I'm not a pessimist. I've always had a great deal of faith in people that we wouldn't succumb to frenzy or rage or greed. That we figure out a solution without destroying the things that we love.
The subcommittee on energy and minerals will now come to order. ...deep shale gas basins in the United States, which contain trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. In fact, North America's natural gas supply is so plentiful, it has been described recently by some experts as a virtual ocean of natural gas. We believe the potential from these four major shale basins is enormous, and it is a game-changer not only for America's natural gas industry, but also potentially for our nation, our economy, and our environment.
I'm here today representing the 30 member states of the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission who produce 99% of our domestic oil and gas. Studies and surveys by GWPC, EPA, and IOGCC over the last 11 years have found no real credible threat to underground drinking water from hydraulic fracturing. Recently, however, there has been concern raised about the methods to tap these valuable resources. Technologies such as the practice of hydraulic fracturing have been characterized as environmentally risky. and inadequately regulated.
Press reports and websites alleging that six states have documented over 1,000 incidents of groundwater contamination resulting from the practice of hydraulic fracturing. Such reports are not accurate. And it's my firmly held view, and also that of IOGCC, the subject of hydraulic fracturing is adequately regulated by the states and it needs no further study.
Thank you for this opportunity to provide an overview. Thank you. Thank the committee. Thank you.
And thank you. Uh, always. You don't know what you just thanked him for. Yeah.
Hi. My name is Josh Fox. Maybe I'll start at the beginning.
This is Dick Cheney. Uh, no. Maybe I'll start at a different beginning. This is my house. It's in the middle of the woods, tucked away on a dirt road in a place called Milanville, Pennsylvania.
The house was built in 1972 when I was born. My parents and their hippie friends built it, and my family and my brothers and sisters and I grew pretty much the same way I did, little by little. There's a stream that runs down the property, connects to the Delaware River.
I've been learning more and more about how water is all connected. In 1972, the year I was born, Pete Seeger and a bunch of banjo-playing freaks in the uptown. upper Hudson Valley reminded New York City that if they polluted the upper Hudson, especially the watershed areas, that New York City's drinking water would be ruined. This land was made for you and me.
In 1972, Richard Nixon signed the Clean Water Act into law. It was an era of environmental progress. The Cold War was on. But there was the concept of leisure time and leisure suits.
Computers and technology were supposed to bring about the four-day work week, and everyone was going to have plenty of time romping around the fields and swimming in the rivers. In New York City, they were building this. But a hundred miles upriver in Milanville, Pennsylvania, on the banks of the Delaware, we were building this. My first word was hammer.
But it's 2009. One day I got a letter in the mail. It was from a natural gas company. The letter told me that my land was on top of a formation called the Marcellus Shale, which stretched across Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, and West Virginia. and that the Marcellus Shale was a Saudi Arabia of natural gas.
I could lease my land to this company, and I would receive a signing bonus of $4,750 an acre. Having 19.5 acres, that was nearly $100,000. Right there in my hand.
Could it be that easy? You've probably seen ads on television hailing natural gas as the clean burning transition fuel. American shale basins contain an ocean of natural gas. What I want is to use our resources in America. And it's ours.
It's ours. What would it mean if the United States and the rest of the world adopted natural gas as the fuel of the future? We've cracked the code for natural gas supply.
And what I didn't know was that the 2005 energy bill pushed through Congress by Dick Cheney exempts the oil and natural gas industries from the Safe Drinking Water Act. They were also exempt from the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Superfund Law, and about a dozen other environmental and democratic regulations. And when the 2005 energy bill cleared away all the restrictions, companies like Encana, Williams, Cabot Oil & Gas, and Chesapeake began to use the new Halliburton technology, and they began the largest and most extensive domestic gas drilling campaign in history, now occupying 34 states.
The method of gas drilling they use is called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. It blasts a mix of water and chemicals 8,000 feet into the ground. The fracking itself is like a mini earthquake.
The intense pressure breaks apart the rock and frees up the gas. In order to frack, you need some fracking fluid. A mix of over 596 chemicals.
From the unpronounceable, to the unknown, to the too well known. The brew is full of corrosion inhibitors, gelants, drilling additives, biocides, shale control inhibitors, liquid breaker aids, viscosifiers, liquid gel concentrates. On the side of that frack fluid truck, it should say, just add water. Each time they drill a well, they need between 1 and 7 million gallons of water.
Each time they go back and frack an existing well, they need an additional 1 to 7 million gallons of water. They can frack a well up to 18 times in its life. They started out west, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and in the south, Arkansas, Louisiana. Alabama, 450,000 wells, times 18, times 1 to 7 million gallons, is something like 40 trillion gallons of water.
All of it infused with the 596 chemicals in the fracking fluid. And now they're coming east. They're proposing 50,000 gas wells along a 75-mile stretch of the Delaware River, and hundreds of thousands more across New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia.
From 1972 until now, my whole life, all this has been protected. You may dial it to us any time. Yes, ma'am, take a message.
Okay, sure. This is Josh Fox. I'm looking to see if we could interview someone on the subject of natural gas extraction and hydraulic fracturing. The best thing to do would be to send an email with your request.
Halliburton Corporate Affairs. Did I just talk to you? I've been talking to Halliburton. How can I help you? Record your message at the tone.
I'd love to find somebody to interview at Halliburton. So if you'd please call me back, I'd really appreciate it. Good afternoon, Williams. Please leave a voice message for... Thank you.
...the Winchester Peak Energy Corporation, the nation's leading producer of natural gas. Okay, um... What's 405 area code?
Hello? I'd be interested to see if there's any way to get an interview with T-Bone Pickens to see if there was any possibility of... Okay, well, I'm going to have to transfer you to...
I've reached Cabot Oil and Gas. Please leave a name and I will return your call. After the tone, please record your message. Who is the audience for this...
General public. I think we'll decline, but thanks for calling. Now, I'm not sure how many of you have direct experience with streams.
When I was growing up, we could run up and down the stream for miles, for hours and hours on end. I mean, the moment the stream takes a bend, you can walk ten paces and look back and it looks like a different place. This is a place I know. It's a place that runs through my mind. And it's always there.
It feels to me like it's the source of all life. And it is. You need water for life. The closest they were drilling to me was in a place called Dimmock, Pennsylvania, about 40 miles from the New York-Pennsylvania border in the Susquehanna River Basin.
A company called Cabot Oil and Gas from out of Houston had drilled over 40 wells and just under a few months. It's a small place with no major highways, a place where you could easily forget the world, forget yourself, disappear completely. I was going there because I'd heard a lot of complaints and because I'd heard the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection had said that everything was going fine.
The story of Dimmick starts with a frantic series of distress calls from Pat Farnelli. If Dimmick had a town square, she'd be standing in the middle shouting for help. Everywhere there's a gap in the trees, there's a well.
There's like 10. Sometimes it is It bubbles and hisses when it comes out. I highly recommend that you do. Do you want to drink it?
I won't drink it. When Cabot and them came in to get the water and they were telling me it was okay to drink, I said, well, here, go ahead and drink it. And they wouldn't drink it. There were days when four kids were out of school sick. Everybody was sick.
including me. We were all, our stomachs were really, really acting up, couldn't handle eating anything for over a month, right? And then Gene next door talked to me at church and said, did you notice anything funny about your water?
Our well's gone bad. The maize, they have bad water and they've got a newborn in the house. My next trip was just up the road to Ron and Gene Carter's.
They had a gas well in their front yard. Shortly after the well was drilled, Their water started bubbling and fizzing. Turned out to be natural gas.
I told them that I wasn't happy, that our water was good before they started drilling, and when they got done it was bad. We asked if we could prove that it was because of them. And my wife asked the guy if he could prove that it wasn't. He wouldn't talk to her anymore.
We lived here 40 years and the water never had a problem with the water. And they drilled. After they drilled, the water was bad. My next trip was just up the street. Norma Fiorentino's water well exploded on New Year's Day.
You're kidding! This is my daughter-in-law calling. She's saying there's a special on at noon. DEP says cabin oil and gas has polluted...
