Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) may be at the center of current debate in states that are experiencing a shale gas boom, but it will remain an important part of the industry and can be performed safely, according to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

“I think hydraulic fracking is very much a necessary part of the future of natural gas because without this new technology the amount of natural gas that we have available here in the country is a very diminished amount,” Salazar said during a meeting with reporters hosted by the Christian Science Monitor in Washington, DC, last week. “I think hydraulic fracking can be done in a safe way, in an environmentally responsible way, and in a way that doesn’t create all the concerns that it’s creating across the country right now.”

Last year Salazar signaled that Interior was weighing how it would move forward with a policy requiring producers to disclose the fluids associated with fracking on public lands (see NGI, Dec. 6, 2010). Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) oversees 250 million acres, which contain 11% of the nation’s natural gas supply. Approximately 90% of the wells currently drilled on public lands are stimulated by the fracking technique, according to BLM. On Wednesday Salazar said he believes companies operating on public lands should be required to disclose the contents of their fracking fluids.

“My own view is that there ought to be disclosure with some safeguards concerning proprietary information. We are in the process of working on a rule, and I don’t know when we will have that rule ready to go, but I believe it is a necessary part of creating a good opportunity for the future of natural gas,” he said.

While “there may have been places where [fracking] has in fact contaminated the domestic water supply,” most oil and gas wells use fracking “and most of them aren’t impacting our water supply — so there’s a way to do it safely,” Salazar said.

Salazar’s remarks came one day after an expert who has studied fracking for decades told a Senate committee the practice does not negatively impact drinking water or the environment.

“In my opinion, current drilling and hydraulic fracturing activity in the shale gas [basins] does not really affect drinking water aquifers,” Stephen A. Holditch, head of the petroleum engineering department at Texas A&M University, said during a hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “I’ve been working on hydraulic fracturing for over 40 years. My master’s thesis in 1970 was on hydraulic fracturing…and there’s absolutely no evidence that fractures can grow from miles under the ground up to the surface to the aquifer.”

Holditch — along with Mark D. Zoback, a geophysics professor at Stanford University; Daniel Yergin, chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates; and Kathleen McGinty, senior vice president of Weston Solutions Inc. — sat on the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SEAB) Natural Gas Subcommittee, which released a report in mid-August that made a number of recommendations, including that industry measure the volume and composition of fluids being pumped into gas wells, as well as the volume and composition of the flowback (see NGI, Aug. 15).

Holditch believes that fracking has gotten a bad rap. “If you read recent news articles on hydraulic fracturing, the process is often described as pumping in a mixture of water and toxic chemicals under high pressure under the earth. This description is far from the truth,” Holditch said. “Most fracture treatments consist of 99.5% pure water and sand,” and “only 0.5% chemicals,” he told the Senate panel. The chemicals include gelling agents, such as those that are used in a lot of food products; surfactants, such as Dawn liquid soap; and biocide, or Clorox bleach.

Most of the concerns about the safety of shale gas development have nothing to do with fracking but rather involve leakage along well casing, spills and blowouts, Zoback said. As a result, “hydraulic fracturing has become a bumper sticker for everything that we need to watch out for.”

All of the experts agreed that the reins of regulation of fracking should stay in the hands of the states. “We [subcommittee members] didn’t come up with any conclusion that the deck chairs needed to be shuffled,” McGinty said.

More than 100 groups representing U.S. industry last month petitioned to keep the federal government from erecting barriers to fracking. State governments, the on-the-ground regulators of oil and gas drilling, are working with industry to ensure that adequate environmental and safety measures are employed, they said.

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