ProPublica: Energy & Environment

New Yorkers’ Drilling Comments Are In … Now What?

2010-02-26T09:00:22-05:00

When New York State's environmental agency came out with a draft environmental review of drilling in the Marcellus Shale in September, it set off a flurry of action for environmentalists, industry advocates and the general public.

People were given 30 days -- later extended to 90 -- to digest the highly technical 800-plus-page document and submit comments. They could also voice their opinions at four public hearings.

At stake was the future of gas drilling in New York's portion of the Marcellus Shale, which could produce vast amounts of natural gas, but which some residents fear also could contaminate drinking water sources and the air.

Since the comment period ended on Dec. 31, New York's Department of Environmental Conservation has been assembling and evaluating the public's response, which included a stinging analysis of the plan by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. DEC officials aren't saying when the final version of the review will be unveiled, but two department representatives, Yancey Roy and Maureen Wren, did agree to walk us through the process.

They said that since January, DEC employees have been entering handwritten or e-mailed comments into a computer database, along with transcribed comments from public hearings. Those comments are then broken into categories like "surface water" or "groundwater." Six people are currently involved in this part of the process, although at one point 13 people were spending four hours a day entering and sorting the comments.

After that comes the hard work -- actually diving into the substance of the comments to determine how the agency will respond. This department-wide effort involves all the DEC divisions with a stake in the drilling, including the divisions of Air Resources; Fish, Wildlife and Marine Resources; Solid and Hazardous Materials; and Water. Agencies outside the DEC, including the Department of Health and the state Energy Research and Development Authority, are also part of the process. Most of the work is being done by state employees, but in some cases independent consultants may be called in.

When all the comments have been reviewed, the agency will put together a "responsiveness summary," which addresses the comments and suggestions. If you've submitted a comment, don't hold your breath for a personal response -- but this is the section you should check to make sure your comment has been addressed.

DEC Commissioner Pete Grannis will use the responsiveness summary to decide whether to make any changes to the draft. Once any changes are incorporated, the final version will be released and will be used as the DEC's guideline for regulating the industry.

Although the state law that governs the environmental review process doesn't require the DEC to give the public an opportunity to comment on the final document, the agency has the option of doing that. At this point, the DEC says it's too early to say whether it will.

Gas Drillers Plead Guilty to Felony Dumping Violations

2010-02-22T10:59:57-05:00

by Sabrina Shankman, ProPublica -

Feb. 22: This post has been corrected.

Since Pennsylvania’s gas drilling boom ramped up in 2008, companies have been fined regularly for environmental accidents — $23,500 here for spilling 5,000 gallons of waste, $15,557 there for spilling 295 gallons of hydrochloric acid. The fines often amount to slaps on the wrist for companies that stand to make hefty profits from their wells.

But the penalties just got a lot more serious for an owner of Kansas-based Swamp Angel Energy and for the company’s site supervisor, who pleaded guilty last week to felony violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act.

As part of a plea agreement with the U.S. attorney for western Pennsylvania, part-owner Michael Evans, 66, of La Quinta, Calif., and John Morgan, 54, of Sheffield, Penn., admitted dumping 200,000 gallons of brine – salty wastewater that’s created in the drilling process – down an abandoned oil well. The maximum penalty for both Evans and Morgan is three years in prison, a fine of $250,000, or both. Sentencing will be June 24. Attorneys for both men declined to comment.

Swamp Angel Energy was drilling in the Allegheny National Forest, in McKean County in northwestern Pennsylvania, and the brine was dumped just outside the border of the federal land. In mid-December, a federal judge overturned a ruling that had essentially banned drilling in the Allegheny Forest.

According to Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection, which regulates oil and gas drilling, Swamp Angel has 77 active, permitted wells in Pennsylvania, all of them in McKean County. The company is also registered as a municipal and residential waste hauler in the state.

Although Swamp Angel’s well was drilled in a part of the state where the gas-rich Marcellus Shale extends, its well was drilled into a different geologic formation.

Disposing of drilling wastewater is a problem throughout the state, and it’s growing because of large amounts of wastewater produced by drilling in the Marcellus (you can read our coverage of the wastewater problem here). A Marcellus well can produce as much as 1.2 million gallons of wastewater, much of which is brine and can’t be treated in conventional municipal wastewater treatment plants. In the western United States, most drilling wastewater is injected deep into underground wells, but in the East, geology makes those wells trickier, and more expensive, to drill. Some plants in Pennsylvania are permitted to treat drilling wastewater, but most of them are already at capacity.

The lack of treatment options is expected to become even more critical in 2011, when the state has pledged to have stronger wastewater treatment regulations in place, forcing some plants that currently accept drilling wastewater to make expensive upgrades or to stop accepting it entirely.

Some companies are trying to solve the problem by recycling and reusing their wastewater. (With recycling, the industry is still left with dirty, hard-to-deal-with wastewater, but there’s less of it.)

But Swamp Angel Energy chose a different solution.

According to acting U.S. Attorney Robert Cessar, authorities learned about the illegal dumping from a tipster. The EPA found that empty drums had been buried on the site and removed them after determining that they had contained non-hazardous waste.

Regional EPA spokeswoman Terri White said the EPA didn’t test to see if area drinking water wells had been contaminated by the brine, because the nearest residential well is about a mile away.

"And the other factor that we considered is that where the two guys dumped the brine was an old oil well," she said. "It was a deep well, much deeper than the shallow aquifer where folks get their water."

White said the brine was left in the abandoned well.

Drilling industry representatives have been quick to condemn Swamp Angel’s actions. In a news release, Kathryn Klaber, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, said, "On behalf of the members of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, we are appalled by the actions of these two people and their disregard for Pennsylvania’s environmental laws."

Asked whether the felony charges would prohibit Swamp Angel Energy from receiving permits to drill more wells, DEP spokesman Neil Weaver said in an e-mail, "DEP must consider compliance history as a part of our regulatory review process. Environmental violations, including federal violations, could affect a company's ability to acquire and maintain permits, certifications, authorizations and licenses to do business within the Commonwealth."

The wastewater problem resurfaced with another fine this week, when the DEP fined the borough of Jersey Shore $75,000 after its wastewater treatment plant accepted more drilling wastewater than the state allowed. As a result, the plant discharged contaminants, including fecal matter, into the Susquehanna River between September 2008 and May 2009.

Correction: This post originally said that John Morgan was a subcontractor for Swamp Angel Energy. He should have been identified as the site supervisor. The story also implied that the Swamp Angel well was drilled into the Marcellus Shale. Although the well is located in the Marcellus Shale area, the story should have said that it was drilled into a different geologic formation.

Congress Launches Investigation Into Gas Drilling Practices

2010-02-19T10:33:56-05:00

by Sabrina Shankman and Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica -

Two of the largest companies involved in natural gas drilling have acknowledged pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of diesel-based fluids into the ground in the process of hydraulic fracturing, raising further concerns that existing state and federal regulations don't adequately protect drinking water from drilling.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., who released the information in a statement Thursday, announced that the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which he chairs, is launching an investigation into potential environmental impacts from hydraulic fracturing.

