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October 7th, 2014
This past Friday, state commerce officials opened bids to allow natural gas drilling just one mile underneath the northern section of the Ohio River. The bids allow companies to use hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to stimulate the wells, posing a significant risk to the Ohio Valley's primary water supply. Not only that, but there is a fault line located amidst the proposed Ohio River drilling site. Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey have directly linked an increase in earthquakes to fracking and these "fracquakes" have already happened in our neck of the woods. Officials say other West Virginia rivers are next, and wildlife preserves are on the table for drilling too.
Fracking poses a significant risk to water supplies because of the carcinogenic chemicals used in the process, and the large amount of contaminated wastewater it produces. Somewhere between 20 to 40 percent of the water used for hydrofracking a well returns to the surface as wastewater. This wastewater not only contains the toxic and hazardous chemicals of the fracking fluid itself, but also picks up contaminants from deep within the earth, most notably heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, salty brine and radioactive materials. The carcinogenic chemicals, radionuclides and other toxic contaminants in fracking wastewater cannot be completely filtered by our treatment plants to allow for safe drinking water. Few if any plants in North America currently have the technology to treat this toxic cocktail and insufficient or incomplete treatment of wastewater has resulted in water being released into streams, rivers and lakes that contain unsafe levels of these contaminants. Once that water is poisoned, it cannot again be made potable.
West Virginia's track record on environmental regulation enforcement offers little confidence that this drilling effort can be accomplished without significant risk to our critical infrastructure. The annual, multimillion dollar lobbying effort from energy corporations to weaken regulation of the energy industry at every turn has practically turned West Virginia's regulatory system into a paper tiger. At least Ohio has a system to detect possible contaminants in the river and its tributaries before they hit public water supplies. Still, Ohio's environmental agency urges caution at every turn when it comes to fracking. Chris Abbruzzese, Ohio Environmental Protection Agency spokesman, recently offered that "Even with these safeguards in place, it is important that any industry who is conducting activities near critical surface water resources carefully follow all applicable rules and regulations and make sure best management practices are implemented to ensure those assets are protected." West Virginia has no such critical detection system and our, and the federal government's, "slap-on-the-wrist" style of regulatory enforcement offers no deterrent. Freedom Industries, the company responsible for poisoning the water supply for 16 percent of West Virginia's population, was fined $11,000. I can only imagine how difficult a check that was for Freedom Industries' President to write from his $1.2 million mansion on Marco Island, Florida - incidentally a state with no personal income tax.
Nine citizen and environmental groups have urged Governor Earl Ray Tomblin to reconsider his plans, advising that "the well-documented deficient enforcement capability of the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection's Office of Oil and Gas has been on public display for years." The groups have asked Governor Tomblin, "How are we ever to believe that the state has the political will, technical capability and community commitment to guarantee that adequate controls, timely supervision and, when needed, ruthless enforcement would occur on well pads that close to the Ohio River?" Whether their plea falls on deaf ears remains to be seen, but for now it appears as though West Virginia is committed to literally spoiling heaven and earth for a few years of income that, although substantial in the relative short-term, pales in comparison to the long-term environmental destruction that stands to befall the Valley given our State's current approach to regulatory enforcement.
Between this latest development and the prior, rubber-stamping of the Green Hunter fracking fluid storage facility, the stage is set in the Ohio Valley for the same type of environmental disaster that befell the Charleston community last year (when 10,000 gallons of a coal washing chemical, MCHM, poisoned the Kanawha River and changed the lives of 300,000 people) only on an exponentially larger scale. The Ohio River supplies drinking water to more than 3 million people! Very soon we will be surrounding it with millions of gallons of carcinogenic, mutagenic, radioactive lethal wastewater. Chris Regan recently wrote about the culture of "the least we can get away with" that pervades our corporate society. As the citizens of Charleston witnessed first-hand last January, it only takes a couple of key people with this attitude to wreak havoc on an entire community when the instruments of environmental destruction are placed on your doorstep.
