'Fracking' Accidents Prompt Calls for Oversight

Last week, three spills of potentially carcinogenic hazardous chemicals at a natural gas drilling site in Pennsylvania prompted the state’s environmental protection agency to suspend Cabot Oil & Gas's operations in the county.

The spills were just a small part of a larger phenomenon — accidents at natural gas drilling sites that have imperiled the drinking water of nearby communities in states from Pennsylvania to Wyoming and that have no governmental oversight.

 They call it the “Halliburton Loophole” — an exemption for oil and gas companies to inject hazardous materials directly into or near underground drinking water supplies in a process called hydraulic fracturing.

Hydraulic fracturing, commonly called “fracking,” is used in natural gas wells to push fluid and sand at very high pressure into rock formations to release gas. Fracking fluid can contain chemicals that are hazardous and carcinogenic. Halliburton, a pioneer of the technique, says 35,000 wells are fracked each year.

As more accidents are reported at wells being “fracked” (undergoing hydraulic fracturing), both houses of Congress are considering legislation to close the Halliburton Loophole, so nicknamed not just because Halliburton developed the technique but also because former Halliburton CEO and ex-vice president Dick Cheney urged the creation of the exemption in 2005.

More than 160 community and national groups have signed a letter of support for the bills in Congress.

“We think everybody deserves to have their drinking water protected. It’s pretty simple,” says Amy Mall, senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who has blogged regularly about fracking accidents.

“There is a federal law that protects groundwater from underground injection” — the Safe Water Drinking Act — “but this one industry has a particular loophole. They should be subjected to the same laws regarding underground pollution.”

The problems that have surfaced at these drilling sites show that even the cleanest-burning fossil fuel can pose dangers to human health and welfare during extraction. And just like the coal industry with mountaintop mining, the oil and gas industry has launched a campaign to fight any new legislation that might subject its methods to closer scrutiny.

Often with fracking operations, groundwater supplies are at shallower levels than the natural gas deposits — say, 500 feet down as opposed to 5,000 — requiring companies to drill through aquifers to obtain gas. If an accident occurs underground, the fracking liquids can migrate into drinking water. The pending legislation would require companies to disclose what chemicals are in their fracking fluids.

Tracy Carluccio, deputy director at Delaware RiverKeeper, says Pennsylvania has seen a number of fracking accidents as the number of wells for both oil and gas in the state has increased from 2,000 in 1999 to 4,456 wells just for natural gas alone in 2009 up until September 22.