New Gas Wells Leave More Chemicals in Ground
Propublica
27 December 2009
By Abrahm Lustgarten
For more than a decade the energy industry has steadfastly argued
before courts, Congress and the public that the federal law protecting
drinking water should not be applied to hydraulic fracturing, the
industrial process that is essential to extracting the nation’s vast
natural gas reserves. In 2005 Congress, persuaded, passed a law
prohibiting such regulation.
Now an important part of that argument — that most of the millions of
gallons of toxic chemicals that drillers inject underground are removed
for safe disposal, and are not permanently discarded inside the earth —
does not apply to drilling in many of the nation’s booming new gas
fields.
Three company spokesmen and a regulatory official said in separate
interviews with ProPublica that as much as 85 percent of the fluids
used during hydraulic fracturing is being left underground after wells
are drilled in the Marcellus Shale, the massive gas deposit that
stretches from New York to Tennessee.
That means that for each modern gas well drilled in the Marcellus and
places like it, more than three million gallons of chemically tainted
wastewater could be left in the ground forever. Drilling companies say
that chemicals make up less than 1 percent of that fluid. But by
volume, those chemicals alone still amount to 34,000 gallons in a
typical well.
These disclosures raise new questions about why the Safe Drinking Water
Act, the federal law that regulates fluids injected underground so they
don’t contaminate drinking water aquifers, should not apply to
hydraulic fracturing, and whether the thinking behind Congress’ 2005
vote to shield drilling from regulation is still valid.
When lawmakers approved that exemption it was generally accepted that
only about 30 percent of the fluids stayed in the ground. At the time,
fracturing was also used in far fewer wells than it is today and
required far less fluid. Ninety percent of the nation’s wells now rely
on the process, which is widely credited for making it financially
feasible to tap into the Marcellus Shale and other new gas deposits.
Congress is considering a bill that would repeal the exemption, and has
directed the Environmental Protection Agency to undertake a fresh study
of how hydraulic fracturing may affect drinking water supplies. But the
government faces stiff pressure from the energy industry to maintain
the status quo — in which gas drilling is regulated state by state — as
companies race to exploit the nation’s vast shale deposits and meet the
growing demand for cleaner fuel. Just this month, Exxon announced it
would spend some $31 billion to buy XTO Energy, a company that controls
substantial gas reserves in the Marcellus — but only on the condition
that Congress doesn’t enact laws on fracturing that make drilling
“commercially impracticable.”
The realization that most of the chemicals and fluids injected
underground remain there could stoke the debate further, especially
since it contradicts the industry’s long-standing message that only a
small proportion of the fluids is left behind at most wells.
But while the message has not changed, the drilling has.
In the nation’s largest and most important natural gas fields, far more
chemicals are being used today than when Congress and the EPA last
visited the fracturing issue, and far more of those fluids are
remaining underground. Drilling companies say that as they’ve drilled
in the Marcellus they’ve discovered that the shale rock — which is
similar to many of the nation’s largest natural gas projects in
Louisiana, Texas and several other states — holds more fluids than they
expected.
During hydraulic fracturing, drillers use combinations of some of the
260 chemical additives associated with the process, plus large amounts
of water and sand, to break rock and release gas. Benzene and
formaldehyde, both known carcinogens, are among the substances that are
commonly found.
If another industry proposed injecting chemicals — or even salt water —
underground for disposal, the EPA would require it to conduct a
geological study to make sure the ground can hold those fluids without
leaking and to follow construction standards when building the well. In
some cases the EPA would also establish a monitoring system to track
what happens as the well ages.
But because hydraulic fracturing is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water
Act, it doesn’t necessarily have to conform to these federal standards.
Instead, oversight of the drilling chemicals and the injection process
has been left solely to the states, some of which regulate parts of the
process while others do not.
As the industry was lobbying Congress for that exemption — and ever
since — the notion that most fluids would not be left underground
continued to emerge as a recurring theme put forth by everyone from
attorneys for Halliburton, which developed the fracturing process and
is one of the leading drilling service companies, to government
researchers and regulators.
“Hydraulic fracturing is fundamentally different,” wrote Mike Paque,
director of the Ground Water Protection Council, an association of
state oil and gas regulators, to Senate staff in a 2002 letter
advocating for the exemption, “because it is part of the well
completion process, does not ‘dispose of fluids’ and is of short
duration, with most of the fluids being immediately recovered.”
The Ground Water Protection Council did not respond to a request for
further comment.
EPA officials maintained in 2005, and say now, that the volume of
fluids left underground had little to do with its opinion that
hydraulic fracturing for gas wells is not the same as underground
injection. They say that distinction is because the primary function of
the two types of wells is different: Gas wells are for production
processes, while most EPA-regulated underground injection wells are
intended for storage.
