Frack gas is unnatural natural gas, containing different minor and trace components

Letter to the editor by Vickie Oles, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, August 5, 2022

Residents of New Freeport, Greene County, might not agree with letter-writer Dave Callahan, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition (“Natural gas development benefits Pa. residents,” July 25, TribLIVE). Residents report shower water is oily, water smells bad and pets won’t drink the water. There are reports of “errant fracking fluid from a well site.” A microbiology professor’s testing determined the water isn’t potable. The solution? The driller and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection “are investigating.” The families received some bottled water.

Other communities are affected by gas development. Check out “Fractured: The body burden of living near fracking” from Environmental Health News.

In addition to threats to health and disruption to daily life to residents near frack sites, we all might face threats. The frack waste from wells can be toxic and radioactive. Is that what is in the residual waste trucks driving through our communities? Where is it going?

Aren’t jobs a benefit? Workers in the drilling industry have seven times the death rate of other U.S. workers on average with injury and death from road and rail accidents, machinery mishaps, toxic chemical exposure, respirable silica sand, explosions and fires.

These risks seem to outweigh any benefits. {an obvious understatement}

>>> Vickie Oles, Ligonier Township, Laurel Highlands, Westmoreland County, PA

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See Also: PA-DEP Fines CNX for Well Failure Near Westmoreland County Reservoir, Reid Frazier, State Impact Penna, August 21, 2020

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has fined CNX $175,000 for allowing a gas well failure near a drinking water reservoir in Westmoreland County. A casing pipe inside the well ruptured about 5,000 feet below the surface of the Shaw 1G well on Jan. 26, 2019. The rupture sent gas and fracking fluids into nearby rock layers. The gas reached surrounding gas wells.

Tar sands industry is out of control in Canada

From an In-Depth Article by Drew Anderson, The Narwhal News, June 4, 2022

Mapping the growth of the toxic reservoirs shows just how far they’ve expanded since 1975, amid a surge in bitumen (tar) mining.

Picture downtown Toronto. All the condos, subways, roads, office towers and people. Now cover the whole thing with a toxic lake. Maybe you’ve never been there. Have you done the drive from Calgary into the Rockies? Imagine almost the entire 105-kilometre stretch from the city to Canmore as one continuous vista of oilsands tailing ponds.

According to a new report titled “50 Years of Sprawling Tailings” from Environmental Defence and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, those are just two examples of how large the tailings ponds in northern Alberta have grown.

And despite new rules introduced in 2016 around managing tailings, the ponds have continued to grow, according to the report. This growth represents an increasing ecological and economic risk that will cost billions of dollars to clean up and could leave taxpayers footing the bill.

So what exactly does that look like on the ground? And what impact do tailings ponds have?

Here’s a bit of background ~ What are tailings ponds?

First thing to note, and it’s something the authors of the report stress right off the top: the ponds are anything but ponds as most people understand them.

“To be calling them ponds when tailings ponds actually are far larger than anything you would ever describe as a natural pond — it’s deception,” Gillian Chow-Fraser, co-author of the report and boreal program manager for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, says.

“I don’t think it’s being very accountable to the level of destruction that’s happening in northern Alberta.”

One of the largest ponds, notes Chow-Fraser, is eight kilometres long. That’s almost as long as Alberta’s famed Sylvan Lake. Looking further afield, that will almost get you to the top of Mount Everest.

That said, the report uses the term pond to maintain consistency while expounding on the decidedly un-pond-like size of the waste reservoirs.

Inside those ponds is a toxic mix of byproducts from the mining of oilsands, including arsenic, naphthenic acids, mercury, lead and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — all of which can impact ecosystems, wildlife and humans.

The ponds also emit air pollution that extends for kilometres.

The purpose of the ponds is to allow the byproducts of mining to separate from the water and settle at the bottom of the pond, a process that can take decades or more. Once those byproducts are settled, the pond can be drained and capped with soil to achieve some level of reclamation.

Why are Alberta oilsands tailings ponds still growing?

The tailings ponds have been growing for nearly 50 years, increasing in size by nearly 800 per cent in the late 1970s, before continuing to grow at varying rates, depending on factors such as global demand for oil and the state of the economy. Most recently, the size of the tailings ponds grew by over 50 per cent from 2010 to 2015, and then by just over 16 per cent from 2015 to 2020, according to the report.

