Fracking results in toxic & hazardous pollution

From an ABSTRACT by Katherine E. Pelch, Environmental Heath Journal, 2018

Background— In the last decade unconventional oil and gas (UOG) extraction has rapidly proliferated throughout the United States (US) and the world. This occurred largely because of the development of directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing which allows access to fossil fuels from geologic formations that were previously not cost effective to pursue. This process is known to use greater than 1,000 chemicals such as solvents, surfactants, detergents, and biocides. In addition, a complex mixture of chemicals, including heavy metals, naturally-occurring radioactive chemicals, and organic compounds are released from the formations and can enter air and water. Compounds associated with UOG activity have been linked to adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes in humans and laboratory animal models, which is possibly due to the presence of endocrine active chemicals.

Methods— Using systematic methods, electronic searches of PubMed and Web of Science were conducted to identify studies that measured chemicals in air near sites of UOG activity. Records were screened by title and abstract, relevant articles then underwent full text review, and data were extracted from the studies. A list of chemicals detected near UOG sites was generated. Then, the potential endocrine activity of the most frequently detected chemicals was explored via searches of literature from PubMed.

Results — Evaluation of 48 studies that sampled air near sites of UOG activity identified 106 chemicals detected in two or more studies. Ethane, benzene and n-pentane were the top three most frequently detected. Twenty-one chemicals have been shown to have endocrine activity including estrogenic and androgenic activity and the ability to alter steroidogenesis. Literature also suggested that some of the air pollutants may affect reproduction, development, and neurophysiological function, all endpoints which can be modulated by hormones. These chemicals included aromatics (i.e., benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene), several polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and mercury.

Conclusion — These results provide a basis for prioritizing future primary studies regarding the endocrine disrupting properties of UOG air pollutants, including exposure research in wildlife and humans. Further, we recommend systematic reviews of the health impacts of exposure to specific chemicals, and comprehensive environmental sampling of a broader array of chemicals.

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See also: The Endocrine Disrupter Exchange, TEDX

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See also: The Science of Fracking and Health Webinar Series w/Dr. Chris Kassotis – YouTube, September 4, 2018

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FactCheck.org and FracFocus.org provide some answers

The Facts on Fracking Chemical Disclosure – FactCheck.org, April 7, 2017

Q: Are the chemicals in fracking solution protected from being made public by a law passed while Dick Cheney was vice president?

A: Yes. A 2005 law bans the federal government from requiring companies to disclose fracking chemicals. But 28 states do require disclosure of some fracking fluids.

FULL QUESTION

Is it true that the chemicals in fracking solution are protected from being made public by a law or bill passed by Congress while Dick Cheney was in President Bush’s cabinet? Is it true that Cheney strong-armed members in Congress to pass the bill? Is it true that the fracking companies don’t have to reveal the chemicals in fracking solution?

FULL ANSWER – Part II

Regulating Fracking Under State Law

Even though fracking can’t be regulated by the federal government, it can under state law.

Along with other regulations related to the practice, as of January 2016, 28 states require the disclosure of some, but not all, chemicals used during fracking. Twenty-three states use a registry called FracFocus, which is the most comprehensive database on fracking chemicals.

But fracking operators don’t have to report all the chemicals they use in part because of trade secrets laws, which also protect Coca-Cola’s recipe, for example. So what proportion of fracking chemicals do companies reveal in states with disclosure laws?

According to the EPA, fracking operators withheld 11 percent of the chemicals they reported to FracFocus between January 2011 and February 2013. As a reason for not disclosing information, companies said the information was “confidential,” a “trade secret” or “proprietary.” The EPA also found that 70 percent of disclosures withheld one chemical or more.

But the rate of withheld chemicals may have increased since then, according to researchers at Harvard University.

Kate Konschnik, the policy director at Harvard’s Environment Law Program, and a colleague found that 18.9 percent of fracking chemicals reported on over 53,000 forms filed to FracFocus between November 2012 and April 2015 “were intentionally withheld from public disclosure.” And 92.3 percent of these forms included “at least one withheld ingredient,” the researchers reported in their paper published in the journal Energy Policy in January 2016.

