Coal Seam Gas Extraction: Number One Cause of Groundwater Contamination?

Despite its scientifically proven low-carbon credentials, is coal seam gas extraction far from environmentally friendly due to its tendency to cause groundwater contamination?

By: Ringo Bones 

The energy firm Santos in New South Wales, Australia was picketed back in January 28, 2016 by local farmers due to its coal seam gas extraction schemes contaminating the local farmland’s groundwater source, but the energy firm’s “environmental impact” was already a concern almost two years ago. Back in March 24, 2014, leaks of water containing high levels of radioactive uranium from coal seam gas wastewater pond operated by energy firm Santos in New South Wales put the spotlight yet again on an industry already wracked by controversy. Most concerns over coal seam gas have to date focused on “fracking” – fracturing deep rock strata to get gas in coal seams – but as the incident shows, waste produced by coal seam gas wells and brought to the surface is another major environmental issue. 

According to the New South Wales Environmental Protection Authority, the March 2014 incident resulted in the contamination of the groundwater aquifer downstream of the leak that tested 20 times the acceptable levels of uranium for drinking water. This is concerning given the long timescales and effort involved in groundwater clean-up and the fact that the region affected is an area of recharge for the Great Artesian Basin. 

The type of wastewater that resulted in groundwater contamination in this incident – called “produced” or “co-produced” water – is generated in large quantities by all coal seam gas wells and it is usually of poor quality, containing potentially harmful levels of salts, radionuclides, metals and other contaminants. It appears that in this case such water was inappropriately stored in a leaky dam, allowing it to infiltrate and migrate into the underlying aquifer. 

The only viable way to rectify this is to use reverse osmosis to remove the contaminants and release the treated water into local streams but the method can be potentially cost prohibitive in some situations. Some contaminants – such as boron – are harder to remove and are retained in the treated coal seam gas extraction produced water. In some cases, methane can also remain in the water after it leaves the treatment plant, adding concerns of “fugitive emissions” given that methane is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.  And this methane in the water has resulted in scores of sensational videos uploaded to You Tube where homeowners’ tap water catching fire after a lit match is brought close to a turned on faucet highlighting the environmental concerns of fracking. 

Teri Dankovich’s Drinkable Book: Reliable Safe Drinking Water For The World’s Poorest?

Will Terry Dankovich’s “Drinkable Book” finally solve the reliability problem of safe drinking water supply for the world’s poorest citizens?

By: Ringo Bones 

By last count, as many as 358-million people in sub-Saharan Africa do not have a reliable access to safe clean drinking water. The good news is researchers have just come up with a book on water safety whose very pages can be used to filter water to make it safe to drink. Results of the trials done in 25 contaminated water sites in South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Haiti and Bangladesh showed that the said book, which contains tiny particles of copper and silver, could eliminate over 99-percent of disease-causing bacteria as stated in the results of the project unveiled at the American Chemical Society’s national meeting that began back in August 16, 2015.  

Teri Dankovich, from Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, who has been leading the research on what she calls “The Drinkable Book”, said in one trial that they tested a ditch contaminated with sewage that contained millions of disease-causing bacteria. Dankovich said: “even if highly contaminated water sources like the one we tested, we can achieve 99.9-percent purity with our silver-and-copper nanoparticle paper, bringing bacteria levels down comparable to those found in United States’ tap water”.  

Each paper of the pages in the Drinkable Book is embedded with silver and copper nanoparticles. The pages contain instructions in English and the local language the book is destined to. Water is poured and filtered through the pages themselves. One page can purify up to 100 liters – about 26 gallons – of water and one book can supply one person’s drinking water needs for about 4 years, the researchers said. The researchers currently make the books themselves – but are now looking to ramp up production and send the books to local communities.  

Microwave Heated Water: Deleterious To Houseplants?

Even though this curious assumption went viral once microwave ovens became a common household appliance, is microwave heated water deleterious to houseplants? 

