Even Fracking Fans Wonder Why the Feds Would Allow Drilling Under This Lake

While students work in the lab, geologist Jerry Bartz, a lab coordinator at a North Texas community college, sits at a messy desk in the back office, surrounded by piles of papers, reading reports on his computer about the risk that natural gas drilling poses on dams. He's not one to criticize his friends in the oil industry.

"I'm not anti-fracking," he asks me several times to make clear about him. He used to work for the industry as a senior staff exploration geologist—"that's a very high position," he says—and as environmental risk assessor. Several years ago, when a homeowner in Parker County, Texas said that the natural gas drilling near his home had turned his water flammable, Bartz says he testified as an expert witness for the state of Texas, which argued that the man's water was already flammable. Bartz also has four oil-related patents, including one that helps oil companies detect faults deep in the ground.

But that expertise is exactly why Bartz became so concerned about an industry proposal to frack under a major reservoir not far from his home, a proposal that has the blessing of none other than the federal agencies charged with protecting public land.

Several weeks prior, in February, a colleague alerted Bartz to the strange news: an oil and gas company, working through a broker so as to stay anonymous, had expressed interest in drilling under Lewisville Lake, a 29,000 acre reservoir here in north Texas. The lake is an important source of drinking water, part of a network of reservoirs that supplies water to the landlocked region of Dallas and its suburbs.

The United States Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency in charge of the nation's dams, gave the oil and gas company consent to seek drilling rights there. The company's next step then was to make a bid to the Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that is in the sometimes conflicting business of both protecting public land and auctioning off long-term leases on public land to industries. To Bartz, it sounded like insanity.

"We've got an abundance of gas in the United States, they're telling us that we've got the biggest reserves in the world of gas," Bartz told me. "Fresh water, we do not have an abundant reserve of. We have to protect fresh water. "

Fracking—short for hydraulic fracturing, or the technique of pumping high-pressure fluids into the ground, often through horizontal wells, to fracture shale rock and free up natural gas deposits—has swept America in the past decade, allowing energy companies to drill right in our backyards, sometimes literally. But the domestic oil boom and consequent surplus of natural gas it created has run parallel with concerns that fracking contaminates groundwater, that it speeds up global warming via methane leaks, and that the process can cause earthquakes.

It may be a mystery, then, why the Corps of Engineers, an agency charged with building and protecting the nation's water sources and water infrastructure, would allow any of those potential risks near precious water supplies. But the Corps' position is actually in line with the rest of the federal government. During President George W. Bush's administration, fracking operations were notoriously exempt from being regulated under the Clean Water Act, under the so-called "Halliburton Loophole." And President Barack Obama and his administration have continued to embrace natural gas as a "clean" energy, even as they acknowledge that natural gas, like all fossil fuels, contributes to global warming.

In June 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency for the first time acknowledged "specific instances" in which fracking contaminated water sources, by methods including the spillage of toxic fracking fluids at well pads. But the EPA's report also described the 151 water contamination cases it documented as "small" compared to the total amount of fracking wells in the United States.

"While the popular narrative right now is fracking is dangerous and has unexpected consequences, it is not a new technology," said Donna Hummel, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Land Management, repeating a refrain commonly used by the oil industry. "It's a technology that has been exported…t o new formations, and shale formations, so there isn't a 'fracking bad' analysis that we do." (While hydraulic fracturing itself is not new, the industry's combination of fracking and horizontal drilling, rather than traditional vertical drilling, has only been around since the 90s and has made today's fracking a different sort of animal.)

Slowly, though, the feds appear to be reconsidering their longtime collaboration between public land agencies and fossil fuel interests. Earlier this year, President Obama made the historic decision to no longer allow federal public lands to be auctioned off to the coal industry. Natural gas extraction on public lands, which the federal government has reaped billions from in recent years, is still on the table for now.

"The flip side that I would just emphasize, is that the Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Interior, we are really making an effort to look at future reform," Hummel said of fracking on public land. She said that the BLM is now looking at ways to tackle problems like venting and gas flaring. Hummel said that this practice is "probably not the best thing for climate warming."

The fossil-fuel auctions organized by Hummel's agency usually don't get much attention outside of environmental circles or Native American tribes, who live on land managed by the BLM. The proposal to drill under Lake Lewisville sparked a rare public outcry from nearby city leaders and citizens, likely because people in a region that has suffered both droughts and flooding, and which is already facing public pressure against proposals to build more dams, are keenly aware of how their water system works.

According to environmental scientist Rob Jackson, locals' worries about fracking under Lewisville Lake aren't unfounded. "There are concerns about the dam integrity, there are concerns about how near to the water source the fracking activity would be, and there are concerns to the people nearby. It doesn't seem worth it to me for a small lease," he said.