That's my yard! That's my front yard! ...in Susquehanna County. I've lived...
next to these people for 30 or 40 years and we're good friends all of us and we just have the same problem db cab guys are out here and i was talking to him about and i says you guys you know you guys said this water safe for my mother to drink I said, I'll be right back. I'm going to go get you a glass of water. And they all put their head down. DEP and everybody put their head down and said they wouldn't drink it.
Mason, Mason, where's your helmet? Next up on my tour of Dimmock was Debbie May. No helmet, no bike, understand? Anthony, you should have a helmet on too.
Go find one. And in the beginning of November, our water turned color. And it started tasting funny, like metallic-y.
And then it turned brown. and then it looked like mud. Cabot sent quantum labs out to test it, and the guy looked at it and said, don't drink it, don't shower in it, don't do your laundry, don't do dishes, don't do anything in it. Okay, so this is your water well down under there.
and they put that pipe thing on it. And they're venting gas off through this. Yeah. The other thing that was bothering Debbie Mae, well...
was something that was happening with her animals. Sorry, they don't come outside. Their hair was falling out.
Let's see how she's gone. And one of her cats was projectile vomiting. We have three cats that it's happening to.
And then when you said this to the DEP, what did they tell you? They told me I came with too much Lysol. And I told one of Cabot's attorneys about it, and he told me that it comes from telephone poles.
So has the cat been out playing with the telephone poles? The cat doesn't go outside. ever so his hair is falling out yeah and he's losing weight since basically the same time hi our water was perfectly fine and like right after I started drawing like propane and stuff like that all went in it but at one point we could actually light it on fire put the thing in shake it up in the jug and put a master on just light up what's gonna happen to my kids how many years from now you know and then well, it wasn't their fault. You know, they didn't do it. They didn't pollute the water.
From the cases of Pat, Ron, and Gene, Norma, and Debbie, it was clear that something had gone terribly wrong, endemic. But there was something else. I kept hearing reports of a family, a family that could supposedly light their water on fire, a family who wasn't speaking to the press. I wondered why, and I wondered if I could talk my way in.
They didn't want their faces to be on camera, so I ended up taking pictures of their feet. They did show me their water samples, however. They told me, Listen, I know you want to see us light our water on... fire but we can't do it right now basically we've capped our water well we no longer use it and we're afraid to turn it on if we turn it on it's possible that it could explode or get catch our house on fire so even though it's pretty spectacular thing we can't do it for you i can feel myself getting sucked in deeper and deeper and deeper and then I got a phone call I do anything nobody cares because of the holy dollars rolling in yeah and it's wrong it's wrong I don't care you're taking a bit risk yourself going around doing what you're doing money is not worth it and I'm worried for my life I'm gonna be honest with you so I went across the road to see if I could interview the people who called me Or maybe just to say hi. I didn't get to say hi.
But a man came to the door. He spoke to me hastily and he was nervous. He handed me a jar.
I said, what's this? He said, it's bad stuff. I said, what do you mean bad stuff? He said, that's about as bad stuff as you can get. Take some.
Find out what's in it. Apparently, they were buying this act of me being a documentary filmmaker. I guess because you have a camera in your hand. You know what you're doing.
So somebody thrusts a jar of contaminated something into your hand. And they say, hey, take this. Figure it out. I had an inkling of what this stuff was. I'd heard reports of oil and gas wastewater, known as produced water, the water that comes back up out of the ground.
It's contaminated with the fracking fluids being dumped illegally onto fields and into streams. And I'd heard of workers who had chemical burns on their hands and faces. And here I was, being handed a jar of a mysterious yellowish-brownish liquid.
I needed more information, so I called the number again. And all the things that you said about that... the jar that you gave me just got me kind of curious.
You know, without any naming any names, I don't know anything about anything, but that was being dumped out in some place that it wasn't supposed to be, like a stream or a field or something? Yes. All right.
And that's why it's important to find out what's in there? Yeah. All right.
And if I were to be able to analyze that, would you? Would you think that would be a good thing? Yes. I was starting to compile a list of things that happened in Dimmock.
Water trouble, health problems, hazardous explosive conditions inside the house, destruction of land, lack of confidence in state regulatory commissions, a feeling of having been deceived, a feeling of powerlessness, dead or sick animals, the difficulty of obtaining good information about gas drilling, and the idea that there's a cover-up taking place. In other words, a total loss. of normal life.
Who knows if they're right? I don't. It's all speculation. But these citizens certainly felt as if they'd been wronged and that there was no one for them to complain to.
On my way to drop off the jar at a water testing lab, I said goodbye to my $100,000. Even more worrisome to me was the knowledge that everyone all around me had been getting these leases in the mail and a lot of them had leased already. One thing was resoundingly clear. That the industry's projections were correct.
correct, then this would be the end of the Catskills and the Delaware River Basin as we knew it. And it would mean a massive upheaval and redefinition of all of New York State and Pennsylvania. But there was no drilling in my area yet on either the New York or the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware.
New York State had commissioned its Department of Environmental Conservation to do an environmental impact study, and the Delaware River Basin Commission, which controlled my area of Pennsylvania, had not decided whether or not it wanted to allow gas drilling in sensitive watershed areas. It stirred up something else in me, the need to find out what was going on. Was Dimmick an exception or the rule? And how was I going to find out?
Was I actually going to become a kind of natural gas drilling detective? Okay, I guess. Cola! Will you be careful? Because that one's known to nip butts.
And it pinches pretty good. I'll keep the camera over my butt now. Yeah.
And it's gurgling. Oh, wow. So that's the sample. This is, it's all settled out.
Right. But that's what our water looked like. That came out of, just out of the tap?
Out of the tap. Right. So in three weeks, they contacted Mike by phone and said, we've tested your water.
There's nothing wrong with your water. With this? With this.
There's nothing wrong with the water that can be affected by the oil. gas production in your area. So what have you been doing? We put in our own tank and heat house water every week.
I've got a thousand two five hundred gallon tanks and I go to town once a week and buy water. It's a coin-operated thing, so I've got to put in $15 worth of quarters. The purpose of this letter is to inform you that Noble Energy has contracted LT Environmental to conduct an inter-restoration of possible natural gas impacts on the water and oil in the vicinity.
Again, I was a little disappointed in the state. I mean, obviously we have a problem here. Two weeks ago they had the meeting, and I prepared a statement kind of outlining everything.
You know, the director of the oil and gas... acting director of the oil and gas so next question that was dave uh neil yeah yeah he kicked us out of his office two days ago so is there like a theme to your documentary do you have a message you're trying to get across with it um i apologize very much for your inconvenience i wish you good luck with your documentary Um, I'd be happy to talk to you off the record with some background information if that's helpful, but I just can't do it. Alright, well we'll call you.
Okay. Alright. Again, my apologies.
Good luck. Good day. Alright, thanks. Yep.
At one time when we were going through all the gurgling in the well... I decided to put a plastic bag over the wellhead. And with minutes, it filled up that bag. So I closed off the bag and I stuck a fuse in it. And I thought, huh, this might be real stupid.
So I came in and I told Marcia, I said, why don't you dial 9-1? And if this doesn't go right... Hit the other one. Hit the other one.
So I got this bag of who knows what, and I lit it, and it started floating towards the road. And I thought, oh, no, a truck is going to come. I'm going to blow up a truck. Oh yeah, I saw it go up for a second. Yeah.
Just give it a second here. Whoa, Jesus Christ. That's the best I've done.
I smell hair. Oh damn. Can I try it?
Yeah. Um, should we get that in the frame? Don't drink this water.
That one was kind of spooky. That even surprised me. And I've been lighting that water quite a bit.
It's really upsetting, actually. Yeah. You know, it's not supposed to...
to do that. Oh. Oh! That doesn't look very good unless it does.
Here we go. You found us in everything. Got ya.
Right on. Those are all wells. Those are all the wells. Yes. The red.
Yes. That's where we live. That's why it's called the red zone.
Yes. Alright. New information tonight on a story you almost have to see to believe. That's right. Flames shooting from faucets inside a home in Fort Lupton.
