Risk Assessment: The Basis of the Debates about Fracking, Injection Wells, and Most Debates about Environmental Impact and Policy

Risk Assessment: The Basis of the Debates about Fracking, Injection Wells, and Most Debates about Environmental Impact and Policy

Risk assessment can be generally defined as “the process of characterizing the potentially adverse consequences of human exposure to an environmental hazard.” Risk management can be defined as “the process by which policy choices are made once the risks have been determined.” A committee of the National Research Council in 1983 came up with a four-step process for risk assessment: hazard identification, dose-response assessment, exposure assessment, and risk characterization. Basically, one wants to know what is dangerous, how much of it is dangerous, what is the likelihood of exposure at those levels, and what should be concluded about those risks to inform policy. Putting fracking and injection wells into this four-step process involves first identifying the frac chemicals and produced water components and their dose-response. This process was difficult in the beginning, especially with the so-called proprietary chemicals. Now there is Frac Focus which characterizes most chemicals used at every well. There are also state laws requiring disclosure as well as Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) available to the state agencies for each well.  Some companies such as Range Resources disclose all frac chemicals used at each well and make this information available on their website. Typically there are only about a dozen chemicals used rather than the several hundred invoked by anti-fracking activists and many but not all are benign or already well established in the environment through other sources. It is now fairly well-known that surfactants, gelling agents, corrosion and scale inhibitors, and biocides are used in frac “make-up” water, the water that goes down the hole. Those chemicals, many in commonly used products, are diluted in millions of gallons of water so their concentrations are at very low levels. However, some are probable carcinogens, some are known endocrine disruptors, and some might cause nerve and reproductive damage at high doses. What is not generally known is that the initial flowback water is mostly the make-up water returning but after a while some of the brines inherent to the formation also flow back and these can be more toxic than the make-up water. Exposure assessment is probably the most relevant to the fracking debate. Without spills or leaks there is very little to no risk of exposure. While various scenarios have been put forth to try and explain how fracking chemicals or flowback water could end up in drinking water I am not aware of it ever having been found to occur in the absence of a spill or leak. Knowledge of deep subsurface geology and fluid flow dynamics, microseismic hydraulic fracture mapping, and utilizing many nearby wells as monitoring wells to nearby injection wells have been used to assess the extreme unlikelihood of exposure via drinking water, due to these processes. Thus, the risk characterization phase should be based on the dangers of spills and leaks and spill/leak prevention should be emphasized since the risks for exposure via other means is extremely low.

   

The benefits and dangers of fracking, wastewater injection, and the climate impact of natural gas have long been debated. The benefits are clear cut: reduced greenhouse gases when burned compared to coal, drastically reduced pollution compared to coal, and inexpensive, abundant, and accessible supply. Risk assessment is the methodology of determining the dangers. Much has been learned in the last few years. The dangers of induced seismicity, methane migration into groundwater, methane emissions from the natural gas supply chain, and spills, leaks, and accidents are now much better understood. All of these problems can be significantly reduced through vigilance, best practices, better regulations, and innovative technological mitigation techniques. Proper risk assessment is based on real data and science. Recent and ongoing collaborations between industry, academia, environmental scientists, and environmental groups have done much to aid risk assessment. 

The anti-fracking contingent is dependent on scenarios where the dangers of fracking outweigh the benefits. However, the latest science suggests that the dangers can be adequately managed. There are of course risks but the main ones are basically accidents, human error, and human deception. There is some risk for methane to migrate through drilling and inadequate casing cementing into groundwater. Methane is not considered toxic but its flammability can create explosion hazards. This has happened but is very rare. Induced seismicity from injection wells can be mitigated by reducing injection pressures and volumes and by discontinuing injection into reservoirs that have caused seismicity and those that have the potential for hydraulic contact with basement faults. Methane emissions at well sites and processing facilities can be captured. New equipment controls and new regulations are also decreasing methane emissions and VOC emissions from these sites. All of these improvements lower risks. If risks are evaluated based on studies and conclusions reached prior to improvements then they should be considered no longer valid. Risks are not fixed. In the case of fracking they have been reduced, through technology and best practices, through greater awareness and better detection criteria, and through better regulations. 

