Special Report: Health Impacts of Shale Gas Boom Still Unproven

Last month, the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public Health sponsored a conference on the health impacts from Marcellus Shale gas extraction, with speakers from a range of disciplines.

The take-away messages from the conference:

• A few people have had clearly documented health problems related to the Marcellus gas boom, but these were occupational exposures in rig workers.
• Some aspects of gas drilling and production release toxins into the environment, but the level of exposure to the public is uncertain and no links to specific instances of disease have been confirmed, and may never be.
• The most likely impacts are not those typically highlighted in media coverage.

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The Air Up There

Remember we said that about 5.7 million gallons of water and chemicals are needed to drill and frack a well? It all has to be hauled in on trucks. Maybe another 2 million gallons of backflow liquid must be hauled away. Bulldozers have to level about a 100-yard square for the well pad. The heavy drilling equipment, 2,000 yards of well casing, pipes and cables -- all trucked in.

That's a lot of diesel exhaust.

Allen Robinson, PhD, of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, presented estimates that nitrogen oxide emissions associated with one well could average about 7 metric tons. Nitrogen oxides are the precursor to ground-level ozone and come from diesel exhaust and from gas flaring, venting, and leakage.

In any given location, 7 tons would not be a major problem. But when thousands of wells are drilled over an area, it can have a substantial impact, he said.

Air pollution is one field in which extensive baseline data do exist, given that nitrogen oxide and particulate levels have been closely monitored since the 1970s.

Robinson showed projections indicating that, by 2020, emissions of nitrogen oxides in the Marcellus region could more than triple over 2009 levels. Smaller but still significant increases in particulates may be expected as well.

These are particularly important in Pittsburgh because the area already regularly exceeds federal limits for ozone in the summer

http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/EnvironmentalHealth/30005