Fracking is Dangerous: The High Cost of Cheap Gas | ENDEVR Documentary

[Music] i've got the dust i've got the dirt i've got the trucks going by i've got the aggravation but i get nothing for it if there's any risk you know of poisoning a baby or a child why would you risk it my whole life was turned upside down from the moment they got here we had neighbors calling in tears there were explosions there were trucks huge trucks just convoys it was truly apocalyptic it is not clean natural gas the extraction methods and the people that have to live with the extraction don't have clean energy it seems to be really difficult to operate this industry in a clean manner whatever they're going to come and do is to destroy it extract the water table will go lower they will pollute it so you can't drink the water the water is polluted impact our environment and also it will impact our underground water resources if you ask me can you guarantee an incident will not occur my answer is no this is an industry in the incidence can occur and yet we're deploying it not just in colorado not just the united states that horse is out of the barn and galloping worldwide now and we don't really understand the full impact it will have i first encountered gas development by complete chance we were driving through farmington new mexico in the united states and i was shocked by what i saw town after town of ruin farmland and industrial waste on a massive scale we discovered the same sorts of developments are planned in our home in south africa and i wanted to learn more about this industry i'm mira duchiket and i work in human rights law addressing social and economic injustices against poor and vulnerable people [Music] my partner jeffrey barbie is an environmental journalist based in south africa he comes from garfield county colorado a battleground for the truth about the gas industry where tens of thousands of gas wells have reduced this formerly vibrant economy into an environmental tragedy [Music] this is the biggest land grab in american history so the united states a big continent i think that at least 15 percent of the lower 48 of the continental united states has been leased by oil and gas companies randy udall was a colorado-based energy analyst his family helped shape environmental laws in the united states for over 40 years he passed away during the making of this film the natural gas industry is like the suburban sprawl of the energy business it sprawls out not over a whole county but over a whole region will roush is the conservation director of the wilderness workshop in carbondale colorado his group has been successfully fighting to save an important area from being developed by the gas industry and every day there are several spills and so just kind of a byproduct of this type of operation that you're going to be spilling chemicals you know onto the landscape and sometimes into waters gas rigs drill deep into the ground once the layer of coal or shale is reached the drill moves horizontally through the seam this is called directional drilling to learn how the hydraulic fracturing process works we caught up with hun villum egg ink at a talk in johannesburg he is the general manager at shell south africa who plan to drill in the karoo desert how does it work we have this horizontal section of the hole which is properly sealed off and then we push water down with one percent solution of chemicals and that water also contains some sand grains and what you do by pushing that water down actually you create micro fractures in the in the shale the sand grain stay behind in these micro fractures and they keep them open that's the way hydraulic fracturing works hydraulic fracturing or fracking is only one aspect of a much larger operation it appears that the whole process from drilling to fracking through to the refining and transportation of the gas is possibly dirtier than the industry will admit because of the secrecy of the gas business and the legislative protection it has enjoyed in places like the united states it's hard to ascertain the facts behind this process [Music] back in cape town our research led us to one of south africa's biggest oil companies cecil we met up with steve bowden who agreed to talk to us he believes that gas extraction is clean and may bring economic benefits to the region there's lots of opportunities for sustainable development and minimal impact and it's a clean energy resource what more do you want i mean it's great they like to pretend there's never been a single example of groundwater pollution caused by fracking this is ridiculous there have been dozens if not hundreds of examples all over the country now but the industry continues to say that fracking has never caused any damage to groundwater aquifers that's absurd we have good evidence from pennsylvania and wyoming this is the report on parachute creek where the company williams spilled at least 40 000 liters of benzene from this gas production plant the gas industry has done its best to wrap itself in the american flag and they love to talk about clean burning natural gas well yes it's clean when it gets to you but there's a trail of devastation that the gas industry leaves all the way back to the gas well the debate about opening up 20 percent of south africa for gas drilling has been raging for years before the battle started a company visited justin krieger to explore for gas on his organic farm in the crew desert sheep farming brings millions of dollars to the kuru's economy every year it is here that shell and many other companies want to drill for natural gas should fracking come my way my stock would be exposed to many harmful chemicals my integrity as