By: Ringo Bones 

It is important to point out that water heated to a temperature of 70 to 100 degrees Celsius by whatever means – gas range electric oven, induction oven, microwave oven, etc. can kill any plant-life if poured at them at that temperature, this topic deals with the idea that water heated with a microwave oven to its boiling point can have a deleterious effect on houseplants after the microwave heated water is allowed to cool to ambient room temperature then used to water houseplants. Anyone with a working knowledge of homeopathy, the Peter W. Belt effect of polarized water in high fidelity audio and Rupert Sheldrake’s Morphic Resonance Theory will probably be very curious of the idea that microwave heated water having deleterious effects on houseplants whether or not their “preconceived science” behind their explanation of the phenomena seems suspect from the viewpoint of current mainstream science, they would, nonetheless, try this in a well-controlled experiment if their busy schedules will allow. 

Fortunately for those who might not have time to perform such a well-controlled science experiment first hand in order to find out if microwave heated water has a deleterious effect on household plants if used to water at them after it has cooled down to ambient room temperature, an episode of Mythbusters had performed such experiment and – inexplicably – the plants watered by microwave heated water has shown the most growth, Mythbusters’ Adam and Jamie were at a loss to explain their results and only suggested their fans to perform the same experiment to find out whether or not their results match theirs. Based on the Mythbusters’ experiment, Is microwave heated water be healthier for houseplants than either ordinary tap water and rainwater? 

Back in 2007, a Microwave heating system intended to be installed in the ballast tanks of bulk cargo ships and crude oil tankers to kill invasive organisms lurking in their ballast tank’s water that could have ecologically disastrous effects on the ships’ various ports-of-call became one of the years top inventions. Since the end of World War II, scientists have known that an average 250 ml. glass of tap water contains about 250-million bacteria and other microorganisms, could using microwaves to heat tap water then cooling it down to ambient room temperature to water it to houseplants be a healthier option to your houseplants because your microwave oven might have killed deleterious microorganisms present in tap water that could hinder the health and well being of your houseplants? 

To those with a “quirky phobia” with microwave radiation might beg to differ, their concerns over the deleterious effects of microwave radiation on living things does have “scientific credibility”. Even though the jury is still out on the link between deleterious health effects on urban dwellers on our current ambient microwave radiation exposure standards, everyone in the United States got neurotic on this very issue during the late 1980s and early 1990s when they found out that the then Soviet Union – once the socialist states’ occupational microwave radiation exposure standards became accessible by the West – has a more stringent microwave exposure guidelines in comparison to late 1980s era United States' OSHA microwave radiation exposure guidelines.     

Pseudomonas Syringae: Mother Nature’s Cloud Seeding Agents?

Even though the Bergeron-Findeisen theory of rain had been the widely accepted working principle on what causes rainfalls, is there another yet to be discovered mechanism behind precipitation? 

By: Ringo Bones 

Though this microorganism’s role in how rains form has just been discovered relatively recently, it may provide an explanation on why a rainforest or other regions on our planet is an inexplicable magnet for rainfall. Microbiologists and climatologists had just relatively recently found out that the microorganism Pseudomonas syringae that tends to hover above rainforests and other places with dense patches of vegetation has a protein structure that allows water vapor in the atmosphere to freeze just above zero degrees Celsius. The microorganisms themselves act as the nucleating agents that allow rain to form out of atmospheric water vapor that will trigger a rainfall if enough of them coalesce and the Earth’s gravity will do the rest. 

The working principle behind how rains form has been discovered by Swedish meteorologist Tor Bergeron in his white paper published back in 1935 proposing the astonishing theory that most rain begins as snow in the colder parts of the upper atmosphere. This theory was later elaborated by German physicist Walter Findeisen and is now widely accepted as the Bergeron-Findeisen theory of rain which is the working principle behind how rains form and artificial cloud-seeding. Dust blown up into the upper parts of our atmosphere where clouds form, ultrafine dry ice, silver iodide crystals, and even common table salt had been used in artificial cloud seeding with varying degrees of success. Now we can add Pseudomonas syringae to that list. 

