To the Members and Friends of FRERC :

From Chris Amenson

We have a great opportunity to have our voices heard. Let’s take action! This involves writing U.S. Congressmen and Senators and doing so NOW.

House Bill H.R. 2766 and Senate Bill S 1215 have been drafted, referred to Committees, and they concern the passage of amendments to existing law which, once amended, would cause the public disclosure of contents of the fracturing (or “fracing”) chemicals which may be utilized anywhere in the U.S. (including the planned drilling near Mt Herman). NOW IS THE TIME TO HAVE YOUR VOICE HEARD! DON’T LET THIS OPPORTUNITY PASS.

You may see the both the House version of the proposed bill at http://thomas.loc.gov/home/c111query.html and enter the bill number H.R. 2766, and the Senate version at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:S.1215:

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO: Please write a letter or e-mail to any or all of the following Representatives who currently serve on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, to whom the bill has been referred, asking their support of H.R. 2766:

U.S. House of Representatives Committee Membership
The following Members have been selected to serve on the Energy and Commerce Committee in the 111th Congress:

In the U.S. Senate. The related bill, S. 1215, has been referred to the Committee on Environment and Public Works. The Committee members you can e-mail or write include the following:

Senate Committee Members

If you do an Internet search, using Google or Yahoo, on the Committee members’ names you will easily find their home and Washington DC addresses and their e-mail addresses.

We would recommend that you ask for prompt passage of these two bills.

Thank you.

The following article appeared in the Denver Post on April 22, 2009 (ProPublica source).

Jesse Ellsworth thought something was wrong with his water when it began to smell funny and popped out of his faucet in bursts. Then, in February, the Fort Lupton resident launched

Rick Roles, a resident of the Mamm Creek area near Silt where the Garfield County study was focused, has complained of health problems since drilling began several years ago within a quarter-mile of his home. (Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica)

Ellsworth is one of at least 29 residents in small farming communities northeast of Denver who have asked either the energy companies or the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to test for natural gas in their water wells. 

Now the commission is trying to figure out how the gas got there: Are some of Weld County’s 13,957 gas wells leaking methane into drinking water? Or is methane seeping into the water naturally, as it has done from time to time over the years?

So far, officials have determined that at least nine of those contamination cases are not drilling-related; they are likely the result of a water well intersecting with gas underground. But the Ellsworths’ well — which has stronger evidence tying it to drilling — remains a mystery.

“This one I think is best characterized as an isolated circumstance,” said David Neslin, acting director of the oil and gas commission, “We can’t, sitting here today, say ‘yes’ that this is coming from somebody’s gas well.”

While the search for clues continues in Weld County, investigations about methane contamination in Garfield County, on Colorado’s Western Slope, and other parts of the country have tied the contamination to energy development.

In Ohio, a house near Cleveland exploded in late 2007 after gas seeped into its water well. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources later issued a 153-page report that blamed a nearby gas well’s faulty cement casing and hydraulic fracturing — a deep-drilling process that shoots millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals into the ground under explosive pressure — for pushing methane into an aquifer and causing the explosion.

In Dimock, Pa., where drilling recently began in the mammoth Marcellus shale deposit, several drinking-water wells have exploded and nine others were found with so much gas that one homeowner was told to open a window if he planned to take a bath. In February the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection charged Cabot Oil & Gas with two violations that it says caused the contamination, theorizing that gas leaked from the well casing into fractures underground.

Common in nature

Industry representatives say methane contamination incidents are statistically insignificant, considering that 452,000 wells produced gas in the United States last year. They point out that methane doesn’t necessarily come from gas wells — it’s common in nature and can leak into water from biological processes near the surface, such as rotting plants.

The industry also defends its construction technology, saying it keeps gas and drilling fluids — including any chemicals used for hydraulic fracturing — safely trapped in layers of steel and concrete. Even if some escapes, they say, thousands of feet of rock make it almost impossible for it to migrate into drinking-water aquifers. When an accident happens, the blame can usually be traced to a lone bad apple — some contractor who didn’t follow regulations, they say. Those arguments helped the gas-drilling industry win rare exemptions from the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act when Congress enacted the 2005 Energy Policy Act.

