What We Don’t Know about Fracking
Somehow, it is reassuring when a scientist quotes a poet to explain his own uncertainty. It is even more reassuring when the scientist occupies a space and professes a profession that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago, for he is a “contamination hydro-geologist.” This means he spends his life examining the causes and effects of large-scale human error. And more reassuring yet when the poet is the ever-gloomy William Blake, and the quote is from his “Proverbs of Hell” (part of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, written somewhere around 1789), for Blake was not just a gloomster but a skeptic to his bones.
The quote is one of Blake’s better-known aphorisms: You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough. The scientist John Cherry had just presented a report commissioned by the Canadian government on the merits, hazards, and benefits of hydraulic fracturing, and the Blake quote helpfully summed up his panel’s main conclusion: that no matter what point of view you are currently hearing, whether from propagandists of the drilling industry or from environmentalists who oppose fracking in all its forms, the assertions made are almost certainly unjustified. In the year 2014, decades after fracking became widespread, we just don’t yet know whether enough is already enough or whether enough will be more than enough pretty soon. All the papers he’d read, Cherry later told a conference audience in Toronto, declared for one side or the other, but none of them ever revealed by what processes their conclusions were drawn.
Cherry’s day job is at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, in the Centre for Applied Groundwater Research. He is also chair of the Council of Canadian Academies, self-described as an organization that pulls together scientists and other experts to provide independent policy-related assessments, but which stops short of explicit advice. The particular panel in question, the clumsily but accurately named Expert Panel on Harnessing Science and Technology to Understand the Environmental Impacts of Shale Gas Extraction, had been commissioned by Canada’s then environment minister, Peter Kent, whose political bias was such that he no doubt hoped for a resounding pro-fracking conclusion.
Not so. Groundwater contamination? Don’t know yet, basic science not yet done. Methane leaks? Probably, but not enough credible science has been done. Contamination of surface or shallow wells? Yes, but from fracking or merely from poorly designed wells? Don’t know. Science has not been done, not yet.
In a conversation a few months after the report was released, Cherry told a small audience that if pushed, he would probably opt in favour of fracking, just as he would for nuclear power, “if properly executed.” And that was the problem, he said. Fracking is being done without proper monitoring and without any real idea what proper execution would actually be. And, “unlike big hydro plants or nuclear plants, fracking takes place near, and sometimes underneath, ordinary people.”1
For example, he said, one of the problems involves leaking wells, not just leaking noxious chemicals into the groundwater, as alleged, but allowing methane to seep into well water and into the atmosphere. The oil and gas industry recognizes that leaks are an issue, he said, though their propaganda machine will not acknowledge it. “How to prevent leaks, then? Problem is, no one knows how the gas actually leaks, and how the leaks affect groundwater, if they do. Not one single paper examines this issue,” he noted. Russell Gold, the Wall Street Journal reporter and author of an exuberant book on fracking called The Boom, told the same audience of seeing rainwater puddling around a wellhead in Texas: “You could see bubbles coming up, obviously gas leaking. . . . But the well owner’s solution was to remove the water so there were no longer bubbles to be seen. . . . Dozens of tests were made around that well, but the source of the leak was never found.”
In September 2014, a study of gas leaking from fracked wells was published in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and concluded that yes, drinking water was being contaminated, but no, it was almost certainly not from the fracked deep-level shale but from improperly sealed wells at shallower levels. Cement used to seal the outside of the wells or the steel tubing used to line them was at fault, resulting in gas leaking up the wells, into aquifers, and into the atmosphere.
