Water and Power - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 245

In other places, such as Silt, Colorado, fracking for gas has led to even more serious
health problems for people, such as Laura Amos , who developed an adrenal-gland tu-
mor after her water was tainted by hydrofracking for gas. * Colorado gas-ield workers
believe that the fluids used in fracking have caused cancer, though it is difficult to prove.
Understanding the full extent of the problem has been made difficult by the secretive
nature of the gas industry, and its ability to convince people such as Amos to sign
nondisclosure agreements , as she did with Encana, the large Canadian gas company
that drilled a well less than a thousand feet from her home.
Gas companies counter that such horror stories are simply not true or are not their
fault. “In sixty years of hydraulic fracturing across the country, more than a million
wells have been fracked, including fourteen thousand in New York,” maintained Jim
Smith , spokesman for the Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York. The pro-
cess “has never harmed a drop of drinking water.”
BP, the largest producer of natural gas in the United States , with over fifteen thou-
sand natural gas wells, has been expanding through acquisitions, and predicts “ a revolu-
tion in the gas ields of North America . ” But just as the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of
Mexico—which revealed shortcuts to save time and money, aided by regulators' lack of
oversight—brought new scrutiny of deepwater oil exploration, so have a series of ac-
cidents in natural gas fields brought attention to the tremendous potential, and risks,
of hydrofracking—including a blowout at a Pennsylvania gas well in June 2010 that
sprayed gas and wastewater for sixteen hours .
According to Pennsylvania regulators, in Dimock, Cabot Oil and Gas failed to prop-
erly cement well casings, which can allow methane and other chemicals to seep out.
When gas gets trapped in the headspaces of wells, it can explode. Several wells in
Dimock have exploded or been tainted by gas; a house near Cleveland, Ohio, exploded
in 2007 when gas infiltrated its water well; and dozens of wells in Colorado were con-
taminated by methane in 2008. Gas industry representatives point out that methane can
be naturally occurring and doesn't always originate from gas wells. With over 450,000
gas wells in the United States, the industry says, incidents of contamination are statistic-
ally meaningless. But, as scientists study hydrofracking more closely, and Congress and
states weigh tougher environmental oversight of gas drilling, the industry's arguments
are being challenged.
• • •
Natural gas accounts for about a quarter of all energy used in the United States, a per-
centage that has steadily grown. From 1996 to 2006, shale-gas production grew from