The Real Cost of Fracking (3 page)

The initial wastewater, referred to as
flowback
, contains a portion of the hydraulic fracturing fluid; later, substances trapped for hundreds of millions of years in the shale layers flow to the surface along with the gas or oil as “produced water.” Thus, wastewater can be as toxic as, or more toxic than, hydraulic fracturing fluid, as witnessed by farmers whose herds’ reproductive capacity was greatly diminished after the cattle were exposed to leaky impoundments. Other witnesses include pet owners whose dogs died soon after playing in puddles of waste fluids spread on the road or after lapping fluid from unfenced impoundments. The problem is that the well operator must now deal with millions of gallons of toxic fluid in the form of wastewater that has been left in pits to evaporate, recycled to be used in other wells (increasing the concentration of toxic chemicals), spread on our roads as deicing fluid or to suppress dust, given to wastewater-treatment plants that are ill equipped to handle these toxicants, or returned to the earth by injection into deep wells (sometimes resulting in small earthquakes as we learned from a family surrounded by injection wells in central Arkansas). Each of these dubious solutions to the wastewater issue has been associated with environmental and health problems.

But certainly, you would think that citizens would be protected from environmental and health impacts through the strict enforcement of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA had for many years considered hydraulic fracturing outside its regulatory authority. However, a class action lawsuit brought by the Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation (LEAF) in 1994 challenged the EPA’s stance. The suit concerned hydraulic fracturing in coal bed methane wells in the Black Warrior Basin of Alabama.
²⁵
The Eleventh Circuit US Court of Appeals ruled in favor of LEAF in 1997 and required the EPA to regulate the process. In 1999, the EPA began a study of the risks that hydraulic fracturing in coal-bed methane reservoirs posed to drinking water. However, during the four years of the study, the Bush administration came into office, with the former CEO of Halliburton, Richard Cheney, serving as vice president. Cheney’s energy task force repeatedly touted the benefits of hydraulic fracturing, and in 2004, the EPA study was released, concluding that hydraulic fracturing posed no serious threat to drinking water in coal-bed methane reservoirs. Soon after the release of the study, an EPA scientist, Weston Wilson, wrote a letter to Congress outlining the conflicts of interests in the panel that reviewed the data and the political pressure to produce the conclusion favored by the vice president. Wilson’s assertions aside, in 2005, the SDWA definition of underground injection was specified by Congress to exclude hydraulic fracturing. This act of Congress, known as the “Halliburton Loophole,” has removed the EPA from any regulation of hydraulic fracturing, leaving regulation up to the individual states.

One might also consider the danger posed by the millions of gallons of hydraulic fracturing fluid and the toxic flowback fluid at the surface as an important regulatory issue for the EPA. Here again, the EPA has little authority, as the agency regulation states: “Drilling fluids, produced waters, and other wastes associated with the exploration, development, or production of . . . natural gas [are considered] . . . solid wastes which are not hazardous wastes.”
²⁶
That is, no matter how toxic the liquid, if it is produced in the exploration, development, or production of gas, it is by definition nontoxic. Defining a substance as nontoxic in this manner is similar to a vegetarian’s defining a rare, juicy steak as a vegetable and eating it with gusto.

The EPA has recently undertaken a study of hydraulic fracturing and its impact on drinking-water resources and may revise some of these apparently outdated regulations.
²⁷
Despite this ongoing study, the Office of the Inspector General of the EPA issued a report acknowledging the limited air-emissions data for oil and gas production: “With limited data, human health risks are uncertain, states may design incorrect or ineffective emission control strategies, and EPA’s decisions about regulating industry may be misinformed.”
²⁸
Currently, regulations are set by the individual states, and the extent of regulation and degree of enforcement vary widely among the states that allow high-volume hydraulic fracturing. According to Lisa Jackson, the former administrator of the EPA, “The scale has really gone up astronomically: a thousand wells a year in the Fort Worth area. Remember, oil and gas drilling and development is primarily in this country regulated at the state level. States like Texas, states like Wyoming, states like Pennsylvania, are going to have to step up. We do have cases where we do believe we see many cases of groundwater contamination and drinking-water contamination that are if not brought on entirely by natural gas production, were exacerbated by it. Not just methane, which is natural gas, but other contaminants as well.”
²⁹

The question that we are left with is, do the costs outweigh the benefits? That is, to what extent can we tolerate the inevitable environmental degradation that accompanies extraction of hydrocarbons via high-volume hydraulic fracturing? Can we bring renewable sources of energy online rapidly so that the extraction of fossil fuels by any means is less attractive? There are no easy answers to these questions. We can marvel at the accomplishments of geologists and engineers who have devised methods for extracting these natural resources. But the major questions that remain are not in the realm of the engineer. The questions are now of a biological, environmental, and medical nature. Simply put, we are not certain of the public health implications of large-scale industrial oil and gas drilling.

Public health information is difficult to obtain. Reproductive problems and cancer may take years to develop, and in our mobile society, proving a causal relationship between an environmental risk factor and a particular disease can be difficult or impossible. Some environmentalists often invoke the “precautionary principle,” which states that if an action is suspected of causing harm, then the burden of proof is on the entity taking such action. In the case of the fossil fuel industry, the precautionary principle would suggest that this industry has the obligation to prove that its actions do not cause public harm. The fossil fuel industry, however, seems to have taken a page from the tobacco industry playbook. That is, if a link between drilling operations and public health cannot be proven definitively, then the link is rejected, effectively putting the burden of proof on the victim.

