When the Environmental Protection Agency abruptly retreated on
its multimillion-dollar investigation into water contamination in a central
Wyoming natural gas field last month, it shocked environmentalists and energy industry
supporters alike.
In 2011, the agency
had issued a blockbuster draft report saying that the controversial practice of
fracking was to blame for the pollution of an aquifer deep below the town of
Pavillion, Wy. – the first time such a claim had been based on a
scientific analysis.
The study drew
heated criticism over its methodology and awaited a peer review that promised
to settle the dispute. Now the EPA will instead hand the
study over to the state of Wyoming, whose research will be funded by
EnCana, the very drilling company whose wells may have caused the
contamination.
Industry advocates say the EPA’s turnabout reflects an overdue recognition that it had
over-reached on fracking and that its science was critically flawed.
But environmentalists
see an agency that is systematically disengaging from any research that
could be perceived as questioning the safety of fracking or oil drilling, even
as President Obama lays out a plan
to combat climate change that rests heavily on the use of natural gas.
Over the past 15 months, they point out, the EPA has:
-
Closed an investigation into groundwater pollution
in Dimock, Pa., saying the level of contamination was below federal safety
triggers. -
Abandoned its claim that a driller in Parker
County, Texas, was responsible for methane gas bubbling up in residents’
faucets, even though a geologist hired by the agency confirmed this finding. -
Sharply revised downward a 2010 estimate showing
that leaking gas from wells and pipelines was contributing to climate change, crediting
better pollution controls by the drilling industry even as other reports
indicate the leaks may be larger than previously thought. -
Failed to enforce a statutory ban on using
diesel fuel in fracking.
“We’re seeing a pattern that is of great concern,” said Amy
Mall, a senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council in
Washington. “They need to make sure that scientific investigations are thorough
enough to ensure that the public is getting a full scientific explanation.”
The EPA says that the string of decisions is not related,
and the Pavillion matter will
be resolved more quickly by state officials. The agency has maintained
publicly that it remains committed to an ongoing national study of hydraulic
fracturing, which it says will draw
the definitive line on fracking’s risks to water.
In private conversations, however, high-ranking agency
officials acknowledge that fierce pressure from the drilling industry and its
powerful allies on Capitol Hill – as well as financial constraints and a
delicate policy balance sought by the White House — is squelching their
ability to scrutinize not only the effects of oil and gas drilling, but other
environmental protections as well.
Last year, the
agency’s budget was sliced 17 percent, to below 1998 levels. Sequestration
forced further cuts, making research initiatives like the one in Pavillion
harder to fund.
One reflection
of the intense political spotlight on the agency: In May, Senate Republicans
boycotted a vote on President Obama’s nominee to head the EPA, Gina McCarthy,
after asking her to answer more than 1,000 questions on regulatory and policy
concerns, including energy.
The Pavillion study touched a particular nerve for Sen.
James Inhofe, R-Okla., the former ranking member of the Senate Environment and
Public Works committee.
According to correspondence obtained under the Freedom of
Information Act, Inhofe demanded repeated briefings from EPA officials on
fracking initiatives and barraged the agency with questions on its expenditures
in Pavillion, down to how many dollars it paid a lab to check water samples for
a particular contaminant.
He also wrote a letter to the EPA’s top administrator
calling a draft report that concluded fracking likely helped pollute
Pavillion’s drinking water “unsubstantiated” and pillorying it as part of an
“Administration-wide effort to hinder and unnecessarily regulate hydraulic
fracturing on the federal level.” He called for the EPA’s inspector general to
open an investigation into the agency’s actions related to fracking.
When the EPA announced it would end its research in
Pavillion, Inhofe – whose office did not respond to questions from ProPublica
— was quick to applaud.
“EPA thought it had a rock solid case linking groundwater contamination to
hydraulic fracturing in Pavillion, WY, but we knew all along that the science
was not there,” Inhofe said in a press release issued the day of the
announcement.
Others, however, wonder whether a gun-shy EPA is capable of answering the pressing question of
whether the nation’s natural gas boom will also bring a wave of environmental
harm.
“The EPA has just
put a ‘kick me’ sign on it,” John Hanger, a Democratic candidate for governor
in Pennsylvania and the former secretary of the state’s Department of
Environmental Protection, wrote on his blog
in response to the EPA news about Pavillion. “Its critics from all quarters
will now oblige.”