Like the EPA, the researchers found that companies didn’t always specifically cite “trade secret” as the reason for withholding chemical information: Companies also cited “proprietary,” “confidential” and “n/a” as reasons.

Trade secrets have the “clearest and most rigorous legal standards,” as they’re “limited to information about a production method, process or formula … which the owner has taken steps to protect,” the researchers pointed out.

The term “confidential,” on the other hand, is mentioned in some state disclosure requirements, but it’s often not defined. And there are “virtually no definitions or standards” for citing “proprietary” or “n/a” as reasons for withholding information, the researchers said.

The study found that fracking companies withheld chemicals citing “confidential” or “proprietary” grounds in states that only accept “trade secret” as an acceptable justification. For this reason, the researchers reasoned that “some companies are unaware of state-specific rules or do not expect enforcement.”

Overall, “the less rigorous the standard” for justification (i.e., proprietary instead of trade secret), “the more likely it has been used to justify withholding information in FracFocus,” the researchers concluded.

Fracking Chemicals and the Environment

But are the chemicals associated with fracking hazardous to human health and the environment in the first place? And are they reaching sources of drinking water?

The EPA attempted to answer these questions in its final report on the relationship between fracking and drinking water resources that was released in December 2016.

Here’s what the agency found: There are select cases where evidence suggests that fracking chemicals have reached drinking water resources and impacted human health and the environment. But limited data prevents the agency from making general conclusions.

For example, the EPA report cites studies that have linked fracking and the contamination of drinking water resources in instances where companies spilled fracking fluids, experienced equipment failure or fracked wells too close in depth to drinking water resources (i.e., shallow fracking), for example.

The report also notes studies that found associations between the proximity of pregnant mothers living next to natural gas wells and increased cases of congenital heart defects and lower birth weights. Other studies cited in the report found an association between living closer to natural gas wells and an increase in the number of reported respiratory and skin issues. And another study found evidence to support a link between the contamination of streams by fracking fluids and the death of fish and other aquatic animals.

Overall, “while combined evidence suggests hydraulic fracturing has the potential to impact human health via contamination of drinking water resources, the actual public health impacts are not well understood and not well documented,” the EPA concluded.

At least three factors prevented the agency from making definitive conclusions.

First, scientists haven’t evaluated the potential human health and environmental toxicity of the majority of chemicals known to be used in fracking. But this dearth of data isn’t specific to fracking – researchers have estimated that “tens of thousands of chemicals in commercial use” have “not undergone significant toxicological evaluation,” the EPA report notes.

The “potential hazards” associated with chronic ingestion of the chemicals with toxicological profiles include cancer, immune system effects, changes in body weight and changes in blood chemistry. Other fracking chemicals also are known to be specifically toxic to the heart, nervous system, liver, kidneys, reproduction and development.

Second, scientists don’t have comprehensive, national data on when, where and how much of these chemicals are reaching drinking water resources and being ingested by people.

In select cases, fracking fluids have reached drinking water resources through spills, leaks and inadequate disposal, as mentioned previously. Fracking chemicals have also been detected in drinking water resources at levels that could impact human health. Still, “there is a lack of systematic studies examining actual human exposures to these chemicals in drinking water as a result of hydraulic fracturing activity,” the report said.

Third, companies don’t reveal all the chemicals they use, for the reasons described above. “Having a better understanding of the chemicals and formulations, including those that are [deemed confidential business information], along with their frequency of use and volumes, would greatly benefit risk assessment and risk management decisions,” the EPA report concluded.

To sum up, the federal government can’t regulate fracking, including chemical disclosure, because of a provision in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This act was preceded by a 2001 energy policy report that advocated for the expanded use of fracking and was released by a group chaired by Cheney. While 28 states do have chemical disclosure laws on the books, companies do not disclose all the chemicals they use and sometimes do not fully comply with the laws. In order to make a definitive conclusion about the impact of these chemicals on human health and the environment nationally, scientists need to conduct more research. However, there is evidence to support their impact in select cases.

Note: SciCheck is made possible by a grant from the Stanton Foundation, funded from estate of Frank Stanton, PhD, former President of the CBS Broadcasting System.  His PhD was in psychology from the Ohio State University.

