Regulate, Baby, Regulate hat does drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus shale formation of Pennsylvania have in common with the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico? Answer: lack of adequate oversight and regulations on drilling. The consequences of a decade of coziness between government and the oil and gas industry are only now coming into view. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is at the forefront trying to fix the problem. He forced Elizabeth Birnbaum, head of the Materials Management Service (MMS) that oversees offshore drilling, to resign following the BP rig explosion. President Obama admitted that his administration had failed to fix the “cozy and sometimes corrupt” (www.whitehouse.gov) relations between government regulators and the oil and gas industry which developed during the Bush Administration. But now, Obama finds himself in a pitched battle to maintain an unpopular ban on deepwater drilling. On July 12, Salazar said, “... industry must raise the bar on its practices and answer fundamental questions about deepwater safety, blowout prevention, and containment, and oil spill response” (www.doi.gov). Salazar is right. The basic problem is that BP, Transocean, and Halliburton did not have a clue what to do when the worst case happened. And according to Mike Williams, Transocean’s chief technician, they had routinely bypassed key alarm and shutdown systems on the Deepwater Horizon and other drill rigs (July 23, 2010 TimesPicayune [www.nola.com/news]). The American public deserves to know exactly what happened on the Deepwater Horizon, and how it’s been corrected before drilling resumes. If other companies have safer operations, they should be exempted as soon as that can be adequately determined. Bloomberg reported that 73% of all Americans oppose the drilling ban (July 14, 2010 www.bloomberg. com). In July, 15,000 people attended a pro-drilling meeting in the Cajundome in Lafayette, Louisiana. Their logic goes something like this: “You don’t stop flying commercial airlines because one of them crashes, and you shouldn’t ban all deepwater drilling just because one oil rig explodes and spills oil into the Gulf. Besides, thousands of jobs are at stake.” (June 23, 2010 http://caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com). But when an accident is so damaging that it kills 11 people, threatens an entire fishery and coastal ecosystem, and destroys the livelihood of tens of thousands of people, it demands an investigation first, and business-as-usual second. Coincidentally, a new documentary, Gasland, has riveted U.S. attention. In one memorable sequence, it shows tap water on fire in a private home (www.
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6524 9 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY / September 1, 2010
hbo.com/documentaries/gasland/index.html). The gas and water mixture presumably bubbled-up from a deep aquifer due to hydraulic fracturing when “fracking” fluids were pumped at great pressures to shatter shale and freely connect tight pore spaces, thus releasing gas and water. Normally, a well producing water or gas is a good thingsjust not both of them at the same time to a private residence. Horizontal (directional) drilling technology has advanced light years in only the past two decades. In tandem with hydraulic fracturing, it’s enabled shale gas development, which is revolutionizing the energy industry, resulting in perhaps 1000 trillion cubic feet of new natural gas for North America alone (Amy Myers Jaffe, “Shale Gas Will Rock the World, May 10, 2010 Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article). Economists believe it will lower the price of natural gas and power our economy for decades with clean energy. So why not be excited? Unfortunately, the industry is seriously under-regulated. In 2004, a hastily prepared EPA report found hydraulic fracturing to be of very limited risk, and the next year Congress exempted it from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Like the Corexit 9500 dispersant used in the Gulf, even the EPA does not know what proprietary chemicals are contained in “fracking” fluids. In addition to causing tap water to burn, a home has exploded, produced-water has killed wildlife in toxic pits/ ponds/lagoons, and air pollution has added to nonattainment woes in cities like Fort Worth, Texas. Since 2004, thousands of cases of contaminated wells have been documented in court cases in Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Ohio, and Pennsylvania (www.sciam.com). In the case of the Barnett shale drilling operations under Fort Worth, company wellheads, compressor stations, and pipelines leak VOCs and NOx into polluted urban air. In the case of Pavillion, Wyoming, EPA found traces of 2-butoxyethanol, a toxic foaming agent widely used in fracturing fluids in municipal and private wells (Glenn Hess, C&EN 2010, 88 [22], 42-45; http://pubs.acs.org/cen/). In the case of the Marcellus formation, groundwater and surface water supplies are at risk in a region serving four million people. In all these situations, the worst case scenario of massive aquifer contamination by broken well casings during or after gas production is never really evaluated, and like the Deepwater Horizon, a response plan doesn’t exist. Thankfully, if there is any positive outcome from the financial crisis of the past two years, it is that REGULATE is no longer a dirty word. A proper role of government is to protect the health and welfare of its 10.1021/es102534k
2010 American Chemical Society
Published on Web 08/03/2010
people, and it has abdicated for too long in the case of the oil and gas industry. It’s time to regulate, baby, regulate. Managing Editor’s Note: In the interest of space, many of the URLs noted in this Comment go to a homepage, but an Internet search (e.g., site homepage, www.google.com) can retrieve the contextual page. The HTML version of this Comment has active hyperlinks on these homepage URLs that go directly to the (more specific) page in question. The HTML versions of our publications are freely accessible on our Web site http:// pubs.acs.org/journal/esthagssearch by DOI number (in
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Jerald L. Schnoor Editor*
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September 1, 2010 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 9 6525