The process, which forces highly pressurized water, sand and chemicals into rock to release the gas and oil locked inside, gives drillers unprecedented access to deeply buried gas deposits and vastly increases the country's known energy reserves. But as ProPublica has detailed in more than 60 articles, the process comes with risks. The fluids used in hydraulic fracturing are laced with chemicals -- some of which are known carcinogens. And because the process is exempt from most federal oversight, it is overseen by state agencies that are spread thin and have widely varying regulations.

In 2004, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency examined hydraulic fracturing and determined it can be safe as long as diesel fuel isn't added to the drilling fluids. The agency based its decision in part on a non-binding agreement it struck with the three largest drilling service companies -- Halliburton, Schlumberger and B.J. Services -- to stop using diesel. But the agreement applied only to gas drilling in a specific type of geologic formation: shallow coal deposits. The EPA study has since been widely criticized.

The information obtained by Waxman's group shows that B.J. Services violated that agreement and that Halliburton continued to use diesel in other geologic formations not governed by the agreement. All three companies acknowledged using other potentially harmful chemicals, such as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene.

A memo (PDF) released by the Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday said B.J. Services acknowledged that between 2005 and 2007 it injected 2,500 gallons of diesel-based fuels into coal bed methane wells.

Jeff Smith, CFO for B.J. Services, told ProPublica the incidents in which diesel was used were isolated, and that the company has been vigilant in making sure that it has not been used since.

"The company has taken this very seriously," he said.

The memo said Halliburton reported using more than 807,000 gallons of diesel-based fuel to fracture wells in 15 states during the three-year period. But in a statement released Thursday night Halliburton said any suggestion that it had violated the agreement was "completely inaccurate," because none of the fuel was used in coal bed methane wells.

"Halliburton is firmly committed to full compliance" with the agreement, the statement said.

The information about the companies came from an investigation Waxman launched when he was chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform during the last Congress.

As part of the new investigation by the Energy and Commerce Committee, Waxman and subcommittee chairman Edward Markey, D-Mass., sent letters to eight companies, including Halliburton, B.J. Services and Schlumberger, asking for more information about the drilling process and the chemicals it requires. The five other companies -- Frac Tech Services, Superior Well Services, Universal Well Services, Sanjel Corp. and Calfrac Well Services – are smaller companies that make up a growing share of the market. They are not included in the 2003 memorandum of agreement with the EPA.

"As the use of these technologies expands, there needs to be oversight to ensure that their use does not threaten the public health of nearby communities," said the memo from Waxman and Markey.

The letters ask the companies for detailed information, including documentation of all the wells they hydraulically fractured from 2007 to 2009, the proximity of those wells to underground drinking water sources, the volumes and types of chemicals used in the process, and any health and environmental effects of the drilling. If the companies comply, the committee will have created the most complete picture to date of hydraulic fracturing.

Smith said B.J. Services will fully respond to the request. When asked if the company has used petroleum distillates and benzene in its drilling process, he said, "I'm not going to get into the details in terms of what the chemicals are." He said that the information will be disclosed in the company's response to the committee's letter.

Halliburton also said it will respond to the committee's request for information.

Schlumberger spokesman Stephen Harris said in an e-mail that officials at the company "have received the Committee's request and are reviewing it," but he declined to comment further.

New Gas Drilling Rules, More Staff for Pennsylvania’s Environmental Agency

2010-02-09T12:44:33-05:00

by Sabrina Shankman, ProPublica -

Feb. 9: This post has been updated.

For months, the gas drilling industry and environmentalists alike have been fixated on New York, waiting for its environmental agency to hash out final drilling regulations so companies can take advantage of the vast gas reserves buried there.

But now some of those expectations can shift to New York’s neighbor to the south, Pennsylvania, where Gov. Edward Rendell has announced that the Department of Environmental Protection will nearly double its enforcement staff, open a new office closer to the drilling action and release new drilling regulations of its own.

In December, when ProPublica surveyed all 31 drilling states, we found that Pennsylvania was part of a national trend – as gas drilling ramped up, inspection staffing levels didn’t keep pace.

In 2008, Pennsylvania had just 35 people to oversee 74,774 wells – that’s more than 2,000 wells per inspector. But unlike many states, as the industry grew in Pennsylvania, the state started to buck this trend, beefing up its enforcement staff to 76 in 2009.

Now, with the DEP expecting permits for drilling in the Marcellus Shale to more than double this year, Pennsylvania is preparing to add 68 more people to its Bureau of Oil and Gas Management. To pay for the expansion, the DEP will dip into the fees it charges for drilling permits, which it raised last year for the first time since 1984. A proposed extraction tax – which Rendell mentioned in a press release announcing the new positions and is expected to bring up in his annual budget address today – could cushion the department even more.

DEP spokesman Neil Weaver tells us that 45 of the new hires will be on the oil and gas enforcement staff, bringing the number of inspectors to 121, more than three times as many as it had just two years ago. To put that in perspective, in 2008, Texas, the largest drilling state, had an enforcement staff of 106 to oversee 263,704 wells, of which 16,569 were new and required the most oversight.

The governor has also announced the opening of a new satellite oil and gas office in Scranton – in the heart of the Marcellus Shale – where 10 of the new hires will be based.

Myron Arnowitt, Pennsylvania director of the citizens’ advocacy group Clean Water Action, offered a mixed review of the increase. "Obviously we’re glad to see that they’re continuing to increase the staff," he said, "but I do think there are some holes still, and some of it has to do with the funding process."

For this fiscal year, the DEP had more than a quarter of its budget cut. And when the state laid off 319 employees, the biggest hit – 138 positions – was dealt to the DEP. Another 120 vacant positions at the DEP were cut too, bringing the total department loss to 258 positions. Although the oil and gas division is adding positions because of the increased permit fees, that won’t help other divisions that are also involved in the drilling boom.

"There are other departments at DEP that are spending a lot of resources addressing the impacts of drilling," Arnowitt said. "Especially water management, which is issuing regulations, has an increase in wastewater plants applying, and water-related enforcement."

As drilling has ramped up in Pennsylvania, complaints about environmental problems have followed suit. Residents in Dimock had fields damaged from spills, and some believe that drilling caused the contamination of drinking water there. Elsewhere, the Monongahela River was contaminated by toxins from drilling wastewater, and there have been a slew of violations reported at drill sites across the state.

So along with the increased enforcement staff, Pennsylvania is revising its drilling regulations. The proposed regulations, which you can find here, strengthen well construction guidelines, hold drillers responsible for restoring or replacing water sources that are contaminated by drilling, and require drillers to notify DEP immediately if wells are over-pressurized, if casings are defective or if gas has migrated into drinking water sources.

The Marcellus Shale Coalition, which represents many of the drilling companies and industry interests in Pennsylvania, issued a news release supporting Rendell’s moves but declined to comment for this article.