But Stephen Heare, director of the EPA’s Drinking Water Protection
Division in Washington, said that both the circumstances and the
drilling technology have evolved. When asked to explain how hydraulic
fracturing today is different from other forms of underground
injection, he said the bottom line was simple:
“If you are emplacing fluid, it does not matter whether you are
recovering 30 percent or 65 percent of it, if you are emplacing fluids
that is underground injection,” Heare said. “The simple explanation for
why hydraulic fracturing is different from other injection activities,”
he added, is that hydraulic fracturing “is exempt from regulation under
the Safe Drinking Water Act.”
The argument that fracturing should not be regulated by the EPA became
prominent in the 1990s, after the EPA said that fracturing lay outside
the scope of the Safe Drinking Water Act, because the primary purpose
of gas wells was energy production, not fluid disposal.
A 1997 Alabama lawsuit challenged that position, and the 11th Circuit
Court of Appeals ruled against the EPA.
In that decision, the judges wrote that "According to the state agency,
hydraulic fracturing is not underground injection because it does not
result in permanent subsurface ‘emplacement’ of the fluids, as these
fluids are pumped out of the ground before methane gas is extracted out
of the well." But the judges called that assertion “untenable” and
ordered the EPA to regulate fracturing in Alabama under the Safe
Drinking Water Act. They also ordered the EPA to more clearly define
fracturing as a type of underground injection, a move that could have
paved the way for regulation in other states as well.
But in 2005, before such regulation could happen, Congress stepped in
and gave hydraulic fracturing its special exemption from the Safe
Drinking Water Act.
When Congress voted for the exemption it referred to a 2004 EPA report,
which concluded that fracturing did not pose a threat to drinking
water. That report, which has since been criticized as incomplete, said
that while some of the fracturing fluids remained underground, “Most of
the fracturing fluids injected into the formation are pumped back out
of the well along with groundwater and methane gas."
Lee Fuller, vice president of government affairs for the Independent
Petroleum Association of America, said that the emphasis on wastewater
removal was made to help legislators understand how fracturing was
different from underground injection, but that those legislators also
knew that much of the water stayed underground when they voted for the
exemption.
“The EPA study said there was a certain amount of the water that does
stay in the fractured formation. That information was known,” he said,
adding that more of the water may seep out over the lifespan of the
well. “So I think there was an understanding of it on the part of the
proponents of the proposal.”
In the 2004 report, the EPA said as much as 59 percent of fracturing
fluids can remain underground. A 2009 Department of Energy report
titled Modern Shale Gas put that figure at 30 to 70 percent, but
emphasized that most wells fall into the lower end of that range,
explaining that "The majority of fracturing fluid is recovered in a
matter of several hours to a couple of weeks."
Just six months ago that point was reiterated in testimony before the
House Committee on Natural Resources, when the Interstate Oil and Gas
Compact Commission repeated a statement that former Alabama state
geologist Donald Oltz made in the 1997 Alabama court case: "Almost all
hydraulic fracturing fluid is recovered to the surface after a
hydraulic fracturing operation."
That statement contrasts sharply with the latest reports from regions
where gas drilling is on the upswing.
Spokesmen for Cabot Oil and Gas, Range Resources and Fortuna Energy —
three of the most active companies developing gas resources in the
Marcellus Shale — say that more water is trapped underground in newer
drilling areas because the “tight shale” that is loath to give up the
gas is likely to hold onto the fluids too.
“It’s not like you pump a volume of water into the frack and then it
gives you that volume back,” said Ken Komoroski, a spokesman for Cabot
Oil and Gas, who says only 15 to 20 percent of the fluid comes back
out. “Most of the water and sand stays in the formation compared to in
other geologic formations.”
Gas industry officials say the amount of fluids they leave behind in
their wells should have no bearing on whether hydraulic fracturing is
or is not regulated by the federal government. What’s important is
managing the risk, says the Independent Petroleum Associations’ Lee
Fuller, a job he says the industry is doing very well without
additional oversight.
“You are wrapping yourself around a distinction of whether something
should or should not be regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act as
opposed to whether something does or does not pose an environmental
risk,” said Fuller, who asserts that despite numerous reports of
contamination in drilling areas, the fracturing process has never been
conclusively proven to be the cause.
Regulation, Fuller said, “may shut down natural gas drilling for a long
time, but it is not going to make the environment any better.”
It will fall to Congress — and then to the EPA — to decide whether that
is truly the case. Sponsors of the Frack Act hope for a vote this
spring. If it passes, and if the EPA finds reason to change the
conclusions it reached in 2004, the agency would then have to decide
exactly how fracturing will be addressed by the Safe Drinking Water Act.
“The thinking we did then, the study that we did then, we were really
looking at a different set of circumstances,” said Heare, the EPA’s
Drinking Water Protection Division director. “The agency has not
investigated the impacts of hydraulic fracturing in other settings such
as shale gas production and at this time is unable to quantify the
potential threat.”
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