Just under the wire, the EPA has given its official “comments” in response to New York State’s draft plan for drilling for shale gas in the upstate Marcellus field. The EPA found the mammoth 800+ page draft does not adequately address issues of wastewater, air quality, land impact and several other problems. It urges the state to deal with them more fully before setting out the formal regulations for drilling, suggesting they learn from other states’ (Pennsylvania, West Virginia’s) greater experience in drilling.
As I have written before, it is of paramount importance to get this right, since New York City’s drinking water is at stake. The city’s water from several sources upstate comes to the city mostly untreated — a rarity in US cities — and a big mistake in drilling means billions of dollars in treatment plants and more. At least as important: if New York State can figure out a way to satisfy environmental concerns to protect local environment and New York City’s concerns and still get the gas out, it will be a major step forward to protecting the environment and populations in drilling which can be applied in the rest of the US and globally.
In almost painfully technical language, the EPA’s comments urge the smallest environmental footprint possible, the establishment of a regulatory program to deal with naturally occurring radioactive water and brine that comes up from the drilling, avoidance of wetlands and sensitive habitats, air quality oversight, limiting gas flaring (burn-off of the escaping gas), and vastly improved waste water and cuttings treatment, and addressing other water issues.
Not all these problems have been addressed adequately elsewhere. For example, The Dallas Morning News reported in early December that in Texas’s Barnett shale area,
Critics feared everything from polluted groundwater in the Barnett Shale to high-pressure gas lines beneath their front yards. Now the biggest concern – at least the one that governments are watching closely – is in the air. Tests at one natural gas site found benzene at 1,100 parts per billion… people can start experiencing dizziness and nausea at 180 parts per billion with short-term exposure… The OSHA limits for short-term exposure to benzene among workers is 500 parts per billion.
But the major problem is water. A shale gas well especially uses an the enormous amount of water (a million gallons or more) to drill such a deep well to keep the drill bit cool, to bring up the cuttings taken from the rock being drilled, and then to frack it. In some places in Pennsylvania, drilling companies are recycling the water or using air drilling, which has its own dangers (heat = explosion) but minimizes the water used.
There is the use of hydraulic fracturing chemicals that are injected into the well and subjected to explosive pressure to shatter the shale and release the gas embedded in it. The fracking fluid probably contains dangerous additives (and some safe ones), but the very lack of industry transparency and the fact it was developed (decades ago) by Halliburton, and inordinately protected in the 2005 Energy Bill by Dick Cheney, sends up red flags.
And the EPA’s comments focus on a more important question that has not yet been settled to anyone’s satisfaction — what to do with the huge volume of waste water that comes from drilling of the well, and the contaminating waters subsequently pulled out mixedin with the gas. Re-injection into the ground has not been popular. (“Not in my backyard”, cost, and risk.) And what happens to flowback fluids? Open pits? Closed tanks?
New York City (understandably), the New York Times and several environmental groups are totally against the drilling, but I think drilling will happen. (There are already more than 6000 wells in the state.) The economic and energy security opportunity is too great, the land in too many hands, the technology for successful extraction available. Better to set aside and protect the really vulnerable places and set up strict regulations and oversight for the rest. (After all, the watershed isn’t only the streams and rivers that supply the water, but covers the entire drainage area for scores of miles in all directions.)
The beauty of the EPA getting involved and this long and convoluted process is that it is forcing a state to hash out the minutia of the environmental threats raised by drilling. The process is a bellwether. Okay, maybe I’m a geek, but I find it thrilling. In the end, we will all be much safer for the effort, even those who don’t think we need it.
