http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/05/concerns_for_njs_water_as_del.html
Published: Monday, May 30, 2011, 11:51 PM Updated: Tuesday, May 31, 2011, 5:23 AM
By Seth Augenstein/The Star-Ledger
New Jersey is downstream from a bitter battle over natural gas development in Pennsylvania that involves a controversial drilling practice.
During that process, called fracking, a mix of water, sand and chemicals is pumped more than a mile underground, causing explosions that unlock the pockets of natural gas.
But the practice is at the center of a dispute over natural gas development in Pennsylvania. The chemicals going underground could have a severe impact on water quality for more than 2.8 million residents in New Jersey, environmentalists warn.
“We’re going to get the bad end of this, and no one realizes it,” said Tracy Carluccio, deputy director of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, an environmental group.
Gas companies have been tapping wells across Pennsylvania using the process, which is also known as hydraulic fracturing, for several years. But now the gas industry is staking out northeastern Pennsylvania – the closest this natural gas rush has come to New Jersey – and the watershed of the Delaware River, one of the Garden State’s major sources of water.
Doug O’Malley, field director of Environment New Jersey, says it’s a wake-up call.
“We suddenly realized that this isn’t drilling in the arctic – this is drilling along the Delaware. I can’t think of a larger threat to our drinking water,” he said.
The perceived dangers have sparked response from the public. As the Delaware River Basin Commission, a regulatory agency with members from the four states along the river and the federal government, continues to draft regulations for gas drilling in its watershed, about 58,000 comments flooded into the agency before an April 15 deadline – more than 10 times that of other high-profile public issues in recent memory, a commission official said.
A natural gas rush
The pressure to drill is high, according to John Plonski, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s assistant commissioner for water-resource management and the state’s voting member on the commission.
“We know there’s going to be a rush on drilling in northeastern Pennsylvania once the regulations are passed,” he said. “Pennsylvania and New York and New Jersey have never experienced an oil or gas rush like this before.”
As many as 18,000 wells might be fracked in the basin over the next 30 years, said Clarke Rupert, a commission spokesman. Gas companies have already leased Pennsylvania land and are waiting for the rules of when and how to begin drilling, Rupert said. He added the commission’s role is to regulate the industry while protecting the watershed.
Industry groups say the technique is safe and has been newly refined to unearth the energy equivalent of 87 billion barrels of oil underneath the Marcellus Shale, an arc of underground rock from West Virginia and Ohio up to Pennsylvania and New York.
The natural gas industry says the resource is the nation’s clean alternative to coal and oil and the chemicals used are too deep to affect the water table.
The Marcellus Shale Coalition, which represents the drillers, says the wastewater that comes back up is either re-used or cleaned before being released into the environment.
“Hydraulic fracturing is one of the most tightly regulated technologies in one of the most tightly regulated industries,” said Travis Windle, spokesman for the Marcellus coalition.
“As a host of environmental regulators across the country have affirmed, fracturing has never impacted groundwater over the past 60 years. That’s not an accident.”
Pennsylvania just last month tightened the guidelines for how to treat the leftover fluids that come back up after fracking. The new standards require facilities to treat the byproduct to drinking-water standards, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
Still, environmentalists on this side of the border warn Pennsylvania’s standards are not going to do enough to protect water for millions of New Jersey taps.
“New Jersey residents will be affected,” said Carluccio. “Anything that happens upstream affects that water.”
Politicians respond
The fracking debate has intensified since the commission’s comment period ended. New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman threatened on April 18 to sue the federal government if it does not pledge to conduct a full safety investigation into the natural gas industry’s effects on the Delaware. The next day, a fracking well run by Chesapeake Energy in Bradford County, Pa., broke and leaked fluids with chemicals into a nearby tributary of the Susquehanna River.
The effects of the accident have been running downriver. The federal Environmental Protection Agency immediately began an investigation into the fracking process at the site. And on May 2, the Maryland attorney general notified Chesapeake and its affiliates it intended to sue over the incident, claiming that “tens of thousands of gallons of fracking fluids” had leaked into the Susquehanna River watershed – and were endangering the health of Maryland citizens downstream.
“Companies cannot expose citizens to dangerous chemicals that pose serious health risks to the environment and to public health,” said Douglas F. Gansler, the Maryland attorney general.
Water quality has been affected elsewhere, according to some experts. Conrad Volz, the former director of the Center for Healthy Environments and Communities at the University of Pittsburgh, said he has documented the fallout from fracking.
Volz said his team conducted studies in western Pennsylvania and found elevated levels of barium, benzene, strontium, petroleum byproducts and bromides were all being released from a wastewater treatment facility into a creek.
“I think New Jersey should learn from our problems here in Pennsylvania,” said Volz, who testified before the U.S. Senate on fracking a few weeks ago.
“This is one of the issues of our time – I fully believe that.”
Most recently, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a Duke University study documenting “systematic evidence” of methane contamination of drinking water sources in northeastern Pennsylvania and upstate New York, due to fracking. Some people have reported lighting their water on fire from the flammable fumes from their taps – but the National Academy study was the first confirmation of methane contamination.
However, the study found no contamination from fracking fluids in wells near gas wells.
‘Minimal’ effects
Some experts say the concerns are overstated. Terry Engelder, a professor of geosciences and a fracking expert based at Pennsylvania State University, said the industry recycles the fluids it uses, and keeps the ones that remain in the ground at a safe depth that won’t have serious health or environmental impacts.
“It certainly is minimal,” he said.
David Yoxtheimer, a geologist at the Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research at Penn State University, said the wastewater standards for natural gas in Pennsylvania were among the most stringent in the nation. He also said disposal of 90 percent of the fracking fluid a mile deep in the rock shale was no different from than the deep-well injection of toxic waste products from other industries because the fluids don’t have any way to get out of the deep rock beneath the water table.
“There’s really no driving force to get it up to the water table,” Yoxtheimer said.
New Jersey legislators are also getting involved. Five proposed bills in the Legislature would regulate or even ban fracking in the Garden State.
Sen. Linda R. Greenstein (D-Middlesex), a sponsor of a proposed fracking ban, said sponsors were sending an early message to the natural gas industry that New Jersey was going to protect its water, first and foremost.
“I think we wanted to make a strong statement – before it even hits New Jersey,” she said. “We didn’t want to play around the edges on this.”
Special thanks to Richard Charter