by Dan Alger

Created on: August 01, 2010

Policy options for shale gas are not yes or no, but how restrictive requirements must be to protect the environment. We will find that shale gas wells can be operated without hurting the environment, but it involves more costs for the industry than they hoped to pay. Huge amounts of gas will come from them and the industry will still do well, just not as well as they dreamed.

The author and previous commenters provide good background information on the drilling process and the concerns about environmental water quality, but, at least for this reader, leave unclear where the source of the problems are and what the appropriate public policy responses might be.

The source of the problem is not where the fracking occurs. This is thousands of feet of impermeable rock below where our drinking water is. The toxic stew does no harm here.

The source of the problem is that proportion of this stew returned to the surface. Current practice is to construct ponds to hold this stew and let the water evaporate. Under normal conditions, these ponds, if appropriately lined, can keep the toxic chemicals from entering the watershed. Two potential problems occur here. One is the abnormal conditions that would allow these toxic chemicals to go beyond the bounds of these ponds, which would then contaminate the watershed. The second, at least for some areas, is the large amount of water being used.

One response, one to be expected once regulators become fully familiar with the process, is to require these ponds to be built to standards that these "abnormal conditions" are extremely infrequent, significantly more so than most ponds constructed today. This would involve requirements on the impermeability and durability of pond liners and on the probability of overflow.

A second response is to encourage waste water treatment, and the least expensive method is likely to use a single set of waste water treatment facilities for a group of wells, with waste water pipelines connecting all of these wells to these facilities. Costs for these pipelines would be lower than one might suspect, since waste water pipelines could be installed in the same ditches as the relatively small, gathering pipelines that virtually all wells use to transport their gas to a major pipeline system, but they would take the waste water to a single set of water treatment facilities. As well as eliminating harm to the watershed, if treated waste water is recycled, it also significantly reduces the amount of water to be used.

Note that neither response involves new law, but enforcement of existing statutes. New regulations will develop as the regulators learn industry specifics, but they already deal with other industries with toxic waste and others with large water requirements.

Once this is sorted out, the industry will find that holding ponds are a significantly more expensive option than now and they would require continuous regulatory enforcement efforts. A waste treatment option may be cheaper in some areas, especially where they cannot use as much water as they wish, and little enforcement effort would be required once the treatment facilities are built. Recycling waste water would certainly earn the industry points as good stewards for the environment.

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