The report was seized on by the fracking industry, which said it “proved” that fracking was safe. In fact, they went further and asserted that there has never been a “proven instance” of fracking contaminating groundwater. Here’s a quote from a company called Cuadrilla, which is trying to get fracking going in England, among other places: “There have been over two million hydraulic fracture treatments carried out globally, the majority in the United States, and from that activity we are not aware of one single verified case of fracturing fluid contaminating aquifers.” In this Cuadrilla was just echoing what ExxonMobil’s chair, Rex Tillerson, told a congressional panel in 2013: “There have been over a million wells hydraulically fractured in the history of the industry, and there is not one, not one, reported case of a freshwater aquifer having ever been contaminated from hydraulic fracturing. Not one.”2 This careful, misleading phrasing really annoys fracking opponents, who point out, quite correctly, that it is splitting hairs — that if wells on the way down to the fracked area leaked, fracking wasn’t off the hook. Drilling was, in their definition, a necessary part of fracking, and they can point to countless fines and penalties assessed on drilling companies for contaminating groundwater with methane and for dumping toxic chemicals into streams.
Cherry, for his part, referred to a paper by the University of Waterloo’s Maurice Dusseault, called “Why Oil Wells Leak,” which pointed out that cement inevitably deteriorates, even when done properly. “The Germans too,” said Cherry, “have found that gas-well cementing does not remain leak proof.”
So the assertion by Peter Kent’s successor, Leona Aglukkaq, that “shale gas deposits can [therefore] be developed safely, responsibly, and in compliance with the strict environmental policies and regulations in place,”3 is hokum. She can know nothing of the kind. She may be right, of course, but her assertion is fact-free.
It is useful to recap what fracking really is, to get round this notion that it can be neatly compartmented into drilling and everything else.
In one way, of course, it can. You have to drill to get down to the fracking zone, but you don’t have to frack when you get there. This kind of drilling, directly into coal seams or shale beds containing methane gas, has been done for decades. Older wells of this kind used some of the same techniques to shake the gas loose, injecting water under high pressure to crack the shale, allowing gas to seep out. Water wells have done the same thing — the drilled well at my home in Nova Scotia fractured the shale to allow water to pool out, and we still after ten years have to filter the water to get rid of tiny shale fragments.
But fracking as it is currently defined is rather different. The main difference is that it employs horizontal drilling from the original well base, with channels punched up to a kilometre in spoke-like patterns, giving each drilled well a much bigger footprint deep down. Each fracking pad is a major industrial undertaking, with ten to twenty holes on each pad, leaving behind a pocked landscape. Even more controversially, the water that it blasts down the wells to fracture the rock is laced with a witch’s brew of abrasive sand and chemicals, many of them proprietary and therefore unknown to regulators, and all of them persistent and liable to leach into water tables. “Flowback water,” the chemical-laden stuff that comes to the surface with the gas, has to be disposed of. In some areas it can be pumped back deep underground, but only where the geology permits. In other areas, it must remain on the surface, in massive leaching ponds the size of lakes.
As a business, fracking is transforming the energy landscape, though to what extent remains disputed. By the end of 2014, the United States was drilling about a hundred wells a day and the tempo was still accelerating. The Marcellus shale area of Pennsylvania and New York is claimed to be the number two oil-producing region in the world, after Russia. In British Columbia, somewhere around eleven thousand wells were drilled in 2014 alone. The fracking industry currently uses as much energy to extract the gas as eleven multi-megawatt nuclear power plants.
The boast is that fracked gas will be a bridge technology, weaning electricity generation off coal, and transportation off diesel and gasoline. This too is disputed.
So here are the issues:
• Is the promised size of the transformation real, or is it hype, a short-lived boom before the coming bust?
• Are the vast amounts of water needed for fracking justified? Is the water available? Is there enough, or will fracking divert essential water from other applications?
• Does fracking contaminate groundwater and poison wells? What are the contaminants, and what do we know about them?
• Can wells be made leak proof?
• Does fracking allow the escape of more methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, than acknowledged?
How Big an Industry Is Fracking, Really?
Fracking, both for oil and gas, was supposed to be the game changer. It was going to turn the United States into an energy superpower, a net exporter instead of an import hog, with oil and liquefied natural gas as a global power chip. As of 2012, according to industry sources, slightly more than two and a half million wells had been fracked worldwide, more than a million of those in the United States. The typical well produces a gusher of gas or oil that quickly settles down into a stream. The big question remains: Will that stream produce gas for decades, or quickly run out? Skeptics of Russell Gold’s The Boom suggest the supply will soon peter out and the boom will be over, unless the industry drills an ever-increasing number of wells in ever-increasing numbers of places.
