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.

Since Monroe County does not have streams with the capacity to provide for public water supply sources, almost all residents rely on groundwater for their water consumption needs.  The public supplies available, which provide for about half of the county usage, primarily rely on springs or wells for their intake.

Due to the karst topography which underlies much of the county, underground streams, as indicated by numerous dye tracing activities conducted over the years, may travel for several miles.  Further, unlike in other subsurface environments such as sandstone wherein natural filtration takes place, karst aquifers do not receive this benefit.  This lack of filtration and substantial migration is, in the opinions of most authorities, the primary reason that about half of the water samples taken by the Monroe County Health Department over the last decade have been found unsatisfactory due to bacteriological contamination.  Thus a localized contamination event, such as might occur from a drilling error, has the potential to effect a hundred or more wells over a large area.

Although, as mentioned above, a number of dye tests have been undertaken at various locales throughout the county, there is still a substantial lack of information related to our underground aquifer system.  Much more testing and cataloging of results into a coordinated framework is needed to establish flow patterns and contamination potentials before we may understand the full potential of a contamination event.

Dale McCutcheon | Registered Sanitarian, Masters Degree-Environmental Science | Monroe County Health Department

Source : Mountain Messenger

Excerpt from Peggy Mackenzie’s article in the Mountain Messenger:

We are seeing profit-hungry motivated behavior mount as gas drilling companies scramble for leases in karst country. Like any “gold rush,” the money is so good.  Karst topography is a landscape created by groundwater dissolving sedimentary rock such as limestone, according to the website watersheds.org. Karst makes our Valley especially vulnerable when it comes to drilling.

As information streams in concerning the use of hydraulic fracture drilling for natural gas in the abundantly rich shale fields around the country and especially the Marcellus shale which lies beneath West Virginia and other states in the eastern US, it has been pointed out that natural gas is cleaner that coal and oil. Lawmakers, and members of the oil and gas industry along with the media have jumped on the bandwagon touting natural gas as America’s latest clean energy effort.

But, as Myles Yates of SaveTheWaterTable.org says, “Get it straight: Natural gas extracted by way of hydraulic fracture is NOT clean energy.”

Yates, a Monroe County resident, states firmly that “…it is important to note that those statements refer exclusively to the BURNING of natural gas. It does not and cannot possibly refer to the process of extraction, or hydraulic fracturing – a largely unregulated process that exists in its current format solely because the companies that perform it have been exempted from the Clean Water Act.

“Make no mistake,” Yates goes on to say, “contaminating our water supply in the process of harvesting a clean-burning fuel is NOT CLEAN. Spraying a mix of water, sand, and nearly 600 chemicals (including carcinogens and nuerotoxins and more) into the ground by the millions of gallons (only to recover 10-50 percent, leaving the rest deep in the ground) is NOT GREEN.”

All this has bearing on the health of our watersheds in West Virginia. Water is the real gold. We have it in abundance and take it for granted.

According to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), there are more than 500 gas wells in the state targeting the Marcellus shale formation. Like most states where such gas drilling has occurred, West Virginia has experienced its share of contamination problems and other issues linked with fracking operations.

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