Health Impacts of Gas Drilling Examined “If tapping Marcellus Shale were like tapping maple trees we would not be here,” Dr. William Klepack said, opening a program on the health impacts of gas drilling. Close to 100 people filled the Forum room at Tompkins Cortland Community College last Tuesday night to hear what experts in chemistry and endocrinology had to say on the topic.
Klepack, a Dryden physician and medical director of the Tompkins County Health Department, moderated the discussion. In any industrial pursuit people and communities must weigh the benefits and risks, he said. “Right now, natural gas drilling holds out benefits for landowners in terms of income and jobs. But does drilling provide these at an acceptable risk?”
Ron Bishop, a biochemist SUNY Oneonta, notes that chemicals pumped into the ground to break Marcellus shale are a concern. But the shale formation itself contains heavy metals, radioactive elements, salts and gases.
“Shales, more than any other kind of rock, selectively trap heavy metals such as lead, arsenic, barium, strontium, and chromium,” Bishop said. Soluble elements have, over the past 350 million years or so, leached into the water trapped in the rock formation creating extremely salty “brine” that is produced during gas extraction. Bishop also noted that the radioactive elements uranium, thorium and radium are found in Marcellus shales as well as the brines.
“So even if you don’t add any chemicals, what comes out is a hazardous material,” Bishop said.
However, state environmental law defines it as a “general industrial waste”. That means wastewater from drilling does not have to be handled as carefully as wastewater produced by other industries.
Recent tests by the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) showed that in some Marcellus wastewater, radioactive materials occur naturally at levels 250 times EPA allowable levels and thousands of times higher than levels allowed in drinking water. But natural gas drillers aren’t even required to test for radioactivity, Bishop said.
Because Marcellus shale is a relatively thin layer, only a couple hundred feet thick, gas drillers need to use horizontal drilling to maximize the amount of shale they fracture. Horizontal drilling means more water and more chemicals – about 10 to 30 tons of chemicals, Bishop estimated.
These chemicals include biocides to kill subsurface microorganisms, surfactants to keep the drilling mud slippery, corrosion inhibitors to stave off the effects of salts — some 300 chemicals in all. And more than 75 percent of them are hazardous to human health.
“Hydrofracking is not the bogeyman,” Bishop said. “You’re more likely to have problems with transporting the chemicals”
In any industry accidents happen. In the U.S., if drinking water is contaminated people must prove that a company polluted their wells. It’s not like that in the European Union, said Thomas Shelley, a chemical safety and hazardous materials specialist. “They have adopted the precautionary principle and the burden of proof falls on those who advocate the action.” Based on that principle the EU banned hundreds of chemicals found in cosmetics and other consumer items, chemicals still found in products sold in the U.S., Shelley said.
A big problem with fracking chemicals, said Shelley, is “transparency.” While the DEC lists 207 different fracking products in its draft Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS), only 48 of these have partial disclosure of their chemical constituents.
“The names of products really don’t let you know what’s in them,” Shelley pointed out. “Opti-Kleen? That sounds like something you could clean your contacts with,” he said. Many of the chemicals in these products have severe effects at low doses. One of these is 2- butoxyethanol, a solvent used in industrial cleaning solutions that, at doses as low as 0.02 parts per million, affects the endocrine system.
Another problem is that fracking chemicals injected underground into the shale, where the temperature is between 120 to 140 degrees, react, forming new chemicals. Shelley cited trihalomethanes; these chemicals are not present in the fracking fluids, but are formed underground.
The health impacts of drilling go beyond the fracking chemicals, Shelley said. The diesel and natural gas emissions from trucks, compressors, pumps and other equipment contains a complex of benzenes, toluene, and xylene as well as other volatile organic compounds. Drilling activity and traffic create high levels of dust, and methane from venting and flaring contributes to the air pollution. These chemicals may combine with nitrogen oxides to form ground level ozone.
The EPA recently proposed lowering the allowable level of nitrogen oxides and ground level ozone to protect human health, Shelley said. But ozone can also damage forage and food crops, decreasing yields in alfalfa, grapes, pumpkins and leafy vegetables.
Endocrine disruptors are manmade chemicals that, when absorbed into the body, mimic hormones or block hormones and disrupt the body’s normal function. Hormones are involved in reproduction, growth, development and metabolism, said Adam Law, a physician who specializes in endocrinology. It doesn’t take a lot of hormone to an effect on health.
So, too, it takes only a small quantity of endocrine disrupting chemical to impact health – concentrations on the order of parts per trillion are enough to alter gene expression or cause birth defects or cancer.
Now it’s time for the gas drilling industry to disclose what goes into their fracking fluids so state regulators can assess risk and study future effects, Law said. “We need to know what’s going into the ground and we need to know whether we can deal with the wastewater.”
