In July a hydrologist dropped a plastic sampling
pipe 300 feet down a water well in rural Sublette County, Wy. and pulled up a
load of brown oily water with a foul smell. Tests showed it contained benzene,
a chemical believed to cause aplastic anemia and leukemia, in a concentration
1,500 times the level safe for people.
The results sent shockwaves through the energy industry and state and federal
regulatory agencies.
Sublette County is the home of one of the nation’s largest natural gas
fields, and many of its 6,000 wells have undergone a process pioneered by
Halliburton called hydraulic fracturing, which shoots vast amounts of water,
sand and chemicals several miles underground to break apart rock and release
the gas. The process has been considered safe since a 2004 study by the
Environmental Protection Agency found that it posed no risk to drinking water.
After that study, Congress even exempted hydraulic fracturing from the Safe
Drinking Water Act. Today fracturing is used in 9 out of 10 natural gas wells
in the United States.
Over the last few years, however, a series of contamination incidents have
raised questions about that EPA study and ignited a debate over whether the
chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing may threaten the nation’s
increasingly precious drinking water supply.
An investigation by ProPublica, which visited Sublette County and six other
contamination sites, found that water contamination in drilling areas around
the country is far more prevalent than the EPA asserts. Our investigation also
found that the 2004 EPA study was not as conclusive as it claimed to be. A
close review shows that the body of the study contains damaging information
that wasn’t mentioned in the conclusion. In fact, the study foreshadowed
many of the problems now being reported across the country.
The contamination in Sublette County is significant because it is the first to
be documented by a federal agency, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. But more
than 1,000 other cases of contamination have been documented by courts and
state and local governments in Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Ohio and
Pennsylvania. In one case a house exploded after hydraulic fracturing created
underground passageways and methane seeped into the residential water supply.
In other cases the contamination occurred not from actual drilling below
ground, but on the surface, where accidental spills and leaky tanks, trucks and
waste pits allowed benzene and other chemicals to leach into streams, springs
and water wells
It is difficult to pinpoint the exact cause of each contamination, or measure
its spread across the environment accurately, because the precise nature and
concentrations of the chemicals used by industry are considered trade secrets.
Not even the EPA knows exactly what’s in the drilling fluids. And that,
EPA scientists say, makes it impossible to vouch for the safety of the drilling
process or precisely track its effects.
“I am looking more and more at water quality issues… because of a
growing concern,” said Joyel Dhieux, a drilling field inspector who handles
environmental review at the EPA’s regional offices in Denver. “But
if you don’t know what’s in it I don’t think it’s
possible.”
Toxic Brew?
Of the 300-odd compounds that private researchers and the Bureau of Land
Management suspect are being used, 65 are listed as hazardous by the federal
government. Many of the rest are unstudied and unregulated, leaving a gaping
hole in the nation’s scientific understanding of how widespread drilling
might affect water resources.
Industry representatives maintain that the drilling fluids are mostly made up
of non-toxic, even edible substances, and that when chemicals are used, they
are just a tiny fraction of the overall mix. They say that some information is
already available, and that releasing specific details would only frighten and
confuse the public, and would come at great expense to the industry’s
competitive business.
“Halliburton's proprietary fluids are the result of years of extensive
research, development testing,” said Diana Gabriel, a company spokeswoman,
in an email response. “We have gone to great lengths to ensure that we
are able to protect the fruits of the company's research…. We could
lose our competitive advantage.”
“It is like Coke protecting its syrup formula for many of these
service companies,” said Scott Rotruck, vice president of corporate
development at Chesapeake Energy, the nation’s largest gas driller, which
has been asked by New York State regulators to disclose the chemicals it uses.
Thanks in large part to hydraulic fracturing, natural gas drilling has vastly
expanded across the United States. In 2007 there were 449,000 gas wells in 32
states, thirty percent more than in 2000. By 2012 the nation could be drilling
32,000 new wells a year, including some in the watershed that provides drinking
water to New York City and Philadelphia, some five percent of the
nation’s population.
