Engaging Health in Decision Making: The Marcellus Shale and Sustainability

Business and government often respond rapidly, without engaging health professionals, in their efforts to solve crises or embrace new technologies. Too often, decisions made prove to be shortsighted. One needs only to look to recent history for unintended environmental and health consequences, such as methyl tertiary butyl ether in groundwater (Davis and Farland, 2001; Erdal and Goldstein, 2000), or public concerns about risks associated with products derived from wide-scale adoption of genetically modified organisms (Nelson, 2001). In a decision maker’s effort to move forward rapidly, he or she may not be able to fully consider all the implications, from cradle to grave, of a new process or program. But this haste often can result in further economic costs to the industry and the public. When the health community is engaged only after problems are identified, the results are often costly to correct and health is often unfairly portrayed as at odds with economic growth.

In this era of sustainable development, there is a more mature understanding of the linkages among health, the environment, and economic factors. However, significant policy decisions are made daily across the United States and around the world, and environmental public health is not part of the decision-making process, nor is it represented in high-level commissions or committees. A case in point are the efforts to establish energy policies both domestically and abroad. This paper uses the new efforts to employ hydrofracturing technology to extract natural gas tightly bound to the Marcellus Shale in the eastern United States to illustrate how the environmental health perspective has much to contribute, but these points are also crucial to many discussions across transportation, agriculture, and energy, including broader shale gas issues.

A National Research Council committee recently prepared a framework for sustainability in response to a request from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop processes that would incorporate sustainability into the daily activities of the agency (NRC, 2011). The goal was to facilitate EPA’s approach to maximizing benefits rather than just reducing risks. Marcellus Shale activities have many features that cry out for a sustainability approach. A sustainability framework allows the likely economic benefits of Marcellus Shale activities to be considered along with societal, health, and environmental impacts. It allows inclusion of a broad range of potential impacts, ranging from those due to increased truck traffic to social impacts on communities, including crime and psychosocial stress (Braiser, 2012; Goldstein et al., 2013). The concept of sustainability includes a focus on future generations and requires considerations of what will happen to gas-boom communities in perhaps 20 years, when the gas runs out (Jacquet, 2009).

The Marcellus Shale, which extends under much of Pennsylvania and New York and parts of Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia, is said to be the world’s second largest natural gas field (EIA, 2012). Hydrofracturing technology has greatly enhanced the ability to extract natural gas from this area of the United States. Simply stated, hydrofracturing technology consists of drilling underground both vertically and horizontally, injecting high volumes of water
laced with hydrofracturing chemicals under high pressure to break up the shale deposits, and then extracting the gas. Water containing the hydrofracturing chemicals that returns to the surface must be discharged somewhere.

There are many different types of chemical and physical agents within the hydrofracturing mixture that vary by company and by location. Much is still not known about the composition or impact of these chemicals, which has led to significant concerns among scientists and communities in affected areas. In the absence of specific information, it is of course difficult to confirm or discount the health complaints local community members associate with the
drilling sites. Many of the symptoms appear to be related to issues of transparency and trust that are exacerbated by the rapid pace of development (Ferrar et al., 2013). Questions also have been raised about the potential contamination of groundwater with naturally occurring radioactivity, the implications of bromine and other brine compounds coming from the flowback fluids, and the potential for worker and community exposure to naturally occurring radioactivity.

Confusion about the potential risks of hydrofracturing has been engendered in a number of ways. It is true that the hydrofracturing process has been around for decades, but using that as a reason not to be concerned about environmental health effects is incompatible with the new advances in hydrofracturing technology that have led to the ability to exploit the Marcellus Shale. The repeated statement that there is a lack of clear evidence showing that hydrofracturing has polluted groundwater may be true if the definition of hydrofracturing is limited to the successful deployment of these chemicals far underground. However, concerns about health and the environment refer to the whole extraction process, and, not unexpectedly, there already have been incidents in which substantial groundwater contamination has occurred from these sites (Pennsylvania State Department of Environmental
Protection, 2011; Rozell and Reaven, 2012). In addition, the possibility of a dangerous collision with a previously drilled oil or coal mine from more than a century of such activity in Marcellus Shale and other fossil fuel areas should be considered.