a farmer would be challenged because i would not be able to guarantee the wholesomeness of my product as a business i would struggle to continue dr fontonda is one of the country's foremost geohydrologists working at the institute for groundwater studies at the university of the free state fontonda believes that because of the property of the cement which is used to make a casing around the metal gas pipe the wells will inevitably leak the impact of this is catastrophic allowing toxic chemicals to leak into the air and the water that cement will deteriorate with time so all the gas wells eventually will leak us that's a given even egging from shell south africa concedes that well integrity may be a major problem if people have not sealed off the welds properly then the gas can travel while you produce it behind the casing and the rocks upwards and end up in the water table dr fontonda explains why so many of these wells are so prone to leaks okay what we see here is a trouble casing a steel casing first one and the second one and even here you can see after some time can you see the cracks the skecks because it's different material this is a mint and this is steel and it cement cannot bond to steel there's no way and even around it in in practice you will see there's rock and cement and then casing and that will be the big problem [Music] [Music] [Music] here in the karoo most people and most animals live off of water sources like this one which is a borehole that has a windmill operating above it and these old windmills as creaky as they are provide some of the only sources of water in the entire desert it's bore holes like these that people are worried will end up being polluted by fracking liquids raymond clarsen is a koisan farmer a descendant of the original inhabitants of southern africa he worries that fracking will pollute the springs that feed his crops the issue of water is particularly important because here in south africa we've recognized the fact that that water is fundamental to life and that if you're going to say you have a human right to life as protected in the constitution then it's meaningless unless you also protect the basic essentials of life of which water is one environmental lawyer cormac cullinan is convinced that gas development is at odds with the rights in the south african constitution with regards to natural gas extraction that there are a lot of uncertainties many gaps in information which had not been addressed it may indeed leave the groundwater unfit for any use and where the extraction is proposed to now take place is in an area that is extremely water scarce and i think here i must emphasize south africa is a water scarce country our water is already over allocated we wanted to find out how much water it will take to extract gas in the kuru how much water do we need we need for expiration well one to two million liters of water to drill the well for a development well which is longer you you probably have 10 million liters plus that you need for hydraulic fracturing and operations the western cape government of south africa says that gas extraction in the kuru will take as much water as the country uses in groundwater every year an industry that uses and potentially pollutes this precious resource has to be seen in the light of the daily struggle many people endure to gain access to water it seems that these developments in southern africa are much larger than most people realize what is the development the development again works from these football pitch size areas at surfers you can drill nowadays up to 32 wells from one football bit size area and these all radiate from this side outwards for development you have something like 2015 under 2000 wells you drill that means that you have 60 or 70 of these football pitches with 30 wells each that is a development it's often forgotten and the risks assessments are done on population what they forget is that there are 10 million animals in the crew that feed this country and that they may be contaminated you contaminate somebody's water that's the direct damage but what of the consequential damage the loss of income or ill health of animals or ill health of human beings [Music] after decades of gas extraction and fracking in the united states local farmers believe that they have seen their own livestock contaminated by this industry lynn blansit watched his cow fall sick from drinking water around well pads on his farm in new mexico the autopsy indicated toxicity as she came off the mountain she would stop at each one of those pits and get a drink and go on to the next one until she come down the house and she died and i autopsied her and proved that it was bad water and stuff that killed her and so when gas development comes into a landscape there's thousands of these wells and so even if there's a one in one thousand chance of a major spill if you have a thousand or two thousand or three wells you're guaranteed to have several of these spills in colorado the agency that runs oil and gas development is also the watchdog that is supposed to protect communities but there seem to be far too few inspectors if a relatively well-resourced country like the united states cannot provide enough inspectors to control the gas industry there is a real danger that the situation will be worse in southern africa even young william egging from shell admits that south africa does not have the capacity to safely control his industry the petroleum agency of south africa they know that they have to boost their manpower in order to have sufficient knowledge actually and capability to control those the government in their draft report on natural gas extraction in the