When major environmental accidents occur, such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska or the BP oil rig spill in the Caribbean, they make you think. You wonder what the impact will be and how the problems will be resolved. When an environmental accident occurs on your own turf – in this case the broken oil pipeline under the Yellowstone River at Laurel, Montana – you think a little harder.
As you may know, the Shields Valley area of Park County has been surveyed, leased and explored for the presence of natural gas in deep layers of shale. Depending on economic factors, it is possible within a few years this area will become an industrial site for drilling hundreds or thousands of wells over 5,000 feet deep using a drilling technique called unconventional horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or just ‘fracking’ for short. The process injects into the shale layer millions of gallons of water per well, laced with a chemical mix called fracking fluid that enhances the drilling, fracturing and extraction. Many of the chemicals in the fluid are toxic. Eventually most of the contaminated water is pumped back to the surface along with the natural gas, and must be processed, stored, recycled or cleaned.
All of this requires infrastructure. Along with the drilling there will be roads to transport equipment and tens of thousands of truckloads of water (clean and contaminated), pipelines for the natural gas, storage tanks for gas and water (or pits for water) and pumping facilities. In all of this there is environmental risk to the water, air and land, and as we have seen, accidents happen.
Some accidents are dramatic, like the 42,000 gallons of oil spilled into the Yellowstone River. Other accidents, like the leakage of methane from a cracked gas well casing deep underground, may take years or even decades to become noticeable in surface water. However, the point is we can do something about accidents. For one thing, a lot of accidents don’t have to happen. For another, we can be ready to deal with accidents. In Park County we are lucky; we can be proactive about environmental accidents and the economic and social impact of a large-scale natural gas operation.
That’s a big motivation for the Park County Environmental Council (PCEC), in fact, it’s our top priority. Thinking about the potential environmental problems for the county has led us to join and help form the Park County Natural Gas Committee (PCNGC), a group of regional organizations, land-owners from the Shields Valley, experts and concerned citizens that will act as a clearing house and educational provider for information about natural gas extraction in our area.
The committee will be proactive:
First and foremost, it is imperative to have environmental information as a baseline of conditions before significant drilling begins. This means having water (and possibly soil and air) samples collected and analyzed in a systematic and scientifically rigorous manner by impeccably credentialed professionals. This, of course, will cost money. One of the immediate tasks of the PCNGC will be to locate and apply for funding to support a sampling project.
Because environmental accidents associated with the fracking process for natural gas come in many shapes and sizes, it will be critical to develop criteria for evaluating the severity of accidents and other environmental impacts – establishing triggers that determine if and when action needs to be taken. What that ‘action’ should be depends, of course, on what happens; but the PCEC and the Gas Committee believe we need to establish in advance at least an outline of responsibility. For example this means looking for answers to questions such as: Who or what organizations are involved (city, county, state, or national) in the monitoring and evaluation of conditions? Who has the authority to take action? Where is the financial responsibility?
Obviously the best way to deal with accidents is to prevent them. It’s in everybody’s interest to implement what are called industry best management practices or BMPs, which are procedures and techniques that have proven to be both cost effective and that improve operational safety. For example, in the case of contaminated water from wells that is pumped back to the surface, it is a best practice to store the fluid in metal tanks (not open pits) and to recycle as much of the fluid as possible.
The PCNGC hopes to be instrumental in arranging the negotiations that lead to defining BMPs for natural gas extraction in Park County and for development of an outline of responsibility. It’s obvious that there are many interests involved and that there are potentially many contentious issues. Natural gas extraction has many positive economic aspects for the county, state and nation. It also entails some risks that could have significant economic impact. PCEC would like to see the risks and rewards put into balance ahead of the events on the ground, so that what happens isn’t purely a matter of accident.