It's not a secret here that Lewisville Lake's dam needs repairs. In December, the Dallas Morning News published a report claiming that 431,000 people would be in the path of a catastrophic flood if the dam were breached, something the report suggested is a possibility. The report adds that the dam is listed by the Corps as the eighth most hazardous dam in the nation.

The Corps responded to that report defensively, organizing a press conference shortly after it was published to tout the safety of the dam. While the Corps acknowledges some "known safety issues" with the dam, including a 161-foot-long-slide that workers spotted last year, the Corps downplays the newspaper's concerns. "While Lewisville Dam has some known dam safety issues, it is not at risk of failure," the Corps assured the public. Likewise, when it comes to fracking, the Corps officially takes the position that fracking under lakes is safe, as long as there is no drilling within 3,000 feet of a dam.

So, when the anonymous oil company expressed interest in a 259-acre parcel under Lewisville Lake six miles away from the dam, the Corps approved. The Bureau of Land Management scheduled an auction for April 20, promising drillers access to the parcel for the next ten years. Though the Corps has had trouble enforcing its 3,000 foot setback at another nearby dam, it assured the public that there is little reason for concern here.

"Our Corps policy states these [drilling] activities are not allowed within 3000 feet of the dam," Corps spokesperson Rhonda Paige said in a statement. "The current request at Lewisville is 6+ miles away (over 31,000 feet away)."

Environmental groups do not agree that such a setback will protect the public from water contamination. The Corps' setback "doesn't address any of these specific risks" of water contamination, warned Center for Biological Diversity attorney Wendy Park. "All it does is remove the drilling bed, the well bed, 3,000 feet away from the dam… But the drilling can still go beneath the lake."

Bartz, the geologist with oil industry connections, is more hesitant than environmentalists to draw a link between fracking and water contamination. "I'd really have to take a long hard look at that," he said. But he does openly worry that fracking can cause the earth to move, and therefore the dam to move, from distances greater than 3,000 feet away.

When I visited, he pulled out a map with the 259-acre parcel under Lewisville Lake. "I saw that they want to keep a fracking operation right underneath one of these lineaments," he said, pointing to a line on the map. A lineament, he explained, is a possible indication that there is a fracture in the earth's surface deep below the ground.

"If we go in there, and we frack and hit that fracture zone, is that going to cause movement?" he wondered aloud. And any movement could make the dam weaker, he warned. "When we're starting to look at it connecting with a reservoir we need to step back and have strong studies that show we're not going to impact freshwater supplies, whether it be through chemical contamination or doing damage to a dam."

Bartz quickly studied the issue in February and then testified at town meetings near the reservoir, urging the community to consider the safety of the lake. Even towns whose leaders had embraced fracking in the past voted to formally protest the drilling proposal. Finally, in March, after unusually strong local public outcry, the Bureau of Land Management withdrew the parcel from the upcoming land auction, not for environmental reasons, but on a technicality. "It could be re-nominated at a future date," said the BLM's Hummel.

While Dallas and its suburbs appeared to win this fight, at least for now, there are other communities further south in Texas where lake land remain up for auction this April. What's more, Bureau of Land Management records show that the agency already auctioned off a 10-acre parcel of land under Lewisville Lake back in 2011, to a gas company called Atlas Barnett. The Corps declined to discuss that parcel or say when and if drilling will commence there. "I'm really not at liberty to discuss drill extraction from somebody else's drill bed," said US Army Corps spokesperson Clay Church.

It doesn't take a geology or environmental degree for people to understand the risk of drilling under Lewisville Lake. Hickory Creek is a small suburb of Dallas that initially has the same concrete, corporate-sign-dotted landscape as much of north Texas, but drive a few miles past the main thoroughfare, and the roads are suddenly dotted with greenery and large ranch houses. The charming country feel leads up to Sycamore Bend Park, a serene public park along a small section of the lake. There, I met Ron Jennings, a Home Depot employee from a nearby town, while he was walking with a metal detector along the shores. "I'm all for fracking," he said.

But he hadn't yet heard of the proposal to drill under Lewisville. "It surprises me," he said. "We've got the dam right there, and flooding problems now. I'm not sure that we should be messing with it at this point in the game."

If the dam were to rupture, water would flow downstream in an apocalyptic scenario, wiping out suburbs otherwise known for their decent schools and safe neighborhoods. The mayor of Lewisville, one such suburb downstream, insists that the reports about the dam's failure risks are overblown. "It was a story that really wasn't a story," said Lewisville Mayor Rudy Durham.

Durham said he has also leased the land under his own home to an oil and gas producer, though the company hasn't yet drilled because of sinking oil prices. Still, Durham and his City Council voted to send in a protest against the proposal to drill under Lewisville Lake. "The big deal is the safety and reliability of the water supply. That's the main thing. That needs to be taken into consideration," he said.

