EPA caught hiding dangers of horizontal hydraulic hydrofracking

The NY Times has revealed that the Environmental Protection Agency has succumbed to political pressure from the oil and gas industry, hid study results, narrowed the focus of its studies and consequently threatened the drinking water of millions of people.

When Congress considered in the 1980s whether to regulate more closely the handling of oil and gas drilling wastes, it turned to the Environmental Protection Agency to research the matter. EPA researchers concluded that some of the drillers’ waste was hazardous and should be tightly controlled.

But that’s not what Congress heard. Some recommendations regarding oil and gas waste were eliminated in the final report handed to lawmakers in 1987.

“It was like the science didn’t matter,” study author Carla Greathouse said in an interview. “The industry was going to get what it wanted, and we were not supposed to stand in the way.”

She said EPA officials told her that her findings were altered because of pressure from the White House Office of Legal Counsel under President Ronald Reagan. An EPA spokesman declined to comment.

Ms. Greathouse’s experience was not an isolated case. More than a quarter-century of efforts by some lawmakers and regulators to force the federal government to police the industry better have been thwarted, as EPA studies have been repeatedly narrowed in scope, and important findings have been removed.

For example, the agency last year had planned to call for a moratorium on the gas-drilling technique known as hydrofracking in the New York City watershed, internal documents show, but the advice was removed from the publicly released letter sent to New York.

Democracy Now talks with Walter Hang of Toxics Targeting

Efforts by lawmakers and regulators to force the federal government to better police the natural gas drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” have been thwarted for the past 25 years, according to an expose in the New York Times. Studies by scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on fracking have been repeatedly narrowed in scope by superiors and important findings have been removed under pressure from the industry. The news comes as the EPA is conducting a broad study of the risks of natural gas drilling with preliminary results scheduled to be delivered next year. Joining us is Walter Hang, president of Toxics Targeting, a firm that tracks environmental spills and releases across the country based in Ithaca, New York, where fracking is currently taking place.

Much of the problem with hydrofracking and oil drilling seems to lie with the reliance and implementation of cement casings to seal the wells. Either the technology is not sound or cost saving measures have rendered the practice useless.

BP had an oil blowout in Azerbaijan in 2008
In 2008, according to a memo leaked to WikiLeaks, BP suffered a massive gas blowout in Azerbaijan that was similar to the 2010 leak in the Gulf of Mexico. The leak didn’t get much attention in the media at the time, but it was similar to the Gulf of Mexico leak. Both were blowouts — which is what happens when improperly pressurized gas overtakes the drilling mud used during production and causes havoc at the drilling platform — and that both were blamed by BP executives on a “bad cement job,” referring to the special cement used to seal the space between the drill bore and the well’s pipe casing.

The cable further revealed that the president of Azerbaijan believed that BP had exploited his country during a gas shortage in December 2006, when the company asked for an extension of a lucrative contract in exchange for supplying gasoline to the market.

The Azerbaijan blowout endangered the lives of the 212 workers on the platform (who were evacuated) and shut down two large fields, slashing production by at least 500,000 barrels a day for months.

The environmental contamination and human health risk associated with the extraction of natural gas using horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” was little known across the United States for years, until a documentary film brought the issue to the national stage. Josh Fox directed the film Gasland, which chronicles the devastation affecting communities where fracking is taking place, and the influence of the natural gas industry over regulation of the techniques and chemicals used in the process. The industry aggressively attacked the film, especially when it was nominated for an Academy Award this year.