As I was doing some research for my main side project, a website on apocalyptic scenarios, I ran across a story that, as I read further, deeply troubled me. It was from a small paper in Colorado, the Durango Herald. Colorado is home of many natural-gas wells, and energy is a big part of Colorado's economy, so they pay attention to a different set of issues than the national news sectors do.
Entitled "Secrets surround gas-field chemicals:"
All the tests on Cathy Behr were negative. As the medical mystery deepened, her body began failing.
Finally, doctors at Mercy Regional Medical Center diagnosed a chemical exposure that happened in their own emergency room, where Behr works 12-hour shifts as a nurse. She had treated a sick gas-field worker and breathed the fumes on his clothes from a chemical called ZetaFlow for five or 10 minutes.
I wonder what the gas-field worker was sick from...
But the sick nurse is only the snare for the story. As the background deepens, it becomes clear that the chemicals used by gasfield operators to extract natural gas are appallingly regulated.
A state agency wants that to change. The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission's staff has proposed forcing companies to entrust the state with a list of all the chemicals they use to drill and operate a well. Energy companies oppose the plan, and the commission is scheduled to vote on the idea next month....
Industry witnesses who testified last week said the COGCC staff's idea creates heavy burdens for recordkeeping. And, Halliburton managers said they would pull their secret formula out of Colorado if forced to disclose it.
Wells would lose as much as 30 percent of their production without Halliburton's secret formula, said Dale Davis, a company executive, at a COGCC hearing.
This follows a fairly standard industry pattern, when asked to be responsible stewards of public resources. First the whine ("we can't be burdened with providing the recipe we use, recordkeeping is too costly"), then the threat ("we'll pull out if you make us trust you with our chemical recipe"), then the appeal to energy needs ("we'd lose a third").
What began to trouble me further was the by-now-tedious secrecy about issues that might matter to the public. The EPA, nominally the entity that would be "watching out for us," has been under politicized Republican control for the last seven years -- and the hints in the story are disquieting in that regard.
EPA says not to worry
It's difficult or nearly impossible to get information about what companies pump into the ground. The federal government, however, says the risk chemicals like ZetaFlow pose to water wells is minimal.
ZetaFlow is used for hydraulic fracturing, or fracing, which entails pumping large amounts of liquid and sand into a well to break the rocks and let the gas flow out.
The Environmental Protection Agency abandoned a study in 2004 on frac-fluid use in coal-bed methane wells, saying its investigation showed no risk.
"EPA has concluded that the injection of hydraulic fracturing fluids into CBM wells poses little or no threat to (underground sources of drinking water) and does not justify additional study at this time," the agency wrote in June 2004.
The next year, Congress exempted frac fluids from the Safe Drinking Water Act as part of the 2005 energy bill.
So why does this matter?
It's another (in a long line of them) example of this administration's backdoor environmental deregulation, of putting big business short-term interests ahead of longterm environmental health, of dismissing human health as a priority on par with profits, of how local regulatory systems have been abused when possible or trumped when not.
It's the secrecy regarding the chemical make-up of these "frac fluids" that holds the biggest dangers to humans -- the doctors treating the worker and the nurse had no way to know what the chemical was, beyond generic context:
Mercy doctors found the same thing when treating Behr. The sheet listed the chemical as a "proprietary phosphate ester."
In another example, Halliburton's data sheet for CBM Frac Fluid says it "contains no hazardous substances," and under the Notes to Physician, it says, "Not applicable."
"It's laughable," Colborn said. "It's so right in your face -- so bad. It just shows what little control the government has over this."
Corporate secrecy regarding potentially damaging chemicals, in terms of environmental health and public health, behind the smokescreen of "proprietary intellectual property," is fundamentally wrong.
County Commissioner Wally White, a frequent critic of the gas industry, also wants to know more.
"In 10, 15, 20 years, will we have a Love Canal here?" said White, referring to the New York community where toxic waste sickened residents in the 1970s. "Twenty, 25 years down the road, will these environmental things come back to bite us? Nobody knows."
Here's the hope that we can help make a sea-change in the body politic, and the societal attitudes about such secrecy, in the coming months.