Industry and EPA Collaborated to Hide the Truth about How Natural Gas Drilling Is Threatening Drinking Water

By Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica. Posted November 20, 2008.

Thanks in large part to hydraulic fracturing, natural gas drilling has vastly expanded across the United States. In 2007, there were 449,000 gas wells in 32 states, thirty percent more than in 2000. By 2012 the nation could be drilling 32,000 new wells a year, including some in the watershed that provides drinking water to New York City and Philadelphia, some five percent of the nation's population.

The rush to drill comes in part because newly identified gas reserves offer the nation an opportunity to wean itself from oil.

Natural gas, as T. Boone Pickens said recently, is "cleaner, cheaper… abundant, and ours." Burning gas, used primarily to heat homes and make electricity, emits 23 percent less carbon dioxide than burning oil. Gas is the country's second-largest domestic energy resource, after coal.

The debate over water arises at a critical time. In his last days in office President George W. Bush has pushed through lease sales and permits for new drilling on thousands of acres of federal land. President-elect Barak Obama has identified the leasing rush as one of his first pressing matters and is already examining whether to try to reverse Bush's expansion of drilling in Utah.

State regulators and environmentalists have also begun pressing the gas industry to disclose the chemicals they use and urging Congress to revisit the environmental exemptions hydraulic fracturing currently enjoys.

But in the meantime, the drilling continues.

In September, the Bureau of Land Management approved plans for 4,400 new wells in Sublette County, despite the unresolved water issues. Tests there showed contamination in 88 of the 220 wells examined, and the plume stretched over 28 miles. When researchers returned to take more samples, they couldn’t even open the water wells; monitors showed they contained so much flammable gas that they were likely to explode.

'Big Wyoming'

News that water in Sublette County was contaminated was especially shocking because the area is so rural that until a few years ago cattle were still run down Main Street in Pinedale, the nearest town to the gas field. The county is roughly the size of the state of Connecticut but has fewer people than many New York City blocks. With so little industry, there was little besides drilling that people could blame for the contamination.

"When you just look at the data…the aerial extent of the benzene contamination, you just say...This is huge,” says Oberley, who is charged with water study in the area. “You’ve got benzene in a usable aquifer and nobody is able to verbalize well, using factual information, how the benzene got there.”

 

Sublette County, Wyo. (Credit: Abrahm Lustgarten/ProPublica)

Other signs of contamination were also worrying residents. Independent tests in several private drinking wells adjacent to the anticline drilling showed fluoride -- which is listed in Halliburton’s hydraulic fracturing patent applications and can cause bone damage at high levels -- at almost three times the EPA’s maximum limit.

"We need the gas now more than ever," says Fred Sanchez, whose water well is among those with high levels of fluoride. But gazing off his deck at the prized trout waters of the New Fork River, he wonders whether drilling has gone too far. "You just can't helter skelter go drilling just because you have the right to do it. It's not morally right to do it. There should be some checks and balances."

Further east, in the town of Clark, the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality found benzene in a residential well after an underground well casing cracked. In Pavilion, another small town, a series of drinking water wells began running with dark, smelly water, a problem a state official speculated might be linked to drilling nearby.

"There is no direct evidence that the gas drilling has impacted it," says Mark Thiesse, a groundwater supervisor for the Wyoming DEQ. "But it sure makes you wonder. It just seems pretty circumstantial that it’s happening."

On federal land, which is where most of the Sublette County wells are located, the BLM governs leasing and permitting for gas development, with secondary oversight from the state and only advisory input from the EPA. When the contaminated water results were first reported, both the BLM and the state downplayed their significance.

See more stories tagged with: natural gas, clean water, drilling

Abrahm Lustgarten is a former staff writer and contributor for Fortune, and has written for Salon, Esquire, the Washington Post and the New York Times since receiving his master's in journalism from Columbia University in 2003.

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