There are now 30 active ponds in the region, the report also says.

The authors used satellite imagery going back to 1975 to measure the physical growth of the ponds — including the fluids and the related impacts such as berms and areas where dry tailings are stored — but not the volume of tailings they hold.

For that they relied on Alberta Energy Regulator reports (more on that shortly).

Aliénor Rougeot, co-author and climate and energy program manager for Environmental Defence, says they included things like berms and beaches created by the ponds — where you would not want to sunbathe — because all of it impacts the surrounding area.

“That’s the peatlands and boreal forest that were taken away, or that’s the area that the Indigenous communities can no longer have traditional practices on,” she says.

In total, the report says the footprint is 300 square kilometres, big enough to more than twice cover the city of Vancouver or a large chunk of Toronto.

“I live in downtown Toronto, and so I think I know what large means, I think I know what human activity taking over nature looks like,” Rougeot says. “And yet when I saw the scale when I saw those maps, especially the layovers of cities. I mean, that was just baffling to me.”

Ponds increase as new expansions or new mines are approved and the existing ponds fail to shrink.

The report did not trace the rise in the volume of the ponds, but that has also increased over the years, and the report notes current levels are 1.4 trillion litres of tailings based on Alberta Energy Regulator figures.

……. much more in the Article and the Report!

Bottled water transported regularly

From an Article by Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 2, 2020

The Woodlands community in Butler County PA has dealt with water woes for a decade.

On a steamy Monday evening in July, just as they have done every other Monday for too long, Janet and Fred McIntyre unlock the double side doors of the White Oak Springs Presbyterian Church and wait for the first SUV or pickup truck to back into the short driveway.

Soon a line of vehicles forms along Shannon Road. They come for the water. They are residents of the Woodlands, an unincorporated, isolated rural community in Connoquenessing Township, Butler County, 35 miles north of Pittsburgh where 50 or 60 of the 200 homes have been without potable water for nearly a decade.

Their well water turned orange or brown or cloudy or contaminated in 2011, shortly after State College-based Rex Energy began drilling and fracking multiple gas wells into the Marcellus Shale.

Danielle Griffin has lived in the Woodlands for all of her 36 years and stopped by the church to pick up water for her family of six. As the gallon plastic water jugs, six to a box, were loaded into her vehicle, she said her family’s well water still has “particles” suspended in it.

“I just don’t trust it, and it gets old,” Ms. Griffin said. “We’re stuck in a hard place. We’ve had our animals get sick drinking the water and our pet hamsters developed tumors. It’s not a good situation. A lot of people are tired of it.”

Ms. McIntyre said the church’s “Water for the Woodlands” program, which for the last eight years has bought and distributed 400-500 gallons of water each week with few exceptions, has been a godsend for her community. But she and many others wonder why a permanent fix for the Woodlands’ water problems can’t seem to find traction.

“The county has received millions of dollars in impact fees from gas drilling over the years,” Ms. McIntyre said. “Why couldn’t some of that go to put public water in our homes? But it never happens. We just keep getting put off to the side, put on a back burner.”

The McIntyres were one of nine Woodlands families to file a lawsuit alleging Rex ruined their water wells, and the company settled their claims in April 2018 for $159,000. Each family received between $16,250-$27,125, according to spending disclosures Rex was required to make when it filed for bankruptcy in May 2018.

The money is nice, but it doesn’t solve the bigger problem. “We just want to turn on our faucet and have good water come out,” she said. “We’ve lived through enough.”

Since 2011, when the state first began collecting impact fees for each shale gas well drilled, the Public Utility Commission has collected almost $1.5 billion. It has distributed $16.8 million of that to Butler County, including $2.1 million last month. Connoquenessing Township has received about $1.8 million over the past nine years, including $209,511 in July.

But none of that money has found its way to solving the water problems of the Woodlands, a 100-acre swath of forests, fields and mostly unpaved roads originally established more than 50 years ago by Pittsburghers as a hunting and fishing retreat.

When that venture went belly up, the land was divided into smaller parcels and sold at a sheriff’s sale. The new property owners, mostly working poor, built houses or moved in double-wide trailers and dug water wells of varying depths.

