Mining for conventional sources of gas associated with oil is not nearly so damag­ing to the environment as coal mining since it only involves drilling deep holes. But the methods for getting gas out of coal beds or shale do have serious problems.

The gas in these formations is not in large domes but is in relatively impermeable rock or coal and cannot be readily removed. To facilitate the removal of the gas, gas companies use a process called hydraulic fracturing or fracking, to create fis­sures in the rock so the trapped gas can be released. Wells are drilled thousands of feet vertically to reach the shale formations, and then are drilled horizontally for thousands of feet further into the shale formations. Explosions from a perforating gun pierce the casing pipe along its length and fracture the rock. Millions of gal­lons of water, along with sand and toxic but trade-secret organic chemicals and/ or acids, are then injected at high pressure into each well to widen the fractures. The sand is called a “proppant” because it is used to prop open the fractures in the shale from the high-pressure fracturing process. Up to a million gallons of wastewater flush backward through the well (“flowback”) and, of course, natural gas is collected from the deep deposits (39). Of the more than 493,000 natural gas wells in the United States in 2009, about 90% of them use fracking to release the natural gas (40).

Fracking has become very controversial recently, especially because of a docu­mentary film by Josh Fox (no relation to me) called Gasland, which gives anec­dotal evidence of toxic chemicals entering water supplies and causing health problems and even exploding houses from seepage of natural gas into the water! Numerous highly toxic and carcinogenic chemicals were identified in samples of well water after gas drilling occurred nearby. Some houses in Weld County, Colorado, the county east of where I live, had water coming out of the faucets that could be lit with a lighter! According to the film, over 596 chemicals can be used in the fracking solutions. About half of the injected water and chemicals remains in the ground and may enter aquifers, while the other half is stored in reservoirs above ground that may or may not be lined.

In response to the public outcry about fracking, the Ground Water Protection Council and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission started the website FracFocus (www. fracfocus. org) to provide a venue for accurate information about fracking. Companies can voluntarily register on the site and report the chemicals they use in fracking wells, though they may not disclose chemicals that are trade secrets. The fracking fluids fall into several different categories by function and sequence, with the exact fluids and sequence dictated by the specific shale forma­tion. The Marcellus Shale formation is fracked in the following sequence: (1) an acid stage consisting of thousands of gallons of dilute hydrochloric or muriatic acid to clean the wellbore, (2) a pad stage consisting of 100,000 gallons of “slick — water” to reduce friction in the well, (3) a prop sequence stage injecting millions of gallons of water with sand or ceramic material as a proppant to keep the frac­tures open, and (4) a flushing stage to remove the excess proppant from the well. Other additives may include biocides to reduce bacterial growth, scale inhibi­tors, iron-stabilizing compounds to prevent precipitation of iron compounds, friction-reducing agents, corrosion inhibitors, and gelling agents (41).

The gas industry has begun a big play on shale oil and gas resources in the vast Niobrara formation in eastern Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska. Regulators in Colorado have taken the most pro-active approach in the nation in recent regulations that require gas and oil drillers to disclose the concentrations of the chemicals they use in fracking. A few other states require disclosure of the chemi­cals but not the concentrations. Colorado requires companies to report chemi­cals that are trade secrets by disclosing the chemical family (42). Colorado also approved rules that require wells to be tested both before and after fracking to determine whether groundwater is being contaminated by fracking (43). And Colorado also approved setbacks of 500 feet from wells to residences to help miti­gate the noise and smells from drilling (44).

These disclosure rules, setbacks, and groundwater testing may go a long way to alleviating concern about fracking among the public. However, they have not prevented Colorado communities such as Longmont and Fort Collins from ban­ning fracking within city limits, a move that pits the cities against the state govern­ment (45). The state of New York has also temporarily banned fracking for natural gas, and numerous communities have also banned it. Two of the bans have been upheld in court (46). And so it goes.

Evidence is beginning to accumulate that seepage of methane and chemi­cals into groundwater as a result of fracking may be a serious problem (47, 48). Residents in the rural area near Pavilion, Wyoming—which is surrounded by more than 200 gas wells—complained of their water wells becoming contami­nated with an oil-like sheen and a fetid smell from unknown sources. After years of denial by the gas company that it could come from the gas wells, the EPA finally analyzed the water and found that 11 of 39 water samples from area wells were contaminated to varying degrees with arsenic, benzene, methane, toluene, diesel fuel, metals, adamantanes (hydrocarbons found in natural gas), and bis-phenol A. They could not prove that the contaminants came from the fracking, and some evidence indicates that they may come from the abandoned holding ponds for the toxic fracking fluids (49). The gas industry steadfastly maintains that there is no evidence that fracking causes problems with water wells or aquifers, since the wells are thousands of feet below the aquifers. But the evidence against them is mounting. The gas industry is beginning to sound like the tobacco industry in the past with its denial that smoking causes health problems. The gas industry may well be correct that the fracturing itself does not reach the aquifers, but leaks in the well casing and cement may allow fracking fluids and natural gas to leak out of the well into the aquifers.

A recent scientific study of 60 drinking water wells in the Marcellus formation in northeastern Pennsylvania showed that methane concentrations were 17 times higher in wells less than a kilometer from active drilling areas than from wells in non-drilling areas, and were high enough to be explosive (50). Furthermore, the wastewater that flushes back through the pipes (produced water) contains high levels of salts as well as radioactivity from radium. The level of radioactivity can be hundreds to thousands of times higher than that allowed in drinking water. Some of this water is treated in water treatment plants, but some of it is just dumped into rivers. Monitoring of the levels in rivers downstream from the treatment plants is not currently being done, so it is not really known whether the level of radioactiv­ity is hazardous (40).

