Tag Archives: benzene

Myths in the Public Relations Messages from the Gas Industry

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Source : FrackCheckWV
by Duane Nichols on 12.20.2011

Four myths frequently reported by the gas industry were recently described by Professor Anthony Ingraffea, who is a Faculty Fellow at the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell University:

Myth 1. Fracking is a 60-year-old, safe, well proven technology – -

Yes, fracking is 60 years old. But using this shorthand obscures the truth that what’s at issue here isn’t really just fracking. It’s the entire process of coaxing gas from shale using high-volume, slickwater fracking with long laterals from clustered, multi-well pads. Used together, they form a new process, having been introduced about five six years ago, the jury is still very much out on its safety.

Myth 2. Fluid migration from faulty wells is rare – – -

Fluid migration is not rare. For example, industry researchers Watson and Bachu, in a Society of Petroleum Engineers paper in 2009, examined 352,000 Canadian wells and found sustained casing pressure and gas migration. They found that about 12 per cent of newer wells leaked, considerably more than older wells. Also, EPA found benzene, methane and chemicals in water-monitoring wells in Pavilion, Wyoming.

Myth 3. The use of clustered, multi-well drilling pads reduces surface impacts – – -

Such pad sites are large and growing, up to 10 acres or more. Newer sites, in Canada, are bigger than 50 acres, and each will leave behind clusters of wellheads and holding tanks for decades. Cluster drilling facilitates and prolongs intense industrialization and leaves a larger, more concentrated, and very long-term footprint, not a smaller and shorter one.

Myth 4. Natural gas is a “clean” fossil fuel – – -

The newest evidence here is discouraging. NASA climate scientist Drew Shindell’s work, published in Science, shows that methane (i.e. natural gas) is 105 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming contributor over a 20-year time horizon, and 33 times more powerful over a century. Unfortunately, unconventional gas drilling techniques actually leak more methane than conventional ones. Leakage happens routinely during regular drilling, fracking and flowback operations, liquid unloading, processing, and along pipelines and at storage facilities.

Other myths were also mentioned in the article: “There are plenty of other myths swirling around this debate which require analysis: local job-creation versus the reality of imported expertise from Oklahoma and Texas; development of a home-grown resource versus selling gas on the world markets; revitalized, vibrant local economies versus boom-and-bust syndromes of strangled small business investment and profits sent to Norway or China; natural gas as a short-term bridge fuel to renewables, versus an impediment to developing the long-term sustainable energy future.

EPA Finds Compound Used in Fracking in Wyoming Aquifer

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by Abrahm Lustgarten
ProPublica, Nov. 10, 2011

As the country awaits results from a nationwide safety study on the natural gas drilling process of fracking, a separate government investigation into contamination in a place where residents have long complained that drilling fouled their water has turned up alarming levels of underground pollution.

A pair of environmental monitoring wells drilled deep into an aquifer in Pavillion, Wyo., contain high levels of cancer-causing compounds and at least one chemical commonly used in hydraulic fracturing, according to new water test results released yesterday by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The findings are consistent with water samples the EPA has collected from at least 42 homes in the area since 2008, when ProPublica began reporting on foul water and health concerns in Pavillion and the agency started investigating reports of contamination there.

Last year — after warning residents not to drink or cook with the water and to ventilate their homes when they showered — the EPA drilled the monitoring wells to get a more precise picture of the extent of the contamination.

The Pavillion area has been drilled extensively for natural gas over the last two decades and is home to hundreds of gas wells. Residents have alleged for nearly a decade that the drilling — and hydraulic fracturing in particular — has caused their water to turn black and smell like gasoline. Some residents say they suffer neurological impairment, loss of smell, and nerve pain they associate with exposure to pollutants.

The gas industry — led by the Canadian company EnCana, which owns the wells in Pavillion — has denied that its activities are responsible for the contamination. EnCana has, however, supplied drinking water to residents.

The information released yesterday by the EPA was limited to raw sampling data: The agency did not interpret the findings or make any attempt to identify the source of the pollution. From the start of its investigation, the EPA has been careful to consider all possible causes of the contamination and to distance its inquiry from the controversy around hydraulic fracturing.

Still, the chemical compounds the EPA detected are consistent with those produced from drilling processes, including one — a solvent called 2-Butoxyethanol (2-BE) — widely used in the process of hydraulic fracturing. The agency said it had not found contaminants such as nitrates and fertilizers that would have signaled that agricultural activities were to blame.

The wells also contained benzene at 50 times the level that is considered safe for people, as well as phenols — another dangerous human carcinogen — acetone, toluene, naphthalene and traces of diesel fuel.

The EPA said the water samples were saturated with methane gas that matched the deep layers of natural gas being drilled for energy. The gas did not match the shallower methane that the gas industry says is naturally occurring in water, a signal that the contamination was related to drilling and was less likely to have come from drilling waste spilled above ground.

EnCana has recently agreed to sell its wells in the Pavillion area to Texas-based oil and gas company Legacy Reserves for a reported $45 million, but has pledged to continue to cooperate with the EPA’s investigation. EnCana bought many of the wells in 2004, after the first problems with groundwater contamination had been reported.

