Air pollution from fracking includes the
fumes breathed in by people nearby, as well as smog spread over a wide
region and emissions of the greenhouse gas methane.
On Tuesday,
the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to announce the first
national rules to reduce air pollution at hydraulically fractured —
fracked — wells and some other oil and gas industry operations. The
agency estimated that the plan it proposed in July would reduce
smog-forming, cancer-causing and climate-altering pollutants from the
natural gas industry by about one-fourth.
The White House in
recent weeks has been reviewing the EPA plan to consider possible
changes, the normal procedure for regulations. Industry groups have
lobbied for exemptions that would reduce the impact of the rule, saying
the original requirements are too costly. Environmental and health
advocates have been talking to White House officials as well, opposing
the industry’s proposed changes.
The final version on Tuesday will
show how President Barack Obama’s administration navigates between the
nation’s needs for energy and health. Obama supports fracking because it
yields vast amounts of natural gas, a fuel that burns cleaner than
coal. He also has said that it should be done “without putting the
health and safety of our citizens at risk.”
Pam Judy of
Carmichaels, Pa.., says she fears that her family already is at risk
from fumes from a large natural gas compressor station 780 feet from
their home in the hills. When they built it, they were far from
everything. Three years later, a natural gas compressor station was
built on neighboring property.
“We have fumes that are in our
yard almost constantly,” she said. “There are times when it smells like
diesel or a kerosene smell. It’s very difficult to pinpoint the exact
smell. Then there are times we get a smell like chlorine. When we get
that chlorine smell it literally will scorch your eyes and your throat.”
Air
tests found 16 chemicals in her yard, including benzene, a chemical the
EPA classifies as a carcinogen. She said test of her blood also showed
exposure to benzene and other chemicals. Benzene can cause dizziness and
headaches, symptoms she’s had. Her adult children have had runny noses,
headaches and sore throats that go away when they aren’t at their
parents’ home.
The family worries about long-term exposure and is
wrestling with whether to stay. Their land was handed down in her
family since her great-grandparents’ day, Judy said. “It’s really
heart-wrenching for us to make the decision to move.”
Paul
Parker, a retired vice president of an engineering company who worked
with energy companies, has lived for 36 years in an area south of
Pittsburgh where natural gas development has sprung up in the last few
years. Parker said no to leases on his own property, but sees the
development around him and says the area has been ruined.
“When
you go outside, it’s like living in a chemical complex,” he said. He
said pollution comes from vents on storage tanks near his property, as
well as nearby flaring to burn gas in early stages of well development
and the diesel emissions of hundreds of trucks needed to haul water and
equipment to well sites.
Fracking involves pumping water, sand and
chemicals deep underground to release gas. After the injection, the
fracking fluids and gas flow back for a period of several days or more.
The
EPA’s rule would require companies to use portable equipment to capture
this gas that otherwise escapes to the atmosphere or gets burned off in
flares, a process known as green completion. The equipment would reduce
volatile organic compounds, which are part of what forms smog. The same
equipment would capture methane, the primary constituent of natural
gas, and make it available for sale.
The industry estimates that more than 25,000 wells are fractured or refractured each year.
The
American Petroleum Institute, the lobby for the oil and gas industry,
has asked the Obama administration to make the requirement apply only to
wells where the gas stream is 10 percent or more of volatile organic
compounds.
That approach would exclude many wells.
The
EPA’s existing rule for volatile organic compounds in the gas industry
was issued in 1985 and applied only to leak detection at new and
upgraded gas processing plants. That arrangement leaves much of the
volatile organic-compound emissions from the oil and gas industry
unregulated.
API told the EPA earlier that the average well is
2.95 percent volatile organic compounds.
API spokesman Carlton Carroll
said on Friday that API had to correct that number because it was wrong.
“We believe the average is closer to 10 percent,” he said.
API
president and CEO Jack Gerard said in a letter three weeks ago to senior
White House adviser Valerie Jarrett that emissions controls on low
volatile organic-compound gas would not be cost-effective. He also asked
for other changes, including at least two years for building the
equipment needed for green completions.
Environmental groups
oppose those requests. They say that even small percentages of volatile
organic compounds add up, because the volumes in fracking are so large.
They also say that the industry over-estimated the costs of green
completions, and they point out that in states such as Colorado and
Wyoming, where the equipment is already required, the gas industry has
continued to grow.
Other parts of the EPA’s plan would require
equipment on compressors, storage tanks and new pneumatic controllers,
the instruments that control pressure and other conditions.
“This industry produces an astonishing amount of air pollutions,” and the emissions have been largely ignored, said Joe Osborne, legal director of the Group Against Smog and Pollution.
Some pollutants on a local
level can mean greater risks for cancer and neurological and
reproductive problems, Osborne said. Other pollutants combine to form
smog, which spreads over a much wider area. Smog can make it hard to
breathe, aggravate asthma and other lung diseases and permanently damage
lungs
In Pennsylvania, where GASP is based, parts of the state,
along with much of the rest of the Eastern U.S., already don’t meet
health standards for smog. The good news is that smog levels have gone
down in the past 20 years, Osborne said. But the development of shale
gas “has the potential to halt that progress or potentially even reverse
it.”
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