kuru said that there will be checks and balances put into place to make sure that there is no pollution caused by this activity what do you think about that we have seen that those aspirational statements those promises often are not fulfilled and a country with a weak regulatory regime means the costs of compliance will be low and the risks of being prosecuted and incurring financial liabilities through non-compliance will also be low which means that it'll be cheaper so i have no doubt at all that companies have a direct financial incentive to prioritize fracking in jurisdictions where the regulations are weaker when we were researching the developments in south africa we were amazed to find that huge gas projects are already underway in neighboring botswana after exhaustive research we came upon this map published by the government of botswana showing this huge unreported coal bed methane project underway in south africa's northern neighbor foreign companies have started drilling in highly sensitive ecosystems and even inside national parks we assembled our team and drove across the border we moved a little slower today than i thought we were going to but that's all right we've made it into botswana and we're going to stay the night near mapum traveling through the country we found plenty of evidence to show that hydraulic fracturing has already come to the region in botswana they are mostly exploring for shale gas's sister coal bed methane coal bed methane and shale gas are very similar and they both require fracking the main differences between shale gas and coal bed methane is that the coal bed layer is shallower and is therefore closer to the water table the other main difference is that to produce gas in coal bed methane deposits the water in the coal layer must be extracted by pumping it up onto the surface this is what the industry calls produced water when water is extracted from the coal seam it may cause a drop in the local groundwater table in wyoming where coal bed methane has been extracted for decades this u.s government report published by the bureau of land management documents how some local water tables dropped by as much as 30 meters when these coal bed methane wells came online the water is of course salty for sure radioactive material radioactivity in natural gas waste is proven this report by duke university details very clearly how fracking waste dumped into blacklick creek in pennsylvania is 200 times more radioactive than upstream of the facility polluted water in a desert like botswana could spell disaster for a country completely dependent on groundwater supplies there are thirty to sixty thousand elephants that range through this area it is the largest population of elephants left in africa i'm standing here with ben moller on his farm north of nata in botswana this area was a test site for a drill platform that was put up to look for coal bed methane yeah the league well obviously was over the hole here then the waste water most of the wastewater went out there because it's lower there at that point of time when it came out you know the grass actually died it it's poisonous the water that came out there these elephants are completely dependent upon water drawn from the ground from boreholes there's elephants bank on these borders from us throughout up to chobi if it happens that those borders get contaminated through prospecting here in this area it'll be a huge huge disaster for the area i just hope it never happened in my life like many community members we spoke to about gas prospecting in botswana balefi had no idea that his area had been targeted for drilling have you guys been consulted about the prospecting license for gas that was issued for just over here in sewapen i have never heard about that when you shoot me that map i felt like we were left out because to me it seems it was already it is something that is has been already done because if this thing is happening already we are affected saran jonna is part of a team of lawyers who successfully defended the san bushmen's right to occupy their traditional lands in botswana's central kalahari game reserve the bushmen also won the right to access the water from the few precious boreholes in the kalahari the prospecting licenses stretch across half of the game reserve as a human rights advocate i'm extremely worried about this development it threatens the water sources in the bushman's ancestral land and endangers the very survival of these people i would be interested to know how many of our population on the ground is away and not even population on the ground government departments themselves are aware of the consequences of these ongoing activities we took the map to dr modi at the university of botswana he drafted the first government report on natural gas development and oversaw the drilling of the first exploration wells when he worked for the department of geological surveys we started a project to look at coal resources but form another dimension just trying to grow you know the cleaner way of using coal resources which itself has got lesser effect on the environment these licences have been granted and may have been granted without anybody realizing the long-term consequence we went to visit a remote and incredibly beautiful place in botswana's pants called kubu island visitors from all over the world come to this national monument like us they enjoy the starry skies and natural wonder of this majestic place in the morning we met balefi who runs a campsite here on kubu for the department of antiquities the money from this campsite goes to the local communities living around the pans this area is also slated for gas drilling if anything