Residents say the well water was good until the shale gas drilling started. Beginning in 2009, Rex Energy drilled 32 wells on 12 pads within 2 miles of the Woodlands and had permits from the state Department of Environmental Protection to drill 32 more.

Woodlands residents complained that the well drilling and fracking caused severe nosebleeds, skin rashes and respiratory problems, and that the water was unusable for drinking, cooking and bathing. But water quality tests by Rex Energy and the PA-DEP were inconclusive in establishing a connection between the drilling and the bad water.

That assessment didn’t change after two of the nearby shale gas wells were later discovered to have bad “casings” — the concrete sleeves that are supposed to prevent drilling and fracking fluids and gas from escaping the wells and contaminating underground aquifers.

Jenna Alexander, daughter of Janet McIntyre and a volunteer at the water distribution site, lived in the Woodlands but moved out of the area because of the water problems. She first became aware of the problems 10 years ago when she noticed an oily sheen on well water she was using to wash the baby bottles for her then 9-month-old daughter, Peyton.

“Our water went from great water to not being able to drink it,” Ms. Alexander said. “I knew that it wasn’t safe or healthy for a baby to even bathe in it, let alone drink it.”

John Stolz, a professor of biological sciences and director of the Center for Environmental Research and Education at Duquesne University, who has studied the Woodlands’ water issues, said the casing failures may have allowed escaped fluids and gas to pressurize underground formations and push around other contaminants including iron, manganese, oil and gas from shallow old and abandoned wells in the area.

“My 2015 study shows it’s not so much the fracking fluids that have contaminated the water wells, but it’s still the shale gas wells that have damaged the Woodlands’ water supply,” Mr. Stolz said.

Rex Energy went bankrupt in 2018, but its assets were purchased for $600 million by PennEnergy Resources, and Mr. Stolz said additional shale gas drilling in the area could exacerbate the Woodlands water problem.

Mr. Stolz said the county and township impact fee money should be used to extend public waterlines and connections into the Woodlands, a project that would cost approximately $1 million.

“What is the purpose of an impact fee,” he said, “if the money isn’t spent on people in the shale gas drilling fields who are impacted?”

Kevin Boozel, one of three county commissioners and the only Democrat, said there is impact fee money available to support a bond for the public waterlines in the county’s infrastructure bank fund. But the township would need to apply for it and there doesn’t seem to be a consensus for that, he said.

“There are different perspectives. Some residents living there don’t want township water,” Mr. Boozel said. “We can’t run water to some and not all. But should the municipality have interest, I guarantee we would look at it.” Although the water bank at the church has been operating for eight years now, he recognizes it isn’t a viable long-term solution. “I know this will come to a head eventually,” he said.

Every Thursday or Friday, a truck from Crystal Pure Bottled Water of Altoona, Blair County, delivers approximately 70 cardboard cases, each containing six, one-gallon plastic water jugs, to the church.

Every Monday in the morning or evening on alternating weeks, volunteers distribute between 400 to 500 gallons to Woodlands residents in amounts that vary depending on the size of their households.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the water bank pickups at the church had to shut down in March, but the McIntyres continued to deliver water jugs to Woodlands residents’ porches. The distribution at the church reopened in late July to increased demand, likely due to more people working at home or becoming unemployed.

The Rev. Lee Dreyer, who established the water bank at the church and still heads up the Monday morning distribution, said it’s a “Band-Aid,” but a necessary one.

“What is needed is to have water piped into the Woodlands neighborhood, but that’s not happened because those folks are, by and large, the forgotten poor,” said Mr. Dreyer, who retired in June 2019. “They live without a lot of services that most people take for granted. They are in the situation they are in because they don’t carry a lot of political weight locally or with the county. They are kind of powerless.”

Rev. Dreyer said he doesn’t see the situation changing anytime soon, and so will continue to focus on collecting donations to pay for the water. That task was made a bit easier when the Water for the Woodlands program received a $13,484 grant in June through Marcellus Outreach Butler, a local environmental organization, from the Ohio River Valley COVID-19 Response Fund.

According to a news release from Marcellus Outreach Butler (MOB), the grant will allow the program to provide water for up to 60 families for 32 weeks. MOB, which opposes shale gas development, also has called on the Butler County commissioners, the Connoquenessing Township supervisors and state and federal elected officials to provide funding for a Woodlands waterline.

