New - and worrisome - contaminants emerge from oil and gas wells

Researchers find alarming levels of ammonium and iodide in fracking wastewater released into Pennsylvania and West Virginia streams.

Marianne Lavelle  ::  The Daily Climate  ::  Jan. 14, 2015

Unexpected toxics are surfacing with fracking fluid at drilling sites in Pennsylvania and
West Virginia, researchers say. Treatment plants, never designed to handle the mess,
are sending the pollutants straight to the region's waterways. Above, fracking
waste storage tanks in Colorado. Photo courtesy William Ellsworth/USGS.

Two hazardous chemicals never before known as oil and gas industry pollutants – ammonium and iodide – are being released into Pennsylvania and West Virginia waterways from the booming energy operations of the Marcellus shale, a new study shows.

The toxic substances, which can have a devastating impact on fish, ecosystems, and potentially, human health, are extracted from geological formations along with natural gas and oil during both hydraulic fracturing and conventional drilling operations, said Duke University scientists in a study published today in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

The chemicals then are making their way into streams and rivers, both accidentally and through deliberate release from treatment plants that were never designed to handle these contaminants, the researchers said.

Implications for Stronger Regulations

The findings have major implications for whether stronger regulations are needed to curb water pollution from fracking and other oil and gas industry operations. Over the years, the industry has faced questions about unsafe well design that allows methane to seep into drinking water, and about lubricants and other chemicals it adds to frack water. Duke researchers have conducted a number of studies on these problems.

Now add to the list of concerns ammonium and iodide – two naturally occurring, dangerous chemicals that are essentially unregulated in oil and gas wastewater.

"We are releasing this wastewater into the environment and it is causing direct contamination and human health risks," said study co-author Avner Vengosh, professor of water quality and geochemistry at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment. "It should be regulated and it should be stopped. That's not even science; it's common sense."

Steve Everley, spokesman for the oil and natural gas industry group, Energy in Depth, pointed out that a tightening of Pennsylvania regulations in 2011 had ended deliberate discharges of untreated fracking wastewater to the state’s rivers or streams – a point that the Duke study also makes. But some oil and gas wastewater, primarily from conventional drilling sites, is released into waterways after treatment at industrial brine facilities. Also, state records show more than 50 accidental spills of fracking wastewater in Pennsylvania last year, according to the group, Fractracker Alliance.

Nevertheless, Everley said there are already regulations in place to penalize hydraulic fracturing companies that spill wastewater, and the study confuses the issue by lumping them together with conventional producers.

“I’m not sure if the intention was to malign ‘fracking’ by cleverly presenting data on wastewater that doesn’t come from fracking, or if the report was just poorly written,” he said in an email. “In any event, it’s difficult to see how this can provide a meaningful contribution to the public dialogue, seeing how it does more to confuse the public’s understanding of wastewater treatment than anything else.”

Scientists, however, see a serious – and previously unheralded – public health concern.

Fracking's federal loophole

When dissolved in water, ammonium can turn to ammonia, highly toxic to aquatic life. The Duke team found ammonium levels in streams and rivers from energy industry wastewater outflows at levels 50 times higher than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's water-quality threshold. Under a loophole created by Congress in a 2005 energy law, fracking wastewater isn't regulated under the U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act.

Meanwhile, the Duke scientists found that the iodide contamination from energy operations – while not toxic by itself – promotes the production of disinfection byproducts when it comes in contact with the chlorine that is used to treat most drinking water systems. Previous studies have shown that such disinfection byproducts have toxic and carcinogenic properties, but only a few are regulated.

"As far as we are aware, iodide and ammonium are not regulated, nor monitored in any of the [oil and gas] operations in the United States," the researchers said in their paper.

Increased cancer?

Terrence Collins, director of the Institute for Green Science at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, was not involved in the study but said findings of iodide contamination are particularly worrisome, especially if stream or river water is extracted downstream for drinking water. 

"Widely practiced chemical treatments to kill pathogens are likely to cause the iodide to become incorporated into organic matter in the drinking water, and I am concerned that this could result in increased incidences of cancer," he said in an email.

The recent boom in U.S. oil and gas production has been accompanied by a surge in wastewater production. Fracked wells produce about 1 million to 2 million gallons of wastewater per well. For conventional wells, the volume is less but the risk of contamination with ammonium and iodide is the same. "The method doesn't matter," said Vengosh.

"Fracking fluids are not much different from conventional oil and gas wastes," said Jennifer Harkness, lead author of the study and a doctoral student at Duke.

Off to the rivers

The researchers collected and analyzed 44 samples of wastewater produced from conventional oil and gas wells in New York and Pennsylvania and 31 samples of "flowback" – the highly saline and polluted fluid that flows back to the surface during and after fracking – from shale gas wells in Pennsylvania and Arkansas. They also collected and analyzed oil and gas effluents being directly discharged into streams, rivers and surface waters at three disposal sites in Pennsylvania and a spill site in West Virginia.

