Washington, D.C., April 2nd -- A new report shows that states ignore the risks of sometimes hazardous oil and gas waste despite EPA’s exemption of such waste from federal oversight based on “adequate” state management. Wasting Away: Four states’ failure to manage oil and gas waste in the Marcellus and Utica Shale examines how Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and New York neither regulate oil and gas development wastes as hazardous, nor can assure the public that they are protected from exposure to hazardous waste.
The Marcellus Shale is a deep natural gas reserve running under parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, and Virginia. The Utica Shale is even deeper and larger, covering parts of these states plus Kentucky and Tennessee. For the last several years, the Marcellus has been the focus of a huge boom in exploration and extraction, and more recently activity has also started in the Utica (especially in Ohio and West Virginia). New drilling technologies, like the combination of hydraulic fracturing with horizontal drilling, have made these deposits—long considered too difficult and expensive to drill—accessible to the industry.
News broke this week that the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (DNR) – the state agency responsible for regulating fracking and the expansion of the oil and gas industry -- spent taxpayer money to commission a secret promotional communications plan for that selfsame industry. Made public thanks to a Sierra Club open records request, the plan was prepared to pave the way for the Kasich administration to permit fracking for oil and gas in state forest and state park lands.
Marcellus, Utica, Point Pleasant. Hailing from Pennsylvania and studying in Ohio, such names ring many depressing and unsettling bells for me.
In Ohio, the threat of fracking looms over the lives of many. With a monetary backing from the fracking industry, Governor John Kasich has plans to increase the number of fracked wells to over 4,000 in the next four years.
In recent years, natural gas production from the Marcellus Shale has increased dramatically. Since the very beginning of this shale gas boom, water has been a key concern. The issue of water use and pollution due to hydraulic fracturing has been a hot topic amongst environmentalists, industry, and the media, but a comprehensive analysis of water use and disposal for the Marcellus Shale was lacking. Because of this, we took on the task of using publically available data to perform a life cycle analysis of water used for hydraulic fracturing in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
This report can be found here and was summarized on this blog previously.
A funny thing happened on the way to the shale revolution – an outbreak of democracy that will send tremors through the oil and gas industry and its political backers.
Voters in three elections in three different cities (Boulder, Ft. Collins and Lafayette), located on the voter-rich Front Range of Colorado, followed the city of Longmont’s lead and decisively passed bans or moratoria on fracking or drilling. A fourth election in Broomfield is still too close to call.
While driving through eastern Ohio yesterday, I stopped for a stroll along the Cayuhoga. In the language of the First Americans, the name meant “crooked river.” For other Americans born centuries later, the name would come to mean “the river that caught on fire from pollution.”
The famous Cayuhoga fire of 1969 was blamed on heavy oil slicks, and was one of several that afflicted the river during more than a century of unregulated industrial waste dumping. The image of the river burning has been credited with a surge in the environmental movement and the political support needed to pass the Clean Water Act.
Fast-forward to September 2013, as Ohioans turn out in the hundreds to watch different images of rivers threatened and rivers defended—this time in the form of Triple Divide, a documentary about the damage caused by shale gas development.
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