Gas drilling raises concern over water supply

Drillers hoping to retrieve gas through Utica shale wells in eastern Ohio are drawing water for their operations from ponds and streams or purchasing it from public reservoirs, worrying environmentalists who say it might endanger water supplies for the public and wildlife if there’s not enough water for everyone.

The drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, injects millions of gallons of chemical-laced water into the earth at high pressure to free gas. The geology of eastern Ohio makes it rich in resources such as propane, butane and ethane but short on groundwater for that drilling, The Columbus Dispatch reported.

So drilling operations are finding water where they can. Chesapeake Energy signed an agreement with the city of Steubenville last month to take up to 700,000 gallons of water a day from a city reservoir of water from the Ohio River, at a cost of $5 for every 1,000 gallons.

That brought in about $30,000 for the city after the company took about 6 million gallons during a two-week period in late February and early March.

“It’s a great deal,” city Law Director Gary Repella said. “We’re not spending any money to treat the water, and it’s not going to disrupt our system. We can draw as much as we want.”

The Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District is considering requests from a dozen companies seeking to draw water from six eastern Ohio reservoirs it controls.

Some environmentalists, fearful of the repercussions of the growing water demand, aren’t sure the conservancy district should allow that.

“There isn’t enough water to go around,” said Lea Harper, a member of the Southeast Ohio Alliance to Save Our Water.

The Muskingum Watershed’s conservation chief said the district would ask the U.S. Geological Survey to help determine how much extra water is in the area but might approve requests for reservoir water in the meantime if there’s no clear threat to wildlife.

Energy companies say they try to make sure they don’t take too much water, and state officials say they believe Ohio has enough water for everyone.

Businesses aren’t required to register with the state if they draw less than 100,000 gallons from water sources, but officials plan to change rules to better track drillers’ water sources, said Bethany McCorkle, spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

http://www.cantonrep.com/fracking/x586824940/Gas-drilling-raises-concern-over-water-supply

OU must protect its most valuable resources from fracking effects

By Professor Jim Montgomery

I am a faculty member in the College of Health Sciences and Professions at Ohio University. I am compelled to write to remind the leadership of OU, including the Board of Trustees, of one of the primary missions of the university as it prepares its response to the state regarding fracking on lands owned by the university.

OU, along with the College of Health Sciences and Professions (CHSP) and the Heritage College of Medicine (HCOM), have the express obligation to serve the underrepresented and underserved not just in Athens County but all of southeast Ohio. While Athens County has the highest poverty rate in the state (32.8 percent) much of southeast Ohio is impoverished. And with poverty comes many problems, among them poor health and lack of access and opportunity to resources necessary to develop and sustain healthy living.

Long-term exposure to fracking pollutants has the potential of worsening these individuals’ health problems. Others are also very susceptible to environmental toxins, regardless of poverty status – pregnant women, young children and adolescents.

Ohio University has the responsibility to do all it can to protect the most vulnerable among us. First, to the extent possible, the university must oppose fracking until tighter federal regulations are put in place. To do so would be consistent with the university’s commitment to serve all southeast Ohioans. Second, it must demand that the oil industry implement all of the precautions recommended in the Resolution on Hydraulic Fracturing at Ohio University developed by the Environmental Studies Advisory Board and passed by the Faculty Senate (March 12, 2012). These recommendations would require the industry to implement various measures to minimize the negative effects of fracking on the environment and human health within the university community.

The overwhelming majority of the local opposition to fracking has centered on its potential ill effects on the environment (i.e. contamination of water, air, soil) and local economy. This is for good reason. The emerging science and experiences of numerous communities around the country attest to these negative effects.

By contrast, little has been detailed about the risks to human health. There is good reason for this, too. Few studies have been conducted on the short- and long-term effects of fracking on human health. Big oil has taken full advantage of this circumstance when they claim there are no established links between fracking and human health problems. However, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. There are emerging data showing that fracking is indeed associated with numerous human health problems, including dermatological, endocrine, respiratory, kidney, liver, gastrointestinal, vascular, and neurological (Bamberger & Oswald, 2012; Colburn et al., 2011).

