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It CAN Happen Here

1/18/2014

On Jan. 9, about 300,000 West Virginia American Water customers were left without water after a stainless steel and cement containment wall at a nearby chemical plant was breached and failed to keep a toxic chemical from contaminating their public water source, the Elk River. The spill occurred a mile upriver from the WVAW plant. The chemical, methylcyclohexane, is also used in hydraulic fracturing.

This should be a wake-up call for local residents. Trust not in steel and cement walls and casings to protect local private and public water supplies, both under and above ground, from toxic fracking chemicals. (Trust even less the plastic linings used in frac waste ponds and pits.) And don't think that just because you have “public water” that you are immune to contamination from the massive amounts of hazardous chemicals being used by the shale-gas drilling industry all around us.

While these chemicals typically compose less than 0.5% by volume of hydraulic fracturing fluid, with a three million gallon fresh water consumption rate per well per day, this could result in approximately 15,000 gallons of these chemicals being transported to, stored and mixed on one well site per day.

Don't be fooled. What happened in Charleston, W. Va. can happen here, and it can happen to you.

j.p.m.

Long-term Environmental Effects

8/24/2013

Back in the old days, when we drilled for natural gas in “conventional” shallow rock deposits, drilling and fracking for natural gas raised barely a blip on the social controversy radar. Now that those conventional deposits have been mostly depleted and we are drilling in “unconventional” deep shale deposits, using millions of gallons of water laced with a proprietary cocktail of toxic chemicals for fracking, natural gas drilling has sparked local, national and global opposition.

The reasons for worldwide fracking protests are manifold, but one area of particular concern is the likely long-term effects of unconventional drilling on groundwater aquifers.

Back in the old days of conventional drilling, it was economically feasible to capture up to 95% of the natural gas released from shallow rock deposits per well. With unconventional drilling in deep shale deposits, that figure is generally placed in the 30-70% range. Granted, 30-70% of the massive amounts of natural gas locked up in shale, combined with the number of wells being drilled, translates into an enormous amount of natural gas being captured, which is what all the recent crowing about shale gas production is about.

But not much is ever said about the 30-70% of shale gas which is released from the rock and stays in the ground. Where does it go? What does it do?

The natural gas that is released but not captured for human use is free to migrate where it will, including up the well-bore which facilitated its release, even after said well has been capped, and through whatever cracks and fissures, natural or man-made, it may find.

The gas industry would have us believe that between it and Mother Nature, the groundwater aquifers in shale country are completely protected. We are told that the layer of rock between shale and aquifer is totally and permanently impermeable. Not all geologists are in agreement on this. Seismic forces can lead to fissures where none existed previously.

But the main focus of natural gas advertising is on the layers of concrete and steel which are placed between the well-bore and the aquifer. That, we are told, will shield the aquifer from all pollution, be it methane or toxic flowback, forever. Not so. Failure of well casings to prevent leakage is figured at 6-20% from day one to year five of a well, even by industry sources.

But let's estimate the integrity of wells out 30 years, 50 years, 100 years. How well are those concrete and steel casings going to hold up? Think of your knowledge of the roads and bridges in western Pennsylvania. Steel rusts and corrodes. Concrete cracks and deteriorates. And that 30-70% of released natural gas will find those cracks and fissures eventually. Eventually there will be 100% failure of steel and concrete casings across hundreds of thousands of wells throughout Pennsylvania, throughout the Northeast, throughout the U.S., throughout the world. Aquifers will be polluted, by methane gas and by any residual toxic wastes from fracking that are not disposed of properly.

The “unconventional” wisdom of the gas industry seems to be: “Let's make a killing on the drilling now and clean up the mess later.” It may well be a mess unparalleled in the history of human existence.

Indeed, drilling is just the beginning.

j.p.m.

Natural Resources Defense Council Visits Butler Shalefields

10/19/2012

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a national environmental group, contacted MOB in August with a request to visit Butler County to see what is happening with unconventional well drilling. The President, Frances Brenenke, brought two board members and 6 staff members to Butler to see the impact toxic fracking is having on people and communities.

Two members of Marcellus Outreach Butler, Ping Pirrung and Dennis McCann, hosted a lunch at their home in Middlesex Township on August 27 for our visitors. Janet and Fred McIntyre shared how their lives have been turned upside down and their health compromised since drilling began in the Connoquenessing. Woodlands.

John Stolz, Director of the Center for Environmental Research and Education and professor of biology at Duquesne University, explained the research he has been doing with the aquifers in the Woodlands. Rich Waters, an independent videographer, showed a moving video he created of other families’ stories. The final story came from Taylor Jennings who lived across the road from the large gas processing plant on Hartmann Road near Evans City. He described the foul odors, the truck traffic and the contaminated water that he can set on fire.

At the end of the luncheon, Raina Ripple, Director of the Southwest Health Center, told the visitors that the stories of people impacted in Butler County are the same as the stories she is hearing in Washington, Greene and Fayette Counties. People are sick and living with contaminated water and breathing air that forces them to stay indoors. And what is so upsetting to her is that “no one is doing anything to help these people – not the state or local governments, not the medical profession.”

