“When a shale gas well is hydro fracked, the explosive power of the frack breaks up the rock indiscriminately for a considerable distance - far enough to break into nearby aquifers - particularly if the frack hit’s a vertical fault that may cause the gas bearing formation to “communicate” with other strata. This can release natural gas- which consist of methane, butane, propane, and benzene, etc. - into drinking water, along with the toxic chemicals in the fracking fluid. Once introduced, there is NO way to remove the gas or the chemicals from the drinking water.” - James Northrup, former industry insider
Pennsylvania Families File Lawsuit Over Hydro Fracking Water Contamination
Published: September 17th, 2010
An environmental tort lawsuit has been filed against a Texas energy company by more than a dozen Pennsylvania families who claim the company contaminated their water supply by pumping tons of chemicals into the ground to get at natural gas deposits, a process known as hydraulic fracturing or hydro fracking. The complaint was filed on Tuesday in the Court of Common Pleases of Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, on behalf of 13 families who live in the county. Southwest Energy Production Company, and its parent company, Southwestern Energy Company, which are both based in Houston, Texas, are named as defendants.
According to the lawsuit, Southwest Energy Production Company has contaminated water supplies by using a gas mining method known as hydraulic fracturing in the Price #1 Well in Lenox Township. The mining has resulted in chemicals loaded with heavy metals and carcinogens infiltrating the ground water and residents’ well water, the lawsuit claims.
The lawsuit filed in Susquehanna claims that at least one person has gotten ill and suffered what appears to be neurological damage consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals. Some residents have also attempted to show that their well water is being contaminated by gas and other pollutants from the well by lighting their tap water on fire in YouTube videos.
GRIST A Beacon in the Smog
Get freaked about hydrofracking: now!
The New York Times has done an amazing job of investigative reporting on this issue, and a lot of what I’m about to tell you can be found in their series “Drilling Down,” which includes this awesome interactive graphic. When hydraulic fracturing fluids leak into groundwater, they can contaminate nearby drinking water sources [PDF]. Moreover, the wastewater contains heavy metals and radioactive compounds that are naturally occurring in the shale—and that are freed during drilling.
Natural gas companies claim that the wastewater is easily treated to meet the standards for human consumption. But hear this: Pennsylvania water treatment plants have been processing radioactive wastewater 2,000 times more polluted than permitted by federal drinking water standards. To clean it, those plants must dilute the bad water with 2 billion gallons of fresh water.
Even if you’re not drinking it, this wastewater is a nightmare because there are invariably accidents in hydrofracking—just the way there are in any other drilling process. Spills and leaks can cause methane gas—a greenhouse gas 20-30 times more toxic than CO2—to penetrate nearby household wells, causing explosions. Indeed, the EPA recently reported that methane leaks from natural gas drilling are 9,000 times higher than estimated.
March 5, 2011 LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (A.P.)
Two natural gas companies agreed Friday to temporarily cease operations of injection wells in an area of central Arkansas that has seen more than 800 earthquakes during the past six months. Hydrofracking disrupts fault lines, the process can possibly cause earthquakes.
ProPublica, Feb. 2, 2011 Drilling Industry Says Diesel Use Was Legal by Abrahm Lustgarten
After three members of Congress reported this week that drilling companies have been injecting large amounts of diesel fuel underground to hydraulically fracture oil and gas wells, the industry is fighting back -- not by denying the accusation, but by arguing that the EPA never fully regulated the potentially environmentally dangerous practice in the first place.
According to a letter to the EPA from Henry Waxman, D-Calif. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Diana DeGette, D-Colo., 14 fracking companies injected more than 32 million gallons of diesel fuel into the ground in 19 states between 2005 and 2009. And they did it without asking for or receiving permission from environmental regulators in those states. Diesel fuel contains benzene, a known carcinogen, which has been detected in water supplies near drilling facilities across the country.
March 3, 2011 Pressure Limits Efforts to Police Drilling for Gas New York Times
An Earlier Reversal
The E.P.A. also studied hydrofracking in 2004, when Congress considered whether the process should be fully regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act.
An early draft of the study discussed potentially dangerous levels of contamination in hydrofracking fluids and mentioned “possible evidence” of contamination of an aquifer. The report’s final version excluded these points, concluding instead that hydrofracking “poses little or no threat to drinking water.”
Shortly after the study was released, an E.P.A. whistle-blower said the agency had been strongly influenced by industry and political pressure. Agency leaders at the time stood by the study’s findings. “It was shameful,” Weston Wilson, the E.P.A. whistle-blower, said in a recent interview about the study. He explained that five of the seven members of that study’s peer review panel were current or former employees of the oil and gas industry.