Michael Badges-Canning, a MOB spokesman, said the county has used impact fees for repairs to the Alameda County Park swimming pool but never finds money for the Woodlands. “So people can swim at the county park but people in the Woodlands can’t take a bath,” Mr. Badges-Canning said. “We’d like to see the drilling impact fees spent on real impacts.”

>>> Donations to the Woodlands water bank can be made by a check made out to “Water for The Woodlands,” c/​o White Oak Springs Presbyterian Church, 102 Shannon Road, Renfrew, PA 16053.

Fracking wastewater (“brine”) is mainly transported by tanker trucks

From an Article by Kate Mishkin, HD Media, May 12,2019

State and federal regulators are skirting their obligations to protect West Virginia’s drinking water from the effects of fracking, a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council says.

The report, made public this week, examines the way the state Department of Environmental Protection regulates oil and gas underground injection activities, and how hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, can threaten underground drinking water if operators aren’t held accountable.

By examining records from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, the group detailed the times the state was inconsistent in its reporting, and found it often sidestepped the state underground injection control program, and federal Safe Drinking Water Act requirements.

In some cases, companies submitted reports that said they’d been injecting wastewater under an expired permit, and that wells had been abandoned without being plugged.

Companies extract natural gas by shooting water, chemicals and sand at a high pressure into wells, often generating large amounts of wastewater, which can contain contaminants such as radiation and heavy metals. Companies often dispose of the large quantities of wastewater by injecting it underground.

And as companies continue to tap into the sprawling Marcellus Shale, the amount of wastewater injected grows, too – “exacerbating the need for safe waste-management practices,” the report says.

“It is crucial that underground injection be properly designed, constructed, operated and maintained – and eventually plugged and abandoned – to ensure that they do not threaten underground sources of drinking water protected by federal and state statutes,” the report says.

In many cases, though, the state DEP allowed companies to inject without a permit, continue to operate without applying for a renewal permit before the permit expired and continuing to inject after the DEP issued an order stopping it.

The wells, the report says, “reveal a pattern of unsafe practices and lax enforcement over the years. Any improperly operated well has the potential to cause environmental problems, and potential violations should be taken seriously.”

There are currently three active disposal wells that have received Notices of Violations but haven’t been abated, said Terry Fletcher, a spokesman for the DEP. Of those, two have been abated but aren’t in the department’s database; one well isn’t injecting.

“The WVDEP acknowledges that abandoned and unplugged wells are a legitimate issue and has been working with well operators and others within the industry to find viable solutions to this issue,” Fletcher said.

He said the DEP hasn’t logged any incidents of groundwater contamination from a UIC disposal well.

The EPA declined to answer questions about the report.
“Until we’ve had a chance to read it, it wouldn’t be appropriate to comment,” a spokeswoman for the EPA said.

Amy Mall, senior policy analyst for the NRDC, said some of the failure comes from a lack of accountability. “I think there’s a combination of the fact that a lot of these sites are in rural areas, companies may think nobody’s watching them [and] nobody’s going to find out if they don’t fully comply with the law,” she said.

And in many cases, companies don’t have a reason to be deterred from breaking rules, Mall said. “Companies don’t have the incentive to comply with the law unless there’s strict enforcement and penalties, otherwise there’s no incentive for them to comply,” she said.

The report recommends the DEP establish stronger operating standards, enforce its rules and be more transparent. It asks the federal Environmental Protection Agency to enforce the Safe Drinking Water Act in the state.

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REFERENCE: West Virginia’s Groundwater Is Not Adequately Protected from Underground Injection, Amy Mall, NRDC, April 30, 2019

SUMMARY — This paper provides an overview of how the Safe Drinking Water Act’s Underground Injection Control program regulates oil and gas underground injection activities. It then examines aspects of the program that are out of date and ine ective at meeting the statutory goal of protecting underground sources of drinking water. In particular, the paper analyzes the status of the underground injection control program in West Virginia, where the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has failed to incorporate any state requirements under EPA authority for federal enforcement. The paper also provides recommendations for improvements in the policies of both the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and the EPA.

