Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers – "We’re burning the furniture to heat the house."

"We’re burning the furniture to heat the house. In shifting away from coal and toward natural gas, we’re trying for cleaner air, but we’re producing massive amounts of toxic wastewater with salts and naturally occurring radioactive materials, and it’s not clear we have a plan for properly handling this waste."

The concern is based partly on a 2009 study, never made public, written by an E.P.A. consultant who concluded that some sewage treatment plants were incapable of removing certain drilling waste contaminants and were probably violating the law.

The American landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of new wells and drilling rigs, as the country scrambles to tap into this century’s gold rush — for natural gas.

The gas has always been there, of course, trapped deep underground in countless tiny bubbles, like frozen spills of seltzer water between thin layers of shale rock. But drilling companies have only in recent years developed techniques to unlock the enormous reserves, thought to be enough to supply the country with gas for heating buildings, generating electricity and powering vehicles for up to a hundred years.

But the relatively new drilling method — known as high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking — carries significant environmental risks. It involves injecting huge amounts of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, at high pressures to break up rock formations and release the gas.

Ian Urbina

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/us/27gas.html?_r=1&hp

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Water Desalination Patents Granted to Drake Water Technologies, a Montana Company http://matr.net/article-43348.html

Montana-made water system from Drake Engineering Inc. of may be answer for coalbed methane industry http://matr.net/article-16175.html