See also: www.Marcellus-Shale.us

Fracking companies use loopholes to avoid permits for dangerous chemicals

From an Article by Laura Arenschield, Columbus Dispatch, October 23, 2014

Federal laws meant to protect drinking water require fracking companies to get a permit before using diesel fuel in the drilling process. That permit is important: Diesel fuel contains chemicals that can cause cancer and damage nerve tissues. The permits regulate the length and depth of concrete and steel well casings that keep those chemicals from reaching groundwater.

But a loophole in the law allows oil and gas companies to separately inject the same toxic chemicals without a permit, according to a report released by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Environmental Integrity Project.

Four chemicals in diesel — benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene — are the biggest worries to federal regulators and environmental and health officials. Benzene is a known carcinogen. Ethylbenzene and toluene can cause neurological problems.

The Safe Water Drinking Act requires extensive oversight if diesel is used during drilling or fracking, in part because of its benzene content. Diesel can be used, for example, as a lubricant for a pipe or drill going into the ground. Yet all those chemicals are allowed to be used during fracking without a permit issued under the Safe Water Drinking Act, the Environmental Integrity Project said.

The report shows that at least six fracking-fluid additives contain more benzene than diesel fuel, and that at least 21 contain higher concentrations of ethylbenzene, xylene or toluene than diesel.

“From a health and safety perspective, it obviously makes no sense to be restricting diesel because of concerns about its benzene content, (and not) to be doing that for products that have so much more benzene in them,” said Eric Schaeffer, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project. “While hydro-fracking offers obvious economic benefits, that does come at an environmental cost we are just beginning to understand.”

Natural-gas production in Ohio increased by 97 percent from 2012 to 2013, according to the most recent data available from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the agency that regulates drilling. As of the end of June, Ohio had issued permits for more than 1,400 wells that have been or will be fracked.

For the report, the Environmental Integrity Project reviewed data on the FracFocus Chemical Disclosure Registry, a website sponsored by the oil and gas industry that collects information about the chemicals used in drilling and fracking.

Last month, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that while fracking does not inherently contaminate nearby drinking water with methane, poorly constructed wells with leaky casings or faulty concrete can allow the gas to leach into drinking water.

Researchers from Ohio State, Duke, Stanford and Dartmouth universities and the University of Rochester analyzed 133 samples from drinking-water wells over the Marcellus and Barnett shale formations. Barnett shale is found mostly in Texas. The researchers found eight clusters of methane-contaminated groundwater wells near shale-drilling sites — seven in the Marcellus region and one in the Barnett.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced in February that it would start researching federal and state governments’ ability to manage potential threats to water resources from hydraulic fracturing. That report is not yet finished.

Brian Kunkemoeller, a conservation project manager with the Sierra Club’s Ohio chapter, said that the Environmental Integrity Project report shows that laws need to be tightened. “Until these major loopholes are reversed, there are not enough protections on the books for clean water,” he said.

Looking for Loopholes w/ 3D Glasses

Proposed new legislation would undo state laws on fracking toxics

Press Release from John Rumpler and Lauren Pagel, Environment America, April 28, 2014

With “trade secrets” claim debunked, proposed changes are clearly aimed at hiding toxic substances from the public.

The current draft of the Chemicals in Commerce Act (CICA), made public today, would add another special oil and gas industry loophole to federal environmental law. CICA, legislation that aims to “reform” the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), would block states and localities from requiring the oil and gas industry to reveal the toxics they inject through the water table during hydraulic fracturing. The legislation would also prohibit states or localities from regulating or banning toxic chemicals used in the drilling and fracking process, such as benzene and diesel fuel.

As hydraulic fracturing has facilitated the extraction of shale oil & gas across the country, affected states and communities have increasingly required some form of public disclosure of the chemicals used during fracking.

“Oil and gas industry apologists in Congress have sunk to a new low,” said Lauren Pagel, Policy Director for Earthworks. “This toxics reform legislation risks public health in favor of energy industry profits. It would undo even modest efforts by states to protect and inform the public about fracking risks.”

Nationwide, toxic fluids and waste from fracking are polluting our air and water and making nearby residents sick.  There are more than one thousand documented instances of fracking-enabled oil and gas development contaminating water – from the residential wells in Dimock, PA to the more than 400 waste pits that have leached into groundwater in New Mexico alone.

Last week Baker Hughes Inc., one of the nation’s three major hydraulic fracturing service companies, promised to disclose all chemicals they use in fracking:
“It’s obvious that there’s no compelling reason to hide fracking chemicals behind a ‘trade secrets’ claim,” said Lauren Pagel. She continued, “Baker Hughes’s promise makes clear that the purpose of this bill is to hide fracking toxics from the public, not protect trade secrets from competitors.”

But the oil and gas lobby has rebuffed efforts to close the loopholes that exempt their drilling operations from key provisions of federal environmental laws – maintaining that the states know best when it comes to regulation of oil and gas.