The rush to drill comes in part because newly identified gas reserves offer the
nation an opportunity to wean itself from oil.
Natural gas, as T. Boone Pickens said recently, is “cleaner,
cheaper… abundant, and ours.” Burning gas, used primarily to heat
homes and make electricity, emits 23% less carbon dioxide than burning oil. Gas
is the country’s second-largest domestic energy resource, after coal.
The debate over water arises at a critical time. In his last days in office
President George W. Bush has pushed through lease sales and permits for new
drilling on thousands of acres of federal land. President-elect Barak Obama has
identified the leasing rush as one of his first pressing matters and is already
examining whether to try to reverse Bush’s expansion of drilling in Utah.
State regulators and environmentalists have also begun pressing the gas
industry to disclose the chemicals they use and urging Congress to revisit the
environmental exemptions hydraulic fracturing currently enjoys.
But in the meantime, the drilling continues.
In September the Bureau of Land Management approved plans for 4,400 new wells
in Sublette County, despite the unresolved water issues. Tests there showed
contamination in 88 of the 220 wells examined, and the plume stretched over 28
miles. When researchers returned to take more samples they couldn’t even
open the water wells; monitors showed they contained so much flammable gas that
they were likely to explode.
Dirty Water
News that water in Sublette County was contaminated was especially shocking
because the area is so rural that until a few years ago cattle were still run
down Main Street in Pinedale, the nearest town to the gas field. The
county is roughly the size of the state of Connecticut but has fewer people
than many New York city blocks. With so little industry, there was little
besides drilling that people could blame for the contamination.
“When you just look at the data… the aerial extent of the benzene
contamination, you just say . . . . This is huge,” says Oberley, who is
charged with water study in the area. “You’ve got benzene in a
useable aquifer and nobody is able to verbalize well, using factual information,
how the benzene got there.”
Other signs of contamination were also worrying residents. Independent tests in
several private drinking wells adjacent to the anticline drilling showed
fluoride -- which is listed in Halliburton’s hydraulic fracturing patent
applications and can cause bone damage at high levels -- at almost three times
the EPA’s maximum limit.
“We need the gas now more than ever,” says Fred Sanchez, whose
water well is among those with high levels of fluoride. But gazing off his deck
at the prized trout waters of the New Fork River, he wonders whether drilling
has gone too far. “You just can’t helter skelter go drilling just
because you have the right to do it. It’s not morally right to do it.
There should be some checks and balances.”
Further east, in the town of Clark, the Wyoming Department of Environmental
Quality found benzene in a residential well after an underground well casing
cracked. In Pavilion, another small town, a series of drinking water wells
began running with dark, smelly water, a problem a state official speculated
might be linked to drilling nearby.
“There is no direct evidence that the gas drilling has impacted
it,” says Mark Thiesse, a groundwater supervisor for the Wyoming DEQ.
“But it sure makes you wonder. It just seems pretty circumstantial that
it’s happening.”
On federal land, which is where most of the Sublette County wells are located,
the BLM governs leasing and permitting for gas development, with secondary
oversight from the state and only advisory input from the EPA. When the
contaminated water results were first reported, both the BLM and the state
downplayed their significance.
The EPA’s regional office in Denver sharply disagreed. But because it has
only an advisory role in the federal review process, and hydraulic fracturing
is exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act, there was little the EPA could
do. It rebuked the BLM in a strongly worded letter and gave the development
plans in Sublette County a rare “unsatisfactory” rating. It also
recommended that the project be stopped until further scientific study could be
done.
The BLM, backed by a powerful business lobby, ignored that recommendation. Why
do a study if you can’t prove something is wrong, industry argued.
Drilling operators said the benzene came from leaky equipment on the trucks
that haul water and waste to and from the drill sites – and in one or two
cases, EPA scientists say that was likely. One theory put forth by the BLM
blamed the benzene contamination on malicious environmentalists “hostile
to gas production,” an accusation the agency later said it had no
evidence of.
