The public turned out in force for the Environmental Protection Agency’s first hydraulic fracturing meeting in the heart of the Rocky Mountain region. “We want as much input as possible on the design of the hydraulic-fracturing study,” said Jeanne Briskin, hydraulic fracturing research task-force leader, EPA, at the mid-July meeting in Denver. “We don’t want to look back one day and say we could have done more.”

The first of three EPA public meetings was held in the agency’s Region 8, which covers North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado. The evening event drew more than 300 attendees, and 100 speakers had two minutes each to provide input and comments to the panel. Additional meetings are planned this year in New York and Pennsylvania. The EPA is seeking public input to help design the best possible program for a hydraulic-fracturing research study mandated by Congress, due for release in December 2012.

Most speakers at the Denver meeting were representatives of the oil and gas industry. These participants urged EPA researchers to use the best science available, to honor current federal, state and local guidelines, to secure the best peer-to-peer consultants for review, and to limit the study to the congressional mandate. They exhorted the EPA not to include air-quality monitoring or other possible drillsite hazards in the fracturing study.

The study aims to analyze information on water quality in hydrocarbon-prone areas; characterize chemical compounds used in fracturing and how these might interact with native compounds in formations; and conduct case studies of drinking-water contamination by fracturing. It will also look at technological solutions to reduce risk and improve decision making.

Industry members and local government spokespersons suggested the panel make the results easy to understand for all members of the public; characterize wells as tight gas or shales as part of the study design; include frac size and length, as well as multifrac designs; and look at historical data of illness, before and after fracturing. A water-systems analyst suggested that the study include water clean-up and filtration systems.

A final suggestion was for the EPA to go outside the congressional mandate and study air pathways for frac fluids between the well and the mud pit, and to further study geological seals between fractured formations and surrounding formations.
“It’s safe,” said speaker Barbara Kirkmeyer, commissioner, Weld County. “In Weld County, we have more than 30,000 wells, and 19,000 active wells. That’s more than any other county in the nation, and we’ve never had any problems with fracturing.”

Several members of the public offered their residences to the EPA as possible case-study sites. Two individuals from La Plata County, Colorado, told how their private well water had become cloudy or unusable after nearby drilling and hydraulic fracturing occurred. A landowner from Las Animas County, Colorado, said that the water on his ranch was affected by drilling and fracturing operations carried out at nearby coalbed-methane operations.

John Fenton, former oilfield worker, welder and owner of a four-generation ranch in west-central Wyoming’s Fremont County, offered his ranch for study also. “We have eight gas wells on our ranch and we have to have our water shipped in because of drilling and fracturing,” he said. “It’s a problem we have to live with 24 hours a day.”

According to IHS Inc., Fremont County has the following producing fields: Bison Basin, which primarily produces oil from the Cretaceous Frontier above 2,000 feet; Girrard, a Muddy and Dakota gas pool above 2,000 feet; and Crooks Gap and Happy Springs, where oil has been produced from Nugget and several other zones.

The EPA continues to invite public comment on the hydraulic-fracturing study.

Information on the study, public meetings and presentations used during the meetings and webinars are on the EPA website at epa.gov/safewater/uic/wells_hydrofrac.html.