The Trillion-Gallon Loophole: Lax Rules for Drillers that Inject Pollutants Into the Earth

Friday, September 21, 2012 by ProPublica

by Abrahm Lustgarten, 

 

On a cold, overcast afternoon in January 2003, two tanker trucks backed up to an injection well site in a pasture outside Rosharon, Texas. There, under a steel shed, they began to unload thousands of gallons of wastewater for burial deep beneath the earth.

 The waste – the byproduct of oil and gas drilling – was described in regulatory documents as a benign mixture of salt and water. But as the liquid rushed from the trucks, it released a billowing vapor of far more volatile materials, including benzene and other flammable hydrocarbons.

The truck engines, left to idle by their drivers, sucked the fumes from the air, revving into a high-pitched whine. Before anyone could react, one of the trucks backfired, releasing a spark that ignited the invisible cloud.

Fifteen-foot-high flames enveloped the steel shed and tankers. Two workers died, and four were rushed to the hospital with burns over much of their bodies. A third worker died six weeks later.

What happened that day at Rosharon was the result of a significant breakdown in the nation's efforts to regulate the handling of toxic waste, a ProPublica investigation shows.

The site at Rosharon is what is known as a "Class 2" well. Such wells are subject to looser rules and less scrutiny than others designed for hazardous materials. Had the chemicals the workers were disposing of that day come from a factory or a refinery, it would have been illegal to pour them into that well. But regulatory concessions won by the energy industry over the last three decades made it legal to dump similar substances into the Rosharon site – as long as they came from drilling.

Injection wells have proliferated over the last 60 years, in large part because they are the cheapest, most expedient way to manage hundreds of billions of gallons of industrial waste generated in the U.S. each year. Yet the dangers of injection are well known: In accidents dating back to the 1960s, toxic materials have bubbled up to the surface or escaped, contaminating aquifers that store supplies of drinking water.

There are now more than 150,000 Class 2 wells in 33 states, into which oil and gas drillers have injected at least 10 trillion gallons of fluid.  The numbers have increased rapidly in recent years, driven by expanding use of hydraulic fracturing to reach previously inaccessible resources.

ProPublica analyzed records summarizing more than 220,000 well inspections conducted between late 2007 and late 2010, including more than 194,000 for Class 2 wells. We also reviewed federal audits of state oversight programs, interviewed dozens of experts and explored court documents, case files, and the evolution of underground disposal law over the past 30 years.

Our examination shows that, amid growing use of Class 2 wells, fundamental safeguards are sometimes being ignored or circumvented. State and federal regulators often do little to confirm what pollutants go into wells for drilling waste. They rely heavily on an honor system in which companies are supposed to report what they are pumping into the earth, whether their wells are structurally sound, and whether they have violated any rules.

More than 1,000 times in the three-year period examined, operators pumped waste into Class 2 wells at pressure levels they knew could fracture rock and lead to leaks. In at least 140 cases, companies injected waste illegally or without a permit.

In several instances, records show, operators did not meet requirements to identify old or abandoned wells near injection sites until waste flooded back up to the surface, or found ways to cheat on tests meant to make sure wells aren't leaking.

"The program is basically a paper tiger," said Mario Salazar, a former senior technical advisor to the Environmental Protection Agency who worked with its injection regulation program for 25 years. While wells that handle hazardous waste from other industries have been held to increasingly tough standards, Salazar said, Class 2 wells remain a gaping hole in the system. "There are not enough people to look at how these wells are drilled … to witness whether what they tell you they will do is in fact what they are doing."

Thanks in part to legislative measures and rulemaking dating back to the late 1970s, material from oil and gas drilling is defined as nonhazardous, no matter what it contains. Oversight of Class 2 wells is often relegated to overstretched, understaffed state oil and gas agencies, which have to balance encouraging energy production with protecting the environment. In some areas, funding for enforcement has dropped even as drilling activity has surged, leading to more wells and more waste overseen by fewer inspectors.

"Class 2 wells constitute a serious problem," said John Apps, a leading geoscientist and injection expert who works with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "The risk to water? I think it's high, partially because of the enormous number of these wells and the fact that they are not regulated with the same degree of conscientiousness."

In response to questions about the adequacy of oversight, the EPA, which holds primary regulatory authority over injection wells, reissued a statement it supplied to ProPublica for an earlier article in June.

"Underground injection has been and continues to be a viable technique for subsurface storage and disposal of fluids when properly done," a spokesperson wrote. "EPA recognizes that more can be done to enhance drinking water safeguards and, along with states and tribes, will work to improve the efficiency of the underground injection control program."

Some at the EPA and at the Department of Justice, which prosecutes environmental crimes, say the system's blind spots suggest that many more violations likely go undiscovered – at least until they mushroom into a crisis.

That's what happened at Rosharon.

The accident prompted the EPA to examine what else had been dumped at the site, ultimately exposing a scheme by a company that was not involved in the explosion, Texas Oil and Gathering, to pass off deadly chemicals from a petroleum refining plant as saltwater from drilling.  

The switch saved the company substantial fees by allowing it to dispose of the material in a Class 2 well, instead of a more stringently controlled well for hazardous waste, federal investigators said.

Texas Oil and Gathering's owner and operations manager were convicted of conspiring to dump illegal waste and violating the Safe Drinking Water Act. Both declined to comment for this article.

Texas officials acknowledged that they had not looked beyond the paperwork submitted by the operators using the well. The delivery trucks weren't inspected; the wastewater was not sampled.

"Staff had no reason to believe at the time that such testing was necessary at this facility,'' Ramona Nye, a spokeswoman for the Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates the oil and gas industry activity in the state, wrote in an email. "The likelihood of unpermitted material being disposed of is low.''

William Miller, the EPA's chief investigator on the case, points out that the only reason anyone was held accountable for injection-related violations was because the site blew up.

"If you can get the stuff down the well how is anyone ever going to know what it was?" said Miller, who retired from the EPA in 2011. "There is no way to recover it. It's an easy way to commit a crime and not have any evidence left of it afterwards."


States and Industry Resist Environmental Protections

 One reason that Texas Oil and Gathering was able to dump toxic waste for years without getting caught is that environmental regulations governing how the oil and gas industry disposes of material underground were weakened almost as soon as they were written.

A series of injection accidents beginning in the 1960s – involving pesticide waste in Colorado, dioxins in Beaumont, Texas, and drilling waste that spread for miles through a drinking water aquifer in Arkansas – prompted lawmakers to impose tougher rules on injection wells.

Wells were divided into classes, depending on the source of the waste they handled. Class 1 wells for chemical, pharmaceutical and other industrial wastes, along with Class 2 wells for the oil and gas industry, were subjected to tough controls under the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. From the start, the EPA says, oil and gas waste was treated as less toxic than waste from other industries, but all such material was seen as dangerous to drinking water.

