To many outside the energy industry, the environmental and health risks posed by these proprietary blends are unknown. The withdrawal last week of an amendment to the Safe Drinking Water Act by Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) only prolongs the uncertainties. The amendment would have required the oil and gas companies to disclose materials used in hydraulic fracturing fluids. The withdrawal has angered environmentalists and reinforced their belief that the oil and gas industry still gets its way with Congress and has something to hide.
“I don’t even see what there is to negotiate,” says Natural Resources Defense Council senior policy analyst, Amy Mall. “The companies should just be supporting this amendment.”
DeGette withdrew the amendment under pressure from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), according to an article in The New York Times. “This is an issue that merits further consideration,” says Waxman. “Now is not the right time for this change.”
The pressure to stop efforts to force the disclosure of hydraulic fracturing fluids comes from one of the most powerful oil companies in the world, Exxon Mobil Corp. Exxon CEO, Rex Tillerson, told Congress that he did not know if disclosing the materials in fracturing fluids would make the process uneconomical – thereby ruining their plans to buy the U.S.’s largest natural gas producer, XTO Energy Inc., for $41 billion.
The gas industry has Congress in a headlock promising a utopia of “low-carbon,” domestic fuel. Government officials fear imposing regulations on hydraulic fracturing – a technique that industry says is essential for economical extraction from tight shale formations – could ruin investments in natural gas.
Because oil companies are running out of convenient and easy oil drilling locations, natural gas seems like a good alternative. But BP’s Gulf disaster proves loosely regulated, domestically produced fuel can be more costly than the industry claims. “The fact that oil companies now have to go a mile underwater and then drill another three miles below that, in order to hit oil, tells us something about the direction of the oil industry,” says President Obama in an article on CBS.News.com. “Extraction is more expensive, and it is going to be inherently more risky.”
Oil companies, faced with this reality, have been joining the shale play. Most recently, petroleum giant Royal Dutch Shell announced it plans to buy East Resources Inc., which has 650,000 acres in the Marcellus Shale – a formation geological experts say holds the world’s greatest store of natural gas.
But residents overlaying the Marcellus know natural gas is not a cost-free alternative to oil. Discharges from drilling in the Marcellus have polluted Pennsylvanian waterways. And water tests in high drilling areas of the state have revealed unsafe levels of methane, iron and aluminum.
Last year, DCBureau revealed a discrepancy in the list of fracturing fluid chemicals given to New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) by the suppliers and those coming from gas wells in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Anthony Hay, director of Cornell University’s Institute for Comparative and Environmental Toxicology, and Amy Risen, a graduate student in the program, discovered 4-nitroquinoline N-oxide, a chemical mostly known for its use in inducing tumors in laboratory animals, and benzene, a known carcinogen, in well discharges. These chemicals were not listed in DEC’s environmental impact statement of horizontal drilling and high-volume hydraulic fracturing.
“She [DeGette] saw an opportunity of trying to get the disclosure piece done as an amendment on the Safe Drinking Water Act but did end up withdrawing it because she’s close to a compromise with the industry and other members,” says Juliet Johnson, DeGette’s press secretary.
Maybe when a gas drilling accident occurs, like the oil rig explosion in the Gulf, and ruins New York City’s unfiltered-water supply, fed primarily through surface water from 19 reservoirs and three controlled lakes, Waxman will find it “the right time” for chemical suppliers and gas drilling companies to reveal the composition of hydraulic fracturing fluids. But then it would be too late for inspectors to test for the proper contaminates in 9 million people’s water supply.
