Activists rally against proposed hydraulic fracturing in New York Photo: Richard Levine / Alamy
Inflammable tap water, cancer threats and earthquakes: probably coming soon, near you. Sebastian Doggart reports from New York on the dangers of hydraulic fracturing, or 'fracking'.
Go to your nearest tap. Light a match, and place it next to the running water. If it catches fire, as it has in many American homes, your water supply has probably been polluted by a natural-gas extraction process called fracking. If no flames appear, don’t get complacent. Fracking is becoming the gold rush of the 21st century – as well as an urgent wake-up call on the irreparable damage we are wreaking on our environment. Fracking began in Britain in March, and is probably coming to a gas reservoir near you.
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, involves blasting huge amounts of water, mixed with sand and often toxic chemicals, to break up shale formations thousands of feet under the earth, to release natural gas.
The first record of fracking for natural gas was in 1821, in Fredonia, New York. For the next 120 years, gas extraction mostly came from conventional reservoirs which did not require fracking. In 1949, the technique was revived by US companies including Halliburton. Its use skyrocketed since 2005 in the US when the Energy Policy Act exempted fracking wells from federal regulation under the Safe Drinking Act. Championed by Dick Cheney, then Vice-President, this became known as the “Halliburton loophole”.
By the end of 2009, some 26,000 wells were fracking in 16 American states. It’s become big business. British Petroleum (BP) paid more than $3 billion for fracking rights in 2008. The world’s largest mining company, Australian-based BHP Billiton, forked out $5 billion earlier this year for sites in Arkansas. Companies often have to make deals with individual landowners, offering cash payments and a percentage of the proceeds. One large company, Chesapeake Energy, claims to have signed contracts with one million American households.
Huge momentum is now behind the industry. According to forecasts from energy consultants Black & Veatch, almost half of all US electricity will come from burning natural gas by 2034.
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Supporters of fracking boast that the United States has natural gas deposits equivalent to two Saudi Arabias-worth of oil. This could supply the US with gas for heating, electricity generation and car fuel for up to 100 years, and wean it off its energy dependence on the Middle East.
Some environmentalists say natural gas is a green option, since it produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions than coal and oil. Legislators say gas extraction generates much-needed jobs .
Opponents point to the catastrophic environmental costs that fracking incurs, claiming it causes mini-Fukushimas every day. The most visually dramatic impact can be seen when methane leaks into the water supply, causing tap water to catch fire.
This methane has also been the subject of recent studies that have undermined the conventional wisdom that natural gas is “cleaner” than coal or oil. In late 2010, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a report stating that natural gas extracted using fracking emits greater amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, than conventionally mined gas. Another study emerging from Cornell University concluded that the greenhouse gas footprint of gas fracked out of shale is far worse than those of coal and fuel oil when analysed for the 20-year period after emission.
Fracking has been most vigorously criticised for the damage caused by its waste water, which contains carcinogens such as benzene and radioactive elements such as radium. Some of these chemicals are in the secret cocktail of liquids injected in the well; others come up naturally from underground. These toxins have regularly polluted rivers, streams and lakes. Some are endocrine disruptors, and have been scientifically shown to stunt growth and human reproductive capacity.
The damage spreads when contaminated water enters the food chain. A confidential study commissioned by the American Petroleum Industry and leaked to The New York Times, concluded that radium in drilling waste water dumped off the Louisiana coast posed “significant risks” of cancer for people who ate fish from the Gulf of Mexico.
Air pollution caused by natural-gas drilling has become a real problem. In Wyoming, fumes containing benzene and toluene spewed out by its 27,000 wells, most of them fracked in the past five years, led to the state failing its federal requirements for air quality.
Texas has seen some of the worst pollution. The town of Dish, which has 362 residents and 60 gas wells, saw the departure of its mayor, Calvin Tillman, who was not willing to place his family’s health in the hands of the gas companies smashing up the Barnett Shale beneath their home. A sickening smell of gas hung in the town, and, when the gas companies denied responsibility, Tillman commissioned an independent air quality test, at a cost of 15 per cent of the town’s annual budget of $70,000.
The resulting report showed the air contained the carcinogen benzene at levels 55 times higher than even the relaxed Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) allowed. Neurotoxicants such as xylene and carbon disulphide, as well as the blood poison naphthalene, were also found at levels up to 384 times higher than levels deemed safe. The final straw was when both of Tillman’s sons began suffering from acute nosebleeds. “My five-year-old woke up with blood all over his hands, blood on the walls – our house looked somewhat like a murder scene.” Similar reports of severe nosebleeds, respiratory problems and rashes have been made across the country.
Fracking has also been blamed for damaging the bedrock of the earth and causing seismic events. In the six months leading up to March 2011, Arkansas was hit by 1,000 earthquakes, including a dozen over 3.0 magnitude, and one of 4.7 – the highest in the state for 35 years.
