GLOBAL CLIMATE DEBATE

SUSAN MCGINNIS: The Gulf spill is shining its spotlight on the environmental and health effects of generating all forms of energy, and now a new film is generating some buzz in energy circles, professing to expose the dangers of a type of natural gas drilling called hydraulic fracturing.

‘Gasland’ filmmaker Josh Fox shows startling shots of folks lighting their faucet water on fire, purportedly due to hydraulic fracturing. This is the method used to extract natural gas from shale rock, and it involves injecting water, sand, and chemicals underground. And the film tries to illustrate that the practice holds environmental and health risks.

Joining us now to talk about ‘Gasland’ and hydraulic fracturing are Rich Haut from Houston, Senior Research Scientist at the Houston Advanced Research Center. It is a nonprofit, non-partisan supported by government agencies, foundations, and corporations.

Also in Ithaca, New York, Walter Hang is President of Toxics Targeting, which provides data to engineers, municipalities, and individuals buying properties about possibly toxic sites.

Gentlemen, welcome!

RICH HAUT: It’s a pleasure to be here today.

WALTER HANG: Thank you!

SUSAN MCGINNIS: We are happy to have you both. I wanted to get right to one of the most compelling issues of this film, which of course is one of the most impactful parts of the documentary, flammable drinking water. You can’t argue with these graphic images, folks lighting their faucet water on fire, and this is apparently due to...I will ask you first Rich, to the practice of hydraulic fracturing, leaving natural gas, seeping into drinking water, is this what’s happening there?

RICH HAUT: Well, when I watched ‘Gasland’, my first reaction was, was my heart really goes out to these people. Everybody has the right to clean water here.

And then I started looking into it, and I actually delved into -- well, out in Colorado, I know that the Colorado Oil and Gas Commissioners, I gave testimony to them when they were looking at their rules and regulations. And they have actually studied those issues, in particular at the West Divide Creek, at the Markham home and at the McClure home, all three of those, it’s a form of biogenic gas, and what that means, it’s separated from thermogenic gas.

Thermogenic gas is our natural gas that we look at down in the gas shales themselves, and it's what we are trying to produce here.

The biogenic gas occurs in very shallow formations. It’s created by bacteria. It’s caused by landfills and other things. Every single one of those cases in Colorado, they were caused by biogenic gas. And so when we look at the gas coming out of these faucets and all, it is not the natural gas that we are looking at when we drill these wells into the gas shales.

SUSAN MCGINNIS: And I have heard also that this methane migration can occur naturally. Walter, what do you say about these shots of folks lighting their faucet water on fire?

WALTER HANG: Well, in New York State, Toxics Targeting reviewed more than 300,000 spills, many of them associated with gas drilling and oil drilling. We have State Department of Environmental Conservation documents that clearly show that gas has blown it right out of the ground, migrated through fractures in the rock, traveled as far as 8,000 feet in a matter of minutes, and literally has come blasting up inside people’s homes, polluted their wells, was literally jetting out of the ground. People had to run for their lives because of this flammable gas.

I found a person in Candor, New York, there was seismic investigation going on near his home. So they think that this may have been the cause of the gas that now is coming out of his faucet, and he too can light his water.

So this kind of mining is very, very potent and there are lots of problems, according to the data in New York; fires, explosions, people being evacuated, polluted wells, the data are absolutely sound.

SUSAN MCGINNIS: Rich, how do we get to the bottom of this flammable water issue?

RICH HAUT: Well, I know that biogenic gas is -- if we look at gas around the United States, 20% of that gas is biogenic, created by the bacteria in small formations, very uneconomical for people to go after.

You can actually do a test and look at the isotopes and test that gas to see where it is coming from. Is it biogenic, or is it thermogenic? Now, if it’s biogenic, that means it is not coming from the gas shales.

Like I said, the ones that were particularly pinpointed through ‘Gasland’, in the movie there, Markham house, McClure house, and the West Divide Creek, were all biogenic gas.

SUSAN MCGINNIS: Okay. Let’s move on, I wanted to point out that the producers of this film will not allow ‘Clean Skies’ to air any clips from the film, though plenty of them are available out there on ‘YouTube’ and elsewhere.

One of the scenes shows a couple holding up a mason jar filled with water; very, very dirty water. They said it came right out of the tap, extremely graphic image. Give me a sense, Rich, how large of a risk is there to contaminated groundwater caused by hydraulic fracturing?

