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HBO is airing a documentary series this month, and one of the films is called "Gasland" by Josh Fox, about the problems associated with domestic natural gas extraction in American communities. The filmmaker was actually approached by a gas drilling company to lease his family's land for extraction for $100,000, and he first wanted to research the pros and cons before making a decision. What he discovered was so angering and shocking that he decided to drive across America to interview people living with the consequences of gas drilling for a documentary. Of course they were unaware of the impending BP disaster when the broadcast schedule was planned, but the content is now all too familiar. This is part of the true cost of our energy consumption habits.
The natural gas industry touts its product as cheap and "green", and yes its combustion is less polluting than petroleum and coal (but only 25% so). Plus it can be used in a variety of applications (from large scale electricity generation to vehicle fuel), extraction infrastructure is fairly compact, and we even have plenty of domestic reserves, so it sounds like a great energy source. But like ethanol, natural gas is dirtier than most of us know, and the companies tasked with its extraction have committed a litany of environmental and ethical violations. This controversy is not well publicized maybe because US natural gas reserves mostly exist in poorer, rural counties in the northeast, mountain states, and the southern Midwest. Much of the land is federally-owned, and those who live there don't have much of a political voice. The residents are generally less-educated and lower-income, so when a Halliburton-type drilling company approaches them with a fat check to buy the rights to drill on their land, they tend to sign. Companies give all sorts of guarantees that the drilling is safe and you won't even notice, and the rural residents are from the "my word is my bond" tradition, so they trust them without reading the dozens of pages of fine print. And if pollution problems are found and admitted to, the companies often pay off the victims into silence (or underpay for the true damage they inflict) and keep drilling the next day. But some short-changed victims were so mad that they broke their non-disclosure agreements to speak on camera. Even if landowners refuse to sign with drillers, they can still get screwed. If their neighbors agree to lease, their property value may sink because now they live next to an industrial site. By that stroke, drillers and your neighbors can collectively force you off your land by making your property virtually worthless if you resist.
Just as we are tapping new oil reserves with more sophisticated (and riskier) deep-sea drilling, we can now access deeper natural gas deposits using a technique called hydraulic fracture (nicknamed with a masculine moniker, "fracking"). Basically, the gas is trapped in dense rock (shale) over a mile underground and can't be cost-effectively harvested by a conventional well, so with the advent of horizontal drilling, we can bore into the shale and then pump in a high-pressure fluid mix. The mix of water, sand, and proprietary chemicals (that companies may or may not admit are included in the pumping fluid, and are currently not legally required to disclose) fractures the shale so the gas can percolate up to the wells. Through the work of the filmmaker and environmental activists, we now know that fracking fluid contains benzenes, sulfides, and other carcinogens banned by the EPA Clean Air, Water, and Safe Drinking Water Acts. 65 identified ingredients are known to be health hazards. It used to even contain diesel fuel, but Halliburton cut a deal with the EPA in 2005 to stop using it in exchange for a waiver to substitute benzene.
If you recall, 2005 was a big year for the industry with the passing of the Energy Policy Act. After VP Cheney's formed his energy task force and held secret meetings, industry lobbyists successfully convinced politicians to open up unprecedented tracts of federal land to energy exploration, and insert loopholes to exempt the oil and gas industries from many environmental rules. As you would expect, Halliburton is one of the biggest gas drillers, and the industry fracks a staggering 35,000 wells each year in the US. So far the EPA has shown interest and expertise in investigating and regulating fracking chemicals, but agency leaders have copped out, and pronounced that "the states should decide" how to regulate gas drilling. In response to calls for greater scrutiny, the industry has said that fracking is completely safe without providing much supporting evidence. They in turn threaten back that added regulation of drilling will only serve to increase the cost of natural gas to consumers. In response to criticism that "Gasland" paints a slanted picture with anecdotes only from angry anti-gas families, the filmmaker challenged an industry rep to provide him with just one example of a happy, healthy American community living alongside fracture drilling, and so far they haven't gotten back to him yet.
Fracking may sound good; we're tapping vast gas pockets that were previously inaccessible. But the fracking fluid has to go somewhere, and drilling sites are often near aquifers that supply well water to local residents (and in many drilling areas, there aren't big reservoirs or rivers, so people rely on wells to survive and farm/ranch). Some of the waste fluid returns to the surface and is collected in huge pits. If the company is conscientious, they will pump up the liquid and dispose of it safely. But often the drillers will just allow the fluid to evaporate, seep back into the soil, or even expedite evaporation by pumping the fuel through vaporizers. This is all legal apparently. But the poisons don't just disappear. They either accumulate in the water supply or become aerosols that get inhaled by living things nearby.
Fracking breaks up underground shale to release gas, but that gas isn't 100% collected by the wells either. It also seeps into the water supply, and there have been several documented accidents of tap water catching on fire and causing well or household explosions. Many residents were forced to buy bottled water or rely on rainwater cisterns instead. Poisons also contaminate the wildlife, making it harder for local farmers and ranchers to make a living, or even live healthily. The incidence of some cancers, asthma, and neurological disorders (all well-documented side effects of exposure to various fracking fluid base chemicals) is uncommonly high in communities near drilling areas. And as one interviewee in Wyoming said, viewers may think it's crazy but people like him really love what they do - 3rd or 4th generation ranchers who carry on the tradition of Western living that we usually relegate to nostalgia. Now they can't even water their herds enough to develop them for market. So in addition to the massive environmental and health effects of gas drilling, we may be losing a unique and precious feature of American history and culture also. Yes our supercharged economy needs energy to run, and gas is a precious resource. But potable water is also very precious, and although laws and subsidies make its price artificially low, humans are also fighting wars across the globe (either with guns or lawsuits) over water access. Ideally we should protect both our energy and water resources, and it makes no sense to destroy one while pursuing the other, unless you stand to make a lot of money in the process of course.
Even if companies went beyond the porous rules and made sure their drilling waste didn't endanger local life (if that is even possible with fracking), how green and minimally-invasive is natural gas exploration anyway? Reserves are often in remote areas, so there has to be hundreds of diesel truckloads of equipment transported hundreds of miles to set up a well, and in many cases miles of new road to the site have to be paved beforehand. It's like clear-cutting in the Amazon, and may leave the land like a moonscape afterward. Fracking consumes 400-600 tanker truck loads worth of water, and only a fourth of that volume can be recovered and cleansed (if the company chooses to). If each well consumes 1-7M gallons of water per frack (and wells are sometimes fracked over 10 times), the industry creates trillions of gallons of contaminated water per year (the industry term for the waste is "produced water"). The drilling and refining processes also need to be powered by diesel generators, which collectively spew out tons of emissions. Combine that with gas leaks and chemical evaporation, and the air in microclimates near heavy drilling zones (even densely populated areas like Ft. Worth, which has 15,000 wells in its vicinity) is more unsafe than LA smog.
Most states are in very bad financial shape now, and thanks to the GOP blocking of the jobs bill, will get even less federal assistance in 2010. As consequence, they have had to trim down their environmental and regulatory workforce, and may be more open to allow gas drilling to reap royalties, taxes, and create jobs. As long as they don't live in drilling areas, what do those state legislators care? A major drilling expansion is planned in the Marcellus shale in upstate New York and Pennsylvania. But projected well sites are located in the upper Delaware River Basin and NYC watershed that collectively supply the drinking water to NYC, Philadelphia, and over 15M residents in between. NYC council members are trying to stop the expansion, and so far no wells have broken ground yet.
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