Companies drilling the wells were required to do geological modeling to ensure that surrounding rock layers would not allow waste to escape through fissures or fault lines. They also were required to check for the presence of other wells that could be a conduit for contamination.  The EPA set baseline standards and mandated periodic inspections for defects. In many cases, states oversaw their implementation.

The ink had barely dried on the new regulations when the oil and gas industry – aided by sympathetic state regulators who thought their existing oversight was sufficient – began arguing that its waste should be treated differently.

Industry officials lobbied for state oil and gas agencies, some of which already had rules in place, to oversee Class 2 wells, not federal or local environmental officials. Some argued state energy regulators had greater expertise in well construction and regional geology.

In 1980, California Rep. Henry Waxman sponsored a measure that allowed the EPA to delegate authority to oversee Class 2 injection to state oil and gas regulators, even if the rules they applied varied from the Safe Drinking Water Act and federal guidelines.

A few years later, Dick Stamets, New Mexico's chief oil and gas regulator at the time, told a crowd of state regulators and industry representatives that the Waxman amendment was a biblical deliverance from oppressive federal oversight for the drilling industry.

"The Pharaoh EPA did propose regulations and there was chaos upon the earth," Stamets said. "The people groaned and labored, and great was their suffering until Moses Section 1425 (the Waxman amendment) did lead them to the Promised Land."

In the late 1980s, the EPA moved to impose more stringent measures on injection wells after Congress banned injection of "hazardous" waste. The new rules barred underground dumping unless companies could prove the chemicals weren't a health threat. To earn permission to inject the waste,  companies would have to conduct exhaustive scientific reviews to dispose of hazardous materials, proving their waste wouldn't migrate underground for at least 10,000 years.

The energy industry moved preemptively to shield itself from these changes, too. The Safe Drinking Water Act prohibited the EPA from interfering with the economics of the oil and gas industry unless there was an imminent threat to health or the environment. The industry argued that its waste was mostly harmless brine and that testing and inspecting hundreds of thousands of wells for waste that would qualify as "hazardous" would delay drillers or cost them a fortune.
  
"It would have been crippling to U.S. oil and gas production," said Lee Fuller, vice president of government relations for the Independent Petroleum Association of America. Fuller was a former staff member for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, whose ranking member at the time, the late Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, led the fight against the hazardous waste rule. "So yes, the industry was very aggressively seeking some mechanism to address those consequences."

Bentsen had won the industry a temporary reprieve in 1980 by persuading Congress to redefine any substance that resulted from drilling – or "producing" – an oil or gas well as "non-hazardous," regardless of its chemical makeup, pending EPA study.  In 1988, the EPA made it permanent, handing oil and gas companies a landmark exemption.  From then on, benzene from the fertilizer industry was considered hazardous, threatening health and underground water supplies; benzene derived from wells for the oil and gas industry was not.

The effect was that the largest waste stream headed for underground injection, that from the oil and gas industry, was exempted from one of the most effective parts of environmental rules governing hazardous waste disposal.

"A blanket exemption without any sense of what the actual chemistry of these wastewaters is, is very concerning," said Briana Mordick, a geologist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Other protections also began to unravel, widening the gap between Class 1 and Class 2 well regulations. Both regulators and the industry regularly refer to drilling waste as "salt water" even though, according to a 2002 EPA internal training document obtained by ProPublica, "on any given day, the injectate of a Class II-D well has the potential to contain hazardous concentrations of solvents, acids, and other… hazardous wastes."

Once the wastes were defined as nonhazardous, there was little justification for holding Class 2 wells to the same rules as other waste being injected deep underground.

Today, for example, Class 1 wells for hazardous waste are tested for pressure continuously and are supposed to be inspected for cracks and leaks every 12 months. Oil and gas wells – though the goal is to inspect their sites annually – have to be tested only once every five years.
Injection wells are known to cause earthquakes, so Class 1 wells usually have rigorous seismic and geologic siting requirements. Often, Class 2 wells do not. An EPA staff member might spend an entire year reviewing an application for a new hazardous waste well. Class 2 wells are often permitted in bulk, meaning hundreds can be green-lighted in a matter of days.

Where Class 1 hazardous waste is injected, companies have to inspect a two-mile radius for old wells, making sure contaminants will have no avenue to shoot back up into drinking water aquifers or to the surface. The minimum standard for oil and gas companies is to inspect within 400 yards, even though it is widely believed, according to internal EPA memorandums obtained by ProPublica, that such a rule is arbitrarily defined, runs against "much existing evidence" and "may not afford adequate protection" of drinking water.

EPA officials acknowledge that their Class 1 regulations represent the best practices to keep water safe and that the risk of a Class 2 well leaking is no different than the risk of a Class 1 well leaking. The contrast in regulations reflects "varying legal authorities, not varying levels of confidence," an agency spokeswoman wrote in an email, referring to the mandate not to let environmental rules interfere with the nation's drilling progress.

State injection regulators counter that much drilling-related waste is put in the same geologic formations that produce oil and gas, in which contaminants like benzene naturally occur. The water close to these wells is often already undrinkable, they say, so lesser protections make sense.

According to the EPA's most recent inventory, the number of Class 2 wells is near an all-time high.

Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and California use tens of thousands of Class 2 wells to push out oil and gas or dispose of fracking fluids and "produced" water, as the waste derived from drilling is called. In North Dakota, injection permits have increased tenfold, with more wells being permitted in one month – September 2011 –than is typical in an entire year. New Mexico issued twice as many permits last year as it did in 2007. Ohio injected twice as much waste in 2011 as it did in 2006 and is evaluating applications for dozens of new injection sites. largely for waste exported by Pennsylvania and New York, where such wells are deemed unsafe.

As much as 70 percent of the waste destined for Class 2 facilities would be considered toxic if it were not for the loopholes in the law, according to Wilma Subra, a chemist and activist who sits on the board of STRONGER, a partnership of oil and gas industry representatives and state regulators aimed at bolstering state standards.

Recently, Stark Concerned Citizens, an anti-drilling group, asked Ohio regulators why radioactive materials such as radium weren't identified or disclosed when injected into Class 2 wells.

"The law allows it," Tom Tomastik, a geologist with Ohio's Department of Natural Resources and a national expert on injection well regulation, replied in a Sept. 17 email. "It does not matter what is in it. As long as it comes from the oil and gas field it can be injected."


Well Operators Game Safety Tests

 When Carl Weller showed up, shovel in hand, at a Kentucky farm field dotted with injection wells in June 2007, he was acting on a tip.  Weller, a contracted EPA injection inspector, was an expert in testing for what regulators call "mechanical integrity," using air pressure to check if wells have leaks or cracks.

Such tests are among the only ways to know whether cement and steel well structures are intact, preventing brine and other chemicals from reaching drinking water.

Using his shovel, Weller dug around the top of a well, unearthing the steel tubing near the surface. A few inches down, he came across an apparatus he had never seen before: A section of high-pressure tubing ran out of the well bore and connected to a three-foot-long section of steel pipe, sealed at both ends. The apparatus appeared designed to divert air pumped into the well into the pipe instead, making the well test as if it were airtight.