So far, the shrinkage has been minimal. In fact, although the number of drilling rigs has remained steady for a couple of years, production is still increasing, as is productivity, mostly through more sophisticated extraction techniques. No one really knows whether this will last, or for how long, or how much further each well can be pushed.
In one way, of course, this became moot late in 2014, as gas and oil prices fell through the floor and the drilling rigs fell silent (“Up to their derricks in debt,” as the Economist put it). But no one expects those rock-bottom prices to persist forever.
What is clear is that early estimates of the potential reserves were vastly overstated. Nothing illustrates this more than the potentials that were publicized for the Monterey shale drilling area south of San Francisco, in California — right on the San Andreas fault, as it happens. In 2011, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) contracted out a study of the Monterey “play,” as it is called, to a company called Intek, which seconded research to an analyst named Hitesh Mohan. Recoverable oil and gas, Mohan wrote, amounted to a very substantial 15.4 billion barrels (almost three and a half trillion litres), almost double the productive Bakken shale in Montana and five times larger than Eagle Ford in Texas. Developing the field would add 2.8 million jobs by 2020 and produce a gusher of taxes into state and federal coffers, $24.6 billion worth. As it turns out, however, the study’s numbers were based almost entirely on optimistic technical reports from petroleum companies, including Occidental Petroleum, which owned millions of acres of leases in the Monterey area.
Two years later, the EIA, attempting to wipe the egg from its face, published revised estimates, this time based on known geological factors. The new estimates were about 90 percent lower than the original ones. There would not be 15.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil and gas, but 600 million. It wasn’t only that the original estimates of the amount of gas were inflated but also that the jumbled geology of the area, sitting as it does at the junction of active tectonic plates, made recovery incrementally more difficult.
The write-down vindicated opponents of Californian fracking, such as the Post Carbon Institute, whose spokesman, the geoscientist David Hughes, wrote that the Monterey formation “was always [a] mythical mother lode puffed up by industry — it never existed.”4
So what, then, to make of other industry analyses elsewhere in the country?
The Marcellus shale, which underlies parts of New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and Maryland, is described on the website energyfromshale.org as “one of the largest shale regions in the United States[,] . . . estimated to be the second largest natural gas find in the world. . . . The 400-year-old [sic] Marcellus shale region is estimated to contain more than 410 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and could supply US consumers’ energy needs for hundreds of years.” Penn State University’s Terry Engelder, described in the Philadelphia Inquirer as “a leading advocate of shale gas development,” was quoted there as putting the reserves at 4,359 trillion cubic feet, a nicely precise number, of which “perhaps 30 percent may be recoverable.” The region could produce for perhaps twenty years or more.5 However, on other petroleum industry websites, Engelder’s estimates were 500 trillion cubic feet, which more closely match those of other geologists.
Other shale areas include Eagle Ford, near Dallas, Texas, which best guesses say holds somewhere between 150 and 180 trillion cubic feet, plus twenty-five or so billion barrels of oil. The Barnett shale field, which underlies the Dallas–Fort Worth metro area, has already produced five trillion cubic feet of gas and is expected to yield up forty trillion more — this estimate from the fracking giant Chesapeake Energy, which in 2013 set a record of sorts by becoming the first company to drill a well in the middle of an international airport. The Bakken shale area, which mostly produces oil and not gas, is now pumping a million barrels a day — but it will likely take twenty-five hundred new wells a year to sustain that rate, and it is far from clear how long the reserves will last.
David Hughes, the geoscientist who pooh-poohed Monterey, has produced a substantial study of the fracking industry, sardonically titled Drill Baby Drill, after the mantra of the industry’s congressional shills. His conclusion, not at all sardonic, was measured: the United States was not going to become the new energy superpower to rival Saudi Arabia. Or Russia, for that matter.
