragraph) and then right click that constant on the blue dot to add another port function.

To save the project and download the group went to file > save > right click (on the bottom bar) > NXT > download > click orange.

Completed motor car

Completed motor car

The second lab is a continuation of what I talked about in the paragraphs above only we had to measure distance and velocity. Distance is scalar quantity or actual path length traveled, associated with speed. Velocity is a vector quantity meaning there is a direction. This lab is using the motor car to measure the distance the wheel traveled and the speed at which the car traveled. The first thing we did as a class was program the motor car to spin clockwise in a circle of two feet and the separate groups had to figure out what setting to have the motors run so that one wheel is turning more than the other and measure it with the ruler. This was done by measuring the circumference of the wheel (.19m) which we later plugged into the program. Subsequently running the program the group recorded how many complete turns the wheel had made and the degrees at which the wheel was rotating. Knowing the degrees at which the wheel turns lets the group know where the wheels stopped and how many turns it had made. The program (VI) recorded the distance the motor car traveled but the group double checked with a ruler. From this data above the group found the percent error for three trials at low, medium, and fast with the outcome of medium and high speeds having the least difference of measurement compared to low speeds. The formula is as follows:  (d stands for distance). Motor-Car-Turning

The lab did a wonderful job of opening my eyes and helping me understand how cars work and how we can save energy while driving. This is important information to be aware of when purchasing a car or designing a car to be economical and energy efficient. This is extremely important so we can help little by little to reduce the toxins within the air and planet to decrease the ill effects of global warming.

GMO Blog

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GMO InfoGraphicGMO’s or Genetically Modified Organisms appear to be the utmost talked about entity this year as well as the most mysterious. It’s not a surprise that when you type GMO’s into the Google search bar that you get 21,500,000 results and it’s also not surprising that out of the first five links on Google, three are about the negative effects of GMO. But as it was learned from reading “A Lonley Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops” by: Amy Harmon, there isn’t enough empirical evidence presented to the public about GMO’s and their effects whether it be positive or negative. It appears that the world is left in the dark uneducated about the truth of GMO’s while news and media play a game of he said she said. Why aren’t the consumers being educated and GMO products labeled on the shelf? And if GMO products were to be labeled would it even be effective or will people become susceptible to it? Why isn’t private long term research being done on the effects of GMO within the agriculture industry? One of the leading questions is the lawfulness of GMO products. Are they safe? Who are they harming? And are people really scared of GMO’s or large corporations like Monsanto?

Resembling council member Greggor Ilagan, I believe there are a lot of answers left uncountable that need to be answered in order for the public to make a decision whether GMO’s are moral or immoral for our plant and our health. The public can no longer ignore that every time GMO is brought up the topics change. As humans and consumers we can’t keep following the game of word against word without true answers. And to get true answers a task force needs to be created with certified scientists not bought by Monsanto. The warning of Derek Brewer, “We don’t fully understand genetics. Once you change something like this, there is no taking it back”. Consumers have no idea what they are buying and what is inside their food and we as a country need to change that.

The United States is sort of in a bad position, we are focusing on GMO labeling when in fact we should be concerning ourselves with whether or not to ban GMO’s altogether such as Ms. Wille’s bill. GMO labeling doesn’t actually address the problem it only gives the consumer information to make a conscious decision to buy that product or not. Although it might not seem a problem for most, almost 80% of packaged foods in the US contain GMOs so what is the use of labeling when you can’t buy anything without having GMOs in it?Food and GMO

Some might even say they are fine with buying the 10% of foods that don’t have GMOs but it is almost guaranteed to be made from agriculture sprayed with pesticides and herbicides more toxic than “Roundup”. So either way you end up eating food that can kill you in many different forms and we don’t seem to be doing anything about that. You might say okay well label the pesticides and herbicides as well but that doesn’t stop the farmer from using it nor the manufacturer from making it. The point is labeling can only do so much and it doesn’t prevent people from growing GMO food or producing toxic chemicals. The problem is our current farming practices and meat industry are not suitable, we can’t keep injecting our meat with growth hormones, using massive amounts of fossil fuel to produce food, or let mega corporations control our food supply. And if the above information isn’t convincing enough we need to examine why GMOs have been banned in 27 countries, and labeling is required in 50.

    • 94% of U.S. soy crops (which by volume accounts for just under half of all the GMO crops grown worldwide)
    • 90% of U.S. cotton plantings
    • 88% of the U.S. corn crop
    • 90% of the U.S. canola crop
    • 95% of U.S. sugar beet plantings
    • Alfalfa (planted in 2011)
    • Papaya (Hawaiian crop; around 988 acres)
    • Zucchini/Yellow Summer Squash (approx. 25,000 acres)

Personally one of the principal aspects the article barely touched on is: are people really scared of GMO’s or Monsanto? Yes, there seems to be a lot of confusing evidence floating around the internet that GMOs cause tumors and other such dieses but we haven’t truly learned of any positives from GMO’s yet. That might be because there are no positive outcomes from GMO within food but we as a society don’t fully know this without testing it. And by successful I don’t mean the survival of the Rainbow Guava, I mean no pesticide use and natural vitamins. I am contradicting myself a little bit only to say that each case should be treated individually like Mr. Ilagan thought. Why shoot down all the future opportunities when they might be more natural and beneficial? Even though at present GMOs seem to be more harmful than good. My main concern is the company Monsanto who has a reputation I can’t forgive and most Americans forgot. One of their most notorious products was a chemical called Agent Orange which was an herbicide and defoliant used in Vietnam by the U.S. Military to deteriorate the foliage around the jungle to make it easier for U.S. soldiers to see enemies. The herbicides sprayed were 50 times the concentration that would have been used for normal agricultural uses. Vietnam estimates 400, 000 people were killed or maimed, and 500,000 children were born with birth defects as a result of Agent Orange. The facts are unforgettable and the truth unforgivable that Monsanto and the Government knew the herbicides had sever consequences yet sprayed anyway. A company capable of doing that is a company I will never trust.

If the facts about Agent Orange isn’t troubling enough take Ms. Wille’s quote for example; “There’s a saying, ‘If you control the seed, you control the food; if you control the food, you control the people’”. Monsanto has dominated the seed market to the point where they control the price of the seed they are no longer a company but a multi-million dollar corporate. They perform their own safety testing and have never conducted long term experiments. Worst of all they created a Terminator gean that makes a seed sterile until the farmers spray it with a Zombie spray that wakes the seed up. In my opinion there is no need for a seed like that or Monsanto.

We as Americans and human beings need to focus on what is important which the Earth we live upon and the future of our children and grandchildren. What matters isn’t the amount of food that is produced or the size of it, but that its sustainability and nutrients remain. The fruits and vegetables with added GMO’s don’t appear to be natural when it requires more pesticides and chemicals. We aren’t taking care of ourselves or our Earth by soaking it with chemicals, burning fossil fuels to produce food, and enhancing organisms. We all need to take a step back and create a taskforce into investigating the effects of GMO on food and people. As well as inform one another and shut down Monsanto. Then maybe more people will realize the fight for GMO’s isn’t just about labeling it is about morality.

Link to: “A Lonley Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops”

Link to Video on Monsanto and GMOs: “2 Minutes on Monsanto and GMOs”