“These topics were cut from the current study plan, even though E.P.A. officials have acknowledged that sewage treatment plants are not able to treat drilling waste fully before it is discharged into rivers, sometimes just a few miles upstream from drinking water intake plants. “
“Exemptions Stymie E.P.A.
In Wyoming, for example, the agency is investigating water-well contamination in an area of heavy drilling, even though some E.P.A. officials said in interviews that because of industry exemptions, the agency might not have jurisdiction for such an investigation.
In Texas, after an aquifer was contaminated, E.P.A. officials in December ordered a drilling company to provide clean drinking water to residents despite strong resistance from state regulators who said the federal action was premature and unfounded.
The stakes are particularly high in Pennsylvania, where gas drilling is expanding quickly, and where E.P.A. officials say drilling waste is being discharged with inadequate treatment into rivers that provide drinking water to more than 16 million people. “
March 1, 2011 Wastewater Recycling No Cure-All in Gas Process
New York Times
“……State and company records show that in the year and a half that ended in December 2010, well operators reported recycling at least 320 million gallons. But at least 260 million gallons of wastewater were sent to plants that discharge their treated waste into rivers, out of a total of more than 680 million gallons of wastewater produced, according to state data posted Tuesday. Those 260 million gallons would fill more than 28,800 tanker trucks, a line of which would stretch from about New York City to Richmond, Va.”
“At least 50 million additional gallons of wastewater is unaccounted for, according to state records.”
“The tracking system that was put in place requires monthly or yearly reports to the state from well operators indicating where their waste was taken, but offers no way for the state to guarantee that the waste actually reached the disposal sites.
The challenges of tracking all of the industry’s drilling waste and disposing of it will not go away soon. At least 50,000 new Marcellus wells are supposed to be drilled in Pennsylvania over the next two decades, up from about 6,400 permitted now.
Wells also create waste that is not captured by recycling, because operators typically recycle only for the first several months after a well begins producing gas.
Though the amount of wastewater decreases over time, the wells can continue to ooze for decades after they have been hydrofracked. There are regulations, however, that govern how gas wells are plugged and abandoned.
“This is important because as the well ages, the fluids that come up from it become more toxic, and the state or companies are even less likely to be tracking it,” said Anthony Ingraffea, a drilling expert and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell.
State regulators predict that the heaviest burdens are still to come.
“The waste that flows back slowly and continuously over the 20- to 30-year life of each gas well could produce 27 tons of salt per year,” Pennsylvania officials wrote in new rules adopted last August about salt levels in drilling wastewater being sent through sewage treatment plants. “Multiply this amount by tens of thousands of Marcellus gas wells,” they said, and the potential pollution effects are “tremendous.”“
Drilling Down - Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers
New York Times
The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle.
Other documents and interviews show that many E.P.A. scientists are alarmed, warning that the drilling waste is a threat to drinking water in Pennsylvania. Their concern is based partly on a 2009 study, never made public, written by an E.P.A. consultant who concluded : “The level of radioactivity in the wastewater has sometimes been hundreds or even thousands of times the maximum allowed by the federal standard for drinking water. While people clearly do not drink drilling wastewater, the reason to use the drinking-water standard for comparison is that there is no comprehensive federal standard for what constitutes safe levels of radioactivity in drilling wastewater.
Drillers trucked at least half of this waste to public sewage treatment plants in Pennsylvania in 2008 and 2009, according to state officials. Some of it has been sent to other states, including New York and West Virginia.”
Most sewage treatment plant facilities cannot remove enough of the radioactive material to meet federal drinking-water standards before discharging the wastewater into rivers, sometimes just miles upstream from drinking-water intake plants.
In Pennsylvania, these treatment plants discharged waste into some of the state’s major river basins. Greater amounts of the wastewater went to the Monongahela River, which provides drinking water to more than 800,000 people in the western part of the state, including Pittsburgh, and to the Susquehanna River, which feeds into Chesapeake Bay and provides drinking water to more than six million people, including some in Harrisburg and Baltimore. ”
At least 12 sewage treatment plants in three states accepted gas industry wastewater and discharged waste that was only partly treated into rivers, lakes and streams.
Of more than 179 wells producing wastewater with high levels of radiation, at least 116 reported levels of radium or other radioactive materials 100 times as high as the levels set by federal drinking-water standards. At least 15 wells produced wastewater carrying more than 1,000 times the amount of radioactive elements considered acceptable.
