Natural Gas Drilling: What We Don’t Know
ProPublica
31 December 2009
By Abrahm Lustgarten,
It takes brute force to wrest natural gas from the earth. Millions of
gallons of chemical-laden water mixed with sand -- under enough
pressure to peel paint from a car -- are pumped into the ground,
pulverizing a layer of rock that holds billions of small bubbles of gas.
The chemicals transform the fluid into a frictionless mass that works
its way deep into the earth, prying open tiny cracks that can extend
thousands of feet. The particles of sand or silicon wedge inside those
cracks, holding the earth open just enough to allow the gas to slip by.
Gas drilling is often portrayed as the ultimate win-win in an era of
hard choices: a new, 100-year supply of cleaner-burning fuel, a
risk-free solution to the nation’s dependence on foreign energy. In the
next 10 years, the United States will use the fracturing technology to
drill hundreds of thousands of new wells astride cities, rivers and
watersheds. Cash-strapped state governments are pining for the revenue
and the much-needed jobs that drilling is expected to bring to poor,
rural areas.
Drilling companies assert that the destructive forces unleashed by the
fracturing process, including the sometimes toxic chemicals that keep
the liquid flowing, remain safely sealed as much as a mile or more
beneath the earth, far below drinking water sources and the rest of the
natural environment.
More than a year of investigation by ProPublica, however, shows that
the issues are far less settled than the industry contends, and that
hidden environmental costs could cut deeply into the anticipated
benefits.
The technique used to extract the gas, known as hydraulic fracturing,
has not received the same scientific scrutiny as the processes used for
many other energy sources.
For example, it remains unclear how far the tiny fissures that radiate
through the bedrock from hydraulic fracturing might reach, or whether
they can connect underground passageways or open cracks into
groundwater aquifers that could allow the chemical solution to escape
into drinking water. It is not certain that the chemicals – some, such
as benzene, that are known to cause cancer – are adequately contained
by either the well structure beneath the earth or by the people,
pipelines and trucks that handle it on the surface. And it is unclear
how the voluminous waste the process creates can be disposed of safely.
“This is a field where there is almost no research,” said Geoffrey
Thyne, a former professor at the Colorado School of Mines and an
environmental engineering consultant for local government officials in
Colorado. “It is very much an emerging problem.”
The lack of scientific certainty about hydraulic fracturing can be
traced in part to the drilling industry’s success in persuading
Congress to leave regulation of the process to the states, which often
lack manpower and funding to do complex studies of underground geology.
As a consequence, regulations vary wildly across the country and many
basic questions remain unanswered.
ProPublica has uncovered more than a thousand reports of water
contamination from drilling across the country, some from surface
spills and some from seepage underground. In many instances the water
is contaminated with compounds found in the fluids used in hydraulic
fracturing. ProPublica also found dozens of homes in Ohio, Pennsylvania
and Colorado in which gas from drilling had migrated through
underground cracks into basements or wells.
But most of these problems have been blamed on peripheral problems that
could be associated with hydraulic fracturing – like well failures or
leaks – without a rigorous investigation of the entire process.
ProPublica has also found that drilling procedures that can prevent
water pollution and sharply reduce toxic air emissions – another
frequent side effect -- are seldom required by state regulators and are
mostly practiced when and where the industry wishes.
Another uncertainty arises from the enormous amounts of water needed
for “fracking.” The government estimates that companies will drill at
least 32,000 new gas wells annually by 2012. That could mean more than
100 billion gallons of hazardous fluids will be used and disposed of
each year if existing techniques, which often involve 4 million gallons
of water per well, are used.
Proposals for new regulations that might prevent many of these problems
almost always lead to a fight. And more often than not, that fight
devolves into stark, overdrawn choices between turning on the lights or
having clean drinking water; getting rich or staying poor.
Energy lobbyists portray skeptics as hysterical and would-be-regulators
as over-reaching. Environmentalists cast the dangers as more proven
than is the case, and as unsolvable.
In less contentious settings, even the industry acknowledges the lack
of science on key issues.
In a conference call with reporters this spring, American Petroleum
Institute senior policy advisor Richard Ranger – an industry expert who
has spoken frequently on the fracturing issue -- was asked for evidence
that fracturing is without environmental risk:
“Have there been any recent studies done on the safety of this?” a
reporter asked.