In states like Texas and Oklahoma, with long histories of conventional drilling, oil and gas wastewater is disposed by injection in deep underground wells. But in Pennsylvania, a hotbed of fracking, there are few such sites. Some oil and gas wastewater is discharged to waterways after treatment at commercially operated industrial brine treatment plants, which were not designed to remove ammonium or iodide.

There also have been wastewater spills, including seeps from illegal disposal, leaking from surface impoundments, and truck tanker accidents. Some states even have purposely spread the salty oil and gas wastewater on roads to suppress dust or for de-icing.

The estimated volume of oil and gas industry wastewater generated in the U.S. is now more than 837 billion gallons (3.18 billion cubic meters) per year. For comparison, that's nearly three times the volume of all the oil and gasoline that the United States consumes each year (291 billion gallons).

The researchers said their study adds to a growing body of evidence that government action is needed. "There are significant environmental and ecosystem impacts of current [oil and gas wastewater] disposal practices in the U.S.," they wrote, "Regulatory action is needed to address these concerns."

Marianne Lavelle is a staff writer for The Daily Climate. Follow her on Twitter @mlavelles. The Daily Climate is a nonprofit news site covering energy, the environment and climate change.

Photos: West Virginia unconventional shale drilling site courtesy Avner Vengosh/NSF. Water sampling in West Virginia courtesy U.S. EPA.

Find us on Twitter @TheDailyClimate or email editor Brian Bienkowski at bbienkowski [at] EHN.org

  Find more Daily Climate stories in the TDC Newsroom

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

 Based on a work at www.dailyclimate.org

A Cautionary Tale

In 2007 the Nova Scotia government leased land in the Kennetcook, Hants County area to Triangle Petroleum of Denver to drill five exploratory shale gas wells.  Of these five wells, three were eventually fracked for exploration rather than production purposes.  

Ten million liters of fracking wastewater was produced from these initial test wells and is contained in two ponds in Kennetcook, left behind by Triangle and their associates.  

Accurate figures on the exact number of liters of remaining wastewater are hard to come by;  freezing and thawing alters levels in the ponds, dilution of the effluent causes spillage, illegal dumping is suspected and approximately seven million liters of supposedly treated wastewater was dumped into the sewage treatment facility in Windsor, N.S.

  

To complicate matters further, N.S. has ten million liters of wastewater in holding ponds in Debert that was accepted from Corridor Resources in N.B.  Nova Scotia has since passed legislation that prohibits all municipalities from accepting fracking waste from N.B.  

At present Atlantic Industrial Services (AIS) in Debert N.S. is actively seeking willing towns and cities, in either province, that will take and dispose of any or all of the remaining 30 million liters of flowback still sitting in open holding ponds in Debert and Kennetcook.  

Aside from the toxic chemicals found in the original fracking fluid, produced water contains heavy metals, volatile organiccompounds (VOC's) and radioactive materials.

Barbara Harris, author of "Out of Control:  Nova Scotia's Experience with Fracking for Natural Gas" explains:  "Fracking waste water is not normal sewage, nor is it highly salty wastewater, sewage treatment plants  such as the Windsor plant are not set up to remove either the chemicals, heavy metals or radioactive materials commonly found in fracking wastewater.  After treatment at the Windsor treatment facility water flows into Le Breau Creek which empties into the the Avon River and then into the Minas Basin."

All of this occurred because three exploratory wells were hastily drilled by a company that didn't have the technological expertise to maintain some level of control over events that caused serious environmental harm.  The government displayed a lack of regulatory oversight over an industry that was too pervasive to care about the health and safety of local residents. 

The same can be said for the industry's handling of wastewater anywhere in North America.  There are few, if any, active treatment plants with a technology specializing in the decontamination of produced  water.  And it certainly would not be feasible to truck

hundreds of millions of liters of fracking wastes throughout the U.S. and Canada to dispose of this highly toxic substance.

What industry has chosen to do in many U.S states, to avoid the expense and "nuisance" of water treatment, is to inject the  contaminated water back into the earth using older non-productive wells.  Evidence indicates, however, that wells used to bury 

wastewater threaten aquifers and increases the possibility of seismic activity.

In 2012 Exxon Mobil commented on water treatment as follows:  "More precise experiments and analyses are needed for a reliable evaluation.  The same is true of the treatment of radioactive polluted reservoir water.  We currently regard the treatment of waste water as possible, but not viable for economic reasons.  Hence the preference for deep well injection."*  With regard to this issue, nothing has changed since 2012.

The only interpretation we can take from all this, is that the industry that has been fracking for the last fifteen years, is allowed by governments in heavily fracked areas, to continue this practice without the knowledge or the means to effectively treat the hazardous waste they produce.