of that kind is going to happen in this area it will mean that people who are living in the ages of the parents or in the ages of suffering suffering will be left empty-handed the government should consult us in everything that is going to take place in an area we are living on i think that you're kidding yourself if you think that these small communities that have very little voice are going to be protected by their government because this industry is going to run over their government just like they ran over our government here in the united states of america hydraulic fracturing operations are exempt from government overview through a bill that was signed into law by president bush in 2005. they are not bound by the clean air act the community right to no act the clean water act and other laws meant to protect communities it appears that in botswana's new gas rush basic environmental regulations are also not being followed there's far greater risk and long-term loss that people will stand to sustain if proper environmental impact assessment reports are not conducted over these types of areas the condition okay the government that we have to have an environmental impact assessment before the project can start we weren't required to do an environmental management plan for it but in in our opinion it's best practice that we do so you weren't you weren't required by the botswana government no wow well it wasn't an aia it's an environmental management plan okay so it doesn't appear that there was anything in the legislation that that actually triggers an environmental management plan process without an environmental management plan it is impossible for affected communities like the sun or the bushman people to hold these companies to account for the harm that they may cause this is the central kalahari game reserve conservationists and ngos and local communities like the san buschman people who call this place home are very worried about the gas development planned if you take a certain group of people the indigenous people of botswana like the central colorado games of bushman there are going to be much much affected as that is going to affect their way of life because they are hunters they are gatherers so if you extract that from them then you kill their culture you killed what they are themselves chimanda and his people fought a series of court cases with saran janna to secure the right of the bushman people inside the central kalahari game reserve suran is concerned that the hard-won legal victory will be diminished if the gas industry is allowed to operate as freely as it is at the moment water is not a resource that is overly abundant in botswana as a whole more especially within an area such as the central kalahari game reserve i would say it's going to be an extremely far-reaching and dire for a sector of our population if not the whole country obviously you're de-watering a coal seam because sometimes the dewatering can actually lower the water table in some place well yeah it has the potential to the biggest issue around that is the geohydrology of the area in botswana for example the aquifer there is accessed by the local community for water i mean it's a dry semi-arid environment and they're quite reliant on that water so we have to be cognizant of those things when botswana started considering gas exploration we found industry press releases saying that the wastewater pulled out of the coal seam could be used by local communities there was a talk by the government that they were going to provide the water to communities that's another option as well and that's a really good one actually and i'm glad that you brought up that water one because one of the big things with cbm is you produce water and the thing is is what do you do with that water so really what you want to do is is turn it into a revenue stream of some sort if you're thinking from a business sense or or it's a contribution to the local community they call it produced water you could just as easily call it poisoned water it's toxic as hell it would kill you if you drank any quantity of it it'll kill birds it'll kill human beings it'll kill cattle so this is poisonous stuff it's a it's a clean engine it is it's a clean energy resource cbm plays or cbm production environments are very quiet they're very sedate lower levels of pollution no noise visually there you can make them so that you can't even really see them this has not been the experience of most people who live around these wells the blankets in new mexico have collected scientific data on the gas wells on their property for 20 years cobed methane is the dirtiest type of natural gas extraction that we have in the san juan basin you can actually have a commercial operation where you do not change land use for example the well heads are leaking the pits have overflowed they're unlined they seep into the water sources into the springs and that was the main thing that caused us to quit ranching is because our water's contaminated can cause headaches dizziness drowsiness you know it's got all of this bad stuff on it and they'd leave these unnetted or not netted properly wildlife can get in it cattle would just crowd up one and push in and drink from there's always going to be an impact with oil and gas if if your water is polluted and your animals are drinking that water maybe they're not surviving even if they are the economic benefit of those animals people don't want to buy beef that's potentially polluted what does this mean for the large-scale gas developments in southern africa to find out we cut across the vast distances of the kalahari desert through many places where drilling licences have