Documented cases of gas escaping into drinking water -- not just
in
Pennsylvania but across North America -- is raising new concerns about
the hidden costs of natural gas drilling. In Dimick PA stray methane
gas worked into tiny crevasses in the rock, leaking upward into
the aquifer and slipping quietly into a residential well. Then,
according to the state's working theory, a motorized pump turned on in
the well house, flicked a spark and caused a New Year's morning blast
that tossed aside a concrete slab weighing several thousand pounds. If
the fumes that built up in the well house had collected in the home's
basement, the explosion could have been fatal to anyone in the house.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection charged Cabot
Oil & Gas with two violations that it says caused the
contamination, theorizing that gas leaked from the well casing into
fractures underground. A string of documented cases of gas escaping into drinking water -- not just in Pennsylvania and the Northeast but across North America -- is raising new concerns about the hidden costs of this economic tide and strengthening arguments across the country that drilling can put drinking water at risk. The industry defends its construction technology, saying it keeps gas and drilling fluids -- including any chemicals used for hydraulic fracturing -- safely trapped in layers of steel and concrete. When an accident happens, the blame can usually be traced to a lone bad apple -- some contractor who didn't follow regulations, they say. Those arguments helped the gas drilling industry win rare exemptions from the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act when Congress enacted the 2005 Energy Policy Act. An examination of the methane problem in western Colorado is offering a strong scientific repudiation of that argument. Released in December by Garfield County, one of the most intensely drilled areas in the nation, the report concludes that gas drilling has degraded water in dozens of water wells. The three-year study used sophisticated scientific techniques to match methane from water to the same rock layer where gas companies are drilling -- a mile and a half underground. The scientists didn't determine which gas wells caused the problem or say exactly how the gas reached the water, but they indicated with more clarity than ever before that a system of interconnected natural fractures and faults could stretch from deep underground gas layers to the surface. They called for more research into how the industry's practice of forcefully fracturing those deep layers might increase the risk of contaminants making their way up into an aquifer. Back To Home Page |