Drillers Burn Off Record Amounts of Gas as Focus Remains on Oil. A couple years ago, Jim and Suzanne Franklin’s quiet country life outside the West Texas town of Balmorhea was a lot different. “At night, used to, this was so dark,” Jim says, pointing to the skies. “You had the most beautiful view of the Milky Way.” Now, Suzanne says, the night horizon off their small front porch is lit up by flames at oil and gas sites. “You start here and you just start counting, one, two, three, four…” she says, pointing in all directions across the wide-open views from their house. “And it just keeps going on around.” Across the West Texas oilfield, energy companies have more natural gas on their hands than they know what to do with. So, they’re increasingly burning it off into the air. Flaring, as it’s called, has recently hit record highs, and that’s alarmed critics who worry about local air pollution and the effect on dark skies. Companies say there’s not a lot they can do about it at the moment, though they’re trying. It’s a situation with an uncertain future, because it largely depends on how aggressively industry decides to act. Read more at HoustonPublicMedia.com
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If ‘they’ can’t stop or slow down drilling/exploitation of the Delaware basin one way…they’ll attack from multiple directions. Now it’s light pollution of the night sky and they have the astronomers at McDonald Observatory leading that charge.
Produced water treatment, reuse, disposal with volumes building is another EPA tactic.
IF they force the oil companies to make the produced water fresh…what are they gonna do with TRILLIONS of gallons of fresh water each month? IF they store it for irrigation of crops or reuse it for fracking…soon the entire surface Reeves county will be a manmade water reservoir…with no place to live,no ranching, farming, etc.
I recommend they get the RRC and the State to allow the produced water that is treated and reclaimed as fresh water run down the old dry
creek beds to the Pecos River and down to the Rio Grand river and out to the Gulf of Mexico. Let the farmers and ranchers use the water in the
dry creek beds for their farming and ranching operations for free.
Then they’ll jump to H2S levels in the ambient air and from that to methane (which makes up 86% of natural gas) as a greenhouse gas
heat pollution source. And if that’s not enough, decry the lack of housing
and ‘decent’ accommodations for oilfield workers in Reeves county. They got LOTS of tacks they can take and lots of ammo to shoot up oil and gas exploration operations. Are YOU for or agin, them??
, Reeves county, Tx 