It seemed like such a strange and unusual phenomena. Water so contaminated. It catches on fire.
I'm terrified. There are no other words for it. I am absolutely terrified.
Amy Ellsworth was so scared she had her well water tested and found out the groundwater is contaminated with natural gas. Two, three, four. Wait, did I count that one already?
One, two, three. What's that one? Yeah, four.
Oh, it's hiding behind the tree. Seven or eight. Yeah.
I can see from there. But they said it wasn't their fault, and yet at the same time they're supplying you with water. Well, yeah.
Well, because they're being good neighbors, even though they don't have good neighbor programs. I am the cup is half full person. I am the most optimistic.
I believe in the good of people. I really, I say this three times a day, all the time. I do believe in the good of people.
And I do believe that things will work out the way that they're supposed to work out. I will stand up for what I believe in and I will fight till the end. And there's no way you can even try to describe that to people.
You can't make them understand how a part of who you are is being destroyed by the actions of others for selfish purposes. No one should ever have to go through what I went through and call them crying, begging for help and be told no. And that's where the system is broken. Black is one word for it, terror. is probably more effective.
That's because Amy is living in a home that could explode. And now we've learned she isn't the only one. It just, like, popped and caught on fire.
Renee McClure discovered her water is also flammable after she saw our story last night. I want to know that we're safe. Renee worries her family has been drinking the contaminated water for years.
Is this your bus? Yeah. My school bus.
It just seems like in the last year and a half, I'm never healthy. And I've always been healthy, so that's why I don't know what it is. I get headaches all of the time. And, you know, I mean, at least.
two or three headaches per week. Actually the whole family gets headaches, but mine gets so bad where I just have to go lay down. Since you moved here?
Uh-huh, yeah. I like to ask the congress people why We're supposed to be living in Colorado. It's supposed to be such a green state.
But yet we can't even get clean water out here. One or two glasses might not affect a person, but what about long term? It says here you have trichlorobenzene in the water.
And what is that? It's one of the volatile organic compounds that comes up with the production of the gas. What blows my mind is that the oil and gas.
Conservation Commission, I thought they were there to work for the people. They're not there to work for the people. They are there to work and help the oil and gas companies.
And I asked him, who's there for the people? And he told me, nobody. Call an attorney. That's what they told me.
The Gas Commission is aware of the situation and will probably be doing some additional testing in the area as soon as possible. Well, the bottom line is, whose responsibility is it? To take care of this problem, they're really going to have to look a little deeper into this, because it does seem to be more widespread than we thought. Very scary.
All right, Heidi, thanks. Let's clear this up. I'm not here under the authority of EPA speaking on behalf of views that the agency represents.
I will put Weston Wilson not speaking on behalf of the EPA, although he works for the EPA. In 2004, the EPA was investigating a water contamination incident due to hydraulic fracturing in Alabama. But a panel rejected the inquiry, stating that although hazardous materials were being injected underground, EPA did not need to investigate. Weston Wilson, a 20-year veteran of the EPA, wrote a letter to Congress objecting.
He also noted that on the peer review panel that authored the report, five of seven members appeared to have conflicts of interest and would benefit from the EPA's decision not to conduct a further investigation. They came out with a patently ridiculous conclusion. They had showed it was toxic and then said it wasn't a risk.
It made no sense and only in an Orwellian world would you accept that. From 1995 until 2000 when he became vice president, Dick Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton. One of the first things he did when he became vice president was to form what was known as the Energy Task Force. They met up to 40 times with industry leaders. They only met once with members from environmental groups.
The Energy Task Force and a $100 million lobbying effort on behalf of the industry were significant in the passage of what's called the Halliburton Loophole to the Safe Drinking Water Act, which authorizes oil and gas drillers exclusively to to inject known hazardous materials unchecked directly into or adjacent to underground drinking water supplies. It passed as a part of the Bush administration's Energy Policy Act of 2005. So all science at that point stopped? All science, all data, everything stopped.
We were appalled about burying this kind of, maybe no pun intended, burying this secret that was known to be toxic. You know, when the president says to its bureaucracy, don't investigate, expedite things for industry, we do those jobs well too. One could characterize this entire industry as having 100 years of history of purchasing those they contaminate.
So they purchased the land. and often with an agreement of secrecy of somebody that's alleging they've been contaminated by oil and gas production. So the industry itself has that type of practice. You're saying the industry itself should be proving it and not the people who are...
This is America. We shouldn't be assuming that corporations can keep a secret, especially when they're practicing in our backyard. So the onus should be on the industry to prove to the government that their practice is benign and not that assumption.
What you could be picking up from... from these citizens is what we should be investigating, but we're not. We're still asleep at the wheel.
And don't assume, since Obama got elected, that something's changed at the EPA yet in that regard. Even if it weren't true, they deserve an investigation. They're citizens of the United States.
And they certainly don't deserve to be exposed to secret chemicals. It's not America. So I understand your question and your frustration. and you're seeing how this may be a pattern repeating itself. But so far, we're not on duty.
We're not present as a government agency to answer your legitimate questions. And we must be directed to. Thank you. Black all-ethers, it says extreme danger. Yeah, yeah.
Extreme health hazard. Yeah, almost like having a loaded gun in your hand there, standing there, isn't it? And then, uh, you can zoom in. Let me take this nice and slow.
Cheese. Cheese. Jeff and Rhonda Locker, they've been living here for at least 30 years. But at some point in the late 90s, there was a gas company re-stimulating a well out behind their house. Rhonda was out doing the wash and the wash went black.
They knew they had a small problem with the water. And there isn't a laundromat for miles. All of a sudden the washing machine plugged up and the water that came out and flooded the back.
where the washing machine is, was pure black, black, complete black. And, of course, at that time, I went out and stopped the pumper when he came through the yard and asked him what he'd done to our water, and he says, well, we didn't do anything to it. In pursuing it further, I finally got water samples, and that's when we found out the water was totally unfit for consumption.
That fast? Yeah, it was just immediate. This is about right for a cool day. Now... The Lockers threatened the gas company with a lawsuit.
They settled for $21,000 to put in a reverse osmosis filtration system. This is the well that was on the property when we bought it. We're still using it, but it's the one that went bad. Jeff and Rhonda Locker had to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
The day that I signed it, I even said to him, I just want you to know I may sign this, but if anyone asks me, I will not lie. Now, they're so frustrated that they're breaking their silence. This is our system. It pumps out of there, it pumps through the softener. pumps through there and it fills this 500 gallon tank.
This is just a centrifugal pump. It goes through a real fine, I call it a filler. It's more like a membrane. We were actually drinking it for a while. But four and a half years ago, Rhonda got really sick with extreme neuropathy and is in a lot of pain.
She just faded fast and had the bone pain and she's been through spinal taps and everything to try to find a cause. Jeff and Rhonda Locker found out that a reverse osmosis unit won't filter out glycol ethers. Glycol ethers eat the membranes inside of the filters.
We don't drink it anymore. We haul our water and we... Tell me about hauling water.
Where are you getting it from and how does it work? Walmart. Buy it.
Like Jeff and Rhonda Locker, after a nearby frack job, Lewis Meeks' water went bad. Started smelling like gas. See, 2004, they drilled this well right over here. I don't know if you can see it from here.
There was five numerous water tests turned up various forms of hydro... hydrocarbons, and glycol ethers. In Cana, the company doing the fracking claimed no responsibility.
With his back against the wall, Lewis had no alternative but to try to drill a new water well on his property. From 180, 160, you could smell gas. And he went in there and we got to 240. And when we put that joint on and started to try to blow it out, well, it came at us. Natural gas exploded out of Lewis Meeks' water well for over three days.
The Department of Homeland Security reported that over three million cubic feet of natural gas escaped into the atmosphere. Lewis had to get an injunction from a judge to get Encana to cement the well to stop the flow, and to provide him with a replacement water source. The big green building next to Lewis' house contains two cisterns that Encana fills up. twice a week.
I can show you the water. So these are two big water tanks that they're filling up for you. Why are they bringing it?
Tell me. If nothing's wrong, why are they bringing it? So you actually hired a hydrogel just to figure out what was going on around here.