County digs for clues

Now an exhaustive examination of a methane problem on the Western Slope is offering a scientific repudiation of that argument. Released in December by Garfield County, the report concludes that gas drilling has degraded water in dozens of water wells.

The three-year study used sophisticated scientific techniques to match methane from water to the same rock layer — a mile and a half underground — where gas companies are drilling. The scientists didn’t determine which gas wells caused the problem or say exactly how the gas reached the water, but they indicated that a system of interconnected natural fractures and faults could stretch from deep underground gas layers to the surface. They called for more research into how the industry’s practice of forcefully fracturing those deep layers might increase the risk of contaminants making their way into an aquifer.

“It challenges the view that natural gas, and the suite of hydrocarbons that exist around it, is isolated from water supplies by its extreme depth,” said Judith Jordan, the oil and gas liaison for Garfield County who has worked as a hydrogeologist with Du Pont and as a lawyer with Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection.

“It is highly unlikely that methane would have migrated through natural faults and fractures and coincidentally arrived in domestic wells at the same time oil and gas development started, after having been down there . . . for over 65 million years.”

The Garfield County analysis comes as Congress considers legislation that would toughen environmental oversight of drilling and reverse the exemptions enjoyed by the gas companies. Colorado has already overhauled its own oil and gas regulations, despite stiff resistance from the energy industry. The new rules, which went into effect earlier this month, strengthen protections against, among other things, methane contamination.

Migration underground

Drinking water with methane, the largest component of natural gas, isn’t necessarily harmful. The gas itself isn’t toxic — the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t even regulate it — and it escapes from water quickly, like bubbles in a soda.

But the gas becomes dangerous when it evaporates out of the water and into people’s homes, where it can become flammable. It can also suffocate those who breathe it.

According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as the concentration of gas increases, it can cause headaches, then nausea, brain damage and eventually death.

The Garfield County report is significant because it is among the first to broadly analyze the ability of methane and other contaminants to migrate underground in drilling areas, and to find that such contamination was in fact occurring. It examined more than 700 methane samples from 292 locations and found that methane, as well as wastewater from the drilling, was making its way into drinking water not as a result of a single accident but on a broader basis.

As the number of gas wells in the area increased from 200 to 1,300 in this decade, methane levels in nearby water wells increased too. The study found that natural faults and fractures exist in underground formations in Colorado, and that it may be possible for contaminants to travel through them.

Conditions that could be responsible include vertical upward flow “along natural open-fracture pathways or pathways such as well-bores or hydraulically-opened fractures,” states the section of the report done by S.S. Papadopulos and Associates, a Maryland-based environmental engineering firm specializing in groundwater hydrology.

Weaknesses suspected

The researchers did not conclude that gas and fluids were migrating directly from the deep pockets of gas the industry was extracting. Instead, they said it was more likely the gas originated from a weakness somewhere along the well’s structure. But the discovery of so much natural fracturing, combined with fractures made by the drilling process, raises questions about how all those cracks interact with the well bore and whether they could be exacerbating the groundwater contamination.

“One thing that is most striking is in the area where there are large vertical faults, you see a much higher instance of water wells being affected,” said Geoffrey Thyne, the hydrogeologist who wrote the report’s summary and conclusion. He is a senior research scientist at the University of Wyoming’s Enhanced Oil Recovery Institute, a pro-extraction group dedicated to tapping hard- to-reach energy reserves.

The report, referred to as the Garfield County Hydrogeologic Study, has been met with cautious silence by the industry and its regulators.

The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, the state’s regulatory body, would not respond to questions from ProPublica because it hasn’t thoroughly analyzed the data behind the November report, said its acting director, David Neslin.

Neither the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, which promotes the expansion of Rocky Mountain natural-gas markets, nor Encana, the Canadian energy company that drills in the study area, would comment on the Garfield County report. Both referred questions to Anthony Gorody, a Houston- based geochemist who specializes in oil and gas issues and frequently is employed by the energy industry.

“Junk science”

Gorody dismissed the report’s conclusions as “junk science.”

“This is so out of whack. There are a handful of wells that have problems. These are rare events,” said Gorody, president of Universal Geosciences Consulting. “They are like plane crashes — the extent tends to be fairly limited. I do not see any pervasive impact.”

