December 28, 2009: New gas wells, more chemicals:

For more than a decade, the energy industry has steadfastly argued 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 passed a law prohibiting such regulation.

Now it appears that 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 corporate 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 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 3 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 should not apply to hydraulic fracturing and whether the thinking behind Congress' 2005 vote to shield drilling from regulation is still valid.

The federal Safe Drinking Water law regulates fluids injected underground so they don't contaminate drinking water aquifers.

When lawmakers approved the exemption it was generally accepted that only about 30 percent of the fluids stayed in the ground. At the time, fracturing was also used in far fewer wells than it is today and required far less fluid. Ninety percent of the nation's wells now rely on the process, which is widely credited for making it financially feasible to tap into the Marcellus Shale and other new gas deposits.

Congress is considering a bill that would repeal the exemption, and has directed the Environmental Protection Agency to undertake a fresh study of how hydraulic fracturing may affect drinking water supplies.

But the government faces stiff pressure from the energy industry to maintain the status quo - in which gas drilling is regulated state by state - as companies race to exploit the nation's vast shale deposits and meet the growing demand for cleaner fuel. Just this month, Exxon said it would spend some $31 billion to buy XTO Energy, a company that controls substantial gas reserves in the Marcellus - but only on the condition that Congress doesn't enact laws on fracturing that make drilling "commercially impracticable."

During hydraulic fracturing, drillers use combinations of some of the 260 chemical additives associated with the process, plus large amounts of water and sand, to break rock and release gas. Benzene and formaldehyde, both known carcinogens, are among the substances that are commonly found.

If another industry proposed injecting chemicals - or even salt water - underground for disposal, the EPA would require it to conduct a geological study to make sure the ground can hold those fluids without leaking and to follow construction standards when building the well. In some cases the EPA would also establish a monitoring system to track what happens as the well ages.

But because hydraulic fracturing is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act, it doesn't necessarily have to conform to these federal standards. Instead, oversight of the drilling chemicals and the injection process has been left to the states, some of which regulate parts of the process while others do not.

Last week, New York City joined a coalition of environmental groups in calling for Gov. David Paterson to scrap New York's proposed rules on natural gas drilling and start over. The city Department of Environmental Protection said the state's proposed rule book on gas drilling "does not adequately address the risks of drilling in the New York City watershed, which supplies drinking water for nine million New Yorkers."

EPA officials maintained in 2005, and say now, that the volume of fluids left underground had little to do with its opinion that hydraulic fracturing for gas wells is not the same as underground injection. They say that distinction is because the primary function of the two types of wells is different: Gas wells are for production processes, while most EPA-regulated underground injection wells are intended for storage.

But Stephen Heare, director of the EPA's Drinking Water Protection Division in Washington, said that both the circumstances and the drilling technology have evolved. When asked to explain how hydraulic fracturing today is different from other forms of underground injection, he said the bottom line was simple: "If you are emplacing fluid, it does not matter whether you are recovering 30 percent or 65 percent of it; if you are emplacing fluids that is underground injection," Heare said. "The simple explanation for why hydraulic fracturing is different from other injection activities," he said, is that hydraulic fracturing "is exempt from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act."

Gas industry officials say the amount of fluids they leave behind in their wells should have no bearing on whether hydraulic fracturing is regulated by the federal government. What's important is managing the risk, says the Independent Petroleum Association's Lee Fuller. He says that's a job the industry is doing well without additional oversight.

"You are wrapping yourself around a distinction of whether something should or should not be regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act as opposed to whether something does or does not pose an environmental risk," said Fuller. Despite numerous reports of contamination in drilling areas, he said, the fracturing process has never been conclusively proven to be the cause.

Regulation, Fuller said, "may shut down natural gas drilling for a long time, but it is not going to make the environment any better."

Abrahm Lustgarten is a reporter for ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit news organization that produces investigative journalism.

Times Union December 28, 2009 front page, By ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN ProPublica

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