Yeah. And what did he say? He said that they got everything intermingled.
When they do anything like frack it, they're going to intermingle everything. You can already see the... You're gonna see little pearls of stuff come out of it, like oil. I just already saw one over here.
And the water that comes out of Lewis Meeks' original well is only good for some bizarre science experiments and brain-altering recreational activities. Oh man! Tell me you drank that. No way.
Tell me there ain't nothing wrong with this water. It smelled like turpentine. That chemical smell that goes straight to your head and gets you dizzy almost immediately.
Here's the thing, you know, I think it's criminal. What would happen if I took some chemicals like I got and took them to like the big bossy in Canada and dumped them in his well? They'd have me in the pen so fast my head would spin. But look, they can come out here and do whatever they want to. And they don't even have to report it and tell us what they're putting in there.
The whole concept of democracy and looking out for the little guy does not apply here. Exactly. And I'll tell you, I ain't not lying.
I've never seen such lying, you know what I mean. I mean, their word ain't no good. And you know, and we was all raised that way, you know, if your word ain't no good, you ain't no good And you talk to these these are grown men lying to you, right?
For what for money and that's it when we had ours tested with the them to have tested they found glycol and it cost us $4,400 It's like a plastic. Glycol ethers are orderless, colorless, and are a liquid chemical component of plastic. There's nothing definitely in it. When Lewis took a blowtorch to his water, I think we found a cheaper way of testing for glycol ethers. Either that or a secret Wyoming recipe for homemade plastic.
I like Louis immediately. Cool 70s patterned mirrors, cowboy statues everywhere, and the most comfortable couch in the United States. You ready? I'm ready.
That's good to see. Shoot behind the buffalo hides. That is fabulous. Wow. John Fenton and his wife Kathy have 24 gas wells on their property, all of them visible from their...
their front porch. I was raised here and at one time there was nothing. I mean there was no oil, nothing. Now you have everywhere you can see. Everywhere you can see.
Yeah and like we can really sell this place with the water situation and well look at it. We don't own our mineral rights. Now see this black cow right here, that little calf? That little calf's probably less than 12 hours old right there.
Oh, really? Yeah, that's a new one there. We've only got a certain amount of water wells to work with, and God, I don't know how they even drink it, to be honest with you. It's the damnedest smelling stuff. It comes out different colors all the time, but you've got to use it sometimes.
I think we should strive to be the cleanest and the most environmentally conscious that we can. A lot of times it's right out in the middle of the field, you know, that's where we make more money. You see the green grass growing, that's money to us, you know, and that's fertilizer and that's feed for the cows, that's everything. And they tear up a football field sized area and drill a hole out there.
They spread toxic chemicals and then on top that you got gravel and rocks and big pieces of metal and then they pipeline Everywhere and it just cuts us to pieces There's no rhyme to reason how they do things out here. They do it different on every hole There's different people people, nobody's watching over them. You know, it's a free for all. Okay. It's...
John Fenton describes his home being surrounded by venting condensate tanks. At times, the fumes from the condensate tanks are so strong, they surround the house in a cloud of toxic vapor. And you can come out here when the sun's coming up and the air is just brown, the first 100, 200 feet of air. It's like a brown blanket laying over the top of everything and you know.
Not only are all the animals in there breathing it and absorbing it through their skin, but all the people are too. Kathy and her mother-in-law, who lives right down the road, suffers from headaches, dizziness, and a loss of smell and taste. It's going to be, I know they say you have to let them drill, you know, you've got to come to a compromise. You know, we already know that.
We've already compromised as much as we can compromise. If they do any more drilling out here, it's just going to force people, you know. It's going to force us out of business, off our land.
The less people they have to deal with out here, the more they can drill. But they can drill whether we like it or not. It doesn't seem to matter that we're affected. Humans are being affected. If I'd known what it was going to be like, I don't know that I'd brought my family here.
I hate to say that because, you know, some people might see this and wonder how I could like this, but this is my way of life, you know. My father and my grandfather were the old-time cowboys, you know. And my grandfather on my mom's side, they were farmers in Nebraska. This is my family heritage.
And my wife's, this is their family farm, you know. We're proud of this. But, by God, if your way of life is being besieged and your health is under attack, I don't know what else you can do.
I don't know where the hell I'd go, though. Where else can I go? This is happening everywhere. That's the biggest thing. I want people to know is you're not alone if this is happening to you because I'm in the same boat you are and what we need to do is we need to get together and we need to stand up and we need to speak with a unified voice and we need to stand up to these assholes these little guys are really enjoyable to watch and be around We want to raise the best, most natural, clean product that we can raise, you know, and by God, if you're breathing in dirty air and you're drinking water that could be tainted, what's going into these girls and what's coming out in those calves, you know, you got to be sure that what you're putting in them to raise that meat is as pure as it can be, you know, cute as they are, in a year or two, they're going to be on somebody's dinner plate.
BANG Actually, this next well we're coming up on here was probably one of the worst ones for Kathy and I. It was a neat little secluded spot. You could go have a picnic, you know, if we wanted to come back and just talk.
And where nobody knew where we were at, it was right here. And it was all these cool-looking kind of rock formations out here. And it was just gone.
Everybody kind of has one of those. And ours is under a dozer, you know. It just disappeared.
It took them one day, and it was gone. You couldn't recognize it anymore. It's amazing that what took Mother Nature millions of years to build can be destroyed in a few hours with a piece of heavy machinery. I was lucky that between John Fenton's house and where I was going was Wind River Canyon, one of the most beautiful places in the United States, almost enough to keep my mind off of where I was going next. I was going to one of those moonscapes I'd seen in the photographs.
One of the biggest and most productive gas fields in the United States. The Jonah gas field is at the foothills of the Grand Tetons, just to the south, Yellowstone Park, and the Bridger-Teton National Forest. Sublette County, at 4,935 square miles, the county is about the same size as the entire state of Connecticut.
The population is about 6,000 people. That means there's about one person per square mile. Much of Sublette County is BLM land, Bureau of Land Management land, our public trust, your land, and mine. You can camp anywhere on BLM land because it belongs to you, the public. The BLM's stated mission is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.
The Energy Task Force, headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, asked the BLM in 2001 to find ways to open new federal lands to oil and gas leasing. And in what some call the greatest transfer of public lands to private hands in history, Dick Cheney persuaded the BLM to lease millions of acres to gas companies for exploration and drilling. The Derrick. tower that you see is the drill rig.
The drill rig moves in for three to four weeks, drilling a hole that's anywhere between 11 and 8,000 feet down to the shale formation. Each well completion, that is the initial drilling phase plus the first frack job, Requires 1,150 truck trips. The breakdown goes like this. Drilling rig mobilization and drill pad and road construction, 10 to 45 truckloads. Drilling rig, 30 truckloads.
Drilling fluid and materials, 25 to 50 truckloads. Drilling equipment, casing, drill pipe, etc., 25 to 50 truckloads. Completion rig, mobilization and demobilization, about 15 truckloads. Completion fluid and materials, 10 to 20 truckloads. Completion equipment, 5 truckloads.
Hydraulic fracture equipment, pump trucks and tanks equals 150 to 200 truckloads. And here's the big one, hydraulic fracture water. For each well, 400 to 600 tanker trucks.
400 to 600 tanker trucks. Hydraulic fracture sand, 20 to 25 trucks. Flow back water removal, 200 to 300 truckloads.
Which means that all the water that goes down, only about half of it comes back up. What you see here is the flowback pit of what you call flowback water, frack water, or what the industry likes to call produced water. Before the water can be hauled away and disposed of somewhere, it has to be emptied into a pit. An earthen pit or a clay pit, sometimes a lined pit, but a pit where a lot of it can seep right back down into the ground. Colored flags, I have no idea what those are there for.
Maybe it's the grand opening of a new pit. I mentioned the problem of water removal. Two to three hundred trucks per well that's a lot of water to clean. To get around this problem the industry employs evaporation sprayers in the flow back pits.