“The issue of where do these fracking fluids go, the answer is based on
the geology being drilled,” Ranger said. “You’ve got them trapped
somewhere thousands of feet below with the only pathway out being the
well bore.
“I’m just not sure that that study is out there,” Ranger said.
“To be clear, we are saying this is a totally safe technology but we
can’t point to any recent studies that say this is a safe technology?”
the reporter asked.
“Or that says it is unsafe,” Ranger replied.
ProPublica reporters have posed similar questions to more than 40
academic experts, scientists, industry officials, and federal and state
regulators. No one has yet provided a more definitive response.
ProPublica’s reporting over the last year points to four looming
questions:
Where are the gaps in the environmental science and what will it take
to address them?
How will the wastewater be safely disposed of?
Are regulations in place to make sure the gas is extracted as safely as
possible?
And are state and federal regulatory agencies equipped to keep up with
the pace of drilling?
“Most likely there are not a lot of win-win propositions,” said David
Burnett, a scientist at Texas A&M University’s Global Petroleum
Research Institute who specializes in industry practices to reduce
environmental harm. But, he said, there is opportunity for compromise
on enough issues “so that everybody wins sometimes.”
What We Think We Know
Drilling industry officials say they use a slew of engineering
techniques – from sonar to magnetic resonance imaging – to study the
underground explosions and strictly control the reach of hydraulic
fracturing.
They say that the actual fracturing happens thousands of feet from
water supplies and below layers of impenetrable rock that seals the
world above from what happens down below.
Yet there are reasons for concern. Even if layers of rock can seal
water supplies from the layer where fluid is injected, the gas well
itself creates an opening in that layer. The well bore is supposed to
be surrounded by cement, but often there are large empty pockets or the
cement itself cracks under pressure. In many instances, the high
pressure of the fluids being injected into the ground has created leaks
of gas – and sometimes fluids – into surrounding water supplies.
A recent regional government study in Colorado concluded that the same
methane gas tapped by drilling had migrated into dozens of water wells,
possibly through natural faults and fissures exacerbated by hydraulic
fracturing.
Dennis Coleman, a geologist in Illinois, has seen an example where
methane gas has seeped underground for more than seven miles – several
times what industry spokespeople say should be possible. He is a
leading international expert on molecular testing whose company,
Isotech Laboratories, does scientific research for government agencies,
pharmaceutical companies, and the oil and gas industry.
“There is no such thing as impossible in terms of migration,” Coleman
said. “Like everything else in life it comes down to the probability.
It is never a hard and fast thing.”
In another case, benzene, a chemical sometimes found in drilling
additives, was discovered throughout a 28-mile long aquifer in Wyoming.
“It is common knowledge that the lower layers are full of
irregularities and inconsistencies,” said Patrick Jacobson, a rig
worker who manages drilling fluid pumps and has worked on Wyoming
drilling projects for more than 20 years. “I think anybody who works in
the oil fields, if they tell you the truth, would tell you the same
thing.”
Scientists have found it difficult to determine whether hydraulic
fracturing is responsible for these problems. In large part that’s
because the identities of the chemicals used in the fluids have been
tightly held as trade secrets, so scientists don’t know precisely what
to look for when they sample polluted streams and taps.
Drilling companies disclose enough information to comply with labor
regulations meant to keep workers safe, but that information normally
consists of a product trade name and rarely includes a complete list of
the chemicals it contains.
Recently, this has begun to change.
In September, New York State – as part of a lengthy environmental
review meant to assess the risks of fracturing – made public a
comprehensive list of 260 chemicals used in drilling fluids, which it
had compiled from disclosures it required drilling companies to make.
http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/materials_minerals_pdf/ogdsgeischap5.pdf
And several companies themselves have begun to
advocate for more disclosure, in the hope that transparency may quell
the public outcry that has kept them from drilling in valuable parts of
New York State.
Chesapeake Energy, which last year told ProPublica that the chemicals
are kept secret because “it is like Coke protecting its syrup formula,”
now says that disclosure would bring honest discussion.
“We as an industry need to demystify,” Chesapeake’s CEO, Aubrey
McClendon, said at an industry conference in September, “and be very
upfront about what we are doing, disclose the chemicals that we are
using, search for alternatives to some of the chemicals.”
What is now needed most, according to scientists at the Environmental
Protection Agency and elsewhere, is a rigorous scientific study that
tracks the fracturing process and attempts to measure its reach into
underground water supplies.
