We’re still waiting on EPA’s Hydrofracturing Study Report. While we are waiting I’ll go over some of the studies EPA is conducting according to their Study Plan and 2012 Hydraulic Fracturing Study Progress Report. In my last post on hydrofracturing, I discussed two types of case studies that EPA contemplated conducting.  The only case studies which we will probably see in their upcoming Hydrofracturing Study Report are what EPA is calling the “retrospective” studies.

EPA’s “retrospective” studies are case studies of hydrofractured areas that have complaints of groundwater contamination. EPA’s five case studies are from some of the largest oil and gas shale developments. Who hasn’t heard of the Bakken shale in North Dakota by now or the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania? These are the big new developments in oil and gas that are helping to reduce the price per barrel of oil and producing the cheap natural gas we see on the east coast. It can’t be but five years ago I was reading in the paper about peak oil – the idea that the oil industry was reaching the peak of oil production and would soon run out of sources for hydrocarbon production. Then voila an existing technology – hydrofracture is modified to be used in conjunction with horizontal drilling to shatter shale and free up the gas and oil within. And suddenly everything is changed. Peak oil is dead. At least for the next fifty years or so I would think.

EPA is conducting case studies of the Bakken Shale in Dunn County, North Dakota where a blowout in 2010 resulted in an uncontrolled release of hydraulic fracturing fluid and water from the formation. Water from the formation is simply water already existing within the rock containing the oil and gas. They are often brines and exist most everywhere there is oil and gas. Some people also call them produced waters. The formation water comes up along with the oil and gas. It then has to be separated from the oil and gas and disposed of.

EPA is conducting two case studies in the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania: one in Bradford County, Pennsylvania and the other in Washington County, Pennsylvania. For those of you with some historical knowledge, you’ll remember the first oil well in the United States was drilled in the 1850’s in Titusville, Pennsylvania in Crawford County. Washington County is south of there and Bradford County is way east of there. There are plenty of other counties in Pennsylvania where the Marcellus Shale is being developed for gas production but the two case studies EPA chose were based on homeowner complaints about changes in the water quality from their household wells after hydrofracturing of gas wells.

There is also a case study in the Barnett Shale in Wise County, Texas. The Barnett is Texas’s big new oil and gas play. I don’t know much about the Barnett Shale but it is in central Texas. Texas as we know is a huge historic and current producer of oil and gas. I briefly lived in the Fort Worth area when I was young and what I remember about it was the aromatic smell of the oil pumps that were as common as dog walkers are in my current neighborhood. You’d think people would be used to oil and gas development in Texas, but interestingly enough the National Science Foundation did a series of seminars on hydrofracturing a few years back and I got to listen to a lot of people from Texas complaining about oil development in their suburban neighborhoods and to local government officials in Dallas and Ft. Worth who are having to address the increased traffic and noise from drilling and development. Ever heard a compressor pumping oil? It can be really loud.

The other study is of a coal bed methane project in Las Animas and Huerfano Counties, Colorado. I’m not really interested in coal bed methane so I’m not going to write about that study.

If we don’t get a release soon on the EPA Study Report, I’ll do a few more posts in the next few weeks with more details of the four case studies that involve shale oil and gas.

While we’re waiting for the Environmental Protection Agency to issue their report on hydraulic fracturing, I thought I’d write some more detailed posts on how the Agency is approaching their overall study to determine whether there are impacts to drinking water. I read through their work plan again and their 2012 progress report on their research.

In many ways science reminds me of a good who done it. You take a lot of facts, put them together, form a theory, and then track down all your leads to see if your theory is right. But instead of sending the butler to jail, you publish your work in a peer reviewed journal. So how do you prove or disprove that hydrofracturing is resulting in contaminated water wells. Well one way is to look at areas where there have been complaints of water well contamination and try to look at all possible avenues and sources for the contamination. Forensics can include sampling of domestic and commercial water wells to analyze for additives found in fracturing fluid, assessing oil and gas production wells in the area to see if cementing and other groundwater protections are intact and working as engineered, examining whether there are faults, fractures and abandoned oil and gas wells in the area through which fluids might have traveled, and identifying potential other sources for contamination like agriculture or water well treatments. Based on that information you form a site conceptual model and apply numerical models to determine the likelihood of your concepts.