Thiesse, the DEQ supervisor, recounted a meeting where the debate
dwindled down to semantics: “I called it contamination, and somebody said
is it really contamination? What if it’s naturally occurring?”
The industry insisted, as it has for years, that hydraulic fracturing itself
had never contaminated a well, pointing to an anecdotal survey done a decade
ago by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, a coalition of state
regulatory bodies and, again, to the 2004 study by the EPA.
“You have intervening rock in between the area that you are fracturing
and the areas that provide water supplies. The notion that fractures are going
to migrate up to those shallow formations -- there is just no evidence of that
happening,” says Ken Wonstolen, an attorney representing the Colorado Oil
and Gas Association who has worked with the petroleum industry for two decades.
“I think fracturing has been given a clean bill of health.”
A flurry of mail from industry representatives to the BLM said the sort of
study the EPA wanted would needlessly slow production. “BLM’s
restrictions on drilling in the Intermountain west have seriously reduced the
supply of natural gas reaching consumers,” wrote the American Gas
Association.
Washington leaned down on Pinedale too. The message, according to Chuck Otto,
field manager for the BLM: Make this happen by November. The 4,400 new wells
were approved in September without any deadline for cleaning up the
contamination or further research. State regulators told ProPublica that
hydraulic fracturing was not even considered as a possible cause.
“The BLM looks at it more as a business driven process,” Otto said.
“It's not like I have Vice President Cheney calling me up and saying you
need to get this done. But there definitely is that unspoken pressure…
mostly from the companies, to develop their resources as they'd like to see
fit… to get things done and get them done pretty fast.”
Flawed Report?
The 2004 EPA study is routinely used to dismiss complaints that hydraulic
fracturing fluids might be responsible for the water problems in places like
Pinedale. The study concluded that hydraulic fracturing posed “no
threat” to underground drinking water because fracturing fluids
aren’t necessarily hazardous, can’t travel far underground, and
that there is "no unequivocal evidence" of a health risk.
But documents obtained by ProPublica show that the EPA negotiated directly with
the gas industry before finalizing those conclusions, and then ignored evidence
that fracking might cause exactly the kinds of water problems now being
recorded in drilling states.
Buried deep within the 424-page report are statements explaining that fluids
migrated unpredictably -- through different rock layers, and to greater
distances than previously thought -- in as many as half the cases studied in
the United States. The EPA identified some of the chemicals as biocides and
lubricants that “can cause kidney, liver, heart, blood, and brain damage
through prolonged or repeated exposure.” It found that as much as a third
of injected fluids, benzene in particular, remains in the ground after drilling
and is “likely to be transported by groundwater.”
The EPA began preparing its report on hydraulic fracturing in 2000, after an
Alabama court forced the agency to investigate fracturing-related water
contamination there under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Political pressures were
also mounting for the agency to clarify its position on fracturing. The 2001
Energy Policy, drafted in part by the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, a
former Halliburton CEO, noted that “the gas flow rate may be increased as
much as 20-fold by hydraulic fracturing.” While the EPA was still working
on its report, legislation was being crafted to exempt hydraulic fracturing
from the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Before that happened, however, the EPA sought an agreement with the three
largest hydraulic fracturing companies, including Halliburton, to stop using
diesel fuel in fracturing fluids. Diesel fuel contains benzene, and such a move
would help justify the report’s conclusion that no further studies were
needed.
“Our draft is pending release,” a senior EPA official wrote to
Halliburton’s counsel in an August 2003 email. “It would certainly
strengthen our preliminary position not to continue studying the issue…
if the service companies were able to remove diesel all together, or even move
in that direction.”
In a subsequent meeting, an EPA official’s handwritten notes show that a
Halliburton attorney asked federal officials: “are we willing to
entertain regulatory relief in other areas; eg: fewer inspections?”
“Willing…,” was the reply from Tracy Mehan, then the
EPA’s assistant administrator for water.
A Halliburton spokesperson declined to comment on this exchange.
