Carbon Dislufide found above safe levels in Fort Worth

We won’t know what the report really says until we read the damn thing. As one friend put it: The executive summary is awfully “squishy” for there to be nothing. But apparently there were 5 sites with high emissions and…

They keep trying to sweep the CS2 (Carbon Disulfide) under the rug. Andy Mechling gave the report a quick scan and found the following. (His comment is also posted on the Fort Worth site.)

Please be more careful with your own interpretations of ERG’s report.

Above, in your first bullet item, you state: ” Ambient air monitoring . . revealed no site-related pollutants above health-based screening levels . . .”

This is simply not the case, as carbon disulfide (CS2) is repeatedly measured off-site, in a residential commnunity (site 5) at levels above 1ppb, which is TCEQs LONG-TERM ESL for CS2.

The authors of the report are careful to claim only that no SHORT-TERM values were breached. (10ppb for CS2) You should also be this careful.

Carbon disulfide was included in the sampling at only 5 sites, but was detected in all 92 available samples. Levels detected at site 5 (the site nearest the wellpads) are more than triple all of the other 4 sites COMBINED!. Consistently. Please check this fact.

Of 138 chemicals included in the ambient canister sampling; only CS2 is measured at elevated levels near the wellpads like this. The other 137 chemicals test negative in this regard.

No sampling was done for hydrogen sulfide or carbonyl sulfide during the course of this study.

No explanations are offered for the gross discrepancies between the amount of CS2 actually measured in the ambient sampling, and the miniscule off-site concentrations estimated through the dispersion modeling.

No explanation is offered as to why these “modeled” concentrations were utilized in favor of the actual measured concentrations by ERG in the risk assessment portions of this report. see tables 8.2.4, 8.2.5.

No actual emissions monitoring was done at the fracking or drilling operations. The IR camera saw nothing, and so no monitoring was done. Please be careful how you report this. None of the sulfur compounds are strong “absorbers” in the Infrared Range, and are not readily detected / characterized by many IR-based detectors.

On page 246; under the second bullet item, the report’s authors make the following observation:

“This program did not consider the complete range of air pollutants that might be emitted from natural gas sites. . Therefore, this study’s findings apply only to the pollutants considered in the ambient air monitoring program and point source testing program, and should not be assumed to apply to a broader range of pollutants.”

I strongly encourage any journalist attempting to summarize the findings of this report to try to come to terms with the cautionary language used by ERG here, and to incorporate this aspect of the million-dollar study into their own reporting. Thank You.