We are in the way. The Marcellus Shale development to the west has created a demand for more pipelines to carry gas east to export terminals and urban markets. These big pipes cut wide swaths through natural areas and disrupt developed areas. PA State Representative Steve Santasiero forsees that pipeline zoning presents a big challenge for municipalities, and possibly a more immediate one that fracking.
If you want to get an idea why visit State Impact – Pennslyvania and read their excellent article on the regulatory mess and the consequent challenges faced by municipalities.
Flyer Announcing 8/3 Update and Supervisors’ Visit
We’re asking everyone to come out on Monday August 3 to hear an update on our efforts to prevent premature adoption of the jointure drilling zone ordinance. We’ll meet at six (6PM) at the Wrightstown Friends Meeting at 535 Durham Road, PA 413 North. After a short update there will be time for comments and questions. Then at seven (7PM) all will go over to the Wrightstown Municipal Building (2203 Second Street Pike) for the Supervisors’ Meeting that starts at 7:30PM. As before a few people will present our concerns.
We’ve been in touch with the Supervisors and anticipate a good reception and discussion. It’s clear that they are not eager to see fracking come to our area. We want to be a resource and provide support for a good strategy to deal with the threat fracking represents to our quiet enjoyment of our beautiful Bucks County homes and surroundings.
One of our contributors discovered “Explore a Fracking Operation – Virtually” – a website that lets you see photographs of the various stages of fracking operations. Those who have not traveled to the regions where fracking is done may be surprised at the scale of this industry. Well drilling and fracking requires hundreds of heavy vehicles and a logistics reminicent of a large scale military mobilization. Check it out by clicking the illustration below:
Screenshot of FrackTracker Website.
You will find another excellent website at R-CAUSE.net. Like this site, it seeks to inform its constituency about the risks of fracking. Although New York has banned fracking, there continue to be threats to water and air in the Rochester and Corning areas.
No one can or will guarantee that a gas well will never leak. You can find industry video narrated by one of those deep Walter Cronkite-like voices that tell you about the extraordinary precautions drillers take to protect the aquifer from migration of nasty stuff between layers.
You can even cherry-pick to find industry statistics claiming that leakage is very rare, less than one percent (not true). But you won’t find anybody putting their money on the line that the well they want to drill into your aquifer won’t someday spoil your well water.
You will find that extraordinary measures have been taken to shield drillers from liability and regulatory culpability. Exemptions have been carved out of the body of law intended to protect the environment. You will also find plenty of examples where the industry has obtained gag orders and non-disclosure settlements hoping to keep a lid on public knowledge of mistakes. There are even some egregious examples of perverse use of baseless law suits and even phony criminal charges to discourage public participation showcasing problems with drilling. As the cops say, “you can beat the wrap, but you can’t beat the ride.” (The “ride” is the whole process of being arrested and charged.) Even if one is obviously innocent of doing wrong, legal defense is costly and even if you win you end up out-of-pocket.
What’s behind all this? Independent peer-reviewed studies as well as industry studies show that at least six percent (6%) of fracking wells leak early in their life cycle. I strongly suspect that all wells will leak eventually – maybe not in 10 or 20 years, but in 100?
Let’s stick with what we know for the moment. Drilling puts a large hole through half a mile of ancient rock formations to reach the gas rich layer under Bucks County. It’s deeper elsewhere. At the surface level, where the aquifer is, at least three concentric steel casings line the bore hole. Cement under pressure is forced into the space between the outer casing and the rock to prevent gas and/or liquid from traveling vertically outside of the casing and moving between geologic layers. This cement is supposed to keep the nasty stuff out of the drinking water layers.
This is the fundamental weakness of the drilling system. Think about the cement you see in sidewalks, driveways, and foundations. It cracks. Cement is rigid and very strong in compression, but it doesn’t have good tensile strength. It doesn’t necessarily bond permanently to other materials. Voids, where there is no concrete seal, may be left when concrete is pumped into the annulus or gap around the well casing. It’s not like the footing for a house; you can’t look and see. Even with no disturbances cracks can open as the cement cures or long after it’s fully set. But there are disturbances. Seismic events happen regularly. The earth moves.
