Cabot spokesman: Contaminants were already there

http://citizensvoice.com/news/cabot-spokesman-contaminants-were-already-there-1.1024703

Cabot spokesman: Contaminants were already there

By Laura Legere (Staff Writer)
Published: September 22, 2010

Tests of two private water wells in Dimock Township showed traces of toxic chemicals in 2008 before Marcellus Shale gas drilling began nearby, according to test results made available to Times-Shamrock newspapers on Tuesday by the gas driller active in the township.

But a spokesman for Cabot Oil and Gas Corp. said those chemicals – toluene, benzene and surfactants – were not detected in 2008 in pre-drill samples taken at more than a dozen nearby water supplies along Carter Road in Dimock where a private environmental engineering firm recently  found toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene.

The contaminants found this spring and summer by Scranton-based Farnham and Associates, Inc. were at levels 1,000 times higher than the toluene levels detected in the two wells in 2008, the firm’s president, Daniel Farnham, said.

Cabot released the 2008 water tests on Tuesday in response to reports last week that Farnham had found widespread chemical contamination in water wells already tainted with methane linked to the gas drilling in Susquehanna County.

Farnham took the samples for families in Dimock Township who have sued Cabot for allegedly damaging their water, health and property.

The drilling company said the toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene found in the drinking water could not have come from hydraulic fracturing fluids used in its Marcellus Shale drilling operations because its service contractors do not use those chemicals.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves injecting millions of gallons of chemically treated water underground to break apart the gas-bearing rock. Critics of the process link it to anecdotal reports of water contamination and health problems in drilling regions like Dimock Township, while the industry and state regulators say the practice has never caused water contamination during decades of use.

“Ethylbenzene, toluene, xylene – those are not chemicals that we have used at all in our fracking,” Cabot spokesman George Stark said on Tuesday. “The fact that he’s found these is troubling, but they’re not from frack fluids.”

Cabot indicated that a likely cause of the contaminants, which are found in diesel and gasoline as well as some hydraulic fracturing additives, is an auto repair shop located near the affected wells.

The 2008 test results – which came from water samples taken by Farnham and analyzed by a separate firm for Cabot – detected surfactants at .07 mg/L in two wells, toluene at .002 mg/L in one well and .003 mg/L in the other, and benzene at .002 mg/L in one well.

Neither well showed the presence of ethylbenzene or xylene and none of the other wells sampled by Cabot contractors in 2008 along Carter Road showed any indication of the chemicals, Stark said.

Farnham, who conducted routine sampling of water wells along Carter Road this spring and summer, found ethylbenzene, toluene and xylene in the water at nearly all of the homes at levels between 2 and 7 mg/L.

Those levels exceed federal drinking water standards for toluene and ethylbenzene, a suspected human carcinogen.

Farnham also found ethylene glycol at 20 mg/L and propylene glycol at 200 mg/L in a May 2010 drinking water sample from one of the homes, owned by Victoria Switzer.

An independent water test performed for the Switzers in May 2008 did not analyze for glycols, but the test showed no indication of ethylbenzene, toluene or xylene.

Cabot’s contractors use ethylene glycol and propylene glycol in their hydraulic fracturing fluids, Stark said, but he does not believe they contaminated the Switzer well. Glycols break down within days in water, he said, and Cabot has not hydraulically fractured wells in the Carter Road area since November 2009.

“I would stand pretty confident they are not related,” he said.

The spikes of contamination recorded by Farnham in the water wells after periods of rain indicate a surface spill, not a disturbance of the aquifer through hydraulic fracturing, Stark said.

Cabot has reported at least five diesel spills since 2008 at or around its well sites in the township to the state Department of Environmental Protection, but Stark said the company does not believe its surface activity caused the contamination. A press release distributed by the company on Tuesday said “extensive testing performed this year in cooperation with the PA-DEP has confirmed that Cabot’s operations have not caused any such surface contamination.”

Efforts to contact a DEP spokesman on Tuesday to confirm Cabot’s statement were unsuccessful.

Farnham said the levels of glycols found in Switzer’s water indicate an industrial cause, not the auto repair shop.

“To show up in the levels that we’re seeing (the mechanic) must have had one hell of a radiator leak,” he said.

llegere@timesshamrock.com