Fracking – Injection wells -An unseen leak, then boom.

Firefighters continue to watch the flame go at what used to be Woody’s Appliance store in downtown Hutchinson on January 21, 2001 four days after an explosion rocked the city. (Photo by Fernando Salazar)

Three miles away, a geyser of gas shot out of the earth, sending mud and rocks 30 feet into the air. Elsewhere, the ground popped open like the rotten hull of a boat, spraying brown briny water or catching fire.

The next morning, just when the earth seemed to recover its temper, a new plume of gas and water shot through the floor of a mobile home, killing two people. Hundreds of other Hutchinson residents were evacuated from their homes, many for months.

The mysterious disaster claimed national headlines, but there was little public discussion of the fact that it was caused by problems with underground injection wells.

Among a small community of geologists and regulators, however, the explosions in Hutchinson — which ranked among the worst injection-related accidents in history — exposed fundamental risks of underground leakage and prompted fresh doubts about the geological science of injection itself.

Geologists in Hutchinson determined that the eruptions had sprung from an underground gas storage field seven miles away. For years, a local utility had injected natural gas between 600 and 900 feet down into old salt caverns, storing it in a rock layer believed to be airtight so that it could later be pumped back out and sold. The gas had leaked out and migrated miles into abandoned injection wells once used to mine salt, then shot to the surface.

“It was an unusual event,” said Bill Bryson, a member of the Kansas Geological Survey and a former head of the Kansas Corporation Commission’s oil and gas conservation division. “Nobody really had a feeling that if there was a leak, it would travel seven miles and hit wells that were unknown.”

Though regulated under different laws than waste injection wells, gas storage wells operate under similar principles and assumptions: that deeply buried layers of rock will prevent injected substances from leaking into water supplies or back to the surface.

In this case the injected material had done everything that scientists usually describe as impossible: It migrated over a large distance, travelled upward through rock, reached the open air and then blew up.

The case, described as “a continuing series of geologic surprises and unexpected complexities” by the Kansas Geological Survey, flummoxed some of the leading injection experts in the world.

Perhaps more troubling was that some of the officials assumed to be most knowledgeable about injection wells and the risks of underground storage seemed oblivious to the conditions that led to the accident.

“The existence of those widespread formations and old salt-solution wells was unknown to the operators of the storage facility, the Kansas State Geologic Survey, city personnel, and its inhabitants,” noted a 2006 paper authored by Sally Benson, a leading geoscientist at Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s earth sciences division, and others. “It is still not clear how long the leakage occurred.”

Bryson agrees that officials should have known more about the number of abandoned wells in the area, but he says that otherwise Kansas’ regulations worked as intended.

The cause of the accident was identified because workers were diligently monitoring pressure changes in the gas injection well, as they are required to do. Once in a while, accidents are going to happen, he said.

“How far do you go to make sure that nothing will ever happen?” he said. “Lets face it: Something is going to go wrong… states have to be trusted enough to let us deal with that.”

Facts: Ten scariest chemicals used in hydraulic fracking

 The following is courtousy of Michael Kelley | Mar. 16, 2012, 1:35 PM

You can read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/scary-chemicals-used-in-hydraulic-fracking-2012-3#ixzz1uJ18CTxD

Methanol

Flickr/prizepony
Methanol appeared most often in hydraulic fracturing products (in terms of the number of compounds containing the chemical).
Found in antifreeze, paint solvent and vehicle fuel.
Vapors can cause eye irritation, headache and fatigue, and in high enough doses can be fatal. Swallowing may cause eye damage or death.
 
 

BTEX compounds

Flcikr/arimoore
The BTEX compounds – benzene, toluene, xylene, and ethylbenzene – are listed as hazardous air pollutants in the Clean Air Act and contaminents in the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Benzene, commonly found in gasoline, is also a known human carcinogen. Long time exposure can cause cancer, bone marrow failure, or leukemia. Short term effects include dizziness, weakness, headache, breathlessness, chest constriction, nausea, and vomiting. Toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes have harmful effects on the central nervous system. The hydraulic fracturing companies injected 11.4 million gallons of products containing at least one BTEX chemical between 2005 and 2009.