The water is sprayed into the air in the sunlight so that evaporates faster. Now, of course, you're probably saying to yourself, that's insane, that water contains all the fracking chemicals, which are toxic, and all the volatile organics, which are also toxic. They create ozone, hazardous air pollutants, and they fall down in the form of chemical or acid rain on the grasslands.
Each well site is equipped with a mini refinery and storage unit, which you see here is what's called a separator. When the gas comes up out of the ground, it comes up wet. The separator heats it up to 212. and boils off the water. The BTEX chemicals, the volatile organics, benzene, toluene, xylene, and a host of others are all evaporated right there on the site.
The gas is then pumped into a pipeline to go through further stages of refining. The big tanks you see next to all the gas wells are condensate tanks. The condensate is stored in the tank until the trucker can come and haul it off. The condensate can be anywhere from produced water, which is unusable, to a low-grade jet fuel. It's just sitting there like a big explosive battery.
steaming off volatile organics directly into the atmosphere 24 hours a day. Numerous air pollution advisories in Sublette County were posted by the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality stating that ozone in the air had reached unsafe levels. Ozone's good in the upper atmosphere. It keeps out the radiation of the sun. But down on the ground, it burns holes in your lungs.
Sublette County, the size of Connecticut, 6,000 people had air worse than Los Angeles on a typical day. Right there's a pronghorn antelope. Pronghorn Antelope is not a part of gas development. But the Pinedale Anticline and the Jonah gas fields are directly in the path of the thousand-year-old migration corridor of Pronghorn Antelope, Mule Deer, and Sage-grouse. And yeah, each of these species is endangered and has suffered a significant decline of their populations since 2005. After a while, a gas rig just seemed like a car made in 1890. A car without a windshield, without safety bolts to hold the seats in, without an airbag.
without seatbelts, without crash test ratings. Something fundamentally unsafe. If you think about a car made today, there are probably thousands and thousands of safety features.
Looking at these rigs, I couldn't help but imagine of the hundreds of safety features that might be implemented, including harnessing volatile organics, storing toxic wastes off-site or not on the ground, non-toxic fracking fluids, hundreds of ways that we might improve upon, or just say, the hell with it, can't we build a solar panel instead? I zipped around. I got lost on the snaking, winding roads that lead in and out of the gas fields that aren't marked. Each access road leading to one, to another site, to another site, to another site.
Nobody was monitoring it. I could drive right up wherever I wanted. It was BLM land. It was mine. It belonged to every United States citizen.
No one told me to leave. No one told me I shouldn't be there. And apparently...
I could show the world how to smile, I could be glad of the wild, I could turn the grey skies to blue, if I had you. It was like being hit in the temples with two two-by-fours. Dragged herself into her truck and managed to get out. Became violently ill, was violently ill all night.
These people's hells are ruined. They can't function. They can't live in their homes anymore and go outside. Susan was wearing a respirator.
The woman who had the brain tumors, aside from the fact that she's just a walking nightmare of a mess physically, can't work. You know, she's an invalid. I have tried to bring attention to these stories.
Anytime media comes to town, they drop everything. They clear their schedules in hopes that what happened to them won't keep happening to other people. They know that they're changing.
chance is over. I drove south from Wyoming to Colorado's beautiful western slope. Just to the east of Grand Junction, Garfield County has to have the best names of any county in the United States. The towns of Rifle, Rulison, Parachute, Silt, and Battlement Mesa were all part of one of the first populated areas to get a major gas rush.
In less than a decade... the area became rapidly industrialized with over 5,000 wells drilled. So going to Garfield County is like looking into the future of any area slated for drilling.
It's also the subject of the first preliminary study on the health effects of gas drilling. Seven medical researchers from the University of Colorado studied the air and the water, finding acute problems from toxic emissions from gas development. So when I got calls from people in Garfield County, There were calls from people who had severe health problems.
This is Karen Truelove. She started getting massive headaches, getting really ill, feeling sick. And she said it got so bad that she didn't even plan her days anymore. She just tried to get through them. Then my friend Rick has benzene in his blood, toluene.
Tara was speaking for her friends, friends that couldn't speak for themselves mostly, because of nondisclosure agreements, people who were in lawsuits or who had settlements. that stipulated that once they received their money, they could no longer go public with their stories. Tara had one friend who hadn't signed a nondisclosure agreement. My great friend, Dee Hoffmeister.
We had just celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary. We came back, and as we drove in the yard, there was this huge rig and semis, and the smell was so intense, the benzene was so intense that we ran for our deck. The deck was enveloped and it had this big gray cloud. It was like it was being held in on the deck with this cloud. So we were in the house, I'd say mostly at the most 15 minutes when I got up and passed out.
And you get pains, pains all over your body. You don't know why you're getting the pains. And then they come and go and they'll show up in another part of your body.
I got to the point where... I was walking with a four-pronged steel cane because I couldn't walk on my own. After her first big knockdown exposure, she wasn't in very good shape.
But then just a couple of years ago... The Hofmeister's gas well exploded. The condensate tanks caught fire and the rig was consumed. At three in the morning, we heard these pops.
Our son got up to go look outside and he had to run back in because the deck was so hot he was burning. And I opened my eyes and I couldn't keep them open because everything started spinning. And then the next day I was even worse and he took me to emergency.
We had our son and his wife and four kids living upstairs here in the house when this all started. All four of them got asthma. And two of my daughter's children got asthma.
They were on nebulizers in the winter to breathe. We had beautiful playgrounds, but we got to the point where you could never leave your kids out to play. I kept getting in car after car, hearing symptom after symptom. My first day in Garfield County, I did 16 hours worth of interviews. And then finally, I got a chance to sit down with Theo Colborn.
Winner of five Rachel Carson Awards, a Time Magazine Environmentalist of the Year, and Congressional Fellow, her accolades are too numerous to count. We've begun to look at what's being used to drill, well, data that the government should be collecting but isn't collecting. We've been able to get our hands on some of that.
Because of the exemptions, fracking chemicals are considered proprietary, like the special sauce for a Big Mac or the secret formula for Coca-Cola. The only reason we know anything about the fracking chemicals. is because of the work of Theo Colborne. By chasing down trucks, combing through material safety data sheets, and collecting samples, Theo has identified 596 different chemicals in 900 chemical products. Every environmental law we wrote to protect public health is ignored.
But the neurological effects are very insidious. Three years ago, I started getting really dizzy. At first, you may just have headaches.
Then the next thing you might have ringing in your ears. I thought I had an inner ear infection. I went to my doctor and she's kind of, your ears are clean. Or you may be a little disoriented or you may feel a little dizzy.
So they sent me down for a CAT scan. But eventually you may feel what is called peripheral neuropathy. And when you get to this stage, you have irreversible brain damage.
For the last four years, I have these lesions in my brain. I don't know where they came from. You may begin to get swelling. I hurt. everywhere in my body.
My legs, my feet, everywhere. Your extremities, especially the arms and the legs. I couldn't move.
I couldn't reach my face to eat. And never know where the pain is going to be. The pain can be excruciating. Think about the workers or the people whose yards or backyards are within a thousand feet of their home have a well pad.
They can't get rid of the tanks and the fumes all the time. They're inhaling these chemicals. 24-7 around the clock.
What does that smell? I don't know, I can't smell anything. You lost your sense of smell and so did he.
That is one of the side effects of hydrogen sulfide exposure. I don't smell the cat box. That's a good thing. Yeah, for two years now I haven't smelled flowers.
Taste, I can't taste hardly nothing. I can taste salty and I can taste sweet. Salty, I can taste it.
sweet, I can taste it, but I don't get any of the subtleties or aromas of food. It's like all texture for me now. Yeah, it's not good.
I go out and I talk to the bosses, you know, the men who are overlooking what's going on, and even their supervisors, the public relation people that talk to us from the industry. They are so surprised. They look at me as if I'm crazy when I ask them, where are they mixing in the chemicals now?
Oh, we're not using any chemicals. Well, if we are, they're safe. Even the bosses don't know what they're telling those men to handle.
Once the public hears the story and they'll say, well, why aren't we out there monitoring? We can't monitor until we know what they're using. There's no way to monitor. You can't.
