Toxic chemicals skyrocketing near fracking sites

A study found dangerous chemicals such as
benzene and formaldehyde near wells.

Oil and gas wells across the country are spewing “dangerous" cancer-causing chemicals into the air, according to a new study that further corroborates reports of health problems around hydraulic fracturing sites.

“This is a significant public health risk,” says Dr. David Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany-State University of New York and lead author of the study, which was published Thursday in the journal Environmental Health.

“Cancer has a long latency, so you’re not seeing an elevation in cancer in these communities. But five, 10, 15 years from now, elevation in cancer is almost certain to happen.”

Eight poisonous chemicals were found near wells and fracking sites in Arkansas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wyoming at levels that far exceeded recommended federal limits.

Benzene, a carcinogen, was the most common, as was formaldehyde, which also has been linked to cancer. Hydrogen sulfide, which smells like rotten eggs and can affect the brain and upper-respiratory system, also was found.

The health effects of living near a fracking site have been felt elsewhere, according to separate research.

A study published last month by researchers from the University of Washington and Yale University found residents within a kilometer of a well had up to twice the number of health problems as those living at least 2 kilometers away.

For Carpenter's study, trained volunteers living near the wells conducted air measurements, taking 35 “grab air” samples during heavy industrial activity or when they felt symptoms such as dizziness, nausea or headaches.

Another 41 “passive” tests – meaning samples were taken during a designated period, not merely when levels spiked – were conducted to monitor for formaldehyde. The tests were then sent to accredited labs.

Not every sample exceeded the recommended limits. But in those that did – slightly less than half the samples taken – benzene levels were 35 to 770,000 times greater than normal concentrations, or up to 33 times the exposure a driver might get while fueling his or her car.

Similarly, hydrogen sulfide levels above federal standards were 90 to 60,000 times higher than normal – enough to cause eye and respiratory irritation, fatigue, irritability, poor memory and dizziness after just one hour of exposure.

Excessive formaldehyde levels were 30 to 240 times higher than normal, which a statement on the study described as “more than twice the formaldehyde concentration that occurs in rooms where medical students are dissecting human cadavers, and where most students report respiratory irritation.”

A law passed in 2005 by Congress included what's commonly known as the "Halliburton loophole," which exempts oil and gas companies from federal regulations involving the monitoring and disclosure of fracking chemicals.

“It’s the gift that keeps on giving, the longer you’re exposed to these things,” says Wyoming resident Deb Thomas, who saw a well open across the road from her in 1999 and helped collect air samples for Carpenter’s study.

“I had an asthmatic episode – I’ve never had any asthma, I don’t have a history of asthma. I ended up at the hospital where they gave me breathing treatments. I’ve had really bad rashes.”

Thomas has come across similar symptoms at other unconventional oil and gas sites across the country, where as executive director of the nonprofit group ShaleTest, she’s helped take air samples for low-income families and communities affected by fracking.

“We see a lot of cognitive difficulties,” she says. “People get asthma or breathing difficulty or nose polyps or something with their eyes or their ears ring – the sorts of things that come on very subtly, but you start to notice them.”

However, it’s difficult to determine which health issues are a result of oil and gas operations and which stem from other factors, because symptoms often start only gradually and government air quality studies have proved limited in scope.

“It’s really hard to say what’s from the actual exposure,” Thomas says. “It’s very scary. It’s very hard to get information about what the development is. One minute you’re living your normal life, the next, people start to get really sick and they can’t get any answers.”

Occupational risks for workers

The chemicals may pose major risks to oil and gas workers, too.

“The occupational exposures we’re not even talking about,” Carpenter says. “If anybody is exposed at the levels our results show, these workers are exposed at tremendous levels.”

The American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s largest trade and lobbying group, and America’s Natural Gas Alliance, which represents independent gas exploration and production companies, both declined to comment ahead of the study’s release.

Spokesmen at each group referred questions to another industry organization, Energy In Depth, which dismissed the study's methods and conclusions as "dubious."