been issued at the gate of the central kalahari game reserve a warden admitted to us that gas drilling is going forward in the park that is where they are drilling for against that side and they're drilling in the park yeah in the park along ancient animal migration routes we found huge pits like these probably waiting to be filled with hydraulic fracturing waste even on the edges of the kama rhino reserve we found kalahari energy already hard at work with american drilling trucks deep in the botswana bush we've been practically doing everything for drilling into through the front you know success in the equipment do we need more equipment to improve the fracks and then the last year with horizontal drilling and deciding which is the best way to go but again we've got some reasonable results over that and we're going to throw in gas over there now for about two years botswana's biggest drilling company devette drilling is working all over the country including near ben muller's elephant watering holes they acknowledge that they drill horizontal wells inside the central kalahari game reserve cecil used the vet for the gas wells they drilled just north of the kama rhino sanctuary cecil has big plans for botswana in terms of a cbm commercial development on a large scale you know you're looking at thousands of gas wells um so you may have over i don't know maybe a three thousand square kilometer area you might be running two and a half thousand gas wells at any one time this is what a similar gas development looks like in colorado ben thinks that this is bad news for the wildlife he feels responsible for in the dry seasons we've got a huge problem to uh have enough water for our elephants we bring water from a borel not so far from us but we're using anything between 20 and and 30 to 35 000 liters a day for the elephant for the elephant birds and other wildlife can get trapped in these holding ponds where the water is being held that we don't have a clear idea of is this water really being handled safely and clearly in some circumstances it's not there's always been that possibility that we're going to pollute the environment do you think that trading something like the ckgr and the ecosystem that exists there that has supported say the sen and baswara community for so long is a fair trade-off for the natural gas resource that lies beneath it yeah because i mean what else can you do in the end we can have no job creation we can now have no economic growth if we destroyed our water resources or our environment african countries promote natural gas drilling as a way to boost the economy and create jobs because most workers are imported to drill for gas the economic benefits do not trickle down to the local communities steve bowden from cecil suggests that this is true it doesn't require a lot of people but you need very specialized skills if you can't source them in country then then you've got to go outside the country and bring people in to be able to do it what comes from that is the boom and bust cycle which has been well recorded and documented in the united states where there's this enormous influx of workers with lots of money to spend the local business people expand their businesses they cater to this rush of activity for two or three years and when their team moves on the economy contracts too much smaller and worse off than it was before it constantly amazes me that when developments like fracking are proposed the response that you get is but it'll create jobs but quite frankly it depends what kind of jobs there is no benefit in my view in creating jobs which harm society the jobs are completely unsustainable they for specialized people and the economics of shale gas is showing that the sustainability and the depletion rate of the world is that it's a very short-term thing and a short-term benefit according to the researchers at the u.s department of agriculture the natural gas boom drives out other more sustainable jobs like farming and tourism once the boom is over the sustainable industries don't recover in a remote campsite near hansi botswana sun bushman activist jumanda kakeli bony shares the worries of his people first thing those companies when they come they bring people which are educated and aspects and or technology whatever the technology is used tomorrow today none of us had it a lot of people just then they are not educated they are not trained for those jobs and so they will not benefit anything from that mine [Music] this is the town of parachute colorado parachute has thousands of gas wells and many of the people who come here to work on these wells come from canada or out of state this entire valley although it has ten thousand gas wells has only a few hundred jobs in the oil and gas industry for people who live here i know the money is tempting the jobs are just temporary yeah we had a big room for maybe a year and then everybody was laid off so who's making the money that's a good question typically most of the money goes back to the oil and gas companies typically their senior executives are very well paid in colorado and in africa the gas companies seem to pollute the political process by buying power through large investments it has been reported publicly and it's not been denied that debbie investments which is a investment company of the inc has shareholding in shell south africa it's affecting our country so we can not allow this fraction wherever whenever whatsoever in south africa or in the cairo for there for that matter there's definitely some jobs that come along with this but they don't stick around for that long and oftentimes it's a bit of a transient population because you need a lot of people