High-Tech Gas Drilling Is Fouling Drinking Water

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday May 10, 2011 @12:14AM from the sometimes-you-have-to-roll-a-hard-six dept.

sciencehabit writes "Drilling for natural gas locked deep in a shale formation — a process known as fracking — has seriously contaminated shallow groundwater supplies beneath far northeastern Pennsylvania with flammable methane. That's the conclusion of a new study, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The analysis gives few clues, however, to how pervasive such contamination might be across the wide areas of the Northeast United States, Texas, and other states where drilling for shale gas has taken off in recent years."

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A sign of desperation by Anonymous Coward · 2011-05-10 00:23 · Score: 0, Offtopic

The era of easy to get, cheaply-extractable high-quality fossil fuels is over. We're feebly grasping at pockets of gas here and there. But we'll colonize the stars. Riiiiiight. We'll use windmill-powered ion drives, right?
See, this is one of those things a truly advanced technological species WOULDN'T be doing...
Pssst.... Space Nutters... Put down the Star Trek DVDs and take a long hard look at reality.