hydro-fracking...more people v. profits

Eagle Ford Shale


The Next Petro Boom

Patricia Schultz-Ormond represents one of two companies working a room full of potential clients on a recent weekday evening. If her glowing review inflamed any cynical nerves they were quickly soothed by gnawing self-interest. This group is waiting to hear what their land is worth to the increasingly frequent visitors prowling courthouse record rooms and county roads, contracts in hand, sniffing out easy access to the oil- and gas-bearing Eagle Ford Shale thousands of feet below.

For more than a year, the shale formation that starts in East Texas and sweeps southwest to the U.S.-Mexico border in Maverick County has been touted as the next big play on natural gas in the country. So far, the field has been the territory of a range of light- to middleweight companies, but that’s quickly changing. And White House efforts to implement a moratorium on offshore drilling in response to the Gulf disaster is likely to quicken the rush.

“You are sitting on one of the greatest things to happen to South Texas,” Schultz-Ormond tells the crowd. She compares the rush on the Eagle Ford to the last wave of oil development that hit these parts in the 1980s, when everyone in Wilson County either had a well on their land, knew a neighbor with a well, or “smelled it going down the road.”

It all comes down to the fact that fracking involves a lot of water. There's the at least 11.5 million liters involved in fracking a well in the first place. There's the brine and other fluids that can come to the surface with the natural gas. And there's the problem of what to do with all that waste fluid at the end of the day.

In Dimock's case, Houston-based Cabot Oil and Gas has spilled fracturing fluid, diesel and other fluids, according to Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection. And elsewhere in the state fracturing fluid contamination has been detected in the Monongahela River, which is a source of drinking water. In more common practice, companies dump used fracking fluid back beneath the surface, usually injecting it into other formations beneath the shale. For example, in the case of the Barnett Shale, disposal wells send that water into the deeper Ellenburger Formation.

But there's also the problem of what's actually in the fracking fluid. EPA tests in Wyoming have found suspected fracking fluid chemicals in drinking water wells, and a study by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation identified 260 chemicals used in the process—a review undertaken as the state decides whether to allow such drilling on lands comprising the watershed providing New York City with its drinking water. And Dow Chemical notes that it sells biocides—antimicrobial poisons—to be included in the mix. But companies zealously guard the secret of what exactly makes up their individual "special sauce." It is one of the ways the companies distinguish themselves.