The NRDC visitors were visibly moved by what they heard and this was reinforced when they piled into cars and took a tour of the shalefields in Butler County. With Janet McIntyre and John Stolz as guides, a caravan of cars traveled down Brownsdale Road where there are 4 drilling sites within a mile radius from one another. At one site in the Woodlands, the liner from a pond which had held contaminated flowback water had been carelessly left by the side of the road. After visiting several drilling sites, a compression station and the gas processing plant, our guests had to travel south to Washington County where Ron Gulla was hosting a similar event for them the following day to show them the impacts in Southwestern PA.

What were the results of NRDC’s tours of fracking sites, like their visit to Butler County?   Check out the impressions of Frances Brenenke’s, President of NRDC, tour of western PA as captured in her blog.

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/fbeinecke/calling_for_national_fracking.html

On September 19th, NRDC launched the Community Fracking Defense Project. This new project, which is launching in five states—New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and North Carolina—will provide assistance to towns and other local governments that want added control over the siting of and/or protections against the harms of fracking in their communities.

For example, NRDC legal and policy staff, together with local partners, will:

•    Assist in drafting local laws and land use plans that control the extent of fracking within their borders and/or limit the harmful effects of fracking.

•    Work to re-assert communities’ rights to protect themselves under state law.

•    Defend relevant zoning provisions and other local laws that are challenged in court.

Kate Sidding, a NRDC attorney, filed an amicus brief in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on behalf of a number of municipalities in support of a lower court decision striking down portions of Act 13, a recently enacted Pennsylvania law that severely limits the ability of local governments to use their zoning powers to control where fracking occurs.

MOB was happy to host NRDC’s visit and is encouraged by their response and actions. We need more powerful organizations to step forward and take a stand like NRDC is doing. As more people and organizations stand up and make their voices heard, we increase our chances of stopping this destruction and getting permanent solutions for the people whose lives have been so negatively impacted.

-Dianne Arnold

Response to more Industry Spin

4/3/2012

This blog is in response to Deke Forbes' Mar. 7 Letter to the Butler Eagle, “Welcome Gas Industry.”

While it's true, as Forbes states, that hydraulic fracturing has been in use since the 1940's, the current combined technology known as “high-volume slickwater hydraulic fracturing” (google “Old and New Hydraulic Fracturing: What's the Difference?”) has been in widespread use for 10-15 years at most and has been plagued with problems throughout its short history.

To wit, the PennEnvironment Research and Policy Center has culled from PA DEP records a total of 3,355 violations of environmental laws by 64 different gas drilling companies between January 1, 2008 and December 31, 2011. Of these violations, 2,392 violations were identified as those likely to pose a direct threat to the environment and were not reporting or paperwork violations.

Another truth in Forbes' letter is that only 0.5% of fracking fluid consists of chemicals, but let's put that number into perspective. According to Dr. Simona Perry, research scientist at the Rensselaer (NY) Polytechnic Institute: “While these chemicals typically compose less than 0.5% by volume of the hydraulic fracturing fluid, with a three million gallon fresh water consumption rate per well per day, this could result in approximately 15,000 gallons of these chemicals being transported, stored and mixed on one well site per day.”

Forbes claims that many of the chemicals used in fracturing are found in common household items. True, the report “Chemicals Used in Hydraulic Fracturing” released by the U.S. House of Representatives lists instant coffee and walnut hulls as components of fracking fluid. It also lists diesel fuel, benzene and toluene. In all, 29 toxic compounds were found in 652 different fracturing products that were either 1.) known or possible carcinogens, 2.) regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act for their risks to human health or 3.) listed as hazardous air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. And then there are the undisclosed substances which the industry claims are “proprietary” or “trade secrets” – the ones that doctors aren't allowed to tell anyone about under Act 13. If they were innocuous substances, the industry would not be required to disclose them to doctors as possible causes of illness.

The “mandated concentric layers of thick-walled steel pipe and cement” that Forbes extols have been a perennial problem for the industry. Cement casing violations for the first eight months of 2011 had already exceeded the total for all of 2010, according to DEP violations data. Faulty well casings have often been implicated in drilling-related groundwater contamination, including the infamous 2009 case in Dimock Twp., Susquehanna County.

Forbes claims that these cases do not exist, but that is just not true. In May 2011 the DEP fined Chesapeake Energy $900,000 for contaminating the drinking water of 16 families in Bradford County. The DEP implicated drilling in Dimock and the EPA implicated fracking in Wyoming for groundwater contamination.

Forbes cites “misinformation ignorant of the truth” behind fears and concerns regarding shale gas drilling, but this, too, is false. The reports I have cited are reliable, and only a small sampling of all that has been published. The issues are real; the concerns are many. It is not “panic and fear-mongering,” as Forbes claims. It is seeking to inject a dose of unpleasant reality into the sugar-coated pablum being fed us by the gas industry.

j.p.m.

It CAN Happen Here

Long-term Environmental Effects

Natural Resources Defense Council Visits Butler Shalefields

Response to more Industry Spin

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