Another way to prove or disprove whether hydrofracturing is resulting in contaminated wells is to look at an area where a new well is going to be hydrofractured. You characterize the area by taking samples from newly installed monitoring wells and domestic water wells before the fracturing process take place. You examine the processes involved in constructing the well pad. You examine the data from the well logs to make sure the cement is all properly set. You examine how the well performs during the fracturing process. And you examine the well after the fracturing process. Then you go back and sample all the monitoring wells and water wells you previously sampled. And you continue to sample those wells over time.

EPA is doing both of these methods. They are busy with five areas that have current complaints of water well contamination. They are also examining and working with some oil and gas companies to find some sites that might be eligible for study before and after hydrofracturing occurs. EPA originally had two of these types of sites selected but it looks like coordination of the studies has been difficult because of scheduling conflicts. EPA is well underway studying the five areas with complaints of contamination. EPA is calling them “retrospective” studies. But EPA is behind on studying sites that have not been hydrofractured yet. These sites are being called “prospective” studies.  EPA anticipates data from prospective studies will be published much later than their other findings.  So we probably won’t see that information in EPA’s upcoming 2015 report.

I finally had a chance to listen to EPA’s webinar on their report “Analysis of Hydraulic Fracturing Fluid Data from the FracFocus Chemical Disclosure Registry 1.0”. If you read my April 6, 2015 post on the report, than you can skip the hour long webinar which is located at (http://www2.epa.gov/hfstudy/epa-analysis-fracfocus-10-data-webinar-presentation) because there’s not much information in the webinar other than what I already covered in my post. However, EPA did give a timeframe for when we can expect their final assessment report of hydraulic fracturing. EPA didn’t give a precise date but said it would be issued later in the Spring of 2015.

I guess I should have paid more attention when I attended those webinars that EPA held regarding their Hydrofracturing Study. Their study is huge and wide-ranging. It is certainly about more than simply what underground mechanisms could transport natural gas and hydrofracturing fluid to people’s domestic water wells. And after reading the project plan and the 2012 update on research, I can see why they haven’t published a final report. This is an enormous endeavor. EPA does say though, that they are close to getting a draft report out for peer review and public review. They were supposed to have a final report at the end of 2014, but I think that was very optimistic considering the scientific studies they had planned.

In addition to looking at subsurface mechanisms for contamination of drinking water wells by hydrofracturing activities, EPA is also looking at potential routes of contamination caused by surface spills of hydrofracturing fluids and what is called flushback water. Flushback water is simply the hydrofracturing fluid coming back up the cased hole once the fracture of the oil and gas formation is completed.  It makes sense that EPA is looking at potential for contamination of drinking water aquifers from spills of flushback water. It is certainly a likely scenario if drill pads are not bermed or if fluids fill an unlined area.

And you know that hydrofracturing fluid. Well it is more than 98% water. That water has to come from somewhere, so EPA is researching impacts to available water resources in an area. This makes sense as well, since the amount of water involved is not trivial. EPA says up to 13 million gallons can be needed to conduct hydrofracturing. Of course the exact amount of water is going to be variable depending on a lot of engineering factors. It might not be a big concern say in Pennsylvania where there is a lot of water available. But think about Texas and North Dakota. Those are some pretty dry states that have serious oil and gas development. The good thing is that many oil and gas companies have gone to treating and recycling water that they use for hydrofracture, so it will be interesting to see what EPA’s final conclusions are. And in all fairness, other energy development, such as solar power, uses a lot of water in dry environments as well.