**
Before fracking became the subject of a high-stakes national
debate, federal agencies appeared to be moving aggressively to study whether
the drilling technique was connected to mounting complaints of water pollution and
health problems near well sites nationwide.
As some states began to strengthen regulations for fracking,
the federal government prepared to issue rules for how wells would be fracked
on lands it directly controlled.
The EPA also launched prominent scientific studies in Texas,
Wyoming and Pennsylvania, stepping into each case after residents voiced
concerns that state environmental agencies had not properly examined problems.
The EPA probe
in Pavillion began in 2008 with the aim of determining whether the town’s water
was safe to drink. The area was first drilled in 1960 and had been the site of
extensive natural gas developmentsince
the 1990’s. Starting at about the same time, residents had complained of
physical ailments and said their drinking water was black and tasted of
chemicals.
The EPA conducted four rounds of sampling, first testing the water from more than
40 homes and later drilling two deep wells to test water from layers of earth
that chemicals from farming and old oil and gas waste pits were unlikely to
reach.
The sampling revealed oil, methane, arsenic, and metals including
copper and vanadium – as well as other compounds –in shallow water
wells. It also detected a trace of an obscure compound linked to materials used
in fracking, called 2-butoxyethanol phosphate (2-BEp).
The deep-well tests showed benzene, at 50
times the level that is considered safe for people, as well as phenols —
another dangerous human carcinogen — acetone, toluene, naphthalene and traces
of diesel fuel, which seemed to show that man-made pollutants had found their
way deep into the cracks of the earth. In all, EPA detected 13 different compounds
in the deep aquifer that it said were often used with hydraulic fracturing
processes, including 2-Butoxyethanol, a close relation to the 2-BEp found near
the surface.[1]
The agency issued
a draft report in 2011 stating that while some of the pollution in the
shallow water wells was likely the result of seepage from old waste pits
nearby, the array
of chemicals found in the deep test wells was “the result of direct mixing of
hydraulic fracturing fluids with ground water in the Pavillion gas field.”
The report triggered a
hailstorm of criticism not only from the drilling industry, but from state
oil and gas regulators, who disagreed with the EPA’s interpretation of its data.
They raised
serious questions about the EPA’s
methodology and the materials they used, postulating that
contaminants found in deep-well samples could have been put there by the agency
itself in the testing process.
In response, the EPA agreed to more testing and repeatedly extended the comment period on
its study, delaying the peer review process.
Agency officials insist their data was correct, but the EPA’s
decision to withdraw from Pavillion means the peer-review process won’t go
forward and the findings in the draft report will never become final.
“We stand
by what our data said,” an EPA spokesperson told ProPublica after the June 20 announcement,
“but I do think there is a difference between data and conclusions.”
Wyoming officials say they will launch another year-long
investigation to reach their own conclusions about Pavillion’s water.
Meanwhile, local residents remain suspended in a strange
limbo.
While controversy has swirled around the deep well test
results — and critics have hailed the agency’s retreat as an admission that it
could not defend its science — the shallow well contamination and waste pits
have been all but forgotten.
The Agency for
Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the federal government’s main agency for
evaluating health risk from pollution, has advised Pavillion
residents not to bathe, cook with, or drink the water flowing from their taps.
Some have reported worsening health conditions they suspect are related to the
pollution. They are being provided temporary drinking water from the state in large
cisterns.
**
The EPA opened its inquiry in Dimock, Pa., after residents
provided it with private water tests detecting contaminants and complained that
state regulators weren’t doing enough to investigate the cause.
When an
elderly woman’s water well exploded on New Year’s morning in 2009, Pennsylvania officials discovered
pervasive methane contamination in the well water of 18 homes and linked it to bad
casing and cementing in gas company wells. In 2010, they took a series of steps against the drilling company involved,
citing it for regulatory violations, barring it from new drilling until it
proved its wells would not leak and requiring it to temporarily supply water to
affected homes.
But residents
said state officials hadn’t investigated whether the drilling was responsible
for the chemicals in their water. The EPA stepped in to find out if residents could trust the
water to be safe after the drilling company stopped bringing replacement
supplies.
Starting in early 2012, federal officials tested water in
more than five dozen homes for pollutants, finding hazardous levels of barium,
arsenic and magnesium, all compounds that can occur naturally, and minute
amounts of other contaminants, including several known to cause cancer.
Still, the concentration
of pollutants was not high enough to exceed safe
drinking water standards in most of the homes, the EPA found (in five homes,
filtering systems were installed to address concerns). Moreover, none of
the contaminants – except methane — pointed clearly to drilling. The EPA ended its investigation that July.