In Wyoming EPA scientists with the Superfund program are conducting the
first federal investigation of this kind, sampling available water
sources and looking for any traces of the chemicals used in drilling.
But Colorado’s Thyne says a proper study would go a step further.
“The critical thing that has to be done is a systematic sampling of the
background prior to drilling activity, during and after drilling
activity,” Thyne said, “Ideally we would go out, we would put
monitoring wells in and surround an area that was going to be fractured
as part of normal operations. The budget for that kind of project would
run ballpark $10 million. It’s a relatively small project for the U.S.
Geological Survey or the EPA to undertake.”
Where Should the Waste Go?
On the East coast, one of the most important unanswered questions about
drilling is how to dispose of the chemically tainted wastewater that
hydraulic fracturing produces. Most drilling wastewater in other parts
of the country is stored in underground injection wells that are
regulated by EPA under the Safe Drinking Water Act. However the geology
in the East makes injection less viable, and less common. In New York
and Pennsylvania, millions of gallons of drilling wastewater could
eventually be produced each day.
That wastewater will likely be trucked to treatment plants that don’t
routinely test for most of the chemicals the wastewater contains and
that may not be equipped to remove them. Currently, the plants also
can’t remove the high levels of Total Dissolved Solids found in
drilling wastewater – a mixture of salts, metals and minerals – that
can increase the salinity of fresh water streams and interfere with the
biological treatment process at sewage treatment plants, allowing
untreated waste to flow into waterways. High TDS levels also can harm
industrial and household equipment and affect the color and taste of
water.
After the wastewater passes through the treatment plants it is dumped
back into public waterways that supply drinking water to at least 27
million Americans, including residents of Philadelphia and New York
City. But without identification and routine testing for the
problematic chemicals, it will be impossible to know how much of them
are making their way to drinking water sources, or how they are
accumulating over time. Evolving medical science says low-dose exposure
to some of those chemicals could have much greater health effects than
the EPA or doctors have previously thought.
“Managing produced water has always seemed like one of the large
challenges, because this area geologically doesn’t have the extensive
network of underground injection wells,” said Lee Fuller, vice
president of government relations for the Independent Petroleum
Association of America. “One challenge that industry has got is looking
at developing [treatment] technology, which could be very costly.”
All Equal Under the Law
The gas industry, and hydraulic fracturing, is subject to widely
different laws in different states. Some of those laws are tough,
perhaps burdening the drilling industry unnecessarily. Others are
lenient, perhaps leaving much of the country subject to environmental
danger.
One thing is certain: There is no national standard for an industrial
process that is used prolifically in 32 states and will be used even
more in the future.
Gas drillers receive special exemptions from seven federal
environmental regulations that apply to countless other industrial
activities across the country.
Drilling companies are not required, for example, to report the
discharge of toxic chemicals for the Toxics Release Inventory under the
Superfund law – including the wastewater that threatens Eastern water
supplies. They do not have to comply with the section of the Clean
Water Act that regulates pollutants at construction sites. And they
don’t have to abide by the Clean Air Act, which regulates industrial
emissions.
Gas drilling also has its own individual exemption, approved by
Congress during the George W. Bush administration, that explicitly
prohibits the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating hydraulic
fracturing under the Safe Drinking Water Act, the way the agency
regulates almost all other types of underground fluid injection,
including those injection wells used for wastewater in the West.
The argument behind these exceptions is that state regulations
sufficiently protect the environment from drilling. But the result is
that drilling regulation is left to a patchwork of state laws.
A recent report by the Ground Water Protection Council, a research
group that once had energy executives on its board but now consists
mainly of state regulators, revealed that only four of the 31 drilling
states it surveyed have regulations that directly address hydraulic
fracturing and that no state requires companies to track the volume of
chemicals left underground. One in five states don’t require that the
concrete casing used to contain wells be tested before hydraulic
fracturing. And more than half the states allow waste pits that hold
toxic fluids from fracturing to intersect with the water table, even
though waste pits have been connected to hundreds of cases of water
contamination.
Although energy companies have developed many techniques that can
reduce the spills and seepages that have occurred across the country,
they are usually left to implement them when and if they choose,
meaning protections can be entirely different between drilling fields a
couple of miles apart.
In northern Pennsylvania, for example, drillers do not have to supply
regulators with a complete list detailing every chemical they will pump
underground, while 15 miles away, in New York, state authorities have
said that such disclosure is a must because it is essential to
protecting the water.
