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.

The EPA began preparing its report on hydraulic fracturing in 2000, after an Alabama court forced the agency to investigate fracturing-related water contamination there under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Political pressures were also mounting for the agency to clarify its position on fracturing. The 2001 Energy Policy, drafted in part by the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, a former Halliburton CEO, noted that “the gas flow rate may be increased as much as 20-fold by hydraulic fracturing.” While the EPA was still working on its report, legislation was being crafted to exempt hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Before that happened, however, the EPA sought an agreement with the three largest hydraulic fracturing companies, including Halliburton, to stop using diesel fuel in fracturing fluids. Diesel fuel contains benzene, and such a move would help justify the report’s conclusion that no further studies were needed.

 

Signs put in all directions to drilling sites in Wyoming. (Credit: Abrahm Lustgarten)

"Our draft is pending release," a senior EPA official wrote to Halliburton’s counsel in an August 2003 e-mail. "It would certainly strengthen our preliminary position not to continue studying the issue…if the service companies were able to remove diesel all together, or even move in that direction."

In a subsequent meeting, an EPA official’s handwritten notes show that a Halliburton attorney asked federal officials, "Are we willing to entertain regulatory relief in other areas; eg: fewer inspections?"

"Willing…," was the reply from Tracy Mehan, then the EPA’s assistant administrator for water.

A Halliburton spokesperson declined to comment on this exchange.

The diesel agreement (PDF) was signed. But according to the EPA, it isn't legally enforceable and the agency hasn't checked to see if diesel is still being used. Furthermore, the agreement applies only to fluids used in a specific kind of gas drilling, not all drilling across the United States.

Mehan did not return calls for comment about his negotiations. Roy Simon, associate chief of the Drinking Water Protection Division's Prevention Branch at EPA headquarters in Washington says the "EPA still stands by the findings outlined in the (2004) report."

But one of the report’s three main authors, Jeffrey Jollie, an EPA hydrogeologist, now cautions that the research has been misconstrued by industry. The study focused solely on the effect hydraulic fracturing has on drinking water in coal bed methane deposits, typically shallow formations where gas is embedded in coal. It didn’t consider the impact of above-ground drilling or of drilling in geologic formations deep underground, where many of the large new gas reserves are being developed today.

"It was never intended to be a broad, sweeping study," Jollie says. "I don’t think we ever characterized it that way."

Nevertheless, a few months after the report’s release, the sweeping 2005 Energy Policy Act was passed. Almost no attention was paid to the three paragraphs that stripped the federal government of most of its authority to monitor and regulate hydraulic fracturing’s impact on the environment. By default, that responsibility would now fall to the states.

“That pretty much closed the door,” said Greg Oberley, an EPA groundwater specialist working in the western drilling states. “So we absolutely do not look at fracking...under the Safe Drinking Water Act. It’s not done.”

Waste Hazards

On April 30, 2001 a small drilling company now owned by the Canadian gas company Encana fractured a well at the top of Dry Hollow, a burgeoning field in western Colorado that has seen one of the fastest rates of energy development in the nation.

The well sat at the end of a dirt drive among pinion pines and juniper at the crest of a small mesa overlooking the Colorado River. It was also less than 1,000 feet from the log farmhouse where Larry and Laura Amos lived.

As usual that day, water trucks lined up like toy soldiers on the three acre dirt pad cleared for drilling just across the Amos’ property line. They pumped 82,000 gallons of fluids at 3,600 pounds of pressure thousands of feet into the drill hole.

Suddenly the Amos' drinking water well exploded like a Yellowstone geyser, firing its lid into the air and spewing mud and gray fizzing water high into the sky. State inspectors tested the Amos well for methane and found lots of it. They did not find benzene or gasoline derivatives and they did not test fracking fluids, state records show, because they didn't know what to test for.

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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