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Hock hypothesized that Meeks struck a natural pocket of gas with his water well. Hock also said that Meeks’ well was illegal, because he had a permit to drill it only to 300 feet. But Dickinson, who drilled the water well for Meeks, and has also drilled a water well for EnCana , said that while the allegation is technically accurate, permit depth is considered more of a guideline and is not normally enforced. “It is your best guess,” confirmed Lisa Lindemann, administrator of the groundwater division that issues permits for the Wyoming state engineer’s office. Lindemann said the state would have allowed Meeks to drill deeper than his permit and had no reason for concern.

Convinced he now had tangible evidence tying EnCana’s wells to his water problems, Meeks set out to build a case and get the company to help him. He wanted clean water restored to his property or enough money to buy another ranch. He hired and fired lawyers and sent missives to the press. He spent almost all of his savings, more than $100,000 and armed himself with data culled from thousands of hours of painstaking technical research. In his living room, where two buffalo hides cover couches that sit beneath the mounted bust of a large bull, file boxes full of well records and scientific reports gradually rose in a teetering tower against the wall.

Meeks began developing a theory. The contamination could have come from leaky old waste pits or from a crack in a well pipe. But the more he learned, the more he suspected it had something to do with hydraulic fracturing.

Thousands of pounds of pressure from fracking, he believed, could exploit tiny cracks or flaws in a well’s cement casing. What else could possibly force contaminants through long distances underground, through layers of solid rock? The 14-2 gas well drew gas from more than 1,200 feet lower than his water well. Given the apparent correlation in the gas production and the distance between the wells, he thought something had to be connecting them underground. Since fracturing is designed to crack open the rock, and since no one knows for sure how far those cracks go, such a connection seemed logical.

“If this well is producing at 1,700 feet and that gas is coming up to 500 feet, there is a void in there or something that’s making it come all that way,” he says. “How else would it come up? Fracking is a problem out here because they don’t know where it’s going.”

Dickinson, who drilled the well, said he had never experienced anything like it. “I’ve had a few blow outs,” he said. “It was definitely coming from that lower formation.”

When Meeks began his research in the mid-2000s, there was little factual basis for his suspicions. Outside the industry, not much was known about fracking. All he had was his own logical, but subjective, interpretation of the curious set of circumstances before him.

In fracturing, between 200,000 and 6 million gallons of water are mixed with a cocktail of solvents, surfactants and acids that make up about 1 percent by volume and are pumped into the well under enough pressure to bore a hole in a sidewalk. The fluids are mixed with sand, so they can lodge deep in the cracked earth, prop open the fissures they create and keep the gas and fluids flowing freely.

Exactly how far these man-made cracks reach, or whether they can connect with other faults and fissures to create a pathway toward the surface, is unclear. That 1,000 feet of solid rock and layers of steel pipe should be an effective barrier between the gas well and his water well sounded plausible enough to Meeks, but then someone needed to explain to him how his blowout happened.

EnCana’s Hock said the company never injected enough fluid into the 24-2 well or any other well in the area to make its way all the way back to the surface. Hock insisted the industry had proved such a connection was impossible.

But Meeks couldn’t find a single independent or peer-reviewed study of fracturing’s effects on water resources; the reports he found were mostly drafted by or paid for by the oil and gas industry. The Environmental Protection Agency had said fracturing was safe, but it had based its conclusion in part on a review of many of the same industry materials Meeks had studied. The EPA never tested water wells itself. And scientists say that sort of testing, both before and after drilling takes place, is essential to a sound scientific analysis of the impacts of drilling.

“The critical thing that has to be done is a systematic sampling of the background prior to drilling activity, during and after drilling activity,” said Geoffrey Thyne, a geologist and former professor at the Colorado School of Mines and an environmental-engineering consultant with expertise in drilling and fracturing. “Ideally we would go out, we would put monitoring wells in and surround an area that was going to be fractured as part of normal operations.”

The budget for that kind of project would run to a ballpark of $10 million, which Thyne said would be a relatively small project for the U.S. Geological Survey or the EPA to undertake. But such a study had never been done.

The thing that kept bugging Meeks, a nagging lesson from his own days on the rigs, had to do with the cement and casing. To protect shallow water aquifers, the regulations say that oil and gas wells have to be encased in concrete far deeper than residents usually drill for water. But some of the records Meeks gathered showed that many of the wells had never been cemented that far. And he couldn’t get any of the regulators he talked to to do anything about it.

“I was doing anything I could to get help,” says Meeks. “I’d try to tell them there was a problem here but nobody would listen to me.”