So, what might happen if N.B. establishes a fully fledged shale gas industry in the province?  If we were to see 50, 100 or 500 wells drilled over time, where would the hundreds of thousands of liters of produced wastewater go?

No one from government has so much as mentioned how such toxic waste would be disposed of.  There is no way to treat it and no place to put it.  When TAAHF asked MLA Bernie Le Blanc who would be responsible for flowback, he told us that it would not be

government's responsibility, industry would decide how to dispose of its own fracking wastes.  

If that is the case then industry would have an insurmountable problem to solve, because to date no cities, towns or counties in the Maritimes have been willing to entertain the possibility of accepting this waste.  More often than we know this type of scenario leads to the illegal dumping of poisonous effluents into lakes and rivers, out of sight and with no one the wiser.  

More and more the issue of rejecting shale gas development has a strong municipal connection.  Any residents in N.B. who have concerns about these issues  should check with their local government and see where they stand.                                                                                   

Shale gas, even on its own terms, is not even remotely sustainable, but when you add to that issues of climate change, air and water pollution, overuse of the finite resource of freshwater, danger to human health, infrastructure damage due to trucking and the conundrum of wastewater disposal, then we as citizens need to resolve that we will not allow the shale gas industry access to our cities, towns and rural communities.

* Rosenwinkel, Karl Heinz,  State of the Art and Progressive Approaches to Flowback Disposal, 2012.

Donna Mclellan for the Tantramar Alliance Against Hydro-Fracking

18 December 2014

Texas Town Sues to Uphold Fracking Ban, Protect Democracy

Anastasia Pantsios  ::  EcoWatch  ::  5 December 2014 

The little guys aren’t taking this one lying down. In November, voters in Denton, Texas—fed up with oil and gas drilling companies unwilling to work with citizens to put some reasonable protections in place and with state and local regulators for allowing new fracking wells near homes, schools, parks and hospitals—passed a ban on fracking, despite being hugely outspent. The Texas Oil and Gas Association, representing the fracking companies, and the state’s General Land Office responded with lawsuits to protect their “right” to push fracking on unwilling residents.

Even kids can’t help noticing the impact of fracking on their community.
Image credit: Frack Free Denton

Now Denton is fighting back with lawsuits of its own. Yesterday, with the fracking ban taking effect on Tuesday, the Denton Drilling Awareness Group (DAG) and Earthworks, the groups that led the Frack Free Denton ballot initiative, filed intervention papers in both lawsuits, seeking to assert the right of citizens to decide what happens in their own neighborhoods. The groups are represented by the Texas local government law firm Brown & Hofmeister; attorneys from national environmental organizations Earthjustice and the Natural Resources Defense Council are asking the permission of the court to act as co-counsel.

“Denton residents, with Republican and Democratic majorities, voted overwhelmingly to ban fracking,” said DAG president Cathy McMullen. “Our city has the legal power to prevent bakeries from setting up shop in residential neighborhoods. To suggest that we don’t have the legal power to similarly bar fracking, a much more dangerous process, is the height of industry arrogance.”

“The state and industry could have respected Denton communities’ health, safety and property,” said Earthworks’ energy program director Bruce Baizel. “They chose not to. The ban is the result. Now, rather than constructively engage with the community, they simply overlook their regulatory failure and move to overturn democracy through legal action.”

Fracking wells are literally in residents’ back yards.
Photo credit: Frack Free Denton

At issue is whether local communities have the right to regulate oil and gas operations within their borders or whether, as the lawsuits by the oil and gas interests claim, Denton’s voter-approved ordinance is overridden by state regulators in contradiction of Texas’ long tradition of home rule authority over gas and oil development. There are many other local oil and gas regulations in effect across Texas, including in Dallas just to the south of Denton, which seems to contradict the contention of the frack-friendly interests.

“The State of Texas has granted municipalities the right to oversee oil and gas operations,” Earthjustice managing attorney Deborah Goldberg pointed out. “The people of Denton have exercised that right, and we intend to help preserve it. Communities from California to Texas to New York are fed up with the abuses of the oil and gas industry. When state and federal officials won’t stand up for the public, citizens must have the right to use local democracy to protect themselves.”

Denton citizens mobilized to ban fracking in their community
and aren’t going to back down in the face of gas and
oil companies’ lawsuits. Photo credit: Frack Free Denton

“This fight cuts to the heart of our democracy, and it is far from over,” said Natural Resources Defense Council attorney Dan Raichel. “The people of Denton have voted to keep fracking away from their homes and schools—they will not be bullied by powerful oil and gas companies that want to make a profit at the expense of their health. Denton is a pioneer in Texas, but it is not alone. This community joins hundreds of others around the country—and in Texas—that are demanding the right to determine what happens within their own borders.”