The proposed regulation changes were released late last month and will be open to public comment until March 2. After the comments are reviewed, DEP’s Weaver explained, the department can make changes and submit a new version of the regulations to the Environmental Quality Board, which can either accept them or send them back to the department for revisions. If the board accepts the regulations, they will then be reviewed by several agencies (including state congressional committees, the Office of the Chief Counsel, the Independent Regulatory Review Commission and the state attorney general). Once they sign off, the regulations will be published in the Pennsylvania Bulletin and become enforceable.

The proposed revisions are on a smaller scale than New York’s, where the Department of Environmental Conservation is completely reworking its regulations. New York’s public comment period drew more than 12,000 responses, including a sharply worded technical review from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which expressed serious concerns about the effect that drilling could have on public health.

David Sternberg, a spokeswoman for the EPA’s mid-Atlantic region, said the EPA doesn’t plan to comment on Pennsylvania’s revisions. "The proposed regulations are to change their construction standards for gas well drilling," he said. "That’s something that EPA really doesn’t have jurisdiction over."

The drilling industry has special exemptions from seven federal environmental regulations, so most regulation falls to state agencies. But that may be about to change. Matching bills in Congress would make the industry accountable under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, and increasingly, the EPA is situating itself into the debate.

Late last month, the agency announced that it had created a tip line so the public could report "suspicious activity" related to drilling.

"Public concern about the environmental impacts of oil and natural gas drilling has increased in recent months, particularly regarding development of the Marcellus Shale formation where a significant amount of activity is occurring," said a press release announcing the tip line. "EPA wants to get a better understanding of what people are experiencing and observing as a result of these drilling activities. The information collected may also be useful in investigating industry practices."

Instructions for using the tip line can be found here.

Update: Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell proposed a tax on gas extraction in his 2010-2011 budget address today, projecting that it would result in $160.7 million in wellhead taxes in the coming fiscal year, rising to $1.8 billion over five years. (Check out Reuters' story on the budget here.) The proposed tax would be similar to West Virginia’s, which has a 5 percent severance tax and an additional tax of 4.7 cents per million cubic feet of gas produced.

Pennsylvania’s Gas Wells Booming—But So Are Spills

2010-01-27T16:08:13-05:00

by Sabrina Shankman, ProPublica -

As more gas wells are drilled in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale, more cases of toxic spills are being reported. Earlier this month, Pennsylvania's environmental officials fined Pennsylvania-based Atlas Resources after a series of violations at 13 wells, including spills of fracturing fluids and other contaminants onto the ground around the sites. And just last week the agency fined M.R. Dirt, a company that removes waste from drilling sites, $6,000 for spilling more than seven tons of drilling dirt along a public road.

The reports come on the heels of a string of other incidents that have killed fish in one of the state's most prized recreational lakes and released toxic chemicals into the environment.

The Atlas spills are significant because they are among the latest and because they happened repeatedly during the routine transfer of fluids. Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection fined Atlas Resources $85,000 for the offenses, which took place between May and December of 2009. Many of the spills were discovered by DEP inspectors.

The violations (PDF) cited by the DEP include spills of fluids from the hydraulic fracturing process at seven sites, and failure to report a spill at one of those sites. One spill was the result of a faulty pit liner, which is supposed to insulate the ground from hydraulic fracturing fluids after they are pumped out of a well.

Atlas Resources controls more than half a million acres within the Marcellus Shale, the massive gas deposit that stretches from Tennessee to New York. The company, whose total revenue was $787.4 million in 2008, issued a statement acknowledging that it had entered a voluntary settlement with the DEP and saying that each of the incidents had been corrected. An Atlas spokesman declined a request to answer additional questions about the violations, or about the company's operations in Pennsylvania.

"If you look at this series of violations -- it's not only that there are multiple violations," said DEP spokeswoman Helen Humphreys, pointing to the fact that the same three violations were turning up at each site. "This is a pattern, and it's a problem."

The pattern, and the problem, extend beyond Atlas.

In December the DEP fined Chesapeake and Schlumberger, two of the biggest operators in the Marcellus Shale and in gas development nationally, for spilling hydrochloric acid, which is used for hydraulic fracturing and is corrosive. Cabot Oil and Gas, a Houston-based energy company that lists T. Boone Pickens as one of its stockholders, was fined in November for a series of spills, including a fracturing fluid spill by its contractor Halliburton.

In October Pennsylvania fined (PDF) Texas-based Range Resources $23,500 for spilling nearly 5,000 gallons of wastewater, including hydraulic fracturing fluids, into a tributary of Cross Creek Lake, a protected watershed near Pittsburgh that contains some of the state's most robust fish populations.

A DEP report (PDF) on that spill said, "The creek was impacted by sediments all the way down to the lake and there was also evidence of a fish kill as invertebrates and fish were observed lying dead in the creek.”

The Range Resources spill occurred on May 26, when the company was pumping fluids from the hydraulic fracturing of three wells through a six-inch pipe to a DEP-approved impoundment. Along the way, two screws along the pipe came loose, according to the Range Resources report on the incident, allowing thousands of gallons to spill onto the ground before the company was able to shut it down.

Range Resources spokesman Matt Pitzarella said the loosened screws were a result of vandalism and that the company responded by increasing security at its sites. The fish killed in Cross Creek amounted to less than a pound of minnows, he said.

Just three weeks before the fines were announced, Range was penalized by the DEP for another accident -- this time for spilling more than 10,000 gallons of flowback water, which again resulted in a fish kill and a substantial cleanup effort. A DEP spokesman said he could not comment on that spill, because a settlement is still being decided.

"We find both of these to be unfortunate and unacceptable," said Pitzarella, who said that neither spill had any negative impacts on health or property.

Unlike previous spills -- including the recent Atlas spills -- the DEP has not issued press releases for either of the Range Resources spills, and a spokesman has not explained why.

Stricter Rules for Oil and Gas Leasing on Federal Land

2010-01-06T17:00:14-05:00

by Sabrina Shankman, ProPublica -

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has changed the procedures the Bureau of Land Management must follow before leasing federal land for oil and gas drilling, sending a message that the Department of the Interior aims to reverse some energy policies of the Bush administration.

"The previous Administration's 'anywhere, anyhow' policy on oil and gas development ran afoul of communities, carved up the landscape, and fueled costly conflicts that created uncertainty for investors and industry," Salazar said in a news release. The BLM, which is part of the Department of the Interior, regulates oil and gas on the 256 million acres of federal land it manages.

The reformed policy, which Salazar announced earlier today, will require more detailed reviews before leases are issued, will allow for more public involvement in developing master leasing and development plans, and will shift the focus of new drilling toward areas already being developed. The reforms also create an Energy Reform Team to identify and implement the reforms.

In the past, BLM has used categorical exclusions to approve leases, allowing leases to be rubber-stamped based on existing environmental analysis rather than relying on new reviews. Based on today's announcement, BLM will no longer be allowed to use those exclusions in cases of "extraordinary circumstances" -- meaning drilling that could impact protected species, historic or cultural resources, or human health and safety.

