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Mixed messages: a warning sign at a
fracking site in Pennsylvania.
Photo: Ostroff Law / Wikimedia Commons. |
The US's 'dash to frack' for oil or gas, which has
transformed the country's energy market, is seriously depleting and
contaminating aquifers and surface water supplies, writes Valerie Brown.
The choice facing America is plain - energy, or water?
Since the onset of the fracking boom
almost a decade ago, every state in the US has been examining its
geological resources in the hope of finding oil or gas it can access
through this extraction method.
Almost half the states are now producing at least some shale gas,
with a few - Texas, Pennsylvania, California, Colorado, North Dakota -
sitting on massive deposits. Nearly half a million wells in the US were
producing shale gas in 2012.
But while many countries now seek to bolster their economies by following the American lead in exploiting this
controversial new source of fossil fuels,
campaigners in the US are warning of serious collateral damage to the
environment: the depletion and contamination of vital water supplies.
A single 'frack' uses 5 million gallons of water
The process of fracking, short for 'hydraulic fracturing', involves
injecting water, sand and chemicals down vertical wells and along
horizontal shafts - which can be several miles long - to open up small
pores in the rock. This releases the methane for capture.
Fracking a well just once uses upwards of five million gallons of water, and each well can be fracked 18 times or more.
Texas alone used an estimated 25 billion gallons of water for fracking in 2012, according to a recent report by
Ceres, a not-for-profit group advising investors on climate change.
And where surface water is lacking, as in Texas, underground aquifers are being emptied at record rates.
While fracking's
water use still trails behind personal and agricultural uses, demand is
accelerating even while much of the US is suffering extreme drought,
which is probably caused or worsened by climate change exacerbated,
ironically, by burning fossil fuels.
The 'Halliburton loophole'
There is no overarching policy regulating how the industry uses
water. In the Energy Policy Act of 2005, a provision known as the '
Halliburton loophole'
exempts oil and gas operations from almost all federal air and water
regulations, leaving protection of these basic life necessities to the
states.
Texas does not require operators to report groundwater use, but new
regulations in California require operators to state where they will get
their water and how they will dispose of their wastewater.
Even in the face of a drought emergency, the state's well operators
still plan to take most of their water from surface sources, says Kyle
Ferrar, California state co-ordinator of the
Fractracker Alliance, a not-for-profit data analysis group.
Radioactive, toxic effluents
Disposing of the water when fracking is complete is also challenging.
The wastewater is a mixture of the injected freshwater, fracking
chemicals, and deep formation water, which is usually briny and often
mildly radioactive.
It can't be recycled for typical water uses, as few public drinking
water or sewage treatment plants are equipped to remove fracking
contaminants. In fact, some of these contaminants react with chlorine
compounds to form trihalomethanes, which can cause liver and kidney
damage.
The most reasonable wastewater solution appears to be re-using it in
subsequent fracking operations - a practice that is growing in
popularity among American well operators because it can reduce the
amount of new water required. Waste can also be injected into spent oil
and gas wells, much as CO
2 is sequestered.
The
US Environmental Protection Agency operates
an underground injection control programme, which it administers
directly in some states and allows state government to run in others.
But many operators still pump the waste into large surface ponds
lined with plastic, allowing the water to evaporate and carry some
contaminants into the atmosphere. Storm runoff can also transmit
wastewater from ponds and landfills to surface and groundwater systems.
How's this? Send the waste water in Ohio
Pennsylvania is struggling to balance its resources in the face of
the fracking boom. In 2011, the Department of Environmental Protection
asked the state's gas well operators to stop discharging waste into
surface waters.
Because Pennsylvania's geology is not conducive to stable injection
wells, operators now ship much of their wastewater next door to Ohio,
which encourages the practice as an income source.
In 2011, at least half the wastewater stored in Ohio came from out of state, according to the
Environment Ohio Research & Policy Center.
Many Ohio environmentalists object to taking other states' waste -
partly because the fracking boom has resulted in some shady practices.
Illegal dumping, contaminated aquifers
"Dumping seems to be a really ongoing problem", explains Julie Weatherington-Rice, senior scientist at
Bennett & Williams Environmental Consultants in Ohio.
"We're seeing dumping down old mineshafts and dumping on roads
where the spigot at the end of the tank is allowed to dribble all the
way to the well."
In March, a Youngstown company admitted it had dumped thousands of
gallons of waste into a stormwater sewer feeding into a river system.
Testing revealed that the waste contained benzene, which is a known
carcinogen, and toluene, a nervous system toxicant.
If concrete wellbores or seals at the wellhead are misaligned or
corroded, methane and chemicals can migrate into potable water aquifers -
something that the small town of Dimock, Pennsylvania, learned the hard
way in 2009.
Exploding wells
Most Dimock residents have individual water wells. Shortly after
Cabot Oil and Gas began fracking in the area, a resident's backyard
water well exploded.
After it was determined that Cabot's operations were the source of
the methane contamination, a consent agreement with the state required
Cabot to supply Dimock's drinking water.
But the state allowed Cabot to stop supplying water in 2011, without testing residents' well water, according to a report by
StateImpact, a project of National Public Radio stations.
Because many residents still don't have potable water as a result of
the contamination, volunteers from around the state are holding local
events to raise money to supply water to Dimock, says Karen Feridun, an
activist with
Berks Gas Truth, an anti-fracking group. The situation remains unresolved for the long term.
America faces a choice - energy or water?
Although Pennsylvania and Texas have been hit especially hard by the
effects of shale gas extraction, no part of the US is exempt.
Even the Pacific Northwest, long insulated from fossil fuel
extraction and burning by virtue of its massive hydropower projects and
deep layers of flood basalt covering any oil or gas-bearing formations,
is now vulnerable.
The region faces the prospect of liquefied natural gas (LNG)
pipelines and a massive increase in trains carrying oil and coal through
the scenic Columbia River Gorge to west coast ports for shipment to
China. LNG terminals are also being planned for gas shipment from the US
east coast to Europe.
At some point, campaigners warn, all Americans may have to choose between energy and clean water.
"Make sure [fracking's] not taking your drinking water or your
irrigation or the water that your herds need to survive", says
Weatherington-Rice.
"When this happens, you've lost that water forever."
Valerie Brown is a science writer focusing on climate change and environmental health. Based in Oregon, USA, she is a member of the National Association of Science Writers and Society of Environmental Journalists.
In 2009, Valerie received the Society of Environmental Journalists award for Outstanding Explanatory Reporting in Print for her article Environment Becomes Heredity for the Miler-McCune Center for Research, Media and Public Policy's Pacific Standard journal.
This article was originally published by Climate News Network.