The diesel agreement was signed. But according to the EPA, it isn’t
legally enforceable and the agency hasn’t checked to see if diesel is
still being used. Furthermore, the agreement applies only to fluids used in a
specific kind of gas drilling, not all drilling across the United States.
Mehan did not return calls for comment about his negotiations. Roy Simon,
associate chief of the Drinking Water Protection Division’s Prevention Branch
at EPA headquarters in Washington says the “EPA still stands by the
findings outlined in the (2004) report.”
But one of the report’s three main authors, Jeffrey Jollie, an EPA
hydrogeologist, now cautions that the research has been misconstrued by
industry. The study focused solely on the effect hydraulic fracturing has on
drinking water in coal bed methane deposits, typically shallow formations where
gas is embedded in coal. It didn’t consider the impact of above-ground
drilling or of drilling in geologic formations deep underground, where many of
the large new gas reserves are being developed today.
"It was never intended to be a broad, sweeping study," Jollie says.
"I don’t think we ever characterized it that way."
Nevertheless, a few months after the report’s release, the sweeping 2005
Energy Policy Act was passed. Almost no attention was paid to the three
paragraphs that stripped the federal government of most of its authority to
monitor and regulate hydraulic fracturing’s impact on the environment. By
default, that responsibility would now fall to the states.
“That pretty much closed the door,” said Greg Oberley, an EPA
groundwater specialist working in the western drilling states. “So we
absolutely do not look at fracking... under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
It’s not done.”
Dangerous Ground
On April 30, 2001 a small drilling company now owned by the Canadian gas
company Encana fractured a well at the top of Dry Hollow, a burgeoning field in
western Colorado that has seen one of the fastest rates of energy development
in the nation.
The well sat at the end of a dirt drive among pinion pines and juniper at the
crest of a small mesa overlooking the Colorado River. It was also less than
1,000 feet from the log farmhouse where Larry and Laura Amos lived.
As usual that day, water trucks lined up like toy soldiers on the three acre
dirt pad cleared for drilling just across the Amos’ property line. They
pumped 82,000 gallons of fluids at 3,600 pounds of pressure thousands of feet
into the drill hole.
Suddenly the Amos’ drinking water well exploded like a Yellowstone
geyser, firing its lid into the air and spewing mud and gray fizzing water high
into the sky. State inspectors tested the Amos well for methane and found lots
of it. They did not find benzene or gasoline derivatives and they did not test
fracking fluids, state records show, because they didn’t know what to
test for.
The Amoses were told that methane occurs naturally and is harmless. Inspectors
warned them to keep the windows open and vent the basement, but they were never
advised to protect themselves or their infant daughter from the water. It
wasn’t until three years later, when Laura Amos was diagnosed with a rare
adrenal tumor, that she started challenging the state about the mysterious
chemicals that might have been in her well.
Much of what is known about the makeup of drilling fluids comes from the
personal investigations of Theo Colborn, an independent Colorado-based
scientist who specializes in low-dose effects of chemicals on human health and
has testified before Congress on drilling issues. Although she opposes
drilling, her research is referenced by scientists at the EPA, at the United
States Geological Survey, and at state-level regulatory agencies and is widely
believed to be the most comprehensive information available.
Spurred by reports of water contamination in Colorado, Colborn
painstakingly gathered the names of chemicals from shipping manifests that
trucks must carry when they haul hazardous materials for oil and gas servicing
companies. Whenever an accident occurred -- a well spill in Colorado, or an
explosion at a drilling site in Wyoming – she took water and soil samples
and tested them for contaminants, adding the results to her list.
Industry officials say they use such tiny amounts of chemicals in the drilling
– of the million or so gallons of liquid pumped into a well, only a
fraction of one percent are chemicals – that they are diluted beyond
harmful levels. But on some fracturing sites that tiny percentage translates to
more than 10,000 gallons of chemicals, and Colborn believes even very low doses
of some of the compounds can damage kidney and immune systems and affect
reproductive development.
