Drilling for natural gas is inherently risky, and should not be allowed in the New York City watershed or near any water supply in the state. That was the message Dusty Horwitt shared with citizens, scientists and county and municipal officials early last week.

Horwitt, senior counsel for the Environmental Working Group, addressed the risks of gas drilling and drinking water in a forum at the Unitarian Church on April 18. The following day he brainstormed with scientists and elected officials about strategies and the need for further research.

Marcellus shale is attractive to drillers because of the vast reservoir of natural gas trapped in the rock, Horwitt said. It’s getting it out of the ground that’s difficult; the rock must be fractured to allow the gas to migrate to the surface. That means mixing water with sand and chemicals and injecting the fluid into the well under high pressures , Horwitt noted.

“The water shooting out of Ithaca fire company hoses is 100 psi – enough to knock you over,” Horwitt said. “Frack pressure is hundreds of times more.” But the actual process of hydro-fracking a well presents only one avenue of risk for water contamination.

Horwitt and Steve Penningroth, who directs the Community Science Institute, outlined the numerous ways water might be contaminated during the drilling process. “Surface water is particularly at risk,” Penningroth said. Chemical spills could happen during transport to a drilling site, from leaks of chemicals stored at the drill site, or during transport of waste fluids away from the drilling site.

“If there were only a few hundred trucks involved, that would be one thing,” Penningroth said. “But we’re talking about thousands of truck trips.” He also raised concerns about dumping drilling flowback and brine into public wastewater treatment plants. Undisclosed fracking chemicals may not be detected by the plant operator and may end up in public water supplies.

Unknown fracking chemicals are only part of the problem. For the past year Horwitt has been investigating known petroleum-based fracking chemicals used by drilling companies. Federal exemptions allow companies to inject kerosene, mineral spirits and a number of other petroleum distillates into wells.

The problem, says Horwitt, is that these distillates often contain high levels of benzene, a carcinogen so toxic that EPA’s “safe level” for benzene in drinking water is only 5 parts per billion (ppb). That’s the equivalent of five drops of contaminant in 500 barrels of water.

Because of high benzene levels, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates diesel fuel under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). Companies wishing to inject the fuel as a friction-reducer must obtain the permits through the EPA.

“Ironically, these other petroleum distillates, chemicals they are allowed inject without permits, can contain 93 times more benzene than diesel,” Horwitt said. Petroleum naphtha, for example contains 93,000 ppm (parts per million) benzene — 18.6 million times higher than the EPA standards.

The drilling companies will tell you there is no problem, that these are the same petroleum distillates used in cosmetics, Horwitt said. “But these chemicals are banned from cosmetics in the European Union.”

Citing the DEC’s Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS), Horwitt noted that horizontal wells in Marcellus and other shales will require from one to eight million gallons of water and fracking chemicals. The companies insist that they only add small amounts into the frack fluid.

“Point zero eight (.08) percent,” Horwitt said. “It sounds like a miniscule amount, but do the math.” His calculations show that even at that low level, anywhere from 800-6,400 gallons of petroleum distillates could be injected for a single fracking job.

“That would be enough to contaminate more than 100 billion gallons of water, more than 10 times the amount the entire state of New York uses in a single day,” Horwitt noted.

Horwitt thinks the exemptions for oil and gas drilling should be eliminated, with permits required for any chemical drillers inject into the ground. “Why require a permit for only one type of petroleum chemical,” he asked.

Furthermore,when he asked DEC officials whether they checked to see what chemicals companies are injecting, the response was no. “They [drillers] could easily be injecting diesel,” Horwitt said. And indeed, Halliburton, Schlumberger and other companies have admitted doing just that in some states.

One of the ironies of drilling waste is that even though it contains substances that, under any other circumstance, would be considered hazardous, federal exemptions from the Resource Conserva-tion and Recovery Act (RCRA) allow it to be treated as “non-hazardous.”

The FRAC Act would help close that loophole, Horwitt told a small group of geologists, soil scientists and others. But the FRAC Act won’t address concerns about radioactive elements in the wastewater and drill cuttings. Local landfills, including the one Chemung County, are accepting cuttings from Marcellus wells in Pennsylvania.

Ellen Harrison, former director of the Cornell Waste Management Institute, expressed concern about radioactivity in drilling wastewater that is shipped to public treatment plants. The radioactive elements will be concentrated in the sludge, she noted. And that sludge may end up applied to farmland as a “beneficial use.”

Physicist Bill Podulka pointed out endocrine disruptors might slip through wastewater treatment plants undetected as well, ending up in the effluent. He wondered whether scientists might be able to develop cheaper and better testing technologies.

One of the problems is the lack of good science. “The 2004 EPA study on hydro-fracking was deeply flawed,” Horwitt said, and he suggested that New Yorlk scientists might want to create a group for those investigating issues related to natural gas drilling.

TAGGED WITH: gas drilling, hydrofracking, Marcellus Shale, safety, water