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Meeting Highlights Fracking Dangers in the Air Posted Thursday, October 13, 2011 ; 11:13 PM Updated Friday, October 14, 2011; 07:24 AM
Three local environmental groups sponsored a meeting at the Morgantown Municipal Airport Thursday night to discuss air pollution from Marcellus drilling. By Alex Hines MORGANTOWN -- There's been a lot of discussion of the dangers of Marcellus drilling in the ground, but that's not the only place where there's cause for concern. It may not be as visible, but fracking also has an effect on air quality as well. The West Virginia Sierra Club, Mon Valley Clean Air Coalition, and the Group Against Smog and Pollution hosted a meeting at the Morgantown Municipal Airport Thursday night to discuss those effects. Those at the meeting also discussed some proposed legislation that could help to lower the emissions that fracking causes at the different points in the process. Although not as visible to some as other environmental effects from Marcellus drilling, emissions containing chemicals like methane and ozone do get spread into the atmosphere. Those emissions are not localized at one point, and that adds to the problem. "The concerns are the combined emissions between the production, the processing, the pipelines, the leaks, the flares," said Nicole Goode, a Sierra Club member who came to the meeting to learn more about the air pollution. John Osborne, who gave the presentation Thursday night, said the amounts in all those areas aren't a lot taken alone, but altogether have a much stronger effect. "If you look at the entire process from the time a well is drilled, it's fracked, gas is extracted and processed, there are pieces of equipment that pollute the air at every one of these steps, and when they're considered together, these pollution sources add up," said Osborne. And those pollutants can add up in a big way. Osborne says that in some cases, more ozone-forming pollution was emitted from shale drilling operations than from car and truck traffic in the same area.
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