"Restoring balance to an agency that was out of whack for years is a good move," said Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "It means [the BLM is] not just going to lease a parcel because the industry wants it."

She added that while the announcement is a positive one, it remains to be seen whether the reforms will be adequately implemented.

The Department of Interior has created a side-by-side analysis (PDF) of current BLM policy and the proposed reform, and has posted a fact sheet (PDF) on the changes.

Montana Gas and Oil Regulatory Actions on the Rise

2010-01-05T13:51:32-05:00

by Sabrina Shankman, ProPublica -

Last week, ProPublica rolled out a database tracking natural gas drilling and regulation in each of the 32 drilling states in the country, focusing on the 22 that supplied the most complete data.

We've updated the database to include Montana's gas and oil enforcement actions, which you can check out here. Montana shows an overall growth in enforcement actions -- with a 95 percent increase from 2003 to 2009. During the same period, Montana added just one enforcement staff member, bringing its ranks to six, while the number of new wells drilled between 2003 and 2008 increased 7 percent.

That's contrary to what we found in many other drilling states, where the number of new wells skyrocketed while the number of enforcement staff and enforcement actions either stayed the same or grew only slightly.

We'll continue to update the database as states report their 2009 final numbers, so stay tuned.

Natural Gas Drilling: What We Don’t Know

2009-12-31T14:48:40-05:00

by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica -

It takes brute force to wrest natural gas from the earth. Millions of gallons of chemical-laden water mixed with sand -- under enough pressure to peel paint from a car -- are pumped into the ground, pulverizing a layer of rock that holds billions of small bubbles of gas.

The chemicals transform the fluid into a frictionless mass that works its way deep into the earth, prying open tiny cracks that can extend thousands of feet. The particles of sand or silicon wedge inside those cracks, holding the earth open just enough to allow the gas to slip by.

Gas drilling is often portrayed as the ultimate win-win in an era of hard choices: a new, 100-year supply of cleaner-burning fuel, a risk-free solution to the nation’s dependence on foreign energy. In the next 10 years, the United States will use the fracturing technology to drill hundreds of thousands of new wells astride cities, rivers and watersheds. Cash-strapped state governments are pining for the revenue and the much-needed jobs that drilling is expected to bring to poor, rural areas.

Drilling companies assert that the destructive forces unleashed by the fracturing process, including the sometimes toxic chemicals that keep the liquid flowing, remain safely sealed as much as a mile or more beneath the earth, far below drinking water sources and the rest of the natural environment.

More than a year of investigation by ProPublica, however, shows that the issues are far less settled than the industry contends, and that hidden environmental costs could cut deeply into the anticipated benefits.

The technique used to extract the gas, known as hydraulic fracturing, has not received the same scientific scrutiny as the processes used for many other energy sources.

For example, it remains unclear how far the tiny fissures that radiate through the bedrock from hydraulic fracturing might reach, or whether they can connect underground passageways or open cracks into groundwater aquifers that could allow the chemical solution to escape into drinking water. It is not certain that the chemicals – some, such as benzene, that are known to cause cancer – are adequately contained by either the well structure beneath the earth or by the people, pipelines and trucks that handle it on the surface. And it is unclear how the voluminous waste the process creates can be disposed of safely.

“This is a field where there is almost no research,” said Geoffrey Thyne, a former professor at the Colorado School of Mines and an environmental engineering consultant for local government officials in Colorado. “It is very much an emerging problem.”

The lack of scientific certainty about hydraulic fracturing can be traced in part to the drilling industry’s success in persuading Congress to leave regulation of the process to the states, which often lack manpower and funding to do complex studies of underground geology. As a consequence, regulations vary wildly across the country and many basic questions remain unanswered.

ProPublica has uncovered more than a thousand reports of water contamination from drilling across the country, some from surface spills and some from seepage underground. In many instances the water is contaminated with compounds found in the fluids used in hydraulic fracturing. ProPublica also found dozens of homes in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Colorado in which gas from drilling had migrated through underground cracks into basements or wells.

But most of these problems have been blamed on peripheral problems that could be associated with hydraulic fracturing – like well failures or leaks – without a rigorous investigation of the entire process.

ProPublica has also found that drilling procedures that can prevent water pollution and sharply reduce toxic air emissions – another frequent side effect -- are seldom required by state regulators and are mostly practiced when and where the industry wishes.

Another uncertainty arises from the enormous amounts of water needed for “fracking.” The government estimates that companies will drill at least 32,000 new gas wells annually by 2012. That could mean more than 100 billion gallons of hazardous fluids will be used and disposed of each year if existing techniques, which often involve 4 million gallons of water per well, are used.

Proposals for new regulations that might prevent many of these problems almost always lead to a fight. And more often than not, that fight devolves into stark, overdrawn choices between turning on the lights or having clean drinking water; getting rich or staying poor.

Energy lobbyists portray skeptics as hysterical and would-be-regulators as over-reaching. Environmentalists cast the dangers as more proven than is the case, and as unsolvable.

In less contentious settings, even the industry acknowledges the lack of science on key issues.

In a conference call with reporters this spring, American Petroleum Institute senior policy advisor Richard Ranger – an industry expert who has spoken frequently on the fracturing issue -- was asked for evidence that fracturing is without environmental risk:

“Have there been any recent studies done on the safety of this?” a reporter asked.

“The issue of where do these fracking fluids go, the answer is based on the geology being drilled,” Ranger said. “You’ve got them trapped somewhere thousands of feet below with the only pathway out being the well bore.

“I’m just not sure that that study is out there,” Ranger said.

“To be clear, we are saying this is a totally safe technology but we can’t point to any recent studies that say this is a safe technology?” the reporter asked.

“Or that says it is unsafe,” Ranger replied.

ProPublica reporters have posed similar questions to more than 40 academic experts, scientists, industry officials, and federal and state regulators. No one has yet provided a more definitive response.

ProPublica’s reporting over the last year points to four looming questions:

Where are the gaps in the environmental science and what will it take to address them?

How will the wastewater be safely disposed of?

Are regulations in place to make sure the gas is extracted as safely as possible?

And are state and federal regulatory agencies equipped to keep up with the pace of drilling?

“Most likely there are not a lot of win-win propositions,” said David Burnett, a scientist at Texas A&M University’s Global Petroleum Research Institute who specializes in industry practices to reduce environmental harm. But, he said, there is opportunity for compromise on enough issues “so that everybody wins sometimes.”

What We Think We Know

Drilling industry officials say they use a slew of engineering techniques – from sonar to magnetic resonance imaging – to study the underground explosions and strictly control the reach of hydraulic fracturing.

They say that the actual fracturing happens thousands of feet from water supplies and below layers of impenetrable rock that seals the world above from what happens down below.

Yet there are reasons for concern. Even if layers of rock can seal water supplies from the layer where fluid is injected, the gas well itself creates an opening in that layer. The well bore is supposed to be surrounded by cement, but often there are large empty pockets or the cement itself cracks under pressure. In many instances, the high pressure of the fluids being injected into the ground has created leaks of gas – and sometimes fluids – into surrounding water supplies.