In Garfield County there were signs this was already happening. Animals that
had produced offspring like clockwork each spring stopped delivering healthy
calves, according to Liz Chandler, a veterinarian in Rifle, Co. A bull went
sterile, and a herd of beef cows stopped going into heat, as did pigs. In the
most striking case, sheep bred on an organic dairy farm had a rash of
inexplicable still births – all in close proximity to drilling waste
pits, where wastewater that includes fracturing fluids is misted into the air
for evaporation.
Among Colborn’s list of nearly 300 chemicals – some known to be
cancer causing -- is a clear, odorless surfactant called 2-BE, used in foaming
agents to lubricate the flow of fracking fluids down in the well. Colborn told
Congress in 2007 that it can cause adrenal tumors.
Laura Amos, who suffered from such a tumor, pressed Encana on whether the
compound had been used to fracture the well near her house. For months the
company denied 2-BE had been used. But Amos persisted, arguing her case on TV
and radio. In January 2005 her lawyers obtained documents from Encana showing
that 2-BE had, fact, been used in at least one adjacent well.
“Our daughter was only six months old when fracturing blew up our water
well,” Amos wrote in a letter to the Oil and Gas Accountability Project,
an anti-drilling group. “I bathed her in that water every day. I also
continued breast-feeding her for 18 more months... If there was a chemical in
my body causing my tumor, she was exposed to it as well.”
In 2006 Amos stopped talking to the media after she accepted a reported
multi-million settlement from Encana. The company was fined $266,000 for
“failure to protect water-bearing formations and … to contain a
release of (gas production) waste.” Yet investigators also concluded,
without further explanation, that hydraulic fracturing was not to blame.
Asked about the Amos case and the rash of complaints in the area, an Encana
spokesman said the company disagreed with the state’s judgment on the
Amos case and emphasized that there was no proof that fracturing had caused the
explosion. Environmentalists had created a climate of fear in the community, he
added.
“The concerns residents have expressed – and some of them are
legitimate and heartfelt concerns – a lot of them are out of
misinformation,” said Doug Hock. “Just because chemicals are used
at a site does not create risk. We have a proven process that helps us ensure
that there are no pathways.”
Deep Impact
In the past 12 months a flurry of documented incidents has made such reports
harder to dismiss.
“We’ve kind of reached the tipping point,” says Dhieux, the
EPA inspector in Denver. “The impacts are there.”
In December 2007 a house in Bainbridge, Ohio exploded in a fiery ball.
Investigators discovered that the neighborhood’s tap water contained so
much methane that the house ignited. A study released this month concluded that
pressure caused by hydraulic fracturing pushed the gas, which is found
naturally thousands of feet below, through a system of cracks into the
groundwater aquifer.
In February a frozen 200-foot waterfall was discovered on the side of a massive
cliff near Parachute, Co. According to the state, 1.6 million gallons of
fracturing fluids had leaked from a waste pit and been transported by
groundwater, where it seeped out of the cliff. In a separate incident nearby in
June benzene was discovered in a place called Rock Spring. Three weeks later a
rancher was hospitalized after he drank well water out of his own tap. Tests
showed benzene in his water, and the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation
Commission cited four gas operators, not knowing which one was responsible for
the spill. Colorado state records show more than 1,500 spills since 2003, in
which time the rate of drilling increased 50 percent. In 2008 alone records
show more than 206 spills, 48 relating to water contamination.
As more contamination cases are documented, state governments and Washington
are being pressured to toughen oversight. One aim is to institutionalize
the precautionary measures some companies are already experimenting with.
When ProPublica visited an Encana drilling operation in Pinedale, for example,
the company was placing its drill rigs on raised platforms to protect the
underlying landscape and using rubber pools to catch spilled fluids before they
could seep into the soil. Drilling companies in New Mexico have begun
storing waste in enclosed steel tanks rather than open pits.
Such efforts can add 10 percent to drilling costs, but they also dramatically
lessen the environmental risks, an Encana employee said.