The Piceance Basin1 gas field in the Roan Plateau of northwestern Colorado has been the site of one of the nation’s biggest drilling booms over the last decade with over 5,000 wells drilled for natural gas. Over 95% of the land surrounding the Roan Plateau has been leased to energy development companies by the Bureau of Land Management. This area is a wildlife haven, especially on the Roan Plateau itself. The network of roads and holding ponds is very destructive to the envi­ronment, and if all of the leased land is actually drilled, it will likely have major impacts on the wildlife and on the hunting and fishing economy (51). Fracking is used to extract the gas, with the excess water and unknown toxic chemicals left in holding ponds.

Because of exemptions that Congress approved in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, with strong support from Vice President Dick Cheney, the former president of Halliburton (a huge oil field-services company) and President George W. Bush, a former oil company owner, gas drillers do not have to follow the provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act (51). As a result, the EPA has no jurisdiction to require them to line pits or make public the detailed chemicals that are injected. Scenes from the film Gasland are reminiscent of the excesses that were allowed in the 1960s before the advent of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Scientific studies have now shown that methane from the deep natural gas forma­tions have seeped into wells as a result of fracking (47, 50), but the environmental problems associated with fracking are just beginning to be explored scientifically. The EPA is studying the environmental hazards of fracking, but political pressure is mounting to narrow the scope of the study and minimize the dangers (52).

Fracking uses 2-5 million gallons of water per well, and the availability of water could be a big problem in the arid regions of Wyoming, Colorado, and Texas, where there are major deposits of shale gas. At a Natural Gas Symposium held at Colorado State University in 2012 (53), academics, regulators, and the natu­ral gas industry discussed issues concerning water quality. According to Dr. Ken Carlson, an environmental and civil engineer at Colorado State University and head of the Colorado Water-Energy Consortium, after the well is fracked, about 30% of the fracking fluids return as flowback water, which will have some of the injected chemicals in it. In addition, over the life of the well, “produced water” comes out of the well, along with the natural gas. The produced water is high in total dissolved solids, salts, hydrocarbons (including methane), and potentially even radioactive materials. In the past this water was put in storage pits and not treated properly. But this practice is changing as regulations tighten and the public has become more concerned and involved. An additional problem with the vast amount of water, chemicals, and sand used in fracking is the amount of truck traf­fic needed to haul it in—over 1,000 truck trips per well. This can cause environ­mental damage and fray the nerves of locals where drilling occurs close to cities.

Much is known about how to properly drill and case wells to prevent gas or chemicals from migrating from the fracked shale into an aquifer and how to mini­mize water usage. Many companies use “best practices” that minimize or elimi­nate these problems. The best operators test well integrity, capture “flowback” and “produced” water and recycle it, use liners in ponds, disclose fracking fluids, and do baseline water quality measurements before drilling so that any effects from fracking can be analyzed scientifically. However, there are hundreds of drilling operators in Colorado, and not all of them use best practices. It is like the “dirty car syndrome” in which only a few percent of cars cause most of the air pollu­tion. In the case of natural gas fracking, a few bad operators can cause most of the problems. Ideally, the regulatory agencies, such as the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC), would ferret out any problems, but there are far too few inspectors to make sure the rules are being followed.

New drilling technology used with fracking allows for more than 20 wells to be drilled from a single wellhead, with the wells spreading out horizontally to drill underneath populated or sensitive areas. This can greatly reduce the number of wellhead sites in a given area and reduce the environmental impact.

Contamination of water wells and aquifers is not the only potential problem with fracking for natural gas. In March 2012, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources determined that a dozen small earthquakes were caused in areas where fracking was done. How can this happen? It is not a direct result of the fracking but from trying to responsibly deal with the millions of gallons of wastewater pro­duced per well. The EPA allows this water to be pumped into very deep storage wells so that it doesn’t contaminate aquifers or surface water. The injection wells were in the area of a previously unknown fault line that caused the earthquakes after fracking. The Ohio governor called for a moratorium on shale gas production at that site after a 4.0 magnitude earthquake occurred near Youngstown, Ohio (54).

On September 10, 2010, a gas pipeline explosion in San Francisco killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes (55, 56). This is but one of a number of gas explosions over the years that have killed or caused serious injuries to people and damaged property. More recently, another gas explosion killed five people in Allentown, Pennsylvania (57). According to the National Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), which is in charge of pipeline safety, an average of 45 serious incidents (incidents that caused death or serious injury) occurred each year for the past decade in the United States. There are 321,000 miles of gathering and transmission pipelines in the United States that bring the natural gas from the wellhead to a gas transmission system that covers the nation. Over 2 million miles of pipeline then distribute the gas to homes, businesses, and power plants. Thus, it is inevitable that accidents will happen, and their incidence will most likely increase as the use of natural gas for power production increases.

So natural gas is not really the solution to the energy problem. It is clearly better than coal (especially if fugitive emissions are controlled), and its use is expected to increase substantially as coal power plants are phased out and wind turbine power increases, but it will still be a major contributor to global warming. The issues associated with drilling and fracking are likely to become more important, and it will be up to the industry to change their procedures to minimize road-building in wilderness areas and protect water. As Josh Fox, the producer of Gasland, says with some hyperbole: “We’re in the position right now of trading a short term energy fix and money for the future of our water in America” (58). Let’s make sure that is not the Faustian bargain we make.

Because coal and natural gas have so many “bad” and “ugly” attributes, with the only “good” being that they are plentiful, it is imperative that we wean ourselves from our dependence on these forms of energy. If a choice has to be made—and it will—then the first priority is to drastically reduce the use of coal for electricity production, even if that entails a greater reliability on natural gas. That is not the end of the story, however. What about renewable energy from the sun? Will it solve our energy and global warming problem? That is the topic for the next chapter.