Another Malfunctioning Pennsylvania Well

Last night an equipment failure happened during well-completion activities on the Yarasavage 1H northwest of Tunkhannock, PA. The well, drilled into Marcellus shale well, is owned by Carrizo Oil & Gas. An equipment failure led to release of completion fluids – at an initial rate of 800 gal/minute. About 5,400 barrels were captured in tanks, and other fluid running off the pad was captured by a catch basin set up near the road.

The waste fluid leak was only part of the problem; natural gas also leaked from the well. So last night officials asked four families living within 1500 feet of the well site to evacuate. Three more families voluntarily evacuated to a local hotel.

By this afternoon well crews managed to cap the malfunctioning well, and residents were allowed to return home. State Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) crews told the press that they did a “sweep” of a mile-and-a-half wide circle around the well to detect volatile organic chemicals and/or methane in the air. They found none. They also reported that they tested for radiation but didn’t find any.

Fracking the Farm Part 3: Impacts on Crops

What happens when gas drilling and organic agriculture collide? This series considers some of the issues. Posts are drawn from a 3-part series originally published in New York Organic News (NOFA-NY) in 2012. Research was supported with a grant from SEJ's Fund for Environmental Journalism.

Bradford County, PA

Healthy soil is vital for organic farming, but drilling and related activities can compromise soil health. Four years ago a nursery owner in Texas lost 500 oak seedlings when a pipeline used to transfer brine to an underground injection well leaked. Brine is the salty well waste fluid that flows out of shale after drilling. But there’s more than salt in brine; there’s also benzene, heavy metals and radioactive compounds. XTO Energy, the company responsible for the leak, ended up trucking more than 3,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil to a regulated landfill.

The shale oil rush in North Dakota has brought soil trouble to farmers, too. Like Marcellus, the Bakken shale must be fracked to release the hydrocarbons. Like shale gas wells, fracked oil shale wells produce briney waste fluids that must be hauled to underground injection wells. But recent data shows that a lot of that waste never makes it to regulated disposal sites – it is spilled or dumped along the way. Last year there were 1,000 “accidental releases” of waste fluids and additional unreported releases along the roads. These spills have sterilized acres of farmland. One spill alone covered 24 acres with 2 million gallons of brine. A year after remediation efforts, nothing grows on that land. Not even weeds.

Dimock, PA, famous for water contamination is now facing soil contamination. According to the July 7 Pennsylvania Bulletin, Cabot Oil and Gas will begin remediation efforts at one of their well sites. A study found the soil to be “impacted by VOCs (volatile organic chemicals), SVOCs (semi-volatile organic chemicals), metals, and ethylene glycol due to a release from the reserve pit and a release from the mud shelf.”

Leaking pipelines can impact crops, too. Methane and other hydrocarbons leaking into soil displace air, thus depleting the oxygen. That in turn can change soil pH, and influence the microbial habitat. The result is severe retardation of crop growth, and sometimes early senescence or death.

Air quality is becoming an issue in the gas fields. Rural areas of Wyoming and Utah have measured ozone levels as high as 125 to 140 parts per billion (ppb) – much higher than EPA’s standard of 75 ppb and exceeding the smog levels in Los Angeles. Down in the Texas Barnett shale ozone levels reach 135 ppb, and in Fort Worth gas drilling produces as much ground-level ozone as all the cars and trucks in the city.

Though we don’t have shale gas drilling, NY is not immune. Chautauqua County, home to about 6,000 gas wells, boasts the second highest ozone level in the state. Where is all this ozone coming from? Emissions from drilling pads, truck traffic servicing those pads, and the compressors and other equipment related to drilling. The Clean Air Act regulates ozone, but the oil and gas industry enjoys exemption from those regulations.

Up in the atmosphere ozone is beneficial, protecting the earth from harmful ultraviolet rays. But at ground level it’s a major pollutant, causing more damage to crops than all other air pollutants combined. Each year it’s responsible for an estimated $500 million reduction in crop yields – and that’s just in the United States.

Ozone is created by chemical reactions between nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds (VOC) in the presence of sunlight. It enters leaves through stomata during normal gas exchange, like oxygen, but is more reactive. It can cause spotting and bleaching of leaves, affecting plant growth, flowering, fruiting and yield. Ozone damage can make some crops unmarketable, as in the case of spotting on spinach leaves.

Grapes are particularly sensitive to ozone, says Art Hunt, owner of Hunt Country Vineyards on the north western shore of Keuka Lake. Before the Clean Air Act went into effect, air pollution caused spots on his leaves. That, in turn, affected vine growth, fruit ripening and yield. Large scale industrialized drilling, he says, could roll back the gains made from clean air regulations.

Ozone can also make crops more susceptible to pathogens and pests and, in the case of clover and other crops, retard root growth.  For farmers, high ozone levels may mean lower nutritive value of their forage crops. It may alter how well herbicides work, promote the growth of perennial weeds and create opportunities for invasive species to move in.

Crops sensitive to ozone:

beans (string and snap),

beets

carrots

corn,

grapes (wine and juice)

peas

pinto beans

melons (cantaloupes and musk melons)

peaches

potatoes

squash

strawberries

 tomatoes

turnips

watermelon

Ozone also affects grains, including wheat and rice, as well as tobacco, soybeans, alfalfa, sorghum and cotton.