In my interview with Theo, driving around, it was clear that there had been no planning at all. All the gas filling infrastructure was spread out like a teenager's bedroom. A pipe yard over here, a waste pit hidden behind a mountain over there.
Thank God my last interview had a sense of humor. So the other night I had this dream that I was in this high school or this middle school, maybe. I was in this restroom and there was feces everywhere. I was appalled.
Somebody by God is responsible for this. It's the principal. So I was trying to gather up this crap and I was handling it.
I was trying to put it in bags. And I thought, okay, well, I'm going to present it to the principal. I'm going to put it in a bag.
I'm going to put it in a bag. in a really pretty bag and then I'm gonna put ribbons on it because I really want to get his attention I want to drop this bag of crap on his desk and I want to shock him so he thinks it's a present but when he opens it it's crap and he'll get his attention and I'll take responsibility I mean god how symbolic is this dream so you know what finally it dawns on me crap is crap no matter what kind of package you put it in that was my lesson that was my message it is pretty There ain't no way you can make it pretty, Josh. Stop trying to make it pretty.
Just do it. Just show it for what it is. 115 million cubic feet of gas was estimated and acknowledged to have blown out into West Divide Creek. It's on up beyond that and it's on down also.
It was all the way down probably a quarter of a mile, half a mile. It's really bubbling just like Steve said. That's Nevada Creek. That is where the seep occurred in 2008 in the summer. There was dead crawdads, there was dead rabbits, dead birds, which I still have the bodies.
You have the bodies? I have the bodies in the freezer. In the freezer?
Yeah, because even DOW hasn't been able, it almost... a year to figure out who to send him to. This is all in Canada?
Yeah. You feel like you don't want to sit down or get in the water? Yeah, because you don't know. You don't know. My dad, he was down here all the time in the summertime and drinking out of the creek, because the creek was good creek water.
Sure. The year of the seep, it was discovered in April. He'd been drinking out of the creek for a month.
He was dead two years later of pancreatic cancer. Find for a divided creek seep? Yeah, biggest find in Colorado history.
371,000, I don't think it bankrupted the company. The corporate business model is to come into an area, develop it as fast as you can. And if you trash anything, you make the people who you impact prove it. You make them argue it in a court of law. And the last person standing gets bought off and you move on.
I had tried to keep anger and sorrow at bay. But the moment I knelt down at Divide Creek, looked upstream, and noticed the bend that reminded me of home, and I broke apart. She said she has the dead birds and the frogs that were in the creek in her freezer.
I want to see them. Let's go get the rest of the story. God, you remember that dream?
This is it. There's one bird. In the summer of 2008, all this black stuff with diesel, organic stuff came up and came into the creek.
We had a kind of a mass die-off. Get out of here. Ended up in the freezer as specimens. That's a dove.
And this is the rabbit. He was right down there by the seep. Right down there where propane and ethane was found in the groundwater. This just broke my heart.
Look at this little guy. He didn't even have a chance. Did you ever think that you'd be freezing rabbits, doves, and animals in your freezer? Um, that, that you wanted to get autopsied?
No, that's probably one of the creepiest things. This is so foreign and creepy and alien to me. To have these critters just die and leave, to try to preserve them, it's creepy and weird and unnatural.
And then put them in that bag. All right. In this Walmart bag?
Yeah, in that Walmart bag. You can't get this at Walmart. That you know of. If you really want it, that you know of. All right, thanks.
I'll see you later. Be positive. You too.
Thank you. This is just a nightmare Soon I'm gonna wake up Someone's gonna bring me round This is... I wanted to get out of gas land as fast as I could, but there was nowhere to go.
I've been on the road three and a half weeks. I realized that I hadn't been on a single road between Arkansas and Santa Fe. It didn't have a gas well on it.
All the states started swirling together. Everywhere I went, it was the same story. He says, you see this big dark spot? That's brain damage.
Huge banks of compressor stations in people's backyards. I can't stay here too long. Wells drilled right across the street from people's houses. Y'all get a picture of the pretty flowers over there.
Poison streams in Arkansas. Boy, they're making a beautiful, beautiful piece of country and turn it into just a big trash dump. Huge refineries right next to cemeteries. Land farms where toxic sludge from waste pits were right next to residential communities.
And the dust blows, the toxic waste fumes blow on them. Too many stories to recount, like a skipping record, a song that you hear over and over again, like a scar that runs through you and comes out your face. Everyone had the same look of worry. We can't keep going like we are. I've heard that the White House, power plants is supposed to go natural gas and we tell them don't do it the sheer scope of this massive drilling campaign buckled the mind as a detective i was totally out of my league good afternoon albert communication any particular statement I'd really love to do an interview with Cabot.
You need to hang up. You may hang up. I will pass on the message.
I do suggest that you resend the email. Call me back in a day or two. Thanks and have a great day. Bye.
I wanted to get home, get a sense of the bigger picture. Then I looked at the map. To get home, I had to go through the bigger picture.
Texas. The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. The Barnett Shale.
The place all of this started. Here's a map of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area and all those dots you're looking at here are oil and gas. wells around Fort Worth. On most of their dots there are multiple wells. So each of those dots is what they call a pad and from each of those pads they can sometimes drill two, five, ten wells.
So if you take each of those dots and multiply it by five dots to 10, you start to see why we've now got about 10,000 wells around the city of Fort Worth. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality had no idea, the TCEQ had no idea how many gas wells were being put in and were in the ground around the city of Fort Worth. We were interested in kind of getting a handle on this.
What were really the emissions that were coming out from the oil and gas sector? And we didn't want to rely on the state's numbers. The state had just admitted publicly that they didn't know what the emissions were, that their numbers were grossly underestimated.
So we did our own. We now know that emissions from this sector are greater than the accumulated emissions of all passenger vehicles, all the cars and trucks in Dallas and Fort Worth. So let me get this straight.
You're saying that oil and gas development in the last how many years is greater than the total car emissions for the entire city? That's right. If you look at the latest inventories of what emissions are from passenger vehicles, cars, trucks, vans, motorcycles, it turns out it's about 200 tons a day.
day of emissions, the kinds of things that form ozone and find particles. Now if you take a look at the latest emission inventory that I worked on with Environmental Defense Fund from the oil and gas sector on the city of Fort Worth, it's about 200 tons a day. The rigs were burning diesel, some of them 800 gallons a day, but that wasn't all. There was something coming off the condensate tanks. I'd seen these condensate tanks everywhere all across the United States, but I never got a chance to look at them through an infrared camera that picked up hydro.
carbons. Alright, there it is. Okay. Bank, fence, school.
Right. Condensate venting. Oh, wow. Yeah, you see that?
This is just what's coming off the top. Yeah. And that's why you shouldn't walk up that ladder. Which I've done. Isn't that amazing?
Whoops. Yeah. What is all that stuff?
I found out what that stuff is when I got a call from the mayor of Dish. Hey, we're going to have to turn off the TV for a little while. Can you go sit at Danny's chair in his desk? I'm not going to leave you, baby.
I'm going to be right out there. The town of Dish is a town of people. Town of Dish is two square miles, it's about 150 people. And in 2005, the town changed its name to Dish in exchange for free Dish Network. So everybody in the city gets free Dish Network for a period of 10 years.
We have 10 huge, massive lines coming through here, or meeting here. Those 10 lines carry a billion cubic feet of gas a day. So we have 10 billion cubic feet of gas going through the town of Dish every day. At most places where pipelines converge, there are compressor stations, huge turbine engines that compress the gas into the pipeline. Pipelines are designed to have this release where they're shooting natural gas into the air.
Of course, they tell you that this all shoots up into the, goes straight to the moon and there's none of it lingering around. There's a cloud lingering over one of our subdivisions. When things like this happen, most of the people in the community are Think that they've just taken their last breath Calvin Tillman was so frustrated with the TCEQs in action that he commissioned his own air study The results read sort of like the back of a pamphlet that you don't want to pick up at the American Cancer Society Study found and I quote amazing and very high levels of known and suspected human carcinogens and neurotoxins These chemicals include benzene dimethyl disulfide methyl ethyl disulfide ethyl methyl ethyl disulfide Trimethyl benzene diethyl ethyl benzene, methyl, methyl, ethyl benzene, tetra, methyl, benzene, naphthalene, 1, 2, 4. trimethylbenzene, MNP xylenes, carbonyl sulfide, carbon disulfide, methylpyridine, and diamethylpyridine. Benzene in the air was at 55 times the public health standard.