"The only reason that I know of that that device would be installed would be to perform a false mechanical integrity test, more than likely because the well itself would not pass," Weller testified in 2009 as part of a case against the well's operator. The EPA did not make Weller available to comment for this article.

When EPA inspectors kept digging, they found the buried devices on 10 more wells.
The case stunned regulators. Weller had been inspecting the site's injection wells, which were used to enhance the recovery of oil, for the better part of a decade, certifying them as safe.  After the EPA's discoveries, workers at the company that operated the wells, Roseclare Oil, accused its manager, Daniel Lewis, of having conspired to cheat the tests for much of that time.

In 2009, Lewis was convicted of a felony charge for gaming the safety tests on Roseclare's wells and was sentenced to 3 years probation and a $5,000 fine. He maintains his innocence, saying the wells were rigged by his father, who ran the company's local operations until his death, but said such practices were typical in Kentucky's oil and gas industry. "I'd say it's pretty common," said Lewis, whose probation was commuted in 2011.  "But it's not something people go around talking about either."

From Lewis' perspective, injection well operators sometimes have little choice but to try to fool inspectors. Many wells are decades old and were drilled before the current regulations were written. Some are decrepit, their cement aging and cracked. They also can't be easily – or cheaply – repaired.

Lewis, who is now a part-owner of Roseclare and continues to run its operations, said that before wells were due for EPA inspections he would pretest them himself. If one failed, he'd enter problem-solving mode, prepping the site for the EPA's arrival. Two of his employees testified that he ordered them to fabricate and install the diverters.

"You go and work in it and try to get it to hold and it won't hold," Lewis said of the wells. "What are you going to do? It's kind of a ‘Don't ask, don't tell.'"

Randy Ream, the Assistant U.S. Attorney for Kentucky's Western District who prosecuted the case against Lewis, called his scheme unusually elaborate but agreed that efforts to get around the rules for injection wells are common. Sometimes, he said, they result in the contamination of private drinking water wells.

"We have people who have constructed wells that are not certified injection wells, or we have people who will put their brine in a tank and carry it over and put it in somebody else's well," Ream said.  "One guy, he's got oil coming out of his shower head."

"There is just so much brine," Ream added, "and you have to get rid of it."


So Many Wells, So Few Inspectors
One obstacle to more effective enforcement in Kentucky and elsewhere, Ream said, is that regulators cannot always keep up with well tests and inspections.

According to EPA records, Kentucky has 3,403 Class 2 wells, which are supposed to be tested for mechanical integrity once every five years. But since 2007, an average of just 253 wells a year have been tested, less than half as many as there should have been to remain on schedule.

A spokeswoman for the EPA's regional office in Atlanta said in an email that only half of Kentucky's injection wells are actively used and only active wells can be tested. She said mechanical integrity tests are performed on each well every 36 months, but did not address the discrepancy between this schedule and the number of tests reflected in EPA data.

The EPA employs just six people to check its wells across the southeast, not just in Kentucky, but in Tennessee and Florida, too. Those same people are also responsible for working with state inspection programs in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, which have their own inspection staffs.

Most states aim to visit injection sites at least once a year, and some meet or exceed that schedule, EPA records show. Ohio, for example, recently added staff dedicated exclusively to injection oversight and visits its active injection sites every 12 weeks. (Ohio also insists that Class 2 wells meet many of the more stringent testing and permitting regulations it uses for Class 1 hazardous waste wells.)

"Ohio's [rules] are based on what we felt we needed to develop to continue to alleviate any concerns," said Tomastik, of Ohio's Department of Natural Resources. "Obviously without regulatory presence in the field, the operator is not concerned about operating within the requirements."

But understaffing seems to be endemic across drilling states, especially where state regulatory agencies are responsible for checking both producing oil and gas wells and injection wells for waste or to enhance production.

In Montana, EPA auditors noted that inspectors are choosing which wells to inspect and have a "significant" workload.  In North Dakota, EPA auditors also noted the pressures of "exponential" growth and an "increasing workload."

To meet the goal of inspecting each well annually, Texas inspectors would have to visit eight wells a day, every day, including Sundays and Christmas. That's after Texas' Railroad Commission hired 65 staffers last year to help inspect the state's 428,000 wells.

Nye, the commission's spokeswoman, said the state had sufficient funding and inspected each of its commercial disposal wells twice last year.

"The Commission has a stringent and comprehensive review process for these wells," Nye wrote in an email.  "Railroad Commission staff work diligently to ensure saltwater disposal wells are not and will not be a problem."

But inspectors don't check on private disposal wells, which are far more numerous, with the same regularity. Nor do they keep a schedule for when officials should conduct such visits.
Other states are struggling under similar burdens. In Wyoming, inspectors would also have to check eight wells a day for each well to be checked once a year – a pace possible if wells are clustered together, experts said, but otherwise difficult to achieve. In West Virginia and Kansas, inspectors would have to check seven wells per day.

Visiting injection wells often ranks low among inspectors' priorities unless there is an accident or spill, according to a 2007 Texas auditor's report. The most urgent responsibility for regulators, beyond responding to emergencies, is typically overseeing the development of new oil and gas wells.

The result is that several years can pass between inspections of many injection well sites. In 2010, state regulators visited less than half of the Class 2 sites that a federal well inventory shows they were responsible for monitoring, ProPublica's analysis showed.  EPA inspectors checked on such wells even less frequently, visiting less than one-quarter of the sites under their jurisdiction in 2010.

"I don't give a darn whether you have federal regulations, or a squeaky clean permitting system," said Bill Bryson, a member of the Kansas Geological Survey and the former head of Kansas' oil and gas commission. "If you don't have somebody going out and looking at the wells it doesn't do any good, and if you don't have the right people looking … it doesn't do any good either."

Much of the problem with oversight comes down to money, critics say. In some states, budgets and staff for oil and gas agencies have dropped relative to the number of new wells being drilled over the last nine years.

Kansas employs about the same number of inspectors as it did in 2003, even though it drills four times as many new wells. New drilling has nearly doubled in Louisiana over the same period, but the state's enforcement staff has remained static and its oil and gas budget has increased modestly. In Illinois, drilling has nearly doubled, while the number of enforcement staff has been reduced.

Since the Underground Injection Control program is run under a federal mandate, states rely partly on money from the EPA to fund oversight and enforcement. Federal dollars make up 20 percent of Texas' budget, for example. But in the last 22 years, the EPA's annual operating budget for injection has remained about the same: $10 million. Taking inflation into account, funding has dropped at least 40 percent from 1990 to 2012, though the regulations for all well classes have only grown more complex.

"The UIC program has been flat funded for years," said Dan Jarvis, the field operations manager for Utah's Division of Oil, Gas and Mining.  "With more manpower, obviously you put them on the ground and you're going to have better compliance. Our field people are some of the greatest guys going, but they are overworked."

