Hydraulic
Fracturing Threatens Drinking Water
Sue
Smith-Heavenrich
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| Dusty Horwitt talks with residents about potential impacts of hydrofracking on drinking water. Photo: Sue Heavenrichouldders |
Dusty
Horwitt, senior counsel for Washington DC-based Environmental Working Group (EWG), recently visited
upstate NY to speak about the risk of gas drilling to drinking water. His
focus: that drilling companies continue to inject petroleum distillates into
their mix of fracking chemicals.
Diesel, used
for years as a friction reducer in drilling, is regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act
(SDWA) because of its high benzene level. Companies can still use diesel,
but they need to get a permit from the US EPA. For the most part diesel gets
ignored while companies use other petroleum distillates—the ones that don’t
need any permits.
That practice,
warns Horwitt, is threatening drinking water supplies
from Pennsylvania and New York to Wyoming. Just four months ago he released Drilling Around the Law, an EWG investigation into
petroleum-based fracking chemicals used by companies
drilling for natural gas.
Because of
exemptions allowed for fracking, drilling companies
are allowed to inject kerosene, mineral spirits and a number of other petroleum
distillates into wells. Horwitt notes that these
distillates often contain high levels of benzene. Benzene is a carcinogen
so toxic that the EPA says more than five parts per billion (ppb)
in drinking water is unsafe. That’s the equivalent of five drops of benzene in
500 barrels of water.
“Ironically,
these other petroleum distillates can contain 93 times more benzene than
diesel,” Horwitt said. Petroleum naphtha contains
93,000 ppm benzene – 18.6 million times higher than
the EPA standards.
How much benzene might potentially contaminate NY drinking water?
Drilling
horizontal wells in Marcellus and other shales will
take anywhere from one to eight million gallons of water and fracking chemicals per well.
The companies
insist that they only add small amounts of petroleum distillates into the frack fluid. “Point zero eight (.08) percent,” Horwitt said. “It sounds like a miniscule amount, but do
the math.” He calculates that anywhere from 800–6400 gallons of petroleum distillates
could be injected for a single frack job.
“That’s enough
to contaminate more than 100 billion gallons of water,” Horwitt
exclaimed. “More than ten times the amount the state of New York uses in a
single day!”
Horwitt would like to see the exemptions
for oil and gas drilling eliminated; he thinks they should obtain a permit for
any chemical they inject. “Why require a permit for only one type of petroleum
chemical?”
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WaterHaudenosaunee Statement
on Hydrofracking
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HydrofrackingOn November 5, 2009 the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force, a scienti. c agency of the Haudenosaunee Con-federacy, issued a strongly worded statement calling for a ban on hydrofracking.Visit bit.ly/diJb1q to read the statement. “Representatives of the Onondaga Nation and the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force have visited communities impacted by hydrofracking in Pennsylvania. We have seen . rst-hand the impacts of hydrofracking…even when things are done ‘right’ the impacts are dev-astating.” |
Furthermore,
when he asked Department of Environmental Conservation officials whether they
checked to see what chemicals companies are injecting, the response was no.
“They [drillers] could easily be injecting diesel,” Horwitt
said. And indeed, Halliburton, Schlumberger and other companies have admitted
doing just that in some states.
Sue Heavenrich is a freelance journalist writing about Marcellus gas issues, the environment and science for local media. She is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists.
