EPA BEGINS INVESTIGATION OF PENNSYLVANIA
March 18, 2011
EPA BEGINS INVESTIGATION OF PENNSYLVANIA
Hinchey Press Release on SDWA 2-26-11
February 28, 2011
Washington DC – A New York Times article entitled “Regulation Is Lax for Water From Gas Wells” revealed that toxic wastewater byproducts of hydraulic fracturing, a drilling technique used to obtain natural gas, can contain radioactive contaminants at levels hundreds or even thousands of times the maximum allowed by federal standards for drinking water. In reaction, Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) released the following statement. Hinchey co-authored the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals (FRAC) Act to eliminate the so-called 2005 Halliburton exemption, which prevents the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating fracking through the Safe Drinking Water Act. The legislation would also require the disclosure of chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing process. Hinchey is also the author of language that initiated an ongoing EPA study to determine the environmental impacts of the drilling technique. “The news that radioactive waste from the hydraulic fracturing process is being sent through wastewater treatment plants unequipped to handle it and then dumped into rivers and streams that supply drinking water to millions of people is alarming and must be immediately addressed. This story shows that the risks associated with this drilling technique are far too unknown and the current regulatory framework is far too limited to protect drinking water and the general public. “Congress must take action to untie the hands of the Environmental Protection Agency, allowing it to assert proper oversight of the full life-cycle of the hydraulic fracturing process by repealing the egregious exemptions that this industry enjoys from our nation’s most important environmental safeguards. I will be introducing legislation in the near future to do just that. “The EPA should immediately begin requiring states to monitor radioactivity levels at all drinking water intakes that are in close proximity to sewage treatment plants that accept natural gas drilling wastewater. “We can’t afford to take the ‘wait and see’ approach when it comes to radioactive, carcinogenic materials contaminating drinking water. Now is the time for all those who care about the safety of America’s drinking water supplies to step up to the plate and protect it for future generations.” ### |
| February 26, 2011 |
EPA Submits Draft Hydraulic Fracturing Study Plan to Independent Scientists for Review
February 8, 2011
EPA Submits Draft Hydraulic Fracturing Study Plan to Independent Scientists for Review
The draft plan is open to public comment 2/8/11
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today submitted its draft study plan on hydraulic fracturing for review to the agency’s Science Advisory Board (SAB), a group of independent scientists. Natural gas plays a key role in our nation’s clean energy future and the process known as hydraulic fracturing is one way of accessing that vital resource. EPA scientists, under this administration and at the direction of Congress, are undertaking a study of this practice to better understand any potential impacts it may have, including on groundwater. EPA announced its intention to conduct the study in March 2010 and use the best available science, independent sources of information, a transparent, peer-reviewed process and with consultation from others. Since then, EPA has held a series of public meetings across the country with thousands attending and the agency has developed a sound draft plan for moving forward with the study.
The scope of the proposed research includes the full lifespan of water in hydraulic fracturing, from acquisition of the water, through the mixing of chemicals and actual fracturing, to the post-fracturing stage, including the management of flowback and produced or used water and its ultimate treatment and disposal.
The SAB plans to review the draft plan March 7-8, 2011. Consistent with the operating procedures of the SAB, stakeholders and the public will have an opportunity to provide comments to the SAB during their review. The agency will revise the study plan in response to the SAB’s comments and promptly begin the study. Initial research results and study findings are expected to be made public by the end of 2012, with the goal of an additional report following further research in 2014.
Hydraulic fracturing is a process in which large volumes of water, sand and chemicals are injected at high pressures to extract oil and natural gas from underground rock formations. The process creates fractures in formations such as shale rock, allowing natural gas or oil to escape into the well and be recovered. Over the past few years, the use of hydraulic fracturing for gas extraction has increased and has expanded over a wider diversity of geographic regions and geologic formations.
For a copy of the draft study plan and additional information:
http://yosemite.epa.gov/sab/sabproduct.nsf/02ad90b136fc21ef85256eba00436459/d3483ab445ae61418525775900603e79!OpenDocument&TableRow=2.1#2
More information on hydraulic fracturing:
www.epa.gov/hydraulicfracturing
Clean Air Under Siege – NYTimes.com
February 6, 2011
Clean Air Under Siege – NYTimes. Feb. 6, 2011.
Shortly after he entered the Senate in 2007, John Barrasso told his Wyoming constituents that the country’s biggest need was an energy policy to deal with carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.
