During a five-year period in Colorado, the oil and gas industry reported 1,435 spills in excess of five barrels. The spilled products included crude oil, produced water, diesel fuel, glycol, lubricating oil, hydraulic fracturing fluids, drilling muds and natural gas leaks. Twenty-three of these spills contaminated water sources. Since 1990, the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division has detected and documented 743 incidents of groundwater contamination from oil and gas facilities across the state.
The nonprofit group Endocrine Disruption Exchange analyzed 171 products and 245 chemicals used in the gas drilling process in Colorado. They found 92 percent of the products had health effects covering a vast range of symptoms and disorders.
On June 7, 2006, employees at Halliburton Energy Services in Farmington, N.M., spilled 30 to 60 gallons from a 600 gallon tank of acid. This chemical was used for the hydraulic fracturing of gas wells. The spill sent a toxic cloud into the neighboring community resulting in a mass evacuation of 200 residents.
There are a number of cases in the U.S. where hydraulic fracturing is the prime suspect in incidences of impaired or polluted drinking water. These cases have been reported in Alabama, Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, West Virginia, Texas, Arkansas, Pennsylvania and other states. Residents have reported changes in water quality or quantity following fracturing operations of gas wells near their homes.
Laura Amos and her family lived in Garfield County, Colorado. In May 2001 while fracturing four wells on their neighbors’ property, the gas well operator “blew up” their water well. Fracturing opened an hydrogeological connection between their water well and the gas well. “Immediately our water turned gray, had a horrible smell and bubbled like 7-Up,” she writes.
Although the gas company repeatedly denied it, evidence later surfaced that a fracking fluid, 2-BE had been used for the gas drilling. 2-BE can cause a long list of health problems including tumors of the adrenal gland.
The above text is an excerpt from a Letter to the Editor of a Pennsylvania newspaper.
How CBM Fracking is Wrecking the Rockies
0ut on the western edge of Colorado, where the Rocky Mountains flatten into desert mesas and dusty canyons, there is a small town called Silt. Like the powdery soil beneath it, Silt seems a humble place, with a couple of gas stations, a couple of churches, and a town park offering shade from the persistent summer sun.
Laura Kunau moved here from Illinois about a dozen years ago to join her boyfriend, Larry Amos, whom she would marry a few years later. The couple ran a successful outfitting business in the nearby mountains, leading clients in search of bull elk or prime fly-fishing streams. In the winter they took to the road, promoting their business at hunting banquets and trade shows.
But on the borders of their idyllic life, the Rocky Mountain energy boom was gaining momentum. The nation was thirsting for natural gas, and the Rockies had plenty to offer: Beneath the forests and deserts and ranchlands, beneath the gorgeous open country, lay some of the nation's largest remaining reserves of fossil fuels. With a sympathetic administration in Washington, and state and local governments unwilling or unable to stand in the way, the natural-gas industry tore into the new millennium, perforating landscapes from Montana to New Mexico.
The Powder River Basin of Wyoming is now studded with nearly 25,000 natural-gas wells, a number that is expected to more than double in the next 20 years. The San Juan Basin of southwestern Colorado is home to another 25,000 wells, with 15,000 more projected in the next two decades. The true costs of the boom -- to land, to water, and to human health -- remain largely unassessed and sometimes willfully obscured. And Laura Amos wonders if she is one of its uncounted casualties.
The town of Silt, in Garfield County, may appear unremarkable, but it sits atop a geologic wonder. The Piceance (pronounced "pee-awnce") Basin, the wide bowl of desert cradling Silt and the surrounding small towns, contains as much as 100 trillion cubic feet of natural gas -- enough to supply the entire United States, at current consumption levels, for well over four years.
Most Piceance gas is locked inside "tight sands," rock so fine-grained as to be almost impermeable. Though industry insiders have known about the Piceance for decades, its tight-sands gas has been too difficult -- in other words, too expensive -- to pull out of the ground. But in the late 1990s, when the price of natural gas shot upward, the impossible became possible.
The extraction of Piceance gas demands an awkwardly named technique known as hydraulic fracturing (sometimes called "frac'ing" and pronounced "fracking"). Fracturing, developed by Halliburton in the 1950s, uses a high-pressure blast of fluids to open cracks in gas- or oil-bearing rock formations, allowing trapped fuels to flow out of the underground rock and to the surface.
Most companies keep their particular "recipes" for hydraulic fracturing fluids under wraps, but many fluids are known to contain toxic chemicals intended to increase the efficiency of the process. Some, for example, include the carcinogen benzene and the powerful neurotoxins toluene and xylene. Studies have shown that residues of these and other substances can remain underground after fracturing is completed.
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Voices from the Gas Fields
For residents of a western valley, methane gas development has meant uncertainly, doubt, and dragging fear
There are more than 3,200 gas wells in Garfield County, most drilled in the last five years; in the next eight years, gas companies pursuing coal bed methane and other forms of natural gas plan to drill 10,000 more. Drill rigs rising 75 feet into the sky dot the craggy edges of mesas and the wide valleys that ring once quiet towns with names like Rifle and Silt. Miles of new roads crisscross the land. Three-acre dirt pads that hold condensate tanks, sumps, and wells carve brown scars into the green sloping hillsides. Straight, three-hundred-foot-wide swaths cleared of juniper and aspen trees indicate where underground pipelines carry gas as far as California. Garfield County officials don’t even know how many miles of new roads and gas pipeline exist in the area, so quickly have they been laid.
After a well is drilled, an oil service company may inject—under great pressure—water, sand, and a mixture of chemicals that include carcinogens such as benzene, arsenic, and lead into the well. This “hydraulic fracturing,” or “frac’ing,” cracks the rock in which the gas is trapped in small pockets, and allows the gas to flow toward the well and to the surface. Up to 30 percent of fracturing fluids remain underground, according to studies conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency and by the oil and gas industry. How much “30 percent” is remains a mystery, as does the injection fluid’s exact recipe—all that information is proprietary to the gas companies. These residual toxic fluids may then seep into the surrounding soil, groundwater, and water wells. Industry spokespeople consistently say there’s no proof such pollution has ever occurred, an assertion based on the fact that no state oil and gas commission has ever found a definitive example of frac’ing impacting public health—but then, none of these state agencies nor the EPA has ever directly studied the connection. No evidence has been found, but no one has looked.
After gas companies hydraulically fracture a well, the methane is full of impurities, so well operators vent and burn the initial stream of gas before sending it through pipelines to market. This practice, called flaring, releases as many as 250 hazardous air pollutants, including carcinogens such as naphthalene and benzene, into the ambient air, according to a 1996 study by Environment Canada, a federal agency. In the last decade, neither the Canadian nor American government has further studied the implications of this practice.
We visited one of the many well pads in Garfield County. Beside several silver wellheads were four tanks marked with warning labels reading: Danger! Extremely Flammable. Long term repeated exposure may cause cancer, blood, and nervous system damage. Contains benzene. Overexposure may cause eye, skin, or respiratory irritation or damage, and may cause headaches, dizziness, or other adverse nervous system effects or damage, including death.
Nearby, a string of orange and yellow flags roped off a forty-foot-wide sump filled with a brown sludge—discharged water and fracturing fluid pulled from the ground. There was no alarming noise or odor, just the thin air of midsummer and a dry, nagging dust. Within ten minutes, though, my head ached as if someone were pinching my temples between the jaws of a vise. The skin on my arms began to burn. LaMarca felt nauseous. We are lucky; we could leave and we did so—quickly. The people on these pages are not so fortunate; this increasingly poisonous place is their home.
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