The Real Cost of Fracking (26 page)

Just a mile from Claire’s community, we took a detour. Large, gorgeous houses with big backyards and manicured lawns have also had problems with their well water, according to Claire. But recently, these homeowners were provided with the opportunity to have city water as an alternative to using their well water—a choice Claire’s community, as of late 2013, does not yet have.

“Plain and simple, we just want water,” Claire said. “We don’t care about anything else. Our air is destroyed—there are no changes that are going to happen there. I don’t really have anything against industry coming in and doing their thing. Everybody needs a living, everybody needs a job to do, but if you can’t do it right or can’t admit to doing it wrong, then something needs to change.”

In the middle of quiet country lanes and farmland, a large gas processing plant appeared just off the road: it has much frontage but also extends back beyond view, into the depth of the valley. This one is similar to the plant I passed on the way to the Wassermans’ home, with many towers and elongated tanks, with gates and guards and large signs warning visitors to stop and register before proceeding. This is where the impurities in the gas from the many wells in Claire’s town will be removed—impurities such as non-methane hydrocarbons, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, nitrogen, helium, mercury, and radioactive gas, including radon. I took a photograph of the plant, and later, when I was reviewing the picture, I noticed a security guard in the photo taking a picture of me. It came as a bit of a surprise that the guard could have possibly considered me any sort of threat.

Claire stopped on the side of the road and motioned to the house across the street from this processing plant, explaining that she and Jason used to live here years ago. She said it was a nice house, with thirty-two acres. As large as this processing facility is, there are plans for it to extend even further into this otherwise gorgeous valley, where cornfields and hayfields now inhabit the land.

The processing plant was supposed to be the last thing I saw on this tour. As Claire drove, I watched the streak down the middle of the road, on the opposite lane. She mentioned this streak earlier, but here it was again, darker and more obvious. “When it rains, the whole road is soap bubbles. We saw a truck with the cap off. Just drip, drip, drip. I have a picture on my phone—it said ‘brine water’ [production water] on the truck. What’s in brine water that would make it become soapy once wet?”

I told Claire that without testing, we couldn’t know for sure, but whatever was dripping on the road probably changed the surface tension, like soap, so that foaming could occur easily. Because surfactants (substances that lower the surface tension of liquids) are the largest group of chemicals by weight in hydraulic fracturing fluid, there is a good chance that production water would contain these substances.

Claire was describing how she had passed well-pad access roads that were wet with puddles on bright sunny days, when seemingly on cue, we saw one. Claire shouted, “Caught ’em doing it—the whole road is wet!”

And apparently just finished. The tanker truck paused at the end of the access road ready to turn on to the public road we were driving on, the white pickup right behind it. Claire slowed down and pulled over to the side of the road, just a little way past the access road. But when the pickup didn’t budge, she drove on, turning down a side road, just out of view. From this road, we saw the long row of mailboxes at the entrance to Claire’s community, and we could also see the duck ponds across the street from the newly wet access road.

After waiting a few minutes, I got out and walked to the end of the road to see if the pickup had departed. Unluckily for us, it had, and Claire picked me up and raced to the scene of the crime, ordering me to “get a whiff.” The August sun was hot and the day cloudless, yet from the public road, we could easily see that the gravel road was soaked with many large puddles filled with a cloudy white liquid. I asked where the road led and if it would be possible to see this well pad, the one closest to her. She was sure we could not. This was a private road—someone did live at the end of it, but it was also an access road to a shale gas pad, with a guard shack at its end.

It was not necessary for me to open the door and lean out of her car, for the odor enveloped both the car and us as we parked on the side of the public road. It was unlike anything I had ever smelled. The best description of the smell was a combination of a sewer and my college organic chemistry lab after a three-hour session. Whatever it was, it made Claire and me so nauseated that we departed less than a minute later, Claire holding a cloth with her favorite perfume close to her face to block the foul odor we had just exposed ourselves to.

This is how she survives, I thought. If I lived here, I’d be doing this too, and I hate perfume.

A few months after visiting the Wassermans, I mailed a check to Claire to purchase water for her community. I received a thank you letter from her church’s reverend, who is organizing the water contributions. The letter sums up what I had learned on my visit to Jason and Claire’s home—that vulnerable people in this community, as in many other communities across shale gas country, are in desperate need of clean freshwater for drinking, cooking, bathing, washing dishes, laundry, and tending their animals. In a later correspondence, the reverend explained that what began as a short-term solution has become a long-term project with no immediate end in sight. He thanked me again for my contributions and emphasized that donations will be needed to purchase water until a permanent solution can be found.
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EPILOGUE

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

As we have shown, proving that a toxic substance exists in the environment
and
is the cause of health problems can be extremely difficult. The question then becomes, how do we proceed?

One argument that we have tried to disprove throughout this book is the assertion that no case has been definitively proven to show a direct link between unconventional drilling and a health problem. We believe that the sudden deaths of farm animals following exposure to hydraulic fracturing fluid
¹
provides a clear link between gas drilling operations and health impacts. Another somewhat more defensible but misleading claim, that hydraulic fracturing has never been proven to cause water or air contamination, is often used as a surrogate argument. When people make this argument, they tend to leave out all aspects of the process other than fracturing rock, ignoring issues like surface spills, faulty well casing, and hydrogen sulfide release, and focus only on hydraulic fracturing itself. Except for possible interactions with abandoned wells and fractures that reach back to the well bore, the process itself may be unlikely to cause contamination when the shale layers are a mile below the surface. But in shallower layers, such as wells in Wyoming, Alabama, and Alberta and wells planned for Ireland, Northern Ireland, and New York, the claim remains to be proven. When the entire process is factored in, as we have seen, water and air can indeed become contaminated, to the detriment of humans and animals.

