Filmmaker is unwitting star of House shale-gas hearing

On 1 February US Capitol Police arrested Josh Fox, director of the controversial documentary Gasland , and escorted him from a hearing of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Fox had been recording the hearing, which concerned possible contamination of groundwater in Wyoming as the result of shale-gas drilling. When Representative Andy Harris (R-MD), chairman of the subcommittee on energy and environment, ordered Fox to remove his camera, Fox refused.

In a statement, Harris said that Fox was not an accredited member of the House of Representatives media, as required by a committee rule. A motion by Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) to allow Fox to proceed despite the rule was defeated along party lines.

Harris and other panel Republicans sharply criticized the Environmental Protection Agency’s draft finding that the hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” of a shale-gas well in Pavillion, Wyoming, had contaminated the region’s aquifer. Released in December, the EPA’s finding marked the first time that fracking has been linked by a regulatory entity to a specific instance of groundwater contamination.

In the fracking process, millions of gallons of water, sand, and an assortment of chemicals are pumped under high pressure through horizontally drilled wells to fracture shale formations that contain natural gas. The fractures allow the gas to seep out into the well and flow to the surface. The shale formations are located deep below aquifers, and in most places they are separated by thousands of feet of impermeable rock. (See Physics Today, July 2011, page 23 .)

Fracking in Wyoming

In the Wyoming case, however, fracturing is taking place “in and below the drinking water aquifer and in close proximity to drinking water wells,” said Jim Martin, the EPA’s Region 8 administrator. There, the agency found that “groundwater in the aquifer contains compounds likely associated with gas production practices, including hydraulic fracturing,” he said. “We make clear that the causal link to hydraulic fracturing has not been demonstrated conclusively, and that our analysis is limited to the particular geologic conditions in the Pavillion gas field and should not be assumed to apply to fracturing in other geologic settings,” Martin stressed.

The EPA began looking into the case three years ago in response to residents’ complaints about objectionable taste and odors from well water. Martin said that the EPA’s conclusions were drawn from four separate rounds of sampling that occurred from March 2009 to April 2011, and he noted that the agency had “gone to great lengths” to consult the state, Indian tribes, the drilling company Encana , and the public. Before becoming final, the EPA’s findings will undergo review by an independent scientific panel.

But Tom Doll, chairman of the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission , the state’s regulatory agency, charged that the EPA had issued its report with “incomplete data and technically inadequate conclusions.” Wyoming wasn’t provided an opportunity to verify the data, Doll complained.

Kathleen Sgamma, vice president of government and public affairs for the oil and gas producer industry group Western Energy Alliance , called for more oversight of EPA science. She decried the “inherent conflict between EPA’s regulatory and compliance roles and its ability to conduct objective science.”

In his opening statement, Harris accused the EPA of “substituting outcome-driven science for rigorous objective science” and said that the agency’s findings were an “example of politics trumping policy and advocacy trumping science.” He complained that although the draft report is subject to revision, “the day after the draft report was released, the governor of Delaware announced that it was the validation for his decision to vote against development of natural gas in Delaware River Basin.”

Delaware has no shale-gas formations, but it is located downstream from Pennsylvania, where thousands of shale-gas wells have been drilled, and from New York, where development is expected to commence soon. A spokesman said that Delaware Governor Jack Markell had informed his counterparts in neighboring states of his position on gas development in the Delaware River Basin in November, weeks before the EPA study was released.