PA Rally, Philadelphia, July 2016

PA Doctors call for state ban on drilling and fracking

From an Article by Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, October 28, 2016

The Pennsylvania Medical Society has called for a moratorium on new shale gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing and is urging the state to establish an independent health registry and start studying fracking’s public health impacts.

“We do support a moratorium at this point because of questions that have been raised,” said Charles Cutler, a Montgomery County doctor of internal medicine and the newly elected president of the 16,000-member medical society. “Those questions now point to the need for a registry and more science and research to give us a better understanding about whether fracking is safe and what the risk is.”

The society’s 300-member House of Delegates unanimously approved a resolution at its annual meeting Sunday in Hershey calling for the fracking moratorium, registry and research.

Dr. Walter Tsou, past president of the American Public Health Association and the author of the resolution, noted that a similar resolution was rejected three years ago, but now “growing evidence has shown its increasing deleterious effects outweighs any economic benefit.”

He said the medical society’s board of directors will meet next month to plan how to get the state Legislature, the Department of Health and the governor’s office to act on the resolutions.

The medical society might not get much help from the governor’s office, however. Jeffrey Sheridan, Gov. Tom Wolf’s spokesman, said Thursday night that the governor does not support a statewide moratorium.

“The governor understands the importance of the natural gas industry and he wants the industry to succeed while protecting the health of our residents and our environment,’’ Mr. Sheridan said. “Gov. Wolf has proposed methane regulations that are in the process of being implemented, and his administration developed some of the most stringent regulations on unconventional well drilling in the country that were recently finalized.

“The governor will continue to find ways to support the industry while ensuring we are protecting the environment and the health of Pennsylvania residents.”

Protect Pennsylvania: Health Professionals for a Livable Future, an activist alliance of physicians and nurses organizations opposed to shale gas development, said in a news release it supports the medical society’s resolution, and criticized the state Legislature for failing to establish a health registry or fund research into the health impacts of the decade-old shale gas drilling and fracking industry.

According to Protect Pennsylvania, many communities that benefited economically from the initial shale gas boom are now experiencing environmental and human health consequences.

“Pennsylvania has invested heavily into shale gas drilling, but in-state health studies have demonstrated worsening asthma, premature births, neurological and mental symptoms, and other adverse effects,” said Protect Pennsylvania’s news release, which cited bans or moratoriums on shale gas development in New York, Maryland and Vermont as appropriate precautionary steps.

Statements by the Pennsylvania Independent Oil & Gas Association and the Marcellus Shale Coalition, both representing industry concerns, touted the air quality improvements and health benefits from substituting natural gas for coal. PIOGA characterized the medical society’s resolution as “completely misinformed,” and the health risk concerns as “unfounded.”

The coalition cited U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy’s statement that, “natural gas has been a game changer with our ability to really move forward with pollution reductions that have been very hard to get our arms around for many decades.”

The medical society’s call for a moratorium came just a day before the release of a new study by the Yale School of Public Health that found numerous carcinogens used in fracking have the potential to contaminate the air and water of nearby communities and increase the risk of childhood leukemia.

Published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, the study examined more than 1,000 chemicals that may be released into the air or water by fracking and found that information on their cancer-causing potential was lacking on 80 percent of the compounds, “an important knowledge gap,” it said.

Of the remaining 119 compounds, 55 were identified as confirmed or possible carcinogens, and 20 of those are linked to increased risk for leukemia or lymphoma.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

We Care about Life Down on the Farm

Let us count the ways energy production causes damages

Commentary by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor & Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

I remember a Soil Conservation pamphlet I saw as a child called “6,000 years of civilization.” The thesis was that most of the civilizations before the Romans, and the Romans, too, had destroyed the soils in their areas of the Middle East by ignoring soil depletion. Each generation looked out for itself, extracted the yield without thought of the future. Eventually there was not enough food production (transportation was crude and slow) and eventually there was not enough that the armies could hold the empires together. The principal exception was Egypt, which had the renewing soil deposits from the annual Nile flood. It held on for 3,000 years, when the average empire lasted about 250 years.