Fracking the Farm Part 2: Losing Dairy to Drilling

What happens when gas drilling and organic agriculture collide? This series considers some of the issues. Posts are drawn from a 3-part series originally published in New York Organic News (NOFA-NY) in 2012. Research was supported with a grant from SEJ's Fund for Environmental Journalism.

When Carol French signed a gas lease she never dreamed that half a dozen years later she’d be warning other farmers to think twice. French, a dairy farmer in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, lives in the midst of the drill zone. The last time she counted, there were nine active wells located within a mile of her farm.

photo by Frank Finan

Carolyn Knapp, an organic dairy farmer, lives just a couple miles away. Six years ago she was concerned that signing a lease might affect her organic status. It didn’t. Now, with a handful of wells drilled nearby, she worries about other ways that gas drilling and exploration could impact her operation.

The problem: gas leases do not protect farmland. Once those leases are signed, say Knapp and French, farmers lose control over their land. Gas companies decide where to place access roads, well pads, pipelines and compressors – and that can interrupt normal farming activities.

One of French’s neighbors ended up with a well pad sited behind his barn, effectively cutting off easy access to the fields and pasture. The farmer is earning royalties, French said – about $400/month. But he sold his cows because the drilling operations made it too hard to keep on farming. Knapp, who integrates intensive grazing into her dairy operation, said drillers planned to dig a 20-acre water impoundment right in the middle of her rotational grazing system.

Agricultural land is hit particularly hard; research shows that in the Marcellus, farmland makes up about 62 percent of the acreage affected by drilling. And when Penn State professor Tim Kelsey surveyed Bradford and Tioga counties in PA, his data showed that the number of wells in an area has an impact on farming. Areas with 150 or more gas wells lost 19 percent of their dairy herd; areas with no wells experienced only a 1 percent loss.

He doesn’t have an exact number, but Kelsey says there is no doubt that dairy farmers are quitting because of drilling. Even if their own farms are not impacted, farmers face other challenges. Landowners who used to lease fields to farmers are now renting their land for drilling-related uses such as equipment storage and water withdrawal sites. Large impoundments take land out of production, and crop yields are down in reclaimed pipeline right-of-ways. Add to that the scarcity of sawdust for bedding (it’s mixed with drill cuttings before they’re trucked to landfills) and the recent addition of an 8-cent-per- hundredweight surcharge for hauling milk (gas companies pay higher wages for those with CDL licenses) and it’s clear that the Marcellus boom is a bust for some farmers.

Reuse Fracking Wastewater to Irrigate Crops?

This past Thursday, Commissioner Vik Rao - a member of North Carolina's Mining and Energy Commission, proposed that fracking wastewater could be used to irrigate crops. Of course, he is the former chief tech officer of Halliburton, and he did mention something about sending the fracking waste through a treatment plant it could be useable. Barring irrigation, he posited that, perhaps, the saline fluid could be used to water sheep.

Using fields where we grow food as toxic - or "just" industrial - waste dumps just doesn't seem like a good idea. And it hasn't worked out in other places where waste has been land-farmed due to lack of regulatory oversight and the temptation to just dump stuff without ensuring that it has been cleaned up to proper levels. 

Fracking the Farm Part 1: Shale Gas Drilling Divides PA Organic Community

What happens when gas drilling and organic agriculture collide? This series considers some of the issues. Posts are drawn from a 3-part series originally published in New York Organic News (NOFA-NY) in 2012. Research was supported with a grant from SEJ's Fund for Environmental Journalism.

In June 2012, the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA) asked the governor and legislature of the Commonwealth to place a moratorium on unconventional gas extraction. Like NOFA-NY, they asked that hydrofracking be halted until studies could determine that the industrialized drilling practice will not harm farms, the food they produce and the people who eat that food.

Both NOFA-NY and PASA call for the federal government hold the oil and gas industry to the same environmental regulations as other industries – currently drillers are exempted from the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Safe Drinking Water Act. Both organizations call for drillers to report publicly what chemicals they are using, and to be held accountable for negative impacts.

As far as certification goes, NOFA-NY allows organic farmers to lease their land for drilling – as long as they provide a “safe” buffering distance between drilling activity and their organic fields.  But how close is too close when it comes to growing food near a gas well?

For Adron, that distance ended up being a quarter of a mile. He and his wife leased land just south of Dimock, PA, where they grew organic vegetables for a CSA, farmers market and local restaurant. Just one month after they moved in, a well was drilled half a mile away. A year later another well was drilled, this one a quarter mile away and located uphill from the farm. The family experienced headaches, burning eyes, and hives. It often smelled like a mix of bleach and diesel, said Adron. But he hoped those problems would disappear once the drilling ended.

Then, in the summer of 2011 his well water changed color. The family used spring water to drink and cook, but they depended on the well for irrigation and washing the produce. “I never sold anything I didn’t eat myself,” he said. “But there’s an emotional weight of trying to grow pure food and fearing that it might be contaminated.” By the time their well cleared up, they had decided to leave PA.

 “We want to farm where we don’t have to wonder about the safety of our water,” Adron said.

Shale gas drilling is deeply dividing the farming community in Pennsylvania and surrounding states, and those divisions are showing up in the organic community as well. Pittsburgh-based journalist and filmmaker Kirsi Jansa has been documenting “Gas Rush Stories”, and her latest installment (below)  focuses on the uncertainties and risks facing Pennsylvania’s organic farming community.

Gas Rush Stories: Organic Farmers divided about Fracking