Under Pressure

“Come on, everybody's doing it”.

This week I used this adolescent strategy of coercion to try and convince my township trustees to pass a resolution asking the state for a moratorium on “fracking”. To be more clear, what I think we Ohioans should put a hold on is the establishment of any more deep-shale gas wells that drill horizontally within the shale layer and then use “slick water” and sand at high pressures to force open cracks within the rock, facilitating the flow of gas into the well. We should only allow the industry to proceed when they convincingly demonstrate a new safe version of extraction.

The “slick water” is indeed overwhelmingly water – 95.5% is the number I most often hear – that is made “slick” by the addition of petroleum-derived lubricants, easing the water's flow along the 6-inch diameter pipe that can extend two-plus drilled miles. These lubricants and other additives are not all harmless, and their tiny minority makeup of the fracking fluid belies the actual volumes of chemicals being used. Of one million gallons of fluid – a lesser amount than I've heard are actually used at each well bore – 5000 gallons would be chemical additives. According to a 2011 paper entitled Natural Gas Operations from a Public Health Perspective, published in the journal Human & Ecological Risk Assessment, the authors found that of 353 fracking chemicals with available information on human health impacts, 75% affected the sensory organs, the digestive organs, and/or the lungs; 40-50% could harm the nervous, heart, and immune systems; 37% could disrupt the hormone systems of the body; and 25% cause mutations leading to birth defects in the unborn and cancer.

Furthermore, exposure to many of these chemicals might not be expressed as disease for years or decades, perhaps after drilling operations have moved on or companies have traded hands. And, although many of the chemicals are normally subject to regulation as hazardous substances, the gas companies are largely exempt from this regulation. Some states, like Colorado, have required disclosure of all chemicals used in the fracking process. Some companies have “voluntarily” (under public pressure and the threat of new government regulation) publicly disclosed at least some of the chemicals they use. But the industry has long alleged a “secret recipe” aspect to their fracking cocktail, as if it were a soft drink or fried chicken batter. Ohio allows gas companies to keep secret any ingredient they deem “proprietary information”, which to me represents a PR loophole – the more dangerous a chemical, the more proprietary it might be considered.

Gas companies pour their secrets down the well and apply about 10,000 psi pressure, forcing open the shale, coaxing it to release its 450 million-year-old store of burnable goodies.

The problems with the process are being revealed slowly by independent science, which always seems to play catch up to the progress of industry. But as the scientists are designing their protocols and gathering their data, which might get published in a scientific journal at some future date, another group of people have been communicating the problems in real time, as they experience them. They have already filed their reports, the results of their participation in the vast fracking experiment. They've made their cases heard in local courts and state environmental agencies from the Rocky Mountains, across the southern plains and Deep South and up into the Mid-Atlantic. They've gone on the record with their own blog posts and uploaded videos. Valuable information, freely and readily available online, that could inform those of us on the developing frontier of deep shale gas extraction.

I'm talking about the mostly rural Americans who are already living with an endless unhappy parade of heavy trucks going to 5-acre drill pads that are all too often within a sports-field length of their homes. Their testimonies are paradoxes: tap water you can light your cigarette by; unbreathable country breezes blowing from the direction of compressor stations and containment ponds (No Swimming, No Fishing); healthy, hard-working bodies now suddenly afflicted with unexplained rashes and nose bleeds, a loss of taste and smell, cancers of glands and organs.

It is, I believe, the testimonies of these ordinary Americans that have convinced some local elected officials to question and in some cases deny permits in their jurisdictions in states where local officials still have that authority. This week I read of one such example. In Rockingham County, VA, Carrizo Oil and Gas wanted to tap the eastern edge of the Marcellus shale. Productive wells existed just a few miles away in West Virginia, so it seemed that all that stood between Carrizo and natural gas in Virginia would be a few thousand feet of rock and a permit issued by the five members of the county's Board of Supervisors, four of which were Republican. Carrizo management probably assumed the rock would be the challenging part.

But that's not how this story goes.

Having been presented with the “godsend” of gas investment, the supervisors solicited public comment. They met with industry and conservation group representatives, geologists and farmers, any concerned citizen motivated to meet. For a better sense of the process, the supervisors took a trip to Wetzel county, West Virginia to visit gas wells there. They heard stories of smelly air, 24 hour noise, and the challenges of domestic life ensuing the ruin of one's well water. At least one supervisor seems to have done some more digging, investigating accounts from gas extraction areas in other states. Republican supervisor Pablo Cuevas has been credited with leading the questioning that ultimately resulted in the denial to drill. As quoted by an online news site for the local community, hburgnews.com, Cuevas explained his thinking:

“... you have to ask yourself ‘How much are we hurting for revenue?’ before you approve a permit like this without considering the safety issues... you’re dealing with a company that is a group of investors. They hire other companies to do the drilling and do the trucking. You have five or six companies working under contract, so the energy company has very little to lose if something goes wrong. I would not approve a permit under the current circumstances.”

Supervisor Fred Eberly was a little more succinct: “You don’t trade clean water for dollars...How do you un-contaminate water once it’s been contaminated?”

One wonders how the controversy of fracking and the activities of gas extractors would be different if all communities were given the power to decide on matters of drilling in their area. Would local leaders extend the minimum distance a well can be from a house, a water well, a local stream if a mishap would mean a threat to the quality of life of a neighbor or the whole community? Would local decision-making be more nuanced as to where drilling is most appropriate by local values? Would the gas industry, operating with a currency of drill permits in a “free market” of local access, more quickly change the way it does business and provide information? For communities in many states, the questions are purely theoretical, with permit decisions retained by a state agency, often many miles from where a well will likely be established.

This past week, Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett, who, according to a 2011 report by the political watchdog group Common Cause, has received over $1.5 million in political contributions from the oil and gas industry, signed a law that transferred all drill permitting to the state level there, erasing the decision of residents of Pittsburgh, for example, who banned fracking within their city limits with a unanimous vote of the city counsel in November of 2010.

We Ohioans lost local control of drilling with legislation passes in 2005. And so, Chester Township and the villages of Burton and Garrettsville, among other rural Ohio communities, have asked Governor Kasich for a moratorium on fracking. And so, there I stood in front of the five members of my township government, clumsily handing them copies of resolutions passed by other communities, asking that they consider doing the same.

One trustee seemed impatient for me to finish summarizing the indictment I'd prepared. And as I cut myself short and took my seat, I was replaced by an industry representative. Surprise! After assuring the ten of us in the room that he was “from just down the road” in Summit County, he proceeded to present a Power Point on the incredible benefits and impeccable safety of hydraulic fracturing, featuring every bit of PR I've ever seen on every industry website. As it happened, one of my trustees, elected to represent and be the voice of my township's residents, thought it to be in the “best interest of democracy” to provide a “balance of information” with regard to the concerns of this one township resident.

The gas industry is determined to have unfettered access to as much surface overlying deep shale reserves as possible. Billions of dollars are at stake and political contributions in the hundreds of millions of dollars, which have flowed to federal and state politicians like gas in a pipeline, have thus far proven a good investment. But the stories of rural Americans are finally coalescing around a common story that scientific researchers are bolstering with data.

I have no doubt there will be a regulatory backlash on fracking. What I wonder is if it will do enough and come soon enough to benefit the residents of northeast Ohio.