The Greatest Industrial Crime of Our Time
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, occurs after a well has been drilled and steel pipe (casing) has been inserted in the well bore. The casing is perforated within the target zones that contain oil or gas, so that when the fracturing fluid is injected into the well it flows through the perforations into the target zones. Eventually, the target formation will not be able to absorb the fluid as quickly as it is being injected. At this point, the pressure created causes the formation to crack or fracture. Once the fractures have been created, injection ceases and the fracturing fluids begin to flow back to the surface. Materials called proppants (e.g., usually sand or ceramic beads), which were injected as part of the fracking fluid mixture, remain in the target formation to hold open the fractures.
In the US, nearly 90% of these wells are on private land.
I. Water at The Wellhead
a. According to Scientific American, fracking uses 15+ billions of gallons of water annually, approximately 8 million gallons of water per well.
b. Jeffery Backstrom of Utah State University found that the median water use for a horizontal well was almost 11.2 million gallons in Texas in early 2017, which is up from about 3.8 million in 2012. In the Permian Basin in west Texas, where the largest share of unconventional oil is now being produced, median water use per well was over 14.6 million gallons in early 2017.
c. Water used nationally for fracking between 2005 and 2016 was over 239 billion gallons.
d. It has been estimated that the transportation of two to five million gallons of water (fresh or waste water) requires 1,400 truck trips (Earthworks).
e. Nationally, methane escaping into the atmosphere from wellheads in 2014 was estimated to be 5.3 billion pounds, the equivalent of 22 coal fired plants or 17 million cars. Methane is estimated to be 86 times more polluting than C02 over the course of 20 years. Natural gas is 80% methane.
f. Studies by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the University of California, and Penn State University, among others, concluded that anywhere from 4% to 10% of natural gas produced in several regions of the US escapes into the atmosphere (this percentage increases if natural gas and its load of methane is intentionally flared into the atmosphere at the well head).
g. 7 states accounted for over 15 billion gallons of waste water in 2014.
h. Fracking fluids, which are over 90% water, in addition to being strongly saline, contain over 1000 chemicals (Yale School of Public Health), many of which are not public (for proprietary reasons). A four million gallons fracturing operation uses from 80 to 330 tons of chemicals.
i. Between 2005 and 2015, these chemicals included more than 5 billion pounds of hydrochloric acid (as hydrogen chloride), 1.2 billion pounds of petroleum distillates, and 440 million pounds of methanol. Additional chemicals include: benzene, naptha, ethylene glycol, sodium hydroxide, and formaldehyde (for an expanded list of fracking chemicals used in fracking fluid see: https://www.earthworks.org/issues/hydraulic_fracturing_101/#CHEMICALS).
j. A 2014 study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory concluded that at least 10% of the chemicals used are toxic to humans or aquatic life. The toxicities of over 700 of these chemicals are unknown.
The question we should have been asked at the beginning of this industrial fracking boom, before it embedded itself so thoroughly into our energy policy and economy, and the question we should be asking ourselves now is whether or not we choose as a people to dedicate such enormous volumes of precious ground water to the production of oil and natural gas at this time in our history.
II. What Happens to All This Fracking Waste Fluid?
a. Since 1988, most waste from petroleum production, including highly toxic fracking fluids, has been injected into Class II wells. These wells are drilled anywhere from several hundreds to several thousands of feet deep, through several layers of theoretically impermeable rock which, also theoretically, prevent the fluids from migrating towards the surface and thereby contaminating the aquifers which provide water to farms, towns, and cities. Class II wells are characterized by steel and concrete injection sleeves through which waste fluids are pumped under varying pressures to rock strata deep within the earth. The law requires that these wells be checked for mechanical integrity every 5 years. Enforcement is minimal.
b. Structurally, a disposal well is the same as an oil or gas well. Tubes of concrete and steel extend anywhere from a few hundred feet to two miles into the earth. At the bottom, the well opens into a natural rock formation. There is no container. Waste simply seeps out, filling tiny spaces left between the grains in the rock.
c. According to research by ProPublica, there are over 680,000 injection wells in the United States, more than 150,000 of which inject fluids thousands of feet below the surface (Lustgarten, Abrahm, “Injection Wells: The Poison Beneath Us”, ProPublica, June 2021). Industry modeling attempts to demonstrate that such depths neutralize any potential threats to water supplies.