Carbon disulfide was at 107 times the health standard. The report states that acute impacts to health will occur with these concentrations of chemicals in the air. The cancer and neurotoxins will also have an impact over the long term.
And one of the... One of the sites, it's kind of humorous, but it's not humorous, is that there's a sign that says no open flames, no smoking, and then there's a barbecue grill sitting underneath it. You know, so some guy is going to be cooking his hamburger one day and blow up the town. One of the problems with the Clean Air Act is that it tends to focus on the largest single sources. But the oil and gas sector isn't just one large facility.
So you have these massive companies like Devon, ConocoPhillips, who, because out in their gas fields or on their oil fields have thousands of little sources, each of those little sources... Is exempted from the Clean Air Act. Now the accumulated emissions from those thousands of sources are huge.
It can apply to many different places because there are lots of different communities that are sitting right on top of shale formations. If the drilling happens in those formations, the way it happens in the shale formations, it happened in Fort Worth, very unregulated, wild west, and it'll be a real tragedy because we learned our lesson here. You've got to stay on top of this.
You've got to look at the issues as it's happening and don't wait until you've had development for 10 years the way we did. Because then it's just a big mess. If the cumulative air emissions in Texas were huge, what were the cumulative water impacts like? This whole area produces and the groundwater is contaminated from the production, from the drilling, from the old pits, and this entire area. contaminated with a lot of the heavy metals like barium, which is the weighting agent in drilling fluids, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead.
I have a number of clients who were like exercise buffs and things that drank huge quantities of water each day. And they were getting arsenic poisoning. They'd go to the hospitals and the doctor would ask their spouse to step out and they'd go like, do you think your spouse is poisoning you? This part of Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico, just to the south, has been receiving oil and gas waste for 60 years.
One third of all the natural gas in America passes through the Henry Hub. This is where we take all the byproducts, all the waste water, throw it out. To see, hope it doesn't come back.
During the hurricanes of Rita and Katrina, it did come back. It was the sediment that had accumulated in the water bodies for decades, where people had been dumping and dumping and dumping. The storm surge just scooped it up and layered it up.
Here, the sediment sludge was all over the place, everywhere, just coated the land. The organics that are here on site are the benzene, toluene, xylene, ethylbenzene, a lot of formaldehyde, a lot of the semi-volatiles that are very long-lasting like the polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, and then you have all the heavy metals that are associated with the drilling fluids, barium, arsenic, lead, cadmium, chromium, mercury, and all of those chemicals are there in the tanks, in the flood walls. In the heater treaters, in the storage tanks, but there's no protection from the storm surge. Everything that you see below an elevation of six feet, all that contamination, all those products got washed into the environment. And this happened all over where the storms hit?
All along the coast, in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas. How many sites is that? How many sites?
Hundreds of thousands of sites. I tried to wrap my head around what Wilma was saying. The slow accumulation of 50 years of drilling that had created a permanent contamination situation in southern Louisiana that could probably never be fully cleaned. And the thought of the entire coastline from Mississippi over to Texas being contaminated with oil and gas waste made me think about what the effects could be of this drilling on all the rivers that I'd visited. I'd seen a map that showed you actually what the river systems in the United States really looked like.
They weren't these skinny lines like veins, but something much more comprehensive. And with all these major waterways under duress of a 34-state drilling campaign, I wondered just how extensive the damage would be if this continued for much longer. I was on my way home.
All I wanted to do was clear my head. Think things through. Get out of crisis mode. The phone rang again. It was the water testing lab.
The mysterious, yellowish, brownish jar of liquid from Dimmick had given up some of its secrets. Barium and strontium are drilling muds. They're lubricants for the drill bit. Iron and chloride and conductivity were extremely high.
With pure distilled water, you have a conductivity of zero. This was off the charts. But the scariest and most difficult part of the test to get my head around were two things I'd never heard of.
Total Keldol Nitrogen and MBAS or Methylene Blue Active Substance. MBAS are reactive agents that turn blue when it comes into contact with detergents or surfactants. Now detergents don't sound so bad, you wash your laundry with them. But you don't want to drink a detergent.
And you certainly don't want to drink a surfactant. Everything that enters one of your cells enters through a surface. A surfactant will allow oil or other substances to pass through surfaces by dissolving them. So if a surfactant gets into a stream near fish, it'll dissolve the fish's gills.
So what could one little jar of yellowish-brownish liquid from DEMEC prove? They were told to just release it into a stream. It's the same type of thing over and over and over.
You've lost more than what you've gained. What have you gained? A dollar bill cannot bring back what they've taken away. I think everyone is fed up with it and everybody's afraid to say anything.
I asked my anonymous friend if she'd also talk to the DEP. They said there was no proof, and that they needed proof in order to do something. Well, when the DEP basically refused to help...
How did you feel about that? Like I was talking to a tree. Oh, my tie is out, okay. There is a clear opportunity here in Pennsylvania for major new gas production. I have one quote here from you that's...
that says that you're trying to do this in a way that doesn't damage the environment. But you also said recently that water contamination is inevitable. Well, yeah, I mean...
Are those contradictory? Here, I'll give you the direct, straight answer. There is no such thing as a perfect source of energy. It's... It's absolutely the case that natural gas production is not perfect and the issue of actual contamination by drilling chemicals at Dimmock has been...
examined at 39 homes. We've looked and done independent testing and there's been no contamination of the drinking water by those chemicals found. Well, actually I have. in here you know samples that are from all over the country this one is from Wyoming Colorado and then one here from dimmock now this is tap water in other words drinking water and I'm wondering if you're interested in drinking some of this absolutely I'm not interested in people in Dimmock and we've stopped it what I'm doing in Dimmock is is absolutely to deal with the problem that your address It's the very last thing in the world we want anybody to do is to drink it. There's only four households that water is being replaced by.
Those are the households where the problem exists. If there were ten households, we would require it for ten. If there were fifteen households, we would require it for fifteen.
If there is an individual who has had their water contaminated by gas migrating that is not getting their water replaced, I want to know about it. Every single person who has had that occur to us has had their water contaminated by have their water replaced. The bottom line is what matters. We're not going to allow folks who have had their water contaminated as a result of drilling to sit there and have to drink that kind of water. One of the things about being on that side of the camera and this side of the camera, you guys get to at some level wash your hands of everything.
Folks on this side of the camera have to make some real decisions in the real world. And until somebody comes up with with, I guess, the hydrogen economy, I don't have perfect answers to all these things. And I have to make trade-offs. And those trade-offs recognize that you're often taking two steps forward and perhaps one step back. And that's a lot of the decision-making that goes on right now.
When I'm, I actually view it in the opposite way, as not a person behind the the camera as a person who lives in Pennsylvania as a person whose water is in jeopardy do you really believe that it's adequate to replace water with cisterns if you replace this a stream well replace a stream Which one do you live on? Calkins Creek, which is a tributary to the Delaware. Okay.
Well, you see a problem there. I want to know about it. This is a serious point.
That's where this whole project starts. Right. That's exactly right.
We have a good staff here, and they're out there on the sites. But we're also absolutely eager for the public to let us know about problems. Look.
No, I know. Here's the card. Just a few short months after this interview, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection suffered the worst budget cuts in history, amounting to over 350 full-time positions being eliminated and 25% of their total budget cut in the midst of what could be the largest natural gas drilling campaign in Pennsylvania history.
How much water could you replace? So I'm going to show you a little bit here on the map where New York City and New Jersey and Philadelphia's water comes from. What you have up here in the green area, that's the New York City watershed. It's supposedly a protected area, although all this area on the map that you see here is slated for gas drilling.