That was then. In lockstep with other Senate Republicans, he helped kill last year’s energy and climate bill. Now he has introduced a bill that would bar the Environmental Protection Agency and any other part of the federal government from regulating carbon pollution.
Congress’s failure to enact a climate bill means that the E.P.A.’s authority to regulate these gases — an authority conferred by a landmark Supreme Court decision in 2007 — is, for now, the only tool available to the federal government to combat global warming.
The modest regulations the agency has already proposed, plus stronger ones it will issue later this year, should lead to the retirement of many of the nation’s older, dirtier coal-fired power plants and a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions.
Mr. Barrasso’s bill is not an isolated challenge. Senator James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who called global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” has unveiled a somewhat narrower bill to undercut the E.P.A.’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide. Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican and new chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, simultaneously introduced a companion bill.
There are a half-dozen other such measures in circulation, at least one of which would weaken the agency’s long-held powers to regulate conventional ground-level pollutants like soot and mercury.
One or another of these bills has a real shot in the Republican-controlled House. Their chances are slimmer in the Senate, where the bigger danger is a proposal by Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, that would block any new regulations on power plants and other industrial sources for two years.
That is just obstruction by another name. It would delay modernization and ensure that more carbon is dumped into the atmosphere. History shows that regulatory delays have a way of becoming permanent.
It is tempting to blame the entire energy industry for these attacks on the E.P.A.’s authority. The oil companies are pushing hard against any new rules. The utilities are split. Some companies like General Electric — whose chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is now advising President Obama — signed on to the energy bill that passed the House last year, when it was still under Democratic control.
Mr. Inhofe, an outlier before the midterm elections, has a lot more company now. Even among lawmakers who accept the facts of global warming, he is getting considerable mileage with baseless charges that the E.P.A. is running amok.
The agency does have a heavy regulatory agenda. It will issue proposals not only on greenhouse gases but also ozone, sulfur dioxide, and mercury, which poisons lakes and fish. These regulations are fully consistent with the Clean Air Act. Some of them should have been completed during the Bush years; all are essential to protect the environment. The agency’s administrator, Lisa Jackson, has moved cautiously, making clear that she will target only the largest polluters and not, as the Republicans claim, mom-and-pop businesses.
In his State of the Union address, President Obama promised to protect “common-sense safeguards” to the nation’s environment. The rules under siege in Congress will help clean the air, reduce toxic pollution in fish and slow emissions of greenhouse gases. It is hard to imagine anything more sensible than that.
Diesel Use in Gas Drilling Cited as Violation of Safe-Water Law – NYTimes.com
February 1, 2011
Diesel Use in Gas Drilling Cited as Violation of Safe-Water Law – NYTimes.com.
Gas Drilling Technique Is Labeled Violation
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
Published: January 31, 2011
Oil and gas service companies injected tens of millions of gallons of diesel fuel into onshore wells in more than a dozen states from 2005 to 2009, Congressional investigators have charged. Those injections appear to have violated the Safe Water Drinking Act, the investigators said in a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday.
Ralph Wilson/Associated Press
Workers at a natural-gas well site near Burlington, Pa.
The diesel fuel was used by drillers as part of a contentious process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which involves the high-pressure injection of a mixture of water, sand and chemical additives — including diesel fuel — into rock formations deep underground. The process, which has opened up vast new deposits of natural gas to drilling, creates and props open fissures in the rock to ease the release of oil and gas.
But concerns have been growing over the potential for fracking chemicals — particularly those found in diesel fuel — to contaminate underground sources of drinking water.
“We learned that no oil and gas service companies have sought — and no state and federal regulators have issued — permits for diesel fuel use in hydraulic fracturing,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman of California and two other Democratic members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, in the letter. “This appears to be a violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act.”
Oil and gas companies acknowledged using diesel fuel in their fracking fluids, but they rejected the House Democrats’ assertion that it was illegal. They said that the E.P.A. had never properly developed rules and procedures to regulate the use of diesel in fracking, despite a clear grant of authority from Congress over the issue.
“Everyone understands that E.P.A. is at least interested in regulating fracking,” said Matt Armstrong, a lawyer with the Washington firm Bracewell & Giuliani, which represents several oil and gas companies. “Whether the E.P.A. has the chutzpah to try to impose retroactive liability for use of diesel in fracking, well, everyone is in a wait-and-see mode. I suspect it will have a significant fight on its hands if it tried it do that.”