The drilling process itself involves huge rotating drill bits that pound and vibrate to chip the rock and open the hole. Boring generates heat that is carried away from the bit by the flow of drilling mud, a wet slurry pumped down the drill pipe bathing the cutting bit and carrying the chips and heat back up and out. So there is are temperature changes. Steel and cement don’t expand at the same rate. Drilling itself vibrates the upper casings components and the earth as the bore hole is extended downward. Time is money and sometimes drilling operators don’t wait long enough for the fresh cement to cure to full strength, fracturing the “green” cement as they resume drilling. Rust forms on the mild steel casings as dampness, chemicals, and natural acids do their work. The annulus space outside the casing isn’t clean. All of these conditions act to break the bonds between the casing and the cement, and loosen the cement from the bore hole walls.
Repeated fracking cycles subject the casing and the cement seal to strain. It’s hard to imagine that a steel pipe half a mile long doesn’t flex and move under these extreme pressure changes. The same hydraulic forces that are fracturing rock where the lateral pipe is perforated are also trying to fracture the seal around the well casing. Blowouts sometimes happen.
The casings come in sections and thread together. For more than fifty years the joints have been a problem when put under pressure. Engineers have optimized the shape an pitch of threads and used sealants. In spite of considerable experience and ingenuity, casing joints still fail.
Then there is outright reckless disregard for the consequences of leaks. Drillers have paid huge fines and settlements for blatant disregard for good practice and regulations. Critics say that inspection and enforcement is understaffed and too lax. Drillers sometimes even refuse to allow inspectors onto the drill site.
None of the precautions taken by even the most ethical drillers can ensure that a bore hole once created can be sealed permanently. Consequently every new well increases the probability of contamination of the aquifer forever. That probability starts with the first well at one-in-twenty odds (1:20) and the odds get worse over time. Each new well adds another leak possibility. It’s like playing repeated rounds of Russian roulette first with one gun, then two, and so on.
This is not a game we should want to play. The more I know about fracking, the more it looks like a bargain with the Devil. No matter how appealing the cheap energy is, in the long run we lose.
[revised for clarity and to update links 7/10/15, 7/11/15.]
Attorney Matt McHugh who prepared the proposed drilling ordinance was quoted as saying that “there are no known deposits of natural gas or oil in any of the three townships…” Until someone actually makes a producing well, deposits are termed “undiscovered” but that does NOT mean they aren’t known to be there. Back in 2011 the USGS did a study of the South Newark Basin Shale formation which included data from one well never put into production. James Coleman, a researcher for the U.S.G.S said, “We think there’s a 90 percent probability that there’s gas in the South Newark Basin and that gas is between 363 billion cubic feet and 1,698 billion cubic feet.”
Coleman was speaking to Susan Phillips of State Impact who wrote an excellent article you’ll find on the StateImpact site. I’d say the odds are only slightly less than a sure thing that somebody will want to drill in Bucks if given the opportunity.
Notes from the 7/7/15 Briefing at Newtown Friends Meeting
“Attorney Matt McHugh of Grim, Biehn and Thatcher in Perkasie said the ordinance [to create an gas & oil fracking zone in Wrightstown, Newtown Township and Upper Makefield] will likely be voted on by all three governing bodies in the next month or two.” (front page news, Bucks County Courier Times 7/7/15)
Tonight 70 people gathered at the Newtown Quaker Meeting to hear about this proposed ordinance. Some key points emerged:
Outrage that no public comment has been invited
FHA lending guidelines prohibit financing for homes within 300 feet of a property with “an active or planned drilling site;” homeowner’s insurance mandated by lenders may exclude properties with a gas lease or a gas well; mortgages can be denied because of drilling on a neighbor’s property
Most of the water in Lower Bucks County is drawn from aquifers, which once contaminated by fracking fluid leaks, spills, overflows or surface runoff can never be recovered. As one woman said, “You can get energy from other sources, but you can’t live without water. Our property [in Wrightstown] would be worthless.”
The average water use for a single fracking well is 4.4 million gallons, only 15% of which is recycled fracking fluid
Spent fracking wells continue to degrade and leach forever
Oil and gas jobs and money are boom-and-bust, but the costs to the community last forever.
There is no reason for urgency in passing an ordinance. Most of Bucks County is already covered under the Delaware River Basin Moratorium until January 1, 2018. There’s no pressure to act in haste on the proposed ordinance.
