By Bill
Britton
May, 2015—The
oil and gas industry gave nearly $250,000 to each of the 62 senators who voted
in favor of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project this spring
(Maplight.org). The fossil fuel industry (oil, coal, natural gas) made total
campaign contributions of $40.8 million to members of the 113th
Congress. In 2014, the industry paid $144.9 million to lobbyists; in return,
the industry received $15.2 billion in subsidies (http://priceofoil.org). (By contrast,
National Park Service funding for 2014 totaled $2.6 billion.) And with the
Supreme Court’s obscene decision in the Citizens United case, the floodgates
have been opened: witness the Koch brothers pledge of $1 billion toward
Republican candidates for the 2016 election cycle.
When Edwin
Drake drilled his oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859, the modern oil
industry began. Demand accelerated with the introduction of the Model-T Ford in
1908 and led to seven decades of “easy” oil, easy in the sense that it was both
plentiful and readily accessed. Similarly, natural gas output ramped up to
satisfy demand from power companies, residences, and nitrate fertilizer conversion.
Today, much
of that easy oil and gas is gone, which has stimulated the installation of
ocean drilling platforms, tar-sands mining, and hydraulic fracturing or
“fracking,” which involves injecting water, sand, and various chemicals under
high pressure into shale deposits thousands of feet below the surface. The
fissures thus formed provide flow pathways for the trapped oil and natural gas.
To give you
an idea of the scale of fracking, the Bakken Shale formation alone, located in
North Dakota and Montana, is home to upwards of 15,000 fracking wellheads, with
another 20,000 planned. By mid 2014, there were over 1.1 million active oil and
gas wells of all types in the U.S. Some form of fracking is now used in 90% of
all new onshore oil and gas development, and currently accounts for 60% of
natural gas production in the U.S. The following photo is of a large fracking
field in Wyoming:
The American
Petroleum Institute (API) claims that “There are zero confirmed cases of
groundwater contamination connected to the fracturing operation in one million
wells hydraulically fractured over the last 60 years,” and that “Hydraulic
fracturing and horizontal drilling are safely
(my italics) unlocking vast U.S. reserves of oil and natural gas found in shale
and other tight-rock formations” (API website). However, all extraction methods
carry with them certain inherent risks to both the environment and life, as is
best illustrated by the 2010 explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling
platform in the Gulf. Flaring of waste gas is not an atypical oil field sight:
Along with
the issues of contamination and safety, a third must be included: the water required
for the fracking process. Most fracking takes place in water-stressed areas of
the world. In the U.S. and Canada, 55% of the wells hydraulically fractured are
in areas experiencing drought and 36% overlay regions with significant
groundwater depletion; in Colorado and California, 97% and 96% of the wells,
respectively, are in regions with high or extremely high water stress (2014
Ceres report).
Each fracked
well requires from 3 to 5 million gallons of water. Up to 80% of the water is
“flowback” and returns to the surface. The EPA does not regulate fracking
fluids (the mix is an industry secret) even when they enter our water supply
because in 2005, fracking was given an exemption from the Safe Drinking Water
Act, the so-called “Halliburton Loophole” (The Earth Institute, Columbia
University). A 2015 EPA report stated that groundwater contamination from
fracking is not widespread, but a number of instances have been documented.
Thus, there
are three primary sources of contamination: (1) from the fractured shale
leaking oil, gas, and drilling fluid into aquifers supplying drinking water;
(2) from fracking wastewater discharged at the surface and then into wastewater
injection wells, retention ponds, local streams, or treatment plants; and (3)
from natural gas (methane) and other volatiles released into the atmosphere
(Note that methane as a greenhouse gas is 25 times more potent than CO2). In
any case, the fluid stream contains proven carcinogenics, and in some cases,
high levels of radioactivity (The New
York Times, 02/27/2011).
An emerging
problem is the marked increase in the number of earthquakes in oil fields, not
from fracking itself but from the injection of wastewater flowback into deep
wells. The earthquake hot spots include portions of Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas,
Ohio, Arkansas, Alabama, Colorado, and New Mexico. Until recently, many of these
states were among those places least likely to have an earthquake (USGS report;
Washington Post, 07/03/2014). This is
an Oklahoma church damaged by a fracking quake:
The systemic
problem is the lack of uniform regulations, and uneven enforcement, at both the
state and federal levels. Too often, the regulators are former industry
executives whose interests do not always align with the common good. Plus, weak
campaign-finance laws have led to legislative “pollution.” But the overriding
problem is America’s insatiable demand for energy and the lack of a national
will to move toward alternative energy sources. We seem oblivious to the fact
that fossil fuels are a finite resource and will become exhausted in a century
or less, given the current rates of depletion. And as the oil and gas industry
drills deeper offshore, expands the mining of tar sands, and fracks shallower
shale deposits, the risk of environmental disaster can only increase.