A recent regional government study in Colorado concluded that the same methane gas tapped by drilling had migrated into dozens of water wells, possibly through natural faults and fissures exacerbated by hydraulic fracturing.

Dennis Coleman, a geologist in Illinois, has seen an example where methane gas has seeped underground for more than seven miles – several times what industry spokespeople say should be possible. He is a leading international expert on molecular testing whose company, Isotech Laboratories, does scientific research for government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and the oil and gas industry.

“There is no such thing as impossible in terms of migration,” Coleman said. “Like everything else in life it comes down to the probability. It is never a hard and fast thing.”

In another case, benzene, a chemical sometimes found in drilling additives, was discovered throughout a 28-mile long aquifer in Wyoming.

“It is common knowledge that the lower layers are full of irregularities and inconsistencies,” said Patrick Jacobson, a rig worker who manages drilling fluid pumps and has worked on Wyoming drilling projects for more than 20 years. “I think anybody who works in the oil fields, if they tell you the truth, would tell you the same thing.”

Scientists have found it difficult to determine whether hydraulic fracturing is responsible for these problems. In large part that’s because the identities of the chemicals used in the fluids have been tightly held as trade secrets, so scientists don’t know precisely what to look for when they sample polluted streams and taps.

Drilling companies disclose enough information to comply with labor regulations meant to keep workers safe, but that information normally consists of a product trade name and rarely includes a complete list of the chemicals it contains.

Recently, this has begun to change.

In September, New York State – as part of a lengthy environmental review meant to assess the risks of fracturing – made public a comprehensive list of 260 chemicals used in drilling fluids, which it had compiled from disclosures it required drilling companies to make. And several companies themselves have begun to advocate for more disclosure, in the hope that transparency may quell the public outcry that has kept them from drilling in valuable parts of New York State.

Chesapeake Energy, which last year told ProPublica that the chemicals are kept secret because “it is like Coke protecting its syrup formula,” now says that disclosure would bring honest discussion.

“We as an industry need to demystify,” Chesapeake’s CEO, Aubrey McClendon, said at an industry conference in September, “and be very upfront about what we are doing, disclose the chemicals that we are using, search for alternatives to some of the chemicals.”

What is now needed most, according to scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere, is a rigorous scientific study that tracks the fracturing process and attempts to measure its reach into underground water supplies.

In Wyoming EPA scientists with the Superfund program are conducting the first federal investigation of this kind, sampling available water sources and looking for any traces of the chemicals used in drilling. But Colorado’s Thyne says a proper study would go a step further.

“The critical thing that has to be done is a systematic sampling of the background prior to drilling activity, during and after drilling activity,” Thyne said, “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 ballpark $10 million. It’s a relatively small project for the U.S. Geological Survey or the EPA to undertake.”

Where Should the Waste Go?

On the East coast, one of the most important unanswered questions about drilling is how to dispose of the chemically tainted wastewater that hydraulic fracturing produces.

Most drilling wastewater in other parts of the country is stored in underground injection wells that are regulated by EPA under the Safe Drinking Water Act. However the geology in the East makes injection less viable, and less common. In New York and Pennsylvania, millions of gallons of drilling wastewater could eventually be produced each day.

That wastewater will likely be trucked to treatment plants that don’t routinely test for most of the chemicals the wastewater contains and that may not be equipped to remove them. Currently, the plants also can’t remove the high levels of Total Dissolved Solids found in drilling wastewater – a mixture of salts, metals and minerals – that can increase the salinity of fresh water streams and interfere with the biological treatment process at sewage treatment plants, allowing untreated waste to flow into waterways. High TDS levels also can harm industrial and household equipment and affect the color and taste of water.

After the wastewater passes through the treatment plants it is dumped back into public waterways that supply drinking water to at least 27 million Americans, including residents of Philadelphia and New York City. But without identification and routine testing for the problematic chemicals, it will be impossible to know how much of them are making their way to drinking water sources, or how they are accumulating over time. Evolving medical science says low-dose exposure to some of those chemicals could have much greater health effects than the EPA or doctors have previously thought.

“Managing produced water has always seemed like one of the large challenges, because this area geologically doesn’t have the extensive network of underground injection wells,” said Lee Fuller, vice president of government relations for the Independent Petroleum Association of America. “One challenge that industry has got is looking at developing [treatment] technology, which could be very costly.”

All Equal Under the Law

The gas industry, and hydraulic fracturing, is subject to widely different laws in different states. Some of those laws are tough, perhaps burdening the drilling industry unnecessarily. Others are lenient, perhaps leaving much of the country subject to environmental danger.

One thing is certain: There is no national standard for an industrial process that is used prolifically in 32 states and will be used even more in the future.

Gas drillers receive special exemptions from seven federal environmental regulations that apply to countless other industrial activities across the country.

Drilling companies are not required, for example, to report the discharge of toxic chemicals for the Toxics Release Inventory under the Superfund law – including the wastewater that threatens Eastern water supplies. They do not have to comply with the section of the Clean Water Act that regulates pollutants at construction sites. And they don’t have to abide by the Clean Air Act, which regulates industrial emissions.

Gas drilling also has its own individual exemption, approved by Congress during the George W. Bush administration, that explicitly prohibits the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating hydraulic fracturing under the Safe Drinking Water Act, the way the agency regulates almost all other types of underground fluid injection, including those injection wells used for wastewater in the West.

The argument behind these exceptions is that state regulations sufficiently protect the environment from drilling. But the result is that drilling regulation is left to a patchwork of state laws.

A recent report by the Ground Water Protection Council, a research group that once had energy executives on its board but now consists mainly of state regulators, revealed that only four of the 31 drilling states it surveyed have regulations that directly address hydraulic fracturing and that no state requires companies to track the volume of chemicals left underground. One in five states don’t require that the concrete casing used to contain wells be tested before hydraulic fracturing. And more than half the states allow waste pits that hold toxic fluids from fracturing to intersect with the water table, even though waste pits have been connected to hundreds of cases of water contamination.

Although energy companies have developed many techniques that can reduce the spills and seepages that have occurred across the country, they are usually left to implement them when and if they choose, meaning protections can be entirely different between drilling fields a couple of miles apart.

In northern Pennsylvania, for example, drillers do not have to supply regulators with a complete list detailing every chemical they will pump underground, while 15 miles away, in New York, state authorities have said that such disclosure is a must because it is essential to protecting the water.

Many scientists and members of Congress are arguing for a sturdier national standard that would require minimum environmental protections and ensure that a national energy policy based on natural gas extraction can be pursued without jeopardizing the country’s other natural resources.

“What we’re talking about is just putting some basic parameters around it,” said Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo. “If companies are able to operate within those parameters… then that’s fine. If they can’t economically do that, then that is because they are causing more damage than they are creating value, and they probably shouldn’t be operating in the first place.”