Diesel fuel

A carcinogen listed as a hazardous air pollutant under the Clean Air Act and a contaminant in the Safe Drinking Water Act.
In its 2004 report, the EPA stated that the “use of diesel fuel in fracturing fluids poses the greatest threat” to underground sources of drinking water.
Hydraulic fracturing companies injected more than 30 million gallons of diesel fuel or hydraulic fracturing fluids containing diesel fuel in wells in 19 states.
Diesel fuel contains toxic constituents, including BTEX compounds. Contact with skin may cause redness, itching, burning, severe skin damage and cancer. (Kerosene is also used. Found in jet and rocket fuel, the vapor can cause irritation of the eyes and nose, and ingestion can be fatal. Chronic exposure may cause drowsiness, convulsions, coma or death.)

Lead

Flickr/matthileo
A carcinogen found in paint, building construction materials and roofing joints.
It is listed as a hazardous air pollutant in the Clean Air Act and a contaminant in the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Lead is particularly harmful to children’s neurological development. It also can cause reproductive problems, high blood pressure, and nerve disorders in adults.
One of the hydraulic fracturing companies used 780 gallons of a product containing lead between 2005 and 2009.

Hydrogen fluoride

Flickr/Molly Des Jardin
Found in rust removers, aluminum brighteners and heavy duty cleaners.
Listed as a hazardous air pollutant in the Clean Air Act.
Fumes are highly irritating, corrosive, and poisonous. Repeated ingestion over time can lead to hardening of the bones, and contact with liquid can produce severe burns. A lethal dose is 1.5 grams.
Absorption of substantial amounts of hydrogen fluoride by any route may be fatal.
One of the hydraulic fracturing companies used 67,222 gallons of two products containing hydrogen fluoride in 2008 and 2009.

Naphthalene

Flickr/CraftyGoat
A carcinogen found in mothballs.
Listed as a hazardous air pollutant in the Clean Air Act.
Inhalation can cause respiratory tract irritation, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, fever or death.
 
 
 

Sulfuric acid

Flickr/yetanotherdave
A carcinogen found in lead-acid batteries for cars.
Corrosive to all body tissues. Inhalation may cause serious lung damage and contact with eyes can lead to a total loss of vision. The lethal dose is between 1 teaspoonful and one-half ounce.
 
 
 

Crystalline silica

Source: ProPublica
A carcinogen found in concrete, brick mortar and construction sands.
Dust is harmful if inhaled repeatedly over a long period of time and can lead to silicosis or cancer.
 
 
 
 

Formaldehyde

Flickr/Stadtkatze
A carcinogen found in embalming agents for human or animal remains.
Ingestion of even one ounce of liquid can cause death. Exposure over a long period of time can cause lung damage and reproductive problems in women.
 
 
 

Unknown chemicals

Flickr/SoulRider.222
“Many of the hydraulic fracturing fluids contain chemical components that are listed as ‘proprietary’ or ‘trade secret.’ The companies used 94 million gallons of 279 products that contained at least one chemical or component that the manufacturers deemed proprietary or a trade secret. In many instances, the oil and gas service companies were unable to identify these ‘proprietary’ chemicals,suggesting that the companies are injecting fluids containing chemicals that they themselves cannot identify.”

 

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Fracking-injection wells-Polluted water fuels a battle for answers.

by Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica, June 21, 2012, 10:01 a.m.

DeBerry lies in the heart of the Haynesville Shale natural gas development. When Hudson moved in, the area was littered with injection wells used to deposit waste from oil and gas drilling deep beneath the earth.

The well sites – often located just a few yards from residents’ doorsteps – were busy industrial zones clogged with truck traffic and holding tanks. Oil stains spattered the ground around pipes where waste was pumped underground.

Hudson said he soon noticed that his well water had a metallic flavor and a sharp smell. Congregants in his church told him theirs was cloudy and salty to taste, leaving rings in toilets and sinks. They said they had been complaining to Texas officials since 1996, yet no one had investigated.

“Our cries, they just fall on deaf ears,” Hudson said.

Shortly after moving to DeBerry, Hudson sent water from his well and four of his neighbors’ to be tested for pollutants. The results showed high levels of chlorides, chemicals found in drilling waste, a federal report said.

According to the report, Hudson shared the tests with Basic Energy Services, the company that operated the waste wells nearby, which sent them to the Railroad Commission of Texas, the agency that regulates disposal wells for oil and gas drilling waste.

Nearly a year after receiving the material, commission officials tested DeBerry’s water themselves, confirming that it contained arsenic, cadmium, lead, benzene and other substances. The contamination was extensive enough that they advised DeBerry residents not to drink their water, leaving Hudson and others to purchase bottled water.

In 2004, Texas officials ordered the injection wells in DeBerry to be permanently shut down. A series of 30-foot monitoring wells were drilled to test for leaking waste around the area, and one deeper well was drilled to take samples from 170 feet below. None of the data collected enabled the Railroad Commission to determine the cause of the pollution, however.

