Industry Problems and Community Recap

Hello fellow bloggers. This will be my last blog post on thenaturalgas ALTERNATIVE because the semester has come to an end. I would like to take this time to recap the blogs I wrote throughout the blog.

My first blog post was Cabot Oil & Gas and Chesapeake Energy. In this post I highlighted what Cabot and Chesapeake have been doing in their local communities.

Cabot Oil & Gas is a leading partner with Endless Mountains Health Systems in a $45 million hospital project in Montrose.  They started off the project with a $1 million leadership gift to get the project underway.

Chesapeake Energy is working with their local United Way and has become the first-ever corporate sponsor for their communities united way 2013 campaign. They have also been extremely helpful with the flood recovery efforts in Bradford County.

My next blog post was Wastewater and Casella Waste Systems. In this post I highlighted a major problem in the natural gas industry, wastewater.

Wastewater is the left over water from hydraulic fracturing. The problem with this wastewater is that it can have anywhere for 3 to 12 additive chemicals used for fracking in them.  Potentially this water could be treated at a plant so that it may be used in the future and the is what Casella Waste Systems has been doing. The landfills that Casella Waste Systems sends the wastewater to have a gas collection system they use to collect extra gas in the water and to produce energy for their plants.

My next blog was Natural Gas Pipelines and Bake Hughes. In this blog I highlighted some problems that companies are having with their natural gas pipelines. These problems have caused deaths in the apst but luckily Baker Hughes designed GEOPIGs that are high-resolution caliper in-line inspection services. These PIGs are sent through the pipeline and scan for any weak points they can find.

My last blog was Giving Back to the Community. In this blog I wrote about natural gas companies that are giving back to their communities.

Columbia Gas of Virginia has donated over $3000 to a variety of non-profit organizations in their communities. Virginia Gas has been partnering with their local Salvation Army’s Energy Share program as well as with their local Special Olympics. Briggy Bandz donates between $1 to 40% of each Bandz sold to many non-profit organizations.

I hope you enjoyed reading my posts and don’t forget to check out the other posts by my group members!

Wastewater and Casella Waste Systems

Natural Gas companies use Hydraulic fracturing or fracking to increase the rate that natural gas can be recovered from the natural reservoirs. These reservoirs are typically porous sandstone, limestone or dolomite rocks and are found deep below the earth’s surface. Fracking provides a path connecting a large volume of the reservoir to the well at a faster rate. To make this path they pump fracturing fluid into the well bore at a rate that will increase pressure down hole to exceed that of the fracture gradient of the rock.

The fracturing fluid is made up mostly of water, but most fracturing fluid contains a very low concentration of between 3 and 12 additive chemicals depending on the characteristics of the water. Between 20% to 40% of the water used for this fracking returns to the surface as wastewater, also known as produced water. Wastewater includes the chemicals from the fracturing fluid as well as contaminants that it picks up from deep within the earth such as heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, salty brine, and radioactive materials.

Potentially this wastewater could be treated at treatment facilities if the plant is properly equipped to remove these chemicals and radioactivity. The problem is that there are very few plants that have the technology to do this.

One company, Casella Waste Systems, is helping build plants that have the technology to break down and remove these chemicals and radioactivity.

Casella Waste Systems’ mission statement is “Every day we help create better people, businesses and communities by helping them to protect and enhance our environment and natural resources” and that is exactly what them have been doing.

A lot of the wastewater is sent to landfill plants where they remain wastewater, but not at Casella Waste Systems. Casella knows that landfills are not going to disappear, but they are changing the way they see landfills. They see landfills shifting from resource consumption to resource sustainability. Their landfills have a gas collection system that is not merely designed to passively capture gas, but they also are designed to extract gas to power gas-to-energy plants producing clean electricity and to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. They also call these landfill sites environmental campuses because resources are extracted from all aspects of the waste stream.

Casella Waste Systems is finding creative solutions to the natural gas industry’s problems, and are hopefully getting other companies to change the way they think about landfills and wastewater.