Editor’s Note: This is the first of two articles on hydrofracking, the controversial process of extracting natural gas and oil. Pipeline giant Kinder Morgan has proposed constructing a $5 billion pipeline from the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania through New York and Massachusetts to transport fracked natural gas to eastern New England. Sixty-eight percent of the natural gas is designated for export. The pipeline network has become the subject of intense protests from environmentalists who warn that not only does the pipeline itself represent an environmental risk but that it perpetuates the nation’s reliance upon fossil fuels. In Part II, Mary Douglas will examine how the oil and gas complex managed to elude regulatory oversight for hydrofracking and responsibility for the long-term effects on human health and the environment.
Hydrofracking, or fracking – the contentious technique of extracting oil or natural gas from deep shale formations – is increasingly a source of public alarm as accidents increase, evidence of water contamination mounts, and landowners point to degradation of their health and property. Fracking has increased energy independence, created jobs, and lowered energy prices. But what are the long-term costs to human health and the environment? And, how are federal and state regulators addressing these costs?
Congress largely sidelined federal regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency when it passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, legislation designed to encourage oil and gas exploration and development. The regulatory regimes of the 33 states in which fracking occurs vary considerably, but many states appear to have embraced the economic benefits of fracking without adequately addressing health and welfare issues. Even in those fracking-friendly states, though, cities and towns whose citizens experience firsthand the multitude of harmful impacts of the practice, have emerged as scrappy fracking opponents, willing to test the limits of local control in state courts despite tremendous pressure from the oil and gas industry.
How Horizontal Drilling Caused the Fracking Boom
Tioga County, have been drilled in Pennsylvania since 2005. Courtesy Environment America Research and Policy Center.
Utilized since 1949, fracking activity didn’t explode until the development of horizontal drilling of shale formations began in 1997. The practice gradually picked up speed until, according to a 2013 report by Environment America, more than 82,000 fracked oil and gas wells across the country were in operation by 2013.
Horizontal drilling gives dramatic advantages to drillers: 1) It enables drilling under areas that would be otherwise inaccessible, such as parks and populated areas; 2) It allows drillers to drain a broad area from a single wellpad, that is, the 3- or 4-acre area that is leveled and constructed, using geotextile fabric covered in gravel, that supports all the equipment needed for drilling; 3) It vastly increases the productivity of a well, compared to vertical drilling. As explained in the web site Geology.com, a vertical well could be drilled 100 feet down, but if the well could then be turned horizontally, it could extend for 5,000 feet or more, increasing the “pay zone’” parallel to the shale, and allowing vastly more oil or gas production from one well. Many fracked horizontal wells extend well over a mile.
How It Works – Cement, Perforating Guns, and Chemical Soup
Preparation. Well-drilling begins with lubricating agents called drilling muds that cool the drill bit and keep the drill hole open until the steel casing is put in place in the borehole. As explained in a 2010 Cornell University study, concrete is then forced into the casing down to the end of the borehole. Continued pressure forces the concrete up the outside of the casing. When the drill reaches a certain depth, a different drill device gradually turns the direction of the well horizontally. Following the horizontal drilling, the drill is removed, casing inserted, and cement again forced down to the end and up the outside of the casing.
Wells are drilled to levels below the roughly 1,000-foot level of drinking water aquifers, often to levels of 5,000 – 8,000 feet.
After this process, a bullet-shot casing perforator, which contains small explosive charges, is lowered to the end of the casing where it blasts holes into the casing and cement through which the fracking fluid will be forced.
Fracking. Once the well has been drilled, encased, and perforated, the actual fracking begins. Three to seven million gallons of water are needed per well. The water, which can come from streams, rivers or underground aquifers, is generally trucked to the wellpad location, necessitating hundreds of truck trips.
Hydraulic fracturing proceeds in several stages, but essentially, chemicals, water, and sand are mixed in different combinations and forced down the well at tremendous pressure – three to four tons per-square-inch, creating cracks in the shale formation around the well. First injected as fine particles, the grains of sand are increased in size until they are able to prop open the fissures, allowing the shale gas to flow up the well.
