Fracking boom sucks away precious water from beneath the ground, leaving cattle dead, farms bone-dry and people thirsty
Suzanne Goldenberg in Barnhart, Texas Sunday 11 August 2013 10.07 EDT
Beverly McGuire saw the warning signs before the town well went dry: sand in the toilet bowl, the sputter of air in the tap, a pump working overtime to no effect. But it still did not prepare her for the night last month when she turned on the tap and discovered the tiny town where she had made her home for 35 years was out of water.
"The day that we ran out of water I turned on my faucet and nothing was there and at that moment I knew the whole of Barnhart was down the tubes," she said, blinking back tears. "I went: 'dear God help us. That was the first thought that came to mind."
Across the south-west, residents of small communities like Barnhart are confronting the reality that something as basic as running water, as unthinking as turning on a tap, can no longer be taken for granted.
Nearly 15 million people are living under some form of water rationing, barred from freely sprinkling their lawns or refilling their swimming pools. In Barnhart's case, the well appears to have run dry because the water was being extracted for shale gas fracking [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/20/shale-gas-fracking-question-answer ].
The town — a gas [ http://www.theguardian.com/environment/gas ] station, a community hall and a taco truck – sits in the midst of the great Texan oil rush, on the eastern edge of the Permian basin.
A few years ago, it seemed like a place on the way out. Now McGuire said she can see nine oil wells from her back porch, and there are dozens of RVs parked outside town, full of oil workers.
But soon after the first frack trucks pulled up two years ago, the well on McGuire's property ran dry.
No-one in Barnhart paid much attention at the time, and McGuire hooked up to the town's central water supply. "Everyone just said: 'too bad'. Well now it's all going dry," McGuire said.
Ranchers dumped most of their herds. Cotton farmers lost up to half their crops. The extra draw down, coupled with drought, made it impossible for local ranchers to feed and water their herds, said Buck Owens. In a good year, Owens used to run 500 cattle and up to 8,000 goats on his 7,689 leased hectares (19,000 acres). Now he's down to a few hundred goats.
The drought undoubtedly took its toll but Owens reserved his anger for the contractors who drilled 104 water wells on his leased land, to supply the oil companies.
Water levels were dropping in his wells because of the vast amounts of water being pumped out of the Edwards-Trinity-Plateau Aquifer, a 34,000 sq mile water bearing formation.
"They are sucking all of the water out of the ground, and there are just hundreds and hundreds of water trucks here every day bringing fresh water out of the wells," Owens said.
Meanwhile, residents in town complained, they were forced to live under water rationing. "I've got dead trees in my yard because I haven't been able to water them," said Glenda Kuykendall. "The state is mandating our water system to conserve water but why?... Getting one oil well fracked takes more water than the entire town can drink or use in a day."
Even as the drought bore down, even as the water levels declined, the oil industry continued to demand water and those with water on their land were willing to sell it. The road west of town was lined with signs advertising "fresh water", where tankers can take on a box-car-sized load of water laced with industrial chemicals.
"If you're going to develop the oil, you've got to have the water," said Larry Baxter, a contractor from the nearby town of Mertzon, who installed two frack tanks on his land earlier this year, hoping to make a business out of his well selling water to oil industry.
By his own estimate, his well could produce enough to fill up 20 or 30 water trucks for the oil industry each day. At $60 (£39.58) a truck, that was $36,000 a month, easily. "I could sell 100 truckloads a day if I was open to it," Baxter said.
He rejected the idea there should be any curbs on selling water during the drought. "People use their water for food and fibre. I choose to use my water to sell to the oil field," he said. "Who's taking advantage? I don't see any difference."
Barnhart remained dry for five days last month before local work crew revived an abandoned railway well and started pumping again. But residents fear it is just a temporary fix and that next time it happens they won't have their own wells to fall back on. "My well is very very close to going dry," said Kuykendall.
So what is a town like Barnhart to do? Fracking is a powerful drain on water supplies. In adjacent Crockett county, fracking accounts for up to 25% of water use, according to the groundwater conservation district. But Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, argues fracking is not the only reason Texas is going dry – and nor is the drought. The latest shocks to the water system come after decades of overuse by ranchers, cotton farmers, and fast-growing thirsty cities.
"We have large urban centres sucking water out of west Texas to put on their lands. We have a huge agricultural community, and now we have fracking which is also using water," she said. And then there is climate change.
West Texas has a long history of recurring drought, but under climate change, the south-west has been experiencing record-breaking heatwaves, further drying out the soil and speeding the evaporation of water in lakes and reservoirs. Underground aquifers failed to regenerate. "What happens is that climate change comes on top and in many cases it can be the final straw that breaks the camel's back, but the camel is already overloaded," said Hayhoe.
Other communities across a bone-dry south-west are resorting to extraordinary measures to keep the water flowing. Robert Lee, also in the oil patch, has been hauling in water by tanker. So has Spicewood Beach, a resort town 40 miles from Austin, which has been trucking in water since early 2012.
San Angelo, a city of 100,000, dug a pipeline to an underground water source more than 60 miles away, and sunk half a dozen new wells.
