The Shale Gas Production Subcommittee of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, a special panel charged by President Obama in April and commissioned by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu in May, released a 90-day report last month expressing the panel’s concern with aspects of the extraction and production process.
The panel, charged with “identifying measures that can be taken to reduce the environmental impact and improve the safety of shale gas production,” also called for the industry-wide adoption of “measurement and disclosure” practices that would “(benefit) all parties in shale gas production.”
The report, which largely runs counter to industry assertions that natural gas extraction and production is safe, came under criticism and scrutiny by environmental groups who claim a possible conflict of interest with six of the seven panel members.
In a Freedom of Information Act request filed on June 8 of this year, the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Working Group wrote, “Despite Secretary Chu’s stated commitment to establishing an independent fracking review, DOE has already compromised that aim by stacking the subcommittee with individuals who have significant financial interests in concluding that fracking is safe.”
According to the FOIA request, subcommittee chair John Deutch, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is also on the board of directors at Houston, Texas-based Cheniere Energy, Inc., a “liquefied natural gas company that paid Deutch about $882,000 from 2006 through 2009.”
Five other members were found to have received financial awards from the industry, including: Stephen Holditch, the head of the petroleum engineering department at Texas A&M; Stanford University geophysics professor Mark Zoback; Kathleen McGinty, vice president of Weston Solutions, Inc., a consulting company that does business with companies like Chesapeake Energy; Susan Tierney, former assistant secretary of policy at the Department of Energy under President Bill Clinton; and Daniel Yergin, a Pulitzer-prize winning writer and economic researcher who co-founded IHS CERA, an energy consulting firm.
Despite what a petition of two dozen independent scientists called a “lack of impartiality” on the part of the subcommittee, Amy Mall, a Senior Policy Analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the report “really important.”
“One of the key results of this report was a formal acknowledgement by the subcommittee that natural gas production presents a range of very significant risks to human health and the environment,” Mall said. “We thought it was really important that the panel found that there were significant concerns, and that we need changes in rules to really efficiently protect public health and the environment.”
The report recommended nine separate measures that the natural gas industry could take to make extraction and production safer, including improvement of public information about shale gas operations, protection of water quality and reduction in the use of diesel fuel.
The full report can be find here and more information about natural gas extraction and production, and specifically hydraulic fracturing, can be found here.