Five or six workers clean up after Rover pipeline

From an Article by Scott DiSavino, Reuters News Service, January 12, 2018

(Reuters) – Ohio environmental regulators on Friday told federal energy regulators the state has significant concerns about the potential for a spill from Energy Transfer Partners LP’s drilling under a river as the company works on the Rover natural gas pipeline.

The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency said in a filing with the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) that it learned this week that 148,000 gallons of drilling fluid were “lost down the hole” that ETP is drilling under the Tuscarawas River in Stark County, Ohio.

That is the same site as a spill last April of 2 million gallons of mostly clay and water used to lubricate drilling blades, which led FERC to temporarily ban ETP from new horizontal drilling.

The state has “significant concerns for the potential of similar releases as occurred at this location in April,” it said in the filing. “We are deeply concerned this second drill under the Tuscarawas River is heading towards a similar outcome which resulted in the previous release to the environment.”

The state EPA said in its filing the company has not discovered any new spills in the area. Ohio, which asked FERC to ban all of ETP’s horizontal directional drilling in November, said in its filing on Friday it wants more information on the Tuscarawas drilling.

FERC in December allowed ETP to complete all horizontal drills on the Rover project, including those in Ohio. Pipeline companies use horizontal directional drilling to cross under large obstacles like highways and rivers.

Once finished, the $4.2 billion Rover pipeline will carry up to 3.25 billion cubic feet of gas per day from the Marcellus and Utica shale fields in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia to the U.S. Midwest and Ontario in Canada. One billion cubic feet per day of gas can supply about five million U.S. homes.

ETP said in December it expected to finish Rover by the end of the first quarter. About 0.9 bcfd of gas was already flowing on the completed portions of the pipeline, according to Reuters data.

Major gas producers that have signed up to use Rover include units of privately held Ascent Resources LLC, Antero Resources Corp, Range Resources Corp, Southwestern Energy Co, Eclipse Resources Corp and EQT Corp.

Rover is in WV Counties Doddridge, Tyler, etc.

Kayakers join protest near Paw Paw, WV

From an Article by Patricia Sullivan, Washington Post, August 6, 2017

HANCOCK, MD — Activists with the Potomac Riverkeeper Network set up at Paw Paw Tunnel Campground near Oldtown, Md., for a weekend paddle and protest over TransCanada’s planned natural gas pipeline.

The pipeline that TransCanada wants to build is short, 3.5 miles, cutting through the narrowest part of Maryland. It would duck briefly under the Potomac River at this 1,500-resident town, bringing what business leaders say is much-needed natural gas to the eastern panhandle of West Virginia.

But environmentalists say that brief stretch could jeopardize the water supply for about 6 million people, including most of the Washington-metropolitan area.

That’s why dozens of protesters have gathered each weekend this summer at various points along the upper Potomac, part of a growing national movement that opposes both oil and natural gas pipelines and wants businesses and governments to embrace green energy instead.

Inspired by the Dakota Access oil pipeline protest at Standing Rock, N.D., and the broad wave of demonstrations that has energized the left since President Trump’s inauguration, the protesters hope to persuade Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) and his environment secretary to stop the pipeline, which got an enthusiastic green light from West Virginia.

“It’s got me worried,” said Andy Billotti, 53, who wore a T-shirt from April’s Peoples Climate March in Washington as he erected his tent at the Paw Paw Tunnel Campground near Oldtown, Md., for one recent protest. “If something were to happen, that fracked poison would come down the river . . . right into our wells.”

Opponents gathered at the ­McCoys Ferry campsite in Clear Spring, Md., over the weekend and will be at Taylors Landing next weekend. The protest at Taylors Landing, near Sharpsburg, Md., is slated to include state Sen. Richard S. Madaleno Jr. (D-Montgomery), a gubernatorial candidate and the latest of a handful of politicians to take part.

The activists want Hogan, who this year banned fracking in Maryland, to deny TransCanada a water quality permit to cross the Potomac. Environment Secretary Ben Grumbles said the state has sought additional information about the project from the company and will schedule a public hearing on the permit application in coming weeks.

About 40 other permits are also needed, including ones from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the National Park Service, because the pipeline would also go under the C&O Canal.

Industry and economic development officials say the pipeline is safe and sorely needed to attract new employers to the West Virginia panhandle.

