health effects of toxics

Environmental hazards from fracking may extend well beyond drilling sites

From an Article by Jessica Cohen, The Utne Reader, Fall 2014

Pramilla Malick was reading in bed last summer when suddenly she had to struggle to breathe. Gasping, she went outside and then back inside, getting no relief from the country air around her home in Minisink, New York. Her symptoms began at a time when her children and some of their Minisink neighbors were also experiencing new ailments, such as nausea, nosebleeds, rashes, sore throats, asthma and dizziness. Their symptoms would erupt during or after an “odor event,” a period of malodorous emissions at the new Millennium Pipeline gas compressor station nearby that began functioning in June of 2013. Malick’s asthmatic symptoms, which she never had before, surface only on weekends in Minisink, she says; they live in New York City, 95 miles away, on weekdays.

The community’s ailments mirror those of the Parr family, living near Aruba Petroleum’s hydraulic fracturing (gas fracking) sites in Wise County, Texas. In April the family was awarded $2.95 million in a lawsuit alleging that environmental contamination from drilling sickened them and killed their pets and livestock, compelling them to leave their home. The maladies of Minisink residents suggest that environmental hazards from fracking may extend well beyond drilling sites.

Malick is a member of Minisink Residents for Environmental Preservation and Safety (MREPS), a group of 10 Minisink residents legally representing the community who fought construction of the compressor and our now pressing for monitoring. They presented their case against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and Millennium Pipeline Company, LLC, at a District of Columbia Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals hearing in May.

In addition to explosivity issues, the group cites concern that emission levels acceptable in Millennium’s compressor station application to FERC bump up against the findings of Wilma Subra, an environmental consultant, whom Malick engaged in their efforts. Subra provides communities in the United States and beyond with technical evaluations of environmental issues and strategies for addressing them. She does contractual consulting for the Environmental Protection Agency and was a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient. She helped the Parrs in Texas identify the toxins that were sickening them and found similar toxins in compressor emissions.

Malick and some of her Minisink neighbors attended Subra’s presentation in December, where Subra explained the compressor’s environmental effects. She found that not only do compressor stations produce several tons of carcinogenic volatile organic compounds annually, they also emit chemicals from “fracked gas,” drawn from deep in the earth with hydraulic fracturing. Fracked gas chemicals differ from those of gas from conventional drilling.

So you think environmentalism has gone mainstream, what with Al Gore spreading the climate change gospel ….

“The Marcellus shale has large quantities of radioactive components such as Radium 226 and 228,” Subra explained in her PowerPoint presentation. “The radioactive components contaminate the natural gas stream and build up in the units of compressor facilities. Radium 226 is a bone seeker and causes bone and lung cancer.”

“This is not your grandfather’s gas,” says Malick. “We’re extremely concerned with radioactive particles. There is no explanation by industry or regulators as to how radon gas would or could be removed from the methane. In the absence of an explanation we must conclude that it will be emitted along with methane. The decay particles of radium include dangerous particles such as polonium, which decays into radioactive lead, and then permanently into just lead. So the concern is short-term exposure to highly radioactive particles, and then long-term exposure to and accumulation of lead particles.”

However, uncertainty about the contents of emissions persists. “The industry is largely self-regulated, and their air emissions are entirely self-reported,” says Malick. “No one monitors what is emitted.”

Also, she notes that air quality standards established by the EPA address annual average emissions rather than “episodic emissions,” brief concentrated bursts of emissions known to damage tissue. She points to a study in the March issue of Reviews of Environmental Health, by David Brown and his colleagues at the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project.

“Case study descriptions of acute onset of respiratory, neurologic, dermal, vascular, abdominal, and gastrointestinal sequelae near natural gas facilities contrast with a subset of emissions research, which suggests that there is limited risk posed by unconventional natural gas development,” the authors wrote.

Meanwhile, Subra finds that symptoms troubling Minisink residents are typical of what 90 percent of people living within two to three miles of gas compressor and also metering stations experience. But the 24-hour monitoring MREPS seeks costs $1 million annually. “New York State has done 24-hour monitoring after a cancer cluster develops,” says Malick. “That would be too late for us.”

Because gas facility regulation is federal, MREPS pursued support from Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney. They expressed concern but did nothing, says Malick.

“I think there’s a consensus to facilitate natural gas extraction for the international market,” she concluded. “We’re being sacrificed by them.”

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See also the book by Michelle Bamberger and Robert Oswald, The Real Cost of Fracking: How America’s Shale Gas Boom is Threatening our Families, Pets, and Food, Beacon Press, Boston, 2014

Frack Fluids in the Field

DOE advisers recommend full disclosure with ‘few, if any’ exemptions for fracking fluid

From an Article of Katherine Ling, E&E Reporter, March 25, 2014

There should be very few trade secret exemptions to full public disclosure for companies participating in a hydraulic fracturing chemicals registry, according to a report approved today by leading energy experts who advise the secretary of Energy.

The Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SEAB) voted to support the recommendations of a task force report on the next steps for FracFocus, a chemical registry website created based on a previous SEAB task force recommendation in 2011.

