Hydraulic fracturing blend not just 'sand and water' as Pennsylvania environmental officials claim, experts say

Environmentalists dispute statements from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection about controversial natural gas drilling method. Take the NEWS POLL.

Tucked into a statement last week from Pennsylvania environmental officials touting their ability to regulate natural gas drilling was a line that environmentalists are disputing and a lawmaker says caused him concern.

“Hydraulic fracturing, or (fracking), is a process used in oil and natural gas drilling that injects a mixture of sand and water into the cracks of rock formations to create fissures that allow more oil and gas to be extracted,” the news release from the state Department of Environmental Protection read.

Fracking is how drilling companies are freeing the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas estimated to underlie much of Pennsylvania in a geologic formation called the Marcellus Shale.

The shorthand recipe in the statement belied information put out by the natural gas drilling industry and the state DEP itself: that fracking also relies on a brew of chemicals.

“It’s very dishonest for the DEP to be putting out that kind of misinformation,” said Maya K. van Rossum, of the nonprofit Delaware Riverkeeper Network. “It’s not disingenuous, it’s not misleading, it’s not an innocent error. It is dishonest.”

‘Industry’s choice’

FracFocus.org, a chemical registry advertised by the industry’s Marcellus Shale Coalition, identifies 49 chemicals “used most often” in fracking operations across the nation. The Pennsylvania DEP, in a fact sheet dated June 30, 2010, lists 84 “chemicals used by hydraulic fracturing companies in Pennsylvania.”

“Fracking, the definition of fracking, is indeed the use of sand and water” to open fissures deep underground to release natural gas, DEP spokeswoman Katy Gresh said when asked about the statement. “Fracking itself does not need to use chemicals.”

Rather, it’s the “industry’s choice,” she said.

“They make a choice as to how they are going to get that gas out and how best to do that,” Gresh continued.

Pennsylvania state Sen. John T. Yudichak, D-Carbon/Luzerne/Monroe, said the chemicals have been a point of contention. Under a federal law, known as the “Halliburton loophole,” drilling companies are not required to disclose the chemicals they use, he said.

“Now some companies have voluntarily disclosed that information,” said Yudichak, minority chairman of the Senate Environmental Resources & Energy Committee. “You’ll find out whether that is simply sand and water. I suspect you’re also going to find that there is a chemical compound that is also part of the manufacturing process.”

Yudichak said he is concerned when a “regulatory agency … fails to paint the full picture.”

Quantities used

Travis Windle, spokesman for the drilling industry’s Canonsburg, Pa.-based Marcellus Shale Coalition, said fracking fluids are “more than 99.5 percent water and sand.”

“It’s not a new technology,” Windle said. “It’s been in commercial use since the Truman administration.”

A small percentage, however, does not necessarily mean small quantities. The Pennsylvania DEP says a single horizontal wellbore may require four to 20 fracking intervals, each using 500,000 to 1 million gallons of water.

“Vertical wells use the same solutions but typically require two to three times the volume of a single horizontal (frack) interval,” a Pennsylvania DEP description of the fracking process reads.

The technique’s track record is clean, Windle and the DEP say.

The DEP statement dealt with testimony by Pennsylvania DEP Secretary Mike Krancer on Nov. 16 before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment, where he focused on Pennsylvania’s rejection of federal efforts to regulate natural gas drilling. According to the statement, Krancer testified more than 1.2 million wells have been fracked across the United States in the past 60 years.

“Neither the Environmental Protection Agency nor state regulatory agencies have seen any documented cases of (fracking) causing contamination of drinking water supplies,” the DEP statement about Krancer’s testimony asserts.

Risks of chemicals

But it is not without risk, environmentalists say.

Kate Millsaps, of the New Jersey Sierra Club, reports that a September 2010 International Journal of Human and Ecological Risk Assessment found that 25 percent of fracking chemicals could cause cancer, 37 percent disrupt the endocrine system, 40 to 50 percent could affect the nervous, immune and cardiovascular systems, and more than 75 percent could affect skin, eyes and respiratory systems.

A May report by Pennsylvania state Rep. Camille “Bud” George, D-Clearfield, links the fracking chemicals and their risks — such as methyl alcohol (very poisonous), hydrochloric acid (poisonous, corrosive) and boric acid (normally found in roach-killing products).

The Pennsylvania DEP’s list also includes formaldehyde and napththalene, both considered by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry as “reasonably anticipated to be human carcinogens.”

The Delaware Riverkeepers' van Rossum said chemicals in hydraulic fracturing are only one concern of opponents of drilling in the Delaware River watershed, where 15 million people — including Easton-area residents — draw their drinking water.

“The toxins that are used in the fracturing process, they are putting them underground and opening up the potential for the contamination of underground aquifers,” she said. “We have also, because of the toxins, we’ve got spills in the water, on the ground. The toxins when they’re out in the open pits volatize into the air.

“Those toxins, those toxic chemicals can cause a lot of problems in a lot of different ways."