Most of the methane in the study area, Gorody said, came from shallow gas-bearing rock or decaying matter near the surface — not from the deep gas produced by the energy industry. He criticized the report’s methodology, saying the way that researchers linked the stray gas with the deep-gas formations was speculative at best.

Thyne, standing by his report, said researchers had traced the origin of the gas by conducting the equivalent of a forensic investigation, analyzing its isotopic signature, or molecular fingerprint. The molecular structure showed that most of it was thermogenic, meaning it matched the deeply buried deposit where gas was being drilled, called the Williams Fork Formation. A minority of the samples were difficult to identify by this method, so Thyne used another scientific process to study them. He is confident they, too, were thermogenic in origin.

In most cases, the study couldn’t pinpoint the exact pathway the contaminants had used to travel a mile and a half up into the drinking water aquifer. So Thyne could only reason the possibilities.

The methane could be seeping into water wells through natural fractures, he said, or through leaks in the well casings or cement, or from the well heads.

Many possibilities

When a pipe extends 8,000 feet below Earth’s surface, he said, “there are numerous potential leak points along the way. So is it leaking at 8,000 feet and coming up a well bore, a natural fault or fracture? Or is it leaking 500 feet from the surface? We don’t know.”

The most plausible explanation, Thyne said, is that the same type of well casing and cementing issues that had proved problematic in Ohio and are suspected in Pennsylvania were presenting problems in Colorado too.

“The thesis is that because of the way the wells are designed, they could be a conduit,” said Garfield County’s Jordan, who commissioned the report.

Jordan worries that the methane leaks could be a sign of worse to come.

“We suspect the methane would be the most mobile constituent that would come out of the gas fields. Our concern is that it’s a sort of sentinel, and there are going to be worse contaminants behind it,” she said. “It’s not just sitting down there as pure CH4 (methane). It’s in a whole bath of hydrocarbons,” she said, and some of those “can be problematic.”

ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.

Colorado’s tougher rules, the recession and lower natural-gas prices are blamed.

The following article appeared in the Denver Post April 29, 2009.

Colorado’s cooling natural-gas boom likely will chill further by year’s end.

The number of state permits approved to drill new wells — when projected through the end of 2009 — is expected to drop by 11 percent from last year, according to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

The projected decline is “a reflection of gas prices, which have come down at least 50 percent

A rig for a natural gas well stands in a field north of Interstate 70 outside Parachute, Colo. (AP | David Zalubowski)

from last summer,” said Jim Magill at Platts Gas Daily newsletter. “Part of the problem is the lack of pipelines. Also, there is uncertainty over Colorado’s new oil and gas regulations.”

The state approved 1,602 permits to drill wells from Jan. 1 to March 23 this year, commission staff said in a report issued March 30.

At that rate, the commission estimates that it will approve 7,130 permits in 2009 — 11 percent lower than the record 8,027 permits it approved in 2008.

But the number of approved permits could be even lower — up to a 33 percent drop from 2008 — when estimates are based on the number of permit applications submitted.

Commission director David Neslin warned that projections aren’t always reliable.

“It’s difficult to extrapolate (permits) for 12 months based on the number for three months,” he said, “since we are in a recession and commodity prices have declined.”

The first quarter saw robust permit activity, likely because companies rushed to lock them in before a majority of new, stricter drilling rules took effect April 1, Neslin added. Permits are valid for one year.

Gov. Bill Ritter on Wednesday signed drilling rules giving the commission greater oversight of energy companies.

And given the slowdown in drilling activity, the number of permit approvals could wane the rest of the year, Neslin said.

Colorado’s gas rig count was 52 the week ending April 17, compared with 123 six months earlier, according to Houston-based Baker Hughes Inc.

EnCana Oil & Gas (USA) trimmed its investment in Colorado from $700 million in 2008 to $400 million this year, partly because of new drilling rules, spokesman Doug Hock said.

“We have cut down investment by 10 percent in Texas and Louisiana, 30 percent in Wyoming,” Hock said. “That’s where you see the connection with the rules in Colorado, where we cut back 40 percent.”