Environmental Worries

Natural gas burns clean, but getting it out of the ground is hardly a pristine operation. When the gas is trapped in coal seams, as with coal bed methane, extraction involves fracturing the seam by injecting fluids under high pressure, and then pumping out huge quantities of water, which is necessary to release the gas, as well as pumping out the gas itself.

Depending on the gas field and its particular geological features, one well could produce from five to 20 gallons of water per minute, according to a fact sheet on the process prepared by researchers at Montana State University at Bozeman and the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology. At 12 gallons per minute, that's 17,280 gallons of water per day, the researchers noted. That's about the volume of a 16-by-32-foot swimming pool.

In the drought-plagued West, that might sound like a good thing, and in some cases it is. In many places, the water can be used for livestock watering. But the quality can vary tremendously from well to well, even in the same region. The Powder River Basin in southern Montana and northeastern Wyoming is a case in point, says the Bureau of Land Management's Alan Rabinoff. "The city of Gillette is thinking of supplementing its water supply with coal-bed-produced water, but in other parts of the Powder River Basin, it's of a much lower quality, so water handling becomes an issue," he says.

Rabinoff, the Wyoming deputy state director for minerals and lands, says that elsewhere in the state, oil and gas development produces water of such low quality that it has to be re-injected into different aquifers so it isn't released on the surface.

Concerns about water aren't limited to the quality of what's generated in the production process. Because groundwater flows through coal seams, there is potential that gas field development will contaminate or deplete wells and aquifers used for drinking water and irrigation.

In southern Wyoming, there's growing concern among some ranchers and landowners about an increase in places where methane is found bubbling to the surface. Mud pots, as they are called, aren't unusual in some places-they're found throughout Yellowstone National Park in northwestern Wyoming, for example. But their increase has some people drawing a link to methane gas production.

"I've gone out and toured some of those sites," says Steve Furtney, a policy adviser to Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal. "Most of those have been around for some time, although there are some that are relatively new."

"It doesn't appear, at least at this stage to our experts in the Department of Environmental Quality, to be attributable to the coal bed methane activity. It's not to say that view might not change, but that technical experts have not made that conclusion. Drought could be a factor," he says.

The Western Governors Association, which supports coal bed methane production, issued a best management practices guide in hopes that "many issues might be alleviated through sharing of information."

But information sharing won't be enough to ensure that the unprecedented scale of gas production facing the West won't have serious environmental consequences. Perhaps of greatest concern to environmentalists is that the oil and gas industry is exempt from major provisions in the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and other laws enacted in recent years to protect Americans from the hazardous effects of industrial byproducts. A study last fall by the Natural Resources Defense Council, "Drilling Down: Protecting Western Communities From the Health and Environmental Effects of Oil and Gas Production," catalogs the various legal exemptions unique to the energy industry.

"In addition, the oil and gas industry is not covered by the public right-to-know provisions under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, meaning that companies can withhold information needed to make informed decisions about protecting the environment and human health," the study found.

As a result of these exemptions, the Natural Resources Defense Council found that people and animals living near the several hundred thousand wells throughout the West are vulnerable to chemical poisoning. "Many people who live near oil and gas operations experience symptoms resembling those that may be caused by the toxic substances found in oil and gas or the chemical additives used to produce them. The negative health effects associated with these substances range from eye and skin irritation to respiratory illness such as emphysema, thyroid disorders, tumors and birth defects," the study says.

The report chronicles nearly a dozen cases in which individuals and families attribute serious health problems and environmental damage to energy production occurring on their property or nearby. While no direct cause-and-effect relationship has been proved between possible toxic exposure and the health problems reported, researchers say, "chemical poisoning is notorious for resulting in nonspecific signs of symptoms that resemble common diseases, and immediate symptoms can be nonexistent or mild despite the risk of long-term negative health effects."