Gas Drilling Companies Hold Data Needed by Researchers to
Assess Risk to Water Quality
ProPublica
18 May 2011
By Abrahm Lustgarten,
For years the natural gas drilling industry has decried the lack of
data that could prove -- or disprove -- that drilling can cause
drinking water contamination. Only baseline data, they said, could show
without a doubt that water was clean before drilling began.
The absence of baseline data was one of the most serious criticisms
leveled at a group of Duke researchers last week when they published
the first peer-reviewed study linking drilling to methane contamination
in water supplies.
That study -- which found that methane concentrations in drinking water
increased dramatically with proximity to gas wells -- contained "no
baseline information whatsoever," wrote Chris Tucker, a spokesman for
the industry group Energy in Depth, in a statement debunking the study.
Now it turns out that some of that data does exist. It just wasn't
available to the Duke researchers, or to the public.
Ever since high-profile water contamination cases were linked to
drilling in Dimock, Pa. in late 2008, drilling companies themselves
have been diligently collecting water samples from private wells before
they drill, according to several industry consultants who have been
working with the data. While Pennsylvania regulations now suggest
pre-testing water wells within 1,000 feet of a planned gas well,
companies including Chesapeake Energy, Shell and Atlas have been
compiling samples from a much larger radius - up to 4,000 feet from
every well. The result is one of the largest collections of
pre-drilling water samples in the country.
"The industry is sitting on hundreds of thousands of pre and post
drilling data sets," said Robert Jackson, one of the Duke scientists
who authored the study, published May 9 in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.
Jackson relied on 68 samples for his study. "I asked them for the data
and they wouldn't share it."
The water tests could help settle the contentious debate over the
environmental risks of drilling, particularly the invasive part of the
process called hydraulic fracturing, where millions of gallons of toxic
chemicals and water are pumped underground to fracture rock. Residents
from Wyoming to Pennsylvania fear that the chemicals will seep into
aquifers and pollute water supplies, and in some cases they complain it
already has. But the lack of scientific research on the issue -
including a dearth of baseline water samples - has hindered efforts by
government and regulators to understand the risks.
The industry has two reasons to collect the data: To get to the bottom
of water contamination problems, and to protect itself when people
complain that drilling harmed their drinking water.
"Unless you have the baseline before the analysis you can argue until
the sky turns green," said Anthony Gorody, a geochemist who often works
for the energy industry. "The only real way to address this without
anybody bitching and moaning is by doing this before and after."
Chesapeake Energy alone has tested thousands of private water supplies
in the Marcellus Shale, and the company says its findings demonstrate
that much of the water was contaminated before drilling began.
"Water quality testing... has shown numerous issues with local
groundwater," wrote the company's spokesman, Jim Gipson, in an email to
ProPublica. "One out of four water sources have detectable levels of
methane present... and about one in four fail one or more EPA drinking
water standards."
Gipson declined to elaborate on the findings or share Chesapeake's test
results, making it difficult to verify whether the companies had,
indeed, found the water was contaminated before drilling began. But he
did note that Pennsylvania does not regulate water quality in private
wells and that water sampling is typically not done by homeowners.
"This fact substantially explains why many of these pre-existing issues
have not been previously identified or resolved by landowners," he
wrote.
It is also unclear whether Pennsylvania state environment officials -
who declined to answer questions for this story - have been allowed to
review the industry data or are using it when they investigate drilling
accidents in the state.
That leaves open questions about who will see the water data, whether
it has been verified by independent labs, and how it might be useful in
the public debate. The Environmental Protection Agency's study of
hydraulic fracturing is due to be completed next year, and the
Department of Energy recently appointed a review panel to assess the
risks of drilling.
Energy in Depth's Tucker and others expect the industry will eventually
make its data public.
"There has been talk about releasing it and putting it in the public
domain," said Fred Baldassare, a former Pennsylvania environment
official and expert on underground gas migration who now consults for
the industry.
Baldassare said the drilling companies were concerned that releasing
water test results could affect property values for residents and
amounted to a violation of their privacy. "How do you identify these
points while maintaining some confidentiality?"
Jackson said the data should be made available now to independent
researchers and to agencies investigating the hydraulic fracturing
process. But even without the data, he stands behind his study. The
Duke report said that the link between drilling activity and water
degradation was clear, and said the contaminants could be migrating
through manmade underground fractures, or, more likely, were coming
from cracks in the well structure itself. The researchers said the
wells they analyzed had been hydraulically fractured, but that more
study of that process was needed to understand whether fracturing might
be causing the contamination. No indicators of fracturing fluids were
found in the samples.
Jackson likened the questions about drilling risk to those about the
link between smoking and lung cancer.
"In an ideal study you follow people through their lives. You take
measurements on them in their lungs as they start smoking and as you
grow old. That's what you need to prove cause and effect," he said.
"But instead they asked: 'If you smoke, did you get lung cancer?' That
doesn't prove that smoking is the cause, but it's a pretty good step.
"That's all we did here. If you live near a gas well are you more
likely to have methane contamination? That answer is yes. It's not
proof, but it's a good first step."