Gasland Part II Page #8

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So my question was,

"Could we just call it fresh enough water?"

And the answer was,

"Yes."

I also asked,

point-blank, "Does it have chemicals in it?"

And the answer was,

"Yes."

We have methane

in our water already

that we did not have

before.

Our pre-drill test

proved that our water

was pristine beyond

anybody's standards.

They will tell you

point blank there is no way

that frack fluid

will migrate. Right.

And yet other

hydrogeologists, who are not

on the gas company's

payroll, will tell you

it's not a question

of if it can migrate;

it's a question of when

it will migrate.

Every single one

of these gas-well guys that's come here

has said,

"Wow, you guys have a really nice place."

And we say,

"Thank you,

but you mean we had a really nice place."

The realtor told us

it's worth zero dollars and zero cents.

Tell me about

these water tanks. So...

on the day

that Shell found out,

they instantly brought

these water buffaloes.

This is what we call

"blue water."

I mean, that's my term

for it--"blue water." It's blue.

Because it's blue. Ha!

We don't drink it.

Right.

We drink bottled water.

We can't use it

for our animals 'cause it--

I don't trust this.

I don't know what this is.

The dogs have been

drinking Nestle brand water.

It says "Pure Life."

"Enhanced with minerals

for taste," and then

there are these happy

stick-figure people here

who are about to get

swept away by a tsunami of "Pure Life." Ha ha!

Well, I was thinking

about the 5 cents in Oregon.

If I could get those

empty water bottles 3,000 miles away,

I could get 5 cents out

of each one of those.

They don't ask

for those bottles back.

This is what

the chickens drink now.

I don't know any other chickens

in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, that drink bottled water.

Cluck, cluck, cluck.

Anybody want to say hi?

FOX, VOICE-OVER:
After

the Gee family reported they could light their water on fire,

Shell tried several times

to squeeze, or fix the cement job.

All the while, the gas industry

in public continued

to deny any instances

of water contamination.

This just didn't make sense.

Everywhere I had gone, whether

it was Texas or PA

or Colorado, there were

the same problems.

I'd seen all this on the

surface, but what was actually happening under the ground?

Please welcome Tom Ridge.

You are the former Governor

of the great State

of Pennsylvania,

the Keystone State,

first Secretary of Homeland Security.

Now, you're a lobbyist for

the natural gas industry.

We've all seen the footage

of flaming water.

Whoa!

Is that really

happening to people's water supply, sir?

Out here is the rock.

We're looking in

a cross section of a well

that's being drilled

because, ultimately,

you want your gas

to come up

the steel pipe.

That inch, right there,

this is cement.

And what you don't want

is for that cement to fail...

Mm-hmm.

or to be absent,

to crack, to corrode,

to crumble, to disappear.

If what's down there

can get into this annulus...

Right.

then it can migrate.

Yes, it is happening

to some water supplies,

and it has absolutely

nothing to do with hydraulic fracting.

Methane gas is

naturally occurring.

They've had methane gas--

I'm speaking as a governor-- in some of our water wells

in Pennsylvania long before

any wells, frack wells, were located next to them.

Those are phenomena that

are very well known,

for as long as we've

been drilling wells, encasing them.

Naturally occurring

methane gas often ends up in water wells,

but there has not been

a single proven instance

where it has been related

to hydraulic fracking.

So now the shallow gas goes

into an open annulus,

pressurizes the annulus,

gas migrates into an underground

source of drinking water,

somebody's water well.

In my field, there are only

3 things that are certain:

death, taxes, and fracture.

FOX, VOICE-OVER:

Meet Professor Tony Ingraffea--

professor of engineering

at Cornell;

a two-time winner of the

National Research Council Award

for rock mechanics research;

co-winner of a NASA Group

Achievement Award;

a former researcher for

Schlumberger, the number-one fracking company in the world,

and for the Gas

Research Institute;

proud Sicilian;

accomplished turkey hunter;

and in 2011, one of "TIME"

Magazine's People Who Mattered.

But I like to think of him

as the godfather of cement.

Hundreds of thousands of

on-shore wells and thousands of off-shore wells,

there's a probability

of maybe one in 20

that a cement job will

fail immediately.

FOX:
One in 20?

One in 20.

So 5%.

5% of all wells

immediately will show

a failure of a cement job,

and there will be methane migration.

Because that means

that this annulus, the area

between the casing

and the rock,

is now open

from below to above.

You now have a migration

pathway so that anything that's down there

in the way of salts,

heavy metals,

other deleterious things

that were stored in the rock,

now have a pathway and

a vector and something to carry them upwards.

I'm using the round number

of a hundred thousand Marcellus wells... FOX: Right.

in Pennsylvania alone, OK?

Right.

If one out of 20 is going

to immediately show a cement failure,

now we're talking

5,000 wells.

If that one water well

is going bad, it means that aquifer--

as what happened in Dimock,

it's the one aquifer that was servicing all those water wells.

9 square miles.

Yeah.

FOX, VOICE-OVER:

Professor Ingraffea was basically telling me

that a gas well is

a long, steel pipe surrounded by an inch of cement,

and that that cement

cracks often.

But there's one part

of a gas well that he didn't mention--the PR department.

So my job, and I do have

a paid job as a consultant with the industry,

is to make sure,

as Pennsylvania, that we take advantage of the resources.

FOX, VOICE-OVER:

I needed to talk to an expert in that part of the operation.

Naomi Oreskes, author of

the book "Merchants of Doubt,"

traced disinformation campaigns

from big tobacco all the way up

to climate change.

If we say, you know,

"Oh, yes, oil and gas come out of people's

taps naturally,"

you know, a lot of people just don't know.

They think, "Oh, really?

Is that true? You know-- Oh, well, I have heard

"people say that

in Santa Barbara the tap water smells bad,

you know, so maybe

it's true." OK, now we have a debate, right?

An ordinary person

who doesn't know what to think doesn't need

to think that I'm right;

they just need to think that there's a debate,

because so long

as there's a debate, then there's an argument

for staving off

regulation.

FOX, VOICE-OVER:
In the fifties,

Hill + Knowlton, PR firm,

designed the strategy to dispel

that nasty little rumor

that tobacco caused

lung cancer--

misinformation

and supporting bogus science

that would call into doubt

the legitimate science.

America's Natural Gas Alliance

hired Hill + Knowlton

in 2009 as their PR firm.

All of a sudden,

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