At a time when government and industry are trying to convince the British public that shale-based natural gas production will work in the UK, major research by leading academics in the US paints a disturbing picture.
A detailed paper just published by The Ecological Society of America (ESA) and readily available points to an industry and a regulatory system that need bringing to heel.
The paper discloses a mess … poor records, widespread and mass failure to report incidents leading to environmental damage and secrecy are just some of the issues.
It has multiple authors drawn from the Universities of Wisconsin, and Princeton in the US and the Simon Fraser University in Canada.
It is one that UKOOG and DECC for two should examine closely. Just last month, UKOOG published a survey that claimed more than half the British public is in favour of shale gas extraction, though the sample size is on 4,000.
The ESA paper states: “Currently, the frequency and extent of freshwater contamination due to spills, accidents, and violations is poorly quantified.
“Of the 24 US states with active shale gas reservoirs, only Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Texas maintain public records of spills or violations for oil and gas drilling operations.
“We examined the frequency and nature of violations in the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s (PADEP’s) oil and gas management
compliance-reporting database. A total of 523 violations at 279 permitted wells were detected in 2013, representing 2.5% of inspections (12,452 total) and 5% of wells (5,580 total).”
The three most common violations included:
• Failure to properly store, transport, process, or dispose of residual waste;
• Failure to adopt required or prescribed pollution prevention measures;
• And failure to plug a well upon abandonment.
Spills were detected at 37% of wells found in violation, though they were generally small. The average spill was 265 litres though there were nine spills of over 3500l.
“Spills typically occurred on the well pad, with nearly 20% of reports documenting contamination of land or surface water. Location (on-pad
versus off-pad) was specified in fewer than half of the reports (42%), and spatial
extent of contamination was rarely (5%) described
“In addition to the lack of data describing the nature and extent of spills, spill frequency was probably underestimated.”
Singling out the State of Pennsylvania, the paper states: “Many reports were ambiguous, and companies routinely violated Pennsylvania’s reporting requirement (only 59% of documented spills were reported). Collectively, poor data quality and lack of consistent reporting represent a major obstacle to understanding the impacts of chemical contamination from shale development.”
As in the case of contamination from spills and accidents, it emerged that lack of data on wastewater disposal also impedes environmental assessment.
A significant number of research sources say that waste volume, composition
and fate vary among drilling companies, states.
Industry-reported data from PADEP revealed a 570% increase in wastewater production since 2004 from development of the Marcellus Shale.
Drill cuttings were principally disposed of in landfills.
Wastewater (that is, recycled fluid) was most frequently treated at industrial facilities or injected into deep wells (a large proportion of wastewater was reused prior to disposal.
The ESA paper states: “Risk of waste migration from deep injection wells to freshwater aquifers is poorly understood and, notably, deep well injection has been linked to increased seismic activity.
“Containment ponds frequently serve as temporary wastewater storage at drilling sites, and these vary substantially in structural integrity.
“Inadequately designed ponds can overflow during heavy rain, may leak
as liners degrade, are accessible to wildlife, and are potential sources of air pollution as chemicals volatilise.”
Picking up on the Pennsylvania situation again, particularly the 2013 well inspection data, it was found that there were “numerous violations” regarding storage pits and tanks not constructed with sufficient capacity to contain
“pollutional substances”, indicating that some containment facilities fail to prevent escape of contaminants.
“Inappropriate management of waste products, including the direct discharge of industrial waste into streams, comprised 34% of the total violations issued
by PADEP,” says the paper.
“There is virtually no empirical information about the biotic risks associated with disposal of produced water and drill cuttings.”
Given this paucity of data regarding the pathways and consequences of environmental contamination from waste storage and disposal, this is seen as a high priority for further research.
And a “critical first step” in this research is improving basic reporting to generate accurate data describing waste composition and fate.
The ESA paper says too that, for each method of wastewater disposal, future research should determine the concentration of toxins released into the
environment, exposure duration and potential pathways, such as ingestion, inhalation, or contact, and the effects on aquatic and terrestrial life.
And it calls for a review to discover whether current technologies are capable
of removing contaminants and what site characteristics enhance or preclude effective remediation.
Disclosure of fracturing chemicals
Although not a biotic impact on its own, it has emerged that the lack of disclosure regarding many fracturing chemicals can hamper the ability of researchers to understand, predict, and mitigate adverse environmental effects.
Indeed certain chemicals in fracturing fluids are classified as confidential business information under Section 14(c) of the US Toxic Substances
Control Act (US EPA 2012).
To be fair, however, the research notes that many companies have voluntarily
disclosed non-proprietary fluid components, and ten states currently participate in the FracFocus (www.fracfocus.org) US national registry as a means of chemical disclosure.
Says the paper: “We investigated the proportion of proprietary components for 150 randomly selected wells representing three of the top producing states … Texas, Pennsylvania, and North Dakota … in the registry.
“Overall, 67% of wells in our sample were fractured with fluid containing at least one undisclosed chemical, and 37% were fractured with five or more undisclosed chemicals.
“Some wells (18%) were fractured with a complex fluid containing 10 or more undisclosed components. Importantly, many disclosed chemicals lacked Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) numbers or concentration values.
“Most wells (82%) were fractured with fluid containing either undisclosed components or disclosed chemicals lacking this information.”
