Special Report: Gas Drilling Brings Stress, Social Ills

Speakers at a conference sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh on the health impacts of Marcellus Shale drilling included two sociologists who have studied how these phenomena are playing out in the region, which encompasses a swath of northern Appalachia from New York to Tennessee and west into Ohio.

We're in the Money

Simona Perry, PhD, an ethnographer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., said she has been interviewing residents of Bradford County in northeastern Pennsylvania.

One of the most rural counties in the state, Bradford has become its biggest center of drilling for shale gas, with 653 permits issued by state regulators so far this year.

Perry, who uses a deliberately unstructured technique that lets people tell their own stories in their own way, said the people she's interviewed almost universally cherish their rural way of life and the stable, predictable social networks that resulted from an almost complete lack of in-migration.

The Marcellus Shale boom has changed all that.

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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

As Gas Drilling Spreads, Towns Stand Ground Over Control

The battle is playing out in Pennsylvania as the Republican-controlled legislature considers bills that would in their current form sharply limit a community’s right to control where gas companies can operate on private property. Critics say the final bill could vastly weaken local zoning powers and give industry the upper hand in exchange for a new tax, which municipalities badly need. 

The legislation has struck a nerve in a state where land control has long been considered quintessentially local. 

“I’m a conservative Republican, and this goes against all my principles,” said Brian Coppola, the chairman of the Board of Supervisors of Robinson Township, in Washington County west of Pittsburgh. The pending legislation, he said, “is an enormous land grab on the part of the industry. He added, “Our property rights are being trampled.” 

Mr. Coppola noted a hillside in town that began to crack and slide under the weight of a new shale gas processing plant, which he contends was built without a permit. The town’s zoning powers allowed him, through a court, to compel the company to follow town regulations and allow town inspectors access to the site. The site was eventually stabilized. Losing those powers would leave local officials out of the equation, he said, even though they are responsible for protecting the health and safety of their citizens. 

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Low Cost, High Expense?

Anita Barkin is on a mission for public health.

That's not surprising for Carnegie Mellon's director of Health Services, but this effort stretches far beyond the university's Pittsburgh campus. And far below.

Barkin's mission is to educate the public about the process and impacts of drilling into the Marcellus Shale for natural gas and to advocate for safeguards. Her message to the industry and government officials is to slow down and weigh all of the factors involved. 

While drilling companies and politicians boast about the positive effects of drilling, such as the low-cost clean energy it provides and the economic boost it gives to residents and communities, Barkin argues that the negative environmental and health impacts may far outweigh the positives. She notes that the economic boost it fosters may be exaggerated as well.

In a Learning & Development session this semester titled "Health Concerns Related to Marcellus Shale Drilling," Barkin, who currently serves as president of the American College Health Association, discussed some of the negatives, the need for a closer examination of the impacts and greater regulation and oversight of the industry.

http://www.cmu.edu/piper/stories/2011/december/barkin-drilling.html#.TuoncguRHwM.email

No Fracking Here

The Town Board on December 13 moved on three fronts to prohibit the natural-gas extraction method known as hydrofracking in Woodstock, accepting an advisory commission’s proposal to amend the zoning law, adopting a councilman’s related measure, and asserting the primacy of municipal home rule in land-use decision making.

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Reporter’s Notebook: Unfriendly Bars and The Incredible Hulk Comes to Dimock

Things have got­ten pretty tense in Dimockthese days. On a rainy day this week, more than one hun­dred peo­ple trav­eled from New York to sup­port those res­i­dents along Carter Road who want Cabot Oil and Gas to con­tinue fresh water deliveries.

Up until two weeks ago, Cabot had been sup­ply­ing water to fam­i­lies who, accord­ing to the Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion, had expe­ri­enced high methane lev­els in their water wells due to mis­takes the com­pany made while drilling for nat­ural gas. But DEP recently ruled Cabot had ful­filled its oblig­a­tions, and could stop deliv­er­ing water on Decem­ber 1. The water con­t­a­m­i­na­tion has become a national issue, and made Dimock a flash­point in the bat­tle over hydraulic fracturing.

The press con­fer­ence took place under a tent, and pro­vided ample oppor­tu­ni­ties to gather inter­views with res­i­dents and their sup­port­ers who oppose nat­ural gas drilling, such as a min­is­ter deliv­er­ing a bless­ing, a feath­ered Chief with the Onan­doga Nation, and celebri­ties like actor Mark Ruf­falo. Ruf­falo spoke pas­sion­ately to the crowd, and posed like a pro when he caught him­self within the sights of my camera.

After the press con­fer­ence ended, I asked Ruf­falo to answer a few ques­tions. He eagerly jumped out of the tanker truck filled with water to talk to me. At first I threw him a soft­ball — why is this impor­tant to you? Then I asked him to answer the most obvi­ous crit­i­cism sure to be launched by pro-drillers, that an out­sider, car­pet­bag­ger, Hol­ly­wood Lib­eral, comes to save the day. True, he lives in New York above the Mar­cel­lus Shale, but it’s easy for him to refuse a landman’s offer, he doesn’t need the bonus pay­ments and roy­al­ties. But a lot of impov­er­ished peo­ple in this area do.