The EPA declined to disclose the operating budget for regional offices that monitor waste wells under federal jurisdiction or oversee state injection programs. Documents show, however, that in 2011 the agency suspended its travel budget for visits to some of the states that have the largest injection programs, including Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma.

"Do you think we are doing more now than we were doing 30 years ago? No, there is no money," said Salazar, the former EPA injection expert. "There are not enough people to know what is going on. It is the ideal storm for industry. Less and less people, more and more things that the EPA has to do."

Ultimately, much of the responsibility for meeting EPA standards falls to companies themselves. Some operators routinely exceed the minimum requirements of injection regulations, says Hughbert Collier, who runs a Texas environmental engineering firm that consults with injection well operators. They conduct their own integrity tests every year and make sure employees visit well sites once a month.

But operators inclined to cut corners have little to hold them back.

"What most people would be surprised about is that regulators don't have real good control over everything that goes on in the regulated community," said Miller, the former EPA criminal investigator in Texas. "Most of our environmental law requires self-reporting and that requires honest people."

When violations are identified – such as the 140 times waste was illegally injected and noted in the regulatory reports – the consequences can be minimal, and only in rare cases do transgressions rise to the level of criminal prosecution. In the three years of national data reviewed by ProPublica, which included more than 24,000 formal notices of violations, only one case was referred to criminal investigators.

Usually, violations result in citations or informal warnings. If operators do not address violations, then modest fines may be levied; in some cases, wells are temporarily shut down. There is no central source of information on the size of fines, but an audit of Louisiana's injection program provides a glimpse: In 2011, the state collected an average of $158 for each violation.

After three deaths, two federal worker safety investigations and a criminal prosecution, few injection sites nationwide received as much regulatory scrutiny as those in Rosharon, Texas.  Yet, despite all the attention, the wells there later failed on the most basic level.

On Feb. 17, 2010, thousands of gallons of waste that had been deposited into these wells gurgled to the surface in what the Railroad Commission described as a "breakout." Materials injected far below the earth had managed to migrate back up to the surface, perhaps through an old well missed by regulators.

As of this June, investigators were still analyzing whether the chemicals injected underneath the site had reached water supplies.

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Friday, September 21, 2012 by PRWatch.org
Coordinated Actions Worldwide this Weekend Call for Banning Fracking
by Sara Jerving

 

 

Concerned people from the U.S. and numerous other countries will join in a global campaign event Saturday to call for a ban of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking." More than 150 events, on five continents, are planned for this weekend’s “Global Frackdown” -- a day of action against fracking -- coupled with the promotion of the expansion of clean, sustainable energy options. 

Concerns about fracking, a process of extracting oil and gas from shale formations, have increased over the past few years as a growing number of communities encounter pressure from the well-funded industry to open up their land and water to industrial drilling. New technologies have made obtaining these deposits cheaper than had been possible in the past, leading to a rapid expansion of fracking across the globe.

During the process of fracking, large quantities of fresh water, coupled with chemicals and sand, are pumped into shale formations in order to crack the rock and extract the fossil fuels.

The blend of "proprietary" chemicals used in this process is largely kept confidential, but studies have revealed that fracking fluids contain a host of toxic substances, including known carcinogens and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Fracking has the documented potential to contaminate drinking water sources.  Fracking has also been shown to foul both air and land -- in addition to spoiling millions of gallons of fresh water as part of the drilling process.

Fracking has been a contentious issue in many countries that have large shale deposits, which may be located where people live or set aside as natural wildlife areas or parks.

While communities across the globe continue to fight political or legal battles over the use of land and water for the controversial extraction process, Saturday’s day of action will be the first time such efforts are coordinated internationally.

Citizens on Five Continents Call for a BanThe day of action, spearheaded by Food & Water Watch, has garnered participation of over 150 organizations worldwide. Citizens in Argentina, the Czech Republic, China, Zimbabwe, and the Ukraine, among other nations, will be speaking out on the same day that resisting unlimited fracking is a universal fight.

“Since our water system is deeply interconnected, even if you don’t have a fracking rig next to your house, your health, safety and environment are at risk,” Anna Ghosh of Food & Water Watch said.

Citizens will converge in front of parliament buildings in Bulgaria, South Africa, and the Czech Republic, at the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, and at Noosa Beach in Australia. A brigade of bicycles will protest at the site of an injection well in northern Spain. Street theatre performances portraying the dangers of fracking will be held in downtown Chicago and citizens will hand out information on fracking at Madison's weekly farmers' market on the Capitol building square, among other actions.

Day of Action Follows Protests in Brussels, Philadelphia, and Ottawa Some of the actions already started this week. On Tuesday, members of Green Parties from across Europe gathered in front of the European Parliament building in Brussels, Belgium, holding murky cups of water along with their protest signs, to represent the threat of water contamination that comes with fracking. The European Union is currently in the process of deciding the future of how the continent will move forward on regulating fracking.

This protest came in part in response to the European Parliament’s Industry Committee passing a decision Tuesday that said no environmental regulation amendments are needed to protect citizens from fracking. The European Parliament Environment Committee voted the following day for a more stringent approach to regulation. A European Commission released a report earlier this month calling for strict regulations because of the threat that fracking poses to the health of Europe’s residents and its environment.

On Thursday in Ottawa, the Council of Canadians, dressed in hazmat suits, delivered petitions signed by nearly 10,000 people asking for a moratorium on fracking in that country until federal reviews have been completed. The staff carried fake buckets of toxic fracking fluid to deliver along with the petitions. The protesters had hoped to deliver the petitions to Peter Kent, the Minister of the Environment, but the minister never made an appearance.

About one thousand people gathered in Philadelphia Thursday for “Shale Gas Outrage,” organized by Protecting Our Waters, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit group. The protestors stood outside the Pennsylvania Convention Center where inside Governor Tom Corbett spoke to attendants of a Marcellus Shale industry conference. At the convention, Corbett called those concerned about fracking the "unreasoning opposition" and touted the industry as the "tip of the spear" of a new industrial revolution. Corbett reportedly received nearly $1 million from those in the oil and gas industry during his gubernatorial campaign.

Citizens Standing up to Powerful Industry, Gains Have Been MadeThese citizens are up against a powerful, well-funded oil and gas industry with an aggressive public relations campaign to convince the world that fracking is benign. But despite their efforts, victories have been won by citizens hoping to protect their health and the environment from the dangers fracking poses. Fracking has been banned in France, Bulgaria, and the state of Vermont. There are also moratoriums on new fracking wells in New Jersey and New York, as well as in Romania, the Czech Republic, and the German region of North Rhine Westphalia. New York is currently deciding whether to end the state's moratorium on new wells in the state. Around two thousand individuals marched in Albany in August to persuade Governor Andrew Cuomo not to lift the moratorium.

Within the first 24 hours of which she was named to cabinet, Quebec’s new Natural Resources Minister Martine Ouellet said Thursday that she does not think there is any safe way to extract shale gas. “Our position is very clear: we want a complete moratorium, not only on exploitation but also on exploration of shale gas. We haven’t changed our minds,” she said.
A full list of events planned for the "Global Frackdown" is available here.