RICH HAUT: Well, we have to look at how the well is drilled itself, and a number of barriers that exist between the natural gas formations themselves and the surface water.

Now, a typical freshwater surface water is somewhere around 800 to maybe 1,200 feet below the surface of the earth, whereas the natural gas that we are looking at in the gas shales, depends upon what gas shale you are looking at.

If you are looking through the Mid-Continent area, looking at the Woodford Shale in Oklahoma, the Barnett Shale in Texas, it's somewhere around 8,000 feet.

If we go out to the Marcellus Shale, they are somewhere between 4,000-8,000. The Haynesville Shale out in Louisiana, and into Texas there, is somewhere around 8,000-10,000. So you have thousands and thousands of feet of rock between the gas that we are looking at, the gas shale, and the freshwater zones.

Then we have to look at the well construction itself, and we have to ensure that this well is constructed in a proper manner. So there is certain design procedure, certain drilling procedures, and everything that must be followed.

It's required by law, and the state laws are very particular about where a casing, a piece of pipe has to be set through and across the freshwater sands. So it has to be so many hundreds of feet below that.

So there is a seal there of pipe, plus cement, between the wellbore itself and the freshwater.

Then the well is further drilled down and there’s additional pipe and cement that is set. And there are censors there that then can be run into the wellbore to ensure that the seals are there in this annular space. So when the hydraulic fracturing process occurs, the hydraulic fracturing fluid and the proppant should be injected directly just into that formation.

SUSAN MCGINNIS: Rich, in a word, could hydraulic fracturing cause this dirty water, yes or no?

RICH HAUT: There has been no known case where hydraulic fracturing has caused a channel to occur from the producing formation up into the freshwater zone.

Now, I have talked to some people out in Colorado, who had a well very close to where their house was at, like it was in several hundred feet. And during the hydraulic fracturing process, and for that matter when trucks were rolling by their house or other vehicle traffic, there was some vibration that occurred that caused some scale to be released in their well and in the water pipes themselves, and for a time period they did have the scale being produced in their tap water. However, it did clean up afterwards.

SUSAN MCGINNIS: Okay. So it can happen. Walter, you saw this mason jar full of dirty water and you agree this could happen because of the practice.

WALTER HANG: What has happened in New York, you can see a video of a fellow named Dave Eddy in Allegany County, they were fracking at a well across the street from his home. They told him they were going to frack, and a few minutes later, this incredibly dirty, toxic water came blasting out of his faucet, as his children were taking a bath.

And U.S. Energy Corp, which was involved in this well, has tried mightily to actually compensate Mr. Eddy so that they can prevent him from talking about his problem.

You can actually see the samples of the water. In South Geneva, Chesapeake Appalachia actually compensated a family for impacting their water. They, again, told them they were going to frack the well and then the next day this family could see the contamination in their water. They got a treatment system.

So again, you have the theory, where there are regulatory controls, where you have all these engineering controls, everything is done safely. Then you have the reality of Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf, where things go wrong; there are fires, there are explosions, there’s contamination, all the seals fail, the annular cementing fails, and the next thing you know, you have an uncontrolled problem.

And in New York we have documented examples of well water that is polluted and you have these companies saying, we are going to compensate you or we have compensated you. And that's now come in New York, the State Department of Environmental Conservation is in the process of adopting new regulations specifically for hydraulic hydrofracturing, and until those regs are adopted, we have a de facto moratorium on this practice, and that's been for the last two-and-a-half years. We are trying to separate out myth from truth, but the concept that there has never been a problem in New York, we have disproved that.

SUSAN MCGINNIS: Okay. Let me talk a little bit more about regulation. I want to read a clip from the film. Josh Fox says here. He is talking about the Halliburton Loophole to the Safe Drinking Water Act, and he says, it authorizes oil and gas drillers exclusively to inject known hazardous materials, unchecked, directly or adjacent to underground drinking water supplies. It passed as part of the Bush administration’s Energy Policy Act of 2005.

Walter, do you believe that drillers can inject hazardous materials directly into drinking water supplies?

WALTER HANG: It is a very tricky situation. Almost all of the drilling permits are essentially granted by the states. So in New York, if you want to drill into the Marcellus Formation, there’s really no federal permitting involved in any way, shape, or form. You have to go to the Department of Environmental Conservation and get the permit.