Nor would it become a major exporter. “New technologies of large-scale, multistage, hydraulic fracturing of horizontal wells have allowed previously inaccessible shale gas and tight oil to reverse the long-standing decline of US oil and gas production,” he wrote. “This production growth is important and has provided some breathing room. Nevertheless, the projections by pundits and some government agencies that these technologies can provide endless growth heralding a new era of ‘energy independence,’ in which the United States will become a substantial net exporter of energy, are entirely unwarranted based on the fundamentals. At the end of the day, fossil fuels are finite and these exuberant forecasts will prove to be extremely difficult or impossible to achieve.”
The much touted reduction of US oil imports, he pointed out, has been mostly a story of reduced consumption — the recession caused that, not conservation or extra domestic production. As he told the press at the time, “The good news is that supply grows short term, but the bad news is that we may have a very serious supply issue 10-15 years out.” Then he came back to Monterey: “[This] was a huge field wiped out with a stroke of a pen. That’s like two Bakkens off the table in one fell swoop.”
All this hasn’t been helped by a Bloomberg News investigative report in October 2014 that found that virtually every fracking company was inflating its shale reserves.6
Water Use in Fracking and Its Consequences
Here are some facts:
Fracking a single horizontal well for gas uses an average of 18 million litres of water. These numbers reduce somewhat for oil: 121 million litres in a fracked well for oil. Simple vertical wells use 2.6 million litres for gas, close to 2 million litres for oil.
As techniques get more sophisticated, and more gas is generated from each well, water use goes up. As Russell Gold pointed out to the same small audience addressed by John Cherry, in 2003, a really productive well used 10.6 million litres of water (and 100,250 kilograms of sand); in 2013, the Four Sevens Oil Company drilled a well in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, that required some 47 million litres.
In 2013, 70 percent of fracking was for oil, not gas.
In the United States, 56 percent of wells are being drilled in water-stressed areas, 36 percent in areas of severe groundwater depletion. According to the Water Resources Institute definition, “high-stress” means that over 80 percent of the water in those areas has already been allocated, and there is competition for the rest. In Colorado and California, 97 and 96 percent of the wells respectively were in high-stress areas. In Texas, 52 percent.
Over thirty counties have each used four billion litres of water for fracking, roughly equivalent to the daily use of eight million people. Dimmit County, Texas, in the Eagle Ford play, used the largest volume of water for fracking in the United States — about fifteen billion litres. Wells in the Permian basin of Texas use water from aquifers that overlap the Ogallala aquifer itself, and drilling there is slated to double by 2020, from around three thousand new wells a year to six thousand. In Colorado, fracking in the small Denver-Julesburg basin already uses more than the city of Boulder uses in a year.7
Three companies — Halliburton, Schlumberger, and Baker Hughes — account for about half the water used nationally. The biggest single water user is Chesapeake Energy, though most of its operations are not in high-water-stress areas.
Russell Gold again: “The two areas of Texas where there is most fracking are also the areas of worst drought. In the Eagle Ford region, there was not enough water even before fracking started.” In the freewheeling Texas water market, the Rio Grande has been fully allocated by companies buying up existing water rights. “And since companies have much more money than farmers, they are acquiring all they need. Some cities don’t even know this is going on. It is not a fair fight. Water is a local market but the companies are global.”
All this just to get oil and gas from the ground. Existing conventional oil drilling, even before fracking started, was using somewhere around two billion gallons a day from lakes, streams, and groundwater, according to US Geological Survey figures. The refining process — to turn the stuff mined into usable fuel — used another two billion or so, mostly for cooling. It is all further complicated by the otherwise sensible notion of building new refineries closer to the source, further stressing the local supply. A new refinery called Hyperion in southeast South Dakota will use 45 million litres a day for processing and cooling, if it gets built — this from an aquifer already stressed by agricultural over-pumping. The plant’s wastewater would afterward be dumped into the Missouri River. Unsurprisingly, there is considerable local resistance to the whole thing.
