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Public Health, Safety and TrustI met with municipal water managers,engineers from treatment plants,toxicologists and health officials. Ibecame a voyeur into the preciseworld of environmental water scienceand found that its regulation, wherealmost every detail is explicitly laidout and considered, is intended to beequally exact. Very little seemed to beleft to chance.Then I stumbled on a water issuethat appeared to be all about chance.I spoke with a hydrogeologist withthe U.S. Geological Survey who wasalarmed about a process being usedby the energy industry in which awhole bunch of chemicals are pumpeddirectly into the ground and couldpotentially reach water supplies. Mysource didn’t know much more—infact he explained that this process,called hydraulic fracturing, was notregulated by the federal governmentand that the Environmental ProtectionAgency didn’t have the authorityto examine it.But there were new plans to drillfor natural gas along the Eastern seaboard,including in New York City’swatershed, and this person describeda quiet undercurrent of concern thathe said extended throughout the scientificcommunity. At this point all thatbackground fodder I had collected hada purpose; without my newly acquiredknowledge of water science, I wouldnever have been able to understandthe implications of the drilling issueor expand it into a full-fledgedinvestigation.Digging DeeperHydraulic fracturing, I soon learned,involved shooting large amounts ofwater, sand and chemicals at highpressure down a freshly drilled wellin order to crack the geologic depositsthat hold natural gas thousands of feetbelow and release that gas so it canflow back out of the well. The extraordinarywater pressure—thousands ofpounds—literally fractures the rock.Then the sand floats into tiny cracksand holds them open while bubblesof gas escape to the surface. A proportionallysmall amount of chemicalsare used to control the viscosity of thewater, kill off bacteria, and otherwiseoptimize the whole operation, butconsidering that several millions ofgallons of water might be pumpedinto a gas well, that can amount totens of thousands of gallons of toxicsubstances put into the ground.The process is nearly ubiquitous.Hydraulic fracturing is used in nine outof 10 gas wells drilled in the UnitedStates and is crucial to extractinghard-to-reach geologic deposits of gasat a time when energy independenceis of paramount importance. Plus,natural gas is viewed as a “transitionalfuel” even by environmentalists—it iscleaner burning than any other fossilfuel and emits 23 percent less carbondioxide than oil. For these reasons,plus the discovery of new deposits likethose in New York State, gas drillingactivity is expanding faster than anyother domestic resource or energyprogram.At first, I saw a straightforwardexplanatory story. Here was a fascinatingtechnological process that fewpeople seemed to know about. The stategovernments dealing with it should beable to address predictable questionsabout how the chemicals are managedand treated, what the risks were, andhow they were handling them.But when I eventually sat down withenvironment and gas drilling officialsfor New York State, they were caughtoff guard by the plainest of questions.What chemicals would they be permittingto be pumped into the ground?What waste would be produced, andwhere would it be disposed of? Anddid the practice threaten the state’swater supplies?They could not answer any of thesequestions. In fact, they weren’t evenaware that chemicals were used inhydraulic fracturing. They had neverasked and never been told exactly whatwas being pumped into the earth; theyassumed that the primary byproductof drilling was plain water. Thus theyhad no plans in place to dispose of thewaste; by default it would be sprayedon roads and discharged through conventionalsewage plants back into thearea’s rivers.I wanted to drill deeper, but it wouldcost money and take more time. Myeditor, Steve Engelberg, said to goahead. In fact, at each juncture in myreporting he continued to enthusiasticallygreen light more time, moreairplane tickets, more research. 1As it turned out, the informationI sought was clouded in secrecy.The identity of the chemicals usedin the drilling was a closely guardedcompetitive secret, protected as proprietarytrade recipes by the drillingcontractors who used them. Neitherthe state agencies nor the EPA had acomplete list of what was being used,and scientists were telling me that theycould not measure any threat or decideif the process was safe, because theycouldn’t trace the source of pollutionwithout knowing the names of thechemicals used in fracturing.Gas drilling activities were furthershielded by exemptions from the SafeDrinking Water Act and the CleanWater Act—the two federal laws designedto maintain water quality andprotect American’s drinking supplies,as well as make the law consistentacross the country. Those exemptionsremoved any federal oversight and leftenvironmental enforcement—and therobust task of funding and conductingscientific research—to individual stateslike New York. It meant that federalscience agencies were not even tasked1His story, “Buried Secrets: Is Natural Gas Drilling Endangering U.S. Water Supplies?”was published by ProPublica on November 13, 2008, www.propublica.org/feature/buried-secrets-is-natural-gas-drilling-endangering-us-water-supplies-1113. The storywas also published in BusinessWeek and on the front page of The Denver Post as part ofProPublica’s effort to disseminate its investigative stories widely.Nieman Reports | Summer 2009 63