The green and white areas you see on the map, that's the New York City watershed and the Delaware River Basin. Altogether, the combined watershed supplies water to 15.6 million people. 6.8 million in New York City, 5.4 million in Pennsylvania, 700,000 in Delaware, and 2.9 in New Jersey. It's the largest unfiltered water supply in the world. The reservoirs were created 100 years ago.
Industry has leased hundreds of thousands of acres within the New York City watershed and the Delaware River Basin. That could mean 50,000 gas wells in the combined watershed area. As of spring 2010, there is no drilling in the New York City watershed or the Delaware River Basin.
But that could change any day now. When we look at other planets in the solar system, what are we looking to find? Water.
Now, it's not going to be good as New York City tap water, but you're looking on Mars for water, and everyone has these great discussions because it's all about water. I've been with this committee for the last 18 years. I was the environmental policy advisor for the city council for many, many years.
I'm a trained geologist, and I didn't come all this way and grow all this much older and get this much fatter, you know, just to see everything, like, go away. The whole notion that, like, adults could sit around a table and try to figure out how we can do this kind of activity inside an unfiltered water supply. and make it all work is...
How many times you go into a restaurant and they say, do you want bottled water or tap water? I don't think I've had dinner with somebody in the last 20 years who said, oh, I like the bottled water. People go to a restaurant because they get to have the tap water.
It's beyond ludicrous. People look forward to it. It's part of their dining experience. I'm trying to keep myself composed, but speaking as a geologist, as an environmental scientist...
As a policymaker, this is insanity. And that makes this the number one environmental crisis that we face in the city. Although thousands showed up at public comment sessions, the state's Department of Environmental Conservation was unresponsive. There were hours and hours of hearings at City Hall.
New York City must rely on the New York State DEC, but there's a real question of whether the agency is up to the job. DEC has not proposed a single new regulation. I look at it as a watershed system. As our Holy Grail. But no one from the state's Department of Environmental Conservation came to the city's hearings.
I want to direct staff to put a call to DEC Region 2 and to say that all these people are still in the room. We want someone from DEC in the room. There were even press conferences with no press.
It would be nice to have reporters today. We don't have them. Maybe this story is not sexy enough.
Maybe it's not important enough. Maybe the drink you want to supply for 9 million people, it doesn't quite get people's attention. Where's the press?
They're right in there? They're in the press room. In the press room. You know what to do in press conference with no press. I'd heard that the United States Congress was convening a special session on unconventional shale plays, especially how they related to water contamination and Diana DeGette and Maurice Hinchey's frack act.
A piece of legislation that's one paragraph long that simply takes out the exemption for hydraulic fracturing to the Safe Drinking Water Act. All we have to do is think back, because there was a realization back then of how the kind of drilling that had been going on for more than 20 years... twenty years was having a negative impact it was poisoning wells it was uh... making people's lives very very difficult and dangerous as the situation with energy change the drilling for natural gas was pressing to be able to do it in the least expensive way so that they could have the highest profits rather than being honest and open about the kinds of things that they were doing.
You know, you have to have more information, more details, more understanding. You have to have the people who are doing it being honest about what they're doing. Somehow, from my back porch across the nation, I was going to wind up in the halls of Congress. and finally have a chance for industry and lobbyists to express themselves in this film.
The Subcommittee on Energy and Minerals will now come to order. In recent months, the states have become aware of press reports and websites alleging that six states have documented over 1,000 incidents of groundwater contamination resulting from the practice of hydraulic fracturing. Such reports are not accurate. Studies and surveys by GWPC, EPA, and IOGCC... over the last 11 years have found no real credible threat to underground drinking water from hydraulic fracturing.
Now, why is hydrofracking raising such concern? The materials used for hydrofracking don't biodegrade. Once they're in the environment, they're in the environment to stay. If just 2% of these hundreds of thousands of wells go south in some way or another, that's thousands upon thousands of incidents, and I invite questions about that.
What Mr. Appleton is doing is searching for a problem that does not exist, because looking at... All these other examples in all these states, there has not been a problem with hydraulic fracturing. And I'm proud that I'm supported by the oil and gas industry because they employ a lot of people in my state.
And I'm going to stick up for them. And I'm tired of people trying to shut down an industry when they're not educated on the facts. And if you weren't able to do this hydraulic fracturing, how much more would we be dependent on foreign oil and terrorism?
I'm not aware of any documented cases where hydraulic fracturing has found... Your time's expired. So, Congresswoman DeGette. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Out West, we've had a lot of experiences with different kinds of mining techniques that have caused human health risks and severe environmental damage.
Now, Mr. John, you say that hydraulic fracturing absolutely does not pose a threat to drinking water. So, if that's true... Why would you object to the disclosure of the chemicals used in the fracking process under the Safe Drinking Water Act? As I mentioned earlier, the information packets that we provide to the...
Why would you object? If it's perfectly safe, why would you object to disclosure of the chemicals that are used? What I was saying was that we have disclosed today and prior to the hearing... Which chemicals are used?
Yes, ma'am. In each process? They're listed in a FRAC fact sheet that's been provided by Chesapeake.
Well, so in that case, you would have no objection to my bill? We've supplied that information as part of our... So would you have an objection to my bill then, since you've already supplied that information?
I'm not personally familiar with your bill, ma'am. It makes chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing subject to the reporting requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act. As stated earlier, we believe that the current regulatory framework... Yes or no? We believe the current regulatory framework.
So yes, you would object to my bill, because you don't think we would need to report it under the Safe Drinking Water Act, even though you say the chemicals are safe. Correct? Correct. Okay. How about you, Mr. Kell?
Are you saying that hydraulic fracturing fluids cannot possibly be to blame for water contamination seen in cases across the country? Allegations that were presented through certain media outlets relative to six specific states. We did not survey all states that have oil and gas activity, and therefore would not make the statement that no one has ever identified.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. All right. Mr. Henshie. John, I just want to follow up on some of the things that were just being talked about. And I know that your company is engaged in a lot of hydraulic fracturing.
What chemicals are used in the process? If you would indulge me to pull it from the sheet and to be sure that I read it correctly, I wouldn't want to offer something from memory that was incorrect. Please speak a little closer to that mic. We want everybody to hear you.
Thank you, sir. We've listed... Do you want me to go through all of them, sir?
I'll start with hydrochloric or muriatic acid as a chemical that would help dissolve some of the muds in the wellbore. We would use an antibacterial agent such as glutaraldehyde. We would have a need for a breaker that would take away some of the viscosity from our fluid that we would use in ammonium or sulfate. We would need a corrosion inhibitor to allow the casing strings and the pipes that we use to be preserved. That's the corrosion inhibitor?
testing my site here, it's dimethyl formaldehyde. The cross-linker that we would use would be a borate salt, then use also a friction reducer, petroleum distillate, an iron control agent in some applications, a citric acid, potassium chloride, and we would also use an oxygen scavenger. I wanted to ask Mr. Appleton if you're aware of any of the independent empirical research that has been conducted That in any way suggests that fracking does not pose a risk to water supply. Anytime you put chemicals like you're using fracking into the environment, it's a risk to water supply if they're not properly regulated.
Well, this subcommittee is now adjourned. So here's where we're going to end. The FRAC Act is making its way through Congress, and industry is lobbying hard against it. Neither New York State nor Pennsylvania have moved to protect the watersheds.
I don't know what's going to happen around here. I don't know if all this is going to be destroyed. I don't know what's going to happen around the rest of the United States.
Whether all the friends that I made on this trip are going to get some relief, I guess in large part that's up to you. One thing I've found deep inside is the love for this whole country. There are pieces of my backyard at Divide Creek in Colorado, in Pavilion, Wyoming, in the streets of Fort Worth.
in the cemeteries and school yards of New Mexico. My backyard wasn't my backyard anymore. It belonged to everybody else, too. And with major shale plays being discovered in Europe and in North Africa, and with hydraulic fracturing being hailed there as a possible solution to Europe's energy problems, I don't think this story is going away anytime soon. It's possible.
The gas lamp might stretch a little bit further than my backyard into yours. Ready? All right.
transcript Emily Beynon