Looming Curses of Privatization

Monday, September 17, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Paul Buchheit

With the breakdown of the private financial industry, and with the decision by corporations to stop meeting their tax responsibilities, and with the dramatic surge in tax haven abuse, less tax revenue is available to state and local governments. Deprived of funding, governments are forced to consider privatization schemes to balance their budgets. But any such scheme comes with adversity and pain.

The futility of diverting public funds into the hands of profitseekers has been well-documented. Here are a few of the gathering curses of privatization.

1. Public treasures sold off for short-term budget needs

In his 2006 budget President Bush proposed auctioning off 300,000 acres of national forest in 41 states. This followed attempts by both the Reagan Administration and Clinton-era Republicans to privatize public land.

Now, with continuing budget shortfalls, the Cato Institute and other libertarian groups are pressing for property deals, with the justification that land should be "allocated to the highest-value use," presumably making it available to the highest bidder for consumption purposes.

That brings us to Paul Ryan's dubiously-named Path to Prosperity, which proposes to sell millions of acres of "unneeded federal land" and billions of dollars worth of federal assets. He's starting in his own backyard: the state of Wisconsin is considering the sale of DNR land for some ready cash. The Path to Prosperity is based in part on Republican Jason Chaffetz' "Disposal of Excess Federal Lands Act of 2011," which would unload millions of acres of land in America's west. Worse yet is Rep. Cliff Stearns' perplexing recommendation to "sell off some of our national parks." Mitt Romney also chimed in, admitting that he didn't know "what the purpose is" of public lands.


2. Infrastructure decaying in the hands of profit-seekers

David Cay Johnston describes the deteriorating state of America's infrastructure, with grids and pipelines neglected by monopolistic industries that cut costs rather than provide maintenance. Meanwhile, they achieve profit margins of over 50%, eight times the corporate average.

The government agencies that are usually blamed for the crumbling infrastructure are often staffed with regulators from the industries they're expected to monitor. If and when accidents happen, the companies responsible can plead hardship and demand rate increases from the public.

It's getting worse as corporations become fewer and more powerful. Almost every American adult can relate to the monopolistic phone and Internet industry that controls our public airwaves. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, South Korea has Internet speeds up to 200 times faster than the average speed in the U.S., at about half the cost. Free-market enterprise is simply not working in the U.S. telecommunications industry.

3. Water no longer available for the common good

According to Food and Water Watch, "The finance industry is promoting water privatization as a way to help local governments pay for budget shortfalls and improvement projects." The chief economist of Citigroup concurred: "I expect to see a globally integrated market for fresh water within 25 to 30 years."

But while profits average 12 to 15 percent per year, water and sewer utility rates typically rise 33 to 63 percent, and short-term business ventures are subject to abandonment after just a few years. Desperate local governments often regret their hasty decisions. A Century Foundation report concluded that with privatization "Competition is hard to create and maintain, cost savings (if any) from privatization erode over time, and service quality often suffers."

Numerous examples of water privatization abuse have been documented. In Pennsylvania and California, the American Water Company took over towns and raised rates by 70% or more. In Atlanta, United Water Services demanded more money from the city while prompting federal complaints about water quality. Felton, California privatized its water and received a 74 percent proposed rate increase over three years. Coatesville, Pennsylvania saw an 85 percent increase. Shell owns groundwater rights in Colorado, oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens is buying up the water in drought-stricken Texas, and water in Alaska is being pumped into tankers and sold in the Middle East.

In another ominous note for the future, the House passed the Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act of 2011, which would deny the Environmental Protection Agency the right to enforce the Clean Water Act. Our water is getting dirtier and scarcer. But a hedge fund advisor put a capitalist spin on it, noting the "serious profit opportunities" in water. "If you play it right," he added, "the results of this impending water crisis can be very good."

4. Our children put at risk with unproven educational methods

The few charter schools with good reviews have functioned with limited enrollments, retention policies favoring likely-to-succeed individuals, and an absence of special needs students. This violates a precept underscored by Chief Justice Warren in Brown vs. the Board of Education: "Education...is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms." Charters aren't even close to that. The Louisiana Believes project, for example, which will eventually be the country's most extensive voucher system, has only 5,000 slots available for about 380,000 eligible students.

But corporations are rushing headlong into this lucrative new market anyway, while paying little heed to the body of research confirming their relative ineffectiveness. This includes studies from Stanford University, the Department of Education, Johns Hopkins University, and the RAND Corporation.

In addition to their poor performance, charters are more segregated, less likely to accept students with disabilities, and conducive to a widening of the racial and rich-poor education gaps.

Still, despite all the damning evidence, the charter myth persists in the American mind. And it's getting worse. The newest blind rush into privatization heralds 'virtual' schools, which offer lessons to homebound kids on their computers, even at the K-12 level. In what seems obvious to most of us, virtual schools don't work for children. A 2009 Department of Education study on blended online and face-to-face instruction reported results that were "significantly positive for undergraduate and other older learners but not for K-12 students."

A lengthy New York Times investigation of one of K12 Inc's online schools concluded that "By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing. Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll."

5. Colleges gradually being replaced with prisons

America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and despite a falling violent crime rate, more people are going to jail. As explained by Michelle Alexander, "federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses."

So as education funding drops again this year in most of the states, spending on prisons increases. The U.S. spends over two times as much per prisoner as per public school student. California spends more on prisons than it does on higher education.

The profit motive is hastening prison privatization. Quickly. From 1990 to 2009, the number of prisoners in private facilities increased by more than 1600%, from about 7,000 to over 125,000 inmates. Corrections Corporation of America recently offered to run the prison system in any state willing to guarantee that jails stay 90% full.

Yet studies show that private prisons perform poorly in numerous ways: prevention of intra-prison violence, jail conditions, rehabilitation efforts. A 10-month investigation by the New York Times concluded that "the state's halfway houses have mutated into a shadow corrections network, where drugs, gang activity and violence, including sexual assaults, often go unchecked." Even so, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie insisted that "Places like this are to be celebrated."

The U.S. Department of Justice offered this appraisal: "There is no evidence showing that private prisons will have a dramatic impact on how prisons operate. The promises of 20-percent savings in operational costs have simply not materialized."

Prisons, like public land and utilities and schools, are up for sale in America. Essential public needs are fast becoming the newest products on the market.

US Citizens Ramp Up Battle Against Fossil Fuel Industry

Friday, September 9, 2011 by the Inter Press Service

by Kanya D'Almeida 

 

WASHINGTON -- The fight against oil and gas giants is heating up in the U.S., with new waves of protest and civil disobedience springing up across the country.


The last three weeks saw over 1,200 people arrested outside the White House in Washington D.C. in protest of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. If approved, it would travel from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, through the heartland of the U.S., threatening huge swathes of fresh water supplies and destroying communities and wildlife habitats along its way, activists say.

