The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Part 2: A fight brewing in the North Fork Valley
This is a continuation of last week’s article on the concerns being raised about the natural gas development in the North Fork Valley.
There’s a now-famous, or infamous, scene in the Academy Award nominated documentary ‘Gasland’ that shows a resident of Weld County, Colorado light a lighter next to a faucet and wait. After a minute, boom, the stream of water and sink ignite in orange flame.
It’s an image that sticks in the mind and the message couldn’t be clearer: gas development contaminates water supplies. It’s a claim the gas industry and its regulators deny.
That scene and others from the documentary have become the focus of several ‘fact sheets’ from groups like the American Natural Gas Alliance and the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) to tamp down concern over the potential for development related contamination.
In the first paragraph of its response to the film, the COGCC says, “Because an informed public debate on hydraulic fracturing depends on accurate information…” and that is what has been so hard to come by.
As COGCC director David Neslin pointed out over the phone at a Gunnison County-hosted roundtable discussion in the beginning of February, and others have echoed since, there’s never been any documented, scientifically verifiable link between gas development and the contamination of residential water wells.
Although he refused to talk for the camera in Gasland, Neslin and the COGCC responded to the film’s portrayal of Weld County’s cases of incendiary tap water with their own reports from each property, showing that the water wells were likely drilled into underground pockets of methane, according to the inspectors, but hadn’t been impacted by the nearby drilling.
On the other hand, there’s anecdotal evidence in abundance that links the gas industry to environmental degradation, either in air quality, water quality or just quality of life. The film is full of it.
Concerns about the impacts of gas development, particularly hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, have come to the top in the conversation about domestic natural gas development.
Recently Colorado congresswoman Diana DeGette and several colleagues released the findings of a House Energy and Commerce Committee’s year-long investigation into fracking and found “oil and gas service companies have injected over 32 million gallons of diesel fuel or hydraulic fracturing fluids containing diesel fuel in wells in 19 states between 2005 and 2009,” Colorado being one of them.
When representatives of the gas companies were asked about the use of diesel fuel in fracking fluid during the roundtable discussion, Gunnison Energy Company’s Lee Fyock told the group definitively that none of the companies servicing GEC wells use diesel in their fracking fluid and SG Interests’ Robbie Guinn said he was “reasonably certain” that diesel had not been used at his company’s wells in the county.
At a planning commission meeting Friday, March 11, County Attorney David Baumgarten said he hoped the ‘reasonably certain’ would turn into a ‘completely’ certain soon. At the same meeting, Fyock admitted that GEC had used BJ Services Company, which was one of the companies identified by the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s report called out as one that uses diesel fuel in its fracking fluid.
Although when asked at a planning commission meeting to compare the gas development in the northeast with what’s happening in the North Fork Valley, county attorney David Baumgarten said, “The parallel only goes as far as saying that they’re reaching into the strata to release gas and there’s concern.”
A share of the concern can be attributed to industry secrets. To those in the industry, the process of fracking a well is to gas production what pouring a foundation is to home construction; an important, if relatively small, part of the process that needs to be done right for the project to be successful and it’s almost always done through a subcontractor.
The subcontractors are companies like Halliburton and BJ Services, who make their money on successful fracks and part of that success can be credited to the secret fracking fluid recipe, so subcontractors won’t give the recipe up easily.
“I wish [the subcontractors] would just tell us so we could tell you,” GEC president Brad Robinson told the planning commission at the suggestion that the regulations require full disclosure. “We’re just caught in the middle. Only the subcontractors have that information and there’s not a vendor out there that would sign on to work under these regulations.”
Until the law is changed – and there are ongoing efforts – the gas lease holders, like GEC and SG Interests, won’t know what’s being pumped into their hole and the regulators can’t find out without a very compelling reason, like a large spill or related health concerns.
For Paonia resident Robin Smith and others downstream of the operations, they are the compelling reason Gunnison County, the state Department of Public Health and Environment and the Environmental Protection Agency should all know, and regulate, exactly what’s being put into the ground.
Today, that fluid is the main tool being used by producers to develop gas wells and its components are shrouded in mystery, despite concerns about the impacts an accident could have on water and the people, or animals, who drink it.
