…continued

Other obstacles also blocked the EPA from starting new research. The chemicals used in fracking, the names of the compounds that scientists would have to look for if they were to test water for contamination are kept secret. Industry claims the information is proprietary, akin to Coke keeping its recipes secret from Pepsi. It discloses trade names, like ZetaFlow, of the various concoctions of chemicals the drillers used, along with a statement of health risk meant for worker safety, called a Material Safety Data Sheet. But the exact chemicals and proportions that go into ZetaFlow, for example, remain a mystery.

?These operations are ones the companies have spent millions of dollars developing. From their perspective it is the mechanism by which they have a competitive advantage over other people in their industry,? says Lee Fuller. ?I would fully expect that they would try to protect that right as long as they possibly can.?

But that protection left the scientists to do a lot of guesswork. ?We don?t really know what those things that we should be looking for are,? says Oberley. ?That?s been kind of an issue all along. ? The service companies haven?t been fully disclosing to EPA what those constituents are.?

When Louis Meeks learned that the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing were kept secret he was dumbfounded. Why was everyone so confident that drilling hadn?t ruined his water if no one really knew what contaminants came from the drilling in the first place? Trying to find the truth was like shooting at a target, blindfolded, in the middle of the night.

Yet that?s what Meeks tried to do. In October 2007 he hired a private engineering firm to take samples of his water. The glass vials were shipped to a lab in Virginia, ?The local labs never find anything,? Meeks says and analyzed for an array of pollutants. The tests cost Meeks $4,400, but the results gave him a boost. In addition to abnormal levels of chloride, iron and total dissolved solids, the lab found glycols, a chemical often used to keep fluids flowing in cold conditions. ?Glycols are commonly used in antifreeze,? testing hydrogeologist Bill Newcomb wrote in the lab report, ?and with regard to natural gas production, in dehydration processes.?

For the first time in three years Louis Meeks could fall asleep without wondering if he was crazy. It was a start.

A Crack in the Conventional Wisdom

Still, the energy industry's certainty about the safety of hydraulic fracturing seemed to many people unassailable. The process had been used reliably for more than 60 years, industry spokespeople said, during which time few complaints had been raised relative to the nearly 1 million frack jobs that had been done in the United States. Oil and gas companies employ some of the brightest geological scientists, and the papers that emerged either directly from industry sources or from government agencies that contracted industry consultants to write them, shaped the opinions of regulators and policymakers who read them.

?35,000 wells are hydraulically fractured annually in this country with close to one million wells having been hydraulically fractured in the United States since the technique?s inception with no documented harm to groundwater,? wrote the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission in a white paper it submitted to Congress.

"The technology has proven to be a safe and effective stimulation technique,? said a report contracted by the U.S. Department of Energy, titled ?Modern Shale Gas Development in the U.S.: A Primer.?

The fact that over the years fracturing technology evolved to use more chemicals and vastly larger quantities of water, and go thousands of feet further into the ground, was usually left out of the conversation.

Faced with so much official momentum against him, Meeks felt he had reached a dead end. He and EnCana reached a settlement through arbitration. EnCana paid him money, he says he can?t discuss the amount, and promised to clean up his water. Hock said EnCana had already spent more than $170,000 trying to solve Meeks? water challenge.

Meeks? frustration was apparent to his family. By the end of 2007 his son, Louis Jr., decided to see what he could do to get his father some support. ?They just felt like they were up in a corner and that they couldn?t do anything,? says Meeks Jr., who grew up on the Pavillion ranch and now manages a call center in the Philippines. ?I wanted to find an advocate for my parents, somebody that could give advice.?

Meeks Jr. called a northern-Wyoming-based environmental group, the Powder River Basin Resource Counsel, which was fighting coal- and gas-related issues. Through them, his father was introduced to Deb Thomas, an organizer of an offshoot group that had been battling extensive aquifer contamination from drilling in northern Wyoming.

Thomas came to Pavillion and met with Meeks. ?When I got down there and saw what was going on, it was the same story,? she says. ?So I knew it was going to be really hard to get the state to act on their issues just like it had been on ours. You aren?t heard, because the state?s main priority is the money that they get from the oil and gas development.?

Thomas helped coordinate the Lockers, the Meeks, and others for the first time, and the little group began digging deeper into reports of fracturing-related problems in Colorado and elsewhere. Fueled in large part by their persistence, an avalanche of questions, from environmental groups across the country, began to rain down on regulators and drillers. And people began spotting cracks in the conventional wisdom put forth by the energy industry that said that hydraulic fracturing was safe.