"Their commitment to banning oil and gas development, and their ideological position that fracking can never be adequately regulated, is clearly why this report comes to such harsh conclusions," says Energy In Depth spokeswoman Katie Brown, referring to the group that trained the volunteers, Global Community Monitor. "They were probably determined before the project ever began."

The study's findings came as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo weighed whether to end a state moratorium on fracking. Cuomo, a Democrat, had delayed the release of a state health department study on the industry until after elections.

As a professor and researcher in the New York state capital, Carpenter says he hopes his study “does influence the debate.”

“There’s certainly economic reasons to explore fracking,” he says. “I’m not religiously opposed to fracking. While I prefer renewable fuels, we’re a long way from that. I just want it done safely. There’s been debate about how safe or unsafe it is, and our results say there is a problem.”

Source: US News

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People near fracking wells list health concerns

People living close to fracking wells reported more
health issues, researchers say.

People living near natural-gas wells were more than twice as likely to report upper-respiratory and skin problems than those farther away, says a major study on the potential health effects of fracking.

Nearly two of every five, or 39%, of those living less than a kilometer (or two-thirds of a mile) from a well reported upper respiratory symptoms, compared to 18% living more than 2 kilometers away, according to a Yale University-led random survey of 492 people in 180 households with ground-fed water wells in southwestern Pennsylvania.

The disparity was even greater for skin irritation. While 13% of those within a kilometer of a well said they had rashes and other skin symptoms, only 3% of those beyond 2 kilometers said the same.

"This is the largest study to look at the overall health of people living near the wells," says lead author and University of Washington environmental health professor Peter Rabinowitz, who did the research while at Yale.

The study focused on Washington County, part of the Marcellus Shale where hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is widely used to extract natural gas.

"It suggests there may be more health problems in people living closer to natural gas wells," but it doesn't prove that the wells caused their symptoms, he says, adding more research is needed.

Fracking, combined with horizontal drilling, has spurred a U.S. boom in oil and natural-gas production. It blasts huge amounts of water — mixed with sand and chemicals — deep underground to break apart shale deposits and extract gas and oil from the rock's pores.

Prior peer-reviewed studies have linked fracking to possible birth defects, higher lung disease risks, methane contamination in drinking water and elevated endocrine-disrupting chemical activity in groundwater. Some environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, oppose fracking, saying it has insufficient safeguards.

Yet the oil and gas industry defends fracking as a safe way to bolster the U.S. economy and lessen the nation's dependence on foreign sources of energy.

At the time the research was conducted in the summer of 2012, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection said there were were 624 active natural-gas wells in the survey area, 95% of which used fracking. The study received funding from private foundations, including The Heinz Endowments.

This article has been edited for length.
Source: USA Today

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Fracking health concerns continue

Air quality complaints and water contamination debated

Fracking sites can emit dangerous levels of
toxic substances over short periods of time.

There are more than 6,000 active gas wells in Pennsylvania. And every week, those drilling sites generate scores of complaints from the state’s residents, including many about terrible odors and contaminated water.

How the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection handles those complaints has worsened the already raw and angry divide between fearful residents and the state regulators charged with overseeing the burgeoning gas drilling industry.

For instance, the agency’s own manual for dealing with complaints is explicit about what to do if someone reports concerns about a noxious odor, but is not at that very moment experiencing the smell: “DO NOT REGISTER THE COMPLAINT.”

When a resident does report a real-time alarm about the air quality in or around their home, the agency typically has two weeks to conduct an investigation. If no odor is detected when investigators arrive on the scene, the case is closed.

“The time that it takes them to respond is something people are concerned about,” said Matt Walker, a community outreach director for the Clean Air Council in Pennsylvania, an environmental advocacy organization. Waiting a few days to two weeks to respond to odor complaints, he said, is “way too long.”

The concerns of residents are not likely to be eased by a study published in Reviews on Environmental Health, a peer reviewed journal.

The study, researchers say, confirms what they have long suspected about natural gas operations — that emission levels from these sites spike drastically over short periods of time, making it hard to assess the true threat to people’s health.

Researchers at the Southwest Pennsylvania Environmental Health Project collected real-time readings of particulate matter — soot, dust and chemicals — in 14 homes in Washington County, a heavily drilled part of the state.