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will publish findings later this year and in 2014 detailing both the health and environmental effects of fracking.

Meantime, the epidemiological literature (i.e. the study of disease patterns and the conditions that give rise to disease) provides us ample evidence of the sorts of long-term ill effects on human health we might expect from fracking, especially in children and adolescents who are particularly susceptible to environmental toxins. The science is clear. Well-established links exist between low-level but chronic exposure to environmental toxins and a wide range of childhood physical, neurological, cognitive and behavioral problems.

The National Academy of Sciences (2002) estimated that one in every 200 children suffers from physical, neurological, developmental, learning and/or behavioral disorders caused by exposure to known environmental toxins. A recent study (Trasande & Liu, 2011) reported that environmental childhood diseases cost $76.6 billion or 3.5 percent of U.S. health-care costs in 2008. The authors stated that “the environment has become a major part of childhood disease.”

The developing science focusing on the effects of fracking on human health and the epidemiological literature must not be ignored by OU and the Board of Trustees as they prepare their position statement on fracking. These literatures tell us what to expect in the wake of chronic exposure to toxins from an unregulated hydraulic fracturing technology: an increase in childhood physical, neurological, developmental, learning and/or behavioral disorders.

Also expect staggering financial stress on the health care, social service and educational systems across southeast Ohio as more families seek resources and support systems that already are in short supply. OU, the CHSP and HCOM have an institutional and social responsibility to protect the health of southeast Ohioans, particularly the most vulnerable: those living in poverty, pregnant women, young children and adolescents.

Jim Montgomery is a professor in the College of Health Sciences and Professions at Ohio University

http://www.athensnews.com/ohio/article-36470-ou-must-protect-its-most-valuable-resources-from-fracking-effects.html

From fracking-heavy region, women bring warnings

On Saturday, two dairy farmers from Pennsylvania shared some real-life horror stories from their experience with natural gas “fracking,” during a presentation in Athens.

Some of the roughly 50 people who came to hear Carol French and Carolyn Knapp, however, said they’re hopeful that a recent state geologist’s report, indicating that Athens County may lie outside the part of the Utica shale that’s expected to most oil and gas development, means this county won’t have to undergo a lot of fracking.

“It’s a tremendous relief; I think it’s a reprieve,” said Nancy Pierce of Guysville.

Natalie Kruse, an Ohio University environmental studies professor, said she was not surprised by the report’s findings.

“It’s nothing new,” Kruse suggested. “We’ve always known that we were less mature.” (The “maturity” of organic carbon intermixed with shale – basically its age, organic composition and how much pressure it’s undergone – largely determines its prospective value.)

Travis Milliken of Athens said he was “pleased” to read about the report, and added that he’s been leery from the beginning about the glowing claims of what a “fracking” boom will do for Athens County and the United States.

“I think this quest for ‘energy independence’ is driven by a lust for money, at the expense of many, many things,” he said. “

Knapp and French, who spoke at OU’s Morton Hall, both signed leases with energy companies to have their land in Bradford County, Pa., drilled for gas using the horizontal hydraulic fracturing method to extract the resource from underground shale beds. Both suggested that signing was a bad decision for them, and warned locals of things they need to think about before leasing.

Click to read more ...

Fracking Fluid Soaks Ohio

The nationwide boom in hydraulic fracturing—aka fracking—means energy-extraction companies in the U.S. can produce thousands of barrels of oil and millions of cubic feet of natural gas from once-inaccessible places. They’re also producing something else: oceans of brine from drilling as well as fracking fluid, the chemical-laced water used to blast open cracks in buried rock where fossil fuel lurks. That wastewater has to go someplace. John Kasich, Ohio’s governor, isn’t sure he wants his state to be it.