Critics
pointed to the Dimock investigation as a classic example of the EPA being
overly aggressive on fracking and then being proven wrong.
Yet, as in
Pavillion, the agency concluded its inquiry without following through on the
essential question of whether Dimock residents face an ongoing risk from too
much methane, which is not considered unsafe to drink, but can produce fumes that
lead to explosions.
The EPA also
never addressed whether drilling – and perhaps the pressure of fracking
– had contributed to moving methane up through cracks in the earth into
their water wells.
As drilling has
resumed in Dimock, so have reports of ongoing methane leaks. On June 24, the National Academy of
Sciences published a report by Duke University researchers that underscored
a link between the methane contamination in water in Dimock and across the
Marcellus shale, and the gas wells being drilled deep below.
The gas industry
maintains that methane is naturally occurring and, according to a response issued by
the industry group Energy In Depth after the release of the Duke research, “there’s still no evidence of
hydraulic fracturing fluids migrating from depth to contaminate aquifers.”
**
In opening an inquiry
in Parker County, Texas, in late 2010, the EPA examined a question similar to
the one it faced in Dimock: Was a driller responsible for methane gas
bubbling up in residents’ water wells?
This time, though, tests conducted by a geologist hired by
the agency appeared to confirm that the methane in the wells had resulted from
drilling, rather than occurring naturally.
“The
methane that was coming out of that well … was about as close a match as you
are going to find,” said the consultant, Geoffrey Thyne, a geochemist
and expert in unconventional oil and gas who has been a member of both the
EPA’s Science Advisory Board for hydraulic fracturing, and a National Research
Council committee to examine coalbed methane development.
The
EPA issued an “imminent
and substantial endangerment order” forcing Range Resources, the company it
suspected of being responsible, to take immediate action to address the
contamination.
But once again, the EPA’s actions ignited an explosive
response from the oil and gas industry, and a sharp rebuke from Texas state
officials, who insisted that their own data and analysis proved Range had done
no harm.
According to the environmental news site Energy
Wire, Ed Rendell, the former Governor of Pennsylvania, whose law firm
lobbies on behalf of energy companies, also took up Range’s case with then-EPA
Administrator Lisa Jackson.
Internal EPA emails used in the EnergyWire report and also obtained
by ProPublica discuss Rendell’s meeting with then-EPA Administrator Lisa
Jackson, though Range has denied it employed Rendell to argue on its behalf. Neither
the EPA nor Rendell responded to a request for comment on the Parker County
case.
In March 2012, the EPA dropped its case against Range without
explanation. Its administrator in Texas at the time had been assailed for making
comments that seemed to show an anti-industry bias. He subsequently lost his
job. An Associated Press investigation found that the EPA abandoned its inquiry
after Range threatened not to cooperate with the EPA on its other
drilling-related research.
Agency critics see a lack of will, rather than a lack of
evidence, in the EPA’s approach in Parker County and elsewhere.
“It
would be one thing if these were isolated incidents,” said Alan Septoff,
communications director for Earthworks, an environmental group opposed to
fracking. “But every time
the EPA has come up with something damning, somehow, something magically has
occurred to have them walk it back.”
**
So where does
this leave the EPA’s remaining research into the effects of fracking?
The agency has
joined with the Department of Energy, U.S. Geological Survey and the Department
of Interior to study the environmental risks of developing unconventional fuels
such as shale gas, but those involved in the collaboration say that little has
happened.
That leaves the
EPA’s highly anticipated national
study on hydraulic fracturing.
When the EPA
announced it was ending its research in Pavillion, it pointed to this study as
a “major research
program.”
“The agency will look to the results of
this program as the basis for its scientific conclusions and recommendations on
hydraulic fracturing,” it
said in a statement issued in partnership with Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead.
That national study will concentrate on five case
studies in Pennsylvania,
Texas, North Dakota and Colorado.
It will not,
however, focus on Pavillion or Parker County or Dimock.
Nor will it
devote much attention to places like Sublette County, Wy., where state and
federal agencies have found both aquifer contamination and that drilling has
caused dangerous levels of emissions and ozone pollution.
It will be a
long time before the EPA’s national study can inform the debate over fracking.
While the agency has promised a draft by late 2014, it warned last month that
no one should expect to read the final version before
sometime in 2016, the last full year of President Obama’s term.
