The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Wyoming Outdoor Council, Sierra Club and the Oil and Gas Accountability Project commissioned hydrologist Dr. Tom Myers to review the EPA’s draft statement on well contamination in Pavillion, Wyoming, and are submitting his work to the EPA as technical comments.
The EPA draft is available for public comment through October 2012 and then the data and conclusions will undergo the peer-review process with a panel of independent scientists.
Early in 2008, residents in Pavillion, Wyoming contacted the EPA to report smells, tastes and adverse changes in water quality of their 80 domestic wells. No natural gas wells in the Pavillion Gas Field had been fracked since 2007. The EPA has taken water samples from water and soil locations and also installed two monitoring wells in the Pavillion area in 2010. The concern is that natural gas extraction, "fracking", contaminated well water. The EPA detected contamination in 11 drinking water wells and the contaminants included a chemical that is used in the fracking process. It was also noted that Pavillion has a history of poor drinking water quality, as far back as World War II, and that the methodology used to determine detection of compound was still under development.
The EPA statement does not discuss the correlation of contaminant detects in the domestic wells with depth, though they believe gas production is implicated. Pavillion is the best known example where the fracking process at shallow depth has led to contamination concerns and would lend credence to the belief that guidelines need to be firm in what depth fracking can occur. The synthetic compound found by the EPA does not occur naturally in water and the EPA could not determine an acceptable alternative explanation (outside fracking fluids). Obviously some of the other compounds are also found in wells that have no gas extraction anywhere near them but the draft findings would seem to affirm common sense that natural gas wells need to have cement liners.
Pavillion updates from the EPA
NRDC On Pavillion
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT Fractured Science – Examining EPA’s Approach to Ground Water Research: The Pavillion Analysis
