Peter Gleick: Companies Poisoning Our Water in the Name of Energy Profits

Last week Peter Gleick, President of Pacific Institute, wrote a great piece describing the rapid growth of "hydraulic fracturing" for extracting oil and gas in the United States and the water-related consequences of this practice.

Hydraulic fracturing is a topic that River Network has recently begun to explore. I discussed it briefly in my summary of the Water-Energy Sustainability Symposium and it was mentioned in a post describing how water concerns have stopped energy development in the Northeast. Although hydraulic fracturing has been used for decades, the last few years have seen an explosion in permit requests for this potentially disastrous practice. As Dr. Gleick notes:

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a technique that releases natural gas trapped in underground shale formations by injecting water, chemicals, and sand to "frack" the rock structures and release the gas. Often, large quantities of groundwater contaminated by chemicals, radioactive elements, or other minerals are produced in the process. Unless great care is taken, this "produced water" mixed with water used for fracturing can flow to the surface or into groundwater systems and contaminate land, drinking water supplies, and natural waterways.

Water Number: 77 billion barrels of contaminated "produced water" were generated worldwide in 2000 by oil and gas operations. This estimate comes from a 2003 Journal of Petroleum Technology article by Z. Khatib and P. Verbeek. In recent years this volume has increased as more and more gas is produced from marginal fields like the Marcellus Shales in Pennsylvania and the Barnett Shales in Texas and the Hilliard-Baxter-Mancos Shales in Wyoming. This water has begun to cause more and more health and environmental problems.

In 1990 in the United States, unconventional gas produced from shales, coal-bed methane, and similar formations made up about 10% of total U.S. production. Today it is around 40% and increasing rapidly, mostly from gas produced in shale formations. And as unconventional gas volumes grow, so do the volumes of produced water and the problems this produced water causes.

Dr. Gleick goes on to describe how produced water from gas extraction can be up to 10 times more toxic than water produced from oil extraction. Among the list of known contaminants in the water resulting from gas production are, "high concentrations of salts, acids, benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene, radioactive materials, and other nasty chemicals."

To make matters worse, there is no overarching regulatory framework for dealing with produced water from unconventional oil and natural gas production. As Dr. Gleick summarizes:

There is no doubt that produced water needs to be better regulated, that existing regulations need to be better enforced, and that monitoring of water contamination from fracking and disposal of produced water needs to be expanded. Current regulations are a complicated mix of federal control, state control, and no control. For example, the federal government has exempted produced water from regulation under the hazardous waste requirements of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). Regulation under other federal and state pollution laws is inconsistently applied and weakly enforced.

Click here to check out "What the frack? Poisoning our water in the name of energy profits"