To Hudson and others, there were powerful clues in the commission’s own records, which showed that one of the injection wells had a history of problems. In 2000, a Louisiana trucking company illegally dumped thousands of gallons of hazardous waste from an oil refinery into it, material far more dangerous than the well was allowed to accept under government regulations. Five years later, a mechanical integrity test detected a crack in the well structure that allowed waste to leak.

“Produced water was observed flowing from between the surface casing and the production casing,” a Railroad Commission official wrote to Basic Energy Services in Feb. 2006. “RRC staff requests that Basic immediately evaluate the need for further environmental investigation of groundwater.”

Still, federal and state regulators struggled to obtain a definitive answer about what caused the pollution.

According to a 2007 report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general, the Railroad Commission had a difficult time getting Basic Energy to cooperate. The agency ordered the company to drill additional deep disposal wells to monitor DeBerry’s water, but the company refused.

“Basic Energy Services informed the State that it did not believe the contamination was its responsibility, and since the freshwater well had been plugged, deeper groundwater testing could not be conducted,” the inspector general’s report said.

Basic Energy Services did not return a call requesting comment.

The Railroad Commission told ProPublica that it had done everything it could to solve the mystery.

“The commission investigation did not identify a large plume of hydrocarbon and saltwater in the groundwater that connected the former… facility to residents’ water wells,” said Ramona Nye, a spokeswoman for the agency. “Commission staff address all water well complaints promptly and base their decisions on science and fact.”

Unsatisfied with the state’s progress, federal EPA officials took over the investigation in 2005 under the Superfund program, ordering more water sampling around the injection wells. For the first time, a decade after the saga began, the EPA also began supplying bottled water to DeBerry residents.

By 2007, however, the EPA also concluded that injection wells played no part in DeBerry’s water contamination.

“A range of surface activities including septic systems, surface spills and/or agricultural and domestic practices caused the ground water contamination,” an EPA spokesperson told ProPublica in an April, 2012 email. “Comprehensive review of the admin record for the injection wells in question indicated no ground water contamination from the wells.”

The EPA declined to allow any of its staff in Texas to be interviewed for this story, sending written responses to several questions.

The 2007 inspector general report suggested the EPA’s conclusion may have been premature, however.

“Region 6 personnel told us they believe evidence shows the contamination did not originate from the injection well,” the inspector general’s report states. “Neither the State nor EPA has conclusively determined the source of the contamination… The full extent of the contamination, its lateral limits, its depth, and its migration patterns or movement along the groundwater plume is not known.”

Earlier this month, EPA officials returned to DeBerry to sample five public drinking water wells, in “response to community concerns,” according to a statement sent to ProPublica by the agency Wednesday. The agency did not respond to questions about whether it was reconsidering its previous conclusions.

Hudson has little hope that the renewed scrutiny will yield closure.

“We will always have a problem proving the contaminants are coming from injection wells. You’d have to have a camera underneath the ground somewhere,” Hudson said. “Even if they find oil and gas carcinogens in the water, they are going to find another way to say it came from somewhere else. Nobody wants to say what the cause was.”

Facts: Ten scariest chemicals used in hydraulic fracking

 The following is courtousy of Michael Kelley | Mar. 16, 2012, 1:35 PM

You can read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/scary-chemicals-used-in-hydraulic-fracking-2012-3#ixzz1uJ18CTxD

Methanol

Flickr/prizepony
Methanol appeared most often in hydraulic fracturing products (in terms of the number of compounds containing the chemical).
Found in antifreeze, paint solvent and vehicle fuel.
Vapors can cause eye irritation, headache and fatigue, and in high enough doses can be fatal. Swallowing may cause eye damage or death.
 
 

BTEX compounds

Flcikr/arimoore
The BTEX compounds – benzene, toluene, xylene, and ethylbenzene – are listed as hazardous air pollutants in the Clean Air Act and contaminents in the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Benzene, commonly found in gasoline, is also a known human carcinogen. Long time exposure can cause cancer, bone marrow failure, or leukemia. Short term effects include dizziness, weakness, headache, breathlessness, chest constriction, nausea, and vomiting. Toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes have harmful effects on the central nervous system. The hydraulic fracturing companies injected 11.4 million gallons of products containing at least one BTEX chemical between 2005 and 2009.

