We Need Information

A Temple prof's campaign to alert city officials to the dangers of Shale drilling.

by Isaiah Thompson

Jessica Kourkounis HAIL, SCIENCE: Temple professor Michael Boufadel says little research has been done on the environmental impacts of Marcellus Shale drilling.

[ gas problems ]

A friend who lives in Pittsburgh has a favorite joke: "Where I live, in Pennsylvania ..." he says; or "We have that in Pennsylvania, too." Because while Philly is in Pennsylvania, it is not always of Pennsylvania — at least when it comes to some things: politics, guns, Confederate flags — and natural gas.

By a fluke of geography, most of southeastern Pennsylvania lies outside of the area defined by an underground geologic formation known as the Marcellus Shale, which contains a fantastic amount of natural gas — perhaps enough to significantly change the way America gets energy for decades. It's only relatively recently that the technology to extract that gas has become widely available: a technique called hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," in which water containing toxic and carcinogenic materials is injected thousands of feet below the water table to release trapped gas.

Pennsylvania has suddenly become the epicenter of a massive gold rush — or, rather, gas rush — as companies have raced to lease private and public land for drilling.

And with that drilling have come problems. There was the migration of methane gas into the drinking wells of residents of Dimock, Pa. There are the frequent spills of toxic fracking fluids — more than a hundred in the last year and a half. There was the recent explosion of a well in Clearfield County, which spewed toxic water for hours.

But even as the Marcellus Shale shapes up to be one of the most significant economic and environmental forces in Pennsylvania, now and for decades to come, there has been surprisingly little independent research into what gas drilling means for Philadelphia — and city officials have shown relatively little interest.

What Philadelphia needs is information — so says chemical hydrologist and Temple professor Michel Boufadel, who, with mild, scientific determination, has begun his own campaign to convince the city that what the state will not do for Philly, Philly must do for itself. In short, he thinks Philadelphia — whose water supply, after all, depends upon the very watersheds energy companies seek for gas drilling— should play a leading role in subjecting that drilling to rigorous scientific examination.

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Boufadel is no stranger to toxins. Born in Lebanon, he came to the United States in 1990, just a year after the massive Exxon Valdez spill, to pursue doctoral work on oil spills and the ways that moving water interacts with pollutants. He's become an expert: When scientists discovered a few years ago that the Exxon Valdez oil was still resurfacing, the federal government hired Boufadel to help explain why. When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April, Boufadel — who now chairs Temple's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and heads its Center for Natural Resources Development and Protection — was among the experts hired by federal authorities to assist.

It was less than a year ago, he says, that he first became aware of the scale and potential risk of Pennsylvania's burgeoning fracking industry. "And the more I read, the more I realized there's not much done in terms of scientific, objective studies on this," Boufadel recalls.

Indeed, while the natural gas industry has exploded in Pennsylvania in recent years — from zero Marcellus Shale wells in 2004 to some 1,700 drilled and another 2,300 permitted today — virtually no systemic studies have been conducted on fracking's potential environmental impacts. "We do not have a law that requires or authorizes an environmental impact study," acknowledges Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) Secretary John Hanger.

As the state's chief environmental regulator, Hanger has advocated for changes in other laws governing drilling — a tax on gas production, and a mandate for buffers around sensitive streams, for instance. But Hanger does not think an impact study is necessary. "Studies are nice, but even better is real-world experience," he says.

For Boufadel, such reasoning is backward: Without studies, how can we know what problems might surface?

He ticks off a few possibilities: On-site compressors release all sorts of air pollution, he says. In fact, one study suggests that natural gas drilling near Dallas had doubled the region's air pollution. Then there are the spills: Boufadel's models show that spilled fracking wastewater — because it is salty and heavy — sinks as it moves away from the source of the spill, perhaps too deep for DEP monitors to pick it up.

Nonetheless, Boufadel warns, it will eventually resurface. The word "eventually" is key: Even if the toxins injected into the ground during fracking haven't yet reached groundwater, how, without an independent study, can the public be assured that they never will?

"The idea of assuming that whatever they inject would never come up is really not scientific," says Boufadel. "Everything that exists in the literature tells us that's not the case — that you cannot ensure it will not come up."

The Environmental Protection Agency is in the midst of a large-scale study of hydraulic fracturing, but it could take years, Boufadel says, and won't be the kind of localized study he says Philadelphia needs. Meanwhile, the state has shown no interest in hiring its own academics.

"We need many studies, not just one," says Boufadel. "There are many institutions of higher learning in the Commonwealth. The idea that you would not consult with them is, like, anti-science, I would say."

Seeing little interest from the state, Boufadel is hoping that Philadelphia will step up and, in its own interest, commission such a study, much like New York City did last fall, when it hired a consultant whose research convinced New York's environmental regulators to effectively block drilling, at least for now, in that city's watershed.

In March, City Council passed a resolution asking the Delaware River Basin Commission not to approve drilling applications until such a study is done. (The commission has temporarily halted all drilling in the Delaware River basin while it develops new regulations.) Councilman Curtis Jones Jr. plans to hold hearings on the possible impacts to Philadelphia of fracking this fall, and has invited experts, including Boufadel, to testify.

Of course, resolutions are free, while studies cost money. Boufadel estimates such a study would cost between $250,000 and $500,000 — not exactly chump change, but considerably less than, say, the $8 million the Philadelphia Eagles owed the city in skybox revenue as of 2009.

Boufadel wouldn't mind getting the research money himself — but denies that he or any other academic would be in it for the money. He cites a different motive: "I live here, too — and I have children."

(isaiah.thompson@citypaper.net)