After the meeting at the Newtown Quaker Meeting, about 100 people attended the Newtown Township Planning Board meeting. At the end of the public comment period, the Chairperson urged us to communicate with the Township Supervisors who have the power to make the final decision.
ACT NOW
Come to the Newtown Township Supervisor’s Meeting on , July 8 at 7:30pm and voice your opinion
Can’t attend? Make a phone call (215-968-2800 ext. 8, then ext. 3 to speak with Olivia Kivenko, Administrative Assistant to the Town Manager) or write a short, handwritten note to Newtown Township Supervisors, 100 Municipal Drive, Newtown, PA 18940 and say we want at least a one-year study period with public participation before any gas & oil drilling ordinance is considered for a vote
Attend, write, call the Wrightstown Supervisors (meetings on the 1st and 3rd Mondays of every month at 7:30pm, 2203 Second Street Pike). Ask Wrightstown to withdraw their request for an ordinance to create a gas and oil drilling zone.
Check the coverage in the Bucks Courier-Times (you may need to subscribe ($1 promo), to see the whole article.)
In a June 1st, 2015 article StateImpact reports on the gas well fire that sent flame so high into the air that the flames were visible for miles above the tree tops. Kati Coleneri reports, “Fires at two wells in Dunkard Township, Greene County burned for several days before they could be extinguished, but it took more than one week to find the remains of Ian McKee, 27, a contractor with Texas-based Cameron International who was killed in the blast.”
Katie Colaneri/ StateImpact Pennsylvania. A fire broke out on a Chevron natural gas well pad in Dunkard Township, Greene County, Pa. on Feb. 11, 2014.
Reports like this underscore the hazards of drilling anywhere near where people work or play. The $940,000 fine and the $5,000,000 settlement with McKee’s family dramatize the magnitude of the risks. Little wonder that insurance companies and mortgage lenders shy away from drilling sites. It also underscores how woefully inadequate the proposed ordinance being considered by the Jointure would be if enacted. It provides for unspecified insurance, and a maximum $50,000 financial security, described as laughable by critics.
As a former firefighter I confess I have no idea how to fight such a blaze. I don’t imagine that the first responders of our local communities do either. Well fires often require special teams to be flown in who are equipped with tools and techniques to snuff the flames and cut the flow.
I was shocked to see that PA State investigators were denied access to the site for two days and that there was no penalty assessed for doing so. What protections does state DEP oversight offer if a company with apparent violations can prevent the regulators from inspecting? It suggests that the gas industry has way too much influence in Harrisburgh.
FRACKING: A STORY OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES & COLLATERAL DAMAGES
I don’t believe that the gas and oil industry intends to destroy our quality of life and our communities. This industry provides a good yield for our pension funds and portfolios—and makes a decent return for their investors. They provide fuel to keep us warm in the winter, fuel to power our electronic devices, fuel to drive our cars to the grocery store and our children to school, fuel to transport food from faraway places so we can enjoy strawberries in Dec. in Pennsylvania. They provide the fertilizers to grow our crops. They provide “mail box money” for landowners who allow them to drill on their properties. They provide jobs.
In fact our current oil and gas industry is a marvel of ingenuity. What was once a single oil well is now a shaft that can go miles vertically into the earth, with radial arms that turn and run horizontally for 2-4 miles. Who could have imagined such a thing even 10 years ago?
Another high performing profit sector is the chemical industry, which has created chemicals for all sorts of useful purposes. According to the EPA, there are more than 64,000 chemicals that have been created and are in use, chemicals that have not been tested for toxicity and that can be combined in countless new ways. Fracking wells can use a combination of up to 1,000 of these chemicals. All but 60 of these were essentially omitted from the EPA study released in June, 2015.
But what isn’t accounted for are the unintended consequences that are externalized to the surrounding community.