What I find really interesting though is EPA’s proposed research on treatment and disposal of hydraulic fracture wastewater. A lot of wastewater from hydrofracturing is disposed of through underground injection, a permitted activity under Underground Injection Control regulations. But a good bit of wastewater in Pennsylvania has been disposed through Publically Owned Treatment Works (POTWs). Those are your local city and county treatment plants that treat mostly sewer water. EPA will also be looking at Commercially Owned Treatment Plants where more of your industrial wastewater gets treated. Why the EPA interest, you ask? Here’s the deal. Some people are concerned that POTWs are unable to adequately treat hydrofracture wastewater. The wastewater contains a lot of chloride and bromide and what is termed NORM or naturally occurring radioactive material. NORM is not an additive. NORM comes from the formation being fractured and comes back up with the fracturing fluid. So if it is not being treated it goes out into the river at the POTWs discharge point. Downstream from the POTWs are city and county intakes for public water supply. The river water captured for water supply is treated for public consumption. EPA wants to see if the treatment plants for the public water supply are capable of treating the river water to EPA’s drinking water standards.

More about these different studies in posts to come.

We’ve all seen the pictures in the paper or on the TV news. A homeowner opens their kitchen tap or outdoor faucet, takes a lighter, and sets the water on fire. Very cool, huh?  But it’s probably not very cool to the homeowner. The homeowner has natural gas in their water. They are worried that the natural gas got into their well from a process called hydraulic fracturing or hydrofracturing for short (some people even shorten the term to just fracking). Hydrofracturing is being widely used to develop oil and gas resources in what are called “tight” shales. In addition to natural gas, homeowners also worry that chemicals used during hydrofracturing may end up in their drinking water wells. 

I’m a geologist and have worked in the environmental field for some 30 years. So I get the question all the time from people. Is it really possible for the hydrofracturing process to contaminate people’s water wells with natural gas? My off the cuff response has always been, oh no, I don’t see how it is possible. Oil and gas development is really deep – a mile or more beneath the surface. Most groundwater wells are much shallower. There are miles of rock between where the oil and gas is located and where the groundwater is. And on top of that, oil and gas companies use cement to protect groundwater resources during hydrofracturing. As they are drilling, they insert steel casing into the hole. To protect groundwater they cement the area between the rock and the casing.

 But what about those pictures of burning water, people ask? In areas where there are lots of oil and gas resources, water may have natural methane in it. Maybe the homeowner just never tried to light their water before. I further explain that in the 1800’s drillers often located oil resources from the natural oil seeps they would find at the surface. Scientists have even documented methane seeps on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico where we all know there is a ton of oil and gas wells.

The problem with many scientists like me is that we often give these off the cuff assessments based on limited knowledge. I’ve been a little uncomfortable about my response because frankly I haven’t followed the science on the issue. So I decided, if I’m going to provide some expertise on the subject instead of admitting I just don’t know, I had better inform myself about the science. Now the good thing is that I had been following the hydrofracturing controversy (just a little bit) a few years back and I know that the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy and the United States Geological Survey have been working on a series of studies to answer the questions so many people have about hydrofracturing. Like how effective is that cementing in preventing gas and hydrofracturing fluid from getting into groundwater? What are some of the ways that gas and hydrofracturing fluids could get from those deep rocks where the oil and gas is being developed into people’s much shallower water wells? Are gases and fluids migrating upward along faults and fractures through thousands of feet of rock? Or are those fluids and gases coming up through old abandoned oil and gas wells that were never properly cemented or plugged?

 It’s been several years since EPA, DOE and the USGS embarked on these studies. I think it was in 2011 that I first heard about them. So I thought what the heck, I’ll just get onto EPA’s website and see what they have to say. I’m sure they will have issued some scientific reports by now. I’ll read them and then the next person who asks me about the possibility of the hydrofracturing process contaminating groundwater will get a better informed answer. I’ll let you know what I find out.