at once to come in and there's uh what are called man camps located along the corridor where they're drilling and a bunch of young men in a community with without a family you know definitely changes the social vibe of that community shell itself invested 24 billion dollars in shale gas in the united states in october 2013 admitted to losing as much as 1.3 billion dollars on the investment many reports from the financial media and industry journals suggest that there is a bubble in the natural gas market many projected profits don't account for the high well depletion rates that are being recorded in most gas fields in the united states independent economists like jeremy weber suggest that most of the money from this industry does not stay local in most of africa the mining and extraction industry has not provided much benefit to the poor the riches of mining in africa have never ever been shown to trickle down to the people that have to live with the consequences of it the entire wetlands of the witwatus rand had now been classified either as radiological hot spots because of acid mine drainage and mining pollution but it also now contains elevated levels of catmin cobalt copper zinc arsenic and uranium [Music] to understand the effects of huge extractive industries a good indicator is how southern africa has dealt with these types of developments in the past people here are exposed to dangerous levels of radioactive and polluted waters every day and the government seems powerless to help them to understand more about the nightmare of mining waste we met up with mariette leferink a veteran of the long fight to contain the vast flood of toxic mine pollution in johannesburg the robinson lake which was a popular recreational area in 2002 now contains uranium levels at 16 milligrams per liter that is 40 000 times above natural uranium levels in the natural water 11 491 persons are dependent on that water solely dependent on that water for drinking purposes for irrigation of crops it's very important to emphasize that if you drink acid mind the water undiluted it will be fatal even low levels of exposure to pollution like this can cause cancer the government says it will safely oversee the gas drilling but can the government enforce the rules it created for gas when it cannot protect the people who are still paying the price for historical riches like gold coal and even asbestos even with sound legislation most of the damages that come from extractive industries can almost never be remedied after the fact the dusty desert town of prisca offers a terrifying example prisca for example that lawsuit was pursued decades after the initial damage was caused you may only contract asbestos and die of lung cancer or have have difficulties health issues may only become apparent decades from when the actual harm was caused so you have massive difficulties of proof chris julius is dying of asbestos-related lung cancer he digs that amount of blue asbestos one of the many piles littering the town this is one of the many examples of how an industry that said it was safe took their profits overseas and left the people in a terrible state [Music] i mean it got dear right in south africa the mining companies have escaped their obligations to rehabilitate and do remedial work because they disappear and only years later does the harm become apparent and then what happens inevitably is that government's going to try and do a clean up at the cost of the taxpayer society your crazy brains [Music] i've come to the denver federal center to meet with the center for disease control about some of the hazardous substances used in fracking mixtures here in colorado were you surprised at how much silica people were getting in yes i mean this is essentially something that shouldn't be in your lungs right correct it's a carcinogen correct max kiefer is the director of the national institute for occupational safety and health at the u.s government's center for disease control in denver colorado they issued a national warning to workers about a carcinogenic compound used on fracking operations but i wonder about the people who live near these operations who are exposed on a constant basis to these chemicals around the gas wells initial hazard assessments um identified respirable crystalline silica during the hydraulic fracturing process where they inject hundreds of thousands of pounds of oftentimes silica sand to use as a what's called a propent inside the well anthony peacock lives in garfield county colorado and claims he gets sick whenever they start to drill and frack in his community it's not just in the water it's in the air you know they might call it just dust i don't know of any dust that'll make you sick for three months the important thing is that it's a what's called a progressive disease and that is that the disease will progress even if exposure stops so there is no cure for this disease living inside a gas field sucks big time because it has impacts on your health your roads are crowded the quality of life broadly speaking for most of the people directly impacted goes down and in some cases down quite dramatically i've come here to the place i was born in the north fork valley of the gunnison river in colorado to meet with dr theo colborne dr colborne is one of the foremost scientists in the world studying the effects of endocrine disruptor chemicals on the human body she and many other scientists here are worried about these chemicals entering our bodies and the ecosystem because of the large-scale natural gas developments that are happening one of our staff set out to systematically set up a database in order to look at the long list of chemicals that