One consequence of the drought is that drilling companies are beginning to look at wastewater (or “produced water,” in the jargon of the trade) as a potential asset rather than as a cost. Recycling such water is still only done in trivial amounts, though those amounts are going up. Few companies recycle even half the water they use, and those that do say it costs more than dumping it down “disposal wells,” of which there are many in geological areas like Texas, where such wells are plausible. But recycling does cut down on other disposal and trucking costs. And in the entrepreneurial culture of the fracking industry, some are seeing opportunities. Consider, for example, companies with names like Water Rescue Services and Fountain Quail Water Management, that didn’t exist half a dozen years ago. Some of them are looking beyond the drilling industry. If enough produced water can be cleaned up sufficiently, it could be used for other purposes, such as municipal water systems and farming, in which case its value would increase substantially. It could even be used to recharge aquifers.8
A small curiosity is that an oilfield near Bakersfield, California, the Kern River field, is actually supplying water to the local water district that resells it to farmers — water acquired from the same underground rock formations that contain the oil. The oil and water are separated and the saline water diluted, then pumped ten kilometres to Bakersfield’s Cawelo water district.
As the Economist reported in 2013, a technique developed by a German-Singaporean company called Memsys for desalting seawater could provide a relatively cheap and effective way of separating fracking water from its contaminants, including salts. The technique is called “vacuum multi-effect membrane distillation,” and combines two well-known desalination techniques: distillation and filtration through membranes, called reverse osmosis. The company claims it sharply reduces the energy required for desalination, which if it proves true could make cleaning up fracking fluids much more common.9
Other companies are looking to use the brackish water that exists as a by-product of desalination as source water for fracking purposes.
Groundwater Contamination
A “progress report” from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in December 2012 listed more than a thousand chemicals reported to have been used in fracking or detected in fracking wastewater. The EPA used the phrase “reported to have been detected” because it didn’t do the analysis itself, instead relying on self-reporting from the nine largest fracking companies, as well as a national database called FracFocus.org, an industry-government fracking chemical disclosure registry. Most of the chemicals were known, and so were their properties. Others, not at all. Nor were their quantities always recorded — FracFocus is far from complete, and its mandate allows companies to avoid disclosing chemicals they consider trade secrets. Indeed, sometimes the companies themselves don’t always know what chemicals they are using, having outsourced fracking fluids to third-party contractors. Nor did the EPA report go into the matter of where these chemicals end up, or by what pathways, or how much of the stuff remains underground.10
In any case, the EPA, the agency tasked with protecting the environment, is specifically forbidden from regulating the injection of fracking fluids under the Safe Drinking Water Act. It can regulate pretty well everything else to do with water but not this — it’s an exception that was passed by Congress at the urging of Dick Cheney, then the vice-president but formerly boss of Halliburton, one of the biggest frackers in the world. This — the hands-off fracking clause — is widely known as the Halliburton Loophole.
Some things are known. One of the drilling companies that does recycle its fracking water, Fasken Oil and Ranch, says the solid-waste residues from cleaning up fracking-produced water includes boron, sulphates, and radioactive metals. All fracking fluids are highly saline, much more so than sea water. Methane is common. Toluene, benzene, and ethylbenzene, all of which affect the human central nervous system, are also used in fracking, though most exposure to these chemicals would come from air pollution, not from water. The toxic solvent 2-butoxyethanol, commonly called 2-BE, is a common ingredient in fracking fluids. This stuff, 2-BE, gave rise to a lawsuit that environmentalists derisively call the “Windex Defense,” when a Colorado woman, Laura Amos, sued Encana Corporation blaming a well blowout near her home for the rare tumour she developed. After an “investigation,” state regulators suggested to Amos that fracking wasn’t to blame, and that if Amos indeed had been exposed to 2-BE, it probably came from Windex, a window cleaner. Encana naturally denied any responsibility but hastily shut the case down by paying Amos a multi-million-dollar settlement and buying her family property. The makers of Windex remained silent throughout the affair.
