NG - more signs of desperation - the Rockies as sacrifice zone
Daniel J. Lavigne
Bill exempts disputed drilling process
Despite water-pollution fears, technique would not be regulated by feds
AP / Amy Conn-Gutierrez Sunday, September 07, 2003
By Mike Soraghan, Denver Post Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - Tucked inside an 800-page energy bill winding its way through
Congress is a short
section that would exempt from federal regulation a lucrative gas-drilling
process perfected
by the energy company Vice President Dick Cheney once ran.
The exemption, while it likely wouldn't benefit Cheney financially, is
testament to the
support that the oil and gas industry enjoys in the White House and the Republican-controlled
Congress.
The process, widely used across Colorado and the rest of the West, injects
diesel fuel,
hydrochloric acid or other additives into the ground to help boost production.
Environmentalists say that could put drinking water at risk, and they want
federal officials
to have regulatory power to prevent problems and step in if water is
contaminated. Alabama
residents say the technique, called hydraulic fracturing, fouled
drinking-water wells and
unleashed a stench in homes.
"Waiting for damage to occur was not the intent of the Safe Drinking Water
Act," said David
Ludder of the Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation. "(State) agencies
have an interest in
not finding contamination. They're interested in production, not protecting
drinking water."
Ludder in 1997 persuaded a federal appeals court to require the fluids used
for hydraulic
fracturing in Alabama to meet federal drinking-water standards.
Industry officials want to prevent the spread of federal regulation to places
such as the
Rocky Mountain West, a key region in President Bush's energy plan because 85
percent of the
growth in production of coal-bed methane gas is expected to take place here in
the next 10
years.
The officials say there's no proof that hydraulic fracturing endangers
drinking water and that
regulation would drive up the price of gas for no good reason.
Officials of Halliburton Co., a Houston-based oil and gas giant that Cheney
was running when
Bush picked him as his running mate in 2000, say regulation is a threat to
profits. The
company fought regulation of hydraulic fracturing when Cheney was chief executive.
After Cheney took office and chaired the White House energy task force, his
final report
touted hydraulic fracturing as a way to deliver more clean-burning natural gas
to the nation,
although he did not ask Congress for an exemption. It left out any potential environmental
hazards.
"To the best of our knowledge, there have been no documented cases of
environmental damage
caused by hydraulic fracturing - nada, zip, zero. That's a pretty good track
record," said Ken
Johnson, spokesman for Rep. Billy Tauzin, a Louisiana Republican who chairs
the House Energy
and Commerce Committee and who wants to eliminate federal regulation of
hydraulic fracturing.
But Steve Weiss of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan watchdog
group, said
Halliburton and the oil and gas industry are enjoying the benefits of a
Republican White House
and Congress, to which they gave significant financial contributions.
"Campaign contributions are given with the intent of getting favors large and
small," Weiss
said. "The industry has had many of its issues addressed."
Cheney has sold his holdings in Halliburton, the world's biggest practitioner
of hydraulic
fracturing, but still receives some fixed financial payments from the company.
Analysts say
the process represents about 5 percent of the company's $12 billion total business.
Industry advocates point to an Environmental Protection Agency study that
concluded hydraulic
fracturing is unlikely to pollute drinking water.
"Those findings could not be more clear," said William F. Whitsit, president
of the Domestic
Petroleum Council. "EPA strongly stated that after looking at all incidents,
there wasn't a
single one that could be attributed to hydraulic fracturing."
That study, a two-year peer-reviewed inquiry, was opposed at first by the oil
and gas
industry. Now the industry uses the study, still in draft stage and being
refined, to argue
for total exemption.
But the study also recommends that the industry stop pumping diesel fuel into
the ground as
part of hydraulic fracturing. And it notes that some companies drilled new
water wells or
provided drinking water to homeowners who said their water was contaminated by methane
production.
Those red flags, environmentalists say, indicate hydraulic fracturing might be dangerous.
In addition, they say, the EPA study didn't test groundwater itself; instead,
it relied
largely on the findings of state oil and gas commissions, traditionally
dominated by industry.
In Colorado, for example, five of the seven members of the Oil and Gas
Conservation Commission
are from the industry.
Critics also said that, using the report's own figures, hydraulic fracturing
puts the
carcinogen benzene into groundwater at levels higher than drinking water
standards allow.
And all experts who will review the study are from the oil and gas field. One
is an employee
of Halliburton. None has a background in toxicology or public health.
EPA officials said the peer-review panel doesn't need health officials because
that's the
expertise of the EPA. And they said the study's preliminary phase showed so
little risk from
fracturing that there was no need for the EPA to do its own testing. The
agency said its own
initial calculations for benzene were too high.
"We don't believe a national regulation is warranted because the risk appears
to be low," said
Ben Grumbles, deputy assistant administrator for the EPA's Office of Water.
Still, the EPA wants to retain some of the control Congress seems ready to abandon.