“There are hundreds, if not thousands, of miles of gas lines like this in the Washington, D.C., area,” Eric Lewis, president of the Jefferson County Development Authority (JCDA), told about 60 protesters in July at a town council meeting in Shepherdstown, W.Va. “If people have issues with fracking, they should take it up somewhere else.”

West Virginia’s Public Service Commission already granted its utility, Mountaineer Gas, approval to begin building the distribution pipeline from Berkeley Springs to Martinsburg. Bulldozers are at work. The utility plans to eventually extend that line to Charles Town and Shepherdstown.

The natural gas that runs through the area’s existing pipeline is entirely spoken for since the opening of a Procter & Gamble manufacturing plant near Martinsburg, Mountaineer Gas officials said.

“You’ve got to have an industrial base to provide employment,” said West Virginia Commerce Secretary H. Wood Thrasher. “Without gas service, we are dead in the water.” He said the state has lost a “significant” number of companies interested in moving to the eastern panhandle because of the lack of natural gas service.

The JCDA has been working on getting natural gas service to the region for “decades,” said John Reisenweber, the authority’s executive director. More recently, it has encouraged the development of renewable green energy, such as wind and solar. But manufacturers, commercial and some residential developers insist on natural gas, he said.

While gas pipelines have crisscrossed the country since the 1920s, the number of approved interstate lines has spiked in recent years, driven by the boom in natural gas extraction through hydraulic fracturing. Protests have spiked, too.

New Yorkers convinced their state environmental agency twice in the past two years to deny a water quality certificate for natural gas pipelines. Federal authorities shut down a much-criticized Ohio pipeline in May, after 18 leaks spilled more than 2 million gallons of drilling fluid, adversely impacting the water quality. Catholic nuns near Lancaster, Pa., have built an outdoor chapel in an attempt to stop another pipeline.

In Virginia, two disputes over much larger proposed pipelines have become a hot-button political issue in the governor’s race.

The nation’s 2.3 million-mile pipeline network is considered the safest way to move oil, and the only feasible way to transport natural gas. Natural gas pipeline leaks are down 94 percent since 1984, the industry says. But accidents do happen — an average of 299 significant incidents in each of the past five years, according to federal data.

TransCanada spokesman Scott Castleman noted that his company and its predecessors have a century of experience in the region. The proposed eight-inch diameter pipeline would be buried up to 100 feet beneath the riverbed, with walls twice as thick as required, and constant monitoring for leaks and surges. A dozen TransCanada pipelines safely cross the Potomac River elsewhere in Maryland, Castleman said.

“More and more, people realize that each of these [pipeline] projects deepens our commitment to fossil fuels, locking us in for 40 or 50 more years,” said Bill McKibben, a well-known environmentalist and author. “The scientific verdict on natural gas has changed, and changed dramatically, in the past half-decade.”

The major component in natural gas is methane, which is significantly more efficient at trapping heat — and warming the planet — than carbon dioxide. A study published last year by Harvard University researchers found that emissions from methane have increased significantly since fracking began, although the researchers said they could not readily attribute the increase to fracking.

Members and friends of the Potomac Riverkeeper Network attended the July paddle to raise awareness about the pipeline project. Environmentalists also point to the geology of the upper Potomac. The land beneath the river in this region is karst, a term for a terrain that is full of fractures, caves and pools, where special precautions are needed when building pipelines to avoid spillage of chemicals or gas into the water supply.

“Unless you have an X-ray of the ground, you never know where the water goes, or where it comes from,” said Stephanie Siemek, a doctoral student at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s Appalachian Laboratory in Frostburg, Md., who led a tour of the Paw Paw Tunnel for the environmentalists camping nearby in July. “You don’t know how old it is, or where it’s derived. It might start from a mountaintop, but we don’t know how it gets to a spring.”

Potomac River in eastern WV panhandle

Source: Ernst vs EnCana 2013

Researchers call for effective groundwater monitoring in Canada

From an Article by Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee.ca, April 11, 2017

A new University of Guelph study proves what many western Canadian landowners have long documented — that methane gas leaking from energy industry wells can travel great distances in groundwater and pose safety risks, contaminate water and contribute to climate change.

