By Peter Galuszka
Tap water is now drinkable for most of the 300,000 residents in the environs of Charleston, the capital of Virginia’s sister state to the west, but the mess has ample warnings for future problems notably fracking for natural gas.
The national newspapers are filled with interesting pieces this morning about the problems of now-bankrupt Freedom Industries where 7,500 gallons of a chemical used to treat coal spilled 1.5 miles upstream from a municipal water system intake, making water unusable in Charleston and nine surrounding counties for about a week.
The affected area would be about the size of Chesterfield or Henrico counties individually or more than the entire city of Richmond. Imagine the business losses from the inability to wash dishes in restaurants, wash cars, or even make toilet trips in state office buildings. Think of the unknown health impacts. Incredibly, that’s what happened in Charleston, the epicenter of the anti-regulation “War on Coal” propagandists.
The takeover warning for Virginia is that it could happen here and did back in the 1970s when Allied Chemical tried to sidestep pollution regulations by setting up a dummy company in a converted gas station in Hopewell to make the highly toxic pesticide chemical Kepone.
One cause for future concern here, as well as in West Virginia, is what happens when hydraulic fracturing for natural gas comes. Fracking, which involves using high pressure water with special chemicals to help break up before-unreachable pockets of natural gas has really taken off in recent years.
Combined with newer horizontal drilling methods, fracking has yielded a cornucopia of natural gas with a huge impact. It is utterly changing the dynamics of the U.S. energy picture and positioning the country to become an exporter of both gas and oil for the first time in decades.
Fracked gas has its pluses. It emits half the carbon dioxide of coal and has nowhere near the death toll for employees. It doesn’t destroy entire mountains. But it can increase the chances of fire, pipeline leaks, rail accidents and threaten water supplies depending on the types of chemicals used in the process.
The West Virginia case provides chilling inadequacies with regulation. The tanks at Freedom Industries were inspected for air emissions but not for leaks, even though they were built in the 1940s and 1950s. Ownership wound around a polyglot of corporations.
Within one week of the spill and facing hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuits, Freedom promptly went bankrupt to protect itself against claims. That means that victims of the spill are doubly screwed. They have to eat the losses from the disaster and now they will find it much harder to get legal compensation.
More chilling is the fact that West Virginia’s legislative and regulatory climate will make it harder to know what’s in gas fracking chemicals when companies move south from Pennsylvania to exploit Marcellus Formation shale that covers most of the state.
The New York Times notes that in West Virginia, state regulators can issue regulations but they can’t be enforced until the lobbyist-heavy legislature approves. A law last year would have required that companies disclose the types of chemicals they use for fracking but under pressure from oil equipment giant Halliburton, lawmakers decided to make them confidential.
The same aura of confidentiality in favor of industry pervades Virginia which prides itself on being “business friendly. Much of what the State Corporation Commission does when it deals with firms or handles electricity rates is immune from the Freedom of Information Act. When former Gov. Robert F. McDonnell set up committees to study uranium mining and the nuclear industry in general, they were likewise immune from the FOIA. A lawyer working for former Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli was rebuked by a judge for advocating for energy companies in a lawsuit over natural gas rights.
Fracking could come to Virginia although it isn’t certain when or how much. The state already has more than 7,500 older gas wells near the Southwestern coal fields that do not use fracking.
A sliver of frackable Marcellus formation skirts the West Virginia border west of Interstate 81 in mountainous regions unused to energy extraction. Rockingham County has already blocked a special land use permit sought by an energy firm. Washington area drinking water officials are seeking limits of fracking in the nearby George Washington National Forest at the headwaters of the Potomac River and other municipal water sources.
Another possibility is the so-called Taylorsville Basin which runs from west of Annapolis to east of Fredericksburg and Richmond and Petersburg in areas better known for crab pots and pine forests. It isn’t known how much gas is actually there, but a Dallas firm, Shore Exploration and Production Corp. is looking.
I don’t know offhand what rules Virginia actually has in place to reveal the chemicals companies use for fracking, but it is obviously something to watch. One example not to follow is that of the Mountain State.