The climate impacts of natural gas are quite clear but have been brought into doubt by studies that suggested that methane leakage is significant enough to erase those benefits relative to coal. Further study has concluded that this is not the case and that the leakage is lower than those studies suggested. Methane leakage is low but it can be lower yet and the industry is involved with reducing the leakage even further. New regulations requiring further reductions are also in effect with further regulations on the horizon. When this occurs the climate impacts of gas will be reduced even further. Among those who oppose the industry there are those who seek it to be safer and more regulated and those who want it banned outright. If it can be made safer and if regulations are effective then the second group will have less leverage to make their case as time goes on. I think this has been the case in general with fracking but with increased media scrutiny and a very organized and capable opposition this has been obscured. 

A big factor in the environmental impacts of fracking is the safety and environmental awareness of the individual company and contractor personnel who work in the industry. Safety and compliance culture has been strongly promoted in recent years, partly due to the backlash of environmentalists. There is still room for improvement. Any lax in compliance by even one individual reflects on the whole industry and this should be stressed. Some states have less stringent regs and enforcement of them so the people from those states should perhaps be considered the most vulnerable.

   

Recently, I attended a talk by Thomas Linzey, founding director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. He talked mostly about attempts to empower community ordinances to pre-empt state laws and the fairly fascinating history of his own environmental law firm in aiding that process. He talked about factory hog farms, applying toxic sewage sludge for fertilizer at farms, waste incinerators, fracking, injection wells, and pipelines. Basically, any situation where a group of local people wanted to make their own laws to keep out industry, including big box stores like Walmart, constitutes a situation where his firm was consulted. One part of the process of pre-empting state laws on these matters is risk assessment. Risk assessment by the public at large can be strongly influenced by opinions, singular events, and prevailing beliefs among the local people. Risk assessment about fracking, pipelines, and injection wells, all industrial and technical processes, is best determined by technical people, preferably by people who know the processes through having worked in the industry or those who have been involved in regulation. Those are the people who know the dangers best. Among oil and gas technical people, mainly geologists, engineers, environmental compliance specialists, and managers, most attend many technical conferences with academics, government regulators, environmental consultants, and other scientists. Many of these people have collaborated to better understand the risks and how to reduce them. Linzey, an advocate of democracy over corporations, complained that corporations often write the very state laws that he and his clients want to pre-empt. That baffled me a bit as it is simply untrue although certainly they have useful ideas, make suggestions, and lobby against regulations they deem unnecessary or unfair.  If they wrote the regulations they wouldn’t complain about them! The regulators make the laws as they should. The public is not competent to do so. The reason they are so involved with the laws regulating them is because they know the processes and their implications better than anyone else. The corporations employ scientists and engineers who are experts in their fields and very good at risk assessment. By contrast the general public is usually not well informed enough to form an educated opinion let alone an expert opinion. This situation has been amplified in the case of fracking with the prevalence of passionate activism against the industry. The activism in the early years of fracking did bring some things to light: 1) the oil & gas industry was ill-prepared to handle strong public condemnation of their industry, and 2) the oil & gas industry still needed to come to better understanding of the risks (this has happened and continues). Environmentalists often complain about the failure of the industry at self-regulation. Since the oil & gas industry is mobile and there are many different sites, the practicality of frequent comprehensive inspections is limited. In that sense a fair amount of self-regulation is necessary and failures among the industry and contractors can involve willful illegal activities, although sometimes violations are simply due to ignorance of the regs. The trend has been to hire environmental consulting firms or in-house environmental staff to conduct compliance evaluations. At Linzey’s talk I expected more about the dangers of fracking and injection wells but that was not really addressed. It was just assumed that the processes were dangerous enough to ban them. Basically, the notion of using community ordinances to pre-empt state law regarding industrial activity is a form of NIMBYism. Certainly I can understand not wanting to live real close to a fracking well pad or especially something like a factory hog farm, but people do have rights to lease or sell or lease their property to whoever they want in accordance with state laws. 

