The
institutions of the European Union do not know what chemical substances are
currently being utilized in the hydraulic fracturing process within EU
territory. Worse still, they openly admit it is impossible to carry out an
adequate risk characterization up to date, because
exposure models for such a risk assessment do not exist yet. The plan announced
by the Commission to repair this situation looks insufficient.
Analysis by Samuel Martín-Sosa, International Coordinator (Ecologistas en Acción)
Although
shale gas is not yet commercially mined in the European Union (EU), the
fracking process, which involves pumping a large quantity of pressurized water
and chemicals into substrate rock, is already in use in exploratory wells in
countries such as Poland, Romania or the United Kingdom. Which chemical
substances exactly are getting pumped in? We don't know. Neither do we know
what effect they have on the environment today, nor will have in the future.
Substance
Registration
The EU has
one of the most advanced legal frameworks in the world when it comes to
chemical substances. The REACH regulation mandates that all chemical substances
on the market must be registered with the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA).
Each practical application must be registered separately. For example, if a gas
company wants to use acrylamide for fracking, it makes no difference that the
same acrylamide is already registered as an agglutinant for the paper industry;
each new use requires a new entry in the register that describes the risks
involved in the new process.
At the time
of registration, it is first necessary to indicate
the hazardous properties of a substance.
Certain highly hazardous substances, whether because they are
carcinogenic, mutagenic, toxic for reproduction, respiratory and skin sensitisers, etc., are included on a “special” list. The
chemicals on this list are candidates for being taken off the market at some
point and are subject to very strict authorization procedures, granted only in
exceptional cases.
There is no
way to know at present date whether any of these substances are being used in
the EU for fracking –neither these chemical substances, nor any others, as ECHA
admitted to Ecologistas en Acción a year ago. When asked for comment, the
agency replied that its registration system does
not have a dedicated category to identify chemicals used for “fracking”; it is
reasonable to assume that if any substance has been registered for this
application to date, this registration was under a more general rubric (such as
“mining”). The Commission stated
this week that "a new category "oil and gas field fracturing products"
will be included in an update to the IUCLID tool", but this will only come in
2016 and after the ECHA runs a public consultation on the issue. Until then, we
will probably remain ignorant regarding what is being used today.
Although,
actually, there is something that we do know. Cuadrilla Resources, a company
that uses hydrofracturing in its wells in the United Kingdom and that also
holds licenses in Poland, in what was probably a slip-up, acknowledged to the press that it uses polyacrylamide.
Polyacrylamide is formed from subunits of acrylamide, which appears in the
special list we mentioned earlier because it can cause cancer and mutations. REACH
implementation is happening rather slowly, and it is of course worrisome that
in the meantime, thousands of chemical substances are being used in Europe
while they wait their turn to have their environmental effects evaluated.
What’s simply unbelievable is that chemicals widely recognized to be bona-fide
bombs should still be unregulated and in use.
In
addition, among those substances that have a long track record of use for
hydraulic fracturing in other countries, like the US or Australia, we find such gems as ethoxylated
4-nonylphenol (a persistent, bioaccumulative and
endocrine disruptor), formamide (teratogenic), naphthalene (carcinogenic)...
with characteristics that would surely make them candidates for the special
list in Europe. A 2011 scientific study compiled an exhaustive list of
hundreds of substances used in hydraulic fracturing. Over 75% were found to
affect the skin and eyes, 40-50% affected the nervous, immune, and
cardiovascular systems, 37% the endocrine system, and 25% were carcinogens or
mutagens.
Evaluating
the risks
For those
chemical substances which do not exceed the toxicity thresholds for inclusion in such
priority list, the requirement is to characterize the risk by submitting
a Chemical Safety Report which compares the substance’s “exposure”
(how a given substance would be distributed through water, soil and the atmosphere once released into the
environment) with its toxicity to living organisms. To assess the exposure of a
substance, it is necessary to have an “Exposure Scenario”
specific to each use.
ECHA openly
acknowledges that it is not possible to assess the risk of substances used in
hydraulic fracturing because the exposure scenarios for this process have not
yet been developed. And beyond, the Agency recognized
earlier this week that the EU’s chemicals register will only allow this
categorisation of fracking substances from 2016. The Commission is participating
in OECD talks on developing such generic exposure scenarios for substances
typically used for fracking. In the meanwhile, the absence of these scenarios
is a quite serious issue, because without them it is impossible to evaluate the
risk that these substances pose for human health and the environment.
The
conclusion is terrifying: although we know that some chemicals are being used,
we do not know which ones they are. We therefore cannot know whether any of
these chemicals are highly hazardous. We also do not know, for the “other”
chemicals, what effects they might have on health or the environment. These
three facts, in and of themselves, should be enough to stop fracking in the EU
today.
The
European Commission already acknowledged some time ago that the
use of chemicals in fracking within Europe is probably illegal. Three years
later, things are moving way too slow as we have seen. The European Commission was preparing a directive to regulate fracking,
but this was dropped due to pressure from those countries that want to develop
hydraulic fracturing further. Instead, in January 2014, the EC produced some voluntary recommendations; among other measures
they suggested the Member States “inform the public of the composition of the
fluid used for hydraulic fracturing in each well.” Voluntarily inform the
public of the composition of the fluid?! This seems to indicate that the
European Commission and ECHA are abandoning efforts to identify this fluid’s
composition in order to be able to make this information available to the public,
as one might expect with a more stringent observance of the legal framework.
Taking
Shots in the Dark
In response
to present ECHA’s inability to say which chemicals are being used, the European
Commission published a study a year ago, in which
only 16 substances were chosen from among those commonly employed in other
parts of the world, and which had been registered under REACH in Europe
for uses that could mask fracking, such as mining or offshore drilling (in the
case of shale gas reserves at sea). The aim of the study was to analyze how the
chemicals had been registered. The chemicals considered included methanol,
isopropanol, boric acid, sodium hydroxide, acrylamide, glutaraldehyde, various
petroleum distillates, etc.... The results were discouraging. For the vast
majority of these substances, the environmental Chemical Safety Report was not
provided by the registrant, who claimed than no hazard associated with the substance
has been identified. Nevertheless, when we look at Classification, Labelling and
Packaging (CLP
Regulation) for these substances we see that some type of hazard is attributed
to nearly all of them. Effects range from corrosion, skin irritation,
difficulty breathing, allergies… all the way to causing cancer or reproductive
harm. Business has not told the truth. The request by the Commission to the
ECHA to investigate whether a temporary solution is possible before 2016, for
those substances already registered and in use, seems quite weak.
As
citizens, we cannot stand by and do nothing. We need to demand that European
authorities take off their blindfolds and protect us from chemical substances
in an effective way. We want to know.
And we want to know now, because fracking is already happening in
European subsoil.
Samuel Martín-Sosa Rodríguez
International Coordinator
Ecologistas
en Acción