“Fracking is a major toxic threat to our air and water,” said John Rumpler, senior attorney for Environment America.  “Yet the Shimkus TSCA bill belies the utter hypocrisy of the industry’s ‘states-first’ positioning by stripping away the ability of state and local governments to rein in the toxic pollution from dirty drilling.”

For More Information:
Waxman-Tonko letter to Chairman Shimkus

Halliburton Loopholes Galore

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

One of the principal arguments for extreme energy extraction is “the nation needs the energy,” but the extraction is not done by the nation it is done by a private corporation. According to current legal practice, a corporation is a “person.” It certainly belongs to a person or persons, with these individuals allowed to make the decisions and achieve significant personal benefits there from.

Favorable laws are constructed by government for the business, including (1) pooling, a form of eminent domain, (2) reduced taxes (subsidies), in the amount of $7 billion annually, see chart here; and (3) exemption from environmental laws applied to other businesses (as typified by the 2005 Energy Act). For this, Google exemptions from safety laws of the oil and gas industry. Notice the industry response, such as this one from Energy in Depth, one of the industry constructed apologists. Studying this debate would be a good exercise for a college Logic or Rhetoric class.

(4) Further, partly as the result of safety exemptions, is the death of 138 oil and gas workers in 2012, with a fatality rate eight times as many as the all-industry rate of 3.8 per 1000,000 workers, according the Public Radio, December 27, 2013.

(5) State regulations may be so weak they hardly amount to control at all.

(6) Compounds used are frequently unknown and have toxic properties ignored in spite of massive anecdotal evidence (this site has well over 5000 sick or injured listed). (7) Science is ignored. At a recent meeting at the University of Pennsylvania described as “a summary of the current science, ” Aubrey Miller, the senior medical adviser with the National Institute of Environmental Health and Safety, was the wrap-up speaker. He noted that the nation has some 52,000 unconventional gas wells, yet when he searched the literature for research, he found little. “How do we have no data on an enterprise of this magnitude?”

And there is (8) little personal contact between regulators and operators. West Virginia has only 27 enforcement officers. Only a few token citations are given. A summary of wells drilled, enforcement actions, and staff for WV from 2003 to 2011 is here, and data for other oil and gas states may be accessed at this site also. (9) Property value decrease, representing reduced usefulness of the surface, are generally ignored. In light of the original understanding of the “right to remove” entertained by a lessor one hundred or more years ago, the contract is invariably broken by the lessee today. The inertia of law, not keeping up with the technology changes as time passes, and legislative bias, ignore this fact.

Justification for this mess is “We need the oil and gas” or “We need the energy.” Which phrase used is mostly determined by whether the speaker is the employee of a company extracting the hydrocarbon, or whether an “expert” from government or academia. The energy need and hydrocarbon use is never distinguished. No alternative.

Nor is the mixing of corporate and government prerogatives clarified. The use of force, that is taxation, fines, imprisonment, capital punishment, for the public benefit, is the exclusive prerogative of the state in modern times. It is blended, commixed, entwined and conflated with the corporations ability to place members of society in order according to its own uses, some at the top receiving vast rewards, some receiving crumbs according to the corporations uses, and some left entirely out.

Both corporate and government-academic expert speakers seem not to recognize diminishing the organic resources of the surface of planet is a problem resulting from extreme extraction, as is reducing social cohesiveness by alienating those who dwell near extraction. Using governmental violence on behalf of the corporations in places like Nigeria and Ecuador to control those who live in the lands affected by extraction has not much effected corporate operations. Those natives used violence against superior forces.

Here the “homeland” the problem is different. The natives are the same color as corporate leaders, speak the same language, wear the same clothes, read the same media. They are harder to dismiss. Worst of all, they have the same government. That government’s loyalty is fleeting. Every four years those who govern have to be reelected. Also the legal structure corporations have built into law during the last 150 years and in legislation over a shorter time requires increased maintenance as time goes on: the technology changes and people become better informed.

Opposition to extreme energy extraction is greatest where people are the most educated, the most able to communicate, the most dependent on making their own decisions, and close to the damage. Support occurs where there is trickle down from the corporations: subcontractors, remote royalty owners, investors, workers at various levels, politicians on the take and who lack the ability to understand what is going on, and people who really don’t care about facts on the ground, habitually accepting what they are told.

Our hope, those of us that are being harmed and who care about the future, is to make others see what is going on. To try violence is to face something that looks like like Darth Vader’s troops – body armor and all. To convince others is work, but we have time for that, and motivation, and there are a lot of us and we don’t need paid – our pay is to stop the damage against us, our health, our children’s future.

Tune in ten years from now. The political climate will be different when damage to the earth, sick people, and wealth concentration by taking the hydrocarbons out of the earth have increased. Will the Darth Vader-like forces control or will enlightenment prevail?