Property owners within a 1-5 mile radius may incur additional cost of insurance to cover losses in case of explosion on a site
Surface water contamination from fracking backflow can affect human health indirectly through consumption of contaminated crops, livestock or wildlife
Deafening noise and glaring lights around drilling rigs can make areas uninhabitable, increasing stress and disrupting sleep patterns
Noxious odors can impact air quality for miles around
Housing values drop and in some cases become worthless because banks will no longer provide a mortgage for their resale
Other industries are harmed like agriculture, tourism, organic farming, hunting, fishing, and outdoor recreation
Local enforcement officials and firefighters are overwhelmed with conditions they were never trained to deal with
Well shafts deteriorate over time and shaft leaks can occur in numerous places during drilling, releasing methane “a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than CO2”
Health impacts can include low birth weight babies, birth defects, and especially the very young and the elderly experience allergies, skin rashes and lesions, asthma, bronchial conditions, and cancers
Each fracking operation requires several million gallons of water, of which only around a quarter is being recovered, depleting water sources, increasing tanker truck traffic on small, local roads, creating disposal problems
Exhaust from heavy truck traffic also contributes ultrafine particles (36 times finer than a grain of sand) laden with metals and hydrocarbons in hundreds of combinations, degrading our air quality and creating lung infections, chronic obstructive lung disease, strokes, ischemic heart disease, and lung cancer
Good paying jobs are created for a year or so and then the drillers and riggers move on to the next community and the next well, leaving only the permanent environmental and health costs for communities and citizens to deal with
Some people think that these impacts are just the price of doing business and enjoying the high quality of life we Americans prize, but people around the world are discovering that greater opportunity and innovation is available from “clean energy” industries like wind, solar, battery storage, and permanent, safe jobs like retrofitting homes and businesses and installing clean energy equipment. One small city in Southern France discovered they could generate more than $3 million/year with just a few wind turbines.
Most people believe that costs should be borne by the companies responsible for creating them, not left for the property owners or taxpayers to pay through their taxes or impacts on their health. As a nation, we are currently subsidizing the fossil fuel industries compared to renewable energy industries by a factor of 5:1. We, the people, have made a Faustian bargain. We can still make a new choice.
There is already national, bi-partisan legislation being considered that could allow a predictable, incremental transition from fossil fuels to clean energy sources over a 10-year period. This can be achieved by adding an increasing annual fee to every ton of CO2 at the source and returning all the revenues to American taxpayers on a monthly basis, much like the Home Energy Subsidy that Alaskans currently enjoy.
Wind, solar, and biomass already generate 2.5 – 9 times as many jobs as coal, oil and gas (for every $1 million contribution to GDP). Independent studies show that a Carbon Fee & Citizen Dividend would create more and better jobs (2.1 million new jobs after 10 years), increase GDP by $70-$85 Billion from 2020 on, and save 13,000 lives per year after 10 years due to decreased emissions and improved citizens’ health.
So we have a choice. Bucks County is temporarily protected from oil and gas drilling until 2018 under the Delaware River Basin moratorium. We don’t have to open a door, that once opened, we can’t close. Let’s remember the admonition that we are our brother’s keeper, and that allowing gas and oil drilling in a neighboring town will affect us as well.
Some of the advocates for Fracking seek to dismiss the concern about health risks as fear mongering. This document, assembled by health professionals, organizes and summarizes the facts available more than a year ago. There are even more now (see Links). However this compendium has been compiled to be accessible for decision makers and the public.
Systematically Organized Evidence of Fracking Risks. Source: http://concernedhealthny.org. (Click this image to download/read)
There is no question that fracking is dangerous and damaging to the environment. Someone said that “its hard to make someone see something when their paycheck depends on not seeing it.” We have too many who have been blinded by the prospect of “mailbox money” that comes from deep in the earth. Now we see that there is no free ride.
Zoning is seldom easy. Those who must decide about land use are usually picking winners and losers and it’s certain that someone will get hurt and go away mad. The stress is usually made tolerable by a shared vision of a community that’s pleasing, healthy and safe to live in with economic prosperity for all. But a Fracking well is not like a water well. Fracking poses real danger and not just the ordinary nuisance or aesthetic issues that land use schemes normally address. Big money is in play and Planing Boards and the Supervisors they advise are confronted with pressure from many sides.