This article sums up the elephant in the room when it comes to the fracking industry and its effect on individuals and communities.  The proponents of the fracking industry see nothing wrong with concept of industrializing (sacrificing) 1/7 of the provincial land mass, numerous communities and villages, and the assets of individuals for the benefit of a foreign corporation and a small select group of individuals.  Even if the fracking industry were not inherently dangerous, toxic and promoting climate change, the industry is not feasible unless the process has not limits.  Should not this industry be forced to compensate the individuals, towns and villages affected, i.e. purchase the land mass that they need in lieu of royalties? Should not individuals, villages and towns be able to say yes or no to what industries they wish to have as neighbours?    Richard Lachance

Depleting the Water

Watch this video Depleting the Water from CBS 60 Minutes.  Then think about Frank McKenna's dream for the New Brunswick economy.  Remember it takes 1-5 million gallons of water to frack one well, each well may be fracked several times, each well pad would contain multiple wells.  How much more of this insanity must be endured before we come to our senses?  It's time to move away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, from fossil fueled agriculture to organic agriculture, from too much to enough.  The sooner, the better.

Why Fossil Fuels Are Dirty Politics as Well as Dirty Energy

Carl Pope  ::  EcoWatch  ::  3 November 2014

When the Western Energy Alliance in June invited K-Street mugger Richard Berman to advise them on how to deal with public opposition to oil and gas extraction, Berman’s back-alley style can hardly have surprised those who invited him. His tactics and viciousness have been broadly reported in the media, and blasted even by his own son. CBS’s 60 Minutes called him Dr. Evil.

Richard Berman, Charles Koch and David Koch. So we need to understand that however many oil and coal companies do decide to play clean, there will be others willing to “win dirty,” and that unless we can find ways to limit their political clout both communities and the environment will continue to be devastated in the name of carbon profits.

So it should not have been a surprise when Berman summed up his philosophy by telling the industry you can either “win ugly or lose pretty.” Winning ugly includes tactics like digging up personal dirt about your opponents, discussing “how he had done detailed research on the personal histories of members of the boards of the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council to try to find information that could be used to embarrass them.” (As far as I can tell, Berman is either inept at this tactic or environmental board members are stunningly virtuous people, because there is no public record of any serious embarrassment resulting).

What may have surprised Berman, however, was that someone in the audience not only recorded his remarks but was sufficiently appalled to leak them, so you can read it all in its ugliness. Anadarko Petroleum, to its credit, has distanced themselves from Berman, saying “Anadarko did not support Mr. Berman’s approach and did not to participate in his work because it does not align with our values.” Unfortunately, it appears that Berman may still have raised $3 million from other oil and gas companies for his latest endeavor, “Big Green Radicals.”

Methane Leaks Wipe Out Any Climate Benefit Of Fracking, Satellite Observations Confirm

BY JOE ROMM POSTED ON OCTOBER 22, 2014 AT 3:31 PM

CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK

Satellite observations of huge oil and gas basins in East Texas and North Dakota confirm staggering 9 and 10 percent leakage rates of heat-trapping methane. “In conclusion,” researchers write, “at the current methane loss rates, a net climate benefit on all time frames owing to tapping unconventional resources in the analyzed tight formations is unlikely.”

In short, fracking speeds up human-caused climate change, thanks to methane leaks alone. Remember, natural gas is mostly methane, (CH4), a super-potent greenhouse gas, which traps 86 times as much heat as CO2 over a 20-year period. So even small leaks in the natural gas production and delivery system can have a large climate impact — enough to gut the entire benefit of switching from coal-fired power to gas.

Back in February, we reported that the climate will likely be ruined already well past most of our lifespans by the time natural gas has a net climate benefit. That was based on a study in Science called “Methane Leaks from North American Natural Gas Systems” reviewing more than 200 earlier studies. It concluded that natural gas leakage rates were about 5.4 percent.

The new study used satellites to look at actual “methane emissions for two of the fastest growing production regions in the United States, the Bakken and Eagle Ford formations,” between the periods 2006–2008 and 2009–2011. They found leakages rates of 10.1 percent and 9.1 percent respectively!

Recall the key figure from the 2012 study, Alvarez et al:

Figure: Maximum life-cycle natural gas leak rate as a function of the number of years needed to achieve net climate benefits after switching from coal power to natural gas. The three curves represent: single emissions pulses (dotted lines); the service life of a power plant, 50 years (dashed lines); and a permanent fleet conversion (solid lines).

If the leakage rate were 5.4 percent, replacing a fleet of coal plants with gas plants would be worse for the climate for 5 decades. If the leakage rate were 7.6 percent, fracked gas is worse for a century!

But it’s even worse than that for fracking. Alvarez et al. used old figures for the global warming potential (GWP) of methane. Last year, the IPCC determined that the 100-year GWP of methane is 40 percent higher than previously estimated.

