The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
A fight brewing in the North Fork Valley
(This is part three of a three-part series on the concerns about natural gas development in the North Fork Valley.)
Not only does the area upstream of Paonia hold a sizeable natural gas reservoir, it’s also home to one of the nation’s most prominent advocates for greater accountability and disclosure by the gas industry, Dr. Theo Colburn of the Endocrine Disruption Exchange (TEDX).
When North Fork resident Robin Smith brought up Colburn’s name at a recent meeting of the Gunnison County Planning Commission, which was looking at ways of minimizing the interface between fracking fluid and drinking water, the industry representatives in attendance gave a collective roll of the eyes. Why?
In creating TEDX, Dr. Coburn compiled a list of nearly 1,000 chemicals used in the development of natural gas, along with the potential negative health effects of each.
TEDX research found that 47 percent of the 980 different components found to be used in one batch or another of fracking fluid are known to disrupt endocrine functions such as development and reproduction in humans.
Gunnison Energy Corporation president Brad Robinson pointed out that any one batch of fracking fluid contains only a fraction of those 980 chemicals. To say that one batch of fracking fluid contains so many harmful chemicals would be an exaggeration, he said.
If all of the fracking fluid were accounted for back at the surface, the concerns might be tempered. But even though the amount of fluid that stays underground is in dispute, the EPA estimates that as much as half of the injected fracking fluid, and maybe more, may not be accounted for.
What happens to the fluid, at least from a political perspective, depends on who’s being asked. Sara Sauter, representing TEDX at the county-hosted roundtable, believes the fluid could make its way into ground water and suggested implanting a unique chemical marker into fracking fluid to make it identifiable, so it can be tracked should it migrate. Robbie Guinn, vice president of land for SG Interests, said the fluid would likely just stay trapped in the rock.
As Gunnison County continues crafting amendments to its Regulations for Oil and Gas Operations, planners and the county attorney are trying to balance the unknown potential for contamination with the need to drill for the gas.
High Country Citizens’ Alliance (HCCA) public lands director Matt Reed says his organization “strongly supports the Planning Commission’s proposal to adopt new rules protecting Gunnison County’s rivers, streams and other water bodies from oil and gas-related pollution. Industry asserts that Gunnison County should rely solely on the state-level permitting process [Form 2A process] rather than adopting county rules.
“This assertion greatly overstates the value of the Form 2A process for protecting most water bodies. Ultimately, the county has no assurance that if it devotes the resources to participating in the Form 2A process, its efforts will be successful in achieving anything approaching the level of water quality protection now being considered by the Planning Commission.”
Robin Smith, who is now retired from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and worked for eight years reviewing permit applications for the U.S. EPA, would like to see the holes in the county’s regulatory process plugged with a prescriptive standard for performance.
In his experience, without clear permit requirements to weigh an application against, Smith says regulators can find themselves under pressure to find a way to approve the application.
“We were told by our supervisor not to bring a denial to them. Applications that were brought before us that should have been denied because they didn’t meet the statutory requirements were pushed through. It’s likely that Gunnison County also will feel pressure to approve things,” Smith says. “Government agencies don’t like to say no, they like to say yes. This [regulation] allows them to say yes at a time when they should say no.”
And without further science to back up the industry’s claims that their fracking isn’t contaminating ground water, Smith sees the development going on right outside the Paonia Reservoir state park boundary as being “ludicrous.”
Indicating the Western Environmental Law Center took on Paonia-based advocacy group Citizens for a Healthy Community as a client, Smith says, “Only after we stop this foolhardy production we can talk about how it can move forward.”
Smith says there isn’t science to prove that groundwater contamination isn’t caused by natural gas development and until there is, the practice should be stopped in the North Fork Valley. “The bottom line is that gas development has the potential to devastate our community and destroy the livelihoods of a lot of people in our county.”
For Paonia farmer Jeff Schwartz, the area downstream of the North Fork Valley is still a fairly healthy and intact agricultural community that waxes and wanes, of course, but supports a lot of small produce growers and a handful of orchards turning a profit.
“They’ve had some tough years, but are still there and it’s growing. Not only are you seeing more people come and go growing vegetable and fruit, but we’re seeing more people in this economy coming and knowing that there aren’t many other options,” he says. “So we’re seeing people grow these farms and they have to give it their all, they have to make it viable, because there’s no back-up.”
