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Fracking panel: Individuals, communities lack control over wells
NEW WILMINGTON, PA.
The bottom-line message from a panel on fracking: Learn all you can about this controversial way to draw natural gas from a deep-rock formation called the Marcellus Shale.
Five experts — on fracking, property leases, legislation, the environment and public health — spoke to a large crowd at New Wilmington High School on Wednesday evening.
Western Pennsylvania sits atop the Marcellus. Gas companies want access to the shale. There’s money to be made by the many landowners who are leasing property to the companies.
They’re getting signing bonuses, and there will be royalties from gas- producing wells. Some will be millionaires, but even those with only a couple of acres can make an easy few thousand dollars.
Is the money worth environmental and public-health risks? Even property owners who welcome leasing may be in for unpleasant surprises if they aren’t careful about what’s in those contracts, panelists said.
And those who believe regulators and legislators will look out for them and the environment might be expecting too much. ‘Look out for yourself’ was a recurrent point made Wednesday.
Dave Kern is a member of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, which includes 250 companies with an interest in the shale. He also is area manager for Kroff Well Services Inc., which makes fracking fluid used in the drilling — the fluid is a mixture of water, sand and chemicals. His company also treats flowback, or water that returns to the surface after fracking with horizontal drills has forced it to crack apart the shale and release the gas. He is also a chemist and an environmental scientist.
When wells are bored to reach the shale at depths of 5,000 feet or more, there are protections for aquifers closer to the earth’s surface, he said.
“Well casings are multiple layers of cement and steel to ensure protection,” he said.
John Stolz, a microbiologist and director of the Center for Environmental Research and Education at Duquesne University, said the reality of living with the wells is different than the picture the coalition paints.
He said property owners have no control over where large concrete well pads and compressor stations that pump the gas will be.
Stolz has visited property owners near gas wells in Washington and Butler counties who experienced contaminated well and surface water.
A lack of control for individuals and communities is also a chilling effect of weak state and federal regulation, said Jill Kriesky of the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health, and Douglas Shields, a former Pittsburgh city councilwoman who helped ban fracking there.
Fracking is exempt from regulation under the federal Energy Act, Shields pointed out, and a new Pennsylvania law exempts gas companies from having to follow local zoning laws.
He and Kriesky said doctors who treat patients exposed to fracking chemicals have to sign confidentiality agreements.
“Even the patient can’t know what’s wrong,” Shields said.
Jim Litwinowicz, who owns 45 acres near New Castle and is a member of a landowners association, said he believes the state Department of Environmental Protection enforces regulations.
He said he doesn’t believe fracking fluid, much of which remains in the ground, can travel up thousands of feet through harder rock into an aquifer.
Four million gallons of fracking fluid are typically used to frack one well, Kern said.
Accidents can occur if well casings fail. “There’s been very few cases of failures,” Litwinowicz said.
Panelists advised people to have their well water tested by a certified lab that the DEP will accept before drilling begins near them.
Litwinowicz recommended people read their leases carefully.
The Fracking Truth Alliance of Lawrence and Mercer Counties presented the panel discussion.