Many scientists and members of Congress are arguing for a sturdier
national standard that would require minimum environmental protections
and ensure that a national energy policy based on natural gas
extraction can be pursued without jeopardizing the country’s other
natural resources.
“What we’re talking about is just putting some basic parameters around
it,” said Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo. “If companies are able to operate
within those parameters… then that’s fine. If they can’t economically
do that, then that is because they are causing more damage than they
are creating value, and they probably shouldn’t be operating in the
first place.”
Polis is one of 50 sponsors of the FRAC Act, a bill before Congress
that would restore the EPA’s authority to regulate hydraulic fracturing
under the Safe Drinking Water Act and would require the disclosure of
the chemical additives.
Congress also recently asked the EPA to conduct a new peer-reviewed
study of hydraulic fracturing’s effect on water resources, reassessing
its old position.
On Wednesday, the EPA voiced its most explicit concerns in a decade
about the environmental risks presented by drilling, in its response to
New York State’s plan for drilling in the Marcellus Shale, the layer of
rock stretching from central New York to Tennessee. The agency said it
had “serious reservations” about whether hydraulic fracturing was safe
to do inside the New York City watershed and urged the state to
consider possible threats to public health.
EPA scientists have also told ProPublica that the study suggested by
Congress may soon be underway. If that research is coupled with a
congressional reversal of the exemption from the Safe Drinking Water
Act, hydraulic fracturing could eventually be regulated like any other
injection well in the U.S. That would require, among other things,
thorough testing of the rock miles below the surface to confirm that it
can safely contain whatever is injected into it – a stipulation that
addresses some of the uncertainty and is inconsistently found in state
drilling laws.
EPA regulation “would essentially create a base level,” said Steve
Heare, director of the EPA's Drinking Water Protection Division in
Washington. Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, states “would basically
have to make a showing that their regulations were as effective as
ours.”
Better Policing
All the laws and protections in the world won’t ensure that
drilling can be done safely if effective enforcement isn’t in place to
oversee it.
Yet for all the debate about environmental protections, new laws and
national benefits, very little emphasis has been placed on bolstering
the agencies that issue drilling permits and go out into the field to
make sure the processes are done right.
ProPublica’s recent analysis of 22 states that account for the vast
majority of the country’s drilling found that regulatory staffing has
not kept up with the drilling boom, meaning that the nation’s ability
to enforce rules that provide environmental safeguards is
systematically weakening.
New York, one of the hot spots expected to supply this gas-based
national energy paradigm, has cut its oil and gas regulatory inspection
staff 20 percent since 2003, even while it has approved a 676 percent
increase in the number of new wells being drilled each year. Other
states have added a few people, but almost none have kept up with the
crushing pace of new drilling.
In West Virginia, the third most active gas drilling state in the
nation, four new enforcement employees have been hired since 2003, but
each inspector is still responsible for some 3,300 wells.
“Crisis management is not the best management in the world and we had
to deal with crisis management 90 percent of the time,” said Jerry
Tephabock, a former head of state oil and gas inspections in West
Virginia who retired in 2007. “There were wells out there that had been
drilled that have never been inspected in 15 to 20 years.”
Even if states manage to keep staff levels where they are now – a
challenge since 39 states have projected budget deficits for 2010
– the growth that would come from placing more emphasis on natural gas
as a part of the nation’s energy strategy may still present sizable
risks for both the environment and the economy. Either enforcement
would have to slacken, or the permitting of new wells would slow so
much that it would stifle the economic growth and energy independence
that drilling is expected to bring.
Different states are choosing different paths. Texas regulators promise
they will issue new permits to drill within 72 hours, even though their
regulator-to-well ratio is one of the most demanding in the nation. New
York, in contrast, has pledged to bring new drilling to a crawl until
its staff can catch up.
Neither approach addresses the scientific or regulatory gaps that
represent drilling’s long-term threats to the environment, however. And
it remains to be seen whether politicians and environmental regulators
will make sure precautions are taken at the beginning of this new
energy boom, or if they will leave the nation to clean up the mess
after the boom goes bust, as it has had to do so many times in the past.
ProPublica reporters Joaquin Sapien and Sabrina Shankman contributed to
this report.
Write to Abrahm Lustgarten at Abrahm.Lustgarten@propublica.org