Polis is one of 50 sponsors of the FRAC Act, a bill before Congress that would restore the EPA’s authority to regulate hydraulic fracturing under the Safe Drinking Water Act and would require the disclosure of the chemical additives.

Congress also recently asked the EPA to conduct a new peer-reviewed study of hydraulic fracturing’s effect on water resources, reassessing its old position.

On Wednesday, the EPA voiced its most explicit concerns in a decade about the environmental risks presented by drilling, in its response to New York State’s plan for drilling in the Marcellus Shale, the layer of rock stretching from central New York to Tennessee. The agency said it had “serious reservations” about whether hydraulic fracturing was safe to do inside the New York City watershed and urged the state to consider possible threats to public health.

EPA scientists have also told ProPublica that the study suggested by Congress may soon be underway. If that research is coupled with a congressional reversal of the exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act, hydraulic fracturing could eventually be regulated like any other injection well in the U.S. That would require, among other things, thorough testing of the rock miles below the surface to confirm that it can safely contain whatever is injected into it – a stipulation that addresses some of the uncertainty and is inconsistently found in state drilling laws.

EPA regulation “would essentially create a base level,” said Steve Heare, director of the EPA's Drinking Water Protection Division in Washington. Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, states “would basically have to make a showing that their regulations were as effective as ours.”

Better Policing

All the laws and protections in the world won’t ensure that drilling can be done safely if effective enforcement isn’t in place to oversee it.

Yet for all the debate about environmental protections, new laws and national benefits, very little emphasis has been placed on bolstering the agencies that issue drilling permits and go out into the field to make sure the processes are done right.

ProPublica’s recent analysis of 22 states that account for the vast majority of the country’s drilling found that regulatory staffing has not kept up with the drilling boom, meaning that the nation’s ability to enforce rules that provide environmental safeguards is systematically weakening.

New York, one of the hot spots expected to supply this gas-based national energy paradigm, has cut its oil and gas regulatory inspection staff 20 percent since 2003, even while it has approved a 676 percent increase in the number of new wells being drilled each year. Other states have added a few people, but almost none have kept up with the crushing pace of new drilling.

In West Virginia, the third most active gas drilling state in the nation, four new enforcement employees have been hired since 2003, but each inspector is still responsible for some 3,300 wells.

“Crisis management is not the best management in the world and we had to deal with crisis management 90 percent of the time,” said Jerry Tephabock, a former head of state oil and gas inspections in West Virginia who retired in 2007. “There were wells out there that had been drilled that have never been inspected in 15 to 20 years.”

Even if states manage to keep staff levels where they are now – a challenge since 39 states have projected budget deficits for 2010 – the growth that would come from placing more emphasis on natural gas as a part of the nation’s energy strategy may still present sizable risks for both the environment and the economy. Either enforcement would have to slacken, or the permitting of new wells would slow so much that it would stifle the economic growth and energy independence that drilling is expected to bring.

Different states are choosing different paths. Texas regulators promise they will issue new permits to drill within 72 hours, even though their regulator-to-well ratio is one of the most demanding in the nation. New York, in contrast, has pledged to bring new drilling to a crawl until its staff can catch up.

Neither approach addresses the scientific or regulatory gaps that represent drilling’s long-term threats to the environment, however. And it remains to be seen whether politicians and environmental regulators will make sure precautions are taken at the beginning of this new energy boom, or if they will leave the nation to clean up the mess after the boom goes bust, as it has had to do so many times in the past.

ProPublica reporters Joaquin Sapien and Sabrina Shankman contributed to this report.

Interactive: Search Gas Drilling Data in Your State

2009-12-30T13:21:44-05:00

by Jeff Larson, ProPublica -

As part of our report on the strain that the nationwide boom in gas drilling has placed on state regulators, we collected and analyzed drilling records for the past six years from all 32 oil and gas producing states. (We focused on the 22 states with the most complete data.) We’ve put it all up as a pretty, interactive feature so you can look at the data and see how it changed from year to year.

Look up gas drilling data for your state.

State Oil and Gas Regulators Are Spread Too Thin to Do Their Jobs

2009-12-30T12:38:08-05:00

by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica -

Larry Parrish knew something was wrong as soon as he wheeled his state-owned pickup off the West Virginia highway and onto the rocky field where the natural gas well was supposed to be. Oak trees 18 inches in diameter looked dead as boards, and brush as brown as kindling stretched across a piece of farmland the size of a football field.

The dead zone in this otherwise lush mountain country meant one thing to Parrish: Gas drillers had been illegally dumping briny water mixed with chemicals, and the waste had killed everything from the rusty well head all the way downhill into a creek. The worst part, Parrish said, was that the devastation could have been avoided if the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection had had enough inspectors to make sure the state's growing number of gas wells were checked regularly.

"It was sad -- sickening," said Parrish, a former field inspector for the DEP's office of oil and gas. "It probably had been years since anybody had been out there."

West Virginia has added a handful of people to oversee its growing drilling industry since Parrish retired in 2006, but other than that not much has changed. For the state's 17 inspectors to visit West Virginia's 55,222 wells once a year, they would have to inspect nine wells a day, every day of the year -- no weekends, no vacations.

"We are doing what we can do," said Gene Smith, a regulatory compliance manager for West Virginia. "But that still leaves thousands of wells that are not inspected yearly or even every decade."

Regulators in other states are equally overwhelmed as they try to keep tabs on the nation's nearly one million active oil and gas wells, a number that's likely to climb as the feverish growth in natural gas exploration continues.

Search ProPublica's database to find how many gas regulators work in your state.

A ProPublica investigation comparing the rapid expansion of drilling in 22 states with staffing levels at the agencies charged with policing the wells found that the nation's capacity to enforce its environmental protections is weakening. The picture strikes at the heart of the industry's long-standing argument that state regulatory agencies will be more effective industry watchdogs than the federal government.

While the number of new oil and gas wells being drilled in the 22 states each year has jumped 45 percent since 2004, most of the states have added only a few regulators. Those with the widest gaps are Texas, which is already grappling with the most drilling, and New York, which is expected to soon have the fastest rate of growth.

As regulators' workloads have grown, enforcement actions -- the number of times violations were recorded and acted on -- have dropped in many states, often by more than half. That could mean companies are complying with the law -- or that inspectors aren't checking the wells.

"You just can't do it, physically," said Parrish, who received a $31,000 salary and said he was chronically overworked. "You've got to put out the hottest fires and there was a lot of stuff that slipped through the cracks because no one was looking."

The imbalance between drilling growth and regulatory staffing levels could become a crucial factor as lawmakers and the public weigh how much environmental damage to expect in exchange for the benefits brought by the drilling boom. Thanks in large part to advances in drilling technology, estimates for the amount of natural gas held underneath parts of the United States have increased by 35 percent since 2007 and are now believed to be plentiful enough to meet the nation's needs for more than 100 years. As a result, drilling is expanding rapidly, including in the Marcellus Shale, the layer of rock that stretches from central New York, underneath West Virginia to Tennessee.