I thought of this when I read the editorial in the 13 February Science, the Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science which is the world’s largest scientific organization, and the most prestigious place to publish science.  It was titled “Give soils their due.” Being keen on that sort of thing, since I am a life-long farmer, I realize that at any time the earth has a “carrying capacity.” Just like my pasture can only carry so many cows without being degraded, the earth can only support so many people.

I also remember reading about what caused the 1977 revolution in modern Egypt – high price of food got the hungry people out on the street. There was a riot because of food prices in Argentina in 1989 and in one in Italy not many years ago. Nothing gets people stirred up like having hungry kids. I also remember a graph in Science of the population of China on the vertical scale and time on the horizontal scale. Each bump up was labeled with a new food stuff which caused the increase. Millet, very early, dry land rice, wet land rice and toward the present, corn and then potatoes.

The authors of “Give soils their due” also talk about how properly managed soils hold water and purify it, remove carbon from the air and incorporate it in soil organic matter. It reintroduces nutrients from dead plants and unused plant parts, and prevents wind loss in dust storms. All this is linked to human and animal health, as well as food supply.

These authors recognize paving land over for cities, expansion of farming to marginal soils in deserts and far North regions, and cut down the tropical forests. Unfortunately, nothing is said about modern methods of extracting hydrocarbons for energy.

Now let us count the ways present day energy causes damage to the earth and its inhabitants. Drilling in deep ocean water, like the BP disaster, risks spilling very large quantities of oil into the ocean. The biggest fear of that event was that the leak was around the outside of the drill pipe, and the entire oil reservoir would drain out with no way to stop it, a disaster tens or hundreds of times more serious. Seafood and wildlife were damaged as was the productive capacity of the Gulf. The dispersants, used to break up the oil mass were offenders, too. BP pleaded guilty to 11 counts of manslaughter, two misdemeanors, and a felony count of lying to Congress. BP also agreed to four years of government monitoring of its safety practices and ethics, and the Environmental Protection Agency announced that BP would be temporarily banned from new contracts with the US government. As of February 2013, criminal and civil settlements and payments to a trust fund had cost the company $42.2 billion. Drilling in the Arctic, being pushed by the oil companies, would be even worse, since the platforms would be subject to the surging ice, and spill cleanup would, too.

Fracking destroys the surface by pushing aside top soil and covering the spot with crushed stone for the drilling pad and roads, and preventing forest growth along the numerous pipelines. Also by emitting hazardous chemicals into the air from drilling pads and compressor stations, by contaminating aquifers and streams with waterborne chemicals, all of which degrades farming or forestry, and living in the area where fracking is done. Disposal of fracking water causes earthquakes. Storm water is diverted from the natural channels, and it carries contaminates. The huge area that can be subject to fracking is easily recognizable by looking at a map of the shale beds believed to have gas potential. It even affects the area outside of that due to sand mining in the Upper Midwest and waste water disposal in other places.

Shale oil and tar sands have very low Energy Return on Energy Invested. Tar sands need to be diluted with a light oil supplied from somewhere else, other drilling.

Coal is dirty. In addition to the carbon, it contains a wide variety of elements that contaminate the air: sulfur (as much as 5 percent) and heavy metals, which are bad because the body has no mechanism to eliminate them once inhaled or ingested. I remember reading decades ago that coal contains enough uranium and thorium to generate as much power as the coal itself does. It poisons water with selenium, and if it is strip mined, destroys top soil and drainage.

And then there is the product of burning carbon in air. Few articles remind us that one ton of carbon takes two and two-third tons of oxygen out of the air to make three and two-thirds third tons of carbon dioxide. The kicker, though, is that 400 parts by volume in the atmosphere means carbon dioxide is diluted by 2500 more volumes of pure air to reach the concentration of carbon dioxide the atmosphere. Said in another way, one volume of carbon dioxide will pollute 2500 parts of air. The volume of the atmosphere is huge, but our present way of getting energy, now well over 150 years old is now obsolete.

All the different ways to obtain energy above hurt the earth and its people, the poorest first. There is no moral charity in advocating, or for anyone of any faith to advocate, anything other than reducing burning carbon for energy as quickly as rationally possible.

>> Tom Bond is active with the Guardians of the West Fork and other West Virginia citizens concerned about the impacts of proposed large diameter natural gas pipelines.

