Gas Well Fracking.....Article Contnued

It’s not just the oil-and-gas industry that’s excited about the possibilities. Last year, even a progressive, Washington, D.C.–based think tank, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, desperate for solutions to global warming, touted natural gas as “the single biggest game changer for climate action in the next two decades.” President Obama has been supportive of shale gas and says he wants to see an increase in domestic natural-gas production.

But shale gas and hydraulic fracturing haven’t needed much help from the Obama administration. That’s because they already got a huge helping hand from the federal government under the Bush administration. Although fracking was never regulated by the federal government when it was a less prevalently used technique, it was granted explicit exemptions—despite dissent within the E.P.A.—from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act by the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the wide-ranging energy bill crafted by Dick Cheney in closed-door meetings with oil-and-gas executives. While the average citizen can receive harsh punishment under federal law for dumping a car battery into a pond, gas companies, thanks to what has become known as the Halliburton Loophole, are allowed to pump millions of gallons of fluid containing toxic chemicals into the ground, right next to our aquifers, without even having to identify them.

Claiming that the information is proprietary, drilling companies have still not come out and fully disclosed what fracking fluid is made of. But activists and researchers have been able to identify some of the chemicals used. They include such substances as benzene, ethylbenzene, toluene, boric acid, monoethanolamine, xylene, diesel-range organics, methanol, formaldehyde, hydrochloric acid, ammonium bisulfite, 2-butoxyethanol, and 5-chloro-2-methyl-4-isothiazotin-3-one. (Recently, in congressional testimony, drilling companies have confirmed the presence of many of these chemicals.) According to Theo Colborn, a noted expert on water issues and endocrine disruptors, at least half of the chemicals known to be present in fracking fluid are toxic; many of them are carcinogens, neurotoxins, endocrine disruptors, and mutagens. But Colborn estimates that a third of the chemicals in fracking fluid remain unknown to the public.

While the E.P.A. under Obama is finally undertaking a new review of fracking—a 2001 review commissioned by the Bush administration was tainted by conflicts of interest and suppression of science—that report is not expected to be completed until the end of 2012. Congressional hearings held by the House Energy and Commerce Committee have been taking place since 2009, but proposed legislation to get rid of the Halliburton Loophole has made little progress on Capitol Hill.

All of this is mind-boggling to activists like Pat Carullo. A 56-year-old graphic designer, Carullo is a member of Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, a group that opposes hydraulic fracturing in the Delaware River Watershed. Tan and animated, with a white beard, he has an earthy quality and is wearing an eagle medallion around his neck when I meet him in Damascus.

Carullo and other members of Damascus Citizens have homes in this area. They created the group when it became clear that drilling was poised to begin on leased land in the watershed and were galvanized in 2008 when a large oil-and-gas company, Chesapeake, drilled an exploratory well in their county and signs of a spill—dying trees and vegetation—appeared at the site. (After Damascus Citizens filed a complaint about the matter, the Pennsylvania D.E.P. served Chesapeake a notice of violation, saying that traces of petrochemicals had been detected in the soil around the well site. While Chesapeake director Brian Grove states that “a detailed review of our operations reveals no events or operational deficiencies that would have negatively impacted the environment,” Pennsylvania D.E.P. official Tom Rathbun told Vanity Fair that chlorides from the shale returned as wastewater seem to have been responsible for killing the vegetation.” At the time, the position the group took was radical: no fracking in the Upper Delaware watershed, period. Since then, others have come around to it. Damascus Citizens is now at the center of efforts around the country to spread awareness about the hazards of fracking, study its effects more thoroughly, address the gaping lack of regulation, and slow down the rush of leasing and drilling that has swept so much of the country. A documentary about natural-gas drilling and fracking, Gasland, which won the Special Jury Prize for Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and debuts on HBO this month, is dedicated to the group.

Still, Carullo and the other activists of Damascus Citizens face an uphill battle because of the corporate and political interests stacked against them, the vast amount of money at stake, and the dynamics of our nation’s energy-policy debate. “What it is we’re doing here is trying to dismantle the whole propaganda machine that the industry is involved in,” says Carullo. “For example, ‘natural gas is the bridge to the future.’ That’s the industry’s claim. Only problem is, there’s nothing natural about this, because it’s the most unnatural thing you can imagine—hauling around tons of chemicals, taking pure water and turning it into the worst industrial waste on the planet!”