The preferred way to dispose of the brine and fracking fluid—typically a stew of water and a long list of chemical additives, including rust inhibitors and antibacterial agents—is to pump it out of sight, out of mind into deep, cavernous wells built for the purpose. Ohio’s geological underbelly, composed of permeable rock formations, is ideally suited for such holding tanks. The state is home to 176 of them, operated by more than 80 companies, including an affiliate of Houston-based giant EnerVest and smaller outfits such as BT Energy in Fleming, Ohio. Compare that with just six active wells in neighboring Pennsylvania, where the geology makes drilling less practical. Over the past two decades, Ohio approved an average of four new storage wells a year. Last year, it jumped to 29.

All that underground space has made Ohio a leading importer of wastewater from other states. Last year, oil and gas companies injected 511 million gallons into Ohio’s wells, the most on record, according to the state’s Department of Natural Resources. More than half came from elsewhere. Of the 94.2 million gallons of drilling wastewater that Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale operators sent to disposal wells last year, 98 percent went to Ohio. Currently, well owners pay the state a fee of 5¢ per barrel for fluids originating within Ohio and 20¢ for out-of-state wastewater. Ohio collected $1.45 million in fees last year, according to Ohio Natural Resources.

Kasich isn’t thrilled with the idea of Ohio becoming known as a dumping ground for other states’ industrial waste, though there isn’t much he can do about it. The Republican governor is pushing for tough new regulations to protect the environment, among them rules requiring oil and gas companies to account precisely for the chemical makeup of the spent fluid.

He’s also proposed taxing oil and gas drillers in Ohio as much as 4 percent of the market value of what they pull out of the ground, saying he’ll use the money to reduce the state income tax. The oil and gas tax has not been warmly received by the industry or by Republicans in the state legislature, who say it will hurt smaller companies trying to get a foothold in a growing industry. “When something’s in its infancy, and you’re going to put an onerous tax on it, that’s going to have a definite effect,” says Jerry James, president of Marietta-based Artex Oil.

Kasich believes he’s struck the right balance between attracting business and looking out for the public. When Barack Obama visited the state this month, he and Kasich talked about fracking. “I told the president that all of the rules and the regulations that we’re putting together … could serve as a national model as to how to proceed to be environmentally sound and yet still create jobs,” Kasich said last week.

Oil and gas companies haven’t put up as much of a fight over the proposed regulations, perhaps because they were introduced in the aftermath of a series of bizarre earthquakes near Youngstown that have been linked to the underground wastewater. There had been no record of quakes in the area before D&L Energy, based in Youngstown, began injecting wastewater into a well about 9,200 feet underground in December 2010. Starting in March, there were 12 quakes within a mile of the well ranging from magnitude 2.1 to a 4.0 quake that hit on New Year’s Eve.

A March 9 state report concluded that “a number of coincidental circumstances appear to make a compelling argument for the recent Youngstown-area seismic events to have been induced.” The state said evidence suggested fluid from the Youngstown well “intersected an unmapped fault in a near-failure state of stress causing movement along that fault.” D&L Energy maintains the cause of the earthquakes has not been conclusively determined, and says it will pay for its own study. In a statement, the company says it “has always been an environmentally responsible and legally operating energy producer that voluntarily implements industry best practices that exceed current laws and regulations.”

Ohio’s Department of Natural Resources has proposed a ban on drilling into deep rock formations and wants geological reviews before new wells are approved. State Representative Robert Hagan, a Democrat who represents Youngstown, doesn’t think that goes far enough. He’s called for an indefinite moratorium on injection wells until their impact can be studied more closely. “Some people have accused me of screaming, ‘The sky is falling,’” Hagan says. “But when the earth is moving, we have an obligation to find out why.”

The bottom line: Oil and natural gas companies are storing millions of gallons of drilling and fracking wastewater in Ohio’s 176 underground storage wells.

Dimock, PA Fracking: EPA Water Samples Contained 'Dangerous' Levels Of Methane

When the Environmental Protection Agency announced last week that tests showed the water is safe to drink in Dimock, Penn., a national hot spot for concerns about fracking, it seemed to vindicate the energy industry's insistence that drilling had not caused pollution in the area.

But what the agency didn't say -- at least, not publicly -- is that the water samples contained dangerous quantities of methane gas, a finding that confirmed some of the agency's initial concerns and the complaints raised by Dimock residents since 2009.

