Tucked away in the pages of the evolving energy bill is a task for the EPA: determine if hydraulic fracturing is a risk to drinking water.

This fall, along with heated discussions about drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), mandating the use of ethanol in gasoline and raising the fuel efficiency of sport utility vehicles (SUVs), a halls-of-Congress eavesdropper may overhear conversations about fracture half-length and proppant concentration.
Legislators have begun the conference process to reconcile the House and Senate versions of an energy bill. One portion of the Senate-passed version (Section 610) calls for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to "complete a study of the known and potential effects on underground drinking water sources of hydraulic fracturing...on a nationwide basis."
The purpose of the study would be to determine whether hydraulic fracturing has endangered underground drinking water sources and if any actions might reduce or eliminate any such endangerment. The bill also provides that EPA may carry out a separate study focused on a "particular type of geologic formation." In either case, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) must review the conclusions and offer an opinion on their technical basis. The EPA then would determine if regulation would be necessary.
EPA has been looking at hydraulic fracturing in "a particular type of geologic formation" - coal seams - for the past 2 years. In this effort, EPA is not incorporating new, scientific fact-finding, but conducting a review of the public literature on the hydraulic fracturing process to serve as the basis for a potentially larger study. EPA also is compiling comments from the public on alleged contamination due to hydraulic fracturing practices. A draft report on this review is expected this summer, perhaps even as this column goes to press.
Historically, EPA had not considered regulating hydraulic fracturing because it believed, quite logically, that the process did not fall under either the Underground Injection Control program or the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). In 1997, as a result of a law suit brought by the Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation (Leaf), a federal court ruled hydraulic fracturing of coalbeds in Alabama's Warrior Basin should be regulated under the SDWA as underground injection. The end result of that lawsuit has been that Alabama coalbed methane (CBM) operators must undergo a lengthy permitting process to fracture a coal seam, and even then must haul water from city water supplies for use as fracturing fluid. Leaf lawyers, dissatisfied with this situation, recently petitioned the Supreme Court in an attempt to make the process even more restrictive.
Two years ago, based on anecdotal reports of groundwater contamination associated with CBM production, EPA determined that reviewing the topic before making further decisions concerning the potential regulation of hydraulic fracturing would be a good idea, hence the study.
In 1998, the Ground Water Protection Council, a nonprofit organization with membership representing industry, state and federal regulators, academia and others with interests in groundwater protection, conducted a survey of the agencies responsible for fracturing in 24 states. Only one - Alabama - reported any complaints of alleged water contamination from coal seam fracturing. In that case, site investigations of the water supply wells claimed to have been affected and analysis of water samples by the State Oil & Gas Board of Alabama, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (the state's water pollution control agency) and EPA failed to confirm CBM hydraulic fracturing activities had degraded water quality.
It is this author's suggestion that the EPA's 2-year literature review will show fracture stimulation is a good example of economic and environmental congruency in the energy business. Producers want to keep fracturing treatments in-zone and away from water-bearing formations for economic reasons entirely unrelated to groundwater contamination. It also should show there is very little (if any) quantitative data in the literature to support the notion that fracturing of coal seams has led to groundwater contamination, in Alabama or elsewhere.
An optimist might think the hydraulic fracturing study called for in the energy bill (should it survive the conference process and clear the subsequent funding implementation and NAS hurdles) could lead to a clear statement of the tremendously small risk fracturing of oil and gas formations poses for contamination of drinking water sources at any depth, and particularly at the depths where the majority of hydraulic fracturing takes place.
It might even lead to a more scientific appraisal of what defines an underground source of drinking water. This might eliminate a situation where Alabama CBM producers must haul fracturing makeup water from a city source that meets a certain standard of "drinkability" (not all community water supplies do) to avoid "contaminating" a formation containing water with as much as 10,000 ppm total dissolved solids, not to mention the hydrocarbons that are the producer's target. At the same time, Wyoming CBM operators, producing water that has much less salinity, are facing restrictions on their ability to dispose of that water on the surface.
An optimist also might expect such a study would reveal the fact that even if the brine in shallow gas productive formations were somehow, someday, to be used for drinking, the amount of fracturing fluid chemicals injected in a field, relative to the total volume of water in the formation, would be so small as to be insignificant.
And a wild-eyed optimist might even expect to see such a study provide some balancing of even a statistically possible but marginal risk of water contamination from hydraulic fracturing against the widely demonstrated, enormous benefit of the domestic supply of clean-burning natural gas that fracturing makes possible.
We can hope. At least the legislation, if passed, may act to move the issue toward a science-based conclusion that prevents the export of Alabama's situation to other regions of the country.
While this portion of the energy bill debate may not get as much press as ANWR, ethanol and SUVs, it bears careful watching by the optimists among us.

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