Las Cruces, just across the border from the Texas panhandle in New Mexico, is drilling down 1,000ft in search of water.
But those fixes are way out of reach for small, rural communities. Outside the RV parks for the oil field workers who are just passing through, Barnhart has a population of about 200.
"We barely make enough money to pay our light bill and we're supposed to find $300,000 to drill a water well?" said John Nanny, an official with the town's water supply company.
Last week brought some relief, with rain across the entire state of Texas. Rain gauges in some parts of west Texas registered two inches or more. Some ranchers dared to hope it was the beginning of the end of the drought.
But not Owens, not yet anyway. The underground aquifers needed far more rain to recharge, he said, and it just wasn't raining as hard as it did when he was growing up.
"We've got to get floods. We've got to get a hurricane to move up in our country and just saturate everything to replenish the aquifer," he said. "Because when the water is gone. That's it. We're gone."
LONDON — On Aug. 1, six friends drove a 1970s-era fire engine to the village of Balcombe, south of London, and used it to block the entrance of a site where Cuadrilla Holdings, a leader in the fledgling British shale gas industry, was about to commence drilling.
Eventually, the police arrested the group and impounded the vehicle, which some of the protesters had bought for the occasion.
“It was the first time I had been arrested,” one of the protesters, Lu Brown, said by telephone. “It was completely fine. The officers were quite nice.”
Ms. Brown said her group wanted to stop exploitation of shale gas in Britain because it risked polluting the water and “industrializing the countryside.”
She also said that polls have found that “80 percent of the people of Balcombe” are against the project.
“Corporate interests are being put over people,” said Ms. Brown, who works as a paralegal in London. “We want to help the people of Balcombe and prevent the industry from taking off in the U.K.”
Balcombe has in recent days become a focal point for environmental campaigners from the West Sussex area as well as from around Britain. Small groups have camped near the site, while during the warm summer days the scene has turned into a carnival of protest.
As of Monday, there had been 36 arrests, according to Andy Freeman, a spokesman for the Sussex police.
Shale gas, which in North America has increased natural gas supplies and helped reduce greenhouse gas emissions, has given rise to great anxiety in Europe, where there are environmental concerns, including fears that the extraction process may pollute groundwater.
One could argue that the activists are overplaying their hand in Balcombe. The main aims of the protests are to prevent shale gas drilling and particularly hydraulic fracturing, or fracking — the injection of large quantities of water and sand into the ground under high pressure to break up rock formations to release trapped natural gas.
Yet Caudrilla is drilling in Balcombe for oil, not natural gas, and says it has no plans to use fracking at the well. The protesters do not seem concerned with such details.
Britain is probably the West European country most well-disposed toward shale gas exploitation, yet activists can take comfort in the stuttering start the industry has made there.
Cuadrilla’s main focus has been on Lancashire in the northwest, where it stumbled badly in 2011 when hydraulic fracturing set off minor earthquakes. Since then, the company has been largely stymied in its efforts to continue the work, though the government has given a cautious green light to fracking and Cuadrilla is once again preparing to move ahead.
What’s puzzling is why Cuadrilla is expending its energy on an oil-drilling site in southeast England when it says it has identified an enormous resource — an estimated 200 trillion cubic feet, or 5.6 trillion cubic meters, of natural gas — under land it leases in the northwest of the country.
Just 10 percent of that total would more than double Britain’s current natural gas reserves. And because natural gas burns cleaner than coal, whose use in power generation has been rising in Britain, Cuadrilla’s find could help the country reduce its emissions, a government priority.
But no one will know how much if any gas can be commercially exploited until many wells — perhaps 30 to 50 — are drilled and tested.
Sinking those wells may take a long time, given the pace so far. Along with Cuadrilla, analysts fault the government of Prime Minister David Cameron for not making a strong enough case for natural gas extraction, although London has offered some tax cuts and other incentives.
“The government and the company don’t get it,” said Paul Stevens, an energy expert at Chatham House, a London research organization.
In one sense, the activists’ choice to make a stand in Balcombe has been shrewd. The little village is an easy trip for the London news media and a picturesque illustration of what might be spoiled by oil and gas drilling.
It is also situated in the heartland of Mr. Cameron’s Conservative constituency, and so protests there may be heeded more closely than any arising in the northern part of the country.
The Balcombe drama also highlights the divide between the country’s wealthy southeast and its poorer north, the site of much of what little drilling has been carried out so far.
David Howell, a prominent Tory spokesman on energy matters, drew fire when he said on July 30 that “there are large, uninhabited and desolate areas, certainly in parts of the north-east, where there is plenty of room for fracking, well away from anybody’s residence, and where it could be conducted without any threat to the rural environment.”
The drama playing out in Balcombe won’t encourage the big oil and gas companies to put their money on shale gas in Britain, or in Western Europe. On a conference call with reporters on Aug. 1, Simon Henry, chief financial officer of Royal Dutch Shell, noted that he had said months before that Shell “didn’t want to be in the headlines every day” by drilling for shale gas in Britain.
Given the fuss at Balcombe, “that was probably a good call,” he said.
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