And it’s even worse than that for fracked gas, which, in the real world, doesn’t just displace coal, it also displaces nuclear power, renewable energy, and energy efficiency. Recent studies have confirmed that — even if methane leakage were zero percent — “increased natural gas use for electricity will not substantially reduce US GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions, and by delaying deployment of renewable energy technologies, may actually exacerbate the climate change problem in the long term.”

Bottom line: fracking speeds up global warming and has no net climate benefit whatsoever in any timescale that matters to humanity. Perhaps it is time to stop squandering tens of billions of dollars on it while rendering billions of gallons of water unfit for human consumption.

In Texas, Traffic Deaths Climb Amid Fracking Boom

Andrew Schneider  ::  Houston Public Media  ::  October 12, 2014

Guillermo Gomez, husband of Vilma Marenco, holds his daughter in their home in Northeast Houston. Marenco was killed in April after being hit by an uninsured trucker who ran a red light.

Mayra Beltran/Houston Chronicle

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has unlocked huge reserves of oil and gas in shale formations in many states. The biggest winner, in terms of new jobs, has been Texas.

But an investigation by Houston Public Media and the Houston Chronicle shows Texas highways have become the nation's deadliest amid a fracking boom.

Flatbed trucks bearing loads of steel pipe often barrel down these roads. Truck drivers often run into problems when they have to make wide turns onto narrow side streets.

Vilma Marenco was hit by one of those trucks on April 22.

She was driving home when she stopped at an intersection along Old Beaumont Highway, linking East Houston to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. She entered the intersection, less than a mile from her house, when an 18-wheeler ran the red light on Old Beaumont, crushing her Chevy Cavalier. 

Marenco's husband, Guillermo Gomez, tried desperately to reach her by phone.

"I called her and called her and called her, but she never answered," he says.

It would be hours before Gomez learned his wife was dead.

The Texas Department of Public Safety says the company involved, R & F Quality Transportation, shouldn't have had a truck on the road at all. It had racked up a string of safety violations in the months leading up to the crash, ranging from defective brakes to a driver smoking marijuana behind the wheel. When R & F failed to address the problems, state officials ordered it to shut down, an order the carrier ignored. All attempts to reach R & F for comment failed.

The death toll on Texas highways had been falling for decades, as car companies built safer vehicles. But that trend shifted into reverse as the boom in fracking began to heat up.

The Texas Department of Transportation says that between 2009 and 2013, the state's traffic fatalities rose by eight percent, even as those in most other states continued to fall. And deaths linked to commercial vehicle crashes, like trucks, soared by more than 50 percent over the same period.
The boom has triggered a huge demand for both tractor-trailers and drivers.

"People who've never been in the seat of a truck before go to school for two weeks, and they graduate, and now they're a truck driver, you know," says Larry Busby, the long-time sheriff of Live Oak County in the Eagle Ford shale region of South Texas. "Well, they're not a truck driver yet. They've just passed the school."

The Texas Trucking Association, an industry trade group, says the rising death toll has more to do with drivers sharing the road with trucks than with the truckers themselves.

"There is a level of congestion that is rising all over the state, particularly in these areas of smaller counties that involve the oil field and energy exploration, and it's causing folks that are not accustomed to that type of congestion to make unnecessary risks, and it's costing lives," says John Esparza, president of the Texas Trucking Association.

Experts cite fatigue as another factor pushing up traffic fatalities tied to the oil and gas industry. Oilfield workers often work 12-hour shifts, then pile into a company van to drive half an hour or more from their work site to a hotel.

In March 2013, nine Sanjel Corp. employees were returning to their hotel after an overnight shift in West Texas. A pickup truck hit their van, killing three people.

"To put men in a position of being fatigued and to be driving long distance is not something that a company should do, and it shows a disregard for the safety of their employees," says Alexander Gurevich, an attorney representing the victims' families.

Sanjel says the van driver has testified that he was not fatigued at the time of the accident.

Texas is struggling to find ways to improve safety on its roads, without disrupting the oil industry on which so many jobs depend. The state's trucking industry backed a bill, signed by Gov. Rick Perry last year, making it easier for regulators to strip rogue carriers of the permits they need to operate.

But denying permits isn't always enough. State officials ordered R & F Quality Transportation to cease operations last December, four months before one of its drivers struck and killed Marenco. Gomez, is now raising their daughter alone.

"This has left a great emptiness for my daughter and me," Gomez says. "The only thing I am asking for is a thorough investigation of all of this and that there be justice."

Civil courts are often the only source of justice for victims' families. Few such accidents lead to criminal prosecutions.

Houston Chronicle reporter Lise Olsen contributed to this report.