we had at hand of those products that had health effects 14 had one to three effects and 86 percent had four to fourteen effects and what surprised us was to find that forty three percent of the products on our list contain endocrine disruptors chemicals that can interfere with the development of individuals before they are born and cause irreversible lifetime changes in their health and how they function later in life [Music] many of the worries related to natural gas revolve around water but a growing body of research shows that air quality is actually one of the greatest risks to people living around these wells after being sued by the wilderness workshop the u s government has acknowledged that they had broken the law by not doing proper air quality analysis on 1 300 gas wells they wanted to drill in a sensitive area near my home not only do you have methane emissions which contribute a lot more to global warming than carbon dioxide but you've got all the pollutants and chemicals used in fracking well you know jeff for a long time i've been thoroughly convinced that it's what in the air what is in the air that is affecting people and especially with my experience with all the people in garfield county because they start complaining the day drilling starts i've come here to basalt colorado to meet with dr john hughes dr hughes has been doing blood tests on people who live very close to natural gas wells here in colorado and he's got some very important data to share with us about the dangers of the chemical compounds from natural gas drilling and what it may mean to people who live around these wells what we found in our study is that the patients who lived closest to the wells had the highest concentration of some particular organic organic compounds one's called ethyl benzene and styrene these volatile organic compounds also called vocs are highly dangerous substances that can mimic hormones in the human body cause cancer and birth defects the main voc ingredients in these chemical plumes like this one near my home are benzene ethylene toluene and xylene called the btex chemicals for short an organic chemical compound in a chemistry lab is one of the most dangerous compounds you can actually be exposed to you can have serious side effects everything from cancer to you know eye disorders to toxicity symptoms just like these patients that i saw exposed to the natural gas piles dr von tunder's belief that all the drill stems will eventually leak is a possible explanation for how these compounds are being released into the air aside from the chemicals in the fracking mixtures the volatile organic compounds naturally occur in the coal and shale layers under the ground once the seams have been punctured and the well is hydraulically fracked scientists say these gases escape all the time dr hughes's research into the effect of these gases on communities has been used by the state legislature in colorado to help shape some of the toughest new environmental regulations in the united states for how far away people should live from these gas wells but there are other new studies that point to many different problems related to the whole business of gas development back in botswana one of the people who approved the gas drilling plan for the government believes that because natural gas burns clean at the stove the process is better and safer for the environment than using coal the intention was to move a step up from the level where we are using code knowing that code of course got another mission going to call the method which will lessen the amount of emissions the latest research from the united states shows these environmental claims are false the institute of architect and alpine research at the university of colorado in boulder collects the biggest air quality monitoring data set of volatile organic compounds in the entire world they worked with dr hughes in air quality monitoring at well sites for his study into the health effects of these chemicals their research is also linked to the studies that have discovered methane emissions erupting from america's natural gas boom we were asked to do some air monitoring air quality monitoring in the places where these people are living to investigate if there was possibly exposure to air contaminants what we found is that the levels we're seeing in that regions are highly elevated over what we would have expected but where is this pollution coming from these compounds are released by that particular industry because we don't see them in other places and the closer you get to the oil and gas development areas the higher the concentrations for the uintah basin on the order of seven eight percent of the produced natural gas seven to eight percent of what's being produced expanded into the atmosphere it is venting into the atmosphere according to this paper published by the university of colorado at least 6.2 percent to 11 of all the methane generated in winter county is leaking into the atmosphere their study shows that if that leaking gas was contained it would fill four of the largest ocean-going tanker ships in the world methane and volatile organic compounds these fugitive emissions from gas drilling seem to have stolen gas's green pedigree the unita basin has had more exceedances of the u.s national ambient air quality standard in ozone than downtown los angeles we went to alaska to speak to dr jeffrey kavanaugh he studies the effect of greenhouse gases like methane on glaciers on the longest running project of its kind in north america these large amounts of methane flowing out of america's new gas fields is a serious concern to these scientists with these new facts we see that natural