Drilling for Gas: Home-Grown Energy Isn't Necessarily So Green

As if global warming and wars over oil weren't enough to put a little guilt cloud over our energy consumption patterns, there's a host of other, much closer-to-home environmental problems that need to be addressed if we are to get on the right track to a clean energy future. The oil and gas industry in this country is largely unregulated, despite its use of hazardous chemicals, the environmental and health effects of which have been minimally studied at best, despite gas operations existing close to public land and water supplies, and despite epidemiological studies showing people are getting sick in nearby areas.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process used to extract more oil and gas from underground reserves, relies on what companies call proprietary chemical mixes to enable and increase their access to wells. The chemicals have not been extensively studied because the companies are not required to disclose information about them—though that could change soon due to public pressure—but experience, unfortunately, has shown that these chemicals are anything but harmless, despite industry claims that the formulas are often 95 or even 99 percent water.

Fracking contaminates water in unpredictable (and barely studied) ways. Across the country, water polluted by fracking has killed cows, deer, and fish. Some of the chemicals used are known carcinogens, in some cases causing extremely rare types of tumors.

Looking for change

The currently pending FRAC Act could lead to some significant improvements in industry practices (and better alternatives do already exist), but it's been a long struggle, and much of the damage will be difficult, if not impossible, to undo. As far back as 2003, farmers in the Rocky Mountain region were complaining about the effects of fracking on their land and community. New Mexico rancher Chris Velasquez had led the Bureau of Land Management's Grazing/Oil and Gas Committee since 1996, but in 2003, after showing them "wells that were leaking chemicals, reserve pits that weren't lined," he told Sierra Magazine, he quit. "That liner is supposed to stop stuff from seeping into the ground, but it's all ripped. I showed them how they blocked my drainage when they bulldozed a drill pad and how my marsh area just dried up."

Toxic chemicals have been found spilled at drill sites, with no efforts to clean up the mess and often evidence showing little, if any, effort made in the first place to prevent such spills.

How did we get here?

The explanation for how such contamination has been allowed to happen is not a complicated one. The "Halliburton loophole," which the oil and gas exemption from the Safe Water Drinking Act is known as, was created in 2001, and actually undid an 11th Circuit Court of Appeals decision stipulating in 1997 that the EPA should regulate all "underground injection activities," including fracking. Data commissioned by the EPA itself in 2004 showed that fracking fluids follow natural fractures and can find their ways out of coal beds and into adjacent formations—yet no legal changes were made. And on top of the exemptions from basic environmental laws, the enforcement of what regulations do exist is often lacking. Back in Velasquez's community of Farmington, NM, for example, when he quit the commission, one inspector was available for every 1,500 wells, whereas the national average was one for every 350 wells.

New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana have recently been seeing the greatest oil and gas development, but with the industry expanding in over 30 states, the damage will certainly not stop in the Rocky Mountains. Check out NRDC's oil and gas well map to see how many wells exist in your state, and learn more about the issue from people who have been confronted by it first-hand. As Amy Mall a senior analyst for NRDC who is featured in Split Estate, reminds us, "Not only is this happening in communities, but sometimes it happens on your own property."