To an incendiary story the New York Times published Feb. 27 on hydraulic fracturing, there are proper and improper ways to respond. An improper way might come naturally to US oil and gas producers, who have reason to be jaded by exaggerations underlying opposition to their work. That response would be to ignore the story as yet more mongering of nonexistent problems.
In fact, the Times might have identified a genuine problem. Following sad tradition of investigative journalism, however, its story didn't run hard enough at the central question. Doing so might have produced an antidote to alarm, without which the story would have collapsed. Who, outside an industry dependent on the process for completing horizontal wells in gas-rich shales, wants to read about hydraulic fracturing unless it represents clear and present danger?
Water contamination
The potential problem, enshrouded by the story in several thousand words, is possible mistreatment of contamination brought to surface by frac-water returns. The largest worry: naturally occurring radium and other radioactive substances, encountered in meaningful amounts in some but not all wells.
The Times discovered that not all wastewater treatment plants in Pennsylvania remove all radioactive wastes or even test for them before dumping treated water into rivers; furthermore, downstream drinking-water plants aren't testing intake flows for radioactivity. Contamination, therefore, might be entering drinking water in concentrations high enough to be dangerous.
But is it?
That no definite answer exists is reason for Pennsylvania to require radioactive testing of wastewater plant effluent and, especially, of flows into drinking-water plants. For calling attention to the need for new precaution against a possible health threat, the Times deserves credit. But dilution happens.
The Times story cites several views of the extent to which Pennsylvania streams lower concentrations of waterborne radioactive wastes but leaves the strong impression of an uncontrolled threat. And it deserves scorn for the muted emphasis it gives several other alarm dampeners, such as a toughening of wastewater-disposal regulation in Pennsylvania last year and the increasing use of wastewater recycling in a state unusual for the extent to which it allows discharges into waterways.
John Hanger, until Jan. 18 secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, rebutted the Times article on his blog, citing the new disposal rules and sundry omissions and factual errors. "The article excludes information completely or from the main story, used misleading words to conceal important points, and consistently shaped information to advance the narrative of 'lax regulation,'" Hanger said.
One of the omissions was a favorable review by an independent group last year of Pennsylvania's regulation of hydraulic fracturing. That program has been strained by a drilling surge in the prolific Marcellus shale.
Hanger conceded that the Times identified an important question: "whether or not unhealthy levels of radium are in the drinking water as a result of gas drilling wastewater."
While tougher regulation and recycling provide reason to think not, he said, "Only testing of the drinking water for these pollutants can resolve the issue."
Different response
His response to the Times article is judicious. The same can't be said for an opportunistic appeal for help from the US Environmental Protection Agency by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who seeks federal regulation of hydraulic fracturing.
"I do not believe that the price for energy extracted from deep beneath the earth's surface should include a risk to the health of those who live above it," Markey wrote to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, citing the Times article. "I am outraged that state and federal regulators were evidently well aware of the risks that the wastewater might pose but instead chose to adopt a 'see no evil, hear no evil' approach to regulation by ignoring them."
An industry pest thus distorts a warped report in pursuit of more regulation and less energy supply.
The oil and gas business has unhappy familiarity with Markey's style of extremism—and promotion of it by the New York Times.
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