Regardless of the legal outcome, the Waxman findings are certain to intensify an already contentious debate among legislators, natural gas companies and environmentalists over the safety of oil and gas development in general, and fracking in particular.
Oil services companies had traditionally used diesel fuel as part of their fracturing cocktails because it helped to dissolve and disperse other chemicals suspended in the fluid. But some of the chemical components of diesel fuel, including toluene, xylene and benzene, a carcinogen, have alarmed both regulators and environmental groups. They argue that some of those chemicals could find their way out of a well bore — either because of migration through layers of rock or spills and sloppy handling — and into nearby sources of drinking water.
An E.P.A. investigation in 2004 failed to find any threat to drinking water from fracking — a conclusion that was widely dismissed by critics as politically motivated. The agency has taken up the issue again in a new investigation started last year, although the results are not expected until 2012 at the earliest.
The House committee began its own investigation in February last year, when Democrats were in the majority. In Monday’s letter, Mr. Waxman, along with Representatives Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Diana DeGette of Colorado, said that they were so far “unable to draw definitive conclusions about the potential impact of these injections on public health or the environment.”
Still, the investigators said that three of the largest oil and gas services companies — Halliburton, Schlumberger and BJ Services — signed an agreement with the E.P.A. in 2003 intended to curtail the use of diesel in fracking in certain shallow formations.
Two years later, when Congress amended the Safe Water Drinking Act to exclude regulation of hydraulic fracturing, it made an express exception that allowed regulation of diesel fuel used in fracking.
The Congressional investigators sent letters to 14 companies requesting details on the type and volume of fracking chemicals they used. Although many companies said they had eliminated or were cutting back on use of diesel, 12 companies reported having used 32.2 million gallons of diesel fuel, or fluids containing diesel fuel, in their fracking processes from 2005 to 2009.
The diesel-laced fluids were used in a total of 19 states. Approximately half the total volume was deployed in Texas, but at least a million gallons of diesel-containing fluids were also used in Oklahoma (3.3 million gallons); North Dakota (3.1 million); Louisiana (2.9 million); Wyoming (2.9 million); and Colorado (1.3 million).
Where this leaves the companies in relation to federal law is unclear.
Mr. Waxman and his colleagues say that the Safe Drinking Water Act left diesel-based hydraulic fracturing under the auspices of E.P.A.’s “underground injection control program,” which requires companies to obtain permits, either from state or federal regulators, for a variety of activities that involve putting fluids underground.
No permits for diesel-based fracking have been sought or granted since the Safe Drinking Water Act was amended in 2005.
Lee Fuller, a vice president for government relations with the Independent Petroleum Association of America, said that was because the E.P.A. had never followed up by creating rules and procedures for obtaining such permits and submitting them for public comment.
The agency did quietly update its Web site last summer with language suggesting that fracking with diesel was, indeed, covered as part of the underground injection program, which would suggest that permits should have been obtained. But Mr. Fuller’s organization, along with the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, has gone to court to challenge the Web posting, arguing that it amounted to new rule-making that circumvented administrative requirements for notice and public commentary.
The E.P.A. said Monday that it was reviewing the accusations from the three House Democrats that the companies named were in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act.
“Our goal is to put in place a clear framework for permitting so that fracturing operations using diesel receive the review required by law,” Betsaida Alcantara, an E.P.A. spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message. “We will provide further information about our plans as they develop.”
Gas Drilling Technique Is Labeled Violation
January 31, 2011
Gas Drilling Technique Is Labeled Violation
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
Published: January 31, 2011
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Oil and gas service companies injected tens of millions of gallons of diesel fuel into onshore wells in more than a dozen states from 2005 to 2009, Congressional investigators have charged. Those injections appear to have violated the Safe Water Drinking Act, the investigators said in a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday.
A blog about energy and the environment.
The diesel fuel was used by drillers as part of a contentious process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which involves the high-pressure injection of a mixture of water, sand and chemical additives — including diesel fuel — into rock formations deep underground. The process, which has opened up vast new deposits of natural gas to drilling, creates and props open fissures in the rock to ease the release of oil and gas.
But concerns have been growing over the potential for fracking chemicals — particularly those found in diesel fuel — to contaminate underground sources of drinking water.