SkyTruth Monitoring, Shepherdstown, WV

Transparency about  fracking chemicals remains elusive

From an Article of  ”The Pulse” on WHYY, NewsWorks, Philadelphia, August 7, 2014

The website FracFocus.org was built to give the public answers to a burning question about the shale boom: what exactly were companies pumping down tens of thousands of wells to release oil and gas?

Today, FracFocus has records for more than 77,000 wells. Pennsylvania is one of 14 states requiring operators to use the website as part of their chemical disclosure laws, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

However, transparency about those chemicals remains elusive. FracFocus is run by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission and the Groundwater Protection Council, both based in Oklahoma City. The IOGCC is a multi-state government agency and the GWPC is a nonprofit group of state regulators who oversee water quality and oil and gas development. Pennsylvania is a member of both organizations.

“We were just trying to do some good,” says GWPC Associate Director Dan Yates, “Get some data out there on something we felt the public was hungry for.”

With funding from industry trade groups, FracFocus launched in April 2011 as an optional disclosure tool. More than 200 operators voluntarily uploaded their fracking fluid recipes for each well – with the exception of those ingredients companies deemed “trade secrets.” One year later, the voluntary disclosure site started to become a required regulatory tool in several states, including Pennsylvania.

Yates says the goal was to provide a well-by-well service. “We really wanted to focus in on individual people who lived and worked near a well, what they needed to know about that well,” he says.

That’s a problem, according to David Manthos with the group SkyTruth. He says information about tens of thousands of wells is technically available to the public on FracFocus, “but in such an obscure, obtuse way that it’s impossible to look at it in aggregate.”

SkyTruth is a nonprofit that uses publicly available data and satellite images to monitor the impacts of industry on the environment – all from a tiny office in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. When the SkyTruth team learned about FracFocus, Manthos says they were excited to find a new data set on shale development. The reports included information about the volume of water, sand and chemicals companies used to frack, as well as the location, height and depth of each well.

However, the data wasn’t so easy to get. Drillers post their lists of chemicals as individual PDF documents for each well they frack. PDFs are not “machine-readable.” In other words, computers can’t understand the documents, so it’s harder to tell machines to pull the data out and organize the information as a table or a spreadsheet. (An Excel spreadsheet is one example of a “machine-readable” document.)

Click here to see what a FracFocus report looks like.

At the time, FracFocus had records for more than 30,000 wells. To mine all that data, SkyTruth would have to open one PDF at a time and then copy and paste all the information about each ingredient into a spreadsheet.

Manthos says it was a daunting task. “We calculated about 6 years’ worth of labor and just at minimum wage, would have been something on the order of $90,000 just to manually do this whole thing,” he says.

Paul Woods, SkyTruth’s self-described “big data wrangler,” spent about three months coming up with a better solution. He designed a bot – a software program that could do all the work for them. Every night, the bot scraped the site for all the available PDF documents and compiled the information into a searchable database. SkyTruth published that database online for the public in 2012. “We were overwhelmed by the response of people contacting us, asking questions about the data set, downloading it and then the subsequent reports and publications that used that data set to say very interesting things,” Woods says.

For instance, researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago used the data to look at how much water goes into producing natural gas and using it as a transportation fuel.

The Smithsonian used it to make an interactive map of shale gas wells across the country. Even a consulting firm that does data analysis for the industry tapped into SkyTruth’s database.

But one night last June, the bot hit a roadblock. The first thing Woods noticed was that there was no new data coming in from FracFocus. He ran some tests and was discouraged by what he found. “There was a little error message that was coming out saying, ‘Hey, you’re sending too many requests. You’re being blocked for 24 hours,’” he says. “Then, they block you for 48 hours and then they block you forever.”

The GWPC had set up a system to block automated programs like SkyTruth’s bot. Yates says it was “out of concern about overloading our system resources.”

The new blocking program was part of an overhaul of FracFocus launched on June 1, 2013. “FracFocus 2.0″ included new search tools and more flexibility on the back end of the site so companies could tailor their reports to meet different states’ disclosure requirements. “We didn’t want automated searches overloading the system and blocking or slowing down individual public access,” Yates says, noting that the site was meant for residents and landowners, not groups like SkyTruth looking for big data on drilling.