No one disputes that these chemicals, and many others, are present in fracking fluids. The industry maintains that it is “highly improbable” that they can get into drinking water. Most critics actually agree. But not always: there have been many documented cases of gases bubbling into water wells. Even the industry admits that on occasion fracking fluids do indeed end up in aquifers, but it maintains that it happens where well casings have failed, and that failure rates have dropped significantly as drillers acquire more experience. In an early West Virginia case dating back to 1987, fracking fluids got in a small aquifer whose very existence had not been known, migrating upward through older oil and gas wells that had been abandoned years earlier and plugged with cement, though obviously not well enough, eventually making their way into at least one farmer’s drinking water, that of James Parsons, of Jackson County, some 183 metres from the drilling site. As the journalism website Truthout discovered, a US Department of Energy investigation had found about two and a half million abandoned oil and gas wells in the United States at the time. Parsons never made much of a fuss about his contaminated well, and the case was quietly sealed when he reached an agreement with the drillers, Kaiser Exploration and Mining Company, and was paid an unknown sum in compensation.11
In July 2014, California state regulators shut down a bunch of wastewater injection wells, fearing they had contaminated nearby groundwater. An EPA report was supposed to be delivered in sixty days, but it wasn’t until a year later that the report was finally released, delayed by ferocious industry lobbying. As it turns out, nearly three billion gallons of toxic wastewater had been illegally injected into central California aquifers, and half of the water samples collected showed high levels of dangerous chemicals such as arsenic and thallium, widely used as rat poison. Nine of the eleven sites investigated were illegally dumping chemicals into groundwater. If anyone had thought industry self-policing would work, they were now disabused of that notion.
Best evidence suggests that fracking wells will probably always be susceptible to leakage, but if best practices are used, leaks can be reduced to about half their 2014 values.
Methane, which we weirdly call “natural gas” when we burn it, is the third largest cause of the greenhouse effect, after carbon dioxide and water vapour. It is well known that methane is actually a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, roughly thirty times better at trapping heat in the atmosphere as its bad-boy cousin. It is, on the other hand, short-lived and doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for long. But it is a bad thing to let loose unburned.
The fracking process is, after all, an attempt to get at all that methane trapped underground and bring it up for use. It is hardly surprising that some of it leaks. It is difficult enough to prevent liquids escaping from wells and pipes; gas is even harder to corral. As Bob Howarth, a biogeochemist from Cornell University, told Bill McKibben, “It’s a hard physical task to keep it from leaking — that was my starting point. Gas is inherently slippery stuff. I’ve done a lot of gas chromatography over the years, where we compress hydrogen and other gases to run the equipment, and it’s just plain impossible to suppress all the leaks. And my wife, who was the supervisor of our little town here, figured out that 20 percent of the town’s water was leaking away through various holes. It turns out that’s true of most towns. That’s because fluids are hard to keep under control, and gases are leakier than water by a large margin.”12
Howarth published a study in the journal Climate Change in May 2011 that concluded that somewhere between 3.6 and 7.9 percent of methane from fracked wells was escaping, a pretty big number. Another study, published in PNAS early in 2014, found high levels of methane in the atmosphere over a few wells and nothing very much (or at all) over the majority, which seems to indicate that methane escapes are preventable with proper well casings. The paper also suggested that the higher methane levels might not be due to the fracked wells but to the existence of nearby coal seams, though it was inconclusive on the matter — the fracked wells might have drilled through coal seams on their way down, which would combine the two sources.13
Meanwhile, Colorado, alone of the states that allow fracking, has devised a set of rules aimed at reducing methane, written in collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund. Drillers are now obliged to test for leakages monthly, and if necessary will have to retrofit wells with better valves and casings. The industry has agreed to go along.
Late in 2014, the EPA issued a report called Waste Not: Common Sense Ways to Reduce Methane Pollution from the Oil and Natural Gas Industry. The report provocatively suggests that the escaping emissions from existing natural gas wells, compressors, and other equipment could be enough to heat more than six million homes.
