EPA investigators connect fracking to groundwater pollution
Federal regulators made their first-ever connection between fracking -- a controversial method of improving oil and gas production -- and drinking water pollution, according to a draft report released on Thursday.
Investigators at the Environmental Protection Agency found compounds likely associated with drilling chemicals in the groundwater under Pavillion, a small community in central Wyoming where residents say their well water reeks of chemicals. Disposal pits that held drill cuttings and frack wastewater were a big problem, leading to high concentrations of toxic benzene, xylenes and other hydrocarbons in the water supply.
"The immediate danger from fracking is much, much greater in the Wyoming case than it is in the Pennsylvania case," said Demian Saffer, an associate professor in geosciences at Penn State University. "If there is a lesson, it's the surface pits. ... Unless they're designed and cared for carefully, we know they're essentially a spill site on the surface."
Pennsylvania has been a recent hotspot for fracking because of the gas-rich Marcellus shale. State environmental regulators are reviewing the federal report with plans to make a public comment to the EPA when they finish. The findings should re-emphasize the known risks of faulty well construction, abandoned wells near new wells and above-ground storage pits, said scientists who reviewed the findings.
Industry officials have long contended that fracking is safe, but environmentalists and some residents who live near drilling sites say it has poisoned groundwater at hundreds of sites, according to news reports. Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead has already called the draft report "scientifically questionable" in a news release, saying final judgment depends on further verification.
"Environmental protection is critical to our industry," Marcellus Shale Coalition President Kathryn Klaber said in a statement e-mailed by a spokesman. "And we are confident that as the critical peer-review process moves forward, scientists and engineers on the ground in Wyoming will be able to secure more facts. However, it is entirely too early in this process, given the lack of peer-reviewed data, to arrive at any kind of absolute conclusions."
Health officials had advised Pavillion residents not to drink their water last year after the EPA found low levels of hydrocarbons in their wells and the agency was trying to find the source of those problems. EPA scientists also are doing a national study of shale fracking that includes Marcellus shale drilling in Pennsylvania and several spots where fracking allegedly contaminated water.
There are big differences between that deep-shale extraction and what drillers were doing in Pavillion, scientists said, and the EPA emphasized that the findings are specific to the Pavillion area. Fracking that occurred in Pavillion differed from fracking methods used elsewhere in regions with different geological characteristics, its officials said.
Gas drilling wells there were as shallow as 1,200 feet, maybe only 400 feet below some water wells in the area, according to the EPA report. Shale gas wells in Pennsylvania are typically more than 5,000 feet underground, several thousand feet below the state's water table.
The report also lists a litany of problems with above-ground water pits and the wells themselves. Pennsylvania has had problems with methane contamination coming from poorly constructed wells, and this case may prove to be like those, caused by error and not a process that's inherently flawed, said Mark Northam, director of the University of Wyoming's School of Energy Resources.
"It sounds very much like they've identified egregious mistakes in the drilling process itself as well as in the handling of drilling wastewater and cuttings on the surface," said former Department of Environmental Protection Secretary John Hanger. "What (EPA officials) are doing is critically important and what is very necessary is to make sure those kinds of practices are not allowed in Wyoming or anywhere else in the United States."
