Unnatural Gas

Most of the East’s great trout streams drain New York State’s Catskills, northern Pennsylvania and the highlands of West Virginia. Superimpose a map of these watersheds on the prime drilling sites in the Marcellus shale region—a 48,000-square-mile layer of sedimentary rock a mile or more below Earth’s surface and containing an estimated 363 trillion cubic feet of natural gas—and you get almost an exact geographic match. This probably isn’t coincidence because in high country, where remnant populations of wild trout abide in cold headwaters, natural gas tends to be under greater pressure.

Natural gas extraction from this, potentially the largest of some two-dozen gas development areas in the United States, is just starting. No one I consulted in the conservation community opposes exploiting this rich resource. They’d just like it done right; they’d even settle for legally. Instead, New York, West Virginia and, especially, Pennsylvania are in the process of suspending what the energy industry calls “impediments” to gas production and what the rest of the nation calls environmental laws.

Basically, they’ve embraced the Bush-Cheney “energy policy,” hatched in secret with the energy companies themselves: Extract as much gas as possible as fast as possible, at any cost to fish and wildlife and with enormous subsidies to industry at a time of record profit. One might have supposed that these states would have learned something from the recent rape of Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico, but no.

And, while the Obama administration is relatively sympathetic to fish and wildlife, it can’t do a lot because, unlike western gas reserves, the Marcellus formation underlies mostly private and state lands. The current atmosphere approaches that in Alaska back when whooping sourdoughs were slamming gold nuggets onto the bar at the Red Dog Saloon. Suddenly farmers who have spent their adult lives wresting produce from parsimonious dirt are being offered $2,500 per acre just for drilling rights. Texas-based Range Resources has thus far leased 1.4 million acres in the Marcellus region and claims that in Pennsylvania alone gas extraction would create 100,000 jobs and annual revenue of at least $8 billion. Pennsylvania issued 471 drilling permits in 2008 and, as of this writing in early June, 476 in 2009.

So-called clean natural gas fouls everything but your furnace. In a process called “hydraulic fracturing,” developed by Halliburton Company, a witches’ brew of water, sand, formaldehyde, acids, petroleum compounds and herbicides (highly toxic to fish) that discourage pump-clogging algae in wastewater ponds and tanks, is blasted into the earth at high pressure, fracturing the shale. Dozens of other ingredients are unknown to the EPA and the public because the precise composition of “fracking fluid” is conveniently said by the industry to be a “trade secret.” Halliburton vows to pull its affected operations out of Colorado if the state forces it to disclose the recipe for its toxic cocktail.

And the government accountability outfit OMB Watch reports that in 2008 a Colorado nurse almost died just by treating a gas field worker who had been doused in fracking fluid and that although the nurse was suffering heart, lung and liver failure, kidney damage and blurred vision, the drilling company refused to tell her doctors what the “proprietary” chemicals were. When frack fluid is pumped out, the sand remains, propping open the cracks so the gas can flow.

But now the fluid—as much as 4 million gallons per well—has picked up such additional toxins as benzene, ethyl benzene, toluene, xylene, heavy metals, salts and naturally occurring radioactive material (chastely referred to as NORM) and usually consisting of Radium 226 and Radium 228, bone seekers that cause cancer. According to the Los Angeles Times, information on fracking and its dangers to public health was deleted from the White House National Energy Policy, written largely by then Vice President Dick Cheney, previously CEO of Halliburton, which, while he was in office, paid him $150,000 a year until 2005.

At best, treatment of used frack fluid is only partial, and there’s no place to dispose of it other than in streams where it can poison aquatic ecosystems or underground where it can poison aquifers. In southwest Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia, the Monongahela River, source of drinking water for 350,000 people and habitat for endangered mussels as well as a rich diversity of warmwater fish including bass, sauger and walleye, got so rank with used frack fluid in 2008 that its water wasn’t even fit for industrial use.

U.S. Steel actually had to stop production at its Pittsburg coke plant. Steve Kepler, a biologist with the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, points out that there aren’t anywhere near enough treatment plants to handle used frack fluid and, as a result, it is being trucked halfway across the state, overwhelming municipal sewage treatment plants, and ending up in streams along with the municipal effluent whose treatment it has impeded.