"The members might want to consider a situation that if there were instances
of endangerment
on a case-by-case basis, we could step in," Grumbles said.
Hydraulic fracturing is a process designed to squeeze more gas out of the ground.
Crews pump water, sand and chemicals into the earth at high pressure to open
fissures in the
rock and let gas flow toward the well.
It's common in some coal-bed methane operations, such as those in Alabama and
the San Juan
Basin in the Durango-Four Corners area of Colorado. It's also used in
conventional gas
operations in Western states such as Colorado, where much gas is trapped in
"tight sands" that
are less porous than most formations.
Although geologists for years have studied hydraulic fracturing, first used in
1949, to
increase gas production, the EPA study says there is "very little documented
research" about
its impact on drinking water.
Industry officials say the fracturing fluids are no more dangerous than ice
cream, because the
same thickening agent - guar gum - is used in both.
But the ice cream thickener often is mixed with diesel fuel, according to the
EPA study,
because it costs less than mixing it with water. The fluid also can contain
hazardous bacteria
killers and the chemical thiourea, which, according to the U.S. Occupational
Safety and Health
Administration, can cause goiter, and liver, blood and respiratory damage, and
is "a possible
human carcinogen."
Environmental activists say the cracks made by hydraulic fracturing allow the
chemicals to
migrate toward drinking water.
Hydraulic fracturing, Peggy Hocutt said, fouled her drinking water in the
west-central Alabama
town of Adger in 1989, after a crew fractured a coal-bed methane well.
"I got huge black gobs of jelly, and the odor would knock you down," Hocutt
said. "This
nagging fear was always there about what we'd been exposed to."
She said she suspects contaminated well water contributed to the serious
health problems she
has had since, including the colon disorder diverticulitis, bladder infections
and breast
cancer.
Across the Black Warrior River, Cynthia McMillian's parents were having
similar problems at
their home 20 miles north of Tuscaloosa.
A gas company put a well 700 feet from their water well. One day in September
1989, they said,
their faucet started to hiss, and the water ran cloudy and oily for two days.
"You turn on the tap, and it's coming out black," McMillian said.
After others also complained about methane in their wells, Alabama's top oil
and gas
regulator, state geologist Don Oltz, said the residents were violating the law
by wastefully
letting the gas escape through their water wells.
In the Four Corners region, Colorado and New Mexico residents have reported
problems with
methane in their well water and wells that dry up near coal-bed methane
operations. The oil
and gas board of Colorado, where about 90 percent of gas wells are fractured,
says the
problems can't be attributed to new gas development.
In 1995, the Clinton administration's EPA chief, Carol Browner, said there was
no reason to
regulate hydraulic fracturing because there was no evidence it had
contaminated drinking
water.
But in 1999, EPA officials dealing with the Alabama controversy wrote, "Unless proper
precautions are taken, hydraulic fracturing has the potential to endanger
(underground sources
of drinking water)."
Halliburton, one of only three global companies that perform hydraulic
fracturing, is the only
one lobbying on the issue.
Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall offered only this statement: "We are
following this issue
along with many others in the energy bill."
But in testimony in Alabama in 1999, Halliburton's vice president for
production enhancement,
Jerry Borges, said federal regulation would do little to protect the environment.
"It also violates the intent of the Safe Drinking Water Act by impeding the
development of oil
and gas production," he said.
When Bush, a former oilman like Cheney, took office, hydraulic fracturing
became a hot topic.
Cheney's energy task force discussed fracturing in an April 3, 2001, meeting
in Cheney's
ceremonial office, according to a General Accounting Office report. Cheney
won't say if he or
his staff met with Halliburton, and he has gone to court to block release of
any such
information to the public.
The result, the Bush administration's National Energy Plan, described
hydraulic fracturing as
"one of the fastest-growing sources of gas production."
Cheney spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise emphasized that the report did not ask
Congress for
action.
"It was only cited as an example of a new technology," Millerwise said. "There
was no mention
of fracturing in recommendations sent to the Hill."
The report anticipated "added controls" for hydraulic fracturing, but that now
seems unlikely.
Tauzin, the Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, included the total federal
exemption in
his energy bill, which has passed the House. It's likely to be supported by Republican
senators who will help write the final version.
Yet there hasn't been a hearing in Congress to examine whether hydraulic
fracturing can
pollute drinking water or threaten health.
Halliburton made more than $700,000 in political contributions since 1998,
according to the
nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, with 95 percent of the money going
to Republicans.
The oil and gas industry contributed $58 million for the 2000 and 2002
elections, about 78
percent to Republicans.
"Contributions don't necessarily buy decisions; they buy access," said Weiss,
the Center for
Responsive Politics' spokesman. "The oil and gas industry has had access and
has gotten
results."
The congressional exemption would wipe out the many years of legal work by
McMillian and the
environmental group that helped her, but she hasn't written her congressman or
lobbied to stop
it. She says she's just too tired.
"After a while, you get tired of barking into the wind," she said.
..........................
Lynn Dohner
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