The study, published in Nature Geoscience this month, also concluded that current monitoring for gas leakage, usually at ground level and adjacent to wells, is inadequate to detect contamination.

“Current surface and subsurface monitoring efforts of shale gas development are thus insufficient to meaningfully detect or assess methane impacts to atmosphere and groundwater,” the study found.

British Columbia’s floundering shale gas industry has drilled and fracked nearly 10,000 wells in northeastern B.C. over the last decade, causing more than 1,000 earthquakes in the region. Impacts on groundwater are not being systematically monitored.

The study took a novel approach, said Aaron Cahill, lead author and groundwater researcher at the University of British Columbia. “We asked if leaks occur from an energy well, what happens to the groundwater and where does the methane go, and nobody had looked at that before.”

Cahill and other scientists at Guelph’s Institute for Groundwater Research injected methane over a 72-day period into a shallow sand aquifer at Canadian Forces Base Borden in Ontario at a rate of about a cubic metre a day — a volume much less than actually recorded at many leaking oil and gas wells in Alberta and B.C.

Guelph researchers tracked the injected methane for more than eight months via monitoring wells as the explosive gas travelled through the ground, entered the atmosphere or dissolved into groundwater, causing subtle but important changes to water chemistry.

In an aquifer, bacteria can metabolize methane and generate undesirable byproducts such as hydrogen sulfide. Bacterial reactions can also bring about the release of trace elements, changing water quality and potentially rendering it undrinkable.

“We didn’t see a lot of methane reacting. It degraded at low rates. In other words, if a leak were to occur the methane wouldn’t go away too rapidly from the aquifer,” Cahill said.

Cahill also noted that the study covered only a short time period and used only small amounts of methane. “For larger leaks over longer times and greater areas, these findings would indicate that the groundwater would likely become unusable,” he said.

Cahill said the distance travelled by the methane in a relatively shallow sand-based aquifer and complex interactions showed the importance of monitoring groundwater around energy developments.

Alberta, for example, only classifies a leaking well as “serious” when it leaks 300 cubic metres of methane a day, but the research showed extensive impacts on groundwater with a leak of just one cubic metre per day.

Methane leakage from tens of thousands of shale gas, coalbed methane, inactive and abandoned wells pose a major and costly environmental problem throughout North America where the energy industry has drilled more than 4 million holes since the 1850s.

There are 1,500 inactive and leaking wells in Alberta’s cities (some are in malls and playgrounds) and more than 150,000 abandoned or inactive wells in rural Alberta.

Reports of groundwater contamination are common throughout oil and gas regions in North America. In Pennsylvania alone there have been hundreds of cases of groundwater contamination from energy wells.

Although industry argues that shale gas wells are too deep to affect groundwater, most methane leaks come not from the production source or bottom of the well but from shallower geological formations closer to the surface of the well. Gas flows up then enters groundwater or the atmosphere via corroded, old or faulty seals.

Because all energy wells puncture the earth and caprocks, they often serve as effective pathways for the migration of methane, and other gases such as cancer-causing radon over time.

Phil Rygg, director of communications for the BC Oil and Gas Commission, said there were “some important learnings from the study” but that it only looked at how methane moves through beach sand in Ontario. He added that “it did not examine how gas could move along a shale gas well and enter groundwater.”

However, the researchers noted in their paper that methane will migrate much farther and faster in fractured sedimentary rock, like that found in northern B.C. and Alberta, compared to a sand aquifer.

Rygg said that a similar groundwater study is now being done by UBC and supported by Geoscience BC with technical input from the B.C. Oil and Gas Commission. Its goal is “to understand methane behaviour in the subsurface in northeast B.C., and includes drone and remote sensing research.” “The commission will continue to support research in this area, and supports the general recommendation for enhanced monitoring,” he said.

Despite evidence of serious methane leakage into groundwater from energy wells, many regulators and energy companies have denied the scale of the problem, claimed the methane naturally migrated into the groundwater or was caused by bacteria.   But the study challenges those assumptions by showing how a methane leak actually behaves in an aquifer.

Moreover, the study found that methane leakage into groundwater can affect water over a large area and “is an equivalent, if not, more significant process relative to atmospheric emissions.”  Once methane migrates into a pump house or basement it can be explosive in confined spaces.