For example, despite the industry?s explanation that thick bedrock safely separates the fracturing target from water sources, evidence began to emerge suggesting that contaminants from gas wells were somehow making their way into groundwater. Perhaps the tiny fissures that radiate through the bedrock from hydraulic fracturing really were, as Meeks had suspected, allowing the chemical solution to escape into groundwater aquifers. Or maybe contaminants could travel through pre-existing natural cracks, or through a connection of underground passageways, or by the pathway carved by the well itself.

In Colorado, methane showed up frequently in water wells, and researchers thought it might be originating from the same gas reservoirs being drilled deep underground. In Ohio, gas seepage from a natural gas well blew up a house. In Pennsylvania, a vast underground gas injection cave, where gas is put for long-term storage, had somehow leaked into water supplies over 50 square miles. But these incidents were never linked, in part because the state agencies handling them remain separate and uncoordinated.

Dennis Coleman, a leading international geologist and expert on tracking underground migration, says more data must be collected before anyone can say for sure that drilling contaminants have made their way to water or that fracturing is to blame. But Coleman also says there?s no reason to think it can?t happen. Coleman?s Illinois-based company, Isotech Laboratories, has both the government and the oil and gas industry as clients. He says he has seen methane gas seep underground for more than seven miles from its source. If the methane can seep, the theory goes, so can the fluids.

?There is no such thing as impossible,? Coleman says. ?Like everything else in life it comes down to the probability.?

So, is seepage what made Meeks? water well explode with gas?

?This is a field where there is almost no research,? said Geoffrey Thyne, the geologist and former professor at the Colorado School of Mines and an environmental engineering consultant. Thyne has found methane and drilling wastewater in dozens of water samples, including from domestic wells, in Colorado and thinks it could have traveled through underground fractures. ?It is very much an emerging problem.?

Meeks says that when he was working on well construction and fracturing jobs, there were many times when confusion reigned on the muddy flats of a well pad about what, exactly, the conditions were underground and where all the fluid and cement pumped down there had gone. Well cementing and construction techniques might provide the first and most important line of defense against water contamination and the forces of fracturing, but he knew from experience that they were not always practiced and that even when they were the outcome was far from predictable.

A well is constructed in telescoping sections that become increasingly thinner as the well extends deeper into the earth. The first section is wide, maybe seven inches, and each succeeding section is narrower yet. The sections are supposed to be encased in layers of steel pipe to contain the fracture fluids and the gas that runs through them. Like caulk pumped into a window frame, concrete is then used to fill the void, called an annulus, left between the pipe layers and the earth.

?With respect to groundwater, that?s pretty much the holy grail,? said Mike Paque, director of the Ground Water Protection Council, a group made up of state oil and gas regulators that has examined a number of complaints of groundwater contamination near drilling. ?In almost all those cases where there was any indication that there were problems it?s been tagged back to poor casing and cementing.?

At some point the well?s casing layer ends altogether, and from that point downward the drill pipe runs naked through hundreds, sometimes thousands of feet of earth and bedrock. The assumption is that the solid rock layers function like the cement, sealing in all the fluid that is pumped down. Between the lower bare sections and the upper portions encased by cement, nothing is supposed to be able to escape.

A foremost expert on fracturing supports Meeks? theory that things often don?t go according to plan. Dale Henry, a retired petroleum engineer, said that as many as a third of the wells he worked on over his career ?lose circulation.? That means that during hydraulic fracturing the pressure didn?t build up the way it should have, because fluids seeped out somewhere on the way down, like a garden hose losing pressure because of punctures. According to Henry, the question is more like, how often does it work properly?

For three decades Henry was responsible for cementing and hydraulic fracturing jobs around the world, including in central Wyoming as an employee of Dow Chemical, and then Dowell-Schlumberger, a company that was later bought entirely by Schlumberger, now a leading competitor to Halliburton. In 2006 and again in 2008 he ran unsuccessfully for the top job at the Texas Railroad Commission, one of the nation?s largest oil and gas regulatory agencies, in part because he wanted to reform the laws that protect water. ?I can guarantee you that 90 percent of the time you do not have cement behind the pipe for several thousand feet down at the bottom that keeps your fluids, whether it is produced fluids or frack fluids, where you want them to be,? Henry says.