The first surge of gas, which is propelled to the surface by the force of its own natural pressure, brings with it much of the fracking water, laced with corrosive salts, carcinogenic chemicals such as benzene, and radioactive elements picked up from underground deposits. Following the initial surge, the well will be fracked numerous times: the end of the well-hole will be fracked and then plugged; then the next section will be fracked and plugged; and so on, with the process repeated up to twenty times, depending on the length of the well. Once the fracking is completed, the gas is separated from the waste water, flowed through a meter, and sent out on a transmission line.
Disposal of Waste Water. The waste water from the process (often called “produced water”) can be disposed of in a number of different ways. Drilling operations can utilize on-site storage ponds or pits for temporary storage, can transport the waste water for disposal in underground injection wells, or can take it to municipal sewage treatment plants or private treatment plants.
Health and Environmental Issues
Huge amounts of fresh water are withdrawn from streams and aquifers; hundreds of diesel trucks traverse communities; toxic chemicals are mixed and injected into wells; and volumes of chemical-laced waste water is stored, treated, or disposed of underground. It would be challenging to insure that this process was carried out in a way that protected human health and the environment even under a well- conceived, adequately funded, and vigorously enforced regulatory regime. For now, such protection is lacking.
By any number of measures – state accident reports, scholarly studies, in-depth reporting, and filed lawsuits — hydrofracking operations are endangering the health of people who live in the vicinity, and degrading the air and water.
An Earthjustice web site summarizes scores of fracking accidents that have occurred recently. A few examples illustrate widespread safety problems:
- On January 12, 2015, Ohio’s Columbus Dispatch reported that twenty-five families were forced to flee an out-of-control natural gas leak at an eastern Ohio fracking well. Earlier in the year, in October, four hundred families were evacuated when a well ruptured in Bloomingdale, Ohio, leaking potentially explosive methane. An emergency response team summoned from Texas was finally able to stop the leak.
- According to an April 2014 State Impact Pennsylvania article, a Chevron natural gas well exploded in Dunkard Township, Pennsylvania in February 2014, killing a worker and injuring others. The Department of Environmental Protection Secretary told reporters that he had been able to see methane gas shooting out of the wellhead. Chevron distributed coupons for free pizza to nearby residents.
- A fire started at a Halliburton fracking area in Monroe County, Ohio last June, according to the Daily Kos. “As flames engulfed the area, trucks began exploding and thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals spilled into a tributary of the Ohio River, which supplies drinking water for millions of residents.”
- And in November 2014 in Fort Lupton, Colorado, about 30 miles north of Denver, workers were trying to warm a frozen pipe when it exploded, killing one worker and injuring two others.
Physicians and academics have increasingly questioned the safety of fracking in scholarly articles, petitions, and testimony.
One hundred leading medical and scientific experts, “Physicians, Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy,” petitioned the White House in December 2012 to halt fracking and, in particular, the expanded export of natural gas, stating, “there is a growing body of evidence that unconventional natural gas extraction from shale, that is, fracking, may be associated with adverse health risks through exposure to air, water and soil.”
In February 2012, Bernard D. Goldstein, MD, a physician and toxicologist, from Pennsylvania testified before the U. S. House of Representatives Energy and Environment Subcommittee, urging Congress to fund studies that would advance scientific understanding of mixtures of fracking compounds and “the even more worrisome mixture of agents present in flowback fluids [waste water].” Comparing the number of fracking sites to the number of Superfund sites, Dr. Goldstein stated it is a “virtual certainty that adverse health effects will be statistically associated with [hydrofracking] activities.”
A publication was released in January 2015 by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the National Institute of Health, titled, “Proximity to Natural Gas Wells and Reported Health Status.” The scientists studied two groups of Pennsylvania residents, one of which lived a meter closer to nearby fracking operations than the other. They found that the people who lived closer to the fracking operations were more likely to develop skin rashes and respiratory symptoms than those living farther away.
Not surprisingly, scores of civil actions have been filed. The database of all fracking-related lawsuits maintained by the law firm Arnold & Porter is a catalog of illnesses, misery, and disruption: “Toxic chemicals in our water supply;” “headaches, nausea, nosebleeds from air emissions;” “diesel trucks, fumes, noise, operating continuously night and day;” “earthquakes” and “sinkholes…”
Dangers to Drinking Water from Fracking and Waste water Disposal
The Fracking Process. Residents near fracking wells have long complained of chronic health problems, suspecting contamination of their drinking water. Until recently, the industry has dismissed these claims, asserting that, because wells are located thousands of feet below aquifers, methane from fracked wells could not possibly migrate upward to the level of drinking water aquifers. Methane in drinking water wells, the argument went, consisted of naturally occurring methane traces.
