To the Site: Water can be and often is trucked to location. Water also come from nearby wells. Water can also be recycled from previous fracturing treatments.

Sometimes the web site talks about “1-8 million gallons” per job, and then later says a well can be fractured up to 18 times. When we get those multistage jobs, each frac is not going to be 1-8 million gallons. So, don’t multiply 18 x that huge job size. An 18-stage job can be millions of gallons, but each stage in that job isn’t.

Fracturing Site: I’m not going to contest the 40,000 gals of chemicals. Yet, not all of those 40,000 gals of chemicals are lethal, carcinogenic, etc.

Fracking Fluid: 600 chemicals? All at the same time? Let’s see, if we have two blender trucks out there, each with 2 dry-adds and 4 liquid-adds, I’m an engineer so get the calculator, but I get 12.

Down 10000 ft: Nothing to quibble with here.

The Math: Again, I dispute the 8 x 18 in that math. We can get as high as 25, maybe even 30 stages in a job, but in those cases each of those stages is not 8 million or even 1 million gallons.

Shale Fracturing: YES! That’s what we want! Shale is naturally impermeable, and all that gas can’t get out unless we do something about it.

Contamination: see the original post about contamination. Proper well construction alleviates it.

Drinking Water: And where it happens, the oil and gas industry should be responsible.

Left Behind: The 30%-50% is water, sand, and chemicals, not just chemicals. Water and sand make up 90-95% of a treatment, so the amount of chemicals left behind is significantly less.

Harmful VOCs: Some jobs have VOCs, and some don’t.

“300,000 barrels of natural gas” — gas is measured in cubic feet, oil is measured in bbls. There is risk, to be sure, but our webmaster seems to like his/her plastic computer and electricity. It would have been nice to ditch the fancy JavaScript and hyperlink the references so I could easily see where all the numbers are coming from, but we’d rather have our paper tiger than a discussion, I guess.

—Brian

Can I ask you about underground aquifers?

Coal seam gas exploration and extraction is a new and growing industry in my neck of the woods. One of the arguments used against it is that the chemicals used could contaminate the underground aquifers from which local farmers get much of their water. Eastern Australia has a large underground aquifer known as the Great Artesian Basin. Presumably the local aquifers are part of this larger underground water reservoir.

Incidentally, a good drinking game (with the Lutheran beverage of your choice): One shot (or gulp) every time someone says “congregation” or “church”.

As for me, I will miss singing “Thy Strong Word” every night when the hymn changes. What a fantastic hymn…. maybe I can get away with at least once a week…

Maybe I’m just holding out a false hope.

I do find that utterly repulsive. I guess we’re getting close to Soylent Green?

When I think of the things done to the human body in death, not just self-inflicted like cremation and QLC but worms, decomposition, drowning, radiation sickness, war, etc., and that we have a God who is willing to put all the pieces back together, transform it into an incorruptible, sinless body, and reunite it with its soul for eternity — what kind of a love is this? The same love that sends the Son of God to death, that we may be His own. The same love that makes repentance and the forgiveness of sins greater than the ability to restore a paralytic back to walking. Where we are amazingly crude, He is that more amazingly awesome.

As the great philosopher MegaMind put it, “Unfathombale. It’s like, uh, without fathom…”

Never mind cremation, what about liquefaction?

Here’s something I posted just yesterday on a pastors’ list here ‘down under’:

‘Here in Toowoomba people are very conservative when to comes to funerals. I would estimate that in 9 out of 10 funerals here the body is buried. I know it’s a different story just 130kms away in Brisbane however; I took a funeral there and was surprised when the funeral director told me in 9 out of 10 of their funerals the body is cremated. I know that cremation is accepted by the church where no anti-resurrection sentiment is intended, and I have presided at several cremations myself without too many qualms (I prefer burials, but I’m aware that many people opt for cremation simply because they can’t afford burial costs). But apparently the new method of ‘body disposal’ on the horizon (already here in some places) is liquefaction, whereby the body tissue is dissolved in heated alkaline water under pressure. After several hours, the resulting liquid is flushed into the municipal water drainage system (!) while the bones, which are not dissolved, are crushed as per cremation; presumably (I’m not sure) the remains of the bones are then available to the family. Apparently this process has been approved in some municipalities in Queensland and has in fact been used here.

I think our response to liquefaction is something we should be thinking about now, rather than later (perhaps it should be brought up at pastors’ conferences?). I for one feel distinctly uneasy about the method of disposal of the remains of the body in this case – flushing them into the sewerage system strikes me as incongruent with a Christian theology of the body. There may be no overt anti-Christian intent behind it, but surely such a method of disposal of remains could only be contemplated in a radically post-Christian culture. Is this, I ask, where the church needs to draw a line in order to preserve and teach our doctrine of the body as a temple of the Spirit and the hope of resurrection? Also, it’s not hard to see how this practice confirms the dualistic, neo-Gnostic ‘spirituality’ that is increasingly around us. And, in all seriousness, I can’t ever imagine uttering the words of committal as they would presumably have to be altered to fit such a practice – ‘We now commit (Name) to be flushed’!

Here’s alink to a recent BBC news story, which mentions QLD: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14114555