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."

Comments

Sounds iffy

[damn_registrars]

How can they be sure that they didn't detect the fracking chemicals when the industry continues to refuse to reveal the identity of said chemicals? It is nearly impossible to do a study where you watch for every conceivable chemical that ever has or ever could exist.

Re:Sounds iffy

[dlakelan]

It's pretty easy to run water through a gas chromatograph / mass spec and see if it has anything other than water in it, and how much of that stuff it has. A bit harder to figure out exactly what the pollutant is, but if you have a sample of the fracking water it's easy to look at the peaks the fracking water has and see if they appear in the drinking water even if you don't know the identity of the chemicals.

Re:Sounds iffy

[Anonymous Coward]

If you would RTFA, you would notice that they're not just testing the drinking water for ytterbium contamination, they are using seismographic technologies to watch the spread of liquids in the fracking boreholes. That's how they can tell that one well's liquids migrated 1,800 feet from the target region (which is also noted to still be around a mile below the surface and far from any drinking water).

Re:Sounds iffy

[Herkum01]

It depends on the marker that they use. If the marker is something that is not as soluble or emulates the characteristic of the fracking recipe. You also have the problem of how they injected the marker versus how they normally proceed. A concern was that they were more careful in projects where they were injecting the marker rather than how they normally do business. Finally, Pennsylvania is not the only place they do fracking different soils and naturally occurring fault lines were major concerns.

Re:Sounds iffy

[rsborg]

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.

How is that even reasonable? Why not measure the actual contaminants and check elevation levels?

Here's a question that immediately comes up for me: What if the markers have different rock/soil permeability compared to the chemicals used in fracking? Are those markers closely enough in characteristics to the chemicals used as to be valid for purposes of testing exposure/pollution?

How about another one - why is the DoE doing this test as opposed to the EPA (who are likely more versed in measuring pullution)?

Not testing the presence of the actual chemicals/pollutants doesn't pass the sniff test for me. Something stinks here.

Re:Sounds iffy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but if that's truly the case, then where precisely are the chemicals coming from that are making the water flammable?

That's methane. Any natural gas well can leak methane into the aquifer. If the top of the well shaft is poorly sealed, that can happen, with or without fracking.

Re:Sounds iffy

[PRMan]

Again, I wish I had mod points today.

Re:Sounds iffy

[mellon]

Translation: the study is contradicted by known data, so it would be interesting to understand why.

FTFY.

Re:Sounds iffy

[Anonymous Coward]

Because who should you trust - engineers and scientists who have worked on energy production for decades or fearmongering alarmists who want to shut down energy production in America by any means necessary?

Re:Sounds iffy

[kevmeister]

People seem unable to read papers any longer. This is especially true of the news media. The study on earthquakes repeatedly pointed out that there was NO evidence that fracking itself led to earthquakes. It said that the practice of pumping the toxic waste from fracking into deep wells for disposal, a common, but not universal practice, could and did lead to quakes.

Back in the mid 1960s Colorado experienced a series of quakes, some strong enough to cause damage. Those earthquakes were tracked to the use of deep well disposal at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. The well was used for disposal of chemical warfare agents (toxic gases and their components). The strongest was felt quite strongly in Trinidad, CO, some 200 miles south of the well. I grew up there and felt it personally. This led to the discontinuation of this disposal method.

I am simply amazed that half a century after this well documented and researched event that it seems to have been forgotten.

Re:Sounds iffy

[sycodon]

Translation: the study is contradicted by made up data, so it would be interesting to understand why.

FTFY

Re:Sounds iffy

[Anonymous Coward]

Because not being a goddamn idiot and insisting that we make sure we're not shitting where we eat means we want to shut down energy production in America by any means necessary?

Re:Sounds iffy

[Mashiki]

Snicker snort. You make them sound like dangerous terrists. Been reading Zodiac for trollspiration?

Funny that the AC is right on the money. Perhaps you should be paying attention to the various environmental groups that are running amok and protesting everything from building new power plants, to transporting oil by pipeline. Because "it hurts the environment...says their feelings."

Re:Sounds iffy

[Gorobei]

No, it was a totally solid study. From the article:

paragraph 1: "A landmark federal study"
paragraph 2: "After a year of monitoring"
paragraph 3: "Although the results are preliminary"
paragraph 4: "Drilling fluids tagged with unique markers were injected more than 8,000 feet below the surface"
paragraph 8: "The study marked the first time that a drilling company let government scientists inject special tracers into the fracking fluid"

See, fracking is totally safe. A single "landmark" study proves it. When the fracking was 1.5 miles deep, after one year, no bad effects were observed. Also, this was the one study allowed by any drilling company.

Sheesh, what are you people concerned about?

One data point...

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming everything's above the board (so to speak), these results are all fine and dandy, but this single scenario doesn't itself make for a glowing endorsement of fracking's safety. For one thing, I'm wondering how the results from sites with fracking-related earthquakes might look.

Does anyone really want to bet that aquifers near other fracking sites are just as fracking-chemical-free?

In this case.

[intermodal]

Sure, it didn't get into the groundwater this time. My concern is whether proper studies are being done to ensure that other sites do not see different results from the supposedly clean ones here.

What about long term?

[csubi]

Nothing made its way up in a year, hardly surprising.

I'm sure people will be happy when they see these chemical showing up in the water a couple hundred years from now, then discovering records about fracking in archives. They will probably say things like : they could not have been this stupid?!

Again, the problem here is timescale. One should not think in decades but in centuries.

Re:What about long term?

[Nemyst]

You're asking for long-term thinking from corporations? Ha! They can't think long-term even when it'd benefit them, imagine when they don't give a shit about it.

Re:OK, That's One (this is a preliminary study)

[negRo_slim]

Who picked the site? What was the criteria for selection? A year of monitoring also seems to be pretty short to come to conclusions when we are talking about the most important resource on the planet.

Jackson said the 1,800-foot fracture was very interesting, but also noted it is still a mile from the surface.

Love the lackadaisical attitude.

Says it all!

[Tempest451]

"While the lack of contamination is encouraging, Jackson said he wondered whether the unidentified drilling company might have consciously or unconsciously taken extra care with the research site, since it was being watched. " Ya think?