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Study Finds Fracking Chemicals Didn't Pollute Water
RoccamOccam sends this news from the Associated Press:
"A landmark federal study on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, shows no evidence that chemicals from the natural gas drilling process moved up to contaminate drinking water aquifers at a western Pennsylvania drilling site. After a year of monitoring, the researchers found that the chemical-laced fluids used to free gas trapped deep below the surface stayed thousands of feet below the shallower areas that supply drinking water."
One site, one test well. Big whoop.
>shows no evidence that chemicals from the natural gas drilling process moved up to contaminate drinking water aquifers at a western Pennsylvania drilling site
> one was injected with four different man-made tracers
The way I read it (yes, I read the article) is that they put a marker of some kind into the chemical brew being slugged into the ground, and found no sign of that marker in ground water. Now obviously there are still questions to be raised, but still, in and of itself, this seems a pretty reasonable way to determine groundwater contamination.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I agree, it wouldn't be that difficult. But that is not what was done in the study. An undisclosed amount of four unnamed marker chemicals where added to the chemicals used for fracking by a company at one fracking site. Within the one year the study has been running, non of these markers where detected in a predetermined "monitoring zone". Maybe the study has some value, but since there is no citation in the article and the article contains no facts beside the ones I just mentioned, it is really hard to tell.
I don't recally where I heard this, but my understanding is that the tap water was flammable even prior to the fracking. Natural gas was contaminating the groundwater long before people began mining it. The way I see it, it may be that more places have flammable tap water after fracking, but being able to light water on fire by itself is not indicative of contaminated drinking water. It's more just attention-whoring and if you abscribe malice to the media, then classic straw-man misdirection.
Stronger correlators, such as the tails of cows falling off after fracking began (I don't recall which, but one of the known chemicals used in fracking caused tails to fall off in laboratory experiments), would be a better argument for groundwater contamination.
The other thing to realize is that just because one area is not contaminated does not imply that fracking in general does not contaminate the ground water. It could be due to the specific geology of the area. Or it could be variations in the fracking process used in that particular area or for this particular test.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Nothing changed. That area has had methane in the ground water since long before fracking ever happened.
this article only talks about the fracking chemicals being leaked into the groundwater... it does not mention the other problem with fracking, which is that it causes fault lines to shift and ruptures in the ground due to increased pressure. the latter is what causes methane to leak into the groundwater, which then gets into drinking water. methane is not one of the fracking chemicals, and therefore the study didnt mention it.