The boom, however, has brought complaints of water and air pollution. Modern gas drilling in particular has drawn scrutiny because it relies on hydraulic fracturing, a process that injects millions of gallons of chemically infused water underground and produces large volumes of waste. The industry has fended off efforts to establish stricter regulations in part with its argument that the current state oversight is effective.

What it takes to enforce regulations, and whether authorities have enough resources to get the job done, are questions that rarely enter the debate.

"Not having eyeballs on the ground is horrendous," said Jim Baca, who served during the Clinton administration as director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that oversees more than 85,000 oil and gas wells on federal land. "If you don't enforce the law, the industry will do whatever they think they can get away with."

Spokesmen for state and federal regulatory agencies defend their effectiveness and caution that the picture is more nuanced than mathematical equations can convey. They say that they are working to improve efficiency in their departments and that the number of inspectors alone doesn't always reflect enforcement because staffers can be shifted to meet urgent priorities. Employees might have capacity in their workload to absorb much of the growth in drilling that is taking place, they say.

"They may have to work a little harder," said Stuart Gruskin, New York's executive deputy commissioner for environmental conservation, about staffing in his state. "It's like any other business. You can adjust from a management perspective how you utilize your resources until you reach the point where you are not doing a good enough job."

The New York State public employees union disagrees. "Attempting to have them do even more with less is not possible," it said this week in a statement calling for delaying the expansion of drilling for at least a year because of, among other things, what it called understaffing at the Department of Environmental Conservation and other state agencies.

The Lone Star Record

No state has more drilling than Texas, which has 273,660 wells and just 106 regulators to oversee them.

As in most states, regulators for the Railroad Commission of Texas, the agency that is charged with oil and gas regulation, are kept busy by a broad range of responsibilities. They police gas wells, oil wells, waste injection wells, disposal pits, compressor stations and access roads. The wells can be spread across hundreds of miles, sometimes peppered throughout difficult-to-access terrain, with limited cell phone or computer access, heavy rains and rough roads requiring four-wheel drive.

Regulators also approve new permits -- and try to do it fast enough to not saddle the companies applying for them with extra costs. They visit new wells several times during construction and old wells before they are shut in, or sealed. They are obligated to quickly respond to all complaints, which can range from an unauthorized flaring of emissions or gases to a spill of hazardous fluids.

Eighty-three of Texas' regulatory staffers conduct field inspections, according to the commission, meaning each person is responsible for almost 3,300 wells, many of them requiring several visits in a year.

As in West Virginia, keeping up with the workload is nearly impossible.

"It's one of the worst-kept secrets around the state that the wells that are ostensibly checked once a year aren't," said Jeff Weems, a Houston attorney who specializes in the energy industry and is running for the top job at the Texas Railroad Commission. "They could double the number of inspectors and still be straining their staff to do their job."

In late 2007, a Texas state auditor's report (PDF) examined the Railroad Commission's enforcement record and found that nearly half of the state's wells hadn't been inspected in the five years between 2001 and 2006, when the data was collected. (It also said regulators' routine acceptance of gifts from the companies they police raised questions about their objectivity and conflicts of interest, and the commission imposed a $50 limit on gifts as a result.)

In Texas, as in most states, regulators prioritize their work to make sure the most essential inspections get done. Complaints and spills top the list, along with new well construction.

But the Texas auditor's report found that 30 percent of all spills were inspected "either late or not at all."

"It is quite clear to management that inspecting 100 percent of these notices ... is not possible with current resources," the Railroad Commission wrote in its response to the audit. "To the extent resources become available in future legislative sessions, the Commission could witness more activities."

A spokeswoman for the commission said its workload decreased when drilling activity slowed in 2008, so the staffing situation has improved. She said the agency conducted 128,270 inspections in 2009, and visits every site it deems essential.

"Texas has maintained and will continue to maintain a strong enforcement effort for our environmental rules, regulations and policies," the spokeswoman, Stacie Fowler, said in an e-mail.

But the commission's Web site also makes clear that facilitating energy production is a priority and the state won't slow drilling while inspections catch up. It advertises the current waiting period for approval of new drilling permits: three days.

According to ProPublica's analysis, the number of new wells drilled each year in Texas has jumped 75 percent since 2003. However, staffing increased just 5 percent during that period and enforcement actions increased only 6 percent.

Records show that the Railroad Commission's budget for monitoring and inspections has decreased 10 percent since 2005. Fowler said the agency had requested more staffing from the state legislature at least three times in the last five years and been turned down every time.

From the industry's view, the paucity of enforcement staffing sometimes means it is up to the drilling companies to follow the rules as best they can.

"I never saw a Railroad Commissioner on one of the sites," said Dale Henry, a hydraulic fracturing expert who worked in Texas for the global services company Schlumberger for several decades. Henry said companies abided by the law whether regulators were there or not, but he also said the normal work schedule meant that they often avoided regulators. Inspectors worked 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, and "all the work in the field is done by operators between 5 p.m. and 6 a.m. and on weekends."

A Schlumberger spokesman said that the company works closely with regulators and that it is the nature of the process to work through the night.

Even when regulators do inspect problematic sites, the oversight can be patchy.

In September 2007, a field inspector working in the Barnett Shale outside of Fort Worth made a routine stop at an underground injection disposal well site. His formal report (PDF) found no problems and stated: "Well area clean."

Inspectors returned 61 days later after a resident complained of spilled oil, overflowing dikes and green-colored fluid in standing puddles. According to their report (PDF), they found that "oil-stained soil" had seeped several inches into the ground around a large tank, that the "containment dike will not hold estimated capacity" and that standing rainwater had oil in it.

When asked about the discrepancy, Fowler, the Railroad Commission spokeswoman, said conditions can change at a site on a daily basis. But Fowler did not address perhaps the most remarkable finding in the inspectors' report (PDF): State records showed that the well site was not being used, when in fact it was actively being injected with hazardous waste.

"We looked at some records and found that the well was never technically shut in," said Charles Morris, the now-retired inspector who wrote the second report about the troubled well. "That happens all the time in the field, too. I hate to say it, but the commission, sometimes their record keeping is not what it should be."

Part of a Pattern

Texas' staffing challenges match a pattern across the states where drilling is most active.

The number of new wells drilled in West Virginia increased 53 percent from 2003 to 2008. Since 2003 its regulatory staffing increased 20 percent. Enforcement actions, meanwhile, remained relatively constant, though they temporarily dropped by more than half during a peak in drilling in 2007.

North Dakota saw a 987 percent increase in new wells drilled each year since 2003, but took 13 percent fewer enforcement actions, even though it added five regulators.

In Ohio, where the number of new wells drilled each year doubled between 2003 and 2008, four new staffers were hired but the number of formal actions dropped 33 percent.

Not every state saw a drop in enforcement actions.

In Pennsylvania, a state with intensive new Marcellus Shale drilling, state regulators doubled their enforcement staffing last year. Between 2003 and 2009 enforcement actions increased by 60 percent.