The researchers warn that chemicals that are innocuous to humans, such as some salts, can be lethal to freshwater organisms.
They say too that no chemical information was provided for produced water,
making it impossible to formulate these reclaimed fluids for experimental research.
Moreover, a centralised source of chemical information would greatly facilitate research. The current FracFocus registry has major limitations, including:
incomplete state participation; failure to consistently provide concentrations and CAS numbers for disclosed chemicals; and non-disclosure of a substantial proportion of chemicals.
The paper states that “full chemical disclosure of fracturing fluid and
wastewater is essential for understanding the associated risks to biota, including the effects of leaks, spills, and direct terrestrial or aquatic application.”
Much earlier this year, the UK’s Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM) warned in a report: “Accurate baseline environmental monitoring is essential to assess the impact of shale gas extraction on the environment and any implications for public health and should begin immediately.
“In both Australia and the US, where the regulatory framework developed at the same time as the industry, no environmental baseline was established which has led to what amounts to conjecture on both sides of an extremely polarised debate.
“Massachusetts Institute of Technology reviewed 10,000 wells and found that of 43 pollution incidents related to natural gas operations, 50 per cent were related to the contamination of groundwater due to drilling operations and 33% due to surface spills of stored fracking fluids and flowback water.
However the knowledge gap widening as exploitation of resources accelerates
In the US, natural-gas production from shale rock has increased by more than 700% since 2007. Yet scientists still do not fully understand the industry’s effects on nature and wildlife, according to a report in the US journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
In short, gas extraction continues to vastly outpace scientific examination, which means the knowledge gap is growing.
A team of eight conservation biologists from three North American universities including world renowned Princeton, say that determining the environmental impact of gas-drilling sites – such as chemical contamination from spills, well-casing failures and other accidents – must be a top research priority.
They want scientists, industry representatives and policymakers to cooperate on determining – and minimising – the damage inflicted on the natural world by gas operations such as hydraulic fracturing.
“A major environmental concern, hydraulic fracturing releases natural gas from shale by breaking the rock up with a high-pressure blend of water, sand and other chemicals, which can include carcinogens and radioactive substances,” Princeton says in a statement signalling the research.
“We can’t let shale development outpace our understanding of its environmental impacts,” said Morgan Tingley, a postdoctoral research associate in the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy in Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
“The past has taught us that environmental impacts of large-scale development and resource extraction, whether coal plants, large dams or biofuel monocultures, are more than the sum of their parts.”
The researchers found that there are significant “knowledge gaps” when it comes to direct and quantifiable evidence of how the natural world responds to shale-gas operations.
Critically, they warn that a major impediment to research has been the lack of accessible and reliable information on spills, wastewater disposal and the composition of fracturing fluids.
Of the 24 American states with active shale-gas reservoirs, only five – Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Texas – maintain public records of spills and accidents, the researchers report.
“The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s website is one of the best sources of publicly available information on shale-gas spills and accidents in the nation,” said first author Sara Souther, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Even so, gas companies failed to report more than one-third of spills in the last year.
“How many more unreported spills occurred, but were not detected during well inspections?
“We need accurate data on the release of fracturing chemicals into the environment before we can understand impacts to plants and animals.”
One of the greatest threats to animal and plant life identified in the study is the impact of rapid and widespread shale development, which has disproportionately affected rural and natural areas.
A single gas well results in the clearance of 3.7 to 7.6 acres (1.5 to 3.1 hectares) of vegetation, and each well contributes to a collective mass of air, water, noise and light pollution that has or can interfere with wild animal health, habitats and reproduction, the researchers report.
“If you look down on a heavily ‘fracked’ landscape, you see a web of well pads, access roads and pipelines that create islands out of what was, in some cases, contiguous habitat,” Souther said.
“What are the combined effects of numerous wells and their supporting infrastructure on wide-ranging or sensitive species, like the pronghorn antelope or the hellbender salamander?”
Last month, Energy warned that landscapes where shale gas extraction has assumed an industrial scale are suffering from “shale pox”.
The chemical makeup of fracturing fluid and wastewater is often unknown.
The authors of the report reviewed chemical-disclosure statements for 150 wells in three of the top gas-producing states and found that an average of two out of every three wells were fractured with at least one undisclosed chemical.
“The exact effect of fracturing fluid on natural water systems as well as drinking water supplies remains unclear even though improper wastewater disposal and pollution-prevention measures are among the top state-recorded violations at drilling sites,” they note.
“Some of the wells in the chemical disclosure registry were fractured with fluid containing 20 or more undisclosed chemicals,” said senior author Kimberly Terrell, a researcher at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. “This is an arbitrary and inconsistent standard of chemical disclosure.”
In August last year, a call for comprehensive European regulations to control the environmental impact of waste water from shale fracking was made by NEL (the former National Engineering Laboratory) and the UK’s National Measurement System.
We reported in Energy at the time that, based on current practice, the total volume of water required to fracture a typical well can be up to 20,000cu.m, which can result in up to 300 truckloads of water having to be transported to a well pad for mixing with additives prior to injection downhole.
NEL warned that the resultant waste-water may contain significant levels of contaminants including salts, oil, chemicals, heavy metals and even radioactive materials.
NEL stated too that shale gas waste water management is complex; it cannot simply be discharged into watercourses. Also, unless effectively managed, water withdrawal in certain areas may depress aquifers and affect ground water flows.
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