Diesel fuel

A carcinogen listed as a hazardous air pollutant under the Clean Air Act and a contaminant in the Safe Drinking Water Act.
In its 2004 report, the EPA stated that the “use of diesel fuel in fracturing fluids poses the greatest threat” to underground sources of drinking water.
Hydraulic fracturing companies injected more than 30 million gallons of diesel fuel or hydraulic fracturing fluids containing diesel fuel in wells in 19 states.
Diesel fuel contains toxic constituents, including BTEX compounds. Contact with skin may cause redness, itching, burning, severe skin damage and cancer. (Kerosene is also used. Found in jet and rocket fuel, the vapor can cause irritation of the eyes and nose, and ingestion can be fatal. Chronic exposure may cause drowsiness, convulsions, coma or death.)

Lead

Flickr/matthileo
A carcinogen found in paint, building construction materials and roofing joints.
It is listed as a hazardous air pollutant in the Clean Air Act and a contaminant in the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Lead is particularly harmful to children’s neurological development. It also can cause reproductive problems, high blood pressure, and nerve disorders in adults.
One of the hydraulic fracturing companies used 780 gallons of a product containing lead between 2005 and 2009.

Hydrogen fluoride

Flickr/Molly Des Jardin
Found in rust removers, aluminum brighteners and heavy duty cleaners.
Listed as a hazardous air pollutant in the Clean Air Act.
Fumes are highly irritating, corrosive, and poisonous. Repeated ingestion over time can lead to hardening of the bones, and contact with liquid can produce severe burns. A lethal dose is 1.5 grams.
Absorption of substantial amounts of hydrogen fluoride by any route may be fatal.
One of the hydraulic fracturing companies used 67,222 gallons of two products containing hydrogen fluoride in 2008 and 2009.

Naphthalene

Flickr/CraftyGoat
A carcinogen found in mothballs.
Listed as a hazardous air pollutant in the Clean Air Act.
Inhalation can cause respiratory tract irritation, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, fever or death.
 
 
 

Sulfuric acid

Flickr/yetanotherdave
A carcinogen found in lead-acid batteries for cars.
Corrosive to all body tissues. Inhalation may cause serious lung damage and contact with eyes can lead to a total loss of vision. The lethal dose is between 1 teaspoonful and one-half ounce.
 
 
 

Crystalline silica

Source: ProPublica
A carcinogen found in concrete, brick mortar and construction sands.
Dust is harmful if inhaled repeatedly over a long period of time and can lead to silicosis or cancer.
 
 
 
 

Formaldehyde

Flickr/Stadtkatze
A carcinogen found in embalming agents for human or animal remains.
Ingestion of even one ounce of liquid can cause death. Exposure over a long period of time can cause lung damage and reproductive problems in women.
 
 
 

Unknown chemicals

Flickr/SoulRider.222
“Many of the hydraulic fracturing fluids contain chemical components that are listed as ‘proprietary’ or ‘trade secret.’ The companies used 94 million gallons of 279 products that contained at least one chemical or component that the manufacturers deemed proprietary or a trade secret. In many instances, the oil and gas service companies were unable to identify these ‘proprietary’ chemicals,suggesting that the companies are injecting fluids containing chemicals that they themselves cannot identify.”

 

Help our mission

How to navigate STW ™ postings:
View monthly posting’s calendar, become a subscriber or obtain RSS feed by going to the bottom index of this page.

Explanation of Index:

This Months Postings: Calendar on left displays articles and pages posted on a given day.

Current and Archived Postings: Click on the month you want to view. Most current article for the month will appear at top of screen.

RSS Links : Obtain your RSS feeds.

Subscribe: Subscribe to postings by entering your e-mail address and confirming your e-mail.

Supporting water research and the education program’s growth of Save the Water™ is vital to our future generation’s health, your funding is needed.

Fracking-Injection wells
Whiff of phenol spells trouble.

But the phenol – a deadly chemical used in Aristech’s processes that is known to cause internal burns, muscle spasms and organ failure – indicated that something might have gone wrong.

Environmental regulators suspected that the chemical had somehow drifted upward from the first two wells, travelling as much as 1,400 feet through the very rock expected to contain it.

If confirmed, their suspicions had broader implications: The type of disposal wells Aristech was using were among the most stringently regulated and monitored in the country.

To get permission for the new well — the first of its kind drilled after new national environmental rules went into effect — Aristech needed to prove to the Environmental Protection Agency that its waste would remain trapped for at least 10,000 years. The company had made that case for the two existing wells, using some of the most advanced computer modeling and the best geological science available at the time.

