Study: None of the samples violated drinking water standards (NPR)
Listen: http://www.npr.org/2015/10/13/448182616/study-may-ease-drinking-wat...
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Let's turn to the ongoing controversy about fracking, the technique that injects water deep into the earth to extract natural gas and has generated fears that it could lead to contamination of drinking water in wells nearby. A new scientific study eases some of that worry, at least a bit. NPR's Dan Charles has more.
DAN CHARLES, BYLINE: There have been cases in which contamination has turned up in drinking water in places where fracking is common. And it's raised fears that when gas companies drill their fracking wells, it allows oil and gas that's been trapped a mile underground to migrate up toward the surface and leak into aquifers that people rely on for their drinking water. So Desiree Plata, who teaches chemical and environmental engineering at Yale University, sampled drinking water from 64 wells in northeastern Pennsylvania. There's a lot of fracking going on in that area.
DESIREE PLATA: Towards the end of our study, it was difficult to find a home that was more than a few kilometers from a natural gas well production pad.
CHARLES: She and a colleague looked for contamination in the water. And they found some, but only in a handful of wells.
PLATA: And really, even using that word contamination is a stretch because when these detections were made, they were still at very low concentrations.
CHARLES: None of the samples violated drinking water standards. The scientists also tried to figure out where the contaminants came from. And there were clues - chemical fingerprints - that convinced them these chemicals were spilled on the ground near fracking sites and then seeped down into drinking water. They did not come up from deep underground. Plata says that's good news.
PLATA: Failures at the surface are easier to control than failures beneath the surface of the earth.
CHARLES: And you know about them, I guess.
PLATA: You know about them, right. If you know there's a spill, you can respond to it.
CHARLES: The report appears this week in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Dan Charles, NPR News.
http://www.npr.org/2015/10/13/448182616/study-may-ease-drinking-wat...
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Skip Peel - Mineral Consultant on -
It is not widely known by those concerned about the possible impact of drilling & production upon potable water sources that natural gas is composed of many different constituent elements. And that those elements and their concentrations vary widely from location to location and by formation being produced. It is a very straight forward and relatively simple task to test natural gas contamination in a water source and determine whether it originated from an oil or gas well in the general vicinity. Where natural gas contamination has occurred and tests have been run to determine the source, the number of cases that link that contamination to a well is very, very small.
With approximately 2500 producing Haynesville Shale gas wells in NW LA, if drinking water contamination was a pervasive problem it would have been quite obvious long ago. The facts clearly prove that natural gas contamination is an extremely rare event.
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Permalink Reply by Max on
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I would say that nobody likes contaminated water. Some folks jumped on the well fracking because it was the "new bear in the bushes", and they felt the need to bring this process to the public's eye for discussion.
Other folks saw an opportunity to make some $$$$, so they created two bears in the bushes and took advantage of human nature.
NG is about the cleanest substance that man can obtain and use for concentrated energy. Solar and wind is clean, but it can't be depended on and used like fossil fuels. Battery storage will provide some avenues for use, but not to the extent of the cost and versatility.
We are hearing about the woes of the coal industry and how unfair it is to those States and people who depended on it. Coal's time is over. There is more pollution caused by coal than anything else, including nuclear. One fellow who made a movie to show the evils of fracking wouldn't blink an eye at the removal of whole mountains and the resulting surface contamination that ends up in our water.
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