Then, on Wednesday, hundreds of local residents, scientists and environmentalists stormed the Shale Gas Insight conference in Philadelphia, demanding a moratorium on increased hydraulic fracturing – or fracking – which they say is contaminating water supplies, devastating animal habitats and paving the way for a major "public health hazard".

Organized by a coalition of environmental and ecological justice groups, including Food & Water Watch (FWW), Protecting our Waters and the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, the "Shale Gas Outrage" rally continued Thursday with close to 2,000 demonstrators chanting "Ban it Now!" on the sidewalks lining the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

The groups are urging a ban on drilling in Marcellus Shale, the gas- rich underground rock formation beneath Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and New York, which is home to one of the biggest deposits of natural gas on the planet.

The gas is extracted using a drilling process that pumps millions of gallons of water, as well as sand and chemical additives, at high pressure to "fracture" or crack into gas-bearing rock.

While oil and gas companies have repeatedly insisted that the process is safe, environmentalists and residents from areas that have borne the brunt of fracking argue that the process contaminates underground fresh water supplies, poisoning consumers as well as the environment.

"Our immediate goal is to get a moratorium on fracking in the Delaware River Basin because, as of right now, not a single cumulative health assessment has been made about the safety issues involved in the extraction process," Francesca Lo Basso, communications director of the Shale Gas Outrage, told IPS.

"The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently conducting an analysis, but until the results of that study are made public, the process needs to be halted," she said.

"The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is issuing a permit every two to 30 minutes, without having any idea what this could mean for the community or the environment," Lo Basso stressed. "The DEP's own website has recorded 11 violations by gas companies each day, yet there is no regulation of the process."

According to FWW, 15 million people rely on the Delaware River Basin for their fresh drinking water, a fact that has spurred over 80 state and local governments around the U.S. to take action to protect their residents from the impacts of the drilling process.

"People [across the U.S.] are sick from, and sick of fracking," FWW's executive director Wenonah Hauter said in a press release Wednesday.

"We can't stand by and allow the natural gas industry to endanger any more lives or natural resources. We're here to send a message to the industry that it's time to put public safety before corporate interests by banning fracking throughout the U.S," she added.

The gas companies are not backing down, claiming a range of economic incentives in favor of fracking.

"These extremist activists want us to [halt] drilling altogether," Aubrey McClendon, the chief executive of Chesapeake Energy Co., told conference participants Wednesday. "Which is fine if you don't like heat in your home, electricity in your office, a job to go to, and food on your plate."

A study commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute (API) and undertaken by the energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie was released Wednesday, claiming, among other things, that oil-and-gas development could add 1.1 million U.S. jobs over the coming decade and rake in 36 billion dollars in federal revenues by 2015.

The study advocates for an immediate loosening of federal regulations, calls for a green-light on the Keystone XL pipeline and urges the government to deregulate areas where drilling is currently banned, including the Atlantic and Pacific Coast, Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

In turn, critics accuse the industry of fear-mongering.

"It's shameful that the oil and gas industry is seeking to horse trade environmental regulations on the false premise that it will create jobs," Hauter said Wednesday.

"Even though President (Barack) Obama is under fire to stimulate the economy, deregulating oil and gas drilling won't necessarily create jobs. Instead it will increase industry profits and pose an unacceptable risk for our nation's water resources, which are absolutely vital to our economy," she said.

According to Mitch Jones, a senior legislative and policy analyst in the water program of FWW, the API study that is currently being widely circulated among lobbyists and industry CEOs makes no promises of employment.

"If you look closely at the report, you will notice it only talks about the possibility of job creation," Jones told IPS.

"Which means we have to take the energy industry's word that it will reinvest the money it might save on energy standards into increased production and, therefore, job creation, rather than channeling those savings into profits," he added.

"With prices low, and a huge glut in the energy market already, this is a tough call," Jones told IPS. "If corporations are allowed to drill as freely as they want to, they can't avoid a bigger drop off in prices, especially with the economy still stagnant and no increased demand."

Empty Threats Unraveled"It is deeply disconcerting that the industry not only has a swarm of lobbyists here in Washington, as well as in all the state legislatures where decisions about drilling are made, they've also got multimillion dollar advertising campaigns pushing their agenda and commissioning think tanks to put out reports in support of the industry," Mitch Jones of FWW told IPS.

Dangling potential economic destruction and mass job losses as a result of clean energy practices is an old industry tactic.

In 1997, while the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was attempting to secure stricter regulations on ground-level ozone emissions – or smog – corporate giants such as the American Petroleum Institute, Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers were spending millions to convince the public that tougher clean air standards would "cripple the U.S. economy" by destroying millions of jobs.

Over 14 years later, a comprehensive study by the Center for American Progress (CAP) found that the industries' predictions were completely unfounded.

CAP's detailed analysis of economic growth and employment rates at the time found that smog- choked metropolitan areas that were forced to implement tighter regulations "experienced very similar economic growth [and] employment rates to the nation as a whole".

In fact, CAP found that average GDP per capita in areas predicted to be "devastated" by the EPA's revised standards grew by .7 percent from 2004-2008, while it grew by .87 percent nationwide, a negligible difference.

Similarly, unemployment in the 54 areas affected by the 1997 ozone standard grew by 2.21 percent from 2004- 2008, while unemployment nationwide grew by 2.3 percent.

According to CAP, this data makes abundantly clear that the fear generated by the energy industries was baseless.

Industry Giants Come Full CircleIndustry lobbyists launched an almost identical attack on the most recent attempt by the EPA to update smog pollution.

Last Friday, President Barack Obama announced that he would be abandoning the new air pollution rule brought to him by EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, a move that shocked scores of environmentalists in his camp who had drafted celebratory press releases ahead of the official announcement, so convinced were they that their president would not renege on yet another promise.

According to the EPA, smog is created when pollutants from motor vehicle exhaust, industrial emissions and gasoline vapors from power plants combine with sunlight to form air that "could trigger a variety of health problems including chest pain, coughing, throat irritation, congestion and [worsening] of bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma."

In 2006, the EPA revisited the science and found that ground- level ozone was actually doing far more damage than simply aggravating respiratory problems - it was actually killing people.

In July 2010, administrator Jackson informed the Senate that the Bush-era smog standards allowing 75 parts per billion (ppb) - which will now remain in place as a result of Obama's decision - "were not legally defensible given the scientific evidence in the record" and called for a tougher standard of 60 ppb, to no avail.

Immediately after the president's announcement Friday, CAP said in a statement, "Today's [decision] grants an item on Big Oil's wish list at the expense of the health of children, seniors and the infirm. A new standard for smog would save 4,300 lives and prevent 7,000 hospital visits and tens of thousands of cases of asthma and other serious respiratory illnesses each year."