Recent studies have shown that Pseudomonas syringae is a more potent nucleating agent for rain formation than dust or ultrafine solid carbon dioxide, silver iodide crystals and table salt. The microorganism has also been employed for awhile now as an ice or snow making bacteria to lower the operating costs of snow machines during the Yuletide season in places that normally don’t get snowfall during that time of the year.

Pseudomonas syringae is a rod-shaped, Gram-negative bacterium with polar flagella. Despite its desirable rainmaking and snowmaking properties Pseudomonas syringae is a potent plant pathogen. As a plant pathogen, it can infect a wide range of species and exists as over 50 pathovars seen as bacterial speck in tomatoes. Ice nucleation induced by Pseudomonas syringae that earned it the nickname the “rainmaking” or “snowmaking” bacteria – depending on the local prevailing atmospheric ambient temperature.     

Low Cost Fresh Water From Icebergs?

Even though plans to extract from one dates back to the 1950s, can Antarctic icebergs ever be a viable source of low cost fresh water? 

By: Ringo Bones 

Young Turks these days may have only heard of the scheme from a 2012 Dassault Systèmes advert often aired on the BBC but believe it or not, the idea of obtaining low cost fresh water from icebergs dates as far back as the 1950s. After complex logistical issues are taken into account do icebergs – as in Antarctic icebergs – really provide low cost drinking water for our increasingly thirsty civilization? 

During the 1950s, the US state of California’s number one community problem – and still probably is today – is where to get a low cost supply of fresh water fit for both domestic and industrial use. Back then, an oceanographer from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography named John Isaacs has suggested that icebergs be fetched up from the Antarctic to ease the state of California’s local water shortage. Even though the idea seems too fantastic at the time (and even for this day and age) – Isaacs’ colleagues from the Scripps Institution says not at all when they made the requisite mathematical calculations and found, somewhat to their astonishment, that it is the one dreamboat that might really float. 

Being formed from glaciers, icebergs are completely salt-free and unlike their smaller North Atlantic variety, Antarctic icebergs are big enough to make the idea worthwhile – as in economically viable. A good sized Antarctic iceberg is typically 10 miles long, half a mile wide and 600 feet thick can even be considered “small” when talking about Antarctic icebergs. 

Using 1950s era slide rules to crunch the numbers, the scientists of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography together with John Isaacs calculated that in two months time, three ocean-going tugboats could work a 10 mile long, half a mile wide iceberg drifting in the Antarctic into the Humboldt Current running up the west coast of South America. Where the Humboldt Current slows down off Peru and Ecuador, the tugboats would steer the icebergs into other favorable ocean currents that would lead it in a long, lateral loop almost to Hawaii and eventually to Los Angeles. 

Given that these favorable currents move at around 2 to 3 knots, the whole trip would take about a year and along the way the iceberg might lose as much as half of its vast bulk. But it would still represent about 300 billion gallons of fresh water. Authorities could ground the iceberg on an offshore shoal and surround it with a floating dam extending about 20 feet or so below the surface. This would keep the fresh water penned in around the iceberg as the ice melted. 

Because it is lighter, the fresh water would stay on top of the surrounding salt water and the city of Los Angeles could just pump it out as needed through pipes leading to the mainland. One iceberg that was originally 10 miles long when it was toed back from the Antarctic would be enough to supply the city’s then normal needs of fresh water for about a month – using 1950s water consumption figures. 

Back in the 1950s, the total cost of the water so delivered – mainly the then rate of one million US dollars for a year’s hire of the three ocean going tugboats – works out to be something like one-third of a US cent per thousand gallons, a minute fraction in comparison to what the city of Los Angeles pays back in the 1950s for its regular source of drinking water. Calculated to be financially feasible for California using 1950s prevailing costs, this method of “outsourcing” fresh water might still be appropriate for the water needy arid regions of the Southern Hemisphere – like South Africa, Australia and the Peruvian desert communities.