Geologist Steve Horton, an earthquake specialist at the University of Memphis Center for Earthquake Research and Information, has identified a correlation between the Arkansas earthquakes and the disposal of waste water in injection wells. “Ninety per cent of these earthquakes that have happened since 2009 have been within six kilometres of these salt water disposal wells,” Horton said. “The timing is too coincidental to ignore.”
This extraordinary level of seismic activity prompted the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission to shut down two wells. According to Scott Ausbrooks, geo-hazards supervisor for the Arkansas Geological Survey, there has been an immediate improvement since the closure of the wells: “We have definitely noticed a reduction in the number of earthquakes, especially the larger ones.”
A similar correlation between fracking and earthquakes has been seen in Texas, home to more than half of the country’s natural-gas wells. In June 2009, the small town of Cleburne, which had become wealthy from natural gas exploration, was hit by the first earthquake in the town’s 140-year history, followed by four more shortly afterwards.
Supporters of natural gas exploration say that no scientifically proven link has been shown between fracking and seismic activity. Instead, they hail the industry’s contribution to the economy. According to Bruce Palfreyman, who manages Royal Dutch Shell’s gas extraction operations in Louisiana, fracking has enriched over 3,000 local home-owners who have agreements for up to 25 per cent of royalties, and has also helped create more than 50,000 jobs.
New Yorkers like me are anxiously watching what has been happening in neighbouring Pennsylvania. Both our states, as well as West Virginia, sit atop an enormous natural-gas reserve called the Marcellus Shale, a rock formation the size of Greece. Some have valued the shale-bed methane lying more than a mile under the stone at $2 trillion dollars plus. Last year, Shell paid $4.7 billion for assets in the Marcellus Shale, including huge tracts of land in Pennsylvania.
This state has seen one of the largest recent increases in drilling in the United States. In 2000 there were 36,000 active wells; now there are roughly 71,000, with an estimated 20,000 more planned. In February, an investigative report in The New York Times revealed the dramatic impact the gas boom has had on the landscape: “Drilling derricks tower over barns, lining rural roads like feed silos,” the report’s author Ian Urbina said. “The rigs announce their presence with the occasional boom and quiver of underground explosions. Smelling like raw sewage mixed with gasoline, drilling-waste pits, some as large as a football field, sit close to homes.”
Urbina, who acquired confidential documents from the EPA and gas companies, chronicled how contaminated waste water is usually hauled to sewage plants not equipped to treat it, and is then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, containing exorbitant levels of radioactivity.
Technically, federal law requires drinking-water plants to test for radioactivity. But Pennsylvania legislators have encouraged drillers to come to the state by allowing them to test just once every six or nine years.
As for the gas producers, the state allows them to police themselves. Regulators do not perform unannounced inspections to check for signs of spills. They do not demand disclosure on what chemicals the companies use in the hundreds of millions of gallons of fracking fluids they spit underground, even though Dow Chemical has admitted supplying biocides – antimicrobial poisons – to be included in this concoction. And when spills happen, the companies can write their own reports, and lead their own clean-up efforts.
Committed regulators are deeply frustrated by the industry. “We simply can’t keep up,” said one inspector with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. “There’s just too much of the waste. And if we’re too hard on them, the companies might just stop reporting their mistakes.”
Many regulators have quit their jobs out of exasperation. That’s the case with John Quigley, who resigned as secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. “We’re burning the furniture to heat the house,” he lamented. “In shifting away from coal and toward natural gas, we’re trying for cleaner air, but we’re producing massive amounts of toxic waste water.”
Pennsylvania’s most visible natural-gas disaster took place in June 2010, when a well blow-out in Clearfield County spewed 35,000 gallons of fracking fluids into the air, falling onto a local forest. Campers were evacuated, and the offending company, C.C Forbes, was ordered to cease further operations.
Fracking has caused massive rifts in Pennsylvanian communities. In the town of Damascus, drilling advocate Marian Schweighofer discovered, painted on the road outside her home, the word “Lorax” – the name of the eponymous character from a Dr Seuss book who claims to “speak for the trees” and tells off businessmen for “glimping the pond where the humming-fish hummed”. Schweighofer, who had signed a lease with New York-based Hess Corporation to drill on her 712-acre farm, also received death threats, and now sleeps with a gun beside her bed.
The Pennsylvania experience helped draw the battle lines for New York, where a two-year moratorium on fracking in the Marcellus Shale was imposed to permit legislators to study the environmental threats. That freeze expires on July 1 of this year, and both sides of the argument are feverishly lobbying Governor Andrew Cuomo to extend or lift the ban.