More Capitulation: Obama Halts EPA Regulation On Smog Standards (2 articles)

(Hey, Obama--capitulate much? All the time? That's right, you do...here's an idea: big corporations need to figure out how to expand business without making the air too hazardous to fucking BREATHE! See, breathing clean air is kind of important if you don't want to die a horrible death from lung cancer or asphyxiation. Asshole!--jef)

Smog is Fun for Everybody!!! Wheeeee!!!!
Huffington Post - Sept. 2, 2011
 
WASHINGTON — In a dramatic reversal, President Barack Obama on Friday scrubbed a clean-air regulation that aimed to reduce health-threatening smog, yielding to bitterly protesting businesses and congressional Republicans who complained the rule would kill jobs in America's ailing economy.

Withdrawal of the proposed regulation marked the latest in a string of retreats by the president in the face of GOP opposition, and it drew quick criticism from liberals. Environmentalists, a key Obama constituency, accused him of caving to corporate polluters, and the American Lung Association threatened to restart the legal action it had begun against rules proposed by President George W. Bush.

The White House has been under heavy pressure from GOP lawmakers and major industries, which have slammed the stricter standard as an unnecessary jobs killer. The Environmental Protection Agency, whose scientific advisers favored the tighter limits, had predicted the proposed change would cost up to $90 billion a year, making it one of the most expensive environmental regulations ever imposed in the U.S.

However, the Clean Air Act bars the EPA from considering the costs of complying when setting public health standards.

Obama said his decision was made in part to reduce regulatory burdens and uncertainty at a time of rampant questions about the strength of the U.S. economy.

Underscoring the economic concerns: a new report Friday that showed the economy essentially adding no jobs in August and the unemployment rate stubbornly stuck at 9.1 percent.

The regulation would have reduced concentrations of ground-level ozone, the main ingredient in smog, a powerful lung irritant that can cause asthma and other lung ailments. Smog is created when emissions from cars, power and chemical plants, refineries and other factories mix in sunlight and heat.

Republican lawmakers, already emboldened by Obama's concessions on extending Bush-era tax cuts and his agreement to more than $1 trillion in spending reductions as the price for raising the nation's debt ceiling, had pledged to try to block the stricter smog standards as well as other EPA regulations when they returned to Washington after Labor Day.

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, had muted praise for the White House Friday, saying that withdrawal of the smog regulation was a good first step toward removing obstacles that are blocking business growth.

"But it is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to stopping Washington Democrats' agenda of tax hikes, more government `stimulus' spending and increased regulations, which are all making it harder to create more American jobs," said Boehner spokesman Michael Steel.

Thomas Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the move was "an enormous victory for America's job creators, the right decision by the president and one that will help reduce the uncertainty facing businesses."

White House officials said the president's decision was not the product of industry pressure, and they said the administration would continue to fight other efforts by Republicans to dismantle the EPA's authority.

But that was little consolation for many of the president's supporters. The group MoveOn.org issued a scathing statement, saying Obama's decision was one it would have expected from his Republican predecessor.

"Many MoveOn members are wondering today how they can ever work for President Obama's re-election, or make the case for him to their neighbors, when he does something like this, after extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich and giving in to tea party demands on the debt deal," said Justin Ruben, the group's executive director.

The American Lung Association, which had sued the EPA over Bush's smog standards, said it would resume its legal fight now that Obama was essentially endorsing the weaker limit. The group had suspended its lawsuit after the Obama administration pledged to change it.

Obama's decision, in fact, mirrors one made by Bush in 2008. After EPA scientists recommended a stricter standard to better protect public health, Bush personally intervened after hearing complaints from electric utilities and other affected industries. His EPA set a standard of 75 parts per billion, stricter than one adopted in 1997, but not as strong as federal scientists said was needed to protect public health.

In March, the EPA's independent panel of scientific advisers sent a letter to the agency's director, Lisa Jackson, saying it was its unanimous recommendation to make the smog standards stronger and that the evidence was "sufficiently certain" that the range proposed in January 2010 under Obama would benefit public health.

But the White House, which has pledged to base decisions on science, said Friday the science behind its initial decision needed to be updated, a process already under way at EPA. The smog standard now is to be revised until 2013.

Whether Obama still occupies the White House at that point depends on the outcome of next year's presidential election.

Cass Sunstein, the head of the White House regulatory office, said changing the smog regulation now, only to have it be reconsidered again in two years, would create unnecessary uncertainty for the private sector and local governments.

The stricter limits initially proposed by Obama would have doubled the number of counties in violation. Smoggy cities such as Los Angeles and Houston would have been joined by counties in California's Napa Valley and one in Kansas with a population of 3,000. They would have had up to 20 years to meet the new limits, once EPA settled on a final number, or would have faced federal penalties.

In his statement, the president said scrapping the stronger smog standards did not reflect a weakening of his commitment to protecting public health and the environment.

"I will continue to stand with the hardworking men and women at the EPA as they strive every day to hold polluters accountable and protect our families from harmful pollution," Obama said. (Bullshit!--jef)

Even before Friday's decision – announced as many Americans were paying more attention to their Labor Day weekend plans than the news – the White House has faced some criticism for its record on the environment. Obama abandoned a campaign pledge* to set the first-ever limits on the pollution blamed for global warming, and he announced an expansion of offshore drilling before the Gulf oil spill sidelined those plans.

The ground-level ozone standard is closely associated with public health – something the president said he wouldn't compromise in his regulatory review.

(* for those keeping count, we're close to 20 campaign promises he has broken.--jef) 

++++

Obama withdraws smog regulation, overruling EPA

By Kase Wickman
Friday, September 2nd, 2011

President Barack Obama Friday announced that he would overrule the Environmental Protection Agency's controversial anti-smog regulations. Business leaders and Republicans had voiced strong objections to the new smog standards, and they count Obama's decision as a victory.

Obama cited a desire to avoid costly regulations as his reason for telling EPA Director Lisa Jackson to withdraw the smog rule.

Depending on how strict the standards were, the new smog rules were estimated to cost between $19 billion and $90 billion, according to Forbes.

"I want to be clear: my commitment and the commitment of my administration to protecting public health and the environment is unwavering (except when my corporate contributors tell me otherwise, which is all the time--jef)," Obama said in a statement sent by the White House. "I will continue to stand with the hardworking men and women at the EPA as they strive every day to hold polluters accountable and protect our families from harmful pollution, (except that I'm not going to do that at all. I will keep serving the interests of the corporate contributors to my 2012 Presidential Campaign, and nothing comes before that.--jef)"

The rule will be reconsidered in 2013, Obama said, and it was pointless to pay for regulations that would be so soon up for redrafting.

Last week, Obama was chided by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) for the number of governmental regulations under consideration as well as the amount of regulations with costs exceeding $1 billion.

"A search of this year’s information, posted online in recent days, reveals that the Obama Administration’s job-crushing regulatory barrage is not being scaled back, but rather expanded, appearing to contradict White House rhetoric this week about President Obama’s intent to reduce the regulatory burden on job creators," Boehner wrote in a blog post.