To bolster his argument, Carullo points to decisions by the local governments of New York City and Syracuse, New York, to protect their watersheds from fracking, even though large tracts of state and private land in them have already been leased to drillers. Indeed, a New York City study concluded that the risks posed by fracking could be “catastrophic” to the area’s prized water supply, one of only four unfiltered major-metropolitan water systems in the country. If New York City and Syracuse have (for the time being, at least) taken their watersheds off the table, why is the Delaware Watershed not off limits, too? “This watershed is even grander than those,” Carullo says. “It provides water to even more people.”

As a New York City–based architect who has worked on infrastructure and water issues for years, 55-year-old Joe Levine, another member of Damascus Citizens, is amazed by the scope of the drilling that could invade the Delaware River Basin as soon as New York State settles on some sort of regulatory framework to allow fracking to go forward. (There is currently a statewide ban on the technique, and a bill has been proposed in the state senate to extend the ban until after the E.P.A. finishes its review, but the Paterson administration has expressed a strong interest in obtaining the tax revenues that drilling would generate.) “If you take the industry model, there could be more than 40,000 wells in the Marcellus,” says Levine, who founded a nonprofit advocacy group, NYH2O, dedicated to protecting New York City’s water from gas drilling. “That’s what the industry aspires to.” Levine provides some perspective as to what that would entail: Two hundred billion gallons of water. The clearing of hundreds of thousands of acres and hundreds of millions of trees.

Levine remembers when the offering price for an acre of Marcellus Shale land was just $25. That changed quickly as word spread that an old-fashioned gold rush had hit the area, just like the oil booms of the 19th and early-20th centuries. “It was a big deal when it went up to $200,” Levine says. “Now it’s about $5,000 an acre.” (The Indian materials and energy conglomerate Reliance Industries recently paid Pennsylvania-based Atlas Energy about $1.7 billion for 120,000 acres, or more than $14,000 per acre, to get in on the action.) Many landowners in the Delaware Watershed remain eager to cash in on the royalties they stand to receive, and resent efforts by their neighbors to stop drilling from happening. But Damascus Citizens has found allies such as fishing and hunting advocates in the region, and continues to influence the debate as the Delaware River Basin Commission (the governing body with officers from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware that regulates the entire river system) examines the issue and decides how to proceed.

Reports of environmental degradation have come out of many places where natural-gas drilling and fracking are going on. The full extent of the problem is difficult to determine because much of the evidence is anecdotal and because drilling companies have been known to buy people off when things go wrong. In Silt, Colorado, a woman named Laura Amos no longer talks about the adrenal-gland tumor and other health complications she developed after her water was contaminated by a gas well drilled less than 1,000 feet from her home. (A state investigation into the matter concluded that a drilling failure had likely led to intermingling between the gas and water strata in the ground.) She signed a non-disclosure agreement as part of a deal to sell her tainted land to EnCana, the large Canadian gas company that drilled the well. But perusing newspapers from towns where fracking is going on reveals how the issue refuses to die, with headlines like “Fears of Tainted Water Well Up in Colorado,” “Collateral Damage: Residents Fear Murky Effects of Energy Boom,” and “Worker Believes Cancer Caused by Fracking Fluids” appearing regularly.

A macro look at the way oil and gas drilling has transformed entire landscapes out West, carving them up into patterns resembling those of a transistor board, can be seen by typing “San Juan Basin, New Mexico” into Google Maps and clicking on the satellite view. In Colorado, some 206 chemical fluid spills from oil and gas wells, connected to 48 cases of suspected water contamination, happened in 2008 alone. In New Mexico, toxic fluid had seeped into water supplies at more than 800 oil and gas drilling sites as of July 2008. Clusters of unusual health problems have popped up in some of these drilling hot spots. Kendall Gerdes, a physician in Colorado Springs, tells me of how he and other doctors in the area saw a striking number of patients come to them with chronic dizziness, headaches, and neurological problems after drilling began near their homes. One of Dr. Gerdes’s patients, 62-year-old Chris Mobaldi, developed idiopathic hemorrhaging, or spontaneous bleeding, as well as neuropathy, a pituitary gland tumor, and a rare neurological speech impediment after alleged frequent exposure to noxious fumes from drilling. Although her health improved after she moved to another part of Colorado, she continues to have trouble speaking and walking to this day.

