Betsey Piette, July 2010
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011

Potentially toxic and carcinogenic chemicals are used in the hydraulic fracturing process to obtain natural gas from shale. Whenever industry officials are confronted with concerns regarding their use, their standard answer is, “The chemicals account for less than 1 percent of the fluid that is blasted underground.”

The problem with this pat response is that they never say what these chemicals are.

To see information about the astonishing new video exposing the disastrous consequences of sidestepping all environmental laws and regulation to frack for "natural" gas, click the photo above or go to: gaslandthemovie.com

A recent editorial in a Philadelphia paper revealed that “during a process known as ‘fracking,’ drillers pump millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals underground to break apart the shale deposits and release the gas trapped in the rock. Much of that fracking fluid comes back to the surface, in concentrations saltier than ocean water.” (Philadelphia Inquirer, June 17)

At a workshop held during the recent U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, Julian Rodriguez-Diaz of the Ithaca, N.Y.-based Green Guerrillas noted that “one to seven million gallons of water are used per frack [well].” Rodriguez-Diaz presented a slide show with photos of wells being drilled on a friend’s property near Ithaca, explaining that one well pad could have up to 24 wells with as many as 16 pads per square mile.

Doing the math, this means there’s a potential for between 3,840,000 to 26,880,000 gallons of fracking chemicals to be used in one square mile — hardly a minor amount. Rodriguez-Diaz credited Shaleshock.org for his statistical information.

His slides also demonstrated clearly invasive aspects of the process, in which hundreds of trucks carry water and chemicals over mountainous dirt roads to drilling sites. One slide challenged industry claims of bringing jobs to the areas involved. License plates on vehicles at the site showed few from Pennsylvania or New York.

DEP releases chemical list

Around 1,500 natural gas wells have been drilled in Pennsylvania in the Marcellus Shale region in the past three years, some within view of homes, farms and public roads. In the recently released film “Gasland,” producer Josh Fox noted that more than 200,000 new wells are proposed in Pennsylvania and New York, with 50,000 in the New York City watershed alone. Fox has come under heavy criticism from the natural gas industry for sounding the alarm about the impact of industry practices across the U.S.

Despite gas industry claims that fracking fluids have not migrated into ground water, several incidents of contamination have resulted in a growing public concern and demands for regulation. At least 18 species of fish were killed last September when high levels of dissolved solids polluted 26 miles of Dunkard Creek in Greene County, Pa.

In early June, a well blowout in Clearwater County, Pa., resulted in a gas explosion and a 16-hour uncontrolled spill of about a million gallons of toxic wastewater into a creek in Moshannon State Park.

In May the state Agriculture Department quarantined 28 head of cattle on a farm in central Pennsylvania after they came in contact with wastewater that leaked from a natural gas well holding pond. The state was contacted after the family that owned the farm noticed that grass had died in the area. Tests found chloride, iron and other chemicals in the wastewater. (Associated Press, June 1)

These and other incidents led to pressure on the Pennsylvania Department of Environment Protection to release a list of 80 chemicals used in fracking fluids in the state. In New York, regulators also published a list of more than 250 chemicals that could potentially be used there in natural gas drilling.

At the Social Forum workshop, Rodriguez-Diaz said up to 596 different chemicals have been used in the natural gas drilling process in 34 states.

The list provided by the Pennsylvania DEP includes naphthalene, classified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as a possible carcinogen, and toluene and xylene, both linked to central nervous system depression. While an important first step, the DEP list falls short of really educating the public about the potential danger.

Of the chemicals identified by DEP as being used in fracking fluid, 34 are soluble, allowing them to move into surface and underground water. These include chemicals that cause cancer and disorders of the brain and nervous system, blood, and the immune system.

Wastewater sitting in holding ponds can evaporate into surface air. Twenty-one chemicals are readily airborne, including nine that cause reproductive problems and six known carcinogens. All the known airborne chemicals can harm the skin, respiratory tract, gastrointestinal tract or liver — problems frequently reported near fracking wells across the U.S.

Rodriguez-Diaz’s slide show presentation also illustrated the connection between giant oil companies and chemical and drilling industries, noting a link between oil giant ExxonMobil with Halliburton and Schlumberger. These same two corporations played major roles in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, along with British Petroleum. The slide show included photos of several trucks with Halliburton’s logo.