To get companies to voluntarily disclose what’s in their fracking fluid, the GWPC and IOGCC had to agree it would only serve up the information one well at a time. The industry didn’t want FracFocus to be a wholesale repository of data. “That agreement is still in place,” Yates says. “We think that’s more than likely going to change, but we’re not actively seeking that out.”

FracFocus has come under new scrutiny as the U.S. Bureau of Land Management considers whether to use it as a disclosure tool for fracking on federal and Indian lands. The BLM recently finished combing through more than one million public comments on the draft rule. Spokeswoman Bev Winston says the agency is in the process of writing the final regulation and it is not clear whether the website will play a role.

“Like it or not, FracFocus is now one of the most comprehensive, if not the most comprehensive source of information about the chemicals being used in unconventional oil and gas development,” says Kate Konschnik, director of the Environmental Policy Initiative at Harvard Law School.

In a 2013 report, Konschnik gave FracFocus a failing grade as a disclosure tool. She found that the data were often inaccurate or incomplete, and that companies were making “trade secret” claims for chemicals at one well site while fully disclosing the same chemicals at another. “Not maybe as robust a tool as one would hope if something is regulated or required by state law,” she says.

In March, a task force convened by the U.S. Secretary of Energy’s Advisory Board recommended that the site’s administrators beef up quality control and allow the public better access to the data in aggregate or wholesale form. The task force also recommended federal funding for these improvements.

Morgan Wagner, a spokeswoman for Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection says the agency “is in support of the Advisory Board’s recommendations.”

Konschnik says the groups running the site are under more pressure to make changes, but are juggling multiple interests – the industry, the states and now, the federal government.

Yates admits FracFocus could be improved and says the administrators are already working to fix some of the site’s limitations, but it will be up to the industry and the states to decide whether to release the full data set to the public. “We certainly have capability to make that happen,” he says. “The technical know-how exists.”"If we didn’t build it, there wouldn’t be a FracFocus. Though it has some limitations, it’s better than not existing at all.” “They haven’t really accomplished public disclosure”

What became of SkyTruth’s efforts to get the data? It’s been just over a year since the bot was blocked from the site. Woods says the group is stalled. In the spring, SkyTruth teamed up with another environmental nonprofit called FracTracker, based in Pittsburgh, to try to work things out with the site’s administrators. So far, they have not reached an agreement.

Yates says the blocking system is no longer needed and will eventually be removed. However, he could not say when that will happen. FracFocus is still a unique source of information about a technology that is changing communities and the global energy economy.

But data miners are frustrated that the big information inside FracFocus has been purposefully made so small. Samantha Malone with FracTracker puts it this way: “Imagine trying to understand your financial spending throughout the year by taking photos of all of your receipts of anything you ever purchased the entire year,” she says. “You would need to look at each one, one at a time and even then you still couldn’t see the big picture.”

Without big data, Woods says, even individual homeowners can’t see the big picture of how the shale boom is impacting them or their communities. “The kind of people who can answer those questions for you are people like us,” he says. “And if we can’t get the data because they only want to give it to individual homeowners about their individual wells, then they haven’t really accomplished public disclosure.”

The staff of the Joint Judiciary Committee prepared this bill, which is one of the two major fracking bills to be considered this year in Charleston.  This one is Senate Bill SB-258 with 10 sponsors, equivalent to House Bill HB-2878 with 9 sponsors.  The other bill, known as the WV-DEP bill was prepared at the Department of Environmental Protection. SB-258 and HB-2878 have been referred to the Judiciary Committee, then they go to the Finance Committee.

The DEP bill clarifies that a separate permit must be obtained for each well drilled, no matter the type of well.  Significant permit application fees of $5,000 to $15,000 are included in all these bills, depending on the type of well, to help defray the costs of operating the Office of Oil and Gas.

Both bills require that an application to drill a horizontal well include a “water management plan” which must include a “water resources protection plan”. The anticipated chemical additives that may be used in the fracking water must be listed.

General environmental protection performance standards must be met in the drilling process. And, various measures are included for the protection of the surface land.  However, both bills will continue to allow the burial of drilling pit liners on site.

A comparison of these bills by the WV Environmental Council is available here.