September 28th, 2012

A second major sampling of water near gas wells in Pavilion, Wyo., has found a range of gases and contaminants.

The testing of a monitoring well near where several residents say gas drilling has ruined their drinking water supplies found methane, ethane, diesel compounds and phenol, according to news reports.

[Read more →]

September 20th, 2011

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will hold three public hearings in September on the agency’s proposed standards to reduce air pollution from oil and gas drilling operations. The proposed standards would rely on cost-effective, existing technologies and practices to reduce pollution that contributes to smog and can cause cancer, while supporting the administration’s priority of continuing to expand safe and responsible domestic oil and natural gas production.

[Read more →]

December 14th, 2010

Actor Mark Ruffalo, environmentalists and a couple from Dimock, Penn. whose water well was contaminated by gas well drilling, rallied after New York Gov. Mark Patterson issued a moratorium on horizontal gas fracturing or “fracking,” which has been blamed for sullying drinking well water in several incidents across the country. One of the best known incidents of contamination occurred in Dimock, Penn., which is located above the same Marcellus Shale formations that gas companies want to tap in New York.

Protesters of drilling in New York worry that gas production there will damage the watershed that New York City, among others, depend upon.

[Read more →]

February 18th, 2010

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Congressmen Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) are asking for more information about the chemicals used to extract natural gas wells.

Urban gas well outside a mall in North Texas

Today, the two lawmakers sent letters to eight oil and natural gas companies requesting details of the ingredients used in hydraulic fracturing, a method of accessing natural gas deposits by blasting or fracturing the rock with a high pressure injection of water treated with chemicals.

[Read more →]

January 25th, 2010

(From ProPublica, which originally posted this piece, which was co-published with Politico, on Dec. 27, 2009.)

For more than a decade the energy industry has steadfastly argued before courts, Congress and the public that the federal law protecting drinking water should not be applied to hydraulic fracturing [2], the industrial process that is essential to extracting the nation’s vast natural gas reserves. In 2005 Congress, persuaded, passed a law prohibiting such regulation.

Now an important part of that argument — that most of the millions of gallons of toxic chemicals that drillers inject underground are removed for safe disposal, and are not permanently discarded inside the earth — does not apply to drilling in many of the nation’s booming new gas fields.

Three company spokesmen and a regulatory official said in separate interviews with ProPublica that as much as 85 percent of the fluids used during hydraulic fracturing is being left underground after wells are drilled in the Marcellus Shale, the massive gas deposit that stretches from New York to Tennessee.

[Read more →]

October 8th, 2009

By Abrahm Lustgarten
ProPublica

A version of this story appeared in the Albany Times-Union [1] on Oct. 8, 2009.

A preliminary report [2] from a consultant hired by New York City warns that “nearly every activity” associated with natural gas drilling could potentially harm the city’s drinking water supply and that while the risk can be reduced with strict regulations, “the likelihood of water quality impairment…. cannot be eliminated [2].”

[Read more →]

July 13th, 2009

By Barbara Kessler Green Right Now Pity the American public trying to figure out where to stand on natural gas. There’s a cacophony of appeals to our patriotism, pocketbooks and desire to be eco-correct. The latest twist comes from politicians in Congress, accompanied by oilman and clean energy trumpeter T. Boone Pickens,  who are promoting [...]

[Read more →]