[unclebilly]

Here's something I NEVER EVER thought I would say - Sammy is right!

I am an inventor of several hydraulic fracturing techniques (patents issued in Canada and Australia applied for in the US and other oil and gas countries) that are in common use today in Canada, the US, and Russia.

If your rural neighbor 2 miles away spills PCBs or some other nautious substance on the ground at his place, does it affect your drinking water (unless he is up hill from you)? No, right? How does the typically fresh water that we pump into the ground with trace amounts of guar (edible plant product) and sand affect ground water 2 miles above? There is a thing called gravity (a relatively new concept for some of these anti frac types) that even works underground. Further more, the oil and gas we are going after has not contaminated the ground water in he kazillion years it has been there, why would it now?

The company I work for was one of the first (2005) to develop frac chemicals that pass microtox testing. To give you an idea, no shampoo will pass microtox, not even baby shampoo. Microtox chemicals will not harm living cells.

Not everything we pump is benign but often we are pumping produced formation water back into that same formation, often this formation water contains KCl, traces of oil, Barium Sulfate but we are just putting his back where it came from. If we pump a hydrocarbon product into a hydrocarbon bearing formation, what difference does it make?

With regard to the top secret frac chemicals, we have always had some level of disclosure. This year we have to disclose everything in Canada and the US which is no big deal.

Oh, and I am also a rural land owner. On every piece of land adjacent to my 1/4 section, there is a gas well with at least one frac in it. These are shallow wells (~1200m) or 3/4 of a mile. I assure you that this has not affected my drinking water or anybody else's around here.

I still can't get over the fact at Sammy and I agree about something...