In Flower Mound, another city downstream from the reservoir, city leaders used to embrace the drilling industry. Then, six years ago, residents publicly worried that the drilling had caused a spike in cancer cases, possibly via contamination of the air or water by toxic fracking fluid. "I'm not a rocket scientist, but right now I have three friends that are battling cancer, and every year it seems I've got a couple of friends that are battling cancer," said Tammi Vajda, a longtime Flower Mound homeowner and outspoken anti-drilling activist.

In 2010, the Texas state health department agreed to study the potential cancer cluster and reported that there isn't one. Four years later, a law professor named Rachel Rawlins challenged the state's methods, writing that Flower Mound residents' concerns had yet to be "comprehensively evaluated." According to Rawlins' report, Dr. Maria Morandi found with 95 percent certainty that there is a cancer cluster in Flower Mound. The Texas state health department did not find a cancer cluster, her report said, because the state required a 99 percent certainty threshold, which the researchers argued was too high.

After Rawlins' report was released, the Texas health department defended its testing methods but agreed to look into the issue again. Several months later, the state health department released a new report on Flower Mound stating that "female breast cancer was the only type of cancer considered in this report where the observed number of cases was higher than expected," but denying that the elevated breast cancer cases counted as a "cancer cluster."

Whether or not there is a cancer cluster in Flower Mound has never been resolved between the state health department and its critics, and the story has since died from local headlines. Vajda told me that people with cancer are now reluctant to speak out. "[It's] because their family may be in a certain business that deals with the gas industry or the real estate industry," she said. "We have tried over and over again to try to get these people to come forward in public, but they won't."

Regardless, Flower Mound residents voted in new representatives who ran on an anti-fracking platform in 2010. Drilling has stalled since then. Other councilmembers who used to support local fracking have also agreed to change their tune.

"I've been on the losing side of the gas drilling issue," Councilmember Bryan Webb, who used to support fracking, said at a recent Flower Mound town council meeting. "I still believe there is a time and there is a place for oil and gas development."

But, he added, "our residents clearly stated that that place was not here, near our homes, near our residents, near our schools, and our Oil and Gas Court of Appeals has stated that that place is not near our water supplies." Shortly after Webb's comments, Flower Mound's leaders voted unanimously to file a written protest against the Lewisville land auction.

After environmentalists, suburbs like Flower Mound and Lewisville, and officials such as the Dallas water utilities manager sent in their protests, the Bureau of Land Management announced on March 4 that the parcels under Lewisville Lake would not be auctioned off this April, after all. It turned out some of the land underneath the lake fell within city limits, and therefore was not federal land. The apparent mistake was pointed out to the feds in a petition filed by the Center for Biological Diversity.

However, because the Corps has not revoked its consent for that land to be drilled, it's possible that the Corps could re-draw the parcel and put it up for auction again next year, around the time that the BLM's next southwestern auction will probably take place, Hummel, the BLM spokesperson, said. She added that some land under Lewisville Lake has already been sold.

"There are at least a couple of parcels, on Corps of Engineers, on Lake Lewisville land, for federal minerals that are already leased," Hummel said, referring to the 10-acre parcel that the Corps and BLM auctioned off to Atlas Barnett in 2011.

The larger, 259-acre Lewisville parcel was not the only land to be excluded from the upcoming April auction after activists stepped in. Originally, 31,000 acres of national forest land in Texas were also scheduled to be auctioned off to oil and gas interests. The US Forest Service agreed to revoke its consent and pull the forest land from the auction after environmental groups encouraged the public to protest. Activists cite local pressure as the reason for the Forest Service's decision.

"As Texas residents and local officials learn about the plans to open up our public lands to oil and gas development, they are asking the BLM and other federal agencies for a timeout," Cyrus Reed, conservation director of the Sierra Club's Lone Star Chapter, said in a celebratory news release shortly after.

For now, parcels underneath Lake Conroe in Montgomery County, the Choke Canyon reservoir in Corpus Christi and Somerville Lake in Burleson County remain up for auction this April. "It is irresponsible for BLM to proceed with any of these fossil fuel auctions while serious questions about fracking and its effect on the drinking water supply to millions of Texans remain unresolved," Center for Biological Diversity attorney Wendy Park said in a statement.

Citing a study that says ending drilling on public lands would prevent 450 billion tons of carbon from polluting the atmosphere, activists are intensifying their focus on public land auctions. Center for Biological Diversity organizer Valerie Love recalled how protesters interrupted an auction in Utah by bursting into song last year.

"We all got kicked out," she said, "but it was really powerful." She says her group and other organizers will continue to protest fossil fuel auctions until they end completely. "We have thrown down the gauntlet and said we're going to be at every single one."