EPA Gas-drilling/peer-review-panel-for-fracking-study-includes-six-pa-scientists Jan. 18, 2011
January 18, 2011
List of EPA Peer Review Panel http://yosemite.epa.gov/sab/sabpeople.nsf/WebCommitteesSubcommittees/Hydraulic%20Fracturing%20Study%20Plan%20Review%20Panel
Gas-drilling/peer-review-panel-for-epa-fracking-study-includes-six-pa-scientists-1.1091757. Times Tribune
Peer-review panel for EPA fracking study includes six Pa. scientists
By Laura Legere (Staff Writer)
Published: January 18, 2011
A panel of geologists, toxicologists, engineers and doctors that will peer-review a high-profile Environmental Protection Agency study of hydraulic fracturing will include six scientists from Pennsylvania, more than any other state.
The panel will review the techniques and analysis the EPA uses to draft a study of the potential environmental and health impacts of hydraulic fracturing – the process used in natural gas exploration of injecting a high-pressure mix of chemically treated water and sand underground to break apart a rock formation and release the gas.
The panel might also be called on to review the conclusions of the study, which are slated for release in 2012.
The board, called the Hydraulic Fracturing Study Plan Review Panel, was narrowed to 23 members from a list of 88 nominated candidates, some of whom were criticized in public comments submitted by industry or environmental groups for being biased.
All but four members selected for the panel are affiliated with research universities and none is currently employed by an oil or gas company.
Five of seven members of a previous peer-review panel involved in a 2004 EPA study of hydraulic fracturing in coal-bed methane wells were current or former employees of the oil and gas industry. That study’s findings, that hydraulic fracturing poses “little or no threat” to drinking water aquifers, has been touted by the industry but challenged by an EPA whistle-blower.
In a memo announcing the new panel, the EPA found “no conflicts of interest or appearances of a lack of impartiality for the members of this panel.”
It will be led by David A. Dzombak, professor of environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and include Michel Boufadel of Temple University; Elizabeth Boyer of Penn State University; Richard Hammack, a Pittsburgh-based roject manager for the U.S. Department of Energy; Jeanne VanBriesen of Carnegie Mellon and Radisav D. Vidic of the University of Pittsburgh.
Contact the writer: llegere@timesshamrock.com
Radon in Drinking Water | Radon | US EPA
December 25, 2010
Radon in Drinking Water | Radon | US EPA.
Public Health Standards for Radon in Drinking Water
EPA’s proposal for public health standards for radon in drinking water provided two options to States and community water systems for reducing radon health risks in both drinking water and indoor air quality, a unique multimedia framework authorized in the 1996 Amendments to the Safewater Drinking Water Act (SDWA). Information about the proposed rule and information relating to the status of the rule can be found at http://water.epa.gov
National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Report on Radon in Drinking Water “Risk Assessment of Radon in Drinking Water.”
A report released September 15, 1998, by the National Academy of Sciences is the most comprehensive accumulation of scientific data on the public health risks of radon in drinking water. The report was required by the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). The NAS report (BEIR VI) issued earlier this year confirmed that radon is a serious public health threat. This report goes on to refine the risks of radon in drinking water and confirms that there are drinking water related cancer deaths, primarily due to lung cancer. The report, in general, confirms earlier EPA scientific conclusions and analyses for drinking water, and presents no major changes to EPA’s 1994 risk assessment.
Safe Drinking Water Hotline
Call toll free and speak with an Information Specialist Monday through Friday, 10:00 am to 4:00 pm eastern time at 1-800-426-4791. Local calls or International calls at (703) 412-3330. The Hotline is closed on Federal holidays, except Veteran’s Day. The Hotline is open on Veteran’s Day but closed the day after Thanksgiving.
The Safe Drinking Water Hotline telecommunications system provides only recorded messages in English and Spanish 24-hours a day, seven days a week at 1-800-426-4791. Local calls at (703) 412-3330. International calls at (703) 412-3330. Bilingual service is available. An introductory telephone message tells Spanish callers to leave a detailed message. Bilingual Information Specialists will return these calls. Write to The Safe Drinking Water Hotline, 4606M, 1200 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20460.
States Pursue Radon Limits in Drinking Water as EPA Action Lags
December 25, 2010 1 Comment
States Pursue Radon Limits in Drinking Water as EPA Action Lags.
By GAYATHRI VAIDYANATHAN of Greenwire
Published: December 7, 2010
States are taking the lead with studying levels of radon in drinking water and air even as federal regulators lag, as a coincidence of geology and population density leaves some more at risk than others of suffering from the naturally occurring radioactive toxin.
GDACC 
