Shale emissions being watched from above

There is an eye in the sky above U.S. shale oil and natural gas basins.

Well, more like a nose.

Through April, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will be flying above the basins from Texas to North Dakota collecting air samples to document if drilling is adding to ground-level ozone, said Joost de Gouw, a research scientist at NOAA’s Earth Systems Research Lab in Boulder, Colorado.

“We do that with a focus on air quality,” said de Gouw, also a senior scientist and fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “What are the reactive trace gases that are being released? How much methane is released from these activities?”

Flying 14 to 21 hours a week, the Orion, with a crew of six researchers and nine crew members, will crisscross the shale oil and fracking sites in the Western and Central U.S. The data gathered will require about 18 months to process.

De Gouw said while results may be clear immediately, it will take months to make sure the data are good and even longer to do a proper analysis.

Breathing ozone triggers a variety of health problems for children, the elderly and anyone with lung diseases such as asthma. It’s produced when sunlight mixes with nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds. Gasoline vapors, emissions from factories and electric utilities, motor vehicle exhaust and chemical solvents are some of the major sources of the pollutants that lead to ozone creation, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“Ground-level ozone can also have harmful effects on sensitive vegetation and ecosystems,” according to the agency’s website.

In addition to nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, de Gouw said, the researchers will be looking for methane specific to oil and gas industries. Methane has a lot of different sources, including coal, landfills and animals, but the instruments can distinguish among them.

“Up in Flames,” a San Antonio Express-News analysis last year of flaring data, government pollution estimates and hundreds of pages of public documents, paints a picture of deteriorating air quality in the Eagle Ford Shale.

The Express-News obtained flaring data from the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry, and plugged the numbers into Texas Commission on Environmental Quality formulas to find out how much pollution is emitted collectively from Eagle Ford flares.

In the early days of the boom, flaring released 427 tons of air pollution each year. By 2012, pollution levels shot up to 15,453 tons, a 3,500 percent increase that exceeds the total emissions of all six oil refineries in Corpus Christi. From January to July last year, flares spewed roughly 14,000 tons of air pollutants, including volatile organic compounds, which can produce ground-level ozone, and a precursor to acid rain known as sulfur dioxide.

In addition, drilling activity from the Eagle Ford boom in 2012 produced an estimated 111 tons of nitrogen oxides and 229 tons of volatile organic compounds daily between April and October — more than all the cars and trucks on the road in the eight-county San Antonio metropolitan area, according to an environmental report from the Alamo Area Council of Governments.

The Express-News study didn’t consider ground-level ozone formation in the Eagle Ford.

Elsewhere in the nation, areas of Wyoming and Utah have had ozone incidents in winter corresponding to the time when hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, operations there intensified, de Gouw said. Outbreaks of ground-level ozone usually happen in the summer.

“It’s very specific to these two basins, and we have only known about it for the last five or six years,” he said.

In addition, summer ozone levels in Colorado, which have existed for decades, had been getting better, de Gouw said. But in recent years, that trend has reversed.

“Do these emissions play a role?” said de Gouw. “We don’t know the answer.”

Colorado regulators last month approved rules aimed at fixing leaks from tanks and piles at oil and natural gas operations. North Dakota passed rules effective Oct. 1 to reduce the amount of gas flared at wellheads.

The industry has disputed its role in the formation of ground-level ozone.

“Publicly available information demonstrates that oil and gas production is not a significant contributor to ozone levels,” said Steve Everley, team leader for Energy in Depth, a research and education program of the Independent Petroleum Association of America.

In the San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth areas, cars and trucks add much more volatile organic compounds to the atmosphere than oil and gas production, said Everley, who’s based in Dallas. Nitrogen oxide releases are in the “single-digit percentages in the total area.”