It should be noted that there is a subjective component to risk assessment. The level of acceptable risk is variable among people. Typically, when people develop a more detailed understanding of risks they also come to understand others who either exaggerate or under-emphasize the risks. For example, the more scientific people are less concerned about GMOs, particularly those in the biotech industry. The same can be said about the oil & gas industry. There are scientists who side with activists, particularly among academics, but not many. The problem with CELDF and their approach is that they want to allow people who know little to nothing about the processes, and thus the risks, of the industrial activity they are banning, to make the regulations, at least at the local level. Traditionally, the state regulatory agencies, composed of scientists knowledgeable of the industries, some having worked in them and many having collaborated with other industry scientists, are the ones who make the regulations. Regulations are based on scientifically informed risk assessment. People who are perhaps more risk-averse will favor the Precautionary Principle which suggests that unless a process is proven completely safe then it should be banned or limited. Others have argued that the Precautionary Principle is an unnecessary limitation to development and can lead to other perils by cancelling out the benefits of banned practices.

Risk assessment is often the core issue in many environmental problems with disagreements arising from differing assessments of risk. Environmental quality has been deemed a public good, one that is not amenable to marketing, but must be assured through regulatory actions. Often, the reduction of risks involves significant costs, costs that will cause workers to lose jobs. The level of perceived acceptable risk often varies between people: local residents, workers in the industry in question, the regulators, and the business owners. This is not easy to determine. The idea of having a majority of the public (at least that part of the public that voted for or against a particular issue in a particular election cycle) decide the level of acceptable risk could be considered a form of “paternalism,” or as some would call it, environmental imperialism. If this were to be the case, the people voting should be adequately informed about the real risk potential. This appears not to be the case regarding oil and gas. It seems to me they tend to conflate the incidences of human error, accidents, and human deception (leaks, spills, fires and explosions, dumping) with inherent risks of the subsurface processes. While those three categories cannot be entirely eliminated they can be reduced significantly, especially as an industry matures. There are subsurface risks such as methane migration and illegal use of chemicals in uncased wells that could lead to contaminant migration, but these tend to be rare and preventable in most cases. Paternalists might say that workers have insufficient assessment of risk, especially if they choose to work in a dangerous industry. However, industry people at most levels, particularly in oil and gas, tend to have a much better idea of risk than the public at large. Cognitive biases are often inherent in risk assessment. People may not understand statistical analyses and mathematical ways of presenting conclusions. Very often there are also uncertainties about risk that tend to remain. Since a clean environment is often considered to be a fundamental right, many advocate for maximum feasible regulation. Feasibility is also variable and should ideally be informed by some sort of cost-benefit analysis so that massive amounts of money are not spent on speculative risks and minimal risks. Daniel Farber notes that in the context of environmental law feasibility analysis tends toward presumptions that favor control while cost-benefit analysis tends to balance out such presumptions. There are people who favor shutting down whole industries due to carcinogenic risks (ie. fracking, although likelihood of exposure is extremely low) but many see that as highly impractical and unnecessary. They may point out that many natural substances can be carcinogenic (various plants and plant components, aflatoxins in peanuts and other foods, the fruit and vegetable component acetaldehyde, and many others) and that now we can detect extremely minute quantities (trace parts per billion) of human-made carcinogens and that “the dose makes the poison.”

References:

Breaking a Fixed System: Corporations, Fracking, and the Community Rights Movement in Ohio – talk by Thomas Linzey, (founder of CELDF) in Athens, Ohio, Nov. 13, 2015

   

Environmental Law (Fifth Edition) – by Nancy K. Kubasek and Gary S. Silverman (Pearson Prentice Hall), 2005

 

Eco-Pragmatism: Making Sensible Environmental Decisions in an Uncertain World – by Daniel A. Farber (University of Chicago Press), 1999

Environmental Law and Policy – James Salzman and Barton H. Thompson Jr., (Foundation Press), 2003

Water and Shale Gas – by Paul Ziemkiewicz (West Virginia University) – presented at 2^nd Environmental Considerations in Energy Production Conference, Sept. 2015

Groundswell: The Case for Fracking - by Ezra Levine, McClelland and Stewart/Random House, 2014