They found repeated episodes during which measures of contaminated dust rose sharply, to dangerous levels in the course of a day.

David Brown, the lead researcher on the study, said that a person in such circumstances could get what amounted to a full day’s exposure in half an hour.

The Pennsylvania Independent Oil and Gas Association declined to comment on the Environmental Health Project’s study but said that the oil and gas industry is “heavily regulated” and that the association’s member companies “strive to comply with numerous federal and state air quality related rules, regulations, and reporting requirements.”

Information provided by the DEP shows that between 2011 and 2014, the department received over 2,000 complaints about oil and natural gas operations. Water quality issues featured prominently in the list of complaints. The DEP also registered 110 of the complaints as odor issues.

John Quigley, a former director of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, said the need for greater transparency in the oversight of the fracking industry was real and urgent.

***

Gas drilling operations include several processes that release toxic chemicals into the air. The type and level of chemicals released varies from hour to hour depending on the type of activity taking place on the well pad.

Despite this, researchers and regulators seeking to assess the health threat of fracking operations have typically used measurement devices that capture air emissions over longer periods of time, often 24 hours.

These levels are then, in many cases, compared to the EPA’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards, which were created over 40 years ago at a time when large, 24-hour-a-day sources of pollution such as coal fire plants and steel mills were dominant.

“You can’t use 24-hour standards if the health effect occurs within a few minutes,” said Brown, the lead author of the study released Friday.

The question of whether episodic bursts of contaminated air from fracking could pose an unappreciated but real health menace was first explored in West Virginia in 2010.

West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection asked Michael McCawley, then a professor at West Virginia University’s Health Sciences Center, to study air emissions from fracking operations in the state. McCawley found the contaminants he detected at fracking sites fluctuated over a wide range.

Those findings mirror those in the Pennsylvania study published on Tuesday.

Research has shown that fracking operations can release an array of toxic chemicals — some carcinogenic, others capable, at significant enough levels, of causing serious neurological and respiratory damage. The worry, Brown says, is that these chemicals are attached to the microscopic dust particles that he detected and can reach the bloodstream after being inhaled.

McCawley and Brown say that the wide fluctuations that they’re picking up on are also attributable to operators not using the best available technology to limit possibly harmful emissions.

State and federal regulations, for instance, do not require operators to use equipment that would capture all emissions during drilling. Often, gases are vented or flared into the air. The regulations also don’t consider activities, like diesel truck traffic, that degrade air quality at the fracking site.

“The law requires best technology,” said McCawley, and the data, he says, is telling us that the gas drilling industry is “not working according to the strict definition of the law.”

Source: ProPublica. This article has been edited for length.

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Natural gas wells may leak twice as much gas as previously thought

Gas wells leak up to
4% of methane gas.

A new study is raising concerns about the air quality near natural gas wells and their impact on the climate.

The study shows that wells in Colorado have leaked about twice as much gas into the atmosphere as previously thought.

Natural gas is mostly made of methane and while it gives off less carbon dioxide than coal when burned, methane in the atmosphere is a strong contributor to global warming and can have a big impact on the climate.

The study appeared in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

The researchers measured the air quality near Denver using a 300-meter tower, in an area where more than 20,000 gas wells are being used.

While some of the methane detected by the sensors can come from landfills, cattle feedlots and waste-water treatment sites, the researchers could identify methane from gas wells by other components that accompanied the readings.

The study finds that about 4 percent of the methane in gas wells was leaking.

The researchers previously found that higher-than-expected levels of methane were being released from wells used in the hydraulic fracturing process.

Middle class schools closest to gas wells: Study

In a separate study in Texas, researchers found that socially vulnerable areas tend to have more gas wells near schools, meaning some communities could be burdened more with health or social costs.

In fact, the study shows that middle class neighborhoods (not rich or poor ones) had most gas wells near elementary schools.

The researchers looked at proximity because there is a lack of other studies on health effects or pollution when it comes to the effect of shale gas production on communities, they said.

They focused on children because they are such a vulnerable group, they added.

Sources: Science News, Denton Record-Chronicle

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