Carcinogenic Water - It's a Gas

Natural gas, frequently hailed as a cleaner, safer alternative to our dependence on oil, is not without its own litany of issues:

Millions of gallons of potentially hazardous chemicals and known carcinogens were injected into wells by leading oil and gas service companies from 2005-2009, a report by three House Democrats said Saturday.

The report said 29 of the chemicals injected were known-or-suspected human carcinogens. They either were regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act as risks to human health or listed as hazardous air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

Methanol was the most widely used chemical. The substance is a hazardous air pollutant and is on the candidate list for potential regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

And this is by far my favorite part about the chemicals used in this process:

The report said many chemical components were listed as "proprietary" or "trade secret."

We have Bush/Cheney to thank for that btw. So we have known carcinogens being introduced into sources of drinking water, and energy companies deem these same chemical mixtures to be proprietary. A trade secret can be defined as information which, if released to the general public or obtained by a competitor, could cause the owner of that information significant, adverse economic harm. In other words, energy companies derive economic benefits and  profits from their continued ability to inject enormous volumes of carcinogenic and otherwise unknown fluids and chemicals into our water tables.

The New York Times had a good story on fracking a few months back, which revealed that the effects on groundwater are not limited to carcinogens, but also radioactivity. That and  public wastewater treatment plants are ill-equipped to properly process these substances, so massive amounts of toxins are being poured into our lakes and rivers:

In Pennsylvania, these treatment plants discharged waste into some of the state’s major river basins. Greater amounts of the wastewater went to the Monongahela River, which provides drinking water to more than 800,000 people in the western part of the state, including Pittsburgh, and to the Susquehanna River, which feeds into Chesapeake Bay and provides drinking water to more than six million people, including some in Harrisburg and Baltimore.

Lower amounts have been discharged into the Delaware River, which provides drinking water for more than 15 million people in Philadelphia and eastern Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania is really the epicenter for all of this, and its new wingnut governor is making sure that the industry is regulated only by the invisible hand:

Gas producers are generally left to police themselves when it comes to spills. In Pennsylvania, regulators do not perform unannounced inspections to check for signs of spills. Gas producers report their own spills, write their own spill response plans and lead their own cleanup efforts.

A review of response plans for drilling projects at four Pennsylvania sites where there have been accidents in the past year found that these state-approved plans often appear to be in violation of the law.

At one well site where several spills occurred within a week, including one that flowed into a creek, the well’s operator filed a revised spill plan saying there was little chance that waste would ever enter a waterway.

Sound familiar?

BP PLC's 582-page regional spill plan for the Gulf, and its 52-page, site-specific plan for the Deepwater Horizon rig are riddled with omissions and glaring errors, according to an Associated Press analysis that details how BP officials have pretty much been making it up as they go along. The lengthy plans approved by the federal government last year before BP drilled its ill-fated well vastly understate the dangers posed by an uncontrolled leak and vastly overstate the company's preparedness to deal with one.

In the spill scenarios detailed in the documents, fish, marine mammals and birds escape serious harm; beaches remain pristine; water quality is only a temporary problem. And those are the projections for a leak about 10 times worse than what has been calculated for the ongoing disaster.

There are other wildly false assumptions in the documents. BP's proposed method to calculate spill volume judging by the darkness of the oil sheen is way off. The internationally accepted formula would produce estimates 100 times higher.

More specifically, Gov. Corbett's early decisions have ensured that there will essentially be no regulation of the natural gas industry whatsoever:

Gov. Tom Corbett wants to hand authority over some of the state’s most critical environmental decisions to C. Alan Walker, a Pennsylvania energy executive with his own track record of running up against the state’s environmental regulations.

Walker, who has contributed $184,000 to Corbett’s campaign efforts since 2004, is CEO and owner of Bradford Energy Company and Bradford Coal, which was once among Pennsylvania’s largest coal mining companies. He also owns or has an interest in 12 other companies, including a trucking business and a central Pennsylvania oil and gas company.

Walker was Corbett’s first appointee—he chose him to lead the Department of Community and Economic Development in December, before taking office. Now, as Corbett stakes much of the state’s economy on Marcellus Shale gas drilling, a paragraph tucked into the 1,184-page budget gives Walker unprecedented authority to “expedite any permit or action pending in any agency where the creation of jobs may be impacted.” That includes, presumably, coal, oil, gas and trucking.

And regulators must now obtain approval from Corbett political appointees before they are actually permitted to do their jobs:

Oil and gas inspectors policing Marcellus Shale development in Pennsylvania will no longer be able to issue violations to the drilling companies they regulate without first getting the approval of top officials.

That’s according to a directive laid out in a series of emails received by the Department of Environmental Protection staff last week and leaked to ProPublica. The emails say the new edict applies only to enforcement actions related to Marcellus Shale drilling and that failure to seek prior approval “will not be acceptable.”

The memos require that each of the hundreds of enforcement actions taken routinely against oil and gas operators in Pennsylvania each month now be approved by the department’s executive deputy secretary, John Hines. The memos are raising concerns that the state’s environmental inspectors can no longer act independently and that regulations could be overridden by the political whims of the state’s new governor, Tom Corbett.

When I read about stories like these, it makes me hopeful that people will eventually realize and remember what colossal assholes Republicans are once they're in power. Certainly voters in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida are starting to get that memo. There's literally no depths to which they won't sink. With the modern Republican party, we are no longer talking about an opposition movement that seeks a more "common sense" version of Democratic policies, no matter how hard they try to market their ideals as such. This current group has moved the party so far to the extreme right that many of their policies have the effect of dismantling swaths of society. They want to codify pervasive income inequality as a central tenet of American society, kick the poor and elderly off of Medicaid and Medicare, prohibit your right to unionize, deny the existence of and do nothing about climate change, dictate to women what they can and can not do with their bodies, substitute religion for science, and turn a blind eye to private enterprise and allow them to do whatever they want because the resultant free market trickle down will always outweigh the societal or environmental cost, even if it means poisoning your water and destroying our oceans. And they are one of our two national political parties.

Realizing this is the start. Remembering it at the ballot box is what really matters, but I am hopeful that the current bunch of teatards and wingnut governors and state legislatures will actually prove to be a Democratic net benefit going into 2012.