Does escaping methane matter from a water perspective? Not really.
Sure, producer Josh Fox’s provocative documentary Gasland showed the now famous image of a kitchen tap shooting flame, and a newspaper headline, after a recent study (by scientists at Duke University) into fracking, declared that “Scientific Study Links Flammable Drinking Water to Fracking.” This brought about the now predictable reaction: the fracking people protesting that it was the well drillers who were responsible, as though it mattered to the hapless homeowner. This happens more often than it should, but that is not very often, and the number of incidents is shrinking as industry starts to do something about it. From a water perspective, fracking fluids are a more serious issue.
Fracking and Earthquakes
Fracking does trigger earthquakes. Cornell University’s Katie Keranen took a detailed look at the extravagant number of small quakes near the town of Jones, Oklahoma — 2,547 of them in five years — and found a direct link to fracking. Not so much to the practice itself, but to the vast quantity of wastewater injected far underground into so-called disposal wells. Jones is the home of what Keranen calls “four, modern, high-rate injection wells” that dispose of four million barrels of wastewater a month, and these wells, she found, “impact regional seismicity and increase seismic hazard.”14
On the plus side, another study by Susan Hough of the US Geological Service found that the quakes were all of low intensity and caused significantly less shaking than naturally caused quakes, perhaps because the very fluid that causes them also lubricates the shifting tectonic plates.15
Similar clusters of small quakes have been found at other fracked sites, including in Pennsylvania and Oklahoma. The quakes themselves don’t matter from a water perspective, but the poisons pumped into the disposal wells do.
The Egregious Tar Sands
The environmentalist position on the Athabasca tar sands (or oil sands, as its producers prefer) is admirably uncomplicated: the entire project, Alberta’s crude-oil engine driver, is wholly evil. In this view, mining these immense reservoirs of bitumen for conversion into usable oil represents one of mankind’s largest and ugliest assaults on the natural world. For those who have seen all three, only the West Virginia–Tennessee coal district and possibly Russia’s Donets region even begin to compare in their ghastliness. One of the oil sands’ largest proprietors, Murray Edwards, chairman of Canadian Natural Resources, told a panel of businessmen and lawyers in Lake Louise in November 2014 (rather glumly, I thought) that the “antis” were not going away anytime soon. The oil industry would just have to get used to it. The environmentalist NGOs, he suggested, really didn’t want the oil sands to go away, because they were such a convenient whipping boy.
The producers’ cause has not been helped by the obvious ineptitude of their early attempts at favourable publicity. Not just their insistence on squishing the notion that “tar” had anything to do with it, but also the risible notion that the oil so produced is “ethical oil” (a phrase attributed to Ezra Levant, a media gadfly notorious for his distant relationship with fact) or “responsible oil,” a truly Orwellian assault on reason employed by, among others, Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper (it is responsible because our intentions are pure and we’re nice and therefore anything we produce is responsible too). Well, the tar sands might or might not be responsible, but they are big. The $180 billion or so invested by major oil companies is by far the world’s largest energy project, indeed, the largest industrial project of any kind, anywhere. Its proponents suggest that it may be possible to produce four million barrels of oil a day, most of it for shipment to the United States, via rail if the pipelines don’t get built, or to the coast and thence by tanker. By November 2014, the various companies were still burning through more than $15 billion a year in an effort to expand production.
For the purposes of this book, though, it is the oil sands’ prodigious use of water that is the main issue.
It takes two tonnes of tar sands to produce one barrel of actual oil. To liberate the bitumen from its confining sand, the miners must blast the goop with scalding water to divide it into two streams, a small one containing heavy crude and a much larger slurry containing high concentrations of hydrocarbons, heavy metals, arsenic, selenium, and a dozen other contaminants. When the process is over, it is not really water anymore but a chemical soup of poisons. So far, somewhere around a hundred million cubic metres of water a year is “processed” in this way. About 10 percent is thought to be pure enough to return to the Athabasca River, though independent studies have made it clear that “pure” is a relative term — the water was found to contain high levels of mercury, thallium, cadmium, lead, nickel, and zinc.16 An industry report released the previous year found, unsurprisingly, that tar sands mining was innocent — that the water was just as polluted before the miners showed up.