Fracking California Videos Show Huge Impact of Drilling on Communities

Anastasia Pantsios | September 10, 2014 2:22 pm | Comments

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While politicians, pundits and “experts” are all over the media giving us their opinions, ordinary citizens are frequently unheard. When it comes to the impacts of fracking and drilling on average people, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has made them visible in a series of three videos depicting how fossil fuel energy extraction has radically changed the quality of life for the worse for three families in very different parts of California.

Nalleli Cobo, age 12, has become an activist for shutting down a drilling operation across the street from her apartment that’s giving her headaches, nose bleeds, and heart problems. Photo credit: National Resources Defense Council

In one, 12-year-old Nalleli Cobo, who lives in South Los Angeles, relates the health issues she and her family have suffered since an oil well site opened across the street from her apartment in 2010. She flyers, protests and speaks at public meetings. Dressed in her Catholic school uniform, she talks about how she is in a video appealing to the Pope to shut down the wells—and reveals that the drilling site is owned by the Roman Catholic archdiocese.



In another, ranchers Joe and Kathy Spencer in rural San Benito County near the San Francisco metro area worry that the company that owns the mineral rights under their land and much of their neighbors’ will consume the area’s already scarce water supply, draining their aquifers and making their property worthless.



In the third, Walt and Marilee Desatoff relate how they had to leave their family home in the Bakersfield area because of the noise and smell of oil drilling and fracking operations, as well as their fears about drinking water contamination. Their county includes about 80 percent of the state’s oil drilling and more than 95 percent of the fracking operations.



“These come in the wake of a failed attempt to pass a statewide fracking moratorium this spring, leaving communities across the state (like much of the U.S.) more dependent than ever on efforts to take matters into their own hands while the state and federal leaders continue to let them down,” said NRDC’s Kate Kiely. “Indeed, there are local battles underway in each of these three regions to do just that.”

These videos give a human face to those efforts.

Fracking Literally Makes People Sick, New Study Finds

Anastasia Pantsios | September 11, 2014

A new study provided more ammunition for what public health experts and environmental activists have been saying since fracking became widespread in the last half decade: chemicals used in the natural gas drilling process can be hazardous to health.

The Yale-based research team that produced the study looked at families in southwestern Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale region who use ground-fed water wells.

The study “Proximity to Natural Gas Wells and Reported  Health Status: Results of a Household Survey in Washington County, Pennsylvania,” published yesterday in Environmental Health Perspectives, found that people who live near fracking sites have more health problems than those who don’t.

The Yale-based research team that produced the study looked at families in southwestern Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale region who use ground-fed water wells. Surveying 492 individuals in 180 households, researchers found a significantly greater number of skin and respiratory problems among those who lived within one kilometer of a natural gas well than those who lived two kilometers away.

Washington County has 624 active gas wells with 95 percent of those fracked.

“Despite assurances by the drilling industry and numerous government officials that fracking chemicals do not pose a risk to nearby populations, scientists and environmentalists have repeatedly voiced concern over the high volume of chemicals used in the process and the potential for both groundwater and airborne contamination,” writes Lauren McCauley at Common Dreams.

The researchers explained the impetus for the studying saying, “Little is known about the environmental and public health impact of unconventional natural gas extraction activities including hydraulic fracturing that occur near residential areas.”

“While much of the hydraulic fracturing process takes place deep underground, there are a number of potential mechanisms for chemicals used in the fracturing process as well as naturally occurring minerals, petroleum compounds, and other substances of flow back water to enter drinking water supplies,” they warned. “If contaminants from hydraulic fracturing activities were able to enter drinking water supplies or surface water bodies, humans could be exposed to such contaminants through drinking, cooking, showering, and swimming.”

They also suggested that there could be airborn contamination through flaring, operation of diesel equipment, and leakage. And with stress from the noise and other activities around the wells mentioned by many respondents, they suggested this could be impacting health outcomes as well.

Their conclusion: “While these results should be viewed as hypothesis generating, and the population studied was limited to households with a ground-fed water supply, proximity of natural gas wells may be associated with the prevalence of health symptoms including dermal and respiratory conditions in residents living near natural gas extraction activities. Further study of these associations, including the role of specific air and water exposures, is warranted.”

They also warned of even greater potential danger lurking down the road. Since most of the wells are only five or six years old, they said, “one would not yet expect to see associations with diseases with long latency, such as cancer. Furthermore, if some of the impact of natural gas extraction on ground water happens over a number of years, this initial survey could have failed to detect health consequences of delayed contamination.”

Prescription for health: fight global warming

Credit: Peter Blanchard via Flickr

What if we could reduce worldwide deaths from disease, starvation and disaster while improving the health of people everywhere? According to the World Health Organization, we can.