I knew Ruf­falo would play the Incred­i­ble Hulk in the upcom­ing Avengers movie. But I didn’t know the role would con­sume him so much that he would grow green mus­cles before my very eyes. That his eyes would pop.

“I’d say you don’t bring your daugh­ter to the red light dis­trict just because times are tough,” replied Ruf­falo. “You don’t build your­self a meth lab in your garage just because times are tough. This is poi­son­ing people’s water, there’s absolutely no doubt about it.”

Ruf­falo said he’s will­ing to catch flak for his activism. But he said there’s sim­ply not enough sci­en­tific research to deter­mine the long term impacts of gas drilling to pub­lic health and the envi­ron­ment. Then I asked him about the lack of alter­na­tive energy sources to meet our cur­rent needs. The shirt started to rip.

“That’s not true,” said Ruf­falo, before I could fin­ish the ques­tion.  “If you look at Pro­fes­sor Mark Jacobson’s work, who’s the lead­ing civic engi­neer from Stan­ford, he has shown us that by 2030 we can be com­pletely off car­bon based fuel in this nation.”

Jacob­son wrote this cover piece in the Novem­ber 2009 issue of Sci­en­tific American.

Ruf­falo con­tin­ued to speak, seem­ingly with­out tak­ing a breath and mov­ing closer to my microphone.

“What do we really pay for gas and oil? What does it really cost us? When you back out the sub­si­dies, when you back out the wars, when you back out the reme­di­a­tion, when you back out the health effects? What does it really cost us for energy? And how can we say that those hid­den costs don’t equal what we can do with solar, wind, geot­her­mal, and hydro?”

http://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2011/12/09/reporters-notebook-unfriendly-bars-and-the-incredible-hulk-comes-to-dimock/#more-5166

Air Too Dangerous to Breathe: How Fracking Can Turn Rural Communities Into Industrial Wastelands

The exploding faucet may have launched the movement against fracking, but it's the unsexy compressor station that is pushing it to maturity.

Last week, more than a hundred activists from Pennsylvania and New York, includingactor Mark Ruffalo, brought thousands of gallons of drinking water to 11 families inDimock, Pa., who had been left dry after Cabot Oil and Gas stopped their water deliveries.

The mess Cabot created in 2009 from shale gas drilling had now been cleaned, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), which meant no more water for the Dimock 11, the holdout families in a long-running feud over water contamination and cleanup.

At issue was the safety of well water symbolized by a jug filled with brown fluid taken from Dimock resident Scott Ely's well. Held aloft by Ruffalo, who was flanked by families and Gasland director Josh Fox, the crowd challenged officials to come and take a swig if the water was so safe. Paul Rubin, a hydrogeologist, painted a grim picture, laying out a future of continued water contamination. The Ely water had arsenic, manganese, aluminum, iron, and lead at several times the maximum contaminant level (MCL) for safe drinking water.

The visuals were dramatic, and the anti-frack action ended with supporters triumphantly holding a huge water line that snaked from a tanker truck on Carter Road to a family's "water buffalo" — a large storage tank. The Dimock 11 were now supplied.

Next door pro-gas families and a Cabot industry representative held a dueling press conference calling their anti-frack neighbors liars and greedy for money. They bemoaned the besmirching of Dimock by their neighbors and outside agitators.

How the water went bad, how it was tested, when it was tested, who tested it and for what are just some of the issues confronting residents of the Marcellus Shale region and lawyers around the country suing drilling companies for alleged water contamination.

Many of these legal cases have lagged on for years, leaving residents dependent on bottled drinking water and "good neighbor" gestures by drilling companies that deny blame but temporarily supply water, until they decide to stop as Cabot did in Dimock.

Missing from this debate is what many environmentalists see as an equally important issue in shale gas exploration: the air quality.

An invisible product of the huge industrialization of the Marcellus Shale region is the air pollution created not just from thousands of transport trucks used in well construction and fracking, but the added infrastructure required to bring gas to market, most significantly the compressor stations.

These stations are essential to push gas through the pipelines. They can be loud; they emit methane, and BTEX compounds, benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes. They have been associated with significant headaches, bloody noses, skin lesions, blisters, and rashes. They operate continuously and permanently.

"Compressor stations are not just accessories to gas production facilities — they are large-scale industrial installations. In some parts of the West, compressor engines contribute an average of nearly 60 percent of all nitrogen oxide emissions from oil and gas operations," said Nadia Steinzor, the Marcellus Shale Regional Organizer for Earthworks.

The same day activists staged the water mercy mission to Dimock, a remarkable but largely unnoticed event occurred a few miles north, in Montrose.

http://www.alternet.org/story/153417/air_too_dangerous_to_breathe_how_fracking_can_turn_rural_communities_into_industrial_wastelands_with_photos