Five years ago, 420,000 gallons of oilfield wastewater engulfed the Johnson ranch in Crossroads, New Mexico. Today, those High Plains pastures are dead, and the family worries about the safety of the aquifer below.
This is just one of the many stories of harm done to American land and water by the hydraulic fracturing industry.
In the mid-2000s, fracking for natural gas and oil kicked into high gear — without research into how this new technology might impact the environment or our health. At the time, then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force virtually exempted the industry from existing regulations, including the Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water acts, Superfund law, and hazardous waste disposal rules. Oversight was left to the states, which have largely focused on income generated by fracking operations while ignoring environmental costs.
Now, scientific evidence is mounting on collateral damage from fracking that includes air and water pollution and overuse of drinking water supplies — with entire towns running dry. Last year, the Senate ignored this data, rejecting a bill to introduce environmental oversight in a landslide 35-63 bipartisan vote.
Meanwhile, as of 2014, some 10 million Americans and 6,800 public water systems were located within a mile of a frack site, and more than 1 million active oil and gas wells were operating in at least 25 states.
Extracting the last dregs of America’s fossil fuels requires extreme methods. Fracking blasts fluids into the ground at high pressure, shattering shale bedrock to release gas and oil reserves below. It requires massive amounts of water — a huge issue across the drought-stricken West. It takes one-to-five million gallons to frack a well, and each can be fracked 10-plus times.
Frackwater is mixed with sand and any of 1,076 chemicals, including benzene, toluene, formaldehyde, acetone, kerosene, diesel fuel and other hazardous substances, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Many have serious, long-term health effects in minuscule, parts-per-billion doses. More than 100 frack chemicals are known or suspected “endocrine disruptors,” impacting hormones that regulate metabolism, fertility, child development, and immune function — substances that may harm eyes, kidneys, lungs, liver, or the brain. Some are “toxicants” (from the Latin toxicum, “to poison”); others are known to cause cancer, and nearly half can harm fish and wildlife.
Instead of protecting citizens, government protections enacted in 2005 shield drilling companies. The mix of chemicals that these companies pump into the ground is allowed to remain “proprietary” — secrecy that prevents communities from knowing what they’re being exposed to.
Research shows that at any point in the process, fracking liquids can leach into drinking water, and potentially, into our bodies.
Studies estimate that 10 to 90 percent of these fluids remain underground, potentially flowing into aquifers. Companies often frack at shallow depths of 1,000 feet or less, drilling directly into drinking water sources, according to Stanford University research. Cement casings on wells frequently crack and leak.
Spills are common: pipes rupture, storage tanks overflow. From 2009 to 2014, companies reported over 180 million gallons of spilled wastewater in 21,651 incidents, according to a 2015 Associated Press analysis. Some are disasters, like the nearly 1 million-gallon spill into North Dakota’s Yellowstone River in 2006, or the 3 million gallons of frack wastewater that Bugington Energy illegally dumped in Fort Stockton, Texas pastures. Many spills go unreported.
Then there’s the contaminated “flowback” wastewater that returns to the surface — which is usually pumped back underground into “injection wells.” In California alone, 2,500 oil wastewater injection wells operate within aquifers that contain clean water. A study published in January found that south Texas disposal wells are disproportionately sited in poor communities, making fracking a social justice issue.
More disturbing: frack wastewater is being used to produce our food. In California, Chevron “recycles” 21 million gallons of oilfield wastewater daily — sold to farmers who irrigate some 45,000 acres of crops with it, a largely unregulated process.
The industry contends that fracking operations are safe, but last June, an EPA report found evidence of contamination of surface and groundwater — and drinking water.
Polluting our freshwater reserves, and permanently removing billions of gallons annually from the water cycle by injecting wastewater underground, is contributing to a growing freshwater crisis and endangering public health. It’s just one more reason why our nation must shift to renewables.
The President, presidential candidates, Congress, and state governments remain almost uniformly silent on the fracking issue. But the fossil fuels industry must be governed by the same rigorous regulations as other industries — for the sake of our health and our future.