By Ian Urbina The New York Times
http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_17506714
The American landscape is dotted with hundreds of thousands of new wells and thousands of drilling rigs, as the country scrambles to tap into this century's gold rush for natural gas.
Drilling companies in recent years have developed techniques to unlock these enormous reserves, and energy companies are clamoring to drill.
But the relatively new drilling method — known as high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking — carries significant environmental risks. It involves injecting huge amounts of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, at high pressures to break up rock formations and release the gas.
With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens such as benzene and radioactive elements such as radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself.
While the existence of the toxic wastes has been reported, thousands of internal documents obtained by The New York Times from the Environmental Protection Agency, state regulators and drillers show that the dangers to the environment and health are greater than previously understood.
The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle.
The Times also found never-reported studies by the EPA and a confidential study by the drilling industry that all concluded that radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways. But the EPA has not intervened. The risks are particularly severe in Pennsylvania, where drilling has increased.
"In shifting away from coal and toward natural gas, we're trying for cleaner air, but we're producing massive amounts of toxic wastewater with salts and naturally occurring radioactive materials, and it's not clear we have a plan for properly handling this waste," said John Quigley, who left last month as secretary of Pennsylvania's Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.
In Colorado, the majority of fracking fluids and produced water is recycled and reused, said Dave Neslin, executive director of the state Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.
He said no fluids are sent to wastewater- treatment plants. For the fluid that is disposed, 60 percent goes into regulated deep waste-injection wells, 20 percent evaporates from pits and 20 percent is discharged to surface water under permits from the state Water Quality Control Commission.