For one, nobody could agree that anything was actually wrong with his water. There was little debate that it looked brown, smelled like fuel and tasted awful. But by the standard commonly used to decide if water is safe to drink, the sort of test a homebuyer would require before signing a mortgage, Meeks’ water was fine. It didn’t contain heavy metals or arsenic or any of the handful of obvious contaminants that drinking-water specialists look for. But the tests didn’t look for the vast array of obscure compounds that can come from industrial processes like drilling, many of which are unknown, even to the scientific community.

EnCana also took samples of Meeks’ water, had them tested, and said that it found nothing.

Wyoming state officials, including Mark Thiesse, then the West District groundwater supervisor for the Department of Environmental Quality, told him they didn’t have the inspectors or money to conduct a scientific analysis. “I don’t know how many times Thiesse told me ‘we don’t have a smoking gun and we don’t have any money, so what do you want us to do?’ ” Meeks said.

Thiesse, who has since moved to a different part of the DEQ, said he tested Meeks’ well five times. “We have not found hydrocarbons. We have not found fracking chemicals. We have found nothing out of the ordinary. So it’s pretty circumstantial.”

Each agency Meeks contacted, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is partially responsible for regulating drilling on the Wind River Reservation lands, treated him as if his story were the first time they had heard the suggestion that drilling fluids could wind up in drinking water.

By this time, Meeks’ neighbors, loyal to an oil and gas industry that pumps billions of dollars into Wyoming’s economy and is a significant employer, thought he was a hothead threatening to dismantle their livelihoods more than a victim defending the region’s water. As many people saw it, there was nothing to win by complaining. At best, Meeks would be proved right, and the natural landscape around Pavillion would forever carry a stigma. At worst, he would discredit the industry, hurt their business and put everyone’s jobs at risk.

One afternoon Meeks was down by the road, tearing out a section of fence. “There’s a preacher works a mile down. He stopped and said, ‘You are the worst neighbor I could ever have,’ ” Meeks said. “ ‘Every time I see you you’ve got a jar of water in your hand or you are in the newspaper. What if one of these days I want to sell my land? You’re making it so I can’t.’ ”

Nearly two years after his water first turned bad, Meeks found himself alone, an aging near-bankrupt war vet facing off against one of the more powerful corporations on the continent.
The Feds Grow Alarmed

As Meeks continued his quest, hydraulic fracturing was transforming the energy industry and unfurling a wave of drilling that rippled quickly across the country. The fracturing technology that was first used commercially by Halliburton in 1949 had been reworked until a sweet spot combination of chemicals and pressure was derived that made it possible to reach gas far deeper in the earth than energy companies had previously been able to.

In 1995 hydraulic fracturing was used in only a small fraction of gas wells, and the nation’s gas reserves were around 165 trillion cubic feet. The United States was so desperate for energy that energy companies were scrambling to secure foreign oil and building $300-million ports to import liquefied natural gas from Russia, Qatar and elsewhere.

By late 2008, however, fracturing was being used in nine out of 10 of the roughly 33,000 wells drilled in the United States each year, and estimates of the nation’s gas reserves had jumped by two thirds. Drilling was taking place in 31 states, and geologists claimed the United States contained enough natural gas to supply the country for a century. Russia’s president (and former chairman of its state gas company, Gazprom), Dmitri Medvedev, said he would curtail his own nation’s gas drilling efforts because he thought the United States might have so much gas that it wouldn’t buy more from Russia.

“Hydraulic fracturing is one of the U.S. oil and gas industry’s crowning achievements,” said Lee Fuller, vice president of government affairs for the Independent Petroleum Association of America and an influential lobbyist who helped shape federal policy on fracturing. Fracturing, Fuller said, takes place “with surgical precision and unrivaled environmental safety records.”

As the gas rush spread from central Wyoming, Montana and New Mexico to Colorado, Texas, Arkansas and Pennsylvania, the wells got closer and closer to peoples’ homes, not just in rural towns like Pavillion, but in downtown Ft. Worth and within 150 miles of Manhattan. Forests were checkered with five-acre pads cleared for wells and compressor stations. Tens of thousands of trucks delivered water and removed hazardous waste. In Pennsylvania at least one well was being drilled on an elementary school grounds. In Texas and New Mexico, gas rights were leased beneath city parks. Some states mandated that the typical 15-story, 1,200-horsepower drilling rigs be set up at least 150 feet from homes, not out of any environmental concern, but because that was the distance that would keep the house safe if the rig toppled over.

Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, director of the climate and energy program at Western Environmental Law Center, describes it as “a landscape-scale industrial process.” Think of it, he said, as “a gigantic factory, spread across thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of acres, just without a roof.”

As more wells were drilled, however, more reports began to emerge from people who had similar experiences to that of Louis Meeks.