The test results also showed the group of wells contained dozens of other contaminants, including low levels of chemicals known to cause cancer and heavy metals that exceed the agency's "trigger level" and could lead to illness if consumed over an extended period of time. The EPA's assurances suggest that the substances detected do not violate specific drinking water standards, but no such standards exist for some of the contaminants and some experts said the agency should have acknowledged that they were detected at all.

"Any suggestion that water from these wells is safe for domestic use would be preliminary or inappropriate," said Ron Bishop, a chemist at the State University of New York's College at Oneonta, who has spoken out about environmental concerns from drilling.

Dimock residents are struggling to reconcile the EPA's public account with the results they have been given in private.

"I'm sitting here looking at the values I have on my sheet -- I'm over the thresholds -- and yet they are telling me my water is drinkable," said Scott Ely, a Dimock resident whose water contains methane at three times the state limit, as well as lithium, a substance that can cause kidney and thyroid disorders. "I'm confused about the whole thing... I'm flabbergasted."

The water in Dimock first became the focus of international attention after residents there alleged in 2009 that natural gas drilling, and fracking, had led to widespread contamination. That April, ProPublica reported that a woman's drinking water well blew up. Pennsylvania officials eventuallydetermined that underground methane gas leaks had been caused by Cabot Oil and Gas, which was drilling wells nearby. Pennsylvania sanctioned Cabot, and for a short time the company provided drinking water to households in the Dimock area.

This January, the EPA announced it would take over the state's investigation, testing the water in more than 60 homes and agreeing to provide drinking water to several of families -- including the Elys -- in the meantime.

Then, last Thursday, the EPA released a brief statement saying that the first 11 samples to come back from the lab "did not show levels of contamination that could present a health concern." The agency noted that some metals, methane, salt and bacteria had been detected, but at low levels that did not exceed federal thresholds. It said that arsenic exceeding federal water standards was detected in two samples.

But Dimock residents say the agency's description didn't jibe with the material in test packets distributed to them, and they voiced concerns about why the EPA had passed judgment before seeing results from nearly 50 homes. Several shared raw data and materials they were given by the EPA with Josh Fox, the director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary "GasLand," who shared them with ProPublica.

EPA press secretary Betsaida Alcantara said the agency was trying to be forthcoming by giving the tests results to Dimock residents and is now considering whether to release more information to the public about the water samples. "We made a commitment to the residents that we would give them the information as soon as we had it," she said. "For the sake of transparency we felt it was the right thing to do."

However preliminary, the data is significant because it is the first EPA research into drilling-related concerned on the east coast, and the agency's first new information since it concluded that there was likely a link between fracking and water contamination in central Wyoming last December. The EPA is currently in the midst of a national investigation into the effects of fracking on groundwater, but that research is separate.

As the agency has elsewhere, the EPA began the testing in Dimock in search of methane and found it.

Methane is not considered poisonous to drink, and therefore is not a health threat in the same way as other pollutants. But the gas can collect in confined spaces and cause deadly explosions, or smother people if they breathe too much of it. Four of the five residential water results obtained by ProPublica show methane levels exceeding Pennsylvania standards; one as high as seven times the threshold and nearly twice the EPA's less stringent standard.

The methane detections were accompanied by ethane, another type of natural gas that experts say often signifies the methane came from deeply buried gas deposits similar to those being drilled for energy and not from natural sources near the surface.

Among the other substances detected at low levels in Dimock's water are a suite of chemicals known to come from some sort of hydrocarbon substance, such as diesel fuel or roofing tar. They include anthracene, fluoranthene, pyrene and benzo(a)pyrene -- all substances described by a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as cancer-causing even in very small amounts. Chromium, aluminum, lead and other metals were also detected, as were chlorides, salts, bromium and strontium, minerals that can occur naturally but are often associated with natural gas drilling.

It is unclear whether these contaminants have any connection to drilling activities near Dimock. The agency says it plans further testing and research.