Those supporting an end to the freeze have marched in the state capital of Albany with signs saying “responsible gas drilling” and, more wittily, “pass gas”. In the opposing camp, an editorial in The New York Post called for citizens to “Frack, baby, frack.” And a blogger at Discover magazine bemoaned that fracking is “the next thing for Nimbys to complain about, all the while they are using hydrocarbons in their vehicles, homes and businesses.”
Advocates of a permanent red-light for fracking in the Marcellus Shale focus on the amazingly pristine water which New York enjoys, largely thanks to the Delaware and Catskill aqueducts. So clean is our water that many municipalities in New York City do not even need to filter it. Terrified that our children may end up sipping contaminated water, Brooklynites have been sticking posters in their windows saying: “No fracking way”. And demonstrators in Albany wave banners saying: “Fracking is for gassholes.”
Local celebrities such as Mark Ruffalo, Debra Winger, Steve Buscemi and Melissa Leo have joined the fray.
Perhaps the most outspoken opponent of fracking is Josh Fox, a documentary film-maker whose GasLand was nominated for an Oscar earlier this year. The movie chronicles Fox’s own refusal of a $100,000 offer to drill for gas at his Pennsylvania home, and tells the stories of many Americans whose water has been polluted by fracking. Since the film’s release, the gas companies have done all they can to intimidate and smear him.
Thanks to the efforts of Fox and others, Congressmen have been alerted to the issue and have been holding hearings into fracking. A bill co-sponsored by Senator Lautenberg of New Jersey seeks to close the “Halliburton loophole” and restore the EPA’s powers to regulate fracking.
But it looks highly unlikely that Congress will ever support such a bill, let alone ban all fracking, as environmental groups want. Legislative gridlock on Capitol Hill, coupled with the amount of money and jobs at stake, and a Republican contempt for nanny-state rules, make the evidence of environmental devastation irrelevant.
Pumped up by their American success, gas companies have been moving overseas. Britain is high on their list. The first attempt to extract gas in the UK via fracking took place recently in the Bowland Shale near Blackpool.
It was carried out by US-based Cuadrilla Resources, which is financed by Riverstone Holdings, a private equity firm whose managing director is John Browne, the chief executive of BP for 12 years, before he was forced to hand over to Tony Hayward in 2007. His critics point out that on his watch, a cost-cutting culture of recklessness grew up that led eventually to the 2005 Texas refinery explosion that killed 15 people, and to last year’s Gulf of Mexico disaster.
Browne and his colleagues at Cuadrilla have negotiated a sweet deal with the British Government by which they can explore and extract shale gas until 2015 without publicly disclosing the results of their operations. A government spokesman said this four-year period of silence “is protecting their commercial opportunity”.
The profit incentives for Cuadrilla and Browne are huge. Energy industry experts say that more than 10 per cent of the UK’s gas needs could be produced via fracking by 2015. This could increase significantly if estimates published by the US Energy Information Agency correctly assess the UK’s recoverable shale gas reserves as 20 trillion cubic metres – more than double current North Sea reserves.
But critics from the British Green Party warn that the chemicals, such as hydrochloric acid, emitted by fracking could contaminate the British water supply, just as they have done in the US. On March 1, a parliamentary select committee summoned Mark Miller, Cuadrilla’s chief executive, to a hearing on shale gas and asked him what would happen to the waste products from fracking. Miller said that the waste would be sent to a “landfill in a permitted disposal area”.
When pressed by MPs, Miller admitted that leakages similar to those that have led to inflammable tap water cannot be ruled out. “You never have control,” Miller stated. “Fractures are always going to go along the path of least resistance.”
If you’re thinking of emigrating across the Channel to make sure your water stays clean, don’t bother. Continental European companies are also moving to frack for natural gas, as many countries seek to sever dependence from the Russian energy giant Gazprom. Cuadrilla is expanding, and has already secured licences to mine gas in Spain and the Netherlands.
Energy-hungry China has been investing billions in exploiting its potential gas-bearing shales and has set a goal of producing 30 billion cubic metres a year, equivalent to almost half the country’s gas consumption. An agreement made in 2009 with President Barack Obama will provide US technology and investment. Mr Obama also promised co-operation with India. Last January, India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation announced it had discovered the world’s third-largest shale gas reserve at Durgapur in West Bengal.
Australia is jumping on the natural-gas bandwagon. In February it had its first reported case of pollution caused by fracking, involving Queensland gas company QGC.
The only country where environmental concerns have so far trumped commercial ones has been France. Ecological protests led President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government to suspend three exploration licences until an investigation into the environmental impact is complete, in June.
The war between the fracking factions is only likely to intensify. The prospect for peace would require global consensus on the need to cut back on consumption. Failing that, we will need massively improved technology in wells; the development of greener extraction fluids; and rigorously enforced methods of disposing of contaminated waste.
But the commercial incentives to continue the natural gas gold-rush may prove overwhelming, unless public concern escalates. Which means, as is written in The Lorax: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
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