However, a study released in September 2014 by the National Academy of Sciences disproves this contention. Scientists had tested methane in twenty Parker County, Texas, homes located near fracking wells in 2012, finding negligible amounts of methane. When they retested in 2013, the homes’ water contained far higher methane levels. Moreover, the methane no longer had the chemical makeup of naturally occurring trace methane. Instead, as described by the Los Angeles Times, “it had the same chemical fingerprint as natural gas deposits far below the aquifer.”
In all, 133 natural gas wells in Texas and Pennsylvania were studied. The scientists found that water contamination was caused by “leaky well shafts near the earth’s surface, not by the process of hydraulic fracturing itself,” according to an article in newsobserver.com. Shoddy well construction and faulty cement jobs had created leaks that allowed methane to escape and migrate into aquifers.
Waste water Disposal. Disposing of the water that comes back to the wellhead with the natural gas (about a third of what was injected) comes with its own risks. Fracking waste water that is not treated (and then disposed of in rivers) or stored in pits on-site is disposed of in underground injection wells. For several decades, these subterranean wells have been repositories for industrial wastes from the pharmaceutical, agricultural and chemical industries. They also contain waste from coal and nuclear power plants – and, more recently, from hydraulic fracturing. In the words of one geologist who had been with EPA’s underground injection well program for more than twenty years, “The United States looks like a pin cushion.”
A Scientific American article, using information from ProPublica.com states that there are “more than 680,000 underground waste and injection wells, more than 150,000 of which shoot industrial fluids thousands of feet below the surface.” Deep well injection takes place in 32 states. Propublica’s study states, “Records from disparate corners of the United States show that wells drilled to bury waste deep beneath the ground have repeatedly leaked, sending dangerous chemicals and waste gurgling to the surface or, on occasion, seeping into shallow aquifers that store a significant portion of the nation’s drinking water.”
EPA has divided the wells into six classes under the Safe Drinking Water Act, with Class I wells containing the most hazardous material and requiring the most frequent monitoring and inspections. Because of intense lobbying by the oil and gas industry, EPA designates waste from all oil and gas drilling, including fracking waste, as Class II, “non-hazardous,” regardless of its chemical content. These wells require less oversight and fewer inspections than Class I wells.
As with the fracking wells themselves, failures of the cement casing in a well can cause leakage and migration of waste. Waste has also been found to migrate to aquifers through underground rock formations that intersect other wells, often abandoned and forgotten. Well operators can also inject waste at such high pressure that it shatters the rock that is meant to contain it – again leading to migration of waste and risk to aquifers.
According to Propublica, a leading hydrogeologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Stefan Finsterle, stated, “there is no certainty at all in any of this…You have changed the system with pressure and temperature and fracturing, so you don’t know how it will behave.”
Earthquakes
Reinforcing Dr. Finsterle’s opinion that fracking is bound to have unpredictable consequences, a study released in January 2015 by the Seismological Society of America concluded definitively that a series of earthquakes in Ohio last March were the result of hydraulic fracturing, which caused slippage in an existing – but previously unknown — fault about a half-mile beneath the wells.
According to a New York Times article about the Ohio quakes, “the number and intensity of fracking-related quakes have risen as the practice has boomed.”
Oklahoma experienced a magnitude 5.7 quake in 2011. There have been numerous smaller quakes in Texas in recent years. One quake, in the city of Cleburne, Texas, was the first ever recorded in the town’s 140-year history. The quakes are attributable to the proliferation of fracking wells as well as underground injection wells for waste water, according to state and federal officials.
Quakes related to fracking have also occurred in Colorado and Kansas. In southern Kansas and northern Oklahoma, three quakes measuring 4.1, 3.9, and 2.7 on the Richter Scale, occurred in the morning of January 19. The Kansas Geological Survey linked the earthquakes to fracking waste disposal. As reported in the Wichita Eagle, a geophysicist with the Survey, Rick Miller, said that the state recorded more than 120 earthquakes in 2014, up from none in 2012.