A leak would mean that even subject to the strictest regulations might not be as safe as scientists thought.

At first, Aristech’s managers denied that any leak had occurred. In letters written to Ohio’s Environmental Protection Agency, they said the pollution – still 4,000 feet below ground – could have been caused by other injection wells in the area, or by spills on the surface. They accused the state EPA of botching its investigation. The company even appealed to the agency’s director to intercede, without success.

“Your close personal attention to this proceeding has become essential,” Paul Kaplow, Aristech’s environment and safety manager, wrote to Ohio’s chief environmental official, Richard Shank, in July 1989. Kaplow said that Ohio’s “lower-level” environmental regulators were acting in a way that was “wholly inappropriate.”

Federal and state investigators turned the half-drilled well into a monitoring station to collect underground data, and took samples of rock from nearby to examine it for fractures that could have allowed waste to leak.

By the mid-1990s, investigators confirmed that waste had indeed migrated upwards from Aristech’s older wells, probably through a network of small fractures in the rock. Scientists thought the pressure used to force waste deep into the wells had helped crack the rock and push the contaminants back up.

Their inquiry turned to the future: It had taken 23 years for the waste – leaking at a rate of 2.5 gallons a minute — to move 1,400 feet. Would the chemicals travel thousands of feet further and wind up in drinking water supplies? How long would that take? More than 1.4 billion gallons of chemicals were dissipating beneath the site.

For another decade, the EPA and the state of Ohio studied the site for signs that the waste was still on the move. During that time, the concentration of the contaminants increased in the deep monitoring well, according to Ohio records obtained by ProPublica. Pressure readings taken in that well continued to increase, another sign that the force of injection could still be pushing the waste upward, even after injections into the two original wells ceased in 1996.

Contaminants also began to appear in a shallow drinking water monitoring well drilled to 80 feet below the surface: chloride, barium, iron. Ohio officials wondered whether these compounds, which occur naturally but far beneath the surface, also resulted from the changes deep underground.

Despite the concerns, in March 2005, Aristech petitioned for the investigation, and the wells, to be closed. Years of testing and sampling proved the contaminants could never be a risk to people, the company argued.

Ohio’s regulators weren’t ready to budge. Under a 1996 compliance agreement, regulators required Aristech to test the monitoring wells and provide the results to the state to demonstrate that the conditions were stable. According to correspondence with state officials, however, Aristech often fell behind on tests or failed to deliver the results to the state.

In May 2005, state records show, one of the lead regulators learned that a near-surface water sample taken by Aristech the previous December had tested positive for phenol, the same deadly contaminant in the injection wells.

“Turns out there was a positive hit for phenols in the USDW well,” Jess Stottsberry wrote to a colleague.

According to Stottsberry’s emails, the company had delayed turning the data over to the state so that it could re-sample the well.

The second round, Stottsberry wrote, came back clean. But the circumstances were puzzling: Aristech had waited more than two months before re-sampling the well, Stottsberry learned, and when it did, it used a different lab to test the results. It was another 10 weeks before that data was shared with Ohio’s EPA.

“Why did they change labs?” Stottsberry asked in a May 12, 2005 email to a colleague. “Not happy.”

Aristech was bought by Sunoco in 2001 then sold to Haverhill Chemicals in 2011. A Sunoco spokesman said he could not answer questions about the waste well issue because the employees involved no longer worked for the company.

Stottsberry confirmed the email’s authenticity, but Ohio EPA would not allow him to be interviewed by ProPublica.

The test results in question — among the most significant documents in the entire investigation — are missing. They were not among roughly 40,000 pages of records about the case Ohio provided to ProPublica. State officials said the pages had been lost or destroyed because of a shortage of storage space.

On the same day as Stottsberry’s email questioning the re-sampling, Ohio’s chief drinking and groundwater official, Michael Baker, sent a letter to Aristech management stating that there was not enough evidence to support closing the case.

“The increasing concentrations of waste parameters in Rose Run (the geological formation above the injection point) would suggest that upward migration of waste is continuing,” he wrote. Even after a decade of data-gathering, he wrote, “There is no evidence to support” the idea that the pollution was contained and that the chemicals would not wind up in drinking water.

Yet, just six weeks later, after meeting in person with Aristech executives in Columbus, Ohio regulators closed the case.

Baker – who is now Ohio EPA’s director — said he now believes the sample detecting phenol was a mistake, and says he no longer believes that underground migration is continuing.

“They quite conclusively convinced us that there was no substantial risk” to the underground source of drinking water, he said in an interview.