If you had to choose between oil and water, one or the other, which would you choose? Living without oil or natural gas wouldn’t be fun, but you wouldn’t live at all without drinkable water. Which raises another question: Why is Exxon’s huge bet on natural gas drilling that may widely contaminate U.S. drinking water being so widely praised, with so little examination? It’s a combination of media that tend to lump all natural gas together, and gigantic regulatory loopholes that protect Exxon and other shale-gas drillers from even telling us what they’re putting into our water.
It’s true that natural gas burns cleaner than oil, and much cleaner than coal. Until recently, most natural gas was relatively easy to extract from underground pockets that were often associated with conventional oil wells. But what Exxon is betting on with its purchase this month of XTO Energy is vast deposits of natural gas trapped in deep shale formations, mostly from New York to Tennessee and in the Rocky Mountain states. Extracting it requires deep drilling, plus millions of gallons of water and a chemical stew.
Exxon is also betting that it can stop federal regulation to protect drinking water from these new kinds of natural gas drilling.
To get out shale gas, drillers inject high-pressure streams of water laced with chemicals (including carcinogenic formaldehyde and benzene) deep underground to fracture the shale and release the natural gas. Populated areas near the new drilling fields are finding their water supplies ruined by chemical contamination. Coincidence? Ony the drilling companies think so.
We know about the growing water contamination largely because of one dogged reporter, Abrahm Lustgarten of the nonprofit investigative group ProPublica. His hard-hitting series on shale-fracture drilling added a new chapter this week, describing how the wells use far more water than they used to, and are leaving behind far more chemical waste than they previously admitted:
For more than a decade the energy industry has steadfastly argued
before courts, Congress and the public that the federal law protecting
drinking water should not be applied to hydraulic fracturing, the
industrial process that is essential to extracting the nation’s vast
natural gas reserves. In 2005 Congress, persuaded, passed a law
prohibiting such regulation.Now an important part of that argument — that most of the millions of
gallons of toxic chemicals that drillers inject underground are removed
for safe disposal, and are not permanently discarded inside the earth —
does not apply to drilling in many of the nation’s booming new gas
fields.Three company spokesmen and a regulatory official said in separate
interviews with ProPublica that as much as 85 percent of the fluids
used during hydraulic fracturing is being left underground after wells
are drilled in the Marcellus Shale, the massive gas deposit that
stretches from New York to Tennessee.That means that for each modern gas well drilled in the Marcellus and
places like it, more than three million gallons of chemically tainted
wastewater could be left in the ground forever. Drilling companies say
that chemicals make up less than 1 percent of that fluid. But by
volume, those chemicals alone still amount to 34,000 gallons in a
typical well.These disclosures raise new questions about why the Safe Drinking Water
Act, the federal law that regulates fluids injected underground so they
don’t contaminate drinking water aquifers, should not apply to
hydraulic fracturing, and whether the thinking behind Congress’ 2005
vote to shield drilling from regulation is still valid.
It was also Lustgarten who exposed another key loophole: Drillers don’t even have to disclose what chemicals they’re pumping, making it all but impossible for outraged citizens from Pennslyvania to Colorado to prove the precise connection between new nearby wells and their loss of water that’s safe to drink or even bathe in. In some cases, drillers are providing residents with bottled or tanked water, but claim it’s only out of neighborliness and charity.
The White House has asked the Environmental Protection Agency to go back and re-study the water risks of shale fracturing. But neither the EPA nor Congress is exactly leaping to hold the drillers accountable. Exxon’s involvement will only make it harder–there’s a clause in its contract to purchase XTO saying that any expensive regulation could void the deal.
So thanks to ProPublica for exposing what shale fracture drilling could do to our increasingly scarce clean water, and keeping the issue alive. But I hope the rest of the major media got lumps of coal in their stockings for spurning the chance to spread the details of the story and kick Congress in the butt.