We noted in the introduction that the precautionary principle would put the burden of proof for environmental harm strictly on the industry. Although the strict interpretation of this principle is arguably incoherent (that is, both inaction and action could produce some harm), as we discussed above, the alternative is equally untenable. That is, in the absence of strict proof of a link between drilling and health effects and environmental pollution, we simply ignore all possible cases of air and water contamination. The solution will undoubtedly require a careful assessment of risk and an equally careful assignment of the burden of proof.

The easiest way to think about a solution is to consider the process of drug approval by the FDA. To push a drug through to final approval, the pharmaceutical company must use carefully designed protocols and criteria to prove that the drug is safe. The burden of proof is not on the patient taking the drug; the burden lies on the company proposing the drug for approval. That is actually a somewhat more sophisticated restatement of the precautionary principle. The drug is not assumed to be safe and efficacious until proven otherwise. Let’s take this one step further before returning to gas drilling. Ibuprofen is generally considered a safe drug, although with known side effects. Now imagine that a company wanted to propose a new drug with many of the same therapeutic actions, perhaps working in a similar way but on a slightly different range of targeted proteins in the body. Could the company claim that the long history with ibuprofen proves that this new drug is safe? Of course not, as has been painfully shown in the history of the drug Vioxx (rofecoxib).
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Returning from our analogy to gas drilling, we are told that gas drilling with hydraulic fracturing has been done for sixty years, with no proven cases of water contamination. This claim raises two issues in our analogy. First, we know that large-scale horizontal drilling with high-volume hydraulic fracturing is a massive industrial process that is different qualitatively and quantitatively from the small-scale, conventional drilling of the past—perhaps even more different than ibuprofen is from Vioxx. Second, where does the burden of proof lie? Do we assume now that the process is safe until the public or perhaps an academic lab can prove that it is unsafe? Careful standards must be put in place to approve new procedures that have the potential to affect public health, and the burden of proof must lie with the oil and gas industry, just as it does with the pharmaceutical industry. As it now stands, the burden of proof lies, sadly, on the affected and those of us trying to make sense of what is going on.

There are many realistic solutions between the extremes of placing all the burden of proof on the public, on the one hand, and holding industry to irrational standards of proof, on the other. Among the commonsense, but elusive, reforms is mandatory full disclosure of all chemicals used in the drilling process, including proprietary chemicals, before drilling starts and in time for extensive predrilling testing of air and water. Public health concerns should trump any claim of propriety information. All water wells within a two-mile radius of the proposed well should be tested before drilling, and after drilling and hydraulic fracturing. The tests should be comprehensive (including all substances used in drilling and fracturing and those expected to return to the surface from the shale layers), conducted by an independent certified laboratory with a clearly documented chain of custody, and paid for by the drilling company. All results should be freely available to all interested parties, including physicians, who are currently under gag orders prohibiting them from sharing information, as is currently the law in several states, including Pennsylvania.

This policy would provide baseline information, but the interpretation of changes in air and water quality after drilling remains problematic. Proving that any changes in the air and water are due to drilling activity and that the concentrations present may be a health risk is difficult at best. In 1997, the Environmental Defense Fund published
Toxic Ignorance
, a white paper in which the organization argued that we know little about the risks of commonly used chemicals.
³
This is as true today as it was when the paper was released. In particular, we know little about how low doses of some chemicals can produce long-term health changes. The best examples are the endocrine-disrupting chemicals that are present among the chemicals used in the drilling industry and that work differently at low concentrations than at high concentrations. Add to this the problem we noted at the beginning of this section: we don’t know all of the chemicals that may show up in water or air during and after drilling operations. This is a difficult problem with no clear solutions, but the burden of proof cannot lie solely on the backs of those most affected and those who can least afford an effective defense of their health and safety.

After traveling throughout Pennsylvania and meeting people affected by shale gas extraction and observing the environmental consequences of coal mining, we find it understandable that many people now question the continued use of fossil fuels for energy production. But what about renewables? Consider the cartoon image of the environmental extremist, who not only rejects fossil fuels, but also blames wind power for being too noisy and killing flocks of birds, and calls solar panels an unnecessary blight on the beauty of the landscape. We have never met such a person, and most reasonable individuals would agree that electricity and heating are good things. All of us clearly need energy to maintain our health and standard of living, but we need to think rationally about the choices we make in terms of both energy policy and how we live our lives. More importantly, can we continue to enjoy our lifestyle while knowing that, to some extent, it comes at the expense and the sacrifice of others? After having explored this sacrifice in previous chapters, we would like to consider our energy use from the perspective of both energy policy and everyday life.

The use of fossil fuels permeates our society and will be with us for many years to come. The questions that we face are whether it is necessary to transition away from fossil fuels, how fast we can do so, and what the costs will be. Considering first the necessity of fossil fuels, there are three important concerns. The first concern is examined in this book—that is, the effect of fossil fuel extraction on those living near gas and oil wells. The second concern is that because the supply of fossil fuels is finite, extraction methods become more and more expensive and environmentally risky as the supply diminishes. The third concern is the effect of fossil fuels on climate change. We often hear of the debate on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is a scientific debate only in the minds of those who receive scientific information solely from unreliable sources and those who use the perceived uncertainties for personal gain. The reality of climate change is not a significant debate in the scientific community; only the details are matters of debate.
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