Government Oversight
State regulators and Washington lawmakers though are increasingly impatient
with voluntary measures and are seeking to toughen their oversight. In
September U.S. Congresswoman Diana DeGette and Congressman John Salazar,
from Colorado, and Congressman Maurice Hinchey, from New York, introduced a
bill that would undo the exemptions in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. Wyoming,
widely known for supporting energy development, has begun updating its
regulations at a local level, as have parts of Texas.
New Mexico has placed a one year moratorium on drilling around Santa Fe, after
a survey found hundreds of cases of water contamination from unlined pits where
fracking fluids and other drilling wastes are stored. “Every rule
that we have improved . . . industry has taken us to court on,” said
Joanna Prukop, New Mexico’s cabinet secretary for Energy Minerals and
Natural Resources. “It’s industry that is fighting us on every
front as we try to improve our government enforcement, protection, and compliance…
We wear Kevlar these days.”
The most stringent reforms are being pursued in Colorado. Last year it began a
top-to-bottom re-write of its regulations, including a proposal to require
companies to disclose the exact makeup of their fracking fluids – the
toughest such rule in the nation.
In mid August the Colorado debate intensified when news broke that Cathy Behr,
an emergency room nurse in Durango, CO, had almost died after treating a
wildcatter who had been splashed in a fracking fluid spill at a BP natural gas
rig. Behr stripped the man and stuffed his clothes into plastic bags while the
hospital sounded alarms and locked down the ER. The worker was released. But a
few days later Behr lay in critical condition facing multiple organ failure.
Her doctors searched for details that could save their patient. The substance
was a drill stimulation fluid called ZetaFlow, but the only information the rig
workers provided was a vague Material Safety Data Sheet, a form required by
OSHA. Doctors wanted to know precisely what chemicals make up ZetaFlow and in
what concentration. But the MSDS listed that information as proprietary.
Behr’s doctor learned, weeks later, after Behr had begun to recuperate,
what ZetaFlow was made of, but he was sworn to secrecy by the chemical’s
manufacturer and couldn’t even share the information with his patient.
News of Behr’s case spread to New York and Pennsylvania, amplifying the
cry for disclosure of drilling fluids. The energy industry braced for a fight.
“A disclosure to members of the public of detailed
information… would result in an unconstitutional taking of [Halliburton’s]
property,” the company told Colorado’s Oil and Gas Conservation
Commission. “A number of studies have concluded there are no confirmed
incidents of contamination of drinking water aquifers due to stimulation
operations… EPA reached precisely this conclusion after undertaking an
extensive study.”
Then Halliburton fired a major salvo: If lawmakers forced the company to
disclose its recipes, the letter stated, it “will have little choice but
to pull its proprietary products out of Colorado.” The company’s
attorneys warned that if the three big fracking companies left, they would take
some $29 billion in future gas-related tax and royalty revenue with them over
the next decade.
In August the industry struck a compromise by agreeing to reveal the chemicals
in fracturing fluids to health officials and regulators -- but the agreement
applies only to chemicals stored in 50 gallon drums or larger. As a practical
matter, drilling workers in Colorado and Wyoming said in interviews that the
fluids are often kept in smaller quantities. That means at least some of the
ingredients won’t be disclosed.
“They’ll never get it,” says Bruce Baizel, a Colorado attorney
with the Oil and Gas Accountability Project, about the states’ quest for
information. “Not unless they are willing to go through a lawsuit. When
push comes to shove Halliburton is there with its attorneys.”
Asked for comment, Halliburton would only say that its business depended on
protecting such information. Schlumberger and BJ Services, the two other
largest fracturing companies, did not return calls for comment.
Lee Fuller, vice-president for government relations at The Independent
Petroleum Association of America, said the oil and gas industry’s
reluctance to release information about drilling chemicals is to be expected.
"These operations are ones where companies have spent millions of
dollars," he says. "They are not going to want to give up that
competitive advantage. So I would fully expect that they will try to protect
that right as long as they possibly can."
Abraham Lustgarten is an investigative
reporter for ProPublica,
an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces journalism in the
public interest.
