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Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
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(This goes a long way in compensating for the fracking propaganda from
NYT reporter Clifford Krauss.)
NY Times February 26, 2011
Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers
By IAN URBINA
The American landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of new wells
and drilling rigs, as the country scrambles to tap into this century’s
gold rush — for natural gas.
The gas has always been there, of course, trapped deep underground in
countless tiny bubbles, like frozen spills of seltzer water between thin
layers of shale rock. But drilling companies have only in recent years
developed techniques to unlock the enormous reserves, thought to be
enough to supply the country with gas for heating buildings, generating
electricity and powering vehicles for up to a hundred years.
So energy companies are clamoring to drill. And they are getting rare
support from their usual sparring partners. Environmentalists say using
natural gas will help slow climate change because it burns more cleanly
than coal and oil. Lawmakers hail the gas as a source of jobs. They also
see it as a way to wean the United States from its dependency on other
countries for oil.
But the relatively new drilling method — known as high-volume horizontal
hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking — carries significant
environmental risks. It involves injecting huge amounts of water, mixed
with sand and chemicals, at high pressures to break up rock formations
and release the gas.
With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of
wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens
like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can
occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic
materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the
hydrofracking itself.
While the existence of the toxic wastes has been reported, thousands of
internal documents obtained by The New York Times from the Environmental
Protection Agency, state regulators and drillers show that the dangers
to the environment and health are greater than previously understood.
The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to
sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers
that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than
previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators
say is safe for these treatment plants to handle.
Other documents and interviews show that many E.P.A. scientists are
alarmed, warning that the drilling waste is a threat to drinking water
in Pennsylvania. Their concern is based partly on a 2009 study, never
made public, written by an E.P.A. consultant who concluded that some
sewage treatment plants were incapable of removing certain drilling
waste contaminants and were probably violating the law.
The Times also found never-reported studies by the E.P.A. and a
confidential study by the drilling industry that all concluded that
radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and
other waterways.
But the E.P.A. has not intervened. In fact, federal and state regulators
are allowing most sewage treatment plants that accept drilling waste not
to test for radioactivity. And most drinking-water intake plants
downstream from those sewage treatment plants in Pennsylvania, with the
blessing of regulators, have not tested for radioactivity since before
2006, even though the drilling boom began in 2008.
In other words, there is no way of guaranteeing that the drinking water
taken in by all these plants is safe.
That has experts worried.
“We’re burning the furniture to heat the house,” said John H. Quigley,
who left last month as secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of
Conservation and Natural Resources. “In shifting away from coal and
toward natural gas, we’re trying for cleaner air, but we’re producing
massive amounts of toxic wastewater with salts and naturally occurring
radioactive materials, and it’s not clear we have a plan for properly
handling this waste.”
The risks are particularly severe in Pennsylvania, which has seen a
sharp increase in drilling, with roughly 71,000 active gas wells, up
from about 36,000 in 2000. The level of radioactivity in the wastewater
has sometimes been hundreds or even thousands of times the maximum
allowed by the federal standard for drinking water. While people clearly
do not drink drilling wastewater, the reason to use the drinking-water
standard for comparison is that there is no comprehensive federal
standard for what constitutes safe levels of radioactivity in drilling
wastewater.
Drillers trucked at least half of this waste to public sewage treatment
plants in Pennsylvania in 2008 and 2009, according to state officials.
Some of it has been sent to other states, including New York and West
Virginia.
Yet sewage treatment plant operators say they are far less capable of
removing radioactive contaminants than most other toxic substances.
Indeed, most of these facilities cannot remove enough of the radioactive
material to meet federal drinking-water standards before discharging the
wastewater into rivers, sometimes just miles upstream from
drinking-water intake plants.
In Pennsylvania, these treatment plants discharged waste into some of
the state’s major river basins. Greater amounts of the wastewater went
to the Monongahela River, which provides drinking water to more than
800,000 people in the western part of the state, including Pittsburgh,
and to the Susquehanna River, which feeds into Chesapeake Bay and
provides drinking water to more than six million people, including some
in Harrisburg and Baltimore.
Lower amounts have been discharged into the Delaware River, which
provides drinking water for more than 15 million people in Philadelphia
and eastern Pennsylvania.
In New York, the wastewater was sent to two plants that discharge into
Southern Cayuga Lake, near Ithaca, and Owasco Outlet, near Auburn. In
West Virginia, a plant in Wheeling discharged gas-drilling wastewater
into the Ohio River.
“Hydrofracking impacts associated with health problems as well as
widespread air and water contamination have been reported in at least a
dozen states,” said Walter Hang, president of Toxics Targeting, a
business in Ithaca, N.Y., that compiles data on gas drilling.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/us/27gas.html
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