And with drilling in the Marcellus Shale, the complaints have spread East. Despite making more than a million dollars in royalties from drilling on his 105-acre farm, Wayne Smith, a farmer in Clearville, Pennsylvania, wishes he’d never signed a lease. Some of his livestock mysteriously dropped dead after having motor-skill breakdowns; a veterinarian said the deaths could be attributed to arsenic, high levels of which were found in water on Smith’s property. (Smith also worries about health problems he has developed, such as frequent headaches, abscessed teeth, and other mouth problems.) In Avella, Pennsylvania, a wastewater impoundment caught fire and exploded on George Zimmermann’s 480-acre property, producing a 200-foot-high conflagration that burned for six hours and produced a cloud of thick, black smoke visible 10 miles away. An E.P.A.-accredited environmental-testing company sampled the soil around the well sites on Zimmerman’s property and found arsenic at 6,430 times permissible levels and tetrachloroethene, a carcinogen and central-nervous-system suppressant, at 1,417 times permissible levels. (In January, the state of Pennsylvania fined the company that is drilling on Zimmerman’s land, Atlas Energy, $85,000 for environmental violations related to fracking—a drop in the bucket for a corporation that brought in $1.5 billion in revenue last year. As of press time, Atlas had not provided Vanity Fair with a comment on the matter.)

These are a number of the ways that fracking can conceivably go wrong. Weston Wilson, a former E.P.A. official who blew the whistle on the agency’s flawed report on fracking by writing a letter to Congress, likes to talk about the difference between “bad wells” and “good wells gone bad.” “Bad wells” are ones that leak because of poor construction or an accident; “good wells gone bad” refers to the possibility that fracking may pose a more fundamental, generalized risk to water supplies, through seepage of the wastewater that remains in the ground. While shale formations are thousands of feet below groundwater levels, geological studies have shown that the Earth is full of cracks at these depths, and no one has ruled out the possibility that fracking may open up arteries for the toxic fluid to seep into groundwater in a more insidious way.

That’s not to mention the risks posed by the above-ground handling of return wastewater and the airborne pollution endemic to natural-gas processing. Leaks and spills have occurred at the on-site pits where wastewater is allowed to fester. And the city of Fort Worth, Texas, which sits atop the country’s most productive shale-gas formation, demonstrates the dangers that natural-gas processing poses to “airsheds.” Chemical emissions from natural-gas processing in and around Forth Worth now match the city’s total emissions from cars and trucks, leading to alarming levels of volatile organic compounds and other pollutants in the air.

Facing increasing lawsuits and scrutiny, the gas industry no longer stands by the position it took for years that there’s nothing unsafe in fracking fluid. But it still says that shooting fracking fluid into the ground is a safe and sensible practice. (In a written statement to Vanity Fair, American’s Natural Gas Alliance, an industry lobbying group, said that the current federal regulation of fracking is adequate.) It continues to hammer home the notion that natural gas is cleaner than its fossil-fuel relatives, coal and oil, and produces lower levels of greenhouse gases.

But a new preliminary assessment by Cornell ecology and environmental-biology professor Robert Howarth of the emissions generated throughout the fracking process suggests that, when the thousands of truck trips required to frack every single well are counted, natural gas obtained by fracking is actually worse than drilling for oil and possibly even coal mining in terms of greenhouse-gas production. While Howarth explains that his estimates are subject to uncertainty because of the lack of complete, concrete data about fracking, he concludes, “There is an urgent need for a comprehensive assessment of the full range of emission of greenhouse gases from using natural gas obtained by high-volume, slick water hydraulic fracturing.… Society should be wary of claims that natural gas is a desirable fuel in terms of the consequences on global warming.”

Yet the shale-gas boom, driven by fracking, continues on a global scale. Shale land is already being leased in Western and Central Europe while foreign companies buy up land in the Marcellus Shale. A May 25 memorandum of economic and strategic dialogue between the U.S. and China prominently lists an initiative to help China assess and extract its own shale gas as an item of agreement. In Australia, where fracking has been sweeping the Queensland countryside and where landowners have little or no control over their mineral rights, a furor has been growing over the water contamination happening around drilling locations.

At the same time, the people who have been burned badly by their firsthand experience with what you might call the New Natural Gas, and who have not gone silent, are spreading their message of acute disillusionment, ecological destruction, land-value decimation, and serious health concerns. As I sit and talk with the members of Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, news reports from the tragic Deepwater Horizon leak in the Gulf pop up from time to time on their computers. The disaster serves as a grim backdrop to our conversation,

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/06/fracking-in-pennsylvania-201006?currentPage=1

Just say no! And say yes to the blessings you already have; clean pure water from your well and rivers which are the envy of every sportsman. In this world, there is always a trade off and with gas well drilling into the Marcellus shale the trade you make will cheat you and most likely irrevocably ruin water which is not even yours.