And in 2009 and 2010, public sewage treatment plants directly upstream from some of these drinking-water intake facilities accepted wastewater that contained radioactivity levels as high as 2,122 times the drinking-water standard.
November 9, 2009 Natural Gas Drilling Produces Radioactive Wastewater By Abrahm Lustgarten and ProPublica
Wastewater from natural gas drilling in New York State is radioactive, as high as 267 times the limit safe for discharge into the environment and thousands of times the limit safe for people to drink
As New York gears up for a massive expansion of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, state officials have made a potentially troubling discovery about the wastewater created by the process: It's radioactive. And they have yet to say how they'll deal with it.
The information comes from New York State's Department of Environmental Conservation, which analyzed 13 samples of wastewater brought thousands of feet to the surface from drilling and found that they contain levels of radium 226, a derivative of uranium, as high as 267 times the limit safe for discharge into the environment and thousands of times the limit safe for people to drink.
Dec 23, 2010 Team: City of Houston Shuts Down Two Radioactive Water Wells by Mark Greenblatt/Investigative Reporter
HOUSTON -- A radioactive water well that is controlled by the City of Houston, and that serves residents of Jersey Village, is no longer being used, according to the communications director for Houston Mayor Annise Parker.
On Monday, a KHOU-TV investigation revealed Jersey Village water well #3 was one of 10 water wells identified by recent federal tests as having tested high for a particularly damaging form of radiation called alpha radiation.
As recently as two weeks ago, city officials had said that same well, and nine others across the city, remained online and “available for use,” even after being identified in a draft report by the United States Geological Survey as testing high for radioactive contaminants that are known to immediately increase risks for cancer.
Earlier this week, city council member and former police chief C.O. “Brad” Bradford criticized city leaders for not doing more, sooner. He reviewed the draft copy of the USGS report, which revealed radiation was detected in nearly every groundwater well the federal agency tested in Houston. The draft was delivered to city officials in the public works department in September. Bradford said citizens were in danger and should be warned of their increased cancer risks…
What are radionuclides’ health effects?
Contaminant / Health EffectCombined radium-226/-228 / Some people who drink water containing radium 226 or radium 228 in excess of the MCL over many years may have an increased risk of getting cancer.
(Adjusted) Gross Alpha / Some people who drink water containing alpha emitters in excess of the MCL over many years may have an increased risk of getting cancer.
Beta Particle and Photon Radioactivity / Some people who drink water containing beta particles and photon emitters in excess of the MCL over many years may have an increased risk of getting cancer.
Uranium / Exposure to uranium in drinking water may result in toxic effects to the kidney. Some people who drink water containing alpha emitters, such as uranium, in excess of the MCL over many years may have an increased risk of getting cancer.
This health effects language is not intended to catalog all possible health effects for radionuclides. Rather, it is intended to inform consumers of the most significant and probable health effects, associated with radionuclides in drinking water.
Feb 1, 2010 An Anti-Fracking Day in Court By arimoore
BACKGROUND: Schlumberger has already built and begun operating phase 1 of a 4 phase hydraulic fracturing support facility in the town of Horseheads, without going through a full environmental review or receiving all of the proper permits. The site lies above the primary aquifer for the City of Elmira and across the street from the Ridge Road Elementary School. On the site are paper bags full of toxic chemicals to be used in the hydraulic fracturing process, along with explosives and other materials. People for a Healthy Environment, a group formed by Horseheads citizens outraged by the Village Board of Trustees’“capricious and arbitrary” approval of the site plan, are asking for the temporary shutdown of the facility, pending a 12- to 18-month environmental review.
Contaminated Water Remains a Hot Topic in Midland County By Camaron Abundes
NewsWest 9
ODESSA- The worries continue to pile up for residents living off Cotton Flat Road after officials discovered hexavalent chromium contamination several weeks ago. "I am worried about it. What is it going to do to my property value and everything else," Darrell Moody, a local resident said.
On Tuesday night, residents got more bad news at a community meeting at the Midland Horseshoe.
"The plume is extensive. It's probably at least a mile long it has very very high concentrations," Bob Bowcock, lead investigator working with famed Environmental Activist Erin Brockovich, said the team has found the source of contamination.
"It's relatively simple we drew a straight line North and just followed the water and the water led us to who we are suspecting it is." Bowcock points to Schlumberger, an oil field service company. He claims Slumberger used hexavalent chromium years ago when it partnered with Dow Chemicals.
December 17th, 2010 Two new lawsuits claim fracking contaminated water wells in Texas