Many of the compounds detected have not been evaluated for exposure risk by federal scientists or do not have an exposure limit assigned to them, making it difficult to know whether they present a risk to human health.

Inconsistencies in the EPA's sampling results also are raising concerns. EPA documents, for example, list two different thresholds for the detection of bromide, a naturally occurring substance sometimes used in drilling fluids, opening up the possibility that bromide may have been detected, but not reported, in some tests.

"The threshold that it is safe, that shouldn't be changing," said Susan Riha, director of the New York State Water Resources Group and a professor of earth sciences at Cornell University. "For some reason ... one was twice as sensitive as the other one."

The EPA did not respond to questions about the detection limits, or any other technical inquiries about the test data.

A spokesman for Cabot declined to comment on the water test results or their significance, saying that he had not yet seen the data.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/20/dimock-pa-fracking-epa-water_n_1368148.html?ref=green

Patriot slams limits in new EPA permit

The new permit signed by OEPA Director Scott Nally takes effect April 1 and will halt Warren’s ability to accept treated fracking wastewater from Patriot or any other entity.

Patriot can still accept fracking wastewater from Utica and Marcellus shale exploration but has to find a different method of disposal or reuse, such as recycling or injection-well disposal, said Mike Settles, OEPA spokesman.

Separately, OEPA granted Patriot a permit to accept and treat new wastewater sources from other industries, but Blocksom considered it “a smokescreen” because 98 percent of Patriot’s business is treating fracking wastewater.

Patriot can treat up to 100,000 gallons of fluid per day.

Warren’s new permit, which will replace one that expired at the end of January, comes in the middle of a legal battle involving OEPA, Patriot, Warren and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

The state has said it unlawfully issued permits regarding Patriot’s operations, but the Environmental Review Appeals Commission recently confirmed the legality of the permits.

Legal proceedings, including a hearing in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court, scheduled for Wednesday, are still pending.

But Settles said the entity felt it was time to issue a new permit.

“The appeals of [Patriot’s] original permit are still pending,” he told The Vindicator on Monday. “That could take some time

http://www.vindy.com/news/2012/mar/20/patriot-slams-limits-in-new-epa-permit/

Fracking and the company that's exploring the depths of Fermanagh

They might have struck oil off the coast of County Cork, but one global resources company is going full steam ahead in a bid to extract up to 50 years worth of natural gas from Co Fermanagh.

Earlier this year it was announced that Tamboran Resources had identified a huge shale gas field near the border with Co Leitrim last year. The Australian company is eyeing a £6bn investment which it says could create 600 full-time direct jobs and more than 2,400 indirect posts.

Tamboran claims that the projected production of up to 2.2trn cubic feet of shale gas would remove Northern Ireland's dependency on imported gas and the excess gas supply at peak production would enable Northern Ireland to become a significant net exporter of natural gas to other countries.

The company also said that a community investment fund for Co Fermanagh would lead to additional benefits in excess of £2m per year if the proposed fracking project starts production in 2015.

Dr Tony Bazley, a director of Tamboran locally, said that none of the structures used to drill or extract the gas will be above three metres off the ground and that the visual impact would be minimal. He has also pledged that no chemicals will be used in the process.

"If and when the complex is completed it should look like a large farm with a shed, hopefully a traditional Fermanagh barn and a car park, it should have no impact on farming or tourism, and indeed I would hope that both farming and tourism will benefit from shale gas extraction," he said.

"US President Barack Obama said fracking could be a 'game changer' for the US economy and we hope to see similar benefits in Northern Ireland."

A number of studies as to the pros and cons of fracking are already in circulation. Recently the University of Texas Energy Institute found many problems attributed to hydraulic fracturing are common to all oil and gas drilling systems.

A study said that many reports of contamination could be traced to above-ground spills or mishandling of wastewater rather than the fracking technique itself. The Texas team said that gas found in water wells within some shale drilling areas could be traced to natural sources, and was probably present before fracking operations began.

Surface spills of fracturing fluids posed greater risks to groundwater sources than the actual process of fracking, said the researchers.

Click to read more ...