Really the only thing that the feds do is that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency can issue an Underground Control Injection Well permit if a firm wants to shoot the natural gas waste water back down into the ground.

So in New York, that’s what I have been studying, really there’s no federal permitting for drilling the well, essentially fracking the well, that’s all under state control.

The state determined two-and-a-half years ago that the existing regs were inadequate. They drafted a proposal, it’s under review, but it has not been adopted, its been brutally criticized. The Environmental Protection Agency has said, it’s inadequate to safeguard public health.

So this is really a very new kind of application of hydraulic hydrofracturing, these very deep formations. Marcellus Shale is New York is about an average of a mile deep. They drill down, they drill through, they frack. Then they have to figure out what to do with this waste water. So there are a lot of questions. New York has said, no drilling until these regs have been adopted.

SUSAN MCGINNIS: Right. Rich, can these oil and gas drillers inject hazardous chemicals and Josh Fox says, there are 596 different chemicals that go into this water. Can they inject it directly into drinking water? This is what Fox says.

RICH HAUT: No, they can’t. Let’s look at some facts here. The Environmental Protection Agency has been around now for about 40 years. The Safe Drinking Water Act has been around for 36 years. We have been hydraulic fracturing wells since 1948, over 62 years now. So there’s that part of it.

Then there’s the part that -- there’s the state requirements, local requirements, rules and regulations, where the drilling permits are issues.

Here in Texas, we have the Texas Railroad Commissioner; they are Oil and Gas Commissioners. They have been around since 1901, regulating oil and gas activities in the State of Texas. There is the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, an organization that brings together all the oil and gas commissioners across the United States, so that they can discuss best practices.

So I know Bradfield out there in New York is a member of that. He goes and talks to the people in Pennsylvania, to Colorado, to Texas, and Wyoming and so on, to fully understand the best practices as they start developing their rules and regulations on a state basis.

SUSAN MCGINNIS: Okay. One more part of the film is, it disregards the regulation of fracking and Fox says, “…what I didn’t know was that the 2005 Energy Bill pushed through Congress by Dick Cheney, exempts the oil and natural gas industries from the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, the Superfund Law, and about a dozen other environmental and democratic regulations.”

So what about regulation and fracturing under the Safe Drinking Water Act? Rich, it is exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act, what about all these other regulations?

RICH HAUT: Well, actually, they are controlled under each and one of those acts and other acts as well, such as the National Environmental Protection Act, NEPA laws. So there are certain components of it.

Hydraulic fracturing has never in that whole time period of 36-year time period been underneath the Safe Water Drinking Act. Like I said, there are state laws and rules and regulations that aggressively regulate that industry.

SUSAN MCGINNIS: Walter, what do you say, this is specifically about Fox’s assertion. We understand about the Safe Drinking Water Act, about the Clean Air Act, and all of these other regulations?

WALTER HANG: It’s incredibly complicated. The Safe Drinking Water Act is really charged with setting what are called Maximum Contaminant Levels for pollutants that are present in drinking water, really doesn’t regulate drilling per se.

But there is a provision, they are supposed to protect, for example, sole source aquifers. For example, all of Long Island, New York, where 3.3 million people get their water. But a lot of the components simply aren’t in force.

So in many cases, the letter and the spirit of the law at the federal level are good, but the implementation is very, very bad. Bottom line, in New York, the drilling is regulated by the state authorities, based on the Department of Environmental Conservation’s own data, the enforcement has been woefully inadequate.

SUSAN MCGINNIS: Okay. Unfortunately, we are out of time. I just want to get one quick answer from each of you. Walter, do you believe natural gas can be extracted in an environmentally safe manner?

WALTER HANG: Not under the current regulatory scheme. If they do things better, if they require financial surety, we will find out. But under the existing regs, it cannot be done safely. The data proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

SUSAN MCGINNIS: Rich, can it be done?

RICH HAUT: We have a program going on right now that includes a consortium from environmental organizations, research universities, and industry, that we lead, and we are looking at the technologies and how to go about doing that in a safe and environmentally friendly manner. So I believe we can.

SUSAN MCGINNIS: Okay. We will have to leave it there. Rich Haut, at Houston Advanced Research Center, thank you so much. Walter Hang from Toxics Targeting. Thank you both for joining us.

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