Hydrofracking, Water, Watersheds, and the Ocean
Much wastewater goes to treatment plants like this one at the Monongahela southeast of Pittsburgh, then into rivers, then to the oceans. Photo Source: The New York Times
By Peter Neill Director, World Ocean Observatory
“Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers” by Ian Urbina in the February 26, 2011 New York Times is a must read for anyone interested in yet another direct and indirect threat to the ocean.
“The American landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of new wells and drilling rigs, as the country scrambles to tap into this century’s gold rush: for natural gas.
Drilling companies have only in recent years developed techniques to unlock the enormous reserves, thought to be enough to supply the country with gas for heating buildings, generating electricity and powering vehicles for up to a hundred years.
Environmentalists say using natural gas will help slow climate change because it burns more cleanly than coal and oil, and also, see it as a way to wean the United States from its dependency on other countries for oil.
But the relatively new drilling method, known as high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, carries significant environmental risks. It involves injecting huge amounts of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, at high pressures to break up rock formations and release the gas.
With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself.
Industry officials say they are not concerned.” (Excerpt from Ian Urbina, The New York Times).
The concentrated presence of highly corrosive salts, benzene, radium, other radioactive and toxic chemical elements in the millions of gallons of wastewater used in hydrofracking, a relatively recent process of recovering natural gas from deep underground, is yet another unexpected consequence of the desperate pursuit of fossil fuels on our public health, on the safety of drinking water, watersheds, the food chain, and, ultimately, marine resources and the ocean.
Urbina’s investigation reveals failure by the US Environmental Protection Agency and state regulators to intervene through published study, testing, standards, and enforcement to protect the public from the incapacity of sewage treatment plants (where hundreds of millions of gallons of this wastewater is disposed) to deal with the massive amount of toxic salts and levels of radioactivity hundreds or even thousands of times the maximum allowed by federal standards for drinking water. While that water is not directly consumed by humans, the unmitigated volume of known carcinogenics is nonetheless deposited into streams and rivers, distributed through interconnected watersheds to the ocean, and introduced into the food chain as yet another “invisible” threat to human health. As with the impact of excess CO2 in the atmosphere (acidification) or excess nitrogen from agricultural fertilizers (eutrophication) or mercury in swordfish (persistent organic pollutants), this situation can be easily justified, ignored, or denied by industry and politicians, but it remains yet another example of how alternatives are not always solutions and how the imperative for a new energy policy and significant development and investment in renewable, safer technologies is so needed, now.
The sea connects all things.
Photo Source: Clark Little Photography
Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers, By Ian Urbina, The New York Times