d. "There is no certainty at all in any of this, and whoever tells you the opposite is not telling you the truth," said Stefan Finsterle, a leading hydrogeologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who specializes in understanding the properties of rock layers and modeling how fluid flows through them. "You have changed the system with pressure and temperature and fracturing, so you don't know how it will behave." (Lustgarten, op.cit.)
e. According to the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (“Protecting Our Country’s Resources: The States’ Case”), “There are upwards of 2 million abandoned and plugged oil and gas wells in the U.S., more than 100,000 of which may not appear in regulators' records. Sometimes they are just broken off tubes of steel, buried or sticking out of the ground. Many are supposed to be sealed shut with cement, but studies show that cement breaks down over time, allowing seepage up the well structure…”
f. A ProPublica review of well records, case histories and government summaries of more than 220,000 well inspections “…found that structural failures inside injection wells are routine. From late 2007 to late 2010, one well integrity violation was issued for every six deep injection wells examined — more than 17,000 violations nationally. More than 7,000 wells showed signs that their walls were leaking” (Lustgarten, op.cit.).
g. Regulators say redundant layers of protection (i.e. theoretically geologically stable rock) usually prevent waste from getting that far, but EPA data shows that in the three years analyzed by ProPublica, more than 7,500 well test failures involved what federal water protection regulations describe as "fluid migration" and "significant leaks" (Lustgarten, op.cit.). The industry’s science rests literally on feet of clay.
In summary, over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation's geology as an invisible dumping ground (Lustgarten, op.cit.). Ample documentation of leaking wells and seeping containment rock strata suggest that assurances of the safety of these wells is naïve and grossly self-serving.
We have logged our way through the great temperate forests of the Northern Hemisphere, choosing to believe that, surely, the timber must go on forever. We have fooled ourselves into believing that the atmosphere can absorb unlimited amounts of CO2 and methane without any harmful effects to us or the living web in which we live. We have spent centuries pumping sewage and industrial wastes into our oceans believing that they had an unlimited capacity to absorb and neutralize these toxins without harm being done to the survival of the various species and the ecosystems on which we, and they, depend. Now we pump billions of highly toxic waste fluids into deep, invisible, layers of rock, assuming, as before, that the earth is inert, able to receive, store, and detoxify everything we are clever enough to thrust into her. Neither the data nor our experience supported any of these blind assumptions back in the day, nor do they now.
Hydraulic fracturing, fracking, is a crime against our grandchildren’s futures. It puts the precious aquifers on which our survival and the survival of future generations depends at a steadily increasing risk of contamination. It is, fundamentally, not only a crime against the future, but also a crime against the planet, and a, ultimately, a crime against humanity.
III. A Possible Solution
In addition to the effort to ban fracking on federal land, the federal government needs to establish a fund sufficient to pay private landowners to keep their oil in the ground (most fracking occurs on private land). The amount must be commensurate with what a landowner could expect to receive from a fracking operation (based upon analysis by independent geologists and market analysts). The program begins as a voluntary option, but may, in time, be supported by increasing regulation. There is precedent for these kinds of economic incentives. The Price-Anderson Act, for example, shifted economic liability for nuclear power plants from the private developer to the taxpayer.
This is an extraordinary proposal, affecting the (quasi sacred) rights of private property owners as it does. And there will be a great deal of oppositional posturing. But the real question for the United States and, in fact, the world, is this: How seriously are we to take both climate chaos and the likelihood of the catastrophic contamination of precious aquifers?
Bill McKibben (the founder of the environmental organization 350.org) was once asked what an individual can do to help avert climate chaos. His response was, "stop being an individual."
From the Mayan
“And a man sat alone
drenched in deep sadness.
And all the animals drew near to him and said:
We do not like to see you so sad…
Ask us for whatever you wish and you shall have it.
The man said:
I want to have good sight.
The vulture replied:
You shall have mine.
The man said:
I want to be strong.
The jaguar replied:
You shall be strong like me.
The man said:
I long to learn the secrets of the earth.
The serpent replied:
I will show them to you.
And so it went with all of the animals.
And when the man had all the gifts that they could give…..he left.
Then the owl said to the other animals:
Now the man knows much and is able to do many things….Suddenly I am scared.
The deer said:
The man has all that he needs now his sadness will stop..
But the owl replied :
No….I saw a hole in the man…deep like a hunger he will never fill.
It is what makes him sad and what makes him want.
He will go on taking and taking….
Until one day the world will say: I am no more and I have nothing left to give.”