Drilling activity in the Marcellus Shale also raises concerns about the appropriateness of our environmental laws for regulating multiple sites with the same type of industrial activity. What might be different if we were able to regulate based on the aggregate effect of thousands of permitted extraction sites, rather than dealing with each one as an independent activity? For example, in some parts of Pennsylvania, ozone levels exceed the standard, and in other parts they are just under the standard, which is likely to be made more stringent. Will the aggregate activities of all the extraction sites, including releases of ozone precursors from trucks and diesel generators, result in greater exceedances of the ozone standard? Ironically, if this were to occur, the required state implementation plan may lead to limiting industrial development in Pennsylvania—the opposite of the state’s goal in supporting
Marcellus Shale activities.

The evidence that health issues are not being adequately considered is stark. Three major shale gas drilling advisory commissions formed in 2011 by President Obama and the governors of Maryland and Pennsylvania were specifically tasked to provide advice on health issues. Yet, of the 52 members of these 3 committees, not one had any background in health. No federal or state health agencies with primary health responsibilities were represented, nor were any civil society organizations that consider human health as a significant part of their mission (Goldstein et al., 2012). The eventual outcome in Pennsylvania was an impact fee resulting in about $180 million per year being distributed among 17 state agencies, subagencies, and commissions—but not the Pennsylvania Department of Health (PADOH). Not surprisingly, PADOH has no programs that are responsive to the growing body of shale-related health complaints.

EPA has started major studies of hydrofracturing chemicals, which should be completed in 2014. Unfortunately, this phase of EPA’s studies does not consider important issues such as the potential effect of the natural constituents, including radionuclides and brine components, nor does it consider mixtures of the different chemical and physical agents brought to the surface. New national and state regulations requiring the best available control technologies are under consideration. Various national, state, and nongovernmental organizations and commissions have recently provided recommendations to reduce risks. Industry also has been actively developing ways to recycle hydrofracturing chemicals and to limit loss of natural gas—which is itself an ozone precursor and a greenhouse gas, as well as the products they sell.

One of the reasons given by President Obama’s Deepwater Horizon Commission to resume drilling in the Gulf of Mexico was that it is in the national interest to harvest the oil before it can be extracted by the Cubans, Venezuelans, or Chinese (National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, 2011). But other countries cannot access the shale gas within our borders. It will remain intact until it is extracted, and this is another reason supporting a sustainability approach.

The question that must be asked is whether it is better to extract the perhaps 20-year supply of natural gas in the Marcellus Shale areas immediately, or to begin, say, 3 years from now and end 23 years from now. A more measured beginning to extraction of tightly bound shale gas will permit development of improved recycling processes, well casings that are able to withstand high pressures, and other techniques that will lessen the likelihood of adverse health or environmental effects. It is worth emphasizing that continued improvement in methods to extract the tightly bound gas, which are still evolving, suggests that delay to better consider ways to avoid unwanted health effects will also have the desired benefit of enhancing natural gas extraction. In the long run, states such as New York that have delayed approving natural gas extraction while the potential adverse health impacts are considered will earn more money from their tightly bound Marcellus Shale gas than will states such as Pennsylvania that have raced ahead without carefully thinking through the potential health consequences.

Extraction of tightly bound shale gas is just one example of the many new technologies that are transforming our world, and the many more that will come. All deserve early and careful consideration of the potential for adverse health consequences, as well as continued oversight once they are employed. The current global and local challenges to environmental health—and expanding and increasingly vulnerable human populations and communities—require rigorous advance consideration of human health consequences. In the absence of such consideration, unwanted and costly surprises are a certainty.

A number of questions remain:

1. Why is the United States in such a rush to repeat its past mistakes?
2. Why aren’t health professionals involved in key policy decisions?
3. Where will the funding come from for health studies that will allow us to minimize the inherent risks of new technology, while maximizing the benefits?

 

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References

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