gas is at least twice as bad for climate change as coal 95 percent of north america's glaciers are melting and here these scientists are trying to understand why methane from natural gas drilling is at least partly to blame if you have a gas that lets the energy in but doesn't let it escape then you have a warming influence if you compare molecule by molecule you have one methane molecule with one co2 molecule the the one methane molecule would cause 40 times as much warming than the one co2 molecule methane is one of a number of greenhouse gases but it's particularly powerful because it because of its low concentration any small addition of methane increases its effectiveness the massive new methane emission sources from gas fields should concern all of us no matter how far away we live from the gas patch because they contribute to this much larger global problem in september 2013 a huge flood wiped out at least 1 900 gas well surface installations in weld county colorado this is the most fracked county in the united states and no one knows exactly how much was spilled but thousands of tons of contaminants were washed away into the south platte river the full impact of this disaster on the local farming industry or even on the gas infrastructure is still not yet fully understood we're driving right now through weld county colorado where a hundred year flood has washed out the gas and oil well infrastructure this is an absolutely perfect illustration according to the citizens groups of the dangers of putting these types of installations in rural landscapes like this one you're looking at the natural gas industry taking a tremendous blow and the people taking a blow with them what i'm seeing is is a hell of an awful event i mean you've got the most natural gas populated area in the state completely overrun with flooding and what we see out here in front of us is just i mean it is the case example of every reason why the citizens here want these wells out why they want to stop the drilling while they want to stop the pollution i mean there's air pollution problems there's water pollution problems and we're going to see even more of that now when it comes to this damaged infrastructure i mean i don't think the natural gas industry was prepared for this at all the oil and gas industry had drilled hundreds of wells within the flood floodplain of the river and had taken no precautions to protect this community in case of a flood like this what do you do i'm actually in the oil field and what do you think when you see this it's horrible man a lot of people have lost lost everything because of all this but uh some people say that people shouldn't be putting these wells this close to the river i believe so they say that they have stuff in case something like this happens i don't believe it to be honest with you and you work i believe all that was submerged under water at one point so all that gas has to be somewhere because it's not under there no more there's a huge environmental cost we just haven't quantified at all yet there's a cost to wildlife air quality there's a social cost all of these tend not to be easily quantified in the same way that we can say well that will produce five million dollars worth of natural gas these other costs tend to be could be much larger than that but they're harder to quantify living and staying next to such kind of dangerous companies or industries is going to affect our culture in a few years it's going to be bye-bye with the culture and the bushmen themselves to be existing [Applause] imagine if you talk about united states which everyone knows that when you talk about united states everything technology everything is very high there but look at our country it's a still a developing country so if you bring gas companies like this and if they've destroyed and have done bad things in the united states what about botswana what will happen here that means it's going to be a mess we broke the story about botswana's secret dash for gas in the guardian newspaper and the world responded with shock today thousands of newspapers blogs television stations radio and other media have covered our story of hydraulic fracturing inside botswana's national parks a national dialogue about the drilling has taken the argument to the country's parliament for the first time finally communities are being informed about what is at stake following the release of this story the government of botswana gave us a new map showing that many of the drilling permits inside the bushman's home have been cancelled new permits in many other national parks are on this new map so the battle is not won drilling companies have set their sights on vast areas of earth what botswana is facing is no different from montana romania chile or the green fields of england countries need to be fully aware of the serious risks of this unsustainable extractive industry many are becoming aware these are the countries states communities and towns that have currently banned fracking the list grows longer every day [Music] ah [Music] uh [Music]

Channel: ENDEVR

Views: 56,117

Rating: 4.45959 out of 5

Keywords: Free documentary, documentaries, full documentary, hd documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), Business Documentary, fracking, fracking water fire, gas, gas documentary, investigative documentary, fracking environmental impact, cheap gas, sustainability, energy, energy documentary, hydraulic fracturing process, hydraulic fracturing shale gas, shale gas, environment, environmental impact, dangerous, fracking explained, fracking doc

Id: _wfEaFi8KZg

Length: 56min 9sec (3369 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 11 2020