“There has been no science-based groundwater monitoring using modern methods at fracking sites,” said Beth Parker, director of the G360 Institute for Groundwater Research and a co-author of the paper.  “Our findings are evidence that prospects for insightful information obtained from such groundwater monitoring are good, which goes against the ‘conventional wisdom’ mostly based on speculation or intuition.”

In recent years the chronic problem of methane leakage has been aggravated by hydraulic fracking, which causes more wear and tear on well plumbing and seals with intense pressures, shaking and well-banging seismic activity.

John Cherry, one of Canada’s top hydrogeologists and one of the paper’s authors, said the new study should put to rest any arguments that there is no point monitoring groundwater for methane contamination from energy wells “because it will move like little snakes in channels and you’ll never find it.” “The study found that very small amounts of injected methane ended up having a large impact on the aquifer — the magnitude was huge, and the methane hung around for a long time.”

No Canadian regulator has set up proper groundwater monitoring near shale gas facilities as recommended by a 2014 Council of Canadian Academies report on fracking. “No regulator has yet done what we recommended,” confirmed Cherry. Alberta doesn’t have a protocol for investigating methane contamination of groundwater.

The Council of Canadian Academies report found that the fracking industry, the foundation of B.C.’s failing liquefied natural gas strategy, had marched ahead without credible baseline data, scientific knowledge and necessary monitoring and had put groundwater at risk.

Jessica Ernst, a landowner who is suing the Alberta government and Encana alleging negligence in the fracking of shallow coal seams more than a decade ago, welcomed the Guelph study as long overdue.   Ernst said she would include the study in filings to support her lawsuit alleging the government’s “negligent investigation and cover-up of Encana’s fracking practices when the company illegally fractured my community’s drinking water aquifers and put us in explosive risk in our homes.”

Ernst said that the water reservoir in her hamlet of Rosebud blew up in 2005 — an incident the local paper attributed to an “accumulation of gases” that seriously injured a county worker.

In a separate incident a year later, “Alberta rancher Bruce Jack and two industry gas-in-water testers were also seriously injured and hospitalized after industry’s leaking methane and ethane caused his water to explode,” said Ernst. A 2011 Alberta Innovates report on the leak that identified industry contamination was never released to the Alberta public.

The Guelph study adds some cold and hard science to the growing debate about methane migration from oil and gas wells.

Nearly a half a dozen studies done by scientists at Duke and Stanford universities have consistently found elevated levels of methane in water wells near shale fracking operations but couldn’t always identify the source or the mechanism for contamination.   Other studies have found chemistry changes in groundwater near energy wells.

A 2014 University of Texas study, for example, looked at 100 water wells in the heavily fracked Barnett Shale and found that approximately 30 per cent of the wells within 2.9 kilometres of gas drilling sites showed an increased amount of arsenic and other heavy metals.

An earlier 2013 University of Texas study suggested that elevated levels of strontium, barium, selenium and methanol in water wells near gas wells could be due to a variety of factors, including hydro-geochemical changes from lowering of the water table, or industrial accidents such as faulty gas well casings.

For decades, fracking technology patents filed by industry noted that “it is not uncommon during hydraulic fracturing for the fracture to grow out of the zone of productive interest and proceed into a zone of non-productive interest, including zones containing water.”

But industry has repeatedly dealt with abuses of groundwater by offering landowners money and demanding that they sign non-disclosure agreements. In the absence of any credible groundwater monitoring, governments such as that of British Columbia can also claim, “There has never been a confirmed case of groundwater contamination in B.C. as a result of hydraulic fracturing.”

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers still maintains that “more than 215,000 wells have been hydraulically fractured in B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan without a demonstrated impact on drinking water, according to regulators.”

B.C. Natural Gas Development Minister Rich Coleman denied that energy wells leak methane in 2014. In contrast, the BC Oil and Gas Commission does not deny this reality.

According to a report by three University of Waterloo engineers, more than 10 per cent of B.C.’s existing 20,000 active and abandoned wells leak. In addition, some of the province’s shale gas wells have become “super emitters” of methane.

In recent years one energy company spent $8 million in northern B.C. to repair a badly leaking shale gas well.

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See the technical article: Mobility and persistence of methane in groundwater in a controlled-release field experiment