In his own response this week, Obama outlined "a number of steps" his administration had taken to relieve regulatory burdens and streamline the bureaucratic process.

Friday, the White House posted a blog post by Heather Zichal, deputy assistant to the president for energy and climate change, outlining the ways Obama has achieved "Cleaner Air and a Stronger Economy — A Record of Success," as the post is titled.

The announcement that Obama was ordering the EPA to withdraw their drafted proposal came on the heels of the monthly jobs report, which showed that no new jobs had been added in August.

"The Obama administration is caving to big polluters at the expense of protecting the air we breathe," Gene Karpinski, the president of the League of Conservation Voters, told Forbes.

"This is a huge win for corporate polluters and huge loss for public health."

EPA Proposes New Rules on Emissions Released by Fracking

Friday, July 29, 2011 by ProPublica

by Nicholas Kusnetz, ProPublica 

Prohibited from regulating hydraulic fracturing under the Safe Drinking Water Act, yesterday the EPA took to the air, proposing federal regulations to reduce smog-forming pollutants released by the fast-spreading approach to gas drilling.

If approved as currently written, the rules would amount to the first national standards for fracking of any kind, the EPA said. The agency sets guidelines when companies inject fluids underground for various purposes, but in 2005 Congress prohibited the EPA from doing so for fracking. Regulation has been left to the states, some of which compel companies to report what chemicals they use and have imposed tougher well-design standards.


The new EPA proposal would limit emissions released during many stages of natural gas production and development, but explicitly targets the volatile organic compounds released in large quantities when wells are fracked. Drillers would have to use equipment that captures these gases, reducing emissions by nearly 95 percent, the EPA said.

Environmentalists said the proposed rules represent an important step by federal regulators amid a growing controversy over fracking's safety.

"The EPA has a terrific opportunity here to provide the public with some assurance that the industry has to meet certain performance standards that are protective of public health," said Ramon Alvarez, a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund in Texas.

The American Petroleum Institute, the country's main oil and gas lobbying group, has requested that the EPA delay finalizing the rules for at least six months beyond the current Feb. 2012 deadline. Asked to comment on the proposal's likely effects, API spokesman Reid Porter said only that the organization was reviewing it.

The Marcellus Shale Coalition, a group representing gas drillers in the Northeast, issued a statement criticizing the proposed regulations, saying they would "undercut" gas production.

The EPA contends that the measure would actually be a moneymaker for drilling companies. Though it might compel them to invest in new equipment, this equipment would allow them to capture methane gas currently lost in the drilling process, which they could then sell.

The EPA proposal is the result of a successful 2009 lawsuit brought against the agency by WildEarth Guardians and another advocacy group alleging that the agency had not updated air-quality rules as required. The EPA is supposed to review such rules at least every eight years, but in some cases had not done so for 10 years or more.

While the rules affect the oil and gas industry as a whole, growing awareness about environmental and health risks associated with fracking seems to have played a role in their formulation.

During an interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson called natural gas a critical bridge fuel to a lower carbon future, but acknowledged that drilling had led to poor air quality in some areas. Smog was worsening in rural communities where drilling had increased sharply, she said, and the agency was concerned that without better regulation those problems would grow.

"People's health will be affected," Jackson said, adding that the EPA was developing rules -- the ones announced yesterday -- to address this issue.

Hydraulic fracturing is a major source of emissions because when fluids used to frack a well return to the surface, they carry gases that can be vented into the air, said Jeremy Nichols, the climate and energy program director for WildEarth Guardians.

"Just imagine opening a bottle of soda," he said.

Instead of carbon dioxide, in fracking's case the soda can contain methane, volatile organic compounds and toxic chemicals such as benzene, which generally spray into the environment. Some areas in the West, where emissions from drilling are particularly high, no longer meet federal air quality standards.

The EPA proposal also calls for reducing emissions of toxic chemicals, such as cancer-causing benzene, produced by processing, transmitting and storing natural gas. An exemption in the Clean Air Act prohibits the EPA from requiring similar reductions for fracking. Nevertheless, the agency said that a byproduct of new limits on volatile organic compounds produced by fracking would be reductions in other emissions.

Some environmentalists said they were disappointed that the proposed rules do not target methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is also the primary ingredient of natural gas. The oil and gas sector accounts for nearly 40 percent of all methane emissions nationwide, according to the EPA.

While the EPA said such emissions would be reduced by one-quarter as a result of new limits on the release of other gases, Alvarez said greater cuts would have been possible if methane reductions had been mandated.

The EPA issued its emissions reduction proposal soon after saying it would not meet a July 29 deadline for tougher national ozone standards.

Doing one without the other may not be enough to improve air quality in busy drilling areas such as Wyoming's Upper Green River Basin, Nichols said.

"That's a hard realization that's going to sink in," he said. "We're definitely going to be able to take a bite out of it through some of the standards that are coming on line, but we're going to reach a point where something else needs to be done."

Carcinogens Injected into Wells During Gas "Fracking"

Sunday, April 17, 2011 by Associated Press
Report: Carcinogens Injected into Wells During Gas "Fracking"

WASHINGTON — Millions of gallons of potentially hazardous chemicals and known carcinogens were injected into wells by leading oil and gas service companies from 2005-2009, a report by three House Democrats said Saturday.

The report said 29 of the chemicals injected were known-or-suspected human carcinogens. They either were regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act as risks to human health or listed as hazardous air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

Methanol was the most widely used chemical. The substance is a hazardous air pollutant and is on the candidate list for potential regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

The report was issued by Reps. Henry Waxman of California, Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Diana DeGette of Colorado.

The chemicals are injected during hydraulic fracturing, a process used in combination with horizontal drilling to allow access to natural gas reserves previously considered uneconomical.

The growing use of hydraulic fracturing has allowed natural gas production in the United States to reach levels not achieved since the early 1970s.

However, the process requires large quantities of water and fluids, injected underground at high volumes and pressure. The composition of these fluids ranges from a simple mixture of water and sand to more complex mixtures with chemical additives.

The report said that from 2005-2009, the following states had at least 100,000 gallons of hydraulic fracturing fluids containing a carcinogen: Texas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Wyoming, North Dakota, New Mexico, Montana and Utah.

States with 100,000 gallons or more of fluids containing a regulated chemical under the Safe Drinking Water Act were: Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma, Mississippi and North Dakota.

The report said many chemical components were listed as "proprietary" or "trade secret."

"Hydraulic fracturing has opened access to vast domestic reserves of natural gas that could provide an important stepping stone to a clean energy future," the report said.

"Yet, questions about the safety of hydraulic fracturing persist, which are compounded by the secrecy surrounding the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing fluids. This analysis is the most comprehensive national assessment to date of the types and volumes of chemical used in the hydraulic fracturing process."

The investigation of chemicals used in fracturing was started in the last Congress by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which then was controlled by Democrats. The committee asked the 14 leading oil and gas service companies to disclose the types and volumes of the hydraulic fracturing products they used between 2005 and 2009 and the chemical contents of those products