Of the 21 states that supplied data on their enforcement actions, five substantially increased those actions even as their staff-to-well ratio lagged. In Louisiana, for example, staffing was flat or falling until 2007, when more inspectors were hired and enforcement actions began shooting up. As a result, the state took almost twice as many enforcement actions between 2003 and 2008, even though the overall staff growth was just 3 percent and the number of new wells drilled annually more than doubled.

The federal government, which separately regulates a large proportion of the drilling on federal land in Western states, is also struggling to police its territory. It has seen a 31 percent increase in drilling since 2003.

A 2005 report (PDF) from the U.S. Government Accountability Office said that the Bureau of Land Management's ability to meet its obligations had been lessened by intense growth, and that "staff had to devote increased time to processing drilling permits, leaving less time for mitigation activities, such as environmental inspections."

The agency has significantly expanded its staffing since then. But even so, a 2009 analysis of its enforcement activity by the Western Organization of Resource Councils, a group of environmental organizations, found that the agency issued fewer enforcement actions in 2007, the last year for which data was available, than it did in 1999.

The analysis, which focused on BLM enforcement and inspection in five Western states, found that BLM inspectors spent a third less time on environmental inspections and completed only 15 percent of the highest-priority inspections. In Farmington, N.M., for example, BLM inspectors completed just 82 of 1,257 high-priority inspections. In Buffalo, Wyo., they finished just 136 of 3,527 red-flag jobs, according to a federal database.

"If you ask any BLM staff who has been dealing with the oil and gas industry, they admit they don't have the staff do deal with this. It hasn't been a priority," said Daniel Patterson, an Arizona state representative and southwest regional director for the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which works to convey confidential views of its government employee members. "It's pretty much up to the operator to decide if they are going to operate legally or if they are going to cut corners that lead to more pollution. That's a problem."

State and federal regulatory officials say that there is no such thing as a proper ratio of enforcement actions to wells, and that there is no way to measure how effective informal warnings between inspectors and operators are as a deterrent. Such warnings are not recorded in regulators' statistics. They also say there are myriad ways to increase the effectiveness of their oversight, including investing in new technology that improves efficiency and writing stronger laws.

Colorado, which has seen a 149 percent increase in the number of wells drilled each year since 2003, is one state that has done both.

In 2006 the state hired several new inspectors and began computerizing its records and equipping field regulators with laptops full of everything from well histories to violations. In April the state instituted new drilling regulations that are widely seen as some of the toughest in the country.

"We now have more prescriptive rules and policies, which will help to prevent problems that could otherwise evolve into violations triggering the need for enforcement," said David Neslin, director of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

Whether that is enough to do the job remains to be seen. One new hire is Chuck Browning, who came on eight months ago as a field inspector for the northwest part of the state and said the magnitude of the job can be overwhelming. With two other inspectors, Browning shares responsibility for some 25,000 wells. He bounces back and forth between the Utah and Wyoming borders, tallying 17,000 miles on his Trailblazer since March.

"I'm off in some far-flung remote area of the country side and there's thousands of wells around me," said Browning, a former geologist who has worked in the oil industry for 20 years. "I just pick my way out of the woods knocking them out as best I can."

Not long ago, Browning was wandering through the Rangely field -- an eight-mile wide swath of oil, gas and injection wells that stick up out of the brown arid plain of Northern Colorado like candles in a cake -- when he stumbled on an unmarked open pipe jutting out of the dirt. Gas fumes wavered six inches in the air and when Browning dropped a pebble into the hole, he heard a kurplunk as it struck liquid. Abandoned wells are supposed to be capped and dry -- but this one was about to overflow.

In his truck he fired up his laptop, accessing topographic maps, records and aerial photos of some 88,000 wells across the state, searching for this one. But it didn't appear anywhere.

"I still absolutely have no idea how many wells are up in Rangely. It's well over 1,000," he said. "This one is definitely a potential hazard."

It was the kind of puzzle that can take a day to sort through, and at least another day to bring in the equipment and crews to begin to take care of the abandoned well. It's a wild card that can play havoc with the 10-wells-per-day inspection schedule Browning and so many other regulators are forced to keep.

New York State

If Texas and Colorado -- the first- and eighth-ranked states in the country for number of natural gas wells -- can provide a lesson, states like New York may have the most to learn.

New York, which sits atop the Marcellus Shale, has found itself at the epicenter of the nation's drilling boom and the epicenter of the debate over drilling's effect on the environment. The state's relatively small oil and gas division currently oversees some 13,684 wells, but it is under intense pressure from drilling companies, which would like to see thousands more wells drilled.

Chesapeake Energy, one of the nation's largest natural gas companies, has gobbled up more than a half a million acres of land leases in New York, and earlier this month Exxon said it would pay $31 billion for XTO Energy, a gas company that also holds extensive rights to drill in Pennsylvania and West Virginia's Marcellus Shale.

The state has delayed that development, however, to study the environmental consequences of hydraulic fracturing and investigate a chorus of objections from people who fear that drilling will contaminate drinking water. Just last week New York City called for a ban on drilling inside its watershed, citing a consultant's report that said it could jeopardize the drinking water for nine million residents.

At the same time, however, Gov. David Paterson, reeling from one of the worst state financial shortfalls in the nation, has made gas development a cornerstone of his draft energy plan.

New York regulators say that they have a better environmental record than most states when it comes to regulating oil and gas, and that a suite of proposed rules will put the state's drilling laws on par with Colorado's. Yet New York is the only state examined by ProPublica that has cut its regulatory staffing in recent years. Since 2003 New York's Department of Environmental Conservation has reduced its oil and gas division field inspector staffing by 20 percent (its overall enforcement-related staff, when including management and office positions, dropped 10 percent), stoking concerns that when the drilling kicks into high gear, the state will suffer the same sort of problems that have plagued West Virginia and Texas.

Gruskin, the New York DEC's executive deputy commissioner, says that the agency is committed to good oversight and that energy companies that want to drill in New York will simply have to adapt to the agency's pace.

"It's going to go slow. Very slow," he said. "If we only have a certain number of inspectors available in that region, people are going to have to wait until they are available. And that's just reality, that's the way it's going to be.”

But Gruskin's promise not to let drilling outpace his headcount doesn't match the recent past. Even as the regulatory staffing was being reduced, the DEC allowed a 676 percent increase in new wells drilled each year, a statistic that makes New York one of the fastest-growing drilling states in the nation. Meanwhile, the state's 16 field inspectors took only three more enforcement actions against drilling companies in 2008 than they did in 2003.

If the flat enforcement statistics were a problem, Gruskin said, the number of spills and environmental problems would have gone up -- something he points out hasn't happened.

And unless it does, the state appears content to play chicken.

"I don't think the industry believes that our resources have become so thin that they are not going to get caught." Gruskin said. "There are a lot of eyes on what is going on."

ProPublica reporter Sabrina Shankman contributed to this report. So did ProPublica's director of research Lisa Schwartz and researcher Kitty Bennett.