EPA’s fracking study

This was published yesterday but I haven’t had a chance to post it.

Broad Scope of EPA’s Fracturing Study Raises Ire of Gas Industry
by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica – April 7, 2010 7:09 am EDT

In past interviews with ProPublica, Fuller has explained that, in his view, hydraulic fracturing shouldn’t be blamed for any contamination unless the process of injecting fracturing fluids underground under pressure was “the sole” cause of contamination. If contamination seeped through cracks in a gas well’s protective casing under pressure of the fracturing process, for example, he wouldn’t attribute it to fracturing because the cracks may have existed before the fracturing process began and would be a well construction problem, not a fracturing problem.

Fuller’s definition of fracturing-related contamination helps explain the oil and gas industry’s steadfast claim [5] that that there is not a single case in which hydraulic fracturing has been proven to have contaminated drinking water supplies.

Oh, I get it: it’s the pre esisting cracks in the earth that are at fault for contaminating the water and not all the lethal chemicals Big Gas pumped down into the cracks.

Wow! That’s the kind of rationalization my teenager used when he was about 5.

In reality there are quite a few cases where fracking contaminated water:

“An 18-month investigation by ProPublica, however, has shown more than 1,000 cases [6] in which various aspects of the fracturing lifecycle have affected water supplies, including spills of fracturing fluid waste, cracking of underground cement and well casings meant to enclose the fracturing process, and methane gas traveling large distances [7] underground through faults and fractures. “

Ahm, you know, I don’t think most people care if the BTEX got into their water through cracks that were already there are cracks that were caused by fracking. All they care about is there was no BTEX before fracking but after fracking there is.