Cass Sunstein, a renowned legal scholar from the University of Chicago, argues that the precautionary principle is inherently incoherent in the sense that risks exist both by taking and avoiding a particular action.
³⁰
However, if we move away from the strict interpretation of the precautionary principle, we can begin to define the risks involved in large-scale gas and oil drilling and to assign the burden of proof for avoiding a certain level of harm. This will require careful scientific studies of the health effects of drilling operations. But how can we obtain useful information in a reasonable time? The answer, we believe, is to consider animals, children, and fossil fuel workers as sentinels of human health.

Using animals as sentinels has been championed by Peter Rabinowitz of Yale University,
³¹
and we discussed this approach to studying health impacts of gas drilling operations in a recent paper.
³²
We agree with the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Animals as Sentinels of Environmental Health Hazards, which noted, “The primary goal of an animal sentinel system is to identify harmful chemicals or chemical mixtures in the environment
before
they might otherwise be detected through human epidemiologic studies or toxicologic studies in laboratory animals. Once identified, exposures could be minimized until methods can be devised to determine specific etiologic agents. Animal sentinel systems themselves are not the answer to the latter problem but might provide additional valuable time in which to search for the answer.”
³³

In addition to animals, children are inadvertent sentinels. Because of their higher metabolic rates and immature neurologic and detoxifying systems, children are at higher risk of developing adverse health effects from environmental hazards, including those from nearby industrial operations. As we update our study, we are finding more cases where children are often the first in the family to become ill. Initial results on babies living near industrial gas operations in Pennsylvania have demonstrated an increased prevalence of low birth weight and a reduction of five-minute APGAR scores (assessment of appearance, pulse, grimace, activity, and respiration at birth),
³⁴
indicating that infants born in intensively drilled areas may suffer health impacts starting at birth. But oil and gas workers—with the highest likelihood of direct exposures to chemicals and the highest mortality rates of any industry—are perhaps our best, yet least studied, sentinels.
³⁵

As we studied the impacts of unconventional drilling, we spoke with families about their health and the health of their pets and farm animals. All the families we interviewed live near industrial fossil fuel operations in one of the major shale plays in the United States, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Louisiana, Colorado, North Dakota, Arkansas, and New York. Former employees of the fossil fuel industry and concerned citizens throughout the country referred us to people whose water and air had become severely affected, whose animals were dying, and whose lives were being turned upside down by the oil and gas industry. While each story, each context, each timeline of events was different, we were alarmed by what we kept hearing over and over again from people in very different situations hundreds of miles apart:

We decided that these stories needed to be told. Almost everyone with whom we have spoken is either involved in litigation against the fossil fuel industry or seriously contemplating it. Some people distrust and fear this industry, while others remain staunch supporters despite the devastating consequences of drilling in their own lives. Some people are former oil and gas industry employees, while, for others, the experiences they described were their first contact with oil and gas drilling.

We have divided this book into three sections. The first section,
chapters 1
through
4
, chronicles the lives of families and their pets—dogs, cats, horses, goats, rabbits, pigs, chickens, and a donkey. Because companion animals live among us, sometimes never leaving our sides, changes in their behavior and health are quickly and easily observed. As such, the companion animals in these stories served as bellwethers, giving their owners early warning that something was amiss.

The second section—
chapters 5
through
7
—encompasses farmers and food-producing animals, largely beef cattle. Although the farmers described in this section professed fondness for their animals, a crucial issue was the economic effects of the deaths of their animals and the loss of reproductive capacity. An associated problem is the potential introduction of toxicants into the food supply directly from crops or exposed animals (from meat, milk, eggs, or cheese) or indirectly through rendering, where animals’ flesh and bones are turned into products used to feed other animals or, in some cases, humans (through the production of lard from animal fat). This illustrates the important point that the effects of industrialized gas drilling have the potential to affect people in areas far from active drilling regions.

In the last section (chapters
8
and
9
), we depict the issues surrounding unconventional gas drilling and environmental justice. We illustrate how one family living in a disenfranchised, poor community surrounded by shale gas operations not only copes with the loss of clean water and fresh air, but also survives as a unit by sacrificing for each other.

Each of the stories is told in the first person from the perspective of one of us (Michelle Bamberger), who conducted most of the interviews. For each story told here, there are many more families that could tell similar tales. We think of the travails of the people and animals in our stories as illustrations of the impacts we all face from industrialized gas drilling.

When we first began speaking with people, we simply asked, What happened to you and what happened to your animals? After the first few interviews, it became obvious that to tell a complete story, we needed the details of drilling: we asked about seismic testing; about the distance of the well pad to water sources; the name of the drilling company; when the well was drilled and fractured; about the distance of the wastewater impoundment to the water well and to springs, creeks, and ponds; about trucks spreading and dumping wastewater; about pipeline ruptures and when the well was flared; about compressor stations and processing plants in the neighborhood; about the location of deep-injection wells; and about the occurrence of earthquakes. We asked about all of this, in addition to the results of water, air, and soil tests, veterinary and human health records, and permission to contact veterinarians.

People provided as much information as they had available to them. Not everyone had a regular veterinarian. Cattle farmers, especially beef cattle farmers, often cover their own routine veterinary care. Not everyone had predrilling tests done, and those who did most often consented to driller-initiated tests that were often incomplete, lacking results for volatile and semivolatile organic and radioactive compounds. Tests are expensive: only one person we spoke with ran complete water and air tests through a private laboratory before and after drilling began, spending more than $4,000 in one year. Veterinary testing, including screening for toxicants, was not done routinely, especially in large animals, for the same reason. We found that well-documented cattle cases were the anomaly: necropsies (animal autopsies) were usually not done, screening for toxicants was even rarer, and the names of all chemicals used in drilling and fracturing operations were not known. Without basic testing and knowledge of all the chemicals used, definitive proof linking oil and gas drilling operations to animal or human health problems is difficult to obtain.