"Previously unrecognized health benefits could be realized from fast action to reduce climate change and its consequences," says a news release about WHO's first global conference on health and climate in Geneva August 27 to 29, adding, "changes in energy and transport policies could save millions of lives annually from diseases caused by high levels of air pollution." Encouraging people to use public transit, cycling and walking instead of driving would cut traffic injuries and vehicle emissions and promote better health through increased physical activity.

Reducing the threat of global warming and finding ways to adapt to unavoidable change will also help people around the world "deal with the impact of heat, extreme weather, infectious disease and food insecurity."

Climate change affects human health in multiple ways. Increased extreme weather causes flooding and droughts, which influences food production, water and sanitation. Pathogens that plague humans, livestock and crops spread more widely. WHO notes that diseases such as cholera, malaria and dengue are especially sensitive to weather and climate changes.

According to WHO, "Climate change is already causing tens of thousands of deaths every year from shifting patterns of disease, from extreme weather events, such as heat-waves and floods, and from the degradation of water supplies, sanitation, and impacts on agriculture" — and it will get worse if we fail to address the problem. The poor, elderly and children are most vulnerable.

WHO's conference was held in advance of UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon's Climate Summit 2014 for world leaders, taking place in New York September 23, and geared partly toward ensuring world leaders come up with an agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol at the Paris UN climate change conference next year.

Two days before the Climate Summit, on September 21, more than half a million people are expected to gather in New York for the People's Climate March, with simultaneous events around the world, co-ordinated by a coalition of more than 1,000 organizations, including environmental, social justice, religious, health and labour groups.

WHO's conference and findings show the importance of getting health-care professionals on board with climate action, as they are with the People's Climate March. "The evidence is overwhelming: climate change endangers human health," says WHO director-general Margaret Chan. "Solutions exist and we need to act decisively to change this trajectory."

In a Huffington Post article, Ban Ki-moon stresses that global warming is an immediate and urgent issue. "Instead of asking if we can afford to act, we should be asking what is stopping us, who is stopping us, and why?" he writes. "Let us join forces to push back against skeptics and entrenched interests. Let us support the scientists, economists, entrepreneurs and investors who can persuade government leaders and policy-makers that now is the time for action."

Beyond forestalling the almost-certain catastrophic consequences of unchecked global warming, changing our habits, conserving energy and shifting from fossil fuels to clean energy will have many benefits for human health — and for the economy. Reducing the burden of pollution — and global warming-related health care costs is a big factor, but opportunities also exist in the clean technology sector. Climate Summit organizers point to the "growing recognition that affordable, scalable solutions are available now that will enable us all to leapfrog to cleaner, more resilient economies."

A leaked draft of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment's final synthesis report concludes that global warming is already having major impacts worldwide and that, unless we do something about it, we can expect "severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems." Our news media should be focusing on these issues rather than chasing an endless line of celebrity antics, corporate priorities and political posturing.

Scientists have warned about global warming consequences for decades, but efforts by fossil fuel interests to sow doubt and confusion, combined with intransigent governments and public apathy, have brought us to a tipping point.

The choice is clear: If we want to protect our health, our children's and grandchildren's health, and the natural systems that keep us alive and healthy, we must act now.

By David Suzuki with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington

TransCanada Buys Town’s Silence On Tar Sands Pipeline Proposal For $28K

CREDIT: Shutterstock

by Emily Atkin Posted on July 5, 2014 at 12:51 pm Updated: July 6, 2014 at 4:43 pm

A small town in Ontario, Canada will be receiving $28,200 from energy company TransCanada Corp. in exchange for not commenting on the company’s proposed Energy East tar sands pipeline project, according to an agreement attached to the town council’s meeting agenda on June 23.

Under the terms of deal, the town of Mattawa will “not publicly comment on TransCanada’s operations or business projects” for five years. In exchange for that silence, TransCanada will give Mattawa $28,200, which will ultimately go towards buying a rescue truck for the town.

“This is a gag order,” Andrea Harden-Donahue, a campaigner for energy and climate issues with the Council of Canadians, told Bloomberg News. “These sorts of dirty tricks impede public debate on Energy East, a pipeline that comes with significant risks for communities along the route.”

The terms of the agreement did not specifically mention the controversial Energy East pipeline, which would carry more than a million barrels of tar sands crude oil across Canada each day. However, the deal is being widely seen as a way for the company to avoid obstacles that may get in the way of the pipeline’s approval — especially considering the obstacles that have long plagued the approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline in the United States.

The Energy East pipeline, though, is bigger than Keystone XL — in fact, it’s the most expensive pipeline project TransCanada has ever proposed. If approved, Energy East would carry about 1.1 million barrels of tar sands crude across Canada each day. That’s more than Keystone XL, which would carry 830,000 barrels per day from Canada down to refineries in Texas.