The task force’s recommendations included “full disclosure of all known constituents added to fracturing fluid with few, if any exceptions”; a defined process for determining and objecting to the trade secret exemption; an outside audit to verify the disclosure system; a stable funding source for the program; and improved data entry, storage and retention so that system is more user-friendly for industry, communities and regulators (E&ENews PM, March 5).

John Deutch, the task force chairman, said at the meeting at Energy Department headquarters in Washington, D.C., that all 10 members of the task force favored full disclosure for fracking, noting “this is not a minor remark to have members of this task force to go from deep light blue to heavily dark red in terms of review.”

The task force includes Ram Shenoy, chief technology officer of ConocoPhillips Co.; Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council; Stephen Holditch, professor of petroleum engineering at Texas A&M; Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of IHS and founder of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates; and Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, who is a nonboard member of the team. The task force was created after a request from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the former chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

FracFocus has been upheld by the industry as the answer to calls for drilling transparency, and it has been the basis of much of the fracking fluid disclosure requirements currently adopted in more than 20 states with more than half requiring companies to report on FracFocus. It is also being proposed as the foundation for the Obama administration’s disclosure requirements for fracking on federal lands.

Environmentalists and other stakeholders have criticized the website for being too opaque, however, because of the number of trade secret exemptions allowed.

Deutch emphasized that companies’ intellectual property would not be compromised if there were a “systems approach” to reporting, where chemicals were listed but “additive names and product names” or how they are used were not disclosed. “My favorite example is Julia Child,” Deutch explained. “If you know what Julia Child bought at the supermarket, you don’t really know just what Julia Child is making” in the kitchen.

He also said since FracFocus 2.0 began last summer, about 84 percent of the almost 63,000 wells registered have invoked a trade secret for at least one chemical but a random sample of company internal records do not match these same incidences of use of this same “secret” chemical. These discrepancies should be examined and may shed light on overuse of the trade secret exemption, Deutch said.

“It is a balance,” Deutch said, adding he does not consider the trade secret issue a “trivial matter.” But the importance of public confidence and the benefits of answering the public’s concerns about the nature of the chemicals used in fracking outweigh the possible intellectual property costs to the companies, he said. Or, as the report said: “The public is clearly concerned about the nature of the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing. It is much to industry’s advantage to meet this concern.”

The report also recommends that a company disclose an analysis or the source for 90 percent of the fracking fluid that is “water,” which was previously fresh water but is increasingly recycled fracking fluid. The report will be sent to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz as recommendations supported by SEAB, but SEAB’s duties are solely advisory in nature.

Exxon paid $35 billion for XTO

Judge Rules Exxon Must Face Criminal Charges Over 50,000 Gallon Fracking Waste Dumping

From an Article by Emily Atkin, ThinkProgress, January 3, 2014

ExxonMobil Corp. subsidiary XTO Energy will have to face criminal charges for allegedly dumping tens of thousands of gallons of hydraulic fracturing waste at a Marcellus Shale drilling site in 2010, according to a Pennsylvania judge’s ruling on Thursday. (NOTE. Exxon acquired XTO in 2009 at a cost of about $35 billion. Where did Exxon get all this money? DGN)

Following a preliminary hearing, Magisterial District Judge James G. Carn decided that all eight charges against Exxon – including violations of both the state Clean Streams Law and the Solid Waste Management Act – will be “held for court,” meaning there is enough evidence to take the fossil fuel giant to trial over felony offenses.

Pennsylvania’s Attorney General filed criminal charges back in September, claiming Exxon had removed a plug from a wastewater tank, leading to 57,000 gallons of contaminated water spilling into the soil. The Exxon subsidiary had contested the criminal charges, claiming there was “no lasting environmental impact,” and that the charges could “discourage good environmental practices” from guilty companies.

“The action tells oil and gas operators that setting up infrastructure to recycle produced water exposes them to the risk of significant legal and financial penalties should a small release occur,” Exxon said at the time.

Hydraulic fracturing is a method of extracting fossil fuels that generally increases the flow of oil or gas from a well. It is done by injecting high-pressure water and chemicals miles deep into the ground into subsurface rock, effectively “fracturing” the rock and allowing more spaces for oil and gas to come through. The tactic is generally paired with horizontal drilling.

The high-pressure water and chemical injections generally result in a good amount of wastewater, which is what Exxon is charged with illegally dumping. The specific chemical makeup of that wastewater is a large part of why the practice is so controversial, as public disclosure of what exactly is used in the water is largely self-regulated by the fracking companies. Due  to laws pushed by corporate front groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), sponsored by ExxonMobil, states have allowed minimum disclosure of the chemicals used in the fluid. Though Pennsylvania does now require disclosure to regulators, it has a “gag rule” banning doctors from talking about the health risks.

The most recent study of health risks related to fracking was released in mid-December by the journal Endocrinology, which found the presence of hormone-disrupting chemicals in surface water and groundwater samples in Garfield County, Colorado – one county at the center of the U.S. fracking boom. The chemicals have been linked to infertility, birth defects, and cancer.

Additionally, a July study from the Proceedings of the National Academy Sciences of USA found that the closer residents live to wells used in fracking, the more likely drinking water is contaminated, with 115 of 141 wells found to contain methane.