Can’t be Banned
This decade has seen a battle between large gas and oil drillers and local communities. There was the disaster of Dimock, PA that drew national attention and was the subject of the film Gasland. The PA Legislature passed Act 13 (2012) stripping local municipalities of zoning control over fracking. Several municipalities sued and the PA Supreme Court ultimately declared that all municipalities have a duty to protect “clean air and water” and to preserve “natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment.” But according to Tracy Carluccio of Delaware Water Keeper, “Fracking can’t legally be totally banned …”
It’s Not Pretty and It’s Not Safe
Few, if any, of our officials are experts on fracking methods and practices. Nor are they familiar with the dangers. Indeed, some health hazards like increases of Radon gas are just now being measured and documented. The US EPA study on fracking and water quality raises far more questions than it answeres.
Of 1071 of the chemicals known to be in fracking fluid, only 60 were included in the study.
The selection of the 60 out of the 1073 identified fracking chemicals was based on a number of criteria. Most were excluded because there was no standard of toxicity established for them. In other words they did not know how toxic most of the fracking fluid ingredients were, so they made a list of them and put it in an appendix to the study. Admitting that “hazard evaluation could not be conducted,” they simply noted that these should be evaluated in future studies.
EPA only studied a subset of those few chemicals on which they had toxicity information.
Those who only read the Executive Summary might miss the key fact: they were only talking about 60 chemicals out of more that 1000 possible pollutants. The other potentially hazardous stuff they found was simply listed and left as an open question. The study points out that the technology is still evolving, the ingredients used are secret, and that innovation changes the brew more or less continuously.
Too Many Unknowns
Is it reasonable to think that our municipal officials are up to the task of sorting all this out? There are still too many unknowns. Regulation and enforcement becomes a technological quagmire. If a spill happens, how serious is it? What response is needed? Do you require test wells and monitoring? What do you monitor for? How do you remediate? What are acceptable levels? If you knew that your water was tainted with one or more of 1000 chemicals not known to be safe, would you let your kids drink it?
What we don’t know can kill us.
Sacrifice Zone?
Someone suggested that large tracts already blighted by something like a quarry might be zoned for drilling thus satisfying the state’s mandate not to ban fracking, but still keeping it as far as possible from people. If air and water respected property lines this might seem reasonable. But they don’t.
Groundwater travels many miles under the surface. Whatever is released into the air moves with the wind. There is growing evidence that a buffer of thirty miles may not be enough. Among the concerns are low birth-weight babies, birth defects, and increased respiratory disease (see Links page for reports). These are like the canary that miners once used in mines. The bird succumbs before the less fragile miners sense the presence of the suffocating methane. Problems in pregnancy are, like the dead canary, a warning not to be dismissed.
This illustration shows how fluids can migrate where a well penetrates the earth. (US EPA)
The above illustration shows how a fluid, including vapors and gasses, can migrate along a well casing. Note that the casing goes down to the shale layer and then turns horizontal. These horizontal well casings can be bored to extend one, two and even four miles from the vertical shaft. They can radiate from a site like spokes of a wheel. Half a mile down, out of sight, gas wells cross property lines and even municipal boundaries.
When a house is built, the municipal building inspector can and does hold up construction until he/she can inspect the footers, the framing, the plumbing, the wiring, and so on. With a well there is no such opportunity. If it’s done wrong you can’t really tell – at least not until the damage becomes evident from the surface. How do you proactively regulate that? What does the municipal code official know about fracking wells?
Fracking is a Big Deal
A drilling zone is not just a routine land use issue. Business as usual will not suffice to protect the public and preserve our quiet enjoyment of hearth and home. The presence of a fracking operation anywhere in Bucks County can affect much more than the neighborhood or town; everything downwind and downstream can be compromised. In addition fracking brings traffic that pulverizes roads, pipelines that slash through neighborhoods, emergencies that first responders are not prepared to meet, and a deteriorating bore hole that can allow nasty stuff to creep up into the shallower levels of strata and even the water table. For the drilling company, these are all “externalities.” They aren’t part of the expense model. They are left for the municipality to deal with.
The municipal supervisors are tasked to zone, regulate and police all of these fracking complexities for our common benefit. The State? It took a Supreme Court decision to get back any say in the matter at all. And the Pennsylvania legislators seem unwilling to limit the gas industry because of the money it promises. Enforcement of State regulations may depend on the politics of the current Governor.
The drilling moratoriums expire in 2018. Gas prices are low enough to ease drilling pressures. So we are in the lull before the storm. Even so, I don’t envy our officials as they grapple with these matters and try to remain true to their charge to protect our air, our water, our environment … and our lives.
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