The EPA’s research in Wyoming is separate from the agency’s ongoing national study of hydraulic fracturing’s effect on water supplies, and is being funded through the Superfund cleanup program.

The EPA says it will release a lengthy draft of the Pavillion findings, including a detailed interpretation of them, later this month.

…Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers

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A thorough article from the NY Times on contaminated water (from drilling) in public water sources.
Quoting from the article:

“…Dangers to the environment and health are greater than previously understood.”

“With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself.”

“The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle”

“…Radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways.”

“Drillers trucked at least half of this waste to public sewage treatment plants in Pennsylvania in 2008 and 2009, according to state officials. Some of it has been sent to other states, including New York and West Virginia.”

“Gas has seeped into underground drinking-water supplies in at least five states, including Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and West Virginia, and residents blamed natural-gas drilling.

Air pollution caused by natural-gas drilling is a growing threat, too. Wyoming, for example, failed in 2009 to meet federal standards for air quality for the first time in its history partly because of the fumes containing benzene and toluene from roughly 27,000 wells, the vast majority drilled in the past five years.”

“In Texas, which now has about 93,000 natural-gas wells, up from around 58,000 a dozen years ago, a hospital system in six counties with some of the heaviest drilling said in 2010 that it found a 25 percent asthma rate for young children, more than three times the state rate of about 7 percent.”

“Smelling like raw sewage mixed with gasoline, drilling-waste pits, some as large as a football field, sit close to homes.”

“More than 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater was produced by Pennsylvania wells over the past three years, far more than has been previously disclosed. Most of this water — enough to cover Manhattan in three inches — was sent to treatment plants not equipped to remove many of the toxic materials in drilling waste.”

“Of more than 179 wells producing wastewater with high levels of radiation, at least 116 reported levels of radium or other radioactive materials 100 times as high as the levels set by federal drinking-water standards. At least 15 wells produced wastewater carrying more than 1,000 times the amount of radioactive elements considered acceptable.”

“A confidential industry study from 1990, conducted for the American Petroleum Institute, concluded that “using conservative assumptions,” radium in drilling wastewater dumped off the Louisiana coast posed “potentially significant risks” of cancer for people who eat fish from those waters regularly.”

Officials charge Gas Drilling Company with contaminating the Aquifer

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(CBS/AP) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued an emergency order against a Texas gas driller Tuesday, accusing the company of contaminating an aquifer and giving it 48 hours to provide clean drinking water to affected residents and begin taking steps to resolve the problem….

…The EPA inspected the wells with the commission, Armendariz said, and found high levels of explosive methane, as well as other contaminants, including cancer-causing benzene.

See the full article here: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/12/08/national/main7128797.shtml

Hydraulic Fracturing – How’d it Work Out at Other Sites in Our Region

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Excerpts:

Documented Problems in WV & PA:
Chemicals coming out with wastewater from wells in Pennsylvania and West Virginia were found to include 4-nitroquinoline N-oxide, used to induce tumors in laboratory animals, and benzene, a known carcinogen.

Targeting poor communities

Much of this area is in the impoverished northern Appalachia region, dotted by isolated small towns and farms that are no longer productive, and are communities with high rates of unemployment. The poverty and relative isolation of the region have made residents prime targets of corporate salespeople, who have pushed them into leasing land for oil wells.

Problems stemming from fracking are surfacing in communities throughout the Marcellus Shale region. In Dimrock, considered “ground zero” for drilling, several drinking-water wells have exploded.

In Dimock, Pa., one out of seven residents was out of work and people were facing foreclosure of their homes. When Cabot offered $25 an acre for the right to drill for five years, plus royalties when gas started flowing, it sounded like a good deal to people who owned vacant fields but little else.

In September, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection officials charged Cabot with five violations after nearly 8,000 gallons of hydraulic fracturing fluids spilled in two separate incidents near Dimock. It took a third spill for Cabot to voluntarily halt the fracking. According to Halliburton the substance spilled was a lubricating gel that poses “a substantial threat to human health” and was a “potential carcinogen” that has caused skin cancer in animals.

Workers at U.S. Steel and Allegheny Energy near McKeesport found that water used to power their plant contained so much salty sediment it was corroding their machinery. An estimated 10,000 fish died on a 33-mile stretch of Dunkard Creek in this area.

International Disaster:
Dec. 3 marked the 25th anniversary of the widespread and continued contamination resulting from the Union Carbide chemical leak in Bhopal, India, that claimed tens of thousands of lives. Without any serious regulation of hydraulic fracturing practices, is the U.S. facing a disaster of that magnitude?

SOURCE: http://www.workers.org/2009/us/fracking_1217/

Buried Secrets: Is Natural Gas Drilling Endangering U.S. Water Supplies?

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Hydraulic Fracture Natural Gas Drilling

Excerpt from the full article:

In July, a hydrologist dropped a plastic sampling pipe 300 feet down a water well in rural Sublette County, Wyo., and pulled up a load of brown oily water with a foul smell. Tests showed it contained benzene, a chemical believed to cause aplastic anemia and leukemia, in a concentration 1,500 times the level safe for people.

Thanks to Mark Blumenstein of Friends of the Lower Greenbrier River for sending me this.