One West Virginia woman at the workshop provided a poignant account of being impacted by coal company mountain-top removal and then having to abandon her family home after her water well was poisoned by fracking fluids.

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Environmental Working Group, August 2010

If your family got its water from your own well (and a lot of people do), what would you say to someone who wanted to pump a whole grab-bag of chemicals into the ground nearby, including some that are known to be toxic or to cause cancer?

Just guessing here, but I suspect you’d send him on his way with a few choice words.

You might be slightly reassured if he told you that, actually, he was going to drill a well thousands of feet deep and inject his chemicals into solid rock so that his toxic cocktail would never reach your well water.

But again, just guessing, you’d probably ask a lot of questions and demand some very strong controls and oversight of the process. You might even ask who regulates this stuff to ensure that your water isn’t at risk. It would hardly set your mind at ease to find out that this particular activity has been almost totally exempted from federal laws that are supposed to protect the purity of your, and the nation’s, drinking water.

Remarkably, this little scenario is a pretty fair microcosm of something that is unfolding across the country, from the Northeast to Texas to the far West, with the pell-mell growth of a technology that enables energy companies to capture vast quantities of natural gas locked away in deeply buried shale and other rock. This technology, also used for oil drilling, involves injecting a liquid stew of chemicals, sand and water under very high pressure into underground rock formations. This process, whose technical name is hydraulic fracturing, cracks open the rock and allows trapped gas to escape. “Fracking,” as it is commonly known, is an advance that has been good for energy costs, but it also creates real risks to the nation’s supplies of drinking water. It’s a threat not just for people who have their own wells, but also for major cities such as New York, where everyone is supplied by public waterworks.

EWG Senior Counsel Dusty Horwitt has spent six months looking into the issue. EWG has just issued a report on his findings. Among them:

• Companies are injecting natural gas wells with millions of gallons of fracking fluids with minimal regulatory supervision to ensure that they don’t get into drinking water supplies.
• The quantities of fracking fluids used in a single well contain so much benzene and other toxics that they could potentially contaminate more than the amount of water New York state consumes in a day.
• When Congress exempted fracking from the Safe Water Drinking Act, it drew the line at the use of diesel oil, which contains chemicals that are highly toxic and/or cancer causing, including benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene. But one officials said use of diesel is still common, and the companies’ own statements suggest that they are still using diesel.
• Even when drilling companies don’t use diesel, they rely on other “petroleum distillates” that contain many of the same dangerous substances. Records obtained by EWG showed that some fracking fluids have up to 93 times as much benzene as diesel, but no one regulates their use.
• Major fracking companies repeatedly ignored EWG’s requests for information on the precise nature of their fracking fluid. Horwitt pierced the veil of corporate secrecy by obtaining documents filed by industry with New York state and Pennsylvania officials.
• At least two state officials, and even one regional federal regulator, apparently misinterpret the Safe Drinking Water Act, insisting that all fracking chemicals, including diesel, are exempt from the law’s permitting requirements. Only in Wyoming are officials keeping an eye on the chemicals being used in fracturing, and even there they require companies to disclose only the trade names of their fluids, not the chemical components. to determine whether drillers are using diesel.

The risks of fracking aren’t just theoretical. Drinking water contamination and property damage have been linked to hydraulic fracturing in four states – Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wyoming. In one incident that polluted a Colorado creek, the drilling company is still trying to clean it up – four years later.

The conclusion is inescapable: the petroleum distillates used in hydraulic fracturing pose a serious threat to the nation’s water supplies, but those risks have been largely ignored by federal and state regulators. So EWG is making several important recommendations for action by Congress and federal agencies, before disaster strikes:

• Congress must reverse itself and require companies to comply with the Safe Drinking Water Act when using hydraulic fracturing.
• Congress should require drilling companies to disclose publicly the chemicals they use hydraulic fracturing in every well.
• The U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees drilling on public land, must use its authority to require such disclosures.
• Congress should investigate federal and state oversight of hydraulic fracturing and insist that federal and state personnel be properly informed about existing law.
• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency should use its powers to find out whether companies are using diesel and enforce the existing permit requirements.