In any case, that was the good stuff. The rest is dumped into tailings ponds, there to sit, presumably, until Armageddon. “Ponds” is an understatement; they are really lakes, already in 2012 covering an area twice the size of Manhattan, and forecast to grow steadily until mid-century. One of the dams holding the stuff in is larger than the Hoover dam. Currently, the solution of choice is to cover the ponds’ surface with a metre-thick layer of fresh water, giving the rest time to settle — somewhat. After some settling occurs, the water is recycled.
The Alberta government has licensed tar miners to extract 652 million cubic metres of water from the Athabasca River annually. In 2008, the last reliable figures to hand, the industry was using 184.3 million cubic metres, less than a third of the allotment, though still big — about a tenth of what the entire North American oil industry uses. Even so, there may not be enough overall. Mike Hightower, an engineer at Sandia National Laboratories and the reigning expert on the nexus between energy and water, told the writers for the website Circle of Blue that the limit is closer than it appears: “Canada has a lot of fresh water, but we are beginning to see limits on development of the oil sands. You will see limits where production hits a plateau and won’t get above it. The point is that . . . they were talking about three million or four million barrels a day. The water resources won’t allow them to go there. They will cap out at 2.5 million.”17
But here’s the other side of this debate. In March 2013, thirteen of the biggest companies operating in the Fort McMurray area, representing around 90 percent of all production, set up an unusual organization called COSIA (Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance), and hired Dan Wicklum as its CEO. Wicklum is an environmental engineer (PhD in aquatic ecology), formerly with Environment Canada and Natural Resources Canada as, among other things, director of wildlife and landscape science.18 It would be easy enough to dismiss COSIA (“Our vision is to enable responsible and sustainable development of Canada’s oil sands while delivering accelerated improvement in environmental performance through collaborative action and innovation”) as an industry front, a disinformation initiative, but it turns out that this is more than just a propaganda arm of the industry. Refreshingly, COSIA’s charter declared up front: “Our industry has environmental impacts, which we will work to minimize.” Unusually, and significantly, the member companies have waived intellectual property rights in a wide variety of inventions in order to share them with their competitors — more than five hundred initiatives that cumulatively cost somewhere around $900 million to develop. And they are putting up serious money, about half a billion, to minimize environmental impacts in four areas of focus: land remediation, water reuse and reduction, tailings, and greenhouse gases. So far, 185 separate projects have been set in train, all aimed at reducing impacts on the landscape.
And progress is being made. The intention is to reduce water use by 50 percent by 2022, with the baseline year being 2012. This will still be a lot of water, but it will reduce the water needed to produce one barrel of bitumen from 0.4 barrels of water today to 0.2 barrels. As well, a very large percentage of the water used is already recycled, somewhere from 80 to 85 percent in the close-to-the-surface open-pit mining, and close to 95 percent in the “in situ” operations that in this context means drilling to deeper levels. The declared goal is to recycle 100 percent of all water used. As far as the Athabasca River is concerned, the in situ sector uses no water from the river. The mining sector does — lots of it — but still only about 3.6 percent of the river’s lowest flow, and about 0.1 percent at high-flow times.
On the greenhouse gases front, the declared aim is to reduce emissions below those produced by conventional oil extractions.
The oil sands/tar sands are never going to be pretty, but then nor is conventional mining. Less ugly is the best that COSIA can hope for. Still, from an environmental point of view, less ugly is considerably better than more ugly. Until we wean ourselves off fossil fuels, that’s the best we can do.
I started this chapter quoting John Cherry quoting William Blake. So perhaps it is apt to finish with another of Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell”: Expect poison, Blake wrote, from the standing water.