Despite the company’s apparent attempt to avoid obstacles, the Energy East pipeline proposal has already gotten some push-back in Canada. A February report from the Pembina Institute, for example, found Energy East would have an even greater impact on the climate than Keystone XL, with the potential to generate 30 to 32 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year. That’s the equivalent of adding more than seven million cars to the roads, and more than the 22 million metric tons that the think tank predicts Keystone XL will produce.

Still, representatives from TransCanada insist that the agreement with Mattawa was not intended to avoid or impede public discourse.

“The language in the agreement was designed to prevent municipalities from feeling obligated to make public comments on our behalf about projects that did not impact them and about which they had no experience or knowledge,” TransCanada spokesman Davis Sheremata told Bloomberg. “We are looking at amending our contract language to ensure communities know they and their staff retain the full right to participate in an open and free dialogue about our projects.”

Representatives from Mattawa’s town government have not yet publicly commented on the decision.
As of now, the process for approving the Energy East pipeline is still in its early stages, with TransCanada filing its project description for the pipeline with the National Energy Board in early March. About two-thirds of the Energy East pipeline infrastructure already exists, meaning a major part of the project will be converting that existing line — which currently carries natural gas — into a tar sands crude oil pipeline.

Tar sands oil is controversial because of its unique, thick, gooey makeup. Because of this quality, producers must use what is called “non-conventional” methods of getting the oil out of the ground. Those methods are more carbon-intensive, meaning they emit more greenhouse gases.

Tar sands production also causes a great deal of physical pollution. In Alberta, where the sands are mined, federal scientists have found that the area’s deposits are now surrounded by a nearly 7,500-square-mile ring of mercury.

Scientists Find 7,300-Mile Mercury Contamination ‘Bullseye’ Around Canadian Tar Sands

by Emily Atkin Posted on December 30, 2013 at 1:45 pm

Oilsands development in northern Alberta, Canada.

CREDIT: Shutterstock

Just one week after Al Jazeera discovered that regulatory responsibility for Alberta, Canada’s controversial tar sands would be handed over to a fossil-fuel funded corporation, federal scientists have found that the area’s viscous petroleum deposits are surrounded by a nearly 7,500-square-mile ring of mercury.

Canadian government scientists have found that levels of mercury — a potent neurotoxin which has been found to cause severe birth defects and brain damage — around the region’s vast tar sand operations are up to 16 times higher than regular levels for the region. The findings, presented by Environment Canada researcher Jane Kirk at an international toxicology conference, showed that the 7,500 miles contaminated are “currently impacted by airborne Hg (mercury) emissions originating from oilsands developments.”

The Canadian government touts Alberta’s oil sands as the third-largest proven crude oil reserve in the world, next to Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. The region’s heavy crude oil is mixed with clay, bitumen, and a good deal of sand — hence the name “oil sands.” This makes for a unique and energy-intensive extraction process that some scientists say produces three times the greenhouse gas emissions of conventionally produced oil. Environment Canada has said it expects production emissions from tar sands to hit 104 million tonnes of CO2 by 2020 under current expansion plans.

Giant oil companies across the United States are currently investing in Canada’s tar sands as part of their role in the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry tar sands oil from Alberta all the way to Texas. The pipeline would double imports of tar sands oil into the United States and transport it to refineries on the Gulf Coast and ports for international export. The oil sands industry itself is undergoing a major expansion, powered by $19 billion a year in investments, according to Bloomberg News.

Mercury pollution is just the latest contamination-related environmental woe to hit the tar sands. In May of this year, leaks of the oil started popping up in Alberta, and haven’t yet stopped. In September, the company responsible for the leaks was ordered to drain a lake so that contamination on the lake’s bottom could be cleaned up. By September 11, the leaks had spilled more than 403,900 gallons — or about 9,617 barrels — of oily bitumen into the surrounding boreal forest and muskeg, the acidic, marshy soil found in the forest.

Environment Canada’s research on the mercury pollution reportedly suggested that tar sands development has created a “bullseye” of contamination, with the highest levels of mercury found in the middle. The research also included indications that the toxin was building up in some of the area’s wildlife, with elevated levels being found in some birds’ eggs. Mercury pollution is particularly disconcerting because of its ability to bioaccumulate, meaning it tends to become more concentrated as it moves up the food chain.

The contamination’s reveal comes just one week after it was revealed that the Alberta government would hand over regulatory responsibility for the province’s tar sands industry to a corporation that’s funded entirely by Canada’s oil, coal and gas industry. The Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) said it would take over the duties of the now defunct Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB) — which was funded in part by taxpayers — and Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development.

The shift to the AER as the main environmental regulator in Alberta is part of the provincial government’s plan to streamline the approval process for oil companies. It’s drawn